Visual motion : algorithms for analysis and application

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1990.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-73).by Michael Adam Sokolov.M.S

Confrontation and Integration: An Analyze the Mechanism of Rights Transformation in Urban Renewal from the Perspective of Space Theories

 As one of the subjects under city-related discussions, locality carries significance in the dimensions of both political and economic space. Western researches have brought about various arguments based on theories of human geography, particularly in the area of urbanization. Taiwan adopts urban renewal as an important approach of revitalizing cities. In view of space theories, multiple political and economic confrontations have occurred during the process of spatial differentiation and reproduction. The analysis on the social phenomenon derived from the urban renewal in Taiwan, China from the perspective of political and economic space, taking into consideration of the correlation between capital and rights, suggests the ongoing development of a new growing pattern of cities under the contention or collaboration among industrial, governmental and academic communities

Jahrbuch Migration und Gesellschaft / Yearbook Migration and Society 2020/2021

Migration is not a state of emergency, but a basic existential experience of humanity. It shapes contemporary societies by challenging established orders, creating transnational spaces beyond national hegemonies, creating new economies, influencing urban and communal ways of life, making inequality and precariousness visible locally and globally. Migration research as a social science does not narrow the focus to 'the migrants', but investigates the conditions for living together and shaping life between ethnicization and pluralization, discrimination and empowerment, division and participation. The Yearbook Migration and Society repeatedly turns the prism of narrative anew. The 2020/2021 edition focuses on the topic "Beyond Borders"

Understanding the operatic tenor's legitimate head voice: A comparative study of historical and modern pedagogical approaches

The modern operatic tenor, with his chest-voice-like upper register, produces a vastly different sound to that of the castrato-trained tenore di grazia of the eighteenth century. Notwithstanding this change in tenor vocality, the practice of register-blending or -unification, originally developed by the castrati as a means of extending their voices upwards with a seamless transition to the falsetto register, has remained a core element of classical voice training. The change in tenor vocality did, however, provide an impetus for the evolution of this pedagogical practice during the nineteenth century. It led to the emergence of “mixed voice” as the purported mechanism for the tenor's upper register, and the introduction of a more mechanistic approach to register-blending or -unification as a means of developing the mixed voice source mechanism. In light of more recent discoveries in voice science, the validity of the registerblending or -unification approach has been called into question. An important, albeit minority, view is that the tenor's legitimate head voice is simply an upwards extension of his chest voice mechanism. Science has not found any evidence of a “mixed voice” laryngeal mechanism, while there is evidence suggesting that it is possible to extend the chest voice mechanism upwards through vocal training that strengthens the thyroarytenoid muscle, coupled with the development of the necessary fine motor skill to maintain balanced adduction of the top and bottom edges of the vocal folds at high pitches. If this view is correct, it would have important implications for tenor training methods, in particular the practice of register-blending or -unification in the mechanistic sense

Scale-based surface understanding using diffusion smoothing

The research discussed in this thesis is concerned with surface understanding from the viewpoint of recognition-oriented, scale-related processing based on surface curvatures and diffusion smoothing. Four problems below high level visual processing are investigated: 1) 3-dimensional data smoothing using a diffusion process; 2) Behaviour of shape features across multiple scales, 3) Surface segmentation over multiple scales; and 4) Symbolic description of surface features at multiple scales. In this thesis, the noisy data smoothing problem is treated mathematically as a boundary value problem of the diffusion equation instead of the well-known Gaussian convolution, In such a way, it provides a theoretical basis to uniformly interpret the interrelationships amongst diffusion smoothing, Gaussian smoothing, repeated averaging and spline smoothing. It also leads to solving the problem with a numerical scheme of unconditional stability, which efficiently reduces the computational complexity and preserves the signs of curvatures along the surface boundaries. Surface shapes are classified into eight types using the combinations of the signs of the Gaussian curvature K and mean curvature H, both of which change at different scale levels. Behaviour of surface shape features over multiple scale levels is discussed in terms of the stability of large shape features, the creation, remaining and fading of small shape features, the interaction between large and small features and the structure of behaviour of the nested shape features in the KH sign image. It provides a guidance for tracking the movement of shape features from fine to large scales and for setting up a surface shape description accordingly. A smoothed surface is partitioned into a set of regions based on curvature sign homogeneity. Surface segmentation is posed as a problem of approximating a surface up to the degree of Gaussian and mean curvature signs using the depth data alone How to obtain feasible solutions of this under-determined problem is discussed, which includes the surface curvature sign preservation, the reason that a sculptured surface can be segmented with the KH sign image alone and the selection of basis functions of surface fitting for obtaining the KH sign image or for region growing. A symbolic description of the segmented surface is set up at each scale level. It is composed of a dual graph and a geometrical property list for the segmented surface. The graph describes the adjacency and connectivity among different patches as the topological-invariant properties that allow some object's flexibility, whilst the geometrical property list is added to the graph as constraints that reduce uncertainty. With this organisation, a tower-like surface representation is obtained by tracking the movement of significant features of the segmented surface through different scale levels, from which a stable description can be extracted for inexact matching during object recognition

