65,900 research outputs found
Listening to Emerson's "England" at Clinton Hall, 22 January 1850
Ralph Waldo Emerson's delivery of his essay âEnglandâ at Manhattanâs Clinton Hall on 22 January 1850 was one of the highest-profile of his performance career. He had recently returned from his triumphant British speaking tour with a radically revised view of transatlantic relations. In a New York still in shock from the Anglophobic urban riots of the previous winter, media observers were prepared to find a great deal of symbolism in both Emerson's new message and his idiosyncratic style of performance. This essay provides a detailed account of the context, delivery and conflicting newspaper readings of this Emerson appearance. Considering the lecture circuit as part of broader performance culture and debates over Anglo-American physicality and manners, it reveals how the press seized on both the âEnglandâ talk itself and aspects of Emerson's lecturing style as a means of shoring up civic order and Anglo-American kinship. I argue for a reexamination of the textual interchanges of nineteenth-century oratorical culture, and demonstrate how lecture reports reconnect us to forgotten means of listening through texts and discursive contests over the meaning of public speech
The Results of Locomotion: Bayard Taylor and the Travel Lecture in Nineteenth-Century America
During the mid-nineteenth century, appearances by returning travellers were a ubiquitous feature of the American popular lecture circuit. Attending such talks was one of the few means by which the majority of citizens acquired an insight into distant cultures. These âtravel lecturesâ became an idiom of an emerging mass entertainment culture, one of the periodâs more under-appreciated and idiosyn- cratic cultural practices. Drawing upon a range of archival materials, this essay explores the scope of the phenomenon during the period 1840â70, and argues that these oratorical events represented interpretive performances or âdramas of appraisalâ through which performers brought reformist themes to the platform. Focusing on the career of the poet, writer and diplomat Bayard Taylor â the archetypal âtravel lecturerâ of the period â it reveals the ways in which he used the form to advance a moral vision of mid-century American cosmopolitanism
Failure Rate Computations Based on Mariner Mars 1964 Spacecraft Data
Mariner Mars 1964 failure rates computed for use in reliability predictions and cost allocation
Can Effects of Dark Matter be Explained by the Turbulent Flow of Spacetime?
For the past forty years the search for dark matter has been one of the
primary foci of astrophysics, although there has yet to be any direct evidence
for its existence (Porter et al. 2011). Indirect evidence for the existence of
dark matter is largely rooted in the rotational speeds of stars within their
host galaxies, where, instead of having a ~ r^1/2 radial dependence, stars
appear to have orbital speeds independent of their distance from the galactic
center, which led to proposed existence of dark matter (Porter et al. 2011;
Peebles 1993). We propose an alternate explanation for the observed stellar
motions within galaxies, combining the standard treatment of a fluid-like
spacetime with the possibility of a "bulk flow" of mass through the Universe.
The differential "flow" of spacetime could generate vorticies capable of
providing the "perceived" rotational speeds in excess of those predicted by
Newtonian mechanics. Although a more detailed analysis of our theory is
forthcoming, we find a crude "order of magnitude" calculation can explain this
phenomena. We also find that this can be used to explain the graviational
lensing observed around globular clusters like "Bullet Cluster".Comment: 5 pages, Accepted for publication in Journal of Modern Physics:
Gravitation and Cosmology (Sept. 2012
Universal attraction force-inspired freeform surface modeling for 3D sketching
This paper presents a novel freeform surface modeling method to construct a freeform surface from 3D sketch. The approach is inspired by Newtonâs universal attraction force law to construct a surface model from rough boundary curves and unorganized interior characteristic curves which may cross the boundary curves or not.
Based on these unorganized curves, an initial surface can be obtained for conceptual design and it can be improved later in a commercial package. The approach has been tested with examples and it is capable of dealing with unorganized design curves for surface modeling
A simple construction method for sequentially tidying up 2D online freehand sketches
This paper presents a novel constructive approach to sequentially tidying up 2D online freehand sketches for further 3D interpretation in a conceptual design system. Upon receiving a sketch stroke, the system first identifies it as a 2D primitive and then automatically infers its 2D geometric constraints related to previous 2D geometry (if any). Based on recognized 2D constraints, the identified geometry will be modified accordingly to meet its constraints. The modification is realized in one or two sequent geometric constructions in consistence with its degrees of freedom. This method can produce 2D configurations without iterative procedures to solve constraint equations. It is simple and easy to use for a real-time application. Several examples are tested and discussed
Sketch-based virtual human modelling and animation
Animated virtual humans created by skilled artists play a remarkable role in todayâs public entertainment. However, ordinary users are still treated as audiences due to the lack of appropriate expertise, equipment, and computer skills. We developed a new method and a novel sketching interface, which enable anyone who can draw to âsketch-outâ 3D virtual humans and animation.
We devised a âStick FigureFleshing-outSkin Mappingâ graphical pipeline, which decomposes the complexity of figure drawing and considerably boosts the modelling and animation efficiency. We developed a gesture-based method for 3D pose reconstruction from 2D stick figure drawings. We investigated a âCreative Model-based Methodâ, which performs a human perception process to transfer usersâ 2D freehand sketches into 3D human bodies of various body sizes, shapes and fat distributions. Our current system supports character animation in various forms including articulated figure animation, 3D mesh model animation, and 2D contour/NPR animation with personalised drawing styles. Moreover, this interface also supports sketch-based crowd animation and 2D storyboarding of 3D multiple character interactions. A preliminary user study was conducted to support the overall system design. Our system has been formally tested by various users on Tablet PC. After minimal training, even a beginner can create vivid virtual humans and animate them within minutes
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ERP to chess stimuli reveal expert-novice differences in the amplitudes of N2 and P3 components
This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2013 Society for Psychophysiological Research.ERP experiments were conducted to analyze the underlying neural events when chess players make simple judgments of a board position. Fourteen expert players and 14 age-matched novices viewed, for each of four tasks, 128 unique positions on a mini (4âĂâ4) chess board each presented for 0.5âs. The tasks were to respond: (a) if white king was in check, (b) if black knight was present, (c) if white king was not in check, and (d) if no black knight was present. Experts showed an enhanced N2 with check targets and a larger P3 with knight targets, relative to novices. Expert-novice differences in posterior N2 began as early as 240âms on check-related searches. Results were consistent with the view that prolonged N2 components reflect matching of current perceptual input to memory, and thus are sensitive to experts' superior pattern recognition and memory retrieval of chunks
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