The image as historical source or: grabbing contexts

Displaying images on computer screens is one of the more spectacular types of demonstration available. Besides being spectacular, such systems hold, however, quite some promise for the handling of a type of source which by its great variability proved to be quite elusive for formal, but not only for formal analysis in recent years. The author paper tries to summarize recent developments and argues, that the important potential of image processing, as far as research is concerned, is not in the area of retrieving and displaying images, but in improved possibilities for a more intersubjective way of analyzing them

School Sanitation in Underserved Urban Areas in India

This paper discusses how GIZ is supporting the Ministry of Urban Development in improving the sanitation situation for the urban poor. It selected 47 schools in five Indian cities to significantly improve the sanitation conditions, aiming to build awareness and capacity. All schools showed measurable improvements on school sanitation at the end of the project

The Geoff Egan Memorial Lecture 2011. Artefacts, art and artifice: reconsidering iconographic sources for archaeological objects in early modern Europe

A first systematic analysis of historic domestic material culture depicted in contemporaneous Western painting and prints, c.1400-1800. Drawing on an extensive data set, the paper proposes to methodologies and hermeneutics for historical analysis and archaeological correspondence

Multi-view PointNet for 3D Scene Understanding

Fusion of 2D images and 3D point clouds is important because information from dense images can enhance sparse point clouds. However, fusion is challenging because 2D and 3D data live in different spaces. In this work, we propose MVPNet (Multi-View PointNet), where we aggregate 2D multi-view image features into 3D point clouds, and then use a point based network to fuse the features in 3D canonical space to predict 3D semantic labels. To this end, we introduce view selection along with a 2D-3D feature aggregation module. Extensive experiments show the benefit of leveraging features from dense images and reveal superior robustness to varying point cloud density compared to 3D-only methods. On the ScanNetV2 benchmark, our MVPNet significantly outperforms prior point cloud based approaches on the task of 3D Semantic Segmentation. It is much faster to train than the large networks of the sparse voxel approach. We provide solid ablation studies to ease the future design of 2D-3D fusion methods and their extension to other tasks, as we showcase for 3D instance segmentation.Comment: Geometry Meets Deep Learning Workshop, ICCV 201

Cultural Landscapes: construction; perception and evaluation in the Late Middle Ages and today

Los paisajes culturales “representan el trabajo combinado de la naturaleza y el hombre” (UNESCO). En la Baja Edad Media, imágenes de paisajes lograron convertirse en un medio habitual para crear o fortalecer la identidad de los observadores al mostrar, por ejemplo, vistas de su hermosa ciudad, su comunidad minera exitosa o sus territorios bien gobernados. Hoy en día, los métodos para crear y preservar identidad con la ayuda de paisajes culturales y de su representación son, sin duda, en cierta forma distintos a aquéllos de la época medieval, pero son también sorprendentemente similares y en ninguna manera menos importantes. Cultural landscapes “represent the combined work of nature and man” (UNESCO). In the late Middle Ages, images of them could become a popular means to create or strengthen the identity of their beholders showing, for instance, views of one’s beautiful town, one’s successful mining community or one’s well governed territory. Today’s methods to create and preserve identity with the help of cultural landscapes and their representation are certainly in some aspects different from the late medieval methods, in other ones strikingly similar and clearly not in any way less important.

