The Ambivalence of the Undead – Entropy, Duality and the Sublime as Perspectives on Contemporary Painting

It is well known that painting has died many deaths in the course of modernist history. But whilst Painting dies, paintings keep getting made. My thesis examines this question: Is the fact that paintings have the power to allegorize their own historical death a new ‘fact’ of painting’s ‘essence’? Introduction – Painting’s Perverse Body Painting’s death is investigated to see how painting’s essence was first determined, then abandoned. These narratives are found to run counter to a notion of the essential. Instead, they become narratives of style. Chapter 1 – Multilateral Displacement – Communication and Representation A non-linear model of representation from the established context of modernist linearity is extracted in a close reading of visual concepts in Bataillean Surrealism. This elaborates a notion of death as a style into a constructive representational logic. This determines a non-terminal, death-aware idea of representation. Chapter 2 – Visual Entropy and the Contagion of Death Bataille’s economics of death are expanded in connection with the logic of entropy within living systems. The close relationship between these ideas and the biomechanics of nature uncovers a visual-logical model manifest in the phenomena of insect mimesis. The ‘reciprocal topography’ between the organism and its context is understood as asystem of information exchange embodying Bataillean non-linearity in (something like) visual entropy. Chapter 3 – Sublime Mimesis This chapter investigates the American landscape painters of the 18th century and the relationship between the desiring author-painter and the ‘sublime’ objective vista. The anxiety recorded in the style changes of these paintings is read as reactions to an unrepresentable ‘terrifying (sublime) beauty’ in nature. Painting becomes not a sovereign site on the fringe of the world, but as one crystallisation stage in the matrix of information exchanges in nature. This implies a concordant relocation of the sublime. Conclusion – Painting as Anoriginal Illustration Painting comes to be seen as Anoriginal illustration – it describes the ‘primary text’ of the natural world by always ‘coming after’ and being reassuringly communicative in its resolution. On the other hand, and at the same time, painting is evidence of all that threatens such resolution. Painting’s essence then becomes anoriginal illustration, the mirror that reflects the energetic interdependency of reassurance and anxiety in its oscillating, multi-temporal basic (dead) nature

Rumex and Urtica detection in grassland by UAV

. Previous work (Binch & Fox, 2017) used autonomous ground robotic platforms to successfully detect Urtica (nettle) and Rumex (dock) weeds in grassland, to improve farm productivity and the environment through precision herbicide spraying. It assumed that ground robots swathe entire fields to both detect and spray weeds, but this is a slow process as the slow ground platform must drive over every square meter of the field even where there are no weeds. The present study examines a complimentary approach, using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to perform faster detections, in order to inform slower ground robots of weed location and direct them to spray them from the ground. In a controlled study, it finds that the existing state-of-the-art (Binch & Fox, 2017) ground detection algorithm based on local binary patterns and support vector machines is easily re-usable from a UAV with 4K camera despite large differences in camera type, distance, perspective and motion, without retraining. The algorithm achieves 83-95% accuracy on ground platform data with 1-3 independent views, and improves to 90% from single views on aerial data. However this is only attainable at low altitudes up to 8 feet, speeds below 0.3m/s, and a vertical view angle, suggesting that autonomous or manual UAV swathing is required to cover fields, rather than use of a single high-altitude photograph. This demonstrates for the first time that combined aerial detection with ground spraying system is feasible for Rumex and Urtica in grassland, using UAVs to replace the swathing and detection of weeds then dispatching ground platforms to spray them at the detection sites (as spraying by UAV is illegal in EU countries). This reduces total time requires to spray as the UAV performs the survey stage faster than a ground platform

Measurement of the CKM angle γ using the B^± → D*h^± channels

A measurement of the CP-violating observables from B±→D∗K± and B±→D∗π± decays is presented, where D∗(D) is an admixture of D∗0 and D¯∗0 (D0 and D¯0) states and is reconstructed through the decay chains D∗→Dπ0/γ and D→K0Sπ+π−/K0SK+K−. The measurement is performed by analysing the signal yield variation across the D decay phase space and is independent of any amplitude model. The data sample used was collected by the LHCb experiment in proton-proton collisions and corresponds to a total integrated luminosity of 9 fb−1 at centre-of-mass energies of 7, 8 and 13 TeV. The CKM angle γ is determined to be (69+13−14)∘ using the measured CP-violating observables. The hadronic parameters rD∗K±B,rD∗π±B,δD∗K±B,δD∗π±B, which are the ratios and strong phase differences between favoured and suppressed B± decays, are also reported

Immune Modulation by Schistosoma mansoni Antigens in NOD Mice: Effects on Both Innate and Adaptive Immune Systems

We have shown that Schistosoma mansoni egg soluble antigen (SEA) prevents diabetes in the nonobese diabetic (NOD) mouse inducing functional changes in antigen presenting cells (APCs) and expanding T helper (Th) 2 and regulatory T cell (Treg) responses. A Th2 response to S. mansoni infection or its antigens is key to both the establishment of tolerance and successfully reproduction in the host. More recently we demonstrated that SEA treatment upregulates bioactive TGFβ on T cells with consequent expansion of Foxp3+ Tregs, and these cells might be important in SEA-mediated diabetes prevention together with Th2 cells. In this study we profile further the phenotypic changes that SEA induces on APCs, with particular attention to cytokine expression and markers of macrophage alternative activation. Our studies suggest that TGFβ from T cells is important not just for Treg expansion but also for the successful Th2 response to SEA, and therefore, for diabetes prevention in the NOD mouse