Blank Face Research Articles

The Validity of a Smartphone-Based Method for Acquiring 3D Images of the Face.

Objectives. To evaluate the accuracy and reproducibility of measurements obtained using the Bellus3D Face Application on a mobile smartphone by comparing them to direct measurements on pre-marked and blank face scans. Materials and Methods. Twenty-five healthy young adults (six males and nineteen females; age range 20-30 years) were included in this prospective cross-sectional study, with the only exclusion criterion being the presence of significant facial hair interfering with the placement and visualization of landmarks. Image acquisitions were performed using an iPhone XR with the Bellus3D FaceApp face scanning application, an iOS application for smartphones. Ten single midfacial and five paired bilateral landmarks were defined and marked. Two face scans were performed on each patient, both on blank and marked faces, and distances were measured directly with calipers and digitally. Results. The random error values were 1.0 mm and 0.4 mm for the manual point placement and measurements and virtual point placement on blank faces, respectively. The two methods used (the direct method and acquisition on faces with landmarks) demonstrate relatively similar reliability (ICC > 0.8); however, a paired t-test showed that the differences between several measurements were statistically significant (p < 0.05). Regardless of the method used, there was a systematic error for various values that included the nose and mouth (p < 0.05). The measurements demonstrating the most significant differences between the methods were those that included the tip of the nose, with the mean differences being -4.4-3.3 mm. The measurements of the distances that estimate face "depth" showed the greatest consistency irrespective of the tested method (p > 0.05 and ICC > 0.8). Conclusions. The use of the Bellus3D FaceApp is precise and reproducible for certain areas of the face, but digital reconstruction errors prohibit, for the time being, the use of this technology in everyday clinical practice. The noted discrepancies were consistent and more prevalent for specific areas such as the tip of the nose. Further investigations are required to determine other sources of error and for other smartphone-based applications released for 3D face image acquisitions.

Affect, blankness, theatrics: Rurality and faciality in three Chinese instances

The face and the close-up have been central to film theory since its early days. If modern visual theories of the face arose in Europe amid urbanization and imperial encounter, in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the political aesthetics of faciality became central to Maoist mass mobilizations of the countryside, in part through collective village film screenings. Bringing together themes of faciality, rurality and anxieties of global encounter, this article considers how the rural has been staged through genres of the face in Chinese cinema and television. Through close readings of the Maoist era The Youth of Our Village, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and Zhao Benshan Media’s series Rural Love Story, I consider three distinct deployments of the face in depictions of rural and environmental transformation. Thinking with while also departing from Deleuze’s formulations in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, the article traces an emotively intense face reminiscent of the affection-image, a blank face that operates in part as a time-image and a performative face of what might be called a theatrics-image. Across its readings as a site of affective immediacy, despotic inscription, moral character and social–political manoeuvring, the face offers a multivalent site for political, aesthetic and affective mediation, on- and off-screen.

Song, and: Connecticut, and: My Brother Does Not Return for My Mother’s Fiftieth

Song, and: Connecticut, and: My Brother Does Not Return for My Mother’s Fiftieth Tawanda Mulalu (bio) Song Forgive myself for breath and I should die.Self-love an excuse but for that exit: this daydreamof me ended. Of feet parched with weight beyondthe hurt of pale bathroom scale. Or love thisitch between thighs as slower metabolism giftsslower moods, these dull penetrations of faceinto pillowcase. So die then, says another countryor lover; splits me long through thoughts of this spine.And a dream of nerve cells copying beneath this glass.How inexact to possess skin. Like a flailing sacktoo stuffed with consciousness. I feel as a piñataand you are peckish. Not just the promise of guns shotbut allergic itch draws blood in late summer. I’m sorryother Black men died. I’m sorry I keep thinking,I look like him. I’m sorry my life feels as easyas these leaves failing to defend themselves againsttheir too-soon shifting colors. But I want myself.I want to want myself as much as I want your shadowsflickering against the walls of this cave, fooling meof presences beyond myself. And this music: I want thisfoolishness of my mouth transmuted into woodwindand brass. As if this could salve. As if this grass betweenmy lips epistles this gray sky as any virtue but failed rain.As if peaches. Forgive myself for breath and this songshould die. I am as new as the paintings in this cave.Am the same burrowing of grain into body and loss.Am the same ochre and hematite, inevitable and sorry. [End Page 18] Connecticut Mornings, his wife could not remember who my face was.Her face stared at me with a mushy smile while Henry ate the same corn flakes with bananas. I watched the yellow flakesuncrisping in his bowl of milk, his gums too soft to bear them. Henry then put me to work on his “fields.” I don’t know whofirst said it. Probably, his teeth cackled “fields” to his friend who visited him—limping gently—as Henry rolled around in hisred tractor. It roared through his backyard, funneling narrow lanes into the black, hot soil. Waddling after him in my white sneakers,I held blue seeds of grass that pricked my fingers. I tossed them over the soil like a flower girl. “Why are they blue?” I asked him.“Fertilizer coating,” he said. “Dry, mutant rice,” said my fizzy mind. Nights—they opened with heavy sweat—he would sit and watchFox News blare. Me next to him, reading a long novel on suffering. But he shouldn’t have paid me as a gardener. I dug about as wellas a child in a sandbox—shallow, amazed by my skinny handling of that spade. Its crusted rust as dark as my dry skin. No, Henry paidmy hands to hold his loneliness. To hear him. I needed a place to stay. He liked to hear me singing off-key in the mornings, taking longcold showers. And walk down these stairs to him: aging, waiting to plant more blue seeds. [End Page 19] My Brother Does Not Return for My Mother’s Fiftieth Egg that could but did not quite, I see you in theirmuseums, the coal-dark African masks, your blank face. To not find you walking with me with thesestolen faces, to not find you crawling up from dust— I left you landlocked with our parents, heard tidesbefore my body, wet axes carving shore to noise, and who has ever rescued the drive home? Washedmy crusted hands and what—stubborn grains. Dried my hands with a cold towel, your little hands driedbut could not hold their shores—though other grains now live between your fingers. This world will nothold little hands but turned to dust. At this party, I sip on bitter-dark drink, bearing warm speecheswhile your body turns to airlessness. My thoughts on this glass, roundedness of your once new skullI never saw. My flight returns to their shores. Your face escapes me...

Shooting Justin Bieber &amp; bin Laden in the Woods

Shooting Justin Bieber & bin Laden in the Woods Matt Donovan (bio) Keywords Matt, Donovan, paintball, technology, parenting, militia, bin Laden It begins with rocks, leaves, hubcaps, a plastic bat tucked up where the sky should bebefore the world is set right with an Oops! & in one blurring swerve everything turns right side up as a kid from behind the cameraproclaims what will be unleashed, namely a can of paintball whoop-ass aimed at picturesof Bieber & bin Laden duct-taped to buckets. Someone called Usuck had decided my son neededto see what was about to go down. This was back when we monitored his texts, thinking we could save himfrom who-knows-what while also wondering if we needed to protect the world from whatever he might hurl forthfrom his phone, which most of the time was acronyms traded in rapid-fire bursts mixed with that laughing-but-crying emoji, the one with two enormous teardrops sproutinglike a pair of blue tusks from an eyes-scrunched-shut face. There was no need to watch what Usuck sentall the way through, but I wanted to see [End Page 278] what would happen at the end, which turned out to bewhat was promised: the sound of shots at first beginning like a steady beat before becominga drum roll for paint-splatter, hell-yeahs, the smirk & glower on each face reduced to shreds, two spinning buckets & then a kid running to seeclose-up what he'd done. Usuck & panting, grinning kid, there's a light snow coming down just now& because the wide, blank face of our neighbor's house is filled with the wavering light of whateverthey too have chosen to watch, I wouldn't mind asking you about the pleasures of the trigger, about the sky that once again doesn't cast down upon uswhat we've shot & left behind—plywood, bottles, what look like a rowing machine & anything elseroped to a low-hanging branch that stops rage from becoming grief. Then again, what use is the conceit of a conversation that will never take placewhen there are so many other things now cued & ready to play? Up next: What happens to a Hand Grenade in a Microwave? Up next:Watermelon vs. Artillery Shells. Up next: Company Offers Reenactment of Bin Laden Raid,where each night participants arrive [End Page 279] in Pakistan—played by an office building in Minneapolis—where they storm rooms clutching guns, weaving through metal chairs & self-defense dummiesbefore, without warning, they become as ready as they'll ever be. You'll need to take him out.I don't want to write a letter to your parents. No one wants to write that letter. We'd all rather watch someone barely trained burst through a door to findthe man who had been promised, sitting on a mattress, wearing eye protection & a fake beardresembling a fist of stiff wheat, raising a fake gun slowly enough to be shot by military-grade simulation roundsbefore slumping to the floor & trying his best to still his breath. Mission as always accomplished. Instead of this, I should be watching the snowcontinue its slow work erasing our world, or even a video I wish I could see that would be nothing but a never-veering shot of the same manbored in a costume turban, alone in a room & thinking who-knows-what as he tracesthe long loops of the stitching in a sky-blue quilt & the door for once never opens. Up next: Hendrix Makes His Guitar a Machine Gun just afterthe rocket's red glare, when he gives up on melody [End Page 280] & wrenches his Woodstock solo into gunfire, explosions,a long shriek of feedback followed by the opening notes of "Taps." Up next: Is a Fish Tank Bulletproof?As always, the answer is no, this time in the form of glinting water perched on a milk cratethat becomes the shattered thing we knew it would be before it's all restored—slosh of water rushing backwards, broken glass slipping into place—only to explode againin...

Karakteristike interakcije roditelja i dece s oštećenjem vida predškolskog uzrasta

Parenting is a dynamic process infuenced by the behavior of both children and parents. Behavior of children with visual impairment is characterized by the absence of language which involves smiling and looking, calming down when focusing on voice, unusual posture, stereotyped behavior, blank face, which can all interfere with parentchild interaction. Objective. The aim of this paper was to determine the characteristics of interaction between mothers and children with visual impairment and multiple disabilities. Methods. The research included a total of thirteen mother-child pairs. Five children had a visual impairment, while eight had both a visual impairment and another comorbid condition. The children were between 10 and 68 months of age (M = 31.62, SD = 19.08). The characteristics of interaction between mothers and children with visual impairment and multiple disabilities were assessed by analyzing videos, while Parenting Interactions with Children - Checklist of Observations Linked to Outcomes - PICCOLO was used to record the observed behaviors. Results. Interaction between parents and children with visual impairment and multiple disabilities was satisfactory in three domains: Affection, Responsiveness, and Encouragement. Conclusion. The biggest problem for parents was fnding a way to teach their child some activities or to provide information about the environment.

Japanese Children’s Knowledge of the Facial Components of Basic Emotions

While numerous studies have investigated children’s recognition of facial emotional expressions, little evidence has been gathered concerning their explicit knowledge of the components included in such expressions. Thus, we investigated children’s knowledge of the facial components involved in the expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, and surprise. Four- and 5-year-old Japanese children were presented with the blank face of a young character, and asked to select facial components in order to depict the emotions he felt. Children’s overall performance in the task increased as a function of age, and was above chance level for each emotion in both age groups. Children were likely to select the Cheek raiser and Lip corner puller to depict happiness, the Inner brow raiser, Brow lowerer, and Lid droop to depict sadness, the Brow lowerer and Upper lid raiser to depict anger, and the Upper lid raiser and Jaw drop to depict surprise. Furthermore, older children demonstrated a better knowledge of the involvement of the Upper lid raiser in surprise expressions.

How Therapy With Victims of Political Trauma Repairs the Third—Commentary on Gómez and Kovalskys’s Work in the Context of Postdictatorship Chile

In this discussion I use the concept of the moral Third to designate the position in which we experience the world as lawful because repair is possible. Repair takes place through acknowledgment of harming and consequent suffering. This form of acknowledgment, coupled with social recognition, is considered by the authors to be a crucial part of the therapeutic work with victims of collective trauma, especially of torture by the Pinochet security police. In relation to Gómez’s case, I discuss how the moral Third, the representation of a lawful world, is shattered by attacks on the victim’s family. Further, the witnessing function is reversed and perverted in torture, where the torturer presents a blank face and denies the very suffering he is inducing. The experience of betrayal becomes the core issue which the therapist seeks to address through the attachment relationship itself. In relation to Kovalskys’ case I consider how the moral Third of the activists, the belief in the possibility of a world in which all can live, is attacked in order to affirm the paranoid view that “only one can live.” The lived experience of this traumatizing attack is that the child becomes imbued with the sense of not deserving life, of having gained life at the expense of the other. Helping the patient to testify publicly to her personal history and truth becomes part of the healing process in the context of collective trauma.

How to Kill Gra' Coleman and Live to Tell about It: (Vauxhall, NJ, c. 1949)

How to Kill Gra' Coleman and Live to Tell about It(Vauxhall, NJ, c. 1949) Kim Coleman Foote (bio) 1. With her own braids Two pairs of brown fingers fly down Gra' Coleman's head, weaving the long gray strands that dangle to her waist. All that good hair, the two sisters think. Not like theirs. [End Page 126] Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by simpleinsomnia [End Page 127] They wonder how someone so evil could have such nice long hair, but they dare not tug on it or even speak. At least, if they want to live. Ginger and Nancy eye each other, both eager to finish first, even though Gra' Coleman will grant each of them fifty cents for the braiding. It's that brief moment when she seems like the nice grandma on the radio shows or like their other grandma, Lucy Grimes, whom they don't see enough for their liking. That brief moment when she smiles, reaching into the pocket of her housedress for the money. Gra' Coleman tends to reserve smiles for strangers and neighbors, like now on the porch, when she calls a happy Sunday to Mrs. Kazlauskas in her yard across the street. If she were to say "Thank you" for the girls' work, that would complete their fantasy. But just the fact that she lives up to her promise to pay—it's the best they can hope for. Nancy is halfway done, far ahead. Ginger gets caught up in how much the hair looks like cloth when you put it between your eyes and the sun. She imagines hands smaller than hers braiding the millions of threads to make her dress, her bobby socks. She stiffens when Gra' Coleman says, "They better be straight." Gra' Coleman spits out a stream of snuff. Ginger's shoulders rise higher at the ping inside the rusted coffee tin at their feet on the porch. Her fingers shake as she resumes. She wastes precious seconds watching her grandmother chewing. The girl's blank face masks her insides, where she glowers. At nine years old, she's learned to control herself around Gra' Coleman. Control anything that won't drive the woman crazier, like talking back or laughing. Even sneezing. She can brace her whole body and hold everything inside until she grows hot and thinks she'll explode just like those grenades their Uncle Luke said he handled during the war. Nancy, on the other hand, tries to empty her head when she's that close to Gra' Coleman. At that distance, she half believes their grandma can see her hateful thoughts. She pretends she's styling the hair of a big doll, not a real-flesh person. Especially not one who, minutes before they stepped onto the porch for the braiding, smashed their sister Marlene's head against the wall. Bang, bang, bang, like the Lone Ranger's gun. Nancy concentrates on the Lone Ranger to avoid thinking about her family. Her loony family. Whenever she listens to The Lone Ranger on the radio, she imagines the hero to be a big ol' white man—the type they say would lynch a nigger, even an eleven-year-old girl like her all the way up north in New Jersey. He'd be tough enough to stand up to Gra' [End Page 128] Coleman. Not like their daddy, Gra' Coleman's beloved son (but, truth be told, not like most men in Vauxhall, who seem to fear this barely five-foot lady as much as the Coleman kids do). Sometimes, those Indians the Lone Ranger chases have two long braids. They're dressed in what men Indians wear, but when Nancy envisions them turning their heads, they have her grandma's face. She forgets herself and giggles. "What's so goddamn funny?" "Nothin, Gra' Coleman," Nancy and Ginger say in sync. Ginger raises curious eyes to her older sister, who rolls her lips between her teeth to stop any more laughter. As Nancy's fingers near the end of the braid, she remembers the time the Lone Ranger threw a lasso. She sees the circle of it above his head, just...

A Distinct Technique for Facial Sketch to Image Conversion

A liberal amount of software applications are in market for generating a sketch out of an image, the vice-versa though is unacquainted. Whereas such an implementation will prove to be purposive to the crime investigation departments. Such a youthful approach for generating an image from a sketch is suggested in this paper by following a process of, breaking down the sketch into constituent or component of face, matching or comparing these features with the available database, selecting the best match followed by registering or pasting these image components on a blank face image, performing filtering algorithm in order to perform smoothening of image. Index Terms— Feature detection, feature extraction, facial components, filtering algorithms, fiducial points, smoothening image.

