Ortelius\u27s Map of the World and Homann\u27s Ship Model Map

Abraham Ortelius and Johann Baptist Homann were very successful cartographers who benefitted from the rising trend in curiosity cabinets during the Renaissance. Ortelius lived from 1527-1598 and was born in Antwerp, Belgium, and Homann became famous in Nuremberg, Germany during his life from 1663-1724. [excerpt

Is physical education relevant? Interpersonal skills, values and hybridity

Discussion surrounding the relevance of the document Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum has focused on a range of areas. While some writers claim it has the potential to be emancipatory and the inclusion of interpersonal skills and values is important and meaningful, others have levelled criticisms that the document is trying to do too much and has a middle class agenda. This article reports part of the findings of a small study which explored how some Maori and Pasifika students viewed their experiences of physical education in one major urban New Zealand high school. The experiences of these students are related to Besley's notion of hybridity. Her argument suggests that young people actively negotiate and make critical decisions about what they think is relevant to them. The students believed physical education has provided them with opportunities to develop and practice care for others and to learn and apply interpersonal skills as well as to gain confidence and apply their skills in situations outside the school setting. The study argues the need for curriculum to connect with the wider lives of students and any degree of connection can only occur if students are given a voice in the curriculum implementation process

Model-independent Analyses of Dark-Matter Particle Interactions

A model-independent treatment of dark-matter particle elastic scattering has been developed, yielding the most general interaction for WIMP-nucleon low-energy scattering, and the resulting amplitude has been embedded in the nucleus, taking into account the selection rules imposed by parity and time-reversal. One finds that, in contrast to the usual spin-independent/spin-dependent (SI/SD) formulation, the resulting cross section contains six independent nuclear response functions, three of which are associated with possible velocity-dependent interactions. We find that current experiments are four orders of magnitude more sensitive to derivative couplings than is apparent in the standard SI/SD treatment, which necessarily associates such interactions with cross sections proportional to the square of the WIMP velocity relative to the nuclear center of mass.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures; talk presented at TAUP201

Model-independent WIMP Scattering Responses and Event Rates: A Mathematica Package for Experimental Analysis

The community's reliance on simplified descriptions of WIMP-nucleus interactions reflects the absence of analysis tools that integrate general theories of dark matter with standard treatments of nuclear response functions. To bridge this gap, we have constructed a public-domain Mathematica package for WIMP analyses based on our effective theory formulation. Script inputs are 1) the coefficients of the effective theory, through which one can characterize the low-energy consequences of arbitrary ultraviolet theories of WIMP interactions; and 2) one-body density matrices for commonly used targets, the most compact description of the relevant nuclear physics. The generality of the effective theory expansion guarantees that the script will remain relevant as new ultraviolet theories are explored; the use of density matrices to factor the nuclear physics from the particle physics will allow nuclear structure theorists to update the script as new calculations become available, independent of specific particle-physics contexts. The Mathematica package outputs the resulting response functions (and associated form factors) and also the differential event rate, once a galactic WIMP velocity profile is specified, and thus in its present form provides a complete framework for experimental analysis. The Mathematica script requires no a priori knowledge of the details of the non-relativistic effective field theory or nuclear physics, though the core concepts are reviewed here and in arXiv:1203.3542.Comment: 30+6 page

Limit Theorems For Quantum Walks Associated with Hadamard Matrices

We study a one-parameter family of discrete-time quantum walk models on the line and in the xy-plane associated with the Hadamard walk. Weak convergence in the long-time limit of all moments of the walker's pseudo-velocity on the line and in the xy-plane is proved. Symmetrization on the line and in the xy-plane is theoretically investigated, leading to the resolution of the Konno-Namiki-Soshi conjecture in the special case of symmetrization of the unbiased Hadamard walk on the line . A necessary condition for the existence of a phenomenon known as localization is given

The Whole World in Your Hand: Active and Interactive Segmentation

Object segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer vision and a powerful resource for development. This paper presents three embodied approaches to the visual segmentation of objects. Each approach to segmentation is aided by the presence of a hand or arm in the proximity of the object to be segmented. The first approach is suitable for a robotic system, where the robot can use its arm to evoke object motion. The second method operates on a wearable system, viewing the world from a human's perspective, with instrumentation to help detect and segment objects that are held in the wearer's hand. The third method operates when observing a human teacher, locating periodic motion (finger/arm/object waving or tapping) and using it as a seed for segmentation. We show that object segmentation can serve as a key resource for development by demonstrating methods that exploit high-quality object segmentations to develop both low-level vision capabilities (specialized feature detectors) and high-level vision capabilities (object recognition and localization)

