"My Dear God-Like Sculptor..." RLS & Saint-Gaudens

The portrait-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson in Saint Giles Church in Edinburgh is a graceful memorial to a much-loved writer. It is also Scotland’s only example of the work of the great American sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907). Westminster has a reduction of his standing statue of Lincoln from Chicago; Dublin has the Parnell Monument, to a large extent the work of his studio when Saint-Gaudens himself was dying. But, in the Stevenson Memorial, Edinburgh has a work which held greater personal significance for the sculptor: it commemorates a friend

Imprisoned Princesses: Princess Tarakanova & the Regent Tsarevna Sof'ya

The images of characters presented in 19C history painting reflect their historical reputations at the time of painting. In depicting women from earlier times, artists often projected on to them images of contemporary femininity and concepts of ‘appropriate’ feminine behaviour. However, even in 19C, some artists were prepared to resist pressure to make their works conform to sexual stereotyping, by attempting to portray their subjects more truthfully. An examination of Konstantin Flavitskii’s 'Princess Tarakanova' (1864) and Il’ya Repin’s 'The Regent Tsarevna Sof’ya Alekseevna, in the Year after her Imprisonment in the Novodevichii Convent, during the Execution of the Strel’tsy and the Torture of her Serving-Women, October 1698' (1879; both in the Tret’yakov Gallery, Moscow) demonstrates the contrast in approaches

Pattern Research Project: An Investigation of The Pattern And Printing Process - Family Tradition

2018 Pattern Research Project Kyra Gilchrist – Family Tradition The Pattern Research Project involves research and analysis of contemporary patterns found in the textiles and wallcoverings of the built interior environment. Patterns use motif, repetition, color, geometry, craft, technology, and space to communicate place, time, and concept. Through this research and analysis, built environments - their designers, occupants, construction, and context - can be better understood. Kyra Gilchrist, VCU Interior Design BFA 2021, selected the Family Tradition pattern for the 2018 Pattern Research Project. The text below is excerpted from the student’s work: “Anything can be considered damask as long as it has the general characteristics of the layout. Damask is mainly made from silk, although cotton, linen, wool, and synthetic fibers are also used. The colors used to create the pattern doesn’t have to be monochromatic at all, which makes picking a bold color to separate the foreground and background easier and more unique. It can be recreated digitally, simply for surface design, and handmade by using different techniques such as screen printing or even drawing and printing an image on a surface. The practice of weaving damask patterns developed in countries as a result of trade, colonizing, and mixing of culture. Damask weaving dates back to the 4thand 3rdcenturies.”https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/prp/1019/thumbnail.jp

"The honor of firing before His Majesty": Patrick Ferguson's will and the Royal Armouries’ Ferguson rifle

Patrick Ferguson (1744-80) designed the first breech-loading rifle to be used by the British Army. In November 2000, the Royal Armouries purchased an early example, formerly in the possession of the Fergusons of Pitfour, descendants of Patrick's younger brother, George. Patrick Ferguson's will has helped the author identify the Royal Armouries' Ferguson Rifle as the one which Patrick Ferguson used when he demonstrated it before George III and Queen Charlotte at Windsor in 1776

Construction of regular polygons.

Typewritten sheets in cover. Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1931. Bibliography: p. 57-5

Identifying the liquidity effect at the daily frequency (commentary)

Liquidity (Economics) ; Monetary policy

Visual computation of surface lightness: Local contrast vs. frames of reference

Seeing black, white and gray surfaces, called lightness perception, might seem simple because white surfaces reflect 90% of the light they receive while black surfaces reflect only 3%, and the human retina is composed of light sensitive cells. The problem is that, because illumination varies from time to time and from place to place, any amount of light can be reflected from any shade of gray. Thus the amount of light reflected by an object, called luminance, says nothing about its lightness. Experts agree that the lightness of a surface can be computed only by using the surrounding context, but they disagree about how the context is used. We have tested an image in which two major classes of theory, contrast theories and frame-of-reference theories, make very different predictions regarding what gray shades will be seen by human observers. We show that when frame-of-reference is varied while contrast is held constant, lightness varies strongly. But when contrast is varied but frame-of-reference is held constant, little or no variation is seen. These results suggest that efforts to discover the exact algorithm by which the human visual system segments the image received by the retina into frames of reference should be given high priority

Where is the Xerox Corporation of the LIS Sector?

published or submitted for publicatio