‘A Kind of Magic’

Thank you my sweet friends, my adopted adoptive friends, my water in the desert, my acolytes in dreams for being here altogether with me. As I’m sure you will agree we share remembering, we share forgetting, we share trembling, we share wishing, we share witching, and we are all, all of us, fellow para-practitioners. You won’t be surprised if I tell you I am not ready, I am not finished, as that also we share. And I think it is the fault or the undecidable magic of the terrible subject of this conference that has chosen us. I think it is very much beyond each of us and all of us to imagine anything stable when talking of this momentous subject of analysis, whomever it aims at. I won’t tell you—preterition— I won’t tell you the story of the lecture I wanted to deliver today, which was called ‘Promised Belief ’, as of course it tricked me. And although I brought it here, there is nothing behind. That is technology, the technology of forgetting, and obeying the tricks of the unconscious. So, it has come fatefully purloined and I am going to do something else, partly improvised. I was going to talk of a kind of magic, a kind of magic, that is, s/witch. While gathering these notes and trying to think all the time of, about, with, around, JD, it happened that I lost a word. The lost one was the name of a circuit breaker; I was looking at the blank face of the thing, which remained mute. Asking it its name, feeling wounded, lost. Time passed. Eventually, the word came back, leapt on cat’s paws, on my desk, innocent of course, blameless, and the name was interrupteur.2 Interruption of interruption, theme of my talk. That was what we kept doing, Jacques Derrida and HC, interrupting, enterrupting, interruption, interrupting interruption, with a switch of witch/which tongue, with a whip of an invisible pliant rod. Moses’ compliant rod. Moses’ interrupted tongue, relieved by his interpreter. The mono-dialogue of words and music.

My Stevens: A Titling Hero

My Stevens:A Titling Hero Matthea Harvey Stevens is my titling hero. I can't think of any poet who doesn't wish they had thought of titles like "Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion" or "The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade" or "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle." In a letter of 1935, Stevens writes: Titles with me are, of course, of the highest importance. Some years ago a student of Wesleyan came up to the office. Apparently he had been given the job of writing a paper on Harmonium. He was under the impression that there was no relation whatever between the titles and the poems. Possibly the relation is not as direct and as literal as it ought to be. Very often the title occurs to me before anything else occurs to me. This is not uncommon; I knew a man in New York who ought to know who once told me that many more people have written the first chapters of novels than have written the rest of them, and that still more people have given their novels titles without having given them any bodies. (L 297) I have a little test with which I have come up for myself to explain the relations of poems to their titles and Stevens provides wonderful examples of all of them (except for the untitled category because he seems to have loved titles too much to ever use that). The five categories are: license-plate titles, spotlight titles, helium titles, greased-pig titles, and untitled or not wearing a tie. The license-plate titles give important identifying information: who is speaking, who is being addressed, the setting—for example, "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon." The untitled category is self-explanatory. But I would like to talk here about three Stevens poems that sport a spotlight title, a greased-pig title, and a helium title. Spotlight titles are titles that highlight a phrase or an image in the poem. One of Stevens' most interesting spotlight titles is "So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch." This is a coy and complicated spotlight, one that hops from name to name. The name "So-and-So" makes a point of its anonymity, so that each renaming in the poem is highlighted. First the painted woman who is being described is called "Projection A." Then she is decorated by a crown called "Projection B." And finally she becomes "Projection C" (CPP [End Page 112] 262-63). None of these names comes any closer to specificity. Instead the painter is showing that he is projecting layers and layers onto the blank face of So-and-So. Projection C is described as half the woman herself and half the artist's projection. So when her name is so suddenly Mrs. Pappadopoulos in the final line, we experience a bumpy ride back into reality. Interestingly, the minute she is given her name back, she is also dismissed. Abstraction is what keeps the painter interested. However, the reverse is true for the reader. We have been set up with the spotlight of So-and-So, jumping from Projection A to B to C to be very attuned to the moment her name is revealed. The next category of titling is the greased-pig title. In greased-pig contests, participants try to catch a young pig covered in cooking oil. It's apparently very difficult. Greased-pig titles, like their namesakes, evade connection with the poem. In these titles, the reader can grasp only a tiny point of tangible intersection between the title and the poem, like two lines that intersect in one spot and then go on to infinity in their separate directions. Greased pigs are able to glancingly touch the poem's content, but it is a brush by, not an embrace, as in the title, "Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs." The only truly explicit connection between the title and the poem here is the last word of the title, "hogs," and the word "swine" in the first, second, and final stanzas of the poem (CPP 62). The title's construction sets you up to think about food chains, so phrases that...

