Two emperors and a queen

The film Two Emperors and a Queen has been produced as central element of my practice-as-research PhD project ‘The River Danube as a Holocaust Landscape: Journey of the Kladovo Transport’. The film (re)traces the journey of a group of Jewish refugees from central Europe – through the camera lens. Their entire journey was marked by striking relations to time, starting from its overall duration of more than two years (from 1939 to 1941-42) dominated by stasis rather than movement. The group derived its name from the Serbian town of Kladovo where their trip came to a prolonged halt. The article discusses the process of making this work in the context of practice-as-research. It is equally an online platform where it is possible to see the film

Réveiller l’archive d’une guerre coloniale: photographies et écrits de Gaston Chérau correspondant de guerre en Libye (1911-1912) edited by Pierre Schill, Grâne, Créaphis, 2018, 480 pp., €35 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-2-35428-141-0 [Book review]

Book Review of: Réveiller l’archive d’une guerre coloniale: photographies et écrits de Gaston Chérau correspondant de guerre en Libye (1911-1912) edited by Pierre Schill, Grâne, Créaphis, 2018, 480 pp., €35 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-2-35428-141-

Film practice as interdisciplinary research: a case study

Referring primarily to my own doctoral practice-as-research project as a case study, this chapter explores cinematic practice as a mode of interdisciplinary research. The project traces the journey of the Kladovo transport, a large group of Jewish refugees from central Europe, who attempted to flee Nazi persecutions in 1939 via the river Danube. The majority of the passengers never got further than Serbia, where their journey fatally ended in 1941/1942. This failed escape attempt is charged with striking relationships to time, like the long periods of stasis that the Kladovo transport spent on the Danube waters. While drawing from large an interdisciplinary field, including history, Holocaust geographies and archaeology, I explore this journey as a multi-temporal event, with the camera as my main research tool. In this chapter, I will take a closer look at some of the elements of the interdisciplinary encounters as they appeared in my study

Embedding impact in collaborative filmmaking processes: a case study

Working with two community partners, Barnet Mencap and Why me? (a restorative justice provider), we were invited, with our students from the BA Film programme at Middlesex University, to participate in a knowledge exchange project. The aim of this project was to make the processes of restorative justice more accessible to individuals with learning disabilities and/or autism. We produced and delivered four short educational/campaign films, which are now available online, including on our partners’ websites. While the anticipated impact of the films was clearly defined, positioned from the outset of the project and will be monitored over time, we wish to shift our focus in this article away from the outcomes and explore the notion of impact in relation to the process of making these films. We worked collaboratively with our students, challenging hierarchical assumptions both in an educational setting and in the context of a filmmaking crew. Most importantly, the collaboration also entailed working with a group of neurodivergent actors, who contributed, apart from their acting, through improvisation and interventions to the script. In this context, our project provides for an insightful framework for thinking about impact in relation to a more accessible and inclusive filmmaking process

Using familial information for variant filtering in high-throughput sequencing studies

High-throughput sequencing studies (HTS) have been highly successful in identifying the genetic causes of human disease, particularly those following Mendelian inheritance. Many HTS studies to date have been performed without utilizing available family relationships between samples. Here, we discuss the many merits and occasional pitfalls of using identity by descent information in conjunction with HTS studies. These methods are not only applicable to family studies but are also useful in cohorts of apparently unrelated, 'sporadic' cases and small families underpowered for linkage and allow inference of relationships between individuals. Incorporating familial/pedigree information not only provides powerful filtering options for the extensive variant lists that are usually produced by HTS but also allows valuable quality control checks, insights into the genetic model and the genotypic status of individuals of interest. In particular, these methods are valuable for challenging discovery scenarios in HTS analysis, such as in the study of populations poorly represented in variant databases typically used for filtering, and in the case of poor-quality HTS data

Morphological classification of radio galaxies: Capsule Networks versus Convolutional Neural Networks

Next-generation radio surveys will yield an unprecedented amount of data, warranting analysis by use of machine learning techniques. Convolutional neural networks are the deep learning technique that has proven to be the most successful in classifying image data. Capsule networks are a more recently developed technique that use capsules comprised of groups of neurons, that describe properties of an image including the relative spatial locations of features. The current work explores the performance of different capsule network architectures against simpler convolutional neural network architectures, in reproducing the classifications into the classes of unresolved, FRI and FRII morphologies. We utilise images from a LOFAR survey which is the deepest, wide-area radio survey to date, revealing more complex radio-source structures compared to previous surveys, presenting further challenges for machine learning algorithms. The 4- and 8-layer convolutional networks attain an average precision of 93.3% and 94.3% respectively, compared to 89.7% obtained with the capsule network, when training on original and augmented images. Implementing transfer learning achieves a precision of 94.4%, that is within the confidence interval of the 8-layer convolutional network. The convolutional networks always outperform any variation of the capsule network, as they prove to be more robust to the presence of noise in images. The use of pooling appears to allow more freedom for the intra-class variability of radio galaxy morphologies, as well as reducing the impact of noise

Correlations Between Incidence of Foot Pad Lesions and Body Weight of Broilers in Different Rearing Systems

The incidence of foot pad lesions of broilers of moderate growth was investigated in order to establish correlations with body weight. Broilers were reared until the age of 42 days in the floor system in the poultry house and then were divided into two groups. The first group continued growing in the poultry house until the age of 84 days and the second group was growing in the free range system until the same age. Individual measurements of body weight and evaluation of the incidence of foot pad lesions of broilers were carried out at the end of the experiment. In a correlation analysis of previously transformed data on the percentage of broilers with lesions and body weight within each weight group, data were obtained that showed an association between these traits depending on the rearing system. System of rearing had significant impact on the strength and direction of correlation between body weight and the incidence of foot pad lesions, in light of the determined correlation coefficient r = -0.95 at the significance level p=0.01 in the free range system, and r=0.56 (p>0.05) in chickens reared in the poultry house

The Effect of Raw Soybeans in Mixtures for Laying Hens on Egg Quality and Egg Shell Quality

The study was conducted on hens at the age of 49 - 57 weeks to identify opportunities for replacing, with raw grain, thermally processed soybean Lana variety with a reduced level and Lydia variety with a standard level of trypsin inhibitor. The effect of using different levels of participation of both varieties of raw soybean in mixtures for layers on egg quality and eggshell quality was examined. The research was conducted according to the principle of two-factorial experiment (2 varieties x 4 levels of participation of raw soybeans). The average values of properties of the external and internal egg quality were under statistically significant influence of the level of participation of raw soybean in the mixture. Share of 8 % of raw soybeans of both varieties in diets for layers influenced significantly lower eggshape index, albumen height and Haugh's unit in relation to the mixture with a lower level of participation of raw soybeans. Yolk color and eggshell firmness were not significantly influenced by the studied factors

Constraining the Kahler Moduli in the Heterotic Standard Model

Phenomenological implications of the volume of the Calabi-Yau threefolds on the hidden and observable M-theory boundaries, together with slope stability of their corresponding vector bundles, constrain the set of Kaehler moduli which give rise to realistic compactifications of the strongly coupled heterotic string. When vector bundles are constructed using extensions, we provide simple rules to determine lower and upper bounds to the region of the Kaehler moduli space where such compactifications can exist. We show how small these regions can be, working out in full detail the case of the recently proposed Heterotic Standard Model. More explicitely, we exhibit Kaehler classes in these regions for which the visible vector bundle is stable. On the other hand, there is no polarization for which the hidden bundle is stable.Comment: 28 pages, harvmac. Exposition improved, references and one figure added, minor correction