Ambiguous Line Research Articles

The Shelter Multiple: How Humanitarianisms Hang Together at a Mexican Non-governmental Migrant Shelter

ABSTRACT This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork at a nongovernmental migrant shelter in Mexico to examine how aid workers coordinate apparently contradictory humanitarian orientations. Prior research has called attention to the institutionalization of grassroots humanitarian organizations as they take on the work of categorizing migrants as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’. Studies also call attention to initiatives that oppose such institutionalization, with a particular focus on highly mediated acts of civil disobedience. We argue that in Mexico, where the ambiguous line between state and criminal authority makes such explicit claims potentially damaging and dangerous, knowledge practices that seem to signal the institutionalization of otherwise grassroots spaces—the work of registering, classifying, and documenting migrants—are also central to how aid workers discretely subvert such deservingness distinctions without taking explicit and potentially damaging moral and political stances. Our analysis engages with science and technology studies scholarship that understands knowledge practices to be performative in that knowing migration produces the reality that it describes, rather than merely reflecting a taken-for-granted reality. We suggest that attending to how aid workers enact and coordinate information about migrants illuminates how aid workers simultaneously resist and reify distinct legal and moral regimes in violent contexts.

Obstacles in Identifying Sexual Harassment in Academia: Insights from Five European Countries

Abstract Introduction Experiences of sexual harassment are common among university students. At the same time, research shows that victims and bystanders find it difficult to determine when an incident meets the criteria for sexual harassment. The aim of this study therefore was to obtain a richer and deeper understanding of the obstacles that university students encounter in identifying sexual harassment in the academic environment. Methods Individual interviews and focus groups were conducted with a total of 85 students at the bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral level in five European countries (Belgium, Croatia, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden) between 2020 and 2022. Thematic analysis was used to identify obstacles in identifying sexual harassment. Results The obstacles described by participants were found to fall into three main categories: (1) preconceived notions about what constitutes sexual harassment that did not necessarily concur with lived experiences, (2) navigating an often blurred or ambiguous line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour and (3) the existence of competing interpretations of what had happened. Conclusions The results point to a gap between the participants’ lived experiences and their interpretations of them, which include difficulties positioning their experiences within their theoretical understanding of sexual harassment. Policy Implications Measures to counteract the obstacles faced by victims and bystanders in identifying sexual harassment in academia should target this cognitive gap, for instance by addressing the stereotypes that characterize preconceived notions about sexual harassment.

The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment

The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment

Neural Representations of Conceptual Fixation during Creative Imagination

ABSTRACT A large body of research has revealed that viewing example image stimuli tends to constrain creative idea generation. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying such visual fixation in creative cognition are unclear. In the present experiment, we explored whether example images impacted creative imagination and patterns of neural activity within brain regions associated with visual object recognition. Participants first viewed example images (ambiguous line drawings) accompanied by high-constraint and low-constraint labels. High-constraint labels resembled the line drawings, whereas low constraint labels did not. Next, participants imagined new labels for the same line drawings, with the initial labels removed. Consistent with our predictions, semantic distance analysis comparing cue labels to newly generated labels showed lower average semantic distance (i.e., less creative ideas) on high-constraint trials compared to low-constraint trials. Using representational similarity analysis, we also demonstrated that neural pattern similarity was anticorrelated (less similar) from object recognition to high-constraint imagination trials within the right inferior temporal gyrus, right middle temporal gyrus, and right superior occipital gyrus. Broadly, these findings suggest that salient visual examples may guide the formation of strong mental representations that constrain creative imagination. This research also offers a first step toward identifying neurocognitive signatures associated with the effortful process of producing new, creative ideas following exposure to fixating examples – particularly at the early level of object recognition/representation in the ventral visual stream.

Friends in Need: Belarusian Alliance Commitments to Russia and the Ukraine War

ABSTRACT Belarus, arguably Russia’s closest military ally, observably distanced itself from Russia’s actions early on during the Ukraine conflict. It maintained an ambiguous line about the annexation of Crimea, and its rhetoric toward NATO members became less hostile. Belarus’ actions can be explained within the framework of the alliance security dilemma as fears of both military and economic entrapment, but they also indicate how Belarus uses its alliance with Russia to protect its domestic political system. Importantly, an ostensibly neutral position on Ukraine — though in truth always closer to Russia than Ukraine — should not be mistaken for either aspirations of neutrality or perceptions of a threat from Russia.

