Shane Meadows : representations of liminality, masculinity and class

This thesis offers a new approach to the work of the British filmmaker Shane Meadows. In contradiction to the conventional reading of his work as part of the long tradition of social realism in British cinema, this thesis offers a new approach which argues that the term ‘liminal realism’ best describes both the in-between nature of the texts and Meadows’ place in British screen culture. In order to construct this alternative reading of Shane Meadows, this interdisciplinary study draws upon work from anthropology, folk culture and myth to describe the particular ways in which Meadows’ work demonstrates liminality, most especially via the Jungian archetype of the trickster. The thesis argues that the figure of the trickster describes the cultural construct of the filmmaker himself which can be described as being in-between, whether critically positioned between the mainstream and art-house; between the cultural imaginaries of the British north and the south, residing in the liminal elsewhere of the Midlands; and moving between autographical and biographical registers, arguing how he responds to that positioning with a tricksterish sensibility. Focusing on the ways in which masculinity and class are represented, the thesis explores the centrality of homosociality in Meadows’ work, explaining how it demonstrates a particular dynamic of desire which operates between men. The first chapter identifies the reason existing paradigms for Meadows inadequately describe the particular, liminal quality of both Meadows’ films and the positioning of the filmmaker himself. Chapter Two explores the tradition of social realism in British cinema and how it works as a discourse. It goes on to argue why this conventional paradigm is not adequate as a way of understanding Meadows’ work. Chapter Three demonstrates how the production of the films is liminal, positioned between art-house and commerce, and how a reading of the body of the filmmaker as a text is a productive way to approach the representation of masculinity and class. Chapter Four analyses the film texts using a Jungian archetypal framework to explain the ways in which they are liminal. The study concludes that Meadows can be best understood through the concept of liminal realism, a new paradigm with potentially wider applications for analyses of screen culture.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Fire behaviour and impact on heather moorland

For roughly the past 200 years land-managers have used the practice of “muirburning” to manipulate the structure of heather (Calluna vulgaris) to create a patchwork of habitat structures able to provide forage and nesting sites for red grouse (Lagopus lagopus scoticus) as well as grazing for sheep (Ovis aries) and red deer (Cervus elaphus). This thesis investigates both the behaviour and impact of management fires in recognition of the need to develop multi-aim land management practices that ensure both continued productivity and protection of biodiversity in the face of climatic and environmental change. Fuel structure and loading are crucial controlling factors on both fire behaviour and impact governing both rate of spread and heat release to the ground surface. A visual obstruction method is developed that estimates total and fine fuel loading as well as the structure of the heather canopy. In order to adequately understand fire impact a dimensional analysis approach is taken to estimating the mass of burnt heather stems. Experiments at a number of spatial and temporal scales relate variation in heather fuel moisture content to stand structure and variation in weather conditions. Monitoring shows moisture contents to be relatively stable temporally, but spatially variable. Periods of extreme low moisture contents in early spring are associated with frozen ground, winter cuticle damage and physiological drought. Such conditions may have contributed to the large number of wildfires in 2003. A replicated plot design was used to investigate the effect of weather conditions and fuel loading on fire behaviour. An empirical approach is taken to fire behaviour modelling with equations describing rate of spread and fireline intensity being developed on the basis of fuel structure descriptors and windspeed. The theoretical negative correlation between fuel bed density and rate of spread is demonstrated to hold true for heather stands, while the impact of heterogeneity in fuel bed structure is also investigated. Redundancy Analysis is used to investigate the influence of multiple predictors on a number of aspects of fire behaviour including: rate of spread, fireline intensity, flame length and ground surface heating. Data from this and previous studies are used to ground-truth a number of fire behaviour prediction systems including BehavePlus and the Canadian Fire Behaviour Prediction System. Finally linkages between fire behaviour, fire severity and heather regeneration are investigated. A number of proxy measures of ‘Immediate Severity’ are tested and used to examine the influence of fires on plant regeneration. The post-fire development of stands is shown to relate primarily to stand age and structure before burning, and to post-fire substrates rather than variation in fire behaviour and severity.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Computer vision based interfaces for computer games

Interacting with a computer game using only a simple web camera has seen a great deal of success in the computer games industry, as demonstrated by the numerous computer vision based games available for the Sony PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 game consoles. Computational efficiency is important for these human computer inter- action applications, so for simple interactions a fast background subtraction approach is used that incorporates a new local descriptor which uses a novel temporal coding scheme that is much more robust to noise than the standard formulations. Results are presented that demonstrate the effect of using this method for code label stability. Detecting local image changes is sufficient for basic interactions, but exploiting high-level information about the player's actions, such as detecting the location of the player's head, the player's body, or ideally the player's pose, could be used as a cue to provide more complex interactions. Following an object detection approach to this problem, a combined detection and segmentation approach is explored that uses a face detection algorithm to initialise simple shape priors to demonstrate that good real-time performance can be achieved for face texture segmentation. Ultimately, knowing the player's pose solves many of the problems encountered by simple local image feature based methods, but is a difficult and non-trivial problem. A detection approach is also taken to pose estimation: first as a binary class problem for human detection, and then as a multi-class problem for combined localisation and pose detection. For human detection, a novel formulation of the standard chamfer matching algo- rithm as an SVM classifier is proposed that allows shape template weights to be learnt automatically. This allows templates to be learnt directly from training data even in the presence of background and without the need to pre-process the images to extract their silhouettes. Good results are achieved when compared to a state of the art human detection classifier. For combined pose detection and localisation, a novel and scalable method of ex- ploiting the edge distribution in aligned training images is presented to select the most potentially discriminative locations for local descriptors that allows a much higher space of descriptor configurations to be utilised efficiently. Results are presented that show competitive performance when compared to other combined localisation and pose detection methods.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo