The importance of the visual arts in the esthetic of W. B. Yeats.

Yeats's interest in the visual arts was not just an early phase, ending when he left art school, but rather a lifetime concern that affected him in many ways. Not only did artists and art critics have a shaping effect on his esthetic, but paintings and sculptures and their creators provided him with scenes and symbols for his poetry. Sometimes these references are unacknowledged--Yeats's letters indicate that "On Those Who Hated 'The Playboy of the Western World, ' 1907, " for instance, presents a scene from a painting by Charles Ricketts, although there is nothing in any version of the poem itself to indicate the relationship--but several poems do directly refer to a painting or sculpture. These art works served as alembics through which Yeats's ideas passed before emerging as finished poems: as he said to artist Cecil Salkell, "Your picture made the thing clear." Chapter One of this paper describes the backgrounds of Yeats's involvement with the visual arts, especially the effect upon his esthetic of his tendency to react against the changes in style of his painter-father, J. B. Yeats.Chapter Two attempts a summary of W. B. Yeats's essays about the visual arts, which present his standards of evaluation. Crucial to this esthetic is the necessity for an interrelationship of poetry and painting; it is on this basis that Yeats analyzes his own writing career in the 1913 essay, "Art and Ideas." Painters, sculptors, and art critics were influences through their writing as well as their painting; Yeats divides his career into periods according to the dominance of one or another artist or critic's esthetic theories. Chapter Three deals with the first of these, the Pre-Raphaelites and Blake. The Pre-Raphaelites' "literary" paintings pervade Yeats's early poems in scene--landscape, persons, composition--and theme. The love poems especially reflect this style, and it is likely that the background of the form is Rossetti's "Sonnets for Pictures." Blake and his followers, Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert, on the other hand, were more important in the break between early and mid-career for Yeats: Blake primarily as an esthetician, Palmer and Calvert in their contribution to imagery and style, especially the use of pastoral and the development of the elegy. Part of this influence came through Yeats's reading of Blake's Descriptive Catalogue and Palmer's Life and Letters. Chapter Four analyzes the effect upon the middle period in Yeats's career of the "Aesthetic school, " dominated by Walter Pater. The tendency derived from Pater to "purify" the arts of reference to each other shows in the absence of overt use of the visual arts in the poems Yeats wrote at the first of the century. He had read The Renaissance, Marius the Epicurean, and Greek Studies; the effect of these books appears primarily in his drama. Chapter Five portrays the artists whom Yeats saw as an alternative both to the Decadence and to the violence of modern art as it appears in the work of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and the Vorticists: Charles Ricketts and T. S. Moore. Ricketts' Pages on Art details his conservative esthetic, called by Yeats "our more profound Pre-Raphaelitism." The interaction of the arts was a basic principle, and Yeats's poems reflect this by an increasing frequency of reference to the visual arts, culminating in Yeats's masterpiece in the Rossettian mode, "Lapis Lazuli.

Superfast Line Spectral Estimation

A number of recent works have proposed to solve the line spectral estimation problem by applying off-the-grid extensions of sparse estimation techniques. These methods are preferable over classical line spectral estimation algorithms because they inherently estimate the model order. However, they all have computation times which grow at least cubically in the problem size, thus limiting their practical applicability in cases with large dimensions. To alleviate this issue, we propose a low-complexity method for line spectral estimation, which also draws on ideas from sparse estimation. Our method is based on a Bayesian view of the problem. The signal covariance matrix is shown to have Toeplitz structure, allowing superfast Toeplitz inversion to be used. We demonstrate that our method achieves estimation accuracy at least as good as current methods and that it does so while being orders of magnitudes faster.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, accepted for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Metodisk indsamling af transportrelaterede målsætninger og visioner i korridoren Oslo- Göteborg-København-Berlin.

