Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video

We present an unsupervised learning framework for the task of monocular depth and camera motion estimation from unstructured video sequences. We achieve this by simultaneously training depth and camera pose estimation networks using the task of view synthesis as the supervisory signal. The networks are thus coupled via the view synthesis objective during training, but can be applied independently at test time. Empirical evaluation on the KITTI dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach: 1) monocular depth performing comparably with supervised methods that use either ground-truth pose or depth for training, and 2) pose estimation performing favorably with established SLAM systems under comparable input settings.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2017. Project webpage: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tinghuiz/projects/SfMLearner

The Global Encounter as Communitas: Inter-Pilgrim Musicking Along the Contemporary Camino de Santiago

In an effort to provide new ways of theorising pilgrimages as global encounters (White, 2012) and sites of cosmopolitan interactions, I offer a sound-centred investigation into inter-pilgrim musical events that occurred along the Camino de Santiago (Camino), a historically Catholic pilgrimage in northern Spain. This ethnomusicological perspective on the Camino highlights contemporary pilgrim rituals and artistic practices that are frequently overlooked in other Camino scholarship, which tends to focus on historical musics or the tangible arts. On the Camino, music primarily facilitates cross-cultural encounters for pilgrims, though at varied levels of mis/understandings. This paper explores the ways that participatory musicking (Small, 1998) connects international pilgrims who otherwise would not have come in contact with one another and reinforces the Camino’s Catholic heritage, despite the recent rise in non-religious walkers. The study is based on participant observation and autoethnographic engagement with musical rituals that occurred in two religious albergues (lodging for pilgrims) during the summer of 2019. Due to increased levels of fleeting global-local interactions between pilgrims, the twenty-first century Camino has become a site for cosmopolitan communal formations, although they are often constructed on the basis of language or nationality. Throughout my research, the religious albergues were significant social spaces for interactions across these barriers, as they emphasised communal evenings and activities involving Western popular or Catholically inspired musics after full days of walking alone. I argue that these participatory rituals utilised assumed cosmopolitan musical knowledges and religious backgrounds in order to create idealised senses of heightened community, conceptualised here in terms of Turnerian communitas. These encounters heavily relied on Western musical aesthetics in order to be meaningful for the pilgrims, and at the same time, national distinctions were constructed and broken down in order to create the feeling of a global pilgrim community. Communitas was only achievable after essentialised difference was first sounded, which it often occurred at the cost of excluding particular groups of pilgrims

Life in the Spirit: A Post-Constantinian and Trinitarian Account of the Christian Life

Snavely, Andrea D. Life in the Spirit: A Post-Constantinian and Trinitarian Account of the Christian Life. Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2013. 235 pp. Post-Constantinians John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas have re-imagined the Christian as a follower of Jesus, critiquing natural theology\u27s dominance that eclipses seeing Jesus\u27 life as the content of a Christian\u27s life. However, they lack an answer to the energy” question, of how one lives like Jesus, because their theologies are based on Logos-Christology. This dissertation proposes that a complementary Spirit-Christology provides the answer to the “energy question by describing Jesus\u27 life as receiver, bearer, and giver of the Spirit. Leopoldo Sanchez provides such a framework of Spirit-Christology as a way to understand Jesus\u27 life of sonship with the Father in the Spirit. Sanchez helps us see how Jesus died trusting God in the Spirit, which shows Jesus as the bearer of the Spirit in a unique and unrepeatable way. This also means no one else bears the Spirit to confess Jesus as crucified, risen, and ascended without being given the Spirit to do so. This view of Jesus\u27 life in the Spirit requires a re-imagining of the Church and its ministries from Luke\u27s account of the Church in Acts, which primarily consists of proclaiming the gospel and baptizing in Jesus\u27 name for the remission of sins and for the reception of the Spirit’s indwelling. It is through preaching and baptizing that the Spirit is given through these Church ministries to establish and continue the Church\u27s witness to the world that Jesus is Lord and is coming back to judge the living and the dead. In these last days, the Church proclaims and lives in Jesus\u27 sonship in the Spirit as Christ\u27s ecclesial body of koinonia fellowship with one another. As adopted sons of God in Christ\u27s body by the Spirit, Christians trust God by living in non-violence, by being content with what God gives them so as to share resources with others, and by being content with who they are in God so as to love others as they love themselves

Social Rejuvenation: A New Community Center, Lancaster, PA

The goal of a new community center, set in the Southeast Ward, Lancaster, Pa, is to create an iconic place that will unite people in a downtrodden neighborhood by providing a setting that will bring the community together, once again. The principle element that these downtrodden communities lack is a cultural or social bond. By providing a place where members of the community can gather together, celebrate and share their different cultures will ultimately create a new cultural and social bond within the neighborhood and the greater community. Also by providing a place for everyday activities to take place within the community, rather than remote from its core, will allow for more social interaction. Ultimately the new community center will take one of the worst neighborhoods in Lancaster, Pa, and make it one the most dynamic and prosperous areas of the city

Archaeological Survey and Testing: Castroville\u27s County Village, Unit One, Medina County, Texas

During October 24-26, 1984, the Center for Archaeological Research (CAR), The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), conducted a survey of approximately 30 acres of a housing development site on the northeast edge of Castroville in Medina County, Texas. The survey was required as part of Veterans Administration grant application. One area within the development zone was found to have a light surface scatter of cultural materials. This lithic scatter was recorded and assigned a permanent state site designation (41 ME 31). Shovel tests throughout the site area failed to produce any subsurface cultural material, and we recommend that no further work is needed. The cultural resource found within the survey area was determined not to be significant, and therefore not eligible for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places

God\u27s Power for the Believer

So the questions that will be examined in this paper include the following. Does God manifest His power in any way other than salvation, either through miracles to bring people to salvation or to bless those who are already saved? What is the purpose of God showing His power? What is the connection between God\u27s power and faith and between His power and His righteousness? And finally, how does a biblical theology of God\u27s power give an answer to those who demythologize His power into a social program? These and other questions are very much on the minds of Christians as thev search for l::.,.- .,.biblical answers to apply to their own lives; As these questions are answered throughout this paper, they will be answered in reference to these two continuums mentioned above in order to how the believer should live in the middle of the first continuum and that the second continuum, by virtue of the first being correct, is ruled out completely. The primary task of this paper is to gain an accurate biblical theology of God\u27s power

Preliminary evaluation of infrared and radar imagery, Washington and Oregon coasts

Airborne infrared and radar photography of Oregon and Washington coastal region