How2Sketch: Generating Easy-To-Follow Tutorials for Sketching 3D Objects

Accurately drawing 3D objects is difficult for untrained individuals, as it requires an understanding of perspective and its effects on geometry and proportions. Step-by-step tutorials break the complex task of sketching an entire object down into easy-to-follow steps that even a novice can follow. However, creating such tutorials requires expert knowledge and is a time-consuming task. As a result, the availability of tutorials for a given object or viewpoint is limited. How2Sketch addresses this problem by automatically generating easy-to-follow tutorials for arbitrary 3D objects. Given a segmented 3D model and a camera viewpoint,it computes a sequence of steps for constructing a drawing scaffold comprised of geometric primitives, which helps the user draw the final contours in correct perspective and proportion. To make the drawing scaffold easy to construct, the algorithm solves for an ordering among the scaffolding primitives and explicitly makes small geometric modifications to the size and location of the object parts to simplify relative positioning. Technically, we formulate this scaffold construction as a single selection problem that simultaneously solves for the ordering and geometric changes of the primitives. We demonstrate our algorithm for generating tutorials on a variety of man-made objects and evaluate how easily the tutorials can be followed with a user study

Crowdsourcing in China: Exploring the Work Experience of Solo Crowdworkers and Crowdfarm Workers

Recent research highlights the potential of crowdsourcing in China. Yet very few studies explore the workplace context and experiences of Chinese crowdworkers. Those that do, focus mainly on the work experiences of solo crowdworkers but do not deal with issues pertaining to the substantial amount of people working in ‘crowdfarms’. This article addresses this gap as one of its primary concerns. Drawing on a study that involves 48 participants, our research explores, compares and contrasts the work experiences of solo crowdworkers to those of crowdfarm workers. Our findings illustrate that the work experiences and context of the solo workers and crowdfarm workers are substantially different, with regards to their motivations, the ways they engage with crowdsourcing, the tasks they work on, and the crowdsourcing platforms they utilize. Overall, our study contributes to furthering the understandings on the work experiences of crowdworkers in China

Constructive role of noise: Fast fluctuation asymptotics of transport in stochastic ratchets

The constructive role of random fluctuations is studied in the context of transport in stochastic ratchets. We discuss the interplay of independent white (thermal) and discrete (external) noises and their generation of transport in anisotropic potentials. The constructive cooperation of such fluctuations is most apparent in the asymptotic limit of fast discrete-valued noise, a limit which presents some interesting mathematical features. We describe the asymptotic analysis of the current in the limit of fast external noise, pointing out the strong qualitative dependence of the current on the interplay of the independent noise sources and its surprising sensitivity to the regularity of the underlying anisotropic ratchet potential. © 1998 American Institute of Physics.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69412/2/CHAOEH-8-3-643-1.pd

Language variation and change in academic writing: Recent trends through globalisation and digitalisation

This article discusses variation and change in academic writing, integrating different approaches, from English for academic purposes to lingua franca studies and from contrastive rhetoric to discourse analysis, and various comparative perspectives from national to genre/part genre (e.g. research article abstracts or conclusions) or career specific writings (e.g. BA, MA and PhD theses). It focuses on the interrelated development of discourse as social interaction in the context of technological affordances and societal demands and on the specific applications of the well-known trends of globalisation and digitalisation to non-native academic writing. Of course, the impact of recent changes varies with (sub-) disciplines, genres, and even individual researchers in their construction of careers and identities. The general trends, however, can be observed independently of whether we see them as functional necessity or advancement or threats to established conventions individually. A great number of small-scale empirical corpus studies should be able to provide a detailed mosaic where researchers can collaborate to provide a background for individual academic writers to choose from. Global rhetorical features (like IMRaD) and small-scale usages of pronouns are just examples of current variation and changes that are worth tracing in the wide field of metadiscourse that shapes academic interaction today, for the advancement of science communication and thus of science as a whole

v4v: a View for the Viewer

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright © 2005 AIGA | The professional association for design. We present a View for the Viewer (v4v), a slide viewer that focuses on the needs of the viewer of a presentation instead of the presenter. Our design centers on representing the deck of slides as a stack embedded in a 3-D world. With only single button clicks, the viewer can quickly and easily navigate the deck of slides. We provide four types of annotation techniques and have designed a synchronization mechanism that makes it easy for the viewer to move in and out of sync with the presenter. We also supply alarms as a method for viewer notification. We evaluate our approach with a preliminary user study resulting in positive feedback about our design plus suggestions for improvements and extensions

Changes in Webpage Structure over Time

We present an analysis of the prevalence and nature of structural changes of websites. We study the evolution of some 12,000 webpages from 20 different websites over a period of five months. The websites cover a wide spectrum in both types of content and volume of traffic. We find that the structure of webpages from lower-volume sites changes very little, while webpages from high-volume sites change in mostly minor ways. Some of these sites go through drastic structural changes, but only on the order of once every couple of months. We discuss the implications of these observed changes for the design of structure-based extraction algorithms and how they can evolve over time. Our analysis leads us to the conclusion that structural extraction algorithms can play an important role in future applications for aggregating and summarizing Web content