Visual Vertigo, Phantasmagoric Physiognomies: Joseph Roth and Walter Benjamin on the Visual Experience of Architecture

This paper scrutinises Benjamin’s interest in the urban fabric of nineteenth century Paris, and compares it to contemporary writings on Paris and on (more generally) new forms of urbanism in the journalistic work of Joseph Roth. It argues that both authors come to terms with the modern city through a shared set of observations and concepts, particularly the concepts of ‘expressionism’, ‘physiognomy’, and ‘phantasmagoria’. The paper clarifies how Roth and other writers in (or immediately before) the 1920s developed such concepts, and how Benjamin’s The Arcades Project builds on these writers. It shows that Benjamin’s specific contribution to this body of literature is the invention of a secular mythology, with a clear application to architecture in Benjamin’s focus on the ‘boundless interiorisation’ of glass and iron construction. The paper concludes that Benjamin’s contribution to architecture is considerable when compared to the materialist orientation of his main sources in The Arcades Project (especially Boetticher and Giedion), but that the purported improvements on Benjamin’s distinguished predecessors of architectural non-materialism are by comparison less impressive

Solving Unrestricted Dominance Graphs

We present the first ever algorithm for solving unrestricted dominance graphs. The algorithm extends existing polynomial solvers for restricted classes of dominance graphs, which are not sufficient to model newer theories of scope ambiguity. Using the new solver, these theories now have access to an efficient solver for the first time. The solver runs in cubic time; for those graph classes that could be solved in the past, the runtime is reduced to the same quadratic time that the most efficient previous solvers achieved

Bodenuntersuchungen für Biobetriebe

Das Merkblatt erläutert, warum Bodenuntersuchungen notwendig sind und befasst sich mit der Probenentnahme sowie der Interpretation der Analyseergebnisse

Minimal Recursion Semantics as Dominance Constraints: Translation, Evaluation, and Analysis

International audienceWe show that a practical translation of MRS descriptions into normal dominance constraints is feasible. We start from a recent theoretical translation, develop it into a practical system, and apply it to the output of the English Resource Grammar (ERG) on the Redwoods corpus. We validate the assumptions made by the theoretical translation for a large majority of cases; the MRS descriptions computed in all other cases seem to be systematically incomplete

Block training periodization in alpine skiing: effects of 11-day HIT on V O2max and performance

Attempting to achieve the high diversity of training goals in modern competitive alpine skiing simultaneously can be difficult and may lead to compromised overall adaptation. Therefore, we investigated the effect of block training periodization on maximal oxygen consumption (VO2max) and parameters of exercise performance in elite junior alpine skiers. Six female and 15 male athletes were assigned to high-intensity interval (IT, N=13) or control training groups (CT, N=8). IT performed 15 high-intensity aerobic interval (HIT) sessions in 11days. Sessions were 4×4min at 90-95% of maximal heart rate separated by 3-min recovery periods. CT continued their conventionally mixed training, containing endurance and strength sessions. Before and 7days after training, subjects performed a ramp incremental test followed by a high-intensity time-to-exhaustion (tlim) test both on a cycle ergometer, a 90-s high-box jump test as well as countermovement (CMJ) and squat jumps (SJ) on a force plate. IT significantly improved relative VO2max by 6.0% (P<0.01; male +7.5%, female +2.1%), relative peak power output by 5.5% (P<0.01) and power output at ventilatory threshold 2 by 9.6% (P<0.01). No changes occurred for these measures in CT. tlim remained unchanged in both groups. High-box jump performance was significantly improved in males of IT only (4.9%, P<0.05). Jump peak power (CMJ −4.8%, SJ −4.1%; P<0.01), but not height decreased in IT only. For competitive alpine skiers, block periodization of HIT offers a promising way to efficiently improve VO2max and performance. Compromised explosive jump performance might be associated with persisting muscle fatigu

Learning Informative Health Indicators Through Unsupervised Contrastive Learning

Condition monitoring is essential to operate industrial assets safely and efficiently. To achieve this goal, the development of robust health indicators has recently attracted significant attention. These indicators, which provide quantitative real-time insights into the health status of industrial assets over time, serve as valuable tools for fault detection and prognostics. In this study, we propose a novel and universal approach to learn health indicators based on unsupervised contrastive learning. Operational time acts as a proxy for the asset's degradation state, enabling the learning of a contrastive feature space that facilitates the construction of a health indicator by measuring the distance to the healthy condition. To highlight the universality of the proposed approach, we assess the proposed contrastive learning framework in two distinct tasks - wear assessment and fault detection - across two different case studies: a milling machines case study and a real condition monitoring case study of railway wheels from operating trains. First, we evaluate if the health indicator is able to learn the real health condition on a milling machine case study where the ground truth wear condition is continuously measured. Second, we apply the proposed method on a real case study of railway wheels where the ground truth health condition is not known. Here, we evaluate the suitability of the learned health indicator for fault detection of railway wheel defects. Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to learn the ground truth health evolution of milling machines and the learned health indicator is suited for fault detection of railway wheels operated under various operating conditions by outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Further, we demonstrate that our proposed approach is universally applicable to different systems and different health conditions

The Anomalous Infrared Emission of Abell 58

We present a new model to explain the excess in mid and near infrared emission of the central, hydrogen poor dust knot in the planetary nebula (PN) Abell 58. Current models disagree with ISO measurement because they apply an average grain size and equilibrium conditions only. We investigate grain size distributions and temperature fluctuations affecting infrared emission using a new radiative transfer code and discuss in detail the conditions requiring an extension of the classical description. The peculiar infrared emission of V605 Aql, the central dust knot in Abell 58, has been modeled with our code. V605 Aql is of special interest as it is one of only three stars ever observed to move from the evolutionary track of a central PN star back to the post-AGB state.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures; accepted and to be published in Ap