Dogs can discriminate human smiling faces from blank expressions

Dogs have a unique ability to understand visual cues from humans. We investigated whether dogs can discriminate between human facial expressions. Photographs of human faces were used to test nine pet dogs in two-choice discrimination tasks. The training phases involved each dog learning to discriminate between a set of photographs of their owner's smiling and blank face. Of the nine dogs, five fulfilled these criteria and were selected for test sessions. In the test phase, 10 sets of photographs of the owner's smiling and blank face, which had previously not been seen by the dog, were presented. The dogs selected the owner's smiling face significantly more often than expected by chance. In subsequent tests, 10 sets of smiling and blank face photographs of 20 persons unfamiliar to the dogs were presented (10 males and 10 females). There was no statistical difference between the accuracy in the case of the owners and that in the case of unfamiliar persons with the same gender as the owner. However, the accuracy was significantly lower in the case of unfamiliar persons of the opposite gender to that of the owner, than with the owners themselves. These results suggest that dogs can learn to discriminate human smiling faces from blank faces by looking at photographs. Although it remains unclear whether dogs have human-like systems for visual processing of human facial expressions, the ability to learn to discriminate human facial expressions may have helped dogs adapt to human society.

Mona Lisa on a Bad Day: Or the Impossibility of Neutrality and the Non-Likeness of Photographic Portraiture

This article stems from my ongoing, rather speculative research into a category of photographic portraying that works beyond the limits of recording the individual, unmistakable likeness of a specific sitter in front of the camera. Transcending the constraints of lifelike reproduction, this critique of portraiture investigates the proposition that photographs can be considered as potentially non-mimetic portraits to explore “non-like,” iconic relations between a photograph and its model. Accordingly, I have constructed the term “Non-Likeness” as an extension of our understanding of the genre of portraiture, because—different from the German “Bildnis” and “Porträt”—the English language makes no distinction between individual portraiture on the one hand, and supra-individual (or non-like) portraiture on the other, including forms of metaphorical or allegorical portraying rather than visual identification. Based on a research-by-practice model, also mapping the background of my own artwork, the present article introduces both the blank face and its supposedly “neutral” photograph to identify questions regarding the seemingly canonical debates about the Photographic—the photograph's referential status as an index in opposition to the meanings arising from its surface. Examining different strategies of visual montage by stressing a gap between the photographic sign and its referent, the article explores the triangle of signification between model, image, and viewer, constructing a third meaning from its separated elements.

The Missing Pictures

125 M anzanar. In 1989, my grandma and I make a special stop at the mall, waiting in line at Waldenbooks just for Manzanar. We bring it home and look at it together. Well, not really together. Grandma and I were each other’s weekend for many years, apart from the one weekend a month that my siblings and I went off to our dad’s. Grandma was alone and needed help with chores, my mom needed a break from being a single mom with three kids, and I needed to be around someone steady. Gardening , cooking, cleaning the house, I became part of her routine. Usually Grandma would take a new book straight to her bedroom and put it on her nightstand, waiting until bedtime to flip through it: something to look forward to once the day’s duties were done. Sometimes she enjoyed a book so much that she’d keep reading until she fell asleep with the book on her face. If I spent the night, we would both read in her bed until I’d heard her snoring; my job would be to pick up the book without disturbing her, mark the page with a bookmark, cover her with the blanket, shut out the light. But the day we bring home Manzanar, she takes the book straight to the kitchen table, leaving it in the bookstore bag. She makes herself a pot of genmai cha, her favorite tea. She clears off the table of its everyday mess of stacked bills, fruit that needs eating, used grocery bags. She does not ask me if I want any tea. My cue to leave her alone. Ansel Adams took all the photos in Manzanar, creating a photographic account of Japanese-American internment. He had published some of the photos before, in 1944, in a book called Born Free and Equal. That book didn’t go over so well. It was banned. Copies were burned in the streets. His photos portrayed the internees as humans and not just “Japs.” Americans weren’t ready for that in 1944. But by 1989, Americans are driving Hondas and Toyotas with SARAH FANG THE MISSING PICTURES Winner of the 2008–09 AWP Intro Journals Project, selected by Barbara Hurd colorado review 126 Sony sound systems; sushi has come to places like Nebraska and Oklahoma; two Karate Kids have come out and everyone loves that Mr. Miyagi. Wax on, wax off. Pop culture has paved the way for deeper truths. This is the year after Reagan’s national apology for the internment, after the news of the reparations. The government is sorry they had stuck all the Japanese people in prison, stripped them of their constitutional rights, led many to lose all of their possessions. The government would even offer token compensation for the losses suffered. Our family does not discuss the money, but we all think about it. Grandma’s age means that she would be among the first to receive compensation ; the fact that my uncle K—— was born there means he would be among the youngest and the last. She is seventyfive years old. Uncle K—— is forty-six. I am fourteen. She was already pregnant with him when they got to Manzanar. That much of the story, I knew. I move to the living room and sit on the worn, blue 1960s sofa, still watching her in the kitchen from the corners of my eyes, pretending to occupy myself with something from the pile of old-lady magazines in front of me. National Geographic. Family Circle. Woman’s Day. Her dog, Smokey, keeps me company on the couch, his head resting on my feet. I half-heartedly read an article that teaches me the best way to clean the bathroom grout (instead of throwing away that old toothbrush, use it on the grout!). I am unused to the expression on Grandma’s face. A tense one, a somber one. Blank face, otherwise. Nowadays , I think of this face as the one that some people mean when they call the Japanese “stoic.” Grandma sits at the kitchen table with Manzanar. She sips her tea and spreads the book out flat so she...