Monumental Routes: Movement And The Built Environment At Iron Age Gordion

The archaeological site of Gordion, or Yassıhöyük, located at the confluence of the Sakarya and Porsuk Rivers in central Turkey, is best known as the capital city of the Phrygian King Midas and is essential to understanding the Iron Age on the Anatolian Plateau. One hundred burial mounds (or tumuli) dot the landscape around Gordion’s Citadel Mound, of which 43 have been excavated. The vast majority of those date to the Iron Age, between 850 and 530 BCE. Thus far, they have mainly been studied as burial assemblages, and little research has been conducted on the mounds as archaeological features in their own right. There are suggestions that certain tumuli were aligned along ancient routes, or with monumental architecture of the Citadel Mound. The present study embeds the tumuli within their landscape and considers them intentional transformations of the environment. Through a careful reconstruction of ancient routes, using digital methodologies to model their paths and views along them, combined with personal reconnaissance to document the phenomenology of traveling, I will describe the process of monumentalizing this landscape that unfolded over several centuries, its spatial and chronological distribution, and what it implies about the changing sociopolitical situation at Gordion. Several routes will be shown to share characteristics of monumental construction related to movement and visibility that vary according to topography and the sociopolitical relationship between Gordion other settlements, suggesting strong cultural cohesion throughout the landscape that should be connected to a process of regional coalescence centered on Gordion. I will also discuss the role of the tumuli within Phrygian society, moving beyond a simple designation as royal burials, and focusing on the physical properties of the tumuli - their presence in the landscape, the activities and labor required for their construction, and how these aspects changed over the three hundred years during which they were built. The monuments did not disappear after the Iron Age, but outlasted the sociopolitical system that produced them. The dissertation therefore will conclude by examining how the tumuli survived as physical objects in a changing landscape while signifying something about the history of the area

Riverine Ecosystem Management: Science for Governing Towards a Sustainable Future

This open access book surveys the frontier of scientific river research and provides examples to guide management towards a sustainable future of riverine ecosystems. Principal structures and functions of the biogeosphere of rivers are explained; key threats are identified, and effective solutions for restoration and mitigation are provided. Rivers are among the most threatened ecosystems of the world. They increasingly suffer from pollution, water abstraction, river channelisation and damming. Fundamental knowledge of ecosystem structure and function is necessary to understand how human acitivities interfere with natural processes and which interventions are feasible to rectify this. Modern water legislation strives for sustainable water resource management and protection of important habitats and species. However, decision makers would benefit from more profound understanding of ecosystem degradation processes and of innovative methodologies and tools for efficient mitigation and restoration. The book provides best-practice examples of sustainable river management from on-site studies, European-wide analyses and case studies from other parts of the world. This book will be of interest to researchers in the field of aquatic ecology, river system functioning, conservation and restoration, to postgraduate students, to institutions involved in water management, and to water related industries

Towards a (Meta-)Sociology of the Digital Sphere

Content: 1. Introductory considerations; 2. The functional universality of digital computer systems as a starting point; 3. Is Cyberspace spatial?; 4. Implications of Cyberspace for the level of Social Interaction and Social Systems; 4.1 Ease of exit and absence of density pressures; 4.2. The Softened Dictatorship of Time; 4.3 The absence of locational anchoring, bodily contacts and primary interpersonal perception; 4.4 The leveling and blurring of Real World status differentials; 4.5 The predominance of volatile, monothematic and project-related social relations; 4.6 The need for highly prespecified codes, symbolic patterns, problem definitions and environmental conditions; 4.7 The rising salience of credibility and trust; 4.8 The facilitated social integration of "strangers"; 4.9 Expansion of highly voluntary social interactions, relationships and roles; 4.10 The softened incompatibility between "egocentric" and "altruistic" action; 4.11 The intrinsic "softness" of digital social systems; 5. Implications of the Internet for the Cultural Level; 5.1 The softening of artifacts and the deletability of the past; 5.2 From producer-guided to receiver-guided culture; 5.3 The demise of stable ex ante classification schemes; 5.4 Toward a "Sampling Culture": from molecular to molar forms of production; 5.5 High mutual "permeabilities" as a condition for blendings and “crossovers”; 6. Implications on the Individual Level; 6.1 From offline individuals to online "dividuals" emanci-pated from body and space; 6.2 Freely chosen and freely modifiable self-constructed identities; 6.3 Support for "externalized selves" and microsocial cultures; 6.4 The blurring distinction between productive and receptive roles; 7. For conclusion: some epistemological and meta-theoretical consequences of Cyberspace for the social sciences; 7.1 The concepts of "Virtual Reality" and "Vireality"; 7.2 The Internet as a "hypersocial" space

IT\u27S NOT RAINBOWS AND UNICORNS : REGULATED COMMODITY AND WASTE PRODUCTION IN THE ALBERTA OILSANDS

This dissertation examines the regulated oilsands mining industry of Alberta, Canada, widely considered the world’s largest surface mining project. The industrial processes of oilsands mining produce well over one million barrels of petroleum commodities daily, plus even larger quantities of airborne and semisolid waste. The project argues for a critical account of production concretized in the co-constitutional relations of obdurate materiality and labor activity within a framework of regulated petro-capitalism. This pursuit requires multiple methods that combine archives, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews to understand workers’ shift-to-shift relations inside the “black box” of regulated oilsands mining production where materiality co-constitutes the processes and outcomes of resource development and waste-intensive production. Here, the central contradiction pits the industry’s colossal environmental impact and its regulated environmental relations, which – despite chronic exceedances – are held under some control by provincial and federal environmental agents, further attenuated by firms’ selective voluntary compliance with global quality standards as well as whistleblowers and otherwise “troublesome” employees. ‘It’s not rainbows and unicorns,’ explains one informant, distilling workers’ views of the safety and environmental hazards they simultaneously produce and endure as wage laborers despite pervasive regulation. In addition to buttressing geographical conceptualizations of socionatural resource production, contributions arise in the sympathetic engagement with workers, which may hold useful insights for activism against the industry’s environmental outcomes