Learning an Artist's Style: Just What Does a Pigeon See in a Picasso?

Judgments of style in art, music, and literature are commonplace, although the mechanisms providing for this structural sensitivity are not well understood. Watanabe, Sakamoto, and Wakita (1995) showed that pigeons trained to discriminate colour slides of paintings of Picasso from those of Monet could generalise this discrimination not only to new paintings of Picasso and Monet, but also to paintings of other cubist and impressionist painters. These results suggest that the bases for such judgments of artistic style may be simpler than normally thought. This tacit sensitivity to artistic style is explored in terms of a simple PCA network model applied to pixel-maps of the paintings. The eigenvectors obtained from the singular value decomposition of sets of these pixel-maps provide for descriptions of the stimuli in terms of visual “macro-features”. These macro-features provide a simple basis not only for recognising previously-experienced paintings, but for the successful discrimination of novel paintings into various style categories. A summary of simulations of the performance of Watanabe et al.’s pigeons using precisely the same stimuli and tasks is provided. The results suggest that the eigen-decomposition is a necessary first-step, and that the bases for judgments of style may indeed be quite simple

Alien Registration- Vokey, Mark (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/26647/thumbnail.jp

Alien Registration- Vokey, Mark (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/26647/thumbnail.jp

Alien Registration- Vokey, Mark (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/26647/thumbnail.jp

Alien Registration- Vokey, Mark (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/26647/thumbnail.jp

Intercultural philosophy and the nondual wisdom of ‘basic goodness’: Implications for contemplative and transformative education

Radical personal and systemic social transformation is urgently needed to address world-wide violence and inequality, pervasive moral confusion and corruption, and the rapid, unprecedented global destruction of our environment. Recent years have seen an embrace of intersubjectivity within discourse on educational transformation within academia and the public sphere. As well, there has been a turn toward contemplative education initiatives within North American schools, colleges and universities. This article contends that these turns might benefit from openness to the ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics of the ‘wisdom traditions’ from which many contemplative practices are drawn. To illustrate this point, we discuss the value of intercultural philosophy of education, and introduce Eastern philosophical ideas, specifically, the Shambhala Buddhist notion of the nondual ground and wisdom of basic goodness and related teachings. We detail how awareness of basic goodness and its holistic expression in the ground, path, and fruition of Shambhala teachings can open vital questions regarding intersubjectivity, challenge and reinvigorate aspects of current engagements with contemplative practices, and provide significant insights and educational paths for transformational endeavours in neoliberal times. Informed by our learning from Shambhala, we conclude with a deepened understanding of intercultural philosophy of education

Exploring OB/GYN provider knowledge, practice and confidence levels before and after ACEs training

Trauma-informed training on ACEs improves provider confidence on screening and treating their prenatal patients.https://knowledgeconnection.mainehealth.org/lambrew-retreat-2021/1056/thumbnail.jp

Tingles of terror : the neo-gothic fiction of Margaret Atwood and Jane Urquhart

Although the Gothic novel has its origins in the late eighteenth century, it may be viewed as a socially relevant novel of protest. Traditionally operating as a novel of dissent although ultimately upholding currently accepted social norms, the Gothic novel uses these conventional societal concepts and gender roles against themselves in order to displace them as the existing dominant constructs. This technique continues through to some of our modern neo-Gothic novels. -- Both Jane Urquhart and Margaret Atwood have produced novels which focus on Gothic heroines and the means that they use in their relationships to escape from restrictive roles. Despite their need for personal reassurance and stability, their relationships remain uncertain because they justifiably distrust their sometimes seemingly villainous mates. Though they are frequently uneasy, this fear is not primarily of the men involved. Instead, the fear is of being ultimately alone. Sometimes the heroines are content to continue to dream of their Byronic hero based on the Gothic villain while forming a relationship they regard as less important. This Gothic pattern is both created by these women and imposed upon them. -- The Gothic works out of the context of a patriarchal social setting. The heroines appropriate the approved social behaviours of the Gothic format in order to attempt to regain some autonomy. They invariably seek the well worn comfort of easily classifiable character types and shrink from confronting the various merging of good and evil in common everyday existence. They sometimes achieve an epiphany. However, most often, the heroine is too overtly involved in her own myth-making to be able to reflect upon internal revelations. -- Both Urquhart and Atwood use Gothic techniques to state and to argue the case for the average woman who is caught in a negative social construction. By defining the role of the anti-Gothic heroine, who in both authors is the primary focus rather than mere stereotype, they are increasing the number of possibilities open to her and subsequently, to their readers

Psychological Sketches (7th Edition)

Permission to include in the University of Lethbridge Institutional Repository granted by Dr. John Vokey.Each of the chapters in this book is a short sketch of a particular topic in psychology. They can be read in any order as each chapter is meant to be a self-contained story. By the end of the book, we hope you will have learned what experimental psychology is about, what experimental psychologists do, and more specifically, what experimental psychologists do in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge

Thinking with data (4th Edition)

Permission to include in the University of Lethbridge Institutional Repository granted by Dr. John Vokey.This book comprises a collection of lecture notes for the statistics component of the course Psychology 2030: Methods and Statistics from the Department of Psychology at the University of Lethbridge. In addition to basic statistical methods, the book includes discussion of many other useful topics. For example, it has a section on writing in APA format (see Chapter 17), and another on how to read the professional psychological literature (see Chapter 16). We even provide a subsection on the secret to living to be 100 years of age (see section A.2.2)- although the solution may not be fully satisfactory! Despite this volume comprising the fourth edition of the book, it is still very much a work in progress, and is by no means complete. However, despite its current limitations, we expect that students will find it to be a useful adjunct to the lectures. We welcome any suggestions on additions and improvements to the book, and, of course, the report of any typos and other errors. Please email any such errors or corrections to: [email protected] or [email protected]