This paper describes how an overview of existing aims and visions regarding social devel-opment and transport systems was developed as a part of the Interreg IIIB program funded project COINCO – Corridor of Innovation and Cooperation. The project started up June 2005 and ends in April 2007. The development of this overview lasted from June 2005 to October 2005 and ended up in a database with more than 1000 entries dealing with aims, visions and means from Nor-way, Sweden, Denmark and Germany.By the development of this database it is now possible to search for aims and visions within the project area within a number of categories such as the source of it, country of origin, its subject, whether it is an already decided project or not etc. The result is an example on how to establish a planning foundation for new cross national cooperation

Variational Bayesian Inference of Line Spectra

In this paper, we address the fundamental problem of line spectral estimation in a Bayesian framework. We target model order and parameter estimation via variational inference in a probabilistic model in which the frequencies are continuous-valued, i.e., not restricted to a grid; and the coefficients are governed by a Bernoulli-Gaussian prior model turning model order selection into binary sequence detection. Unlike earlier works which retain only point estimates of the frequencies, we undertake a more complete Bayesian treatment by estimating the posterior probability density functions (pdfs) of the frequencies and computing expectations over them. Thus, we additionally capture and operate with the uncertainty of the frequency estimates. Aiming to maximize the model evidence, variational optimization provides analytic approximations of the posterior pdfs and also gives estimates of the additional parameters. We propose an accurate representation of the pdfs of the frequencies by mixtures of von Mises pdfs, which yields closed-form expectations. We define the algorithm VALSE in which the estimates of the pdfs and parameters are iteratively updated. VALSE is a gridless, convergent method, does not require parameter tuning, can easily include prior knowledge about the frequencies and provides approximate posterior pdfs based on which the uncertainty in line spectral estimation can be quantified. Simulation results show that accounting for the uncertainty of frequency estimates, rather than computing just point estimates, significantly improves the performance. The performance of VALSE is superior to that of state-of-the-art methods and closely approaches the Cram\'er-Rao bound computed for the true model order.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Language Strategy in a Merger Process

There is no point in having a language strategy which merely collects dust on the shelf because it is out of touch with the reality in the company. The strategy must be used in everyday work so that it becomes a proper management tool. If Energinet.dk succeeds in doing so, the company will be able to use the language strategy to unite the company, with a concern to language and achieve a high qualitative level as well

When the unconscious joins the game:a psychoanalytic perspective on modernization and change

Abstract: The article presents a psychoanalytic and cultural perspective on the modernization of the welfare state in a Danish context. The article analyzes the processes of change and development in public welfare organizations through theoretical and empirical perspectives. The first statement argues, that development and change related to modernization cause anxiety, defensiveness, and ambivalence. The second statement shows how an analysis of transference provides significant insight into organizational and human dynamics, thereby refining our understanding of change and modernization. The third statement posits that in the setting of public welfare administration, the typical response to anxiety and defense mechanisms involves rational and instrumental measures rather than the establishment of a reflective, defense-reducing working environment. The fourth statement suggests that developmental work activates previous experiences that can either inhibit or facilitate development and change in a complex alternation. The fifth statement points to the economic, political, and cultural context and its influence on the intensity and extent of defense mechanisms. Key words: life history, modernization, change processes, transference, defense mechanis

Interaction, transference, and subjectivity:A psychoanalytic approach to fieldwork

Fieldwork is one of the important methods in educational, social, and organisational research. In fieldwork, the researcher takes residence for a shorter or longer period amongst the subjects and settings to be studied. The aim of this is to study the culture of people: how people seem to make sense of their lives and which moral, professional, and ethical values seem to guide their behaviour and attitudes. In fieldwork, the researcher has to balance participation and observation in her attempts at representation. Consequently, the researcher’s academic and life-historical subjectivity are important filters for fieldwork. In general, fieldwork can be understood as processes where field reports and field analysis are determined by how the researcher interacts with and experiences the field, the events and informants in it, and how she subsequently develops an ethnography. However, fieldwork is also subjected to psychodynamic processes. In this article, I draw upon a number of research inquiries to illustrate how psychodynamic processes influence research processes: data production, research questions and methodology, relations to informants, as well as interpretation and analysis. I further investigate through a case study how the psychoanalytical concepts of “transference” and “institutional transference” can provide insight into the dynamics of efficiency and democracy at a number of Danish human service organisations