A guide and two untime chronicles to contemplate Rothko's work

The experience offered by a museum to a visitor can have different nature and importance for everyone. Each artwork is perpetually sending a message to the viewer, possibly creating an art-person link. This link can provide experiences of great significant power to the visitor. The article below aims to delve into the facilitation of these experiences in the case of the paintings created by the artist Mark Rothko work (1903-1970). Their special characteristics mean that they can be called "Rothko experiences". As a result, a guide to viewing the work, based on the artist's recommendations, has been developed which can facilitate the emergence of these so-called "Rothko experience". Specifically, some of the multiple "realityaesthetical-art" connections experienced between Rothko's work and people whom observation incorporate an aesthetical and metaphysical dimension of reality are presented. To help in the understanding of these profound experiences and the aesthetical education of sensibility, the narrative method is used through two chronicles that gather the experiences lived by the authors in their contemplation of Rothko's work. These chronicles are examples that can help to understand the possibilities of Rothko's contemplative painting. The result is a synthetic study of Rothko work conceptualization, through one guide and the narrative dialectics between two "Rothko experiences" to show his aesthetical way of thinking, represented in his paintings

Machine learning techniques to select Be star candidates. An application in the OGLE-IV Gaia south ecliptic pole field

Statistical pattern recognition methods have provided competitive solutions for variable star classification at a relatively low computational cost. In order to perform supervised classification, a set of features is proposed and used to train an automatic classification system. Quantities related to the magnitude density of the light curves and their Fourier coefficients have been chosen as features in previous studies. However, some of these features are not robust to the presence of outliers and the calculation of Fourier coefficients is computationally expensive for large data sets. We propose and evaluate the performance of a new robust set of features using supervised classifiers in order to look for new Be star candidates in the OGLE-IV Gaia south ecliptic pole field. We calculated the proposed set of features on six types of variable stars and on a set of Be star candidates reported in the literature. We evaluated the performance of these features using classification trees and random forests along with K-nearest neighbours, support vector machines, and gradient boosted trees methods. We tuned the classifiers with a 10-fold cross-validation and grid search. We validated the performance of the best classifier on a set of OGLE-IV light curves and applied this to find new Be star candidates. The random forest classifier outperformed the others. By using the random forest classifier and colour criteria we found 50 Be star candidates in the direction of the Gaia south ecliptic pole field, four of which have infrared colours consistent with Herbig Ae/Be stars. Supervised methods are very useful in order to obtain preliminary samples of variable stars extracted from large databases. As usual, the stars classified as Be stars candidates must be checked for the colours and spectroscopic characteristics expected for them

Poliartritis y leishmaniosis canina: Patogenia de la alteración articular : caso clínico

Uno de los signos clínicos a menudo observados en los perros con leishmaniosis es la presencia de cojeras, asociadas en muchos casos a poliartritis. la patogenia de estas alteraciones articulares no está del todo clara. Si bien la presencia del parásito en la articulación explicaría en muchos casos la alteración observada, debe tenerse también en cuenta el efecto patógeno que puede tener lugar a través del depósito de inmunocomplejos circulantes (ICC), que son frecuentes en esta enfermedad. En el presente artículo revisamos la bibliografía y comparamos nuestro caso con otros publicados, discutiendo sobre el posible origen de estas artropatías.Lameness, often associated with polyarthritis, is one of the most frequent clinical signs observed in dogs with leishmaniasis.The pathogenesis of these joint disturbances is not well known.Even the presence of the parasite in the joint sometimes may explain the observed alteration, the pathogenic effect triggered by the deposition of circulating immunocomplexes (CIC) that are afien produced in dogs with Cl, should also be considered.The present paper reviews the literature and compares our clinical case with others reported, thus, discussing the possible aetiology of these arthropathies

Environments for sonic ecologies

This paper outlines a current lack of consideration for the environmental context of Evolutionary Algorithms used for the generation of music. We attempt to readdress this balance by outlining the benefits of developing strong coupling strategies between agent and en- vironment. It goes on to discuss the relationship between artistic process and the viewer and suggests a placement of the viewer and agent in a shared environmental context to facilitate understanding of the artistic process and a feeling of participation in the work. The paper then goes on to outline the installation ‘Excuse Me and how it attempts to achieve a level of Sonic Ecology through the use of a shared environmental context