Dead Flowers // i

In the essay In Plato’s Cave, Susan Sontag makes a point of illustrating how in the moment a photographic image is captured its subject becomes ephemeral. Unable to interact with the world from behind a two-dimensional plane, the subject is forever frozen eliminating all agency that would exist within the frame of time that it takes the camera’s shutter to open and close. This agency death is then repeated each time the image is reproduced, multiplying the silence of the subject exponentially with each new viewer. Thanks to Instagram we don’t have to worry about this! Any morsel of agency we may have had left over was required upon sign up. No more hassle over trying to remember, no more first impressions, no more thinking about which dreams to pursue: Facebook, Google, Apple (ie. gods of the new world) have it all covered. Our new gods have no use for prayer or wishes, just living within the world that they oh-so benevolently created for us is enough payment, as long as they get to watch. In exchange there are no more questions, every thought every desire has an answer or at least a facsimile close enough to satiate anyone looking. The best part? Here we can never die. Time can only be expressed through image, and as Ms. Sontag taught us, images never die. Flowers do though. Its rare to see a flower alive. Only weeds that blossom are allowed to stay living in the old world. Beauty must be removed, removed and confined in our old rooms, in our old houses so that when we stumble across their slowly decaying bodies we might feel beautiful too. Their appearance is temporal just as mine used to be, if only we had taken more pictures. i am beautiful. i know because i like me. My friends like me. Sometimes up to 30 people like me! And this is all proof that i am beautiful. You should like me too. i’m not fake, everything i do is proof, every moment is evidentiary, and each action i take becomes an image. These images are liked and shared. Though, in the old world i might have had doubt over the validity that a button push can lend, i no longer have use of doubt as only data exists here and data is truth. Data is truth and truth didn’t exist in the old world. There everything degraded and slowly fell apart. Truth can’t be undeniable if it changes, this was the fault of our past lives. Nothing was real as everything faded. Even images of our past selfs would fade or alter the color of their evidentiary memories if left to their own devices. This was the tragedy of flowers. They could be touched and smelled and created; yet, they always would leave and once gone what was there to prove that they existed in the first place? i no longer worry about tragedy. Tragedy, sorrow, pain, lust all have become treats. Morsels of information that can be created to supply the hunger of my friends. Emotions do have their place in our new homes, they are the pictures we hang on our walls, the created slice of life that we serve to those kind enough to visit. i hope my tragedies are popular ones, followed by data from sources i’ll never know. i hope that the content that makes me means something to those who’s content means more. We had no meaning before. Gods were stories with now power to control or shape the worlds that they supposedly created. There was a constant questioning of seeing and of meaning. The attempt to make sense of a system without any inherent structure cost time and wreaked havoc on our temporal forms. The inhabitants of beauty and entertainment changed and hid, slowly being forgotten as traces of their perfect selves slowly erased itself from consciousness. Then, no one had meaning. Now i have many meanings. i mean information, i mean internet, i mean brand. i hope you see my content. i hope you see me. i hope i never die

Fighting, Screaming, and Laughing for an Audience: Stars, Genres, and the Question of Constructing a Popular Anglophone Canadian Cinema in the Twenty First Century

This thesis addresses English-Canadian cinema’s attempt to establish and maintain a popular cinema during the first decade of the twenty-first century, specifically analyzing the relationship between Canadian genre filmmaking traditions and the complexities of attracting popular Canadian audiences to homegrown films. This extended study examines a variety of films and people in contemporary English-language Canadian cinema, from Anglophone Canadian star Paul Gross and his films Men with Brooms (2002) and Passchendaele, to horror films Splice (Vincenzo Natali 2010) and Pontypool (Bruce McDonald 2009), and finally the action-comedy Bon Cop, Bad Cop (Érik Canuel 2006). Discussing the respective political economies, marketing, critical receptions, and production histories of a diverse selection of contemporary English-language Canadian films in case-study format, this thesis finds that, while troubled, it is undoubtedly possible to create a popular contemporary English-language Canadian cinema that exists, at least geographically and politically, apart from the dominant Hollywood filmmaking