Assessment of mining activities with respect to the environmental protection

This paper deals with the impact of mining on the environment. Coal mining is still among the most widespread and most intense mining activity, which disturbs the landscape around us bringing regional environmental, economic and aesthetic problems. However, for many countries in the world, including the Czech Republic, deposits of raw materials play an important role, especially for purposes of producing electricity and thermal energy. At the same time, growing emphasis laid on the environmental protection can be observed worldwide. To meet the increasing ecological demands, it is reasonable to consider the most significant aspects of mining activities from the environmental point of view, as well as to consider the possibilities of the abandoned mines utilization as possible waste dumps. Parts of this problem consist in: the monitoring, environmental impacts assessment of exploration and mining activities and waste disposal mining, which may significantly contribute to the environmental protection in the future. Several parameters that can significantly affect the usability of the waste disposal mining, such as geological structure, hydro-geological conditions, material composition and physical and mechanical properties of rocks are discussed in detail in this work. The article also includes a practical example of Environmental Impact Assessment process for the particular activity of OKD stock company, which is the only producer of hard coal (bituminous coal) in the Czech Republic. Its coal is mined in the southern part of the Upper Silesian Coal Basin - in the Ostrava-Karvina coal district. KeywordsWeb of Science221937

Painting-to-3D Model Alignment Via Discriminative Visual Elements

International audienceThis paper describes a technique that can reliably align arbitrary 2D depictions of an architectural site, including drawings, paintings and historical photographs, with a 3D model of the site. This is a tremendously difficult task as the appearance and scene structure in the 2D depictions can be very different from the appearance and geometry of the 3D model, e.g., due to the specific rendering style, drawing error, age, lighting or change of seasons. In addition, we face a hard search problem: the number of possible alignments of the painting to a large 3D model, such as a partial reconstruction of a city, is huge. To address these issues, we develop a new compact representation of complex 3D scenes. The 3D model of the scene is represented by a small set of discriminative visual elements that are automatically learnt from rendered views. Similar to object detection, the set of visual elements, as well as the weights of individual features for each element, are learnt in a discriminative fashion. We show that the learnt visual elements are reliably matched in 2D depictions of the scene despite large variations in rendering style (e.g. watercolor, sketch, historical photograph) and structural changes (e.g. missing scene parts, large occluders) of the scene. We demonstrate an application of the proposed approach to automatic re-photography to find an approximate viewpoint of historical paintings and photographs with respect to a 3D model of the site. The proposed alignment procedure is validated via a human user study on a new database of paintings and sketches spanning several sites. The results demonstrate that our algorithm produces significantly better alignments than several baseline methods

Empirical evaluation of alternative cartographic solutions for the user interface of Abisko GIS

Over the last 15 years there has been a rapid increase in the development and usage of digital maps. Methods for assessing the quality of systems for communicating digital geographical information are frequently described in the literature, but few methods have been empirically evaluated. The quality of cartographic products is especially important for resources management and environmental planning, although it may be important in all application areas where spatial information is used. When designing digital communicative systems, it is crucially important to base system development on empirical interactions with potential users. In this thesis, empirical methods were used to develop a geographic information system (GIS) for environmental research and monitoring in the Arctic – the Abisko GIS. Approximately 30 potential users were interviewed via a questionnaire while testing a number of alternative interfaces to Abisko GIS. This allowed the qualities of alternative cartographic solutions to be evaluated and the optimal combination of cartographic objects to be implemented in Abisko GIS. Through statistical inference of the questionnaires, it was concluded that Map Design had the greatest effect on subjects during their evaluation. Gender and the Time spent with evaluation had no significant effect, although Time appeared to play some role for experts and those with experience of GIS. On average, the response to questions asked regarding particular aspects of maps varied diminutively across subjects. Other observations are discussed in the text

3D Reconstruction for Optimal Representation of Surroundings in Automotive HMIs, Based on Fisheye Multi-Camera Systems

The aim of this thesis is the development of new concepts for environmental 3D reconstruction in automotive surround-view systems where information of the surroundings of a vehicle is displayed to a driver for assistance in parking and low-speed manouvering. The proposed driving assistance system represents a multi-disciplinary challenge combining techniques from both computer vision and computer graphics. This work comprises all necessary steps, namely sensor setup and image acquisition up to 3D rendering in order to provide a comprehensive visualization for the driver. Visual information is acquired by means of standard surround-view cameras with fish eye optics covering large fields of view around the ego vehicle. Stereo vision techniques are applied to these cameras in order to recover 3D information that is finally used as input for the image-based rendering. New camera setups are proposed that improve the 3D reconstruction around the whole vehicle, attending to different criteria. Prototypic realization was carried out that shows a qualitative measure of the results achieved and prove the feasibility of the proposed concept