Metaphors and Jokes in the Fragments of Cratinus

Metaphors and Jokes in the Fragments of Cratinus Naomi Scott What’s the difference between a metaphor and a joke? At first this might seem a strange question. Indeed, the differences are so obvious, and the similarities so much less so, that the question itself sounds like the opening to a joke in the “What’s the difference between an elephant and a blueberry?” style.1 However, in this article, I am going to suggest that the line between these two categories is far from clear-cut. Using examples from the comic poet Cratinus, I will show firstly that the same fundamental mechanism underlies jokes and metaphors, and secondly suggest that Cratinus’s metaphorical language in fact actively exploits the slippage between these two modes of speech to create humour and expose the inherent absurdities of literary language and convention. An understanding of the potentially ambiguous line between jokes and metaphors, and the extent to which these two modes of speech may not be entirely distinct categories, provides us with a particularly useful insight into the metaphorical language of Old Comedy. Comedy is hugely rich in metaphorical language,2 and its metaphors range from the large-scale [End Page 231] and structural (for example, the polis-as-oikos metaphor which underpins much of the plot of Aristophanes’ Knights),3 to the frequent short metaphors which colour its poetry. Given that the genre is also, needless to say, rich in humour, a model of metaphor which shows its close likeness to jokes and puns may go some way towards explaining the almost excessive fondness which comedy has for metaphorical language. Old Comedy also seems to be a good place to start when looking to understand how literary (as opposed to everyday) language works. Comedy often operates at the fault lines of language, exposing the impossibilities which, despite their centrality to the function of language (and especially literary language), might otherwise go undetected. Comedy in general, and (as I argue) Cratinus in particular, also has a tendency towards amplification. We therefore find in comedy literary phenomena such as metaphors in a somewhat exaggerated form, and this very lack of subtlety makes for useful case studies. I hope therefore to show not only that theoretical models of metaphor (and especially the model based on joke theory which I shall propose) have much to offer in our understanding of Old Comedy, but also that comic language in its very comicness has much to offer to our theoretical understanding of literary metaphor. METAPHORS AND JOKE THEORY The contention that metaphors and jokes are underpinned by the same fundamental mechanism rests on the observation that, at their core, both involve taking two apparently disparate ideas and mapping them onto one another. In metaphors, this mapping takes the form of the comparison drawn between the vehicle and the tenor (or source and target), whereby one is understood in terms of the other. From the 1990s onward, there has been interest in understanding this relationship between vehicle and tenor from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. This cognitive approach takes as its starting point the idea that metaphorical comparisons involve the mapping not only of linguistic categories, but also of underlying conceptual [End Page 232] domains. Cognitive approaches stress the embeddedness of metaphorical language in everyday speech. For example, common idiomatic expressions such as “the foundations of a theory” or “constructing an argument” are understood to be the linguistic manifestations of an underlying conceptual metaphor THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS.4 Of these cognitive models, the most dominant has been Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s theory of “conceptual blending,”5 which they set out in their 2002 book: The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. According to Fauconnier and Turner, metaphorical language not only involves the two inputs of vehicle and tenor, it also creates a third mental space in which these two inputs are blended together in an impossible way. The most famous and often cited of Fauconnier and Turner’s examples involves an effort in 1993 to break a longstanding sailing record set in 1853. Newspaper reportage described the 1993 ship as being “4 days ahead” of its 1853 predecessor. According to...

Efficient Pose Tracking based on Line Segment Matching

Pose tracking is a crucial issue for many applications such as robotic tasks and facility operations. Vision-based approaches with non-contact properties are appropriate choices for these tasks. However, vision-based approaches are not sufficiently robust and fast. In this work, we propose a vision-based pose tracking to deal with these problems. We estimate poses using Lie group and Lie algebra representation theory. Such operation is performed in a linearized space, therefore it is convenient for pose estimation. To provide reliable visual information for our pose estimation, we detect line segments. Our detection of line segment depends on semi-global image information. We describe all line segments and match those detected in consecutive frames. Our line segment detector and matching descriptor are good at discarding ambiguous line segments and finding real ones in noisy situations. The integration of group theory and line segment detection and matching plays an important role for developing a robust vision-based pose tracking system. Our system proves to be efficient and robust.

New Scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe

A steady stream of creative new scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe has been arriving at the desks of reviews editors in Contemporary European History. Commissioning and editing essays on this scholarship has persuasively demonstrated its wider importance, not least in challenging the ambiguous and arbitrary line that continues to divide European historiography between East and West. We have therefore taken the decision to present the following five articles collectively, as a means of reflecting on and interrogating assumptions in European historiography. Why do Germany and France still dominate narratives of the Great War? Can we speak of urban continuities and similarities across the socialist and capitalist spheres? How does studying food offer new insights on the global phenomenon of socialism and socialist production?

Extended Three-Stage Polarimetric SAR Interferometry Algorithm by Dual-Polarization Data

Until now, most polarimetric synthetic aperture radar interferometry (PolInSAR) research has been based on full-polarization (HH + HV + VH + VV) SAR data, which can provide complete polarimetric information but usually have a smaller swath and lower spatial resolution than dual-polarization (dual-pol) data. Some existing researches concern the dual-pol PolInSAR; however, these works did not perform the coherence optimization process which may make the inversion unstable. In this paper, the PolInSAR technique based on dual-pol (HH + HV) SAR data is investigated in order to demonstrate its validity for forest height retrieval and thus show that PolInSAR is better able to meet the requirements of global-scale research. We extend the three-stage inversion process and coherence optimization algorithm to dual-pol PolInSAR. In addition, based on the random volume over ground model, a search method for finding the volume-only coherence on ambiguous line segments is proposed. Finally, the dual-pol PolInSAR technique is applied to forest height estimation using airborne L-band SAR data acquired by the E-SAR system over the Traunstein test site in Germany. The forest heights estimated by dual-pol PolInSAR are compared with those estimated using the full-pol mode and also with measurements made in situ. The results show that dual-pol PolInSAR can obtain similar estimated forest heights to the full-pol mode and also that the search method for volume-only coherence retrieval can improve the inversion accuracy. The coefficient of determination (r 2 ) for the relation between the dual-pol PolInSAR and the in situ measurements is 0.7287.

Government and (non)event: the promise of control

Control rooms routinely deal with happenings that might become events. They attempt to hide events and their possibility from the users of infrastructure by undertaking various forms of action to stop events coming to pass. Based on ethnographic research in a motorway control room, in this paper we describe how events are grasped and handled and subject to the effect of control. Focusing on how the promise of control is provisionally achieved through detection–diagnosis–response work, we show how control room action is situated on the ambiguous line between event and non- or quasi-event and involves making happenings that might be or might become events into their opposite: non-events, or routine occurrences. We use the case of the work of control rooms in dialogue with Michel Foucault on the relation between ‘government and event’ and Lauren Berlant on ‘modes of eventfulness’ to challenge the emphasis on the event as dramatic transformation in some current research on securing life and some geographical work on events. Paying close attention to what control rooms do shows the multiplicity of relations between government and (non)event, and invites us to expand the ‘modes of eventfulness’ that social and cultural geographers learn to sense and disclose.

Public relations and the practice of paid content: Practical, theoretical propositions and ethical implications

This article focuses on the relatively new marketing phenomenon of embedded paid content. However, the reality is that Israeli public relations (PR) practitioners are engaged in promotion of paid digital content marketing (DCM) without full disclosure or transparency on various internet sites. Three major questions are therefore raised and discussed: (a) Does payment for content – which entails PR practitioners control over content – demand a review of PR practice definitions? (b) Does PR paid DCM makes “give-and-take relationships” with journalists and the “two-way symmetric model” redundant in digital channels? (c) What are the ethical implications of using paid DCM without full disclosure for PR practitioners and brand stakeholders? We suggest that definitions of PR should be reviewed in light of using undisclosed paid DCM. Moreover, we claim that the penetration of PR into buying digital media, and thus purchasing control in the same way as advertising, contributes to an ambiguous line between PR and advertising. From an ethical perspective, when paid DCM is embedded into our main digital information channels, often hiding commercial messages, readers may be confused between editorial and paid content generated by marketers. This confusion may well lead to a decline in the trustworthiness of media organizations and business organizations using this practice.

