27 research outputs found
Girl with Lotus and M-16: The ambiguous lineage of Vietnamese revolutionary visual communication
Even before the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was proclaimed and declared independent of France in 1945, the Viá»t Minh, the revolutionary organisation under the charismatic leadership of Há» ChĂ Minh, began recruiting French-trained Vietnamese visual artists to produce visual communication materials, comprising posters, banners, billboards, murals, and other visual emblems of government.
The political and military strategies of the Vietnam wars are the stuff of legend and subject to a vast literature and endless debate. However, the political messages produced by the DRV to mobilise popular support for independence and a prolonged âpeopleâs warâ against the superior military might of two world powers, France and the United States of America (USA), remain in the shadows, undervalued as shrill ideological artefacts or amusing kitsch souvenirs of communist propaganda.
In this thesis, I argue that DRV propaganda was a communist enterprise that drew on an amalgam of communist Sino-Soviet Marxist-Leninist styles, and a melange of other cultural influences, including Vietnamese literary traditions and French visual innovations. This âpolyglotâ combination produced a vigorous cultural hybrid that was able to rise above party rhetoric and âspeakâ to all Vietnamese in a âlanguageâ they could understand.
I contend that the efficacy of DRV propaganda was enabled, inadvertently, by colonial cultural reforms in literacy and visual arts as part of the French civilising mission, which sought to promote colonial rule to the Vietnamese and French populations. Contrary to design, these cultural reforms produced startling consequences for the Vietnamese revolutionary project, including a national writing system, and, an expert cohort of artists, trained in the aesthetics and techniques of visual communication.
This thesis explores the cultural origins of DRV propaganda by considering the effects of those cultural reforms as vectors for Vietnamese nationalism, and, the motivations of the French colonial enterprise that propelled them. That cultural reform used as propaganda had unintended and perverse consequences for Franceâs imperial project is an enduring dialectical irony that Karl Marx himself might have found intriguing
The LOFAR Transients Pipeline
Current and future astronomical survey facilities provide a remarkably rich
opportunity for transient astronomy, combining unprecedented fields of view
with high sensitivity and the ability to access previously unexplored
wavelength regimes. This is particularly true of LOFAR, a
recently-commissioned, low-frequency radio interferometer, based in the
Netherlands and with stations across Europe. The identification of and response
to transients is one of LOFAR's key science goals. However, the large data
volumes which LOFAR produces, combined with the scientific requirement for
rapid response, make automation essential. To support this, we have developed
the LOFAR Transients Pipeline, or TraP. The TraP ingests multi-frequency image
data from LOFAR or other instruments and searches it for transients and
variables, providing automatic alerts of significant detections and populating
a lightcurve database for further analysis by astronomers. Here, we discuss the
scientific goals of the TraP and how it has been designed to meet them. We
describe its implementation, including both the algorithms adopted to maximize
performance as well as the development methodology used to ensure it is robust
and reliable, particularly in the presence of artefacts typical of radio
astronomy imaging. Finally, we report on a series of tests of the pipeline
carried out using simulated LOFAR observations with a known population of
transients.Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures; Accepted for publication in Astronomy &
Computing; Code at https://github.com/transientskp/tk
The Hyper Suprime-Cam Software Pipeline
In this paper, we describe the optical imaging data processing pipeline
developed for the Subaru Telescope's Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) instrument. The
HSC Pipeline builds on the prototype pipeline being developed by the Large
Synoptic Survey Telescope's Data Management system, adding customizations for
HSC, large-scale processing capabilities, and novel algorithms that have since
been reincorporated into the LSST codebase. While designed primarily to reduce
HSC Subaru Strategic Program (SSP) data, it is also the recommended pipeline
for reducing general-observer HSC data. The HSC pipeline includes high level
processing steps that generate coadded images and science-ready catalogs as
well as low-level detrending and image characterizations.Comment: 39 pages, 21 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to Publications of the
Astronomical Society of Japa
Identifying transient and variable sources in radio images
With the arrival of a number of wide-field snapshot image-plane radio transient surveys, there will be a huge influx of images in the coming years making it impossible to manually analyse the datasets. Automated pipelines to process the information stored in the images are being developed, such as the LOFAR Transients Pipeline, outputting light curves and various transient parameters. These pipelines have a number of tuneable parameters that require training to meet the survey requirements. This paper utilises both observed and simulated datasets to demonstrate different machine learning strategies that can be used to train these parameters. We use a simple anomaly detection algorithm and a penalised logistic regression algorithm. The datasets used are from LOFAR observations and we process the data using the LOFAR Transients Pipeline; however the strategies developed are applicable to any light curve datasets at different frequencies and can be adapted to different automated pipelines. These machine learning strategies are publicly available as PYTHON tools that can be downloaded and adapted to different datasets (https://github.com/AntoniaR/TraP_ML_tools)
LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products
(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in
the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of
science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will
have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is
driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking
an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and
mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at
Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m
effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel
camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second
exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given
night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000
square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5
point-source depth in a single visit in will be (AB). The
project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations
by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg with
, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, ,
covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time
will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a
18,000 deg region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the
anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to . The
remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a
Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products,
including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion
objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures
available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie
Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) for the Subaru Telescope: Overview, recent progress, and future perspectives
PFS (Prime Focus Spectrograph), a next generation facility instrument on the
8.2-meter Subaru Telescope, is a very wide-field, massively multiplexed,
optical and near-infrared spectrograph. Exploiting the Subaru prime focus, 2394
reconfigurable fibers will be distributed over the 1.3 deg field of view. The
spectrograph has been designed with 3 arms of blue, red, and near-infrared
cameras to simultaneously observe spectra from 380nm to 1260nm in one exposure
at a resolution of ~1.6-2.7A. An international collaboration is developing this
instrument under the initiative of Kavli IPMU. The project is now going into
the construction phase aiming at undertaking system integration in 2017-2018
and subsequently carrying out engineering operations in 2018-2019. This article
gives an overview of the instrument, current project status and future paths
forward.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures. Proceeding of SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and
Instrumentation 201
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The TIGGE project and its achievements
TIGGE was a major component of the THORPEX (The Observing System Research and Predictability Experiment) research program, whose aim is to accelerate improvements in forecasting high-impact weather. By providing ensemble prediction data from leading operational forecast centers, TIGGE has enhanced collaboration between the research and operational meteorological communities and enabled research studies on a wide range of topics.
The paper covers the objective evaluation of the TIGGE data. For a range of forecast parameters, it is shown to be beneficial to combine ensembles from several data providers in a Multi-model Grand Ensemble. Alternative methods to correct systematic errors, including the use of reforecast data, are also discussed.
TIGGE data have been used for a range of research studies on predictability and dynamical processes. Tropical cyclones are the most destructive weather systems in the world, and are a focus of multi-model ensemble research. Their extra-tropical transition also has a major impact on skill of mid-latitude forecasts. We also review how TIGGE has added to our understanding of the dynamics of extra-tropical cyclones and storm tracks.
Although TIGGE is a research project, it has proved invaluable for the development of products for future operational forecasting. Examples include the forecasting of tropical cyclone tracks, heavy rainfall, strong winds, and flood prediction through coupling hydrological models to ensembles.
Finally the paper considers the legacy of TIGGE. We discuss the priorities and key issues in predictability and ensemble forecasting, including the new opportunities of convective-scale ensembles, links with ensemble data assimilation methods, and extension of the range of useful forecast skill