Dance Studies in the International Academy: Genealogy of a Disciplinary Formation

For the past thirteen years, I have been traveling to the United States from my home country of Germany, first as a graduate student in California and later as a professor living in New York. Every time I pass through immigration, I am asked a series of questions regarding my final destination and my occupation. The latter always leads to some confusion, because when I am asked what I do, my accent seems to turn “dance history” into “dentistry.” Forced by phonetics to use the term “dance studies,” when confronted by the blank face of the customs officer, I inevitably embark on an explanation of what “dance studies” might be. Just in the moment when I finally see some comprehension of my profession lighting up the officer's face, the question is asked: “And we pay you to do this?”I constantly find myself in the position of having to explain my work. Usually I avoid a long-winded, defensive justification by comparing dance studies to one of its neighboring disciplines: “It is like art history, just writing about dance instead of paintings.” That usually does the trick, but it leaves a foul taste in my mouth. I know that dance studies isn't like art history and I certainly don't want it to be.

Real Options for Playstation

In 1973, Black, Scholes and Merton published two path-breaking papers on rational pricing of financial options, the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a stock in the future at a given price. This new approach to the evaluation of financial projects vividly inspired the academic community: over eleven thousands papers have been published on Real Options so far. Yet, thirty-five years after the publication of the first paper, Real Options have penetrated the decision-making processes of large corporations very slowly. Although the general concept of real options is clear, their specific benefits for individual investment decisions are not. Options are still an obscure mathematical tool and the partial differential equation at the core of the option pricing model leaves management with a blank face. The complexity of the stochastic calculus is preventing practitioners from seeing the new decision space created by Real Options and from moving inside this space at ease. This paper reviews the entire development of Real Options research, taking a completely new direction inspired by the unique goal of achieving relevance in management's eyes. The graphical representation of the Ito's lemma, the partial differential equation central to the Black and Scholes pricing model, would help practitioners to visually capture the essence of Real Option thinking. How different would the development of real Options have been if it had originally been designed as a video game?

In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production

In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production

Ashes in the Gutter: 9/11 and the Serialization of Memory in DC Comics' Human Target

Serialized monthly from August through October, 2003, Unshredded Man?written by Peter Milligan with art by Javier Pulido?is a two-part storyline from short-lived Human Target series published by DC Comics' Vertigo imprint. The story begins at end of issue #1 of series, with a two-page pre lude involving an almost mind-numbing paradox: a living dead man recalling moment of his own demise. remember day I died is prelude's first caption, overlaying a vertical panel focused on an average looking, middle-class man, his eyes closed, kissing a woman on cheek.1 With each successive panel on this page (eight in all), we follow unnamed man on his way to work, and each panel con tains a similar intermixture of mundane visuals and surreal rumina tions. The juxtapositions are stark: as man waves goodbye to his smiling wife and two sons, we read, If I'd known I'd be dying that day I'd have said something more to Helen and kids; as man's blank face and unassuming frame are crowded on subway, we learn that the idea of dying, of escaping exposure, shame and prison had been on my mind for some time. Through caption boxes it be comes apparent that unnamed man has been involved in ques tionable business practices that could land him in jail; feeling the noose tightening, he recalls walking streets, trying to figure a way