Is children’s naming and drawing of pictures mediated by representational intentions? Evidence from typical development and autism

Research has debated whether shape or inferred referential intent directs children’s picture naming. Here we investigate whether typically developing (TD) children aged 2–5 years and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) comprehend pictures differently depending on whether they are intentional symbols. Participants were shown ambiguous line drawings and were informed that they were either intentional or accidental creations. Children were asked to name and draw each picture. TD children only evidenced a preference for shape-based naming when pictures were intentional representations, and were increasingly likely to create canonical drawings of symbolised referents when stimuli were intentional. Representational intentions did not influence the verbal or drawing responses of children with ASD, however, the nature of their drawings was related to their prior naming. Thus, the meaning that TD children derive from 2-D shapes is mediated by referential intent, while picture comprehension in autism may be comparatively egocentric.

PHYSICAL NATURE OF GEOMORPHOLOGIC BOUNDARIES

The boundaries between landforms or relief types can be divided into two large groups: divergent, lined along the positive landforms, and cumulative, lined along the negative landforms. We study as an example a - system, of which unity and stableness depend on the dynamic bonds - erosion-denudation processes in the first place. Geomorphologic elements of are connected downhill by surface flow. The bonds 'uphill are put into motion by lowering of the base level or undercutting the slope by water flow. The boundary of the system catchment basin is the watershed along which the four types of boundaries can be distinguished: apical (watersheds properly) pronounced mostly as the edges of the mountains, slope ones (transit), saddle ones (transfluvial) and watershed areas with ambiguous line of drainage devide.

Single-shot three-dimensional sensing with improved data density

We introduce a novel concept for motion robust optical 3D-sensing. The concept is based on multi-line triangulation. The aim is to evaluate a large number of projected lines (high data density) in a large measurement volume with high precision. Implementing all those three attributes at the same time allows for the "perfect" real-time 3D movie camera (our long term goal). The key problem towards this goal is ambiguous line indexing: we will demonstrate that the necessary information for unique line indexing can be acquired by two synchronized cameras and a back projection scheme. The introduced concept preserves high lateral resolution, since the lines are as narrow as the sampling theorem allows, no spatial bandwidth is consumed by encoding of the lines. In principle, the distance uncertainty is only limited by shot noise and coherent noise. The concept can be also advantageously implemented with a hand-guided sensor and real-time registration, for a complete and dense 3D-acquisition of complicated scenes.

“Poscia, più che ‘l dolor, poté ‘l digiuno”: Translation and Interpretation in Inferno XXXIII

ANYONE who has read or taught Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia in translation has been faced with the vital question of which edition to select. This choice is not made easy by the great abundance of English editions of one of literature's most translated texts. Although the profusion of translations, nearly all completed within the last two centuries, (1) pales in comparison with the 700-year history of Italian editions, the texts vary tremendously in structure, style, and accuracy. Such differences reflect not only historical shifts of translation methodology and theory over time but also the individual translator's understanding and interpretation of the original text. The choices that the translator makes can have a profound effect on the experience of the casual reader as well as the more committed student or scholar. The most dramatic example of the translator's influence over Dante's text is found, perhaps not surprisingly, in the famously controversial Inferno XXXIII, line 75: Poscia, piu che 'l dolor, pote 'l digiuno. In this article, I examine a wide range of English renderings of this line and ponder their implications. (2) The resulting exploration underscores the power of the translated word and its influence over not only the interpretation of the original text but also, perhaps more significantly, our ability to confront uncomfortable cultural realities. The notoriously ambiguous line 75 concludes Count Ugolino's account of his horrific death in what later became known as Pisa's Torre della fame. In Dante's Hell, Ugolino is bound by ice together with Archbishop Ruggieri, the man who had betrayed and then imprisoned him, causing his death. Their bodies are frozen below the surface, merged into one rigid form, with heads exposed and Ugolino's teeth eternally gnawing at the skull and nape of his captor's neck. Ostensibly, Ugolino inhabits this circle of Hell for the sin of treachery, but his tale does not include the narration of this offense. Instead, Ugolino describes how he was locked into the tower with his sons and grandsons--who are represented by Dante as children although, historically, they were adults at the time--and eventually left to starve to death. This is one of the most memorable passages to any reader of the Inferno, with the suffering of the children vividly narrated and then followed by their macabre offer: telling their father to unmake them by stripping them of their flesh, to eat them in order to relieve his own pain. Ugolino did not act on their proposition, and one by one the children died of starvation. His condemned spirit relates how he alone remained, crawling over the bodies of his descendants in despair, concluding his tale with the verse, Poscia, piu che 'l dolor, pote 'l digiuno. After uttering these words, Ugolino buries his teeth once again into his adversary's skull. What exactly does Ugolino mean by these words? Did Dante intend to say that although grief did not kill him, hunger did so? Or was he implying that hunger overcame the reticence of grief and sorrow, driving Ugolino to eat the flesh of his deceased offspring before he, himself, died? The controversy has raged for centuries, with strong and sometimes heated arguments on both sides. (3) I will not attempt to give a definitive answer to this much-debated issue; my interest lies instead in the question of what the translators believed when they translated and/or commented upon the line and how their opinions may or may not be reflected in the end result. The very first English text based on the Divina Commedia was, fittingly, Chaucer's paraphrase of the Ugolino story in the Monk's Tale, dating from c. 1370. Ugolino's episode later became the most widely translated of the Commedia (Crisafulli 12), and he reappeared as a popular figure in many loosely translated fragments from the 18th century, reflecting the era's fascination with the macabre (De Sua 9). (4) Following the first translation of the entire Commedia by Henry Boyd in 1785, the floodgates opened and one translation followed another, among them the first American version, published by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1867. …