Spatial Displays and Spatial Instruments

The conference proceedings topics are divided into two main areas: (1) issues of spatial and picture perception raised by graphical electronic displays of spatial information; and (2) design questions raised by the practical experience of designers actually defining new spatial instruments for use in new aircraft and spacecraft. Each topic is considered from both a theoretical and an applied direction. Emphasis is placed on discussion of phenomena and determination of design principles

Activismo político a través de la poesía performativa en Estados Unidos : de Walt Whitman a Allen Ginsberg

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Filología, leída el 22-10-2021This dissertation has its first prompt in the common scholarly association between the two American poets Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, who vindicated the oral character of poetry as an alternative path for political activism. The nationally tense historical moments they lived (Civil War, McCarthyism, Vietnam War) made them conceive their writing as a shortcut for the citizens’ complete emancipation within democracy. Both founded their ideas in the romantic conception of language, defined in literary theory by Jacques Derrida as pneumological and phonocentrist: it is in oral language and speech where the pure form of communication, the true meaning of what is said, resides. In poetry, these two authors find the key to fight, through a speech-based poetics, an alternative against the corrupted logocracy of the State. Thus, within the framework of their own political career as Americans, who came to exist with a speech act (the Declaration of Independence), Whitman and Ginsberg aim to point at and inaugurate from the performative act both the poet and the new and alternative nation.Este estudio surge de la comúnmente señalada asociación de los poetas estadounidenses Walt Whitman y Allen Ginsberg, ambos defensores de una poesía oral como método de activismo político. Ante dos escenarios históricos de tensión nacional (Guerra Civil, Macartismo, Guerra de Vietnam), estos autores encontraron en su escritura una forma alternativa de lucha por la emancipación del ciudadano en democracia. Los dos cimientan sus ideas en una concepción romántica del lenguaje, definida desde la teoría literaria por Jacques Derrida como pneumológica y fonocentrista: es en el habla, en el lenguaje oral, donde reside el verdadero significado de lo dicho, la rigurosa expresión del individuo. Es pues en el género de la poesía donde encuentran ese código puro de comunicación, frente a la corrupta logocracia del Estado. Así, en el marco de una trayectoria política en la cual la nación se crea con un acto de habla (la Declaración de Independencia), Whitman y Ginsberg se proponen, desde el acto performativo, señalar e inaugurar al poeta estadounidense, encargado a su vez de señalar e inaugurar una nación y un estado alternativos...Fac. de FilologíaTRUEunpu

Nerves in patterns: synaptic space, neuroscience, and American modernist poetry

Both modernist poetry and modern neuroscience used synaptic space to assemble fragments into meaningful arrangements that would replace the outmoded systems of the nineteenth century. Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams attempted to unify language by cleansing semantic associations and restoring the connection between idea and thing. Like her work in medicine and neuroscience, Stein's literary attempts to create accurate depictions of reality must ultimately be considered failures because they privilege grammatical connections over semantic associations, playing with surfaces rather than unearthing the networks underlying identity. As a physician, Williams was more willing to accept the mind and its ideas as systems of objects, things that can be rearranged and reconnected in space to change patterns of meaning. Wallace Stevens also used the imagination to create accurate visions of reality but recognized that a changing and fragmented reality can never be captured by the eye, which can only build fictions that refract, condense, and interpret reality. Stevens' theory of vision is thus rooted in the anatomical structure of the eye, and his theory of aesthetics viewed any phenomenological evasion of the I as an impossibility because the eye necessarily distorts and enriches reality. For T.S. Eliot, the division between the I and eye is framed through the dissociation of sensibility, which rests on a tension between the progressive forces of consciousness, tradition, and culture, and the mind's evolutionary past, the sensibility that not only provides the foundation of thought but also threatens the dissolution of the mind into a primitive bundle of fragmented instincts. In poems such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Eliot resists both higher psychological abstractions that deny the physicality of the brain and a lower physiological behaviorism that would leave the mind without consciousness, scuttling like a crab on the ocean floor. Although modernists used synaptic space to salvage meaning from a skeptical age, this space itself became the target of skepticism as postmodernists questioned the ability of space to unify and limit meaning