Physiological responses of 5-month-old infants to smiling and blank faces

Physiological responses (i.e., EEG, heart period, respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)) were monitored in 5-month-old infants during the replacement of an adult's smiling (SF) with a blank face (BF) in a face-to-face setting. Affect, while the infant looked at and away from the adult's face during both conditions, was analyzed. Infants displayed neutral and some positive affect while looking at both SF and BF. RSA was quantified continuously during both conditions. RSA increased during BF relative to SF. EEG was quantified only while the infants were looking at the adult's face during both conditions. An increase in theta over multiple scalp areas (AF3,4; F7,8; FC3; T6) was observed during BF relative to SF. The data suggest that infant attention to BF and SF reflect different psychophysiological processes that can be indexed by RSA and scalp-recorded theta.

Celluloid is Sticky: Sex, Death, Materiality, Metaphysics (in Some Films by Catherine Breillat)

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Quoted in David J. Hogan, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1986, epigraph. 2. Catherine Breillat, Robert Sklar, ‘A Woman's Vision of Shame and Desire: An Interview with Catherine Breillat’, Cinéaste 25/1, 1999, pp. 24–38. 3. Quoted in Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Romance’, Sight and Sound, November 1999, available at www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/244 (viewed 4 May 2006). 4. See, for example, Adrian Martin, “X” Marks the Spot: Classifying Romance’, Senses of Cinema (online journal) 4, March 2000, at www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/4/romance.html (viewed 4 May 2006). 5. Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. from the French by John Howe, London: Verso, 1995, pp. 77–8. 6. Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. from the French by Brian Singer, New York: St Martin's Press, 1979, pp. 28–9. 7. André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in A. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. from the French by Hugh Gray, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967, p. 14. 8. See Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 184–99. 9. Catherine Breillat, interview with Rhiannon Brown, Arts Today with Michael Cathcart, broadcast on ABC Radio National, Australia, 31 January 2000, transcript available at www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/atoday/stories/s101866.htm (viewed 4 May 2006). 10. Chris Wiegand, ‘A Quick Chat with Catherine Breillat’, kamera.co.uk, 2001, at www.kamera.co.uk/interviews/catherinebreillat.html (viewed 4 May 2006). 11. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 56. 12. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 52. 13. Quoted in Augé, Non-places, p. 79. See also Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. from the French by Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 14. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. from the French by Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 144–5. 15. ‘How the Directors and Critics Voted. Catherine Breillat: Top Ten’, Sight and Sound, 2002, available at www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/voter.php?forename = Catherine&surname = Breillat (viewed 4 May 2006). 16. Quoted in Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, p. 67. 17. Catherine Millet, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., trans. from the French by Adriana Hunter, New York: Grove Press, 2002, p. 96. 18. For an interesting mention of absence as presence in Breillat's films in the very different context of Sartre's theorization of response and the gaze, see Liz Constable, ‘Unbecoming Sexual Desires for Women Becoming Sexual Subjects: Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Catherine Breillat (1999)’, MLN 119, 2004, pp. 672–95. Although this article ignores the question of the ontology of/and the image in Breillat's work and argues for a theory of ‘shame-as-stasis’ (687) that is at odds with my characterization of the materiality of movement in Breillat's work, it is a very compelling piece and one of the few serious treatments in English of Breillat's philosophy. 19. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. from the French by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 99. 20. Lev Kuleshov, a member of the Soviet school in the 1920s, led a series of famous experiments in which he alternated the same photograph of a man's blank face with intercut images of horror, pleasure, silliness etc. He argued that it was juxtaposition that produced a reading of the man's face (audiences saw, at times, him joyous, him mournful) more than any intrinsic properties of the image. 21. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. from the French by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 167. 22. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation, trans. from the French and intro. by Daniel W. Smith, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. xxix. 23. Wiegand, ‘A Quick Chat with Catherine Breillat’. 24. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. xxix. 25. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. xxix. 26. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. 19. 27. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. 51. 28. Catherine Breillat, interview with Rhiannon Brown. 29. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. 34. 30. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. 35.