Combination, Collaboration and Creation: The Case of Jasper Johns

Great art is marked by emphatic individual styles. From Titian to Jasper Johns, Van Gogh to Frank Stella, the individuality of major works of art and leading visual artists is unmistakable. We do not need to be told that a painting is by the hand of Rembrandt or Jackson Pollock. We can see that at a glance. The individual style of a great artist is difficult to miss. Such styles can be copied, parodied and caricatured. The irony is that what is most individual is also most generic. It translates easily into a type that can be imitated. The paradox of great art is that it is the imitable inimitable. That paradox is further underscored by the fact that such art, individualised as it is, is more often than not deeply shaped by collaboration. That which is most emphatically individual frequently bears the impress of the collective milieu, relationships and projects that populate the background experience of the working artist. Serious artists without question are self-possessed. They are driven by singular visions of what to create and how to create

An analytical spectral formulation of glottal flow

The need for accurate voice source characterisation is an established goal in speech processing research. Practical limitations prohibit the widescale use of a glottal source/vocal tract filter implementation for many speech processing applications. In coding applications, for example, the transduction of the speech signal is with non-specialist microphones under diverse and often adverse conditions. In addition the transmission path and decoding process introduces further phase distortion. In the case of synthesis the accurate recording of a phase sensitive database is not overly problematic, however the extraction of the flow waveform from such a database is still a non-trivial task and as yet no automatic inverse filtering technique is readily available. One possible solution for overcoming the problem of extracting the timing events of the glottal flow is to implement a frequency domain representation and parameterization of the glottal flow waveform. An analytical spectral formulation of an existing time domain glottal model is presented

A review of glottal waveform analysis

Glottal inverse filtering is of potential use in a wide range of speech processing applications. As the process of voice production is, to a first order approximation, a source-filter process, then obtaining source and filter components provides for a flexible representation of the speech signal for use in processing applications. In certain applications the desire for accurate inverse filtering is more immediately obvious, e.g., in the assessment of laryngeal aspects of voice quality and for correlations between acoustics and vocal fold dynamics, the resonances of the vocal tract should firstly be removed. Similarly, for assessment of vocal performance, trained singers may wish to obtain quantitative data or feedback regarding their voice at the level of the larynx

Quantifying accident risk and severity due to speed from the reaction point to the critical conflict in fatal motorcycle accidents

In fatal road vehicle accidents motorcycles are overrepresented per vehicle kilometre travelled. Fatal accidents involving motorcycles contain mode specific characteristics, and in common with fatal accidents involving all road users, speed typically presents as a significant contributory factor. The aim of the present study is to provide quantitative estimates for the contribution of speed in situations commencing from the reaction location to the safety critical event involving a motorcyclist and resulting in a fatal accident. The contribution of speed to the resulting accident risk and accident severity is considered from this reaction point. A speed-squared versus stopping distance domain, termed the severity-risk space, is examined to determine the accident measures. The defined accident measures, namely, accident risk, accident severity and accident severity risk are calculated for sixteen fatal accidents from a police dataset of recent UK motorcycle accidents. The estimate of the defined measures are provided in terms relative to values estimated for the vehicle travelling at the speed limit at the safety critical event. The relative accident risk in response to a safety critical situation shows a partial speed dependent reaction phase and a speed squared dependent braking phase and ranges from 1.3 to 2.8. The speed-squared dependent accident severity measure ranges from 1.4 to 7.3 at pre-impact speeds. The relative accident severity risk shows speed squared to speed cubed dependency components during the reaction phase and a speed to the power of four dependent braking phase and ranges from 2.3 to 22.8. In eight cases the collision would have been avoided had the motorcyclist been travelling at the speed limit at the critical point and in the other eight cases the relative accident severity at impact ranged from 1.4 to 17.2. The speed-squared versus stopping distance domain provides an informative parameter space for considering the accident risk and accident severity dimensions of road user accidents.</div

Spectra of amplitude-perturbed glottal waveforms

The spectral description of voice aperiodicities is important for the introduction of refined voice synthesis parameters and for quantifying voice disorders. A quantitative analysis of the spectral properties of glottal pulses contaminated by additive noise and shimmer is given. The results confirm contamination of higher harmonics when additive noise is present and the introduction of sub-harmonics for shimmered pulses

Nanoporous Glass Films on Liquids

Glass-like thin films are used in many applications as dielectric layers, barrier coatings, abrasion-resistant films, and/or transparent films. We report the first direct application of such materials to liquid substrates using a plasma-deposition process at atmospheric pressure. The study demonstrates the broader utilization of these materials, for example, as robust membranes for water harvesting or drug delivery

Time domain note average energy based music onset detection

A novel time domain strategy is proposed for the detection of the onset of musical notes based on the changing energy level. By calculating the note average energy (NAE), the proposed method is insensitive to both the dynamic range of the energy levels in a piece and whether or notthe piece is monophonic or polyphonic. More importantly, the new strategy tackles the thorny ‘threshold’ problem that is always being avoided unsuccessfully. The detection performance of the new method is illustrated by its performance over a range of music pieces played on different instrument

