The Second Sex of Tomorrow? Constructions of Masculinity in the Moral Panic About Boy's Education. A Content Analysis of Canadian News Media

Based on qualitative content analysis of articles in ten major Canadian newspapers between 1990 and 2011, this thesis asks how masculinity is represented in discourses about gender and education. My analysis suggests that the public discourse about boys' education is out of touch with scholarly research, and instead relies on a number of problematic tropes: (1) Schools are imagined as being run for girls and by female educators devoted to an anti-male agenda; (2) education is seen as a zero-sum game, in which what benefits girls must be necessarily bad for boys; (3) boys are being constructed as one homogenous group that is inherently different from girls, while any diversity among boys, especially in terms of race and class, is erased. I argue that the panic about boys' education must be understood as a backlash against feminism, based on a misreading of economic transformations through a gender lens

An Exploratory Investigation of UAS Regulations in Europe and the Impact on Effective Use and Economic Potential

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have rapidly become more common in various applications. At the same time, the need for a safe UAS operation is of great importance to minimize and avoid risks that could arise with the deployment of this technology. With these requirements, UAS regulators in the European Union (EU) are making large efforts to enable a reliable legal framework of conditions for UAS operation to keep up with new capabilities of this technology and to minimize the risk of property damage and, most importantly, human injury. A recent outcome of the mentioned efforts is that new EU drone regulations are into force since 1 January 2021. In this paper we aim to provide a sound overview of recent EU drone regulations and the main changes to the rules since the first wave of regulations adopted in 2017. We highlight how such new rules help or hinder the use of UAS technology and its economic potential in scientific and commercial sectors by providing an exploratory investigation of UAS legal frames in Europe. An example of the impact of legislation on the operation of one particular UAS in Germany is provided, which has been in use since 2013 for atmospheric research

Graph-supported verification of road databases

The verification of existing data is an important task in order to ensure a high level of data quality, such as is needed in geographic information systems (GIS). Today, this work is carried out manually by an operator, who compares vector data from databases with remotely sensed imagery. In this paper, a system for automated road data verification using digital image processing for the extraction of roads from aerial imagery and topological analysis in order to optimise the whole process in terms of reliability and efficiency is presented. The main goal is to call the operator's attention only to parts of the network, where the automated process did not find sufficient evidence of a road. The road extraction is supported by the use of prior knowledge on the global level (whether the road is situated in rural, urban or forest areas), and information on the road geometry and its attributes. The road extraction is executed twice. Firstly, with a strict parameter control ensuring the minimization of false positives and a subsequent evaluation, which denotes roads from the database being accepted or rejected. In a second step, a graph-based search algorithm detects connections, which are missing for an optimised road network. If rejected roads are part of these connections, they are checked again using a more tolerant parameter control. A detailed performance analysis of results shows the applicability of the proposed method for quality control of topographic road databases.</p

„Fußball-Patriotismus“ in Deutschland: Erste Ergebnisse eines repräsentativen Surveys

Der Vortrag fasst die ersten empirischen Ergebnisse eines vom Bundesinstitut für Sportwissenschaft auf Beschluss des deutschen Bundestages geförderten Forschungsprojekts „Effekte des Hochleistungssports auf die kollektive Identifikation der Bürgerinnen und Bürger“ (Förderkennzeichen: 070093/15-17) zusammen. Der Vortrag beschränkt sich dabei auf ein zentrales und relativ neues Phänomen, das wir als „fußballbezogenen Patriotismus“ bezeichnen. Es wird erst ein Vorschlag zur Messung unterbreitet und anschließend die Verbreitung patriotischer Handlungsweisen im Kontext der UEFA Europameisterschaft 2016 in der deutschen Bevölkerung auf Basis repräsentativer Daten differenziert beschrieben. Schließlich verorten wir die „Fußball-Patrioten“ in Deutschland im politischen Raum

A patch-based method for the evaluation of dense image matching quality

Airborne laser scanning and photogrammetry are two main techniques to obtain 3D data representing the object surface. Due to the high cost of laser scanning, we want to explore the potential of using point clouds derived by dense image matching (DIM), as effective alternatives to laser scanning data. We present a framework to evaluate point clouds from dense image matching and derived Digital Surface Models (DSM) based on automatically extracted sample patches. Dense matching errors and noise level are evaluated quantitatively at both the local level and whole block level. In order to demonstrate its usability, the proposed framework has been used for several example studies identifying the impact of various factors onto the DIM quality. One example study proves that the overall quality on smooth ground areas improves when oblique images are used in addition. This framework is then used to compare the dense matching quality on three different terrain types. In another application of the framework, a bias between the point cloud and the DSM generated from a photogrammetric workflow is identified. The framework is also used to reveal inhomogeneity in the distribution of the dense matching errors caused by overfitting the bundle network to ground control points

Skeletal camera network embedded structure-from-motion for 3D scene reconstruction from UAV images

Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques have been widely used for 3D scene reconstruction from multi-view images. However, due to the large computational costs of SfM methods there is a major challenge in processing highly overlapping images, e.g. images from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). This paper embeds a novel skeletal camera network (SCN) into SfM to enable efficient 3D scene reconstruction from a large set of UAV images. First, the flight control data are used within a weighted graph to construct a topologically connected camera network (TCN) to determine the spatial connections between UAV images. Second, the TCN is refined using a novel hierarchical degree bounded maximum spanning tree to generate a SCN, which contains a subset of edges from the TCN and ensures that each image is involved in at least a 3-view configuration. Third, the SCN is embedded into the SfM to produce a novel SCN-SfM method, which allows performing tie-point matching only for the actually connected image pairs. The proposed method was applied in three experiments with images from two fixed-wing UAVs and an octocopter UAV, respectively. In addition, the SCN-SfM method was compared to three other methods for image connectivity determination. The comparison shows a significant reduction in the number of matched images if our method is used, which leads to less computational costs. At the same time the achieved scene completeness and geometric accuracy are comparable

Minimal Camera Networks for 3D Image Based Modeling of Cultural Heritage Objects

3D modeling of cultural heritage objects like artifacts, statues and buildings is nowadays an important tool for virtual museums, preservation and restoration. In this paper, we introduce a method to automatically design a minimal imaging network for the 3D modeling of cultural heritage objects. This becomes important for reducing the image capture time and processing when documenting large and complex sites. Moreover, such a minimal camera network design is desirable for imaging non-digitally documented artifacts in museums and other archeological sites to avoid disturbing the visitors for a long time and/or moving delicate precious objects to complete the documentation task. The developed method is tested on the Iraqi famous statue “Lamassu”. Lamassu is a human-headed winged bull of over 4.25 m in height from the era of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC). Close-range photogrammetry is used for the 3D modeling task where a dense ordered imaging network of 45 high resolution images were captured around Lamassu with an object sample distance of 1 mm. These images constitute a dense network and the aim of our study was to apply our method to reduce the number of images for the 3D modeling and at the same time preserve pre-defined point accuracy. Temporary control points were fixed evenly on the body of Lamassu and measured by using a total station for the external validation and scaling purpose. Two network filtering methods are implemented and three different software packages are used to investigate the efficiency of the image orientation and modeling of the statue in the filtered (reduced) image networks. Internal and external validation results prove that minimal image networks can provide highly accurate records and efficiency in terms of visualization, completeness, processing time (&gt;60% reduction) and the final accuracy of 1 mm