Blue-lip'd cannibal ladies: The allure of the exotic in the illicit Resolution Journal of Gunner John Marra

Discusses the history and content of the “Journal of the Resolution’s Voyage”, an unauthorized and illicitly published account of Cook’s second voyage of exploration in the Antipodes, by Gunner John Marra of the Resolution’s crew

Revisioning the Pacific: Bernard Smith in the South Seas

BORN IN Sydney in 1986, Bernard Smith is today widely considered to be Australia's preeminent art historian and a major cultural theorist.¹ While working as a school teacher and artist during the late 1930S and early 1940s, he came under the influences of surrealist aesthetics and communist politics, especially as mediated by refugee intellectuals from Hitler's Europe. During this period his principal literary inspirations were the Bible, Marx, and Toynbee; it was their different takes on history, especially of its unfolding over long durations, that most impressed him.² As an academic and writer through the next half century, Smith produced numerous historically oriented studies of Australian and modernist art, which broadly can be divided into two periods of publishing activity.³ His most acclaimed achievement, however, is European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas, first published in 1960 and a work that has continued to grow in stature and influence in the four decades since its original appearance. It is the history of this text, and of its companion-piece, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages, published in 1992, and the contexts in which they were produced and have been consumed, that are the main concerns of the present essay.

Of Hearths and Houses

During the 1993 East Texas Archeological Field School conducted at the Tyson site (41SY92) in western Shelby County, the junior author had an opportunity to participate in the excavation of a Caddoan hearth. The work was directed by Linda Lindsay, a graduate student in Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. This paper describes our findings and a few features of hearths and houses. One goal of the 1993 Field School was to explore the area around Feature 3 looking for evidence of a house. This was accomplished by opening a 6 meter by 6 meter unit referred to as Block 1. Feature 3 had been excavated in 1992 and found to be a 1.2 meter in diameter, round, basin shaped pit containing a large amount of daub, bone, and Caddoan pottery sherds. Near the bottom of the pit was a zone of ash. Charcoal and mussel shell from Feature 3 yielded three calibrated radiocarbon dates of about 1425 AD. When Block I was completely exposed, a number of other pits and postholes were seen in plan view. Our activity focused on Feature 9 on the western edge of Block 1. This 1.1 5 meter by O. 9 meter oval hearth was first revealed at 20 cm depth when ash was encountered. The feature contained large amounts of ash from in situ burning, nuggets of fired clay, a small amount of bone, and several burned sherds with ash adhering to their surfaces. The hearth was slightly basin-shaped and approximately 15 cm thick. A discontinuous thin layer of bright orange clay near its bottom was observed. The hearth had been prepared for use by digging a very shallow pit but no intentional clay lining was seen. Two large postholes were found in the area of Feature 9. Feature 17 was discovered beneath the eastern end of the hearth. It was 30 cm in diameter and had a smoothly rounded bottom at 75 cm below ground surface. Feature 12 was a very distinct posthole of similar proportions just west of the hearth. The diameter of F 12 was 27 cm and the depth was 65 cm below surface. How do we understand this feature? Specifically, does Feature 9 represent the central hearth of a Caddoan house? This question is currently difficult to answer because the outside wall of a putative house has not been identified. Possibly, Block l lies entirely inside a large house. The question may be easier to answer after reviewing accounts written by early Europeans visiting the area and reviewing the archeological findings at other East Texas Caddoan sites

Egocentric Perception using a Biologically Inspired Software Retina Integrated with a Deep CNN

We presented the concept of of a software retina, capable of significant visual data reduction in combination with scale and rotation invariance, for applications in egocentric and robot vision at the first EPIC workshop in Amsterdam [9]. Our method is based on the mammalian retino-cortical transform: a mapping between a pseudo-randomly tessellated retina model (used to sample an input image) and a CNN. The aim of this first pilot study is to demonstrate a functional retina-integrated CNN implementation and this produced the following results: a network using the full retino-cortical transform yielded an F1 score of 0.80 on a test set during a 4-way classification task, while an identical network not using the proposed method yielded an F1 score of 0.86 on the same task. On a 40K node retina the method reduced the visual data bye×7, the input data to the CNN by 40% and the number of CNN training epochs by 36%. These results demonstrate the viability of our method and hint at the potential of exploiting functional traits of natural vision systems in CNNs. In addition, to the above study, we present further recent developments in porting the retina to an Apple iPhone, an implementation in CUDA C for NVIDIA GPU platforms and extensions of the retina model we have adopted