PROMISSORY ESTOPPEL: PRINCIPLE FROM PRECEDENTS: I

The doctrine of promissory estoppel is an outstanding modem example of the way in which the Anglo-American legal system develops significant rules and principles out of the day-to-day decisions of our courts. Progress in the law comes about through the formulation and acceptance of generalizations. However, merely stating the results of a number of different instances does not result in clarification and simplification. That comes only when the precedents are studied with a view to discovering the \u27\u27binding thread of principle that runs through them all. Such a principle, if discovered in the course of the appraisal of a series of cases, will make for a more ready understanding of the cases which have already been decided. Even more important, however, is the future use which can be made of the principle thus discovered. It may thereafter be employed in variant and diverse fact situations to produce workable, logical and rational solutions to problems which had previously been solved only by resort to fiction or by the use of historical anomalies and conceptual distortions. As Cohen has so aptly remarked, A legal system that works with general principles has powerful instruments .... [A] generalized jurisprudence enlarges the law\u27s control over the diversity of legal situations. It is like fishing with large nets instead of with single lines

Shape Animation with Combined Captured and Simulated Dynamics

We present a novel volumetric animation generation framework to create new types of animations from raw 3D surface or point cloud sequence of captured real performances. The framework considers as input time incoherent 3D observations of a moving shape, and is thus particularly suitable for the output of performance capture platforms. In our system, a suitable virtual representation of the actor is built from real captures that allows seamless combination and simulation with virtual external forces and objects, in which the original captured actor can be reshaped, disassembled or reassembled from user-specified virtual physics. Instead of using the dominant surface-based geometric representation of the capture, which is less suitable for volumetric effects, our pipeline exploits Centroidal Voronoi tessellation decompositions as unified volumetric representation of the real captured actor, which we show can be used seamlessly as a building block for all processing stages, from capture and tracking to virtual physic simulation. The representation makes no human specific assumption and can be used to capture and re-simulate the actor with props or other moving scenery elements. We demonstrate the potential of this pipeline for virtual reanimation of a real captured event with various unprecedented volumetric visual effects, such as volumetric distortion, erosion, morphing, gravity pull, or collisions

3D Shape Cropping

International audienceWe introduce shape cropping as the segmentation of a bounding geometry of an object as observed by sensors with different modalities. Segmenting a bounding volume is a preliminary step in many multi-view vision applications that consider or require the recovery of 3D information, in particular in multi-camera environments. Recent vision systems used to acquire such information often combine sensors of different types, usually color and depth sensors. Given depth and color images we present an efficient geometric algorithm to compute a polyhedral bounding sur- face that delimits the region in space where the object lies. The resulting cropped geometry eliminates unwanted space regions and enables the initialization of further processes including surface refinements. Our approach ex- ploits the fact that such a region can be defined as the intersection of 3D regions identified as non empty in color or depth images. To this purpose, we propose a novel polyhedron combination algorithm that overcomes compu- tational and robustness issues exhibited by traditional intersection tools in our context. We show the correction and effectiveness of the approach on various combination of inputs

Shape Animation with Combined Captured and Simulated Dynamics

We present a novel volumetric animation generation framework to create new types of animations from raw 3D surface or point cloud sequence of captured real performances. The framework considers as input time incoherent 3D observations of a moving shape, and is thus particularly suitable for the output of performance capture platforms. In our system, a suitable virtual representation of the actor is built from real captures that allows seamless combination and simulation with virtual external forces and objects, in which the original captured actor can be reshaped, disassembled or reassembled from user-specified virtual physics. Instead of using the dominant surface-based geometric representation of the capture, which is less suitable for volumetric effects, our pipeline exploits Centroidal Voronoi tessellation decompositions as unified volumetric representation of the real captured actor, which we show can be used seamlessly as a building block for all processing stages, from capture and tracking to virtual physic simulation. The representation makes no human specific assumption and can be used to capture and re-simulate the actor with props or other moving scenery elements. We demonstrate the potential of this pipeline for virtual reanimation of a real captured event with various unprecedented volumetric visual effects, such as volumetric distortion, erosion, morphing, gravity pull, or collisions

The ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury IX. Constraining asymptotic giant branch evolution with old metal-poor galaxies

In an attempt to constrain evolutionary models of the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) phase at the limit of low masses and low metallicities, we have examined the luminosity functions and number ratio between AGB and red giant branch (RGB) stars from a sample of resolved galaxies from the ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury (ANGST). This database provides HST optical photometry together with maps of completeness, photometric errors, and star formation histories for dozens of galaxies within 4 Mpc. We select 12 galaxies characterized by predominantly metal-poor populations as indicated by a very steep and blue RGB, and which do not present any indication of recent star formation in their color--magnitude diagrams. Thousands of AGB stars brighter than the tip of the RGB (TRGB) are present in the sample (between 60 and 400 per galaxy), hence the Poisson noise has little impact in our measurements of the AGB/RGB ratio. We model the photometric data with a few sets of thermally pulsing AGB (TP-AGB) evolutionary models with different prescriptions for the mass loss. This technique allows us to set stringent constraints to the TP-AGB models of low-mass metal-poor stars (with M<1.5 Msun, [Fe/H]<~-1.0). Indeed, those which satisfactorily reproduce the observed AGB/RGB ratios have TP-AGB lifetimes between 1.2 and 1.8 Myr, and finish their nuclear burning lives with masses between 0.51 and 0.55 Msun. This is also in good agreement with recent observations of white dwarf masses in the M4 old globular cluster. These constraints can be added to those already derived from Magellanic Cloud star clusters as important mileposts in the arduous process of calibrating AGB evolutionary models.Comment: To appear in ApJ, a version with better resolution is in http://stev.oapd.inaf.it/~lgirardi/rgbagb.pd