All data

Data for van den Brink, Murphy & Niewenhuis: Pupil diameter tracks lapses of attention. Three types of data are provided: 1) Raw data; 2) the processed data that were used to compute metrics for inferrential stistics; 3) and the metrics themselves. (1) Raw data are contained in the folder 'raw_data'. The folder 'pupil_data contains four sub folders: * edfs: Raw EDF files as produced by the EyeLink. * samples: ASCII file containing data points from the EDF files (so the pupil data). * events: ASCII file contaning event type and timing information. Type: 0 = Scrambled image; 1 = Mountain; 2 = City; 32 = Response (space bar press). * converted: MATLAB files containing the data imported into EEGLAB format. Each block is contained in a separate EEG entry within ALLEEG. The first channel is pupil diamter in pixels. The second and third channel are gaze x and gaze y respectively. Event type and timing are contained in EEG.event. The folder 'behavior' contains a MATLAB file per participant and block that contains the behavioral data. * The relevant matrix here is 'response', which is organized as trials (rows) by variables (columns). Relevant columns are: Column 1 contains trial types (0 = Scrambled image; 1 = Mountain; 2 = City), Column 2 contains key code (32 = space bar; 0 = no response), Column 5 contains RTs (RT = 0 if no response), Comlumn 7 contains response type (-1 = false alarm; 0 = miss; 1 = hit). (2) Processed data are contained in the folder 'processed_data.’ Within are text files that resulted from the sliding window analysis. In all files the first column is participant number, and the second column is block number. All following columns are data points (a value per window). These data served as regressors in all the major analyses. Folder and file names will tell you what's what. (3) Regression coefficients and slopes are contained in 'statistics'. All MATLAB files containing matrices on which the stats were run. * Slopes, indicative of linear changes over time, are contained in 'Slopes_xxx.mat;’ Size: participant (rows) by block (columns). * Linear regression coefficients are contained in 'Linear_betas_diameter/derivative.mat.’ * Quadratic regression coefficients are contained in 'Quadratic_betas_diameter.mat.’ * File suffix _noTOT indicates that these are regression coefficients after taking time on task into account. The matrices that contain regression coefficients are of size Participant by block by measure. Measure: 1 = False alarm; 2 = Slow quintile 3 = RT; 4 = RTCV.In all of the above, the participants are in the same order as in the text files in the folder 'processed_data'. Note that all statistics were run on the block-average of these matrices

Flexible Polymer-on-Polymer Architecture for Piezo/Pyroelectric Energy Harvesting

An all polymer piezo/pyroelectric device was fabricated using β phase poly­(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) as the active material and vapor phase polymerized (VPP) poly­(3,4-ethylenedioxythiphene) (PEDOT) as the flexible electrode overlay material. Inherent problems usually associated with coating polymeric electrodes onto the low surface energy PVDF were overcome by air plasma treating the film in conjunction with utilizing the VPP technique to simultaneously synthesize and in situ deposit the PEDOT electrode. Strain measurements up to the breaking-strain of PVDF (approximately 35%) indicated that the change in <i>R</i>/<i>R</i>_o was significantly smaller for the PEDOT based electrodes compared to the platinum electrode. Plasma treatment of the PVDF film increased the level of surface oxygenated carbon species that contributed to increased surface energy, as confirmed by confirmed by contact angle measurement. The enhanced adhesion between the two polymers layers contributed to a significant increase in the measured piezoelectric output voltage from 0.2 to 0.5 V for the same strain conditions. Pyroelectric voltage outputs were obtained by placing the film onto and off of a hotplate, for temperatures up to 50 °C above ambient. Finally, as a proof of concept, a simple energy harvesting device (plastic tube with slots for mounting multiple piezo/pyro films) was fabricated. The device was able to generate a usable level of peak output current (>3.5 μA) from human inhalation and exhalation “waste energy”

Large Area Nanostructured Arrays: Optical Properties of Metallic Nanotubes

In this study, large area metallic nanotube arrays on flexible plastic substrates are produced by templating the growth of a cosputtered alloy using anodized aluminum oxide membranes. These nanotube arrays are prepared over large areas (ca. squared centimeters) by reducing the residual stress within the thin multilayered structure. The nanotubes are approximately 20 nm in inner diameter, having walls of <10 nm in thickness, and are arranged in a close packed configuration. Optically the nanotube arrays exhibit light trapping behavior (not plasmonic), where the reflectivity is less than 15% across the visible spectra compared to >40% for a flat sample using the same alloy. When the nanotubes are exposed to high relative humidity, they spontaneously fill, with a concomitant change in their visual appearance. The filling of the nanotubes is confirmed using contact angle measurements, with the nanotubes displaying a strong hydrophilic character compared to the weak behavior of the flat sample. The ability to easily fabricate large area nanotube arrays which display exotic behavior paves the way for their uptake in real world applications such as sensors and solar energy devices