Maori facial tattoo (Ta Moko): implications for face recognition processes.

Ta Moko is the art of the Maori tattoo. It was an integral aspect of Maori society and is currently seeing resurgence in popularity. In particular it is linked with ancestry and a sense of “Maori” pride. Ta Moko is traditionally worn by Maori males on the buttocks and on the face, while Maori women wear it on the chin and lips. With curvilinear lines and spiral patterns applied to the face with a dark pigment, the full facial Moko creates a striking appearance. Given our reliance on efficiently encoding faces this transformation could potentially interfere with how viewers normally process and recognise the human face (e.g. configural information). The pattern’s effects on recognising identity, expression, race, speech, and gender are considered, and implications are drawn, which could help wearers and viewers of Ta Moko understand why sustained attention (staring) is drawn to such especially unique faces

The study of the soap opera

No abstract available

Deconstructive humour: subverting Mexican and Chicano stereotypes in ‘Un Día Sin Mexicanos’

a long time, US cinema developed unshakeable stereotypes of Mexican ‘otherness’, with characters of Mexican cultural and ethnic heritage stigmatised as criminals or as sensual objects of desire. Filmmakers in Mexico, meanwhile, treated Mexican Americans as misfits who belonged nowhere, or ignored them and their complex experience completely. The emergence of a distinct ‘Chicano cinema’ in the 1960s allowed for the development of a more powerful set of images of Mexican Americans, exploiting the very tool of communication that had been used against them, and for the circulation of a more productive and reflective dialogue around the questions of identity, agency and resistance that arise. This article focuses on the use of humour as a subversive tool to deconstruct certain myths and stereotypes of Mexican and, to a certain extent, Mexican American (or, Chicano) identity in Sergio Arau’s popular debut feature, Un Día Sin Mexicanos (2004). The “Mexicans” referred to in the film’s title and used in much of its dialogue stand metonymically for all Hispanic immigrants, whether recently arrived, or born in the US and of Hispanic descent, including Chicanos. Its narrative was inspired by the introduction of controversial anti-immigration legislation in California in 1994, and the Californian State is here made representative of anywhere in the US where there is a Mexican or Chicano population. This essay situates the film within the context of a growing Chicano population in the US and a high level of immigration from Mexico itself. It asks to what extent the feature version, which takes the form of satire, offers a critique of the Mexican immigrant experience, and of discrimination more broadly against Hispanic minorities. In so doing, it explores the ways in which the politics of resistance that are so often aligned with these experiences are inscribed in its narrative form

Intensity-based image registration using multiple distributed agents

Image registration is the process of geometrically aligning images taken from different sensors, viewpoints or instances in time. It plays a key role in the detection of defects or anomalies for automated visual inspection. A multiagent distributed blackboard system has been developed for intensity-based image registration. The images are divided into segments and allocated to agents on separate processors, allowing parallel computation of a similarity metric that measures the degree of likeness between reference and sensed images after the application of a transform. The need for a dedicated control module is removed by coordination of agents via the blackboard. Tests show that additional agents increase speed, provided the communication capacity of the blackboard is not saturated. The success of the approach in achieving registration, despite significant misalignment of the original images, is demonstrated in the detection of manufacturing defects on screen-printed plastic bottles and printed circuit boards

GATE -- an Environment to Support Research and Development in Natural Language Engineering

We describe a software environment to support research and development in natural language (NL) engineering. This environment -- GATE (General Architecture for Text Engineering) -- aims to advance research in the area of machine processing of natural languages by providing a software infrastructure on top of which heterogeneous NL component modules may be evaluated and refined individually or may be combined into larger application systems. Thus, GATE aims to support both researchers and developers working on component technologies (e.g. parsing, tagging, morphological analysis) and those working on developing end-user applications (e.g. information extraction, text summarisation, document generation, machine translation, and second language learning). GATE will promote reuse of component technology, permit specialisation and collaboration in large-scale projects, and allow for the comparison and evaluation of alternative technologies. The first release of GATE is now available

Perceptual recognition of familiar objects in different orientations

Recent approaches to object recognition have suggested that representations are view-dependent and not object-centred as was previously asserted by Marr (Marr and Nishihara, 1978). The exact nature of these view-centred representations however does not concord across the different theories. Palmer suggested that a single canonical view represents an object in memory (Palmer et al., 1981) whereas other studies have shown that each object may have more than one view-point representation (Tarr and Pinker 1989).A set of experiments were run to determine the nature of the visual representation of rigid, familiar objects in memory that were presented foveally and in peripheral vision. In the initial set of experiments recognition times were measured to a selection of common, elongated objects rotated in increments of 30˚ degrees in the 3 different axes and their combinations. Significant main effects of orientation were found in all experiments. This effect was attributed to the delay in recognising objects when foreshortened. Objects with strong gravitational uprights yielded the same orientation effects as objects without gravitational uprights. Recognition times to objects rotated around the picture plane were found to be independent of orientation. The results were not dependent on practice with the objects. There was no benefit found for shaded objects over silhouetted objects. The findings were highly consistent across the experiments. Four experiments were also carried out which tested the detectability of objects presented foveally among a set of similar objects. The subjects viewed an object picture (target) surrounded by eight search pictures arranged in a circular array. The task was to locate the picture-match of the target object (which was sometimes absent) as fast as possible. All of the objects had prominent elongated axes and were viewed perpendicular to this axis. When the object was present in the search array, it could appear in one of five orientations: in its original orientation, rotated in the picture plane by 30 or 60 , or rotated by 30 or 60 in depth. Highly consistent results were found across the four experiments. It was found that objects rotated in depth by 60 took longer to find and were less likely to be found in the first saccade than all other orientations. These findings were independent of the type of display (i.e. randomly rotated distractors or aligned distractors) and also of the task (matching to a picture or a name of an object). It was concluded that there was no evidence that an abstract 3-dimensional representation was used in searching for an object. The results from these experiments are compatible with the notion of multiple-view representations of objects in memory. There was no evidence found that objects were stored as single, object-centred representations. It was found that representations are initially based on the familiar views of the objects but with practice on other views, those views which hold the maximum information about the object are stored. Novel views of objects are transformed to match these stored views and different candidates for the transformation process are discussed