Old Myths and New Forms of Orientalism: Gauguin, Toorop, van der Leck, and Mondrian

More than fifty examples of works by Paul Gauguin, Jan Toorop, Bart van der Leck, and Piet Mondrian demonstrate the significant influence of artifacts, newly revealed since the early nineteenth century, from the ancient Orient, that is, Pharaonic Egypt and biblical lands. The individual interest of these artists is analyzed in four monographic chapters, which indicate enough similarities in their interpretation and use of the ancient motifs to constitute a new departure in Orientalism. Their particular approaches bring out as well particular biographical, symbolic, and iconographic insights into their artistic development. As a leading symbolist painter, Gauguin pioneered the revival of sacred art involving old and new myths of Orientalism, which were critical also for Toorop, van der Leck, and Mondrian. Characteristically, all four artists assimilated ancient Oriental artistic conventions as a form of primitivism a return to original purity -- to create radical images about personal and social renewal. The primordial figured also in the narrative and symbolic synthesis of their art. Stylistically, all of their work became more decorative, two-dimensional, and more compatible with the architectural plane; line and color were released from mimetic servitude, and a pictographic aspect was added. Gauguin, Toorop, van der Leck, and Mondrian all integrated ancient Oriental motifs into their work, but each to his own ends. While Gauguin appropriated Achaemenid Persian and Egyptian art, van der Leck studied Egyptian, Assyrian, and Sumerian art, and Toorop and Mondrian relied on Egyptian art. Though Gauguin discussed music as a paradigm in the new art, the musical quality of Egyptian and Assyrian (and even Sumerian) art made a greater impact on the work of the Dutch artists. Likewise, they embraced the social and mural tradition of ancient Oriental art as a model for their own attempts to reintegrate architecture with utopian art. The dissertation has answered my original question regarding the impact of ancient Oriental art on progressive artists at the turn of the century. The project has also brought surprises, in the form of many unexpected connections between artists and other members of the European intelligentsia, which merit further exploration

Bidirectional ventricular tachycardia in cardiac sarcoidosis.

A 73-year-old man with history of pulmonary sarcoidosis was found to have runs of non-sustained bidirectional ventricular tachycardia (BVT) with two different QRS morphologies on a Holter monitor. Cardiac magnetic resonance delayed gadolinium imaging revealed a region of patchy mid-myocardial enhancement within the left ventricular basal inferolateral myocardium. An 18-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) showed increased uptake in the same area, consistent with active sarcoid, with no septal involvement. Follow-up FDG-PET one year later showed disease progression with new septal involvement. Cardiac sarcoidosis, characterized by myocardial inflammation and interstitial fibrosis that can lead to conduction system disturbance and macro re-entrant arrhythmias, should be considered in differential diagnosis of BVT. BVT may indicate septal involvement with sarcoidosis before the lesions are large enough to be detected radiologically

Phase change materials for life science applications

Phase change materials (PCMs) are a class of thermo-responsive materials that can be utilized to trigger a phase transition which gives them thermal energy storage capacity. Any material with a high heat of fusion is referred to as a PCM that is able to provide cutting-edge thermal storage. PCMs are commercially used in many applications like textile industry, coating, and cold storage typically for heat control. These intriguing substances have recently been rediscovered and employed in a broad range of life science applications, including biological, human body, biomedical, pharmaceutical, food, and agricultural applications. Benefiting from the changes in physicochemical properties during the phase transition makes PCMs also functional for barcoding, detection, and storage. Paraffin wax and polyethylene glycol are the most commonly studied PCMs due to their low toxicity, biocompatibility, high thermal stability, high latent enthalpy, relatively wide transition temperature range, and ease of chemical modification. Current challenges in employing PCMs for life science applications include biosafety and/or engineering difficulties. The focus of this review article is on the life science applications, evaluation, and safety aspects of PCMs. Herein, the advances and the potential of employing PCMs as a versatile platform for various types of life science applications are highlighted.Peer reviewe

Synthetic Aperture Focusing Technique Using the Envelope Function for Ultrasonic Imaging

In traditional ultrasonic imaging systems, a transducer is scanned across the surface of a specimen at constant intervals. Synthetic aperture focusing techniques (SAFT) have been utilized extensively to process the RF data in order to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio of the image [1]. However, the implementation of the algorithm using sampled RF data has the disadvantage of requiring large memory and high-speed devices. These requirements can be reduced by using the envelope of the RF signal which involves processing the baseband signal. The envelope detection can be easily implemented as part of the receiver circuit

A Tale of Two DRAGGNs: A Hybrid Approach for Interpreting Action-Oriented and Goal-Oriented Instructions

Robots operating alongside humans in diverse, stochastic environments must be able to accurately interpret natural language commands. These instructions often fall into one of two categories: those that specify a goal condition or target state, and those that specify explicit actions, or how to perform a given task. Recent approaches have used reward functions as a semantic representation of goal-based commands, which allows for the use of a state-of-the-art planner to find a policy for the given task. However, these reward functions cannot be directly used to represent action-oriented commands. We introduce a new hybrid approach, the Deep Recurrent Action-Goal Grounding Network (DRAGGN), for task grounding and execution that handles natural language from either category as input, and generalizes to unseen environments. Our robot-simulation results demonstrate that a system successfully interpreting both goal-oriented and action-oriented task specifications brings us closer to robust natural language understanding for human-robot interaction.Comment: Accepted at the 1st Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics at ACL 201

A Tale of Two DRAGGNs: A Hybrid Approach for Interpreting Action-Oriented and Goal-Oriented Instructions

Robots operating alongside humans in diverse, stochastic environments must be able to accurately interpret natural language commands. These instructions often fall into one of two categories: those that specify a goal condition or target state, and those that specify explicit actions, or how to perform a given task. Recent approaches have used reward functions as a semantic representation of goal-based commands, which allows for the use of a state-of-the-art planner to find a policy for the given task. However, these reward functions cannot be directly used to represent action-oriented commands. We introduce a new hybrid approach, the Deep Recurrent Action-Goal Grounding Network (DRAGGN), for task grounding and execution that handles natural language from either category as input, and generalizes to unseen environments. Our robot-simulation results demonstrate that a system successfully interpreting both goal-oriented and action-oriented task specifications brings us closer to robust natural language understanding for human-robot interaction.Comment: Accepted at the 1st Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics at ACL 201