Inszenierung/Museum

Die Arbeit zielt darauf ab, den Begriff Inszenierung als heuristisches Analyseinstrument an der Ausstellung über Bühnenkostüme "Verkleiden-Verwandeln-Verführen" im Österreichischen Theatermuseum anzuwenden, um so den Inszenierungscharakter der Ausstellung feststellen zu können. Dafür werden die Parallelen zwischen Theater und Museum erforscht, wozu auch eine geschichtliche Betrachtung beider Medien notwendig ist. Im Zuge dessen stellt sich heraus, dass das Sammeln aus dem Verlangen nach Selbstidentifikation entspringt. Es ist eine Vergewisserung des Selbst durch Vergegenwärtigung vergangener Dinge, die sowohl im Theater als auch im Museum anzutreffen ist. Weiters werden jene Elemente von Ausstellungen betrachtet, die für die Inszenierung von Bedeutung sind. Diese (Semiotik, der Aura, dem Objekt und Raum und Zeit) werden in einen kulturphilosophischen Diskurs gebettet, ehe die Debatte um die Ausstellungsinszenierung eingeleitet wird. Dabei stellt sich heraus, dass die Ausstellungsinszenierung der Optimierung von Ausstellungen dient. Folgend zeigte sich, dass bereits direkte Vergleiche zwischen den Medien gezogen wurden: Der Kurator ist der "Regisseur", der Besucher ist "Zuschauer, Schauspieler und Regisseur" und das Objekt ist ebenso "Akteur". Die Dinge in der Ausstellung befinden sich dabei in einem Dialog, der aus den Vorstellungen kreiert wird; der Ausstellungsraum wird zur Bühne. Im nächsten Schritt wird die Analyse durch die Inszenierungsanalyse und die semiotische Analyse vorgenommen, die durch Experteninterviews gestützt wird. Es ergibt sich, dass die Ausstellung inszeniert und somit auch theatral(isch) ist. Da das Bühnenkostüm ebenfalls dem Schmücken bzw. Inszenieren des Menschen zur Selbstidentifkation dient, wird es als zeitloses Thema erkannt. Das Theatermuseum geht als offenes Haus hervor, das ebenso mit der Inszenierung arbeitet

Microarray analyses demonstrate the involvement of type i interferons in psoriasiform pathology development in D6-deficient mice

The inflammatory response is normally limited by mechanisms regulating its resolution. In the absence of resolution, inflammatory pathologies can emerge, resulting in substantial morbidity and mortality. We have been studying the D6 chemokine scavenging receptor, which played an indispensable role in the resolution phase of inflammatory responses and does so by facilitating removal of inflammatory CC chemokines. In D6-deficient mice, otherwise innocuous cutaneous inflammatory stimuli induce a grossly exaggerated inflammatory response that bears many similarities to human psoriasis. In the present study, we have used transcriptomic approaches to define the molecular make up of this response. The data presented highlight potential roles for a number of cytokines in initiating and maintaining the psoriasis-like pathology. Most compellingly, we provide data indicating a key role for the type I interferon pathway in the emergence of this pathology. Neutralizing antibodies to type I interferons are able to ameliorate the psoriasis-like pathology, confirming a role in its development. Comparison of transcriptional data generated from this mouse model with equivalent data obtained from human psoriasis further demonstrates the strong similarities between the experimental and clinical systems. As such, the transcriptional data obtained in this preclinical model provide insights into the cytokine network active in exaggerated inflammatory responses and offer an excellent tool to evaluate the efficacy of compounds designed to therapeutically interfere with inflammatory processes

Roche lobe effects on the atmospheric loss of "Hot Jupiters"

Observational evidence of a hydrodynamically evaporating upper atmosphere of HD209458b (Vidal-Madjar et al. 2003; 2004) and recent theoretical studies on evaporation scenarios of ``Hot Jupiters'' in orbits around solar-like stars with the age of the Sun indicate that the upper atmospheres of short-periodic exoplanets experience hydrodynamic blow-off conditions resulting in loss rates of the order of about 10^10 - 10^12 g s^-1 (Lammer et al. 2003; Yelle 2004; Baraffe et al. 2004; Lecavlier des Etangs et al. 2004; Jaritz et al. 2005, Tian et al. 2005; Penz et al. 2007). By studying the effect of the Roche lobe on the atmospheric loss from short-periodic gas giants we found, that the effect of the Roche lobe can enhance the hydrodynamic evaporation from HD209458b by about 2 and from OGLE-TR-56b by about 2.5 times. For similar exoplanets which are closer to their host star than OGLE-TR-56b, the enhancement of the mass loss can be even larger. Moreover, we show that the effect of the Roche lobe raises the possibility that ``Hot Jupiters'' can reach blow-off conditions at temperatures which are less than expected (< 10000 K) due to the stellar X-ray and EUV (XUV) heating.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, submitted to A&