A constrained genetic algorithm for line labelling of line drawings with shadows and table-lines

Line drawings are well known to exhibit geometric ambiguities, resulting in, drawings that can have multiple interpretations. However, drawings are used to present design concepts to peers in fields such as engineering design, where it is imperative that the observer interprets the drawing in the same way as the designer for effective communication. Designers therefore use cues, prompting the observer to resolve the geometric ambiguities and achieve the desired interpretation. In this paper, we identify the cues introduced in drawings and focus on two cues, namely table-lines (which convey information about the position of the object in space) and shadows (which convey information about the geometry of the object). These cues can be used in a line-labelling context to allow a line-labelling algorithm to overcome the geometric ambiguities of the drawing. For this purpose, we propose a cue-constrained genetic algorithm that takes the vectorized line drawing and the identified cues attached to each edge, and uses these cues as constraints on the edge labels, thus distinguishing between different object-background interactions. We show that the proposed algorithm can be used to successfully label intentionally ambiguous line drawings according to some desired interpretation as specified by the additional cues present in the drawing.

The Research on Grid-Based Contour Tracking Method

The contour point interpolation, contour tracking, contour connection, and linear iterative curve fitting algorithms were studied by the grid method. Emphasis was on solving the degenerate points and ambiguous contour line connection problems. The results show using these methods can accomplish smooth contour drawing based on discrete data points.

Picasso in the mind’s eye of the beholder: Three-dimensional filling-in of ambiguous line drawings

Cartoon-style line drawings contain very condensed information, after all most of the page stays blank. Yet, they constrain the contents of immediate visual awareness to an extraordinary extent. This is true even for drawings that are – though nominally “representational” – not even in central projection. Moreover, the strokes used in a drawing may stand for a bewildering variety of entities in the world. We studied Picasso drawings from the 1940s in which the artist famously combined multiple viewpoints. We find that the pictorial reliefs obtained from various observers agree to a large extent, and that the differences are of a very specific nature, typically involving variations in the mutual spatial attitudes of rigid body parts in figure studies. Although the purely planar layout of the drawings accounts for much of visual awareness, observers also use the sparse depth cues provided by the artist to evoke volumetric impressions. Observers also freely insert “template knowledge” about the structure of familiar generic objects.

Goya’s Fantastic Vision of Madness

This paper discusses Francisco de Goya. Employing Foucault's discourse to specific works reveals Goya's ability to represent visually the fundamental tension between Romantic and Classical ideas, especially the ambiguous line between reason and madness.

DeLong 이론에 의한 회화속 팜므 파탈 이미지의 복식 형태 분석

This thesis, concerning Femme Fatale Images Costume Form in paintings viewed from DeLong's Theory, analyzed frequency and traits on the basis of DeLong's Form Observation Theory and drew out the result as followings. First, Costume Form was mostly open, whole, planer integration, rounded, and indeterminate. The styles were similar each other. Second, surface structure was expressed by line & shape, color, texture, and pattern of which color had the highest priority. Next, line & shape and texture had the priority in order. They were expressed through intereaction. Third, the traits of Costume Form were a similar color harmony or large light and darkness contrast+soft quality+interaction by ambiguous line & shape. So, Femme Fatale Image in paintings was expressed by soft and pure images and erotic images.