Translating Practical Knowledge: Three Theories of Portraiture from the Mid-Qing Dynasty

This essay discusses three Chinese treatises on portraiture techniques written during the 18th century and how the authors codified practical knowledge.Part of book or chapter of boo

Translating Practical Knowledge: Three Theories of Portraiture from the Mid-Qing Dynasty

This essay discusses three Chinese treatises on portraiture techniques written during the 18th century and how the authors codified practical knowledge.Asian Studie

Pets as Sentinels of Human Exposure to Neurotoxic Metals

The idea that animals may be used as sentinels of environmental hazards pending over humans and the associated public health implications is not a new one. Nowadays pets are being used as bioindicators for the effects of environmental contaminants in human populations. This is of paramount importance due to the large increase in the worldwide distribution of synthetic chemicals, particularly in the built environment. Companion animals share the habitat with humans being simultaneously exposed to and suffering the same disease spectrum as their masters. Moreover, their shorter latency periods (due to briefer lifespans) enable them to act as early warning systems, allowing timely public health interventions. The rise on ethical constraints on the use of animals and, consequently, on the sampling they can be subjected to has led to the preferential use of noninvasive matrices, and in this case we are looking into hair. This chapter focuses in three non-essential metals: mercury, lead, and cadmium, due to their ubiquitous presence in the built environment and their ability of affecting the mammal nervous system. There is a fairly short amount of studies reporting the concentrations of these metals in pets’ hair, particularly for cats. These studies are characterized, and the metal concentrations corresponding to different parameters (e.g., age, sex, diet, rearing) are described in order to provide the reader with a general vision on the use of this noninvasive matrix on the studies conducted since the last two decades of the twentieth century.publishe

Memorable arts: The mnemonics of painting and calligraphy in Late Imperial China

This dissertation investigates memorisation strategies that were employed in the fields of painting and calligraphy in imperial China, with a focus on the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. Its core questions are: How do memory aids reflect the society that produced them? What role did they play in the transmission and codification of practical knowledge in the field of arts?With the expansion of the printing industry during the Ming dynasty, knowledge of artistic practices came to be valued not only by craftsmen, but also by editors, publishers and highly educated authors. By analyzing both publication context and practices of remembering recorded in works from the Ming and Qing, this study provides insight into the dynamic changes of social values attributed to crafts. It takes a socio-historical approach to analyse memory aids in textual and visual formats recorded in manuals, including formulae (jue 訣) and charts. It provides six case studies to discuss under which circumstances memory aids were composed and how they were received over time, laying a foundation for understanding how practical skills were taught and how new canons of artistic knowledge were constantly being negotiated.NWOAsian Studie

Constant thresholds can make target set selection tractable

Abstract. Target Set Selection, which is a prominent NP-hard problem occurring in social network analysis and distributed computing, is notoriously hard both in terms of achieving useful approximation as well as fixed-parameter algorithms. The task is to select a minimum number of vertices into a “target set ” such that all other vertices will become active in course of a dynamic process (which may go through several activation rounds). A vertex, which is equipped with a threshold value t, becomes active once at least t of its neighbors are active; initially, only the target set vertices are active. We contribute further insights into islands of tractability for Target Set Selection by spotting new parameterizations characterizing some sparse graphs as well as some “cliquish ” graphs and developing corresponding fixed-parameter tractability and (parameterized) hardness results. In particular, we demonstrate that upper-bounding the thresholds by a constant may significantly alleviate the search for efficiently solvable, but still meaningful special cases of Target Set Selection.