Linking Art through Human Poses

We address the discovery of composition transfer in artworks based on their visual content. Automated analysis of large art collections, which are growing as a result of art digitization among museums and galleries, is an important tool for art history and assists cultural heritage preservation. Modern image retrieval systems offer good performance on visually similar artworks, but fail in the cases of more abstract composition transfer. The proposed approach links artworks through a pose similarity of human figures depicted in images. Human figures are the subject of a large fraction of visual art from middle ages to modernity and their distinctive poses were often a source of inspiration among artists. The method consists of two steps -- fast pose matching and robust spatial verification. We experimentally show that explicit human pose matching is superior to standard content-based image retrieval methods on a manually annotated art composition transfer dataset

Dark Side Augmentation: Generating Diverse Night Examples for Metric Learning

Image retrieval methods based on CNN descriptors rely on metric learning from a large number of diverse examples of positive and negative image pairs. Domains, such as night-time images, with limited availability and variability of training data suffer from poor retrieval performance even with methods performing well on standard benchmarks. We propose to train a GAN-based synthetic-image generator, translating available day-time image examples into night images. Such a generator is used in metric learning as a form of augmentation, supplying training data to the scarce domain. Various types of generators are evaluated and analyzed. We contribute with a novel light-weight GAN architecture that enforces the consistency between the original and translated image through edge consistency. The proposed architecture also allows a simultaneous training of an edge detector that operates on both night and day images. To further increase the variability in the training examples and to maximize the generalization of the trained model, we propose a novel method of diverse anchor mining. The proposed method improves over the state-of-the-art results on a standard Tokyo 24/7 day-night retrieval benchmark while preserving the performance on Oxford and Paris datasets. This is achieved without the need of training image pairs of matching day and night images. The source code is available at https://github.com/mohwald/gandtr .Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 8 table

It All Begins with One Case

The article discusses the seven roles that pharmacists must fulfil to become a seven star pharmacist as categorised in the WHO report 'Preparing the Future Pharmacist'. The roles of caregiver, decision maker, communicator, leader, manager, lifelong learner, and teacher are considered essential minimum common expectations of pharmacists by health systems worldwide

Worshipping the Enterprising Self: The Oprah Empire's Brand of Spiritual Self-Governance

Oprah Winfrey, currently one of the most popular American cultural and moral leaders, frames her empire of media products with the slogan "Live Your Best Life." Oprah uses this slogan to urge audience members to govern their choices, thoughts, and feelings in such a way that they might emulate her American Dream-like success. According to Oprah, the first step toward one's "Best Life" is to work to perfect one's spirit. The spiritual practices and products she endorses, then, become entry points into the fundamental aspects of the Oprah Empire's subjective ideal. This thesis examines Oprah's recent promotion of two explicitly spiritual books: The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and A New Earth by Eckhart Toile. Specifically, this thesis uses Critical Discourse Analysis to examine five episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show from 2007 and 2008 that focus on one of these two books. Because the intended messages and ideological frameworks embedded in cultural products do not disclose what audiences make of them, the second part of this analysis studies the dominant messages of one online class used to promote A New Earth in dialogue with a sampling of related audience discussion posts on Oprah.com. Together, these two sections of analysis reveal how Oprah, as part of the contemporary historic bloc, works to align audience members' interests with an "enterprising" subjective ideal that benefits neoliberal, postfordist governance

Teaching by (bad) example: what a confused attempt to “advance” EBM reveals about its underlying problems

Professor Jenicek’s paper is confused in that his proposal to ‘integrate’ what he means by ‘evidence-based scientific theory and cognitive approaches to medical thinking’ actually embodies a contradiction. But, although confused, he succeeds in teaching us more about the EBM debate than those who seem keen to forge ahead without addressing the underlying epistemological problems that Jenicek brings to our attention. Fundamental questions about the relationship between evidence, knowledge and reason still require resolution if we are to see a genuine advance in this debate

Digested sludge quality in mesophilic, thermophilic and temperature-phased anaerobic digestion systems

Anaerobic digestion (AD) technology is commonly used to treat sewage sludge from activated sludge systems, meanwhile alleviating the energy demand (and costs) for wastewater treatment. Most often, anaerobic digestion is run in single-stage systems under mesophilic conditions, as this temperature regime is considered to be more stable than the thermophilic one. However, it is known that thermophilic conditions are advantageous over mesophilic ones in terms of methane production and digestate hygienisation, while it is unclear which one is better concerning the digestate dewaterability. Temperature-phased anaerobic digestion (TPAD) is a double-stage AD process that combines the above-mentioned temperature regimes, by operating a thermophilic digester followed by a mesophilic one. The aim of this study is to compare the digestate quality of single-stage mesophilic and thermophilic AD and TPAD systems, in terms of the dewaterability, pathogenic safety and lower calorific value (LCV) and, based on the comparison, consider digested sludge final disposal alternatives. The research is conducted in lab-scale reactors treating waste-activated sludge. The dewaterability is tested by two methods, namely, centrifugation and mechanical pressing. The experimental results show that the TPAD system is the most beneficial in terms of organic matter degradation efficiency (32.4% against 27.2 for TAD and 26.0 for MAD), producing a digestate with a high dewaterability (8.1–9.8% worse than for TAD and 6.2–12.0% better than for MAD) and pathogenic safety (coliforms and Escherichia coli were not detected, and Clostridium perfringens were counted up to 4.8–4.9 × 103, when for TAD it was only 1.4–2.5 × 103, and for MAD it was 1.3–1.8 × 104), with the lowest LCV (19.2% against 15.4% and 15.8% under thermophilic and mesophilic conditions, respectively). Regarding the final disposal, the digested sludge after TAD can be applied directly in agriculture; after TPAD, it can be used as a fertilizer only in the case where the fermenter HRT assures the pathogenic safety. The MAD digestate is the best for being used as a fuel preserving a higher portion of organic matter, not transforming into biogas during AD.This research was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no 676070. This communication reflects only the authors’ view and the Research Executive Agency of the EU is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version