Blurry Boundaries Research Articles

Israeli identity: in search of a successor to the pioneer, Tsabar and settler

1.The Pioneer - an ambivalent identity 2. The Tsabar - a self-defensive identity 3. The erosion of the Tsabar identity 4. The Settler - a quasi-religious identity 5. Blurry boundaries 6. Fracture 7. Concluding remarks

A region-based fuzzy feature matching approach to content-based image retrieval

This paper proposes a fuzzy logic approach, UFM (unified feature matching), for region-based image retrieval. In our retrieval system, an image is represented by a set of segmented regions, each of which is characterized by a fuzzy feature (fuzzy set) reflecting color, texture, and shape properties. As a result, an image is associated with a family of fuzzy features corresponding to regions. Fuzzy features naturally characterize the gradual transition between regions (blurry boundaries) within an image and incorporate the segmentation-related uncertainties into the retrieval algorithm. The resemblance of two images is then defined as the overall similarity between two families of fuzzy features and quantified by a similarity measure, UFM measure, which integrates properties of all the regions in the images. Compared with similarity measures based on individual regions and on all regions with crisp-valued feature representations, the UFM measure greatly reduces the influence of inaccurate segmentation and provides a very intuitive quantification. The UFM has been implemented as a part of our experimental SIMPLIcity image retrieval system. The performance of the system is illustrated using examples from an image database of about 60,000 general-purpose images.

The French concept of "Athymhormie" (Loss of vital force) from 1922 to the present

The psychiatric concept of athymhormie (loss of vital force "élan vital" and affectivity) was developed at the beginning of the 20th century and used exclusively in France, until it was fortunately adopted by mostly French-speaking neurologists. The authors of the concept, M Dide and P Guiraud, considered the term an independent entity, an heir to dementia praecox, for which they did not like to substitute a "schizophrenia" with blurry boundaries. This term then came to mean to them, and to most French psychiatrists to this day, the basic core of psychosis' deficient forms. The word athymhormie (or loss of psychic self-activation) is now also used in neurology for the behavioural and emotional consequences of lesions caused on basal nuclei and, more widely, of a circuit associated with the limbic loop. However, the phenomenological reality of the associated disorders and the relevance of the same name can be questioned. This review concludes that although the settings--in a psychiatric or a neurologic clinic--where athymhormie takes place are very different, the choice of the same name is justified in a renewed and symptomatic neuropsychiatric approach. The objective of this approach is to explore why some symptoms, common or similar, could represent the lack of a physiological function, presumed here to be motivation.

Celebrating blurry boundaries

Celebrating blurry boundaries

The Rhetoric of Fraud in Breast Cancer Trials: Manifestations in Medical Journals and the Mass Media—And Missed Opportunities

In 1994, the Chicago Tribune announced in a blaring page-one story that fraud had been discovered in an important nine-year-old medical study which compared two treatments for early-stage breast cancer. The study had assured women that lumpectomy plus radiation was as safe as the more invasive mastectomy procedure for early-stage breast cancer; however, the revelation of fraud called these results into question. We examine the reactions of two professional medical journals to demonstrate how negotiations for upholding ethical norms in science took place within the pages of these publications. Then, we analyze the public discourse surrounding the fraud and show that much of the coverage was devoted to scandal. Both forums missed opportunities: professional journals ignored a chance to explore the blurry boundary between “writing up” and “making up” results that all scientists must negotiate in interpreting and publicizing data, while public discourse neglected women affected by the fraud.

Metamusic/Metatext: The Blurry Boundaries around Distributed Compositional Systems

The author discusses a software-assisted music composition for small ensemble. The piece was created by a distributed system wherein compositional responsibilities and performance decisions are decentralized.

Blurry boundaries, troubling typologies, and the unruly nonfiction film

Blurry boundaries, troubling typologies, and the unruly nonfiction film

Preschool Children's Interpretation of Facial Expressions of Emotion

A structural model of emotions was used to reveal patterns in how children interpret the emotional facial expressions of others. Three-, four-, five-year-olds, and adults (n = 38 in each group) were asked to match 15 emotion-descriptive words (happy, excited, surprised, afraid, scared, angry, mad, disgusted, miserable, sad, sleepy, calm, relaxed, wide awake, and, as a check on response bias, insipid) with still photographs of actors showing different facial expressions. Whereas prior research had indicated that preschool-aged children are "inaccurate" in associating labels with faces, our results indicated that that research may have severely underestimated children's knowledge of emotions. In this study children used terms systematically to refer to a specifiable range of expressions, centered around a focal point. Multidimensional scaling of the word/facial expression associations yielded a two-dimensional structure able to account for the interrelationships among emotions, and this structure was the same for all age groups. The nature of this structure, the blurry boundaries between emotion words, and developmental shifts in the referents of emotion words suggested the primacy of two dimensions, pleasure-displeasure and arousal-sleep, in children's interpretation of emotion.

The Northern Ireland assembly election of 1982

Interdisciplinary energy research is essential. It advances our understanding of potential transitions from high to low carbon energy systems. However, it is easier to propose than deliver. It requires translation into a simpler language, to aid communication, but not at the expense of the conceptual language that drives our understanding of complex energy systems. We combine legal, political science, and policy studies to show how to balance the need to communicate accessibly and recognise legal and policymaking complexity. We begin with a statement so accepted in legal studies that it has become a truism: the law in the books is not the same as the law in action. The allocation of legal competences is only one influence on policymaking in a complex system. We describe three key ways to conceptualise this relationship between law, policy, and energy systems, focusing on the: (1) ‘on paper’ legal separation of powers between different governments, (2) interaction between law and policy in practice, including blurry boundaries between formal responsibility and informal influence, and (3) role of law as one of many contributors to policymaking. We use these approaches to explain the implications of Brexit for UK energy policy.

Opponentindlæg: Museums as changing organizations and exponents of the museum institution

The museum institution is international and polymorphous with blurry boundaries. However, the institution defines itself and its members quite rigorously. Hieta discusses the museum institution as “an institution which is basically bound on the commitment, how the past is dealt with in the society. The institution is quite binding.” (Translation SP) However, the societal changes and economic exigencies have over and over again tested and changed the understanding of the foci of museums’ tasks, destroyed the basis of the activities of the museums, and created them new duties and potentials.