Effects of epitaxial strain on the growth mechanism of YBa2Cu3O7-x thin films in [YBa2Cu3O7-x / PrBa2Cu3O7-x] superlattices

We report on the growth mechanism of YBa2Cu3O7-x (YBCO). Our study is based on the analysis of ultrathin, YBa2Cu3O7-x layers in c-axis oriented YBa2Cu3O7-x / PrBa2Cu3O7-x superlattices. We have found that the release of epitaxial strain in very thin YBCO layers triggers a change in the dimensionality of the growth mode. Ultrathin, epitaxially strained, YBCO layers with thickness below 3 unit cells grow in a block by block two dimensional mode coherent over large lateral distances. Meanwhile, when thickness increases, and the strain relaxes, layer growth turns into three dimensional, resulting in rougher layers and interfaces.Comment: 10 pages + 9 figures, accepted in Phys. Rev.

An outbreak of occupational textile dye dermatitis from Disperse Blue 106

Contact Dermatitis. 2000 Oct;43(4):235-7. An outbreak of occupational textile dye dermatitis from Disperse Blue 106. Mota F, Silva E, Varela P, Azenha A, Massa A. Dermatology Department, Hospital Geral Santo António, Braga, Portugal. PMID: 11011934 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE

Surface roughness and thermal conductivity of semiconductor nanowires: going below the Casimir limit

By explicitly considering surface roughness at the atomic level, we quantitatively show that the thermal conductivity of Si nanowires can be lower than Casimir's classical limit. However, this violation only occurs for deep surface degradation. For shallow surface roughness, the Casimir formula is shown to yield a good approximation to the phonon mean free paths and conductivity, even for nanowire diameters as thin as 2.22 nm. Our exact treatment of roughness scattering is in stark contrast with a previously proposed perturbative approach, which is found to overpredict scattering rates by an order of magnitude. The obtained results suggest that a complete theoretical understanding of some previously published experimental results is still lacking.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Implementing the livelihood resilience framework: an indicator-based model for assessing mountain pastoral farming systems

CONTEXT: Ongoing decreases in family farms and livestock numbers in European mountain areas are linked to multiple interconnected challenges. The continuity of such farms concerns society at large since they also act as landscape stewards, and their management influences the provision of ecosystem services. The livelihood resilience lens provides a means of examining how farm households respond and build their capacity to persist, to adapt to changes and shocks, and eventually transform what is understood as farming. While an increasing number of studies address livelihood resilience in different parts of the world, its link with livelihood strategies and how these enhance or erode livelihood resilience dimensions is still missing. OBJECTIVE: We built and applied an indicator-based framework to characterize the livelihood strategies of mountain livestock farming households in the Catalan Pyrenees (Spain) considering local historical trends, to assess how these strategies contribute to their adaptive capacity. METHODS: We combined sustainable rural livelihoods and livelihood resilience frameworks and operationalized them to: group farm households with similar livelihood strategies based on their income-generating activities; asses the influence of capital assets and context on the adoption of strategies; and relate these strategies with their performance in three dimensions of adaptive capacity, namely capacity for learning and adaptation, self-organization, and diversity. Information was gathered surveying a sample of 103 farm households. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: We identified five livelihood strategies showing different degrees of adaptive capacity. Farm households either intensified production (21.3% of the sample) or pursued various diversification pathways based on additional off-farm work (28.6%), rural-tourism activities (22.7%), or added-value production (13.3%). Pensioners (11.8%) had a low endowment of assets and presented the lowest estimates in several dimensions of adaptive capacity. In contrast, diversification into rural tourism scored higher in adaptive capacity, showing greater proactive capacity, farmer organization, and multiple income sources. SIGNIFICANCE: We explored the multidimensional issues that influence and are influenced by the livelihood strategies and their adaptive capacity at the farm household level. Our work highlights the relevance of including income-generating activities in addition to structural, technical, and socioeconomic variables in characterizing farming systems. It demonstrates the role of farmer involvement in formal and informal social cooperation networks in the sustainability and adaptive capacity of their households. To be successful, diversification strategies may require certain prerequisites in the farms, while strategies based on off-farm activities, although they support improved financial performance of the farm household, could also contribute to the displacement of agriculture from mountain areas