831 research outputs found
Heaths, Commons, and Wastes:An investigation into the character, management, and perceptions of heathland landscapes in the medieval and post-medieval periods, with particular reference to the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Hertfordshire
Lowland heathland is a priority habitat for conservation in the United Kingdom but is also valued as a historical cultural landscape.1 Many rare or endangered species of both flora and fauna, unable to thrive in modern agricultural or urban landscapes, inhabit heathland environments. These have long been recognised as the products of past management systems which have been in decline since at least the 18th century, and have now been largely discontinued. For the purposes of conservation, the practices which created and sustained them, based on historical examples, must be maintained or reintroduced in order to perpetuate conditions favourable to those species.
This research details both the landscape character of historic heathland within the study area, and the various management practices which influenced and changed that character. As well as making an original contribution to a subject of historical importance, and modern interest, this research will inform the future management of heathland landscapes by showing, clearly and with evidence, how they were managed in the past.
Where management practices were referred to directly in historical documents, or recorded in full, this work presents them in detail and each technique is analysed in terms of its probable environmental impacts. Where heaths appear in the documentary record, but direct references to management were not found, landscape character was reconstructed using place-name and other linguistic evidence, and by examining what flora and fauna were mentioned in association with them – many of which lived only in certain kinds of habitats.
The results of this work detail a highly variable landscape. Heaths were sometimes open and characterised by low shrubs, but also sometimes wooded – either sparsely or densely – or even largely devoid of flora in some parts. The fauna present on heaths also varied widely between regions and periods; including sheep, pigs, cattle, horses, deer, goats, rabbits, geese, and the Brown Bear. Heaths historically were found on a broad range of soil types, not all of them sandy in nature, and contained a variety of both wet and dry habitats. As the term ‘heath’ was applied to all of these landscapes historically, cultural perceptions of what constituted heathland were also highly variable
Aiding the conservation of two wooden Buddhist sculptures with 3D imaging and spectroscopic techniques
The conservation of Buddhist sculptures that were transferred to Europe at some point during their lifetime raises numerous questions: while these objects historically served a religious, devotional purpose, many of them currently belong to museums or private collections, where they are detached from their original context and often adapted to western taste.
A scientific study was carried out to address questions from Museo d'Arte Orientale of Turin curators in terms of whether these artifacts might be forgeries or replicas, and how they may have transformed over time. Several analytical techniques were used for materials identification and to study the production technique, ultimately aiming to discriminate the original materials from those added within later interventions
Valorization of Food Processing By-Products
The papers published in this Special Issue report on recent studies investigating the exploitation of by-products produced by the food industry. The topics investigated include the extraction setups used for valuable food waste by-products and their applications as adjuncts to food preparation; the appropriate selection of solvents and extraction processes; and the interactions between extracted fractions and supplementary foods. The papers evaluate a wide variety of foodstuffs and provide results regarding the extension their shelf-lives and activities as functional foods
6th International Meeting on Retouching of Cultural Heritage, RECH6
RECH Biennial Meeting is one of the largest educational and scientific events in Retouching field, an ideal venue for conservators and scientists to present their research results about retouching.
The main focus will be to promote the exchange of ideas, concepts, terminology, methods, techniques and materials applied during the retouching process in different areas of conservation: mural painting, easel painting, sculpture, graphic documentation, architecture, plasterwork, photography, contemporary art, among others.
This Meeting aims to address retouching by encouraging papers that contribute to a deeper understanding of this final task of the conservation and restoration intervention.
The main theme embraces the concepts of retouching, the criteria and limits in the retouching process, the bad retouching impact on heritage and their technical and scientific developments.This Meeting will discuss real-life approaches on retouching, focusing on practical solutions and on sharing experiencesColomina Subiela, A.; Doménech GarcÃa, B.; Bailão, A. (2023). 6th International Meeting on Retouching of Cultural Heritage, RECH6. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/RECH6.2021.1601
Towards robust real-world historical handwriting recognition
In this thesis, we make a bridge from the past to the future by using artificial-intelligence methods for text recognition in a historical Dutch collection of the Natuurkundige Commissie that explored Indonesia (1820-1850). In spite of the successes of systems like 'ChatGPT', reading historical handwriting is still quite challenging for AI. Whereas GPT-like methods work on digital texts, historical manuscripts are only available as an extremely diverse collections of (pixel) images. Despite the great results, current DL methods are very data greedy, time consuming, heavily dependent on the human expert from the humanities for labeling and require machine-learning experts for designing the models. Ideally, the use of deep learning methods should require minimal human effort, have an algorithm observe the evolution of the training process, and avoid inefficient use of the already sparse amount of labeled data. We present several approaches towards dealing with these problems, aiming to improve the robustness of current methods and to improve the autonomy in training. We applied our novel word and line text recognition approaches on nine data sets differing in time period, language, and difficulty: three locally collected historical Latin-based data sets from Naturalis, Leiden; four public Latin-based benchmark data sets for comparability with other approaches; and two Arabic data sets. Using ensemble voting of just five neural networks, a level of accuracy was achieved which required hundreds of neural networks in earlier studies. Moreover, we increased the speed of evaluation of each training epoch without the need of labeled data
Chapter 34 - Biocompatibility of nanocellulose: Emerging biomedical applications
Nanocellulose already proved to be a highly relevant material for biomedical
applications, ensued by its outstanding mechanical properties and, more importantly, its biocompatibility. Nevertheless, despite their previous intensive
research, a notable number of emerging applications are still being developed.
Interestingly, this drive is not solely based on the nanocellulose features, but also
heavily dependent on sustainability. The three core nanocelluloses encompass
cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs), and bacterial nanocellulose (BNC). All these different types of nanocellulose display highly interesting biomedical properties per se, after modification and when used in
composite formulations. Novel applications that use nanocellulose includewell-known areas, namely, wound dressings, implants, indwelling medical
devices, scaffolds, and novel printed scaffolds. Their cytotoxicity and biocompatibility using recent methodologies are thoroughly analyzed to reinforce their
near future applicability. By analyzing the pristine core nanocellulose, none
display cytotoxicity. However, CNF has the highest potential to fail long-term
biocompatibility since it tends to trigger inflammation. On the other hand, neverdried BNC displays a remarkable biocompatibility. Despite this, all nanocelluloses clearly represent a flag bearer of future superior biomaterials, being
elite materials in the urgent replacement of our petrochemical dependence
A Study of Techniques and Challenges in Text Recognition Systems
The core system for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and digitalization is Text Recognition. These systems are critical in bridging the gaps in digitization produced by non-editable documents, as well as contributing to finance, health care, machine translation, digital libraries, and a variety of other fields. In addition, as a result of the pandemic, the amount of digital information in the education sector has increased, necessitating the deployment of text recognition systems to deal with it. Text Recognition systems worked on three different categories of text: (a) Machine Printed, (b) Offline Handwritten, and (c) Online Handwritten Texts. The major goal of this research is to examine the process of typewritten text recognition systems. The availability of historical documents and other traditional materials in many types of texts is another major challenge for convergence. Despite the fact that this research examines a variety of languages, the Gurmukhi language receives the most focus. This paper shows an analysis of all prior text recognition algorithms for the Gurmukhi language. In addition, work on degraded texts in various languages is evaluated based on accuracy and F-measure
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