In Between Manipulated Pâte de Verre

Any artist is living in between. On one side an artist is part of the society as someone normal living a life not different to anybody else, who eats, loves, feels and communicates with other people about things that happen every day. On the other side any artist is observing every single motion of others. She/he sees the surrounding by all her/his senses in an active and passive way. All this information she/he is getting constantly without even thinking about how to get it. It makes the brain work permanently, even when it seems that she/he is having that normal live mentioned above. Her/his brain is already using all this inspiration in a creative way combining the motions, colors, shapes and lines, sounds and fragments of words and when the time comes the artist's hands will do the job of creation without thinking how to visualize it for others. This is the way I am working/I am living as an artist. I tried to divide my approach into three dimensions which are the poetic, the scientific and the artistic, to give a proof that being 'in between' - not only during my glass art and science studies in Portugal - can be a mental state that artists and scientists have. This mental state is leading us to further development, progress and creativity for a society, my experiments to answer this main question were influenced by Einsteins theory of relativity, which did change mankind's thinking about small (particles) and big (universe) at the beginning of last century, by Portuguese history and literature, by art history and by the material itself: glass made in pâte de verre. The first proof of Einstein's mathematical theory of space and time from 1916, better known as theory of relativity, was possible in May 1919 on the Portuguese island of Príncipe because of a solar eclipse when measuring stars close to the sun[1]. Since then we know that Einstein's mathematical theory was correct. It results into wave and particle duality and that is one part of my pâte de verre experiments. In the poetic field I was highly influenced by Fernando Pessoa's life, literature and his construction of heteronyms. In my research I could find out how he was living 'in between' and how his poems reflect that mental stage. My pâte de verre experiments - the artistic dimension of 'in between' - did bring me further and further away from what is usually made with this kind of method and I could find my own level – I call it manipulated pâte de verre. The final result bringing the three dimensions together was seen at my glass exhibition taking place at the Algerian Embassy in Lisboa [2] and at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Universidade de Lisboa

State of the art in the determination of the fine structure constant and the ratio h/muh/m_\mathrm{u}

The fine structure constant $\alpha$ and the ratio $h/m_{\mathrm{u}}$ between the Planck constant and the unified atomic mass are keystone constants for the determination of other fundamental physical constants, especially the ones involved in the framework of the future International System of units. This paper presents how these two constants, which can be deduced from one another, are measured. We will present in detail the measurement of $h/m_\mathrm{Rb}$ performed by atomic interferometry at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel in Paris. This type of measurement also allows a test of the standard model to be carried out with unparalleled accuracy.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1309.339

Atom interferometry based on light pulses : application to the high precision measurement of the ratio h/m and the determination of the fine structure constant

In this paper we present a short overview of atom interferometry based on light pulses. We discuss different implementations and their applications for high precision measurements. We will focus on the determination of the ratio h/m of the Planck constant to an atomic mass. The measurement of this quantity is performed by combining Bloch oscillations of atoms in a moving optical lattice with a Ramsey-Bord\'e interferometer

Physics-based control of virtual characters in low frequency simulations

International audienceUsing a lower simulation frequency for physics-based control of virtual characters frees computation time that can be used for more complex environment. However, using low simulation frequency may introduce instabilities inside the simulation. In this paper, we demonstrate that even a simple control strategy can be used at a low simulation frequency by adapting the control parameters. Indeed we show that lower frequencies hold a more restrictive space of possible control parameters than higher ones. We propose a method to find optimized control parameters for frequencies as low as 200Hz. As using such low frequencies may introduce foot-ground contact instabilities, we also introduce an additional control feedback on the stance leg. Our controller shows similar robustness as high frequency controller while using 0.8ms per simulation step

Learning-based pose edition for efficient and interactive design

Authoring an appealing animation for a virtual character is a challenging task. In computer-aided keyframe animation artists define the key poses of a character by manipulating its underlying skeletons. To look plausible, a character pose must respect many ill-defined constraints, and so the resulting realism greatly depends on the animator's skill and knowledge. Animation software provide tools to help in this matter, relying on various algorithms to automatically enforce some of these constraints. The increasing availability of motion capture data has raised interest in data-driven approaches to pose design, with the potential of shifting more of the task of assessing realism from the artist to the computer, and to provide easier access to nonexperts. In this article, we propose such a method, relying on neural networks to automatically learn the constraints from the data. We describe an efficient tool for pose design, allowing na{\"i}ve users to intuitively manipulate a pose to create character animations

Didactique du texte littéraire à l’université

Cet article tente de montrer, à partir d’une brève synthèse des théories de la littérature les plus prégnantes, pourquoi une didactique du texte littéraire s’avère une urgence à l’université. L’enseignant-chercheur doit prendre acte de l’évolution du public étudiant et de la demande qu’adresse la société à l’université. Il doit donc clarifier ses objectifs quant aux compétences à faire acquérir en s’intéressant aux finalités, aux conditions, aux instruments et aux démarches liés aux pratiques universitaires de la littérature, car l’université ne peut à l’heure actuelle se satisfaire de l’idée que sa mission est seulement de transmettre des savoirs savants