Cartoon Drawings Research Articles

Separating Shading and Reflectance From Cartoon Illustrations.

Shading plays an important role in cartoon drawings to present the 3D lighting and depth information in a 2D image to improve the visual information and pleasantness. But it also introduces apparent challenges in analyzing and processing the cartoon drawings for different computer graphics and vision applications, such as segmentation, depth estimation, and relighting. Extensive research has been made in removing or separating the shading information to facilitate these applications. Unfortunately, the existing researches only focused on natural images, which are natively different from cartoons since the shading in natural images is physically correct and can be modeled based on physical priors. However, shading in cartoons is manually created by artists, which may be imprecise, abstract, and stylized. This makes it extremely difficult to model the shading in cartoon drawings. Without modeling the shading prior, in the paper, we propose a learning-based solution to separate the shading from the original colors using a two-branch system consisting of two subnetworks. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first attempt in separating shading information from cartoon drawings. Our method significantly outperforms the methods tailored for natural images. Extensive evaluations have been performed with convincing results in all cases.

Archy and mehitabel

Archy and Mehitabel are two inimitable characters — a philosophical cockroach who types out free verse correspondence by dive-bombing the keys and an insouciant feline dancer out to take life for all it is worth, ever the lady and “toujours gai.” Created by Don Marquis and popularized in the New York Sun and New York Herald-Tribune 1916–1922, their best-loved exploits and musings are captured in this marvellous collection of 48 episodes, and illustrated with 29 cartoon drawings by George Herriman. Archy sees the universe at an entirely different angle, and humanity is measured against its miniature insect reflections. We meet cats and rats, spiders and flies, toads, robins, worms, a merry flea, a dissipated hornet, a froward lady bug, plus ghosts and echoes of dramatists, poets, historical figures, and the nightly denizens of the underworlds and alleys of New York, London, and gay Paris. Humorist Don Marquis (1878–1937) was a novelist, poet, columnist, playwright, and author of more than 25 books. Cartoonist George Herriman (1880–1944) is best known as the creator of Krazy Kat.

Emotion Regulation: Toward Establishing a Culturally Based Model of Emotional Expression; Validation Study

Background: Emotion regulation is the ability to exert control over one's emotional state. It involves behaviors such as rethinking a challenging situation to reduce intense emotions. This work is motivated by the absence of Arabic dynamic expression assessments, especially in light of understanding the importance of including emotion regulation in our clinical plan for intervention. This study aimed at validating novel Arabic culturally based related cartoon drawings of emotional expression for the Middle East as a tool to generate a model of self and emotion regulation. Methods: A cross-sectional face-to-face interview was conducted with 55 children aged 5-14. The participants were asked to identify the emotions by matching one emoji at a time using one of four (or one out of eight in older kids) of our culturally adapted emoticons. The participants were then asked to name the chosen emotion. Data were collected from King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz University Hospital, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the community. Results: Most participants were 9 years of age and older (70.9%). Most participants correctly identified the emotion by matching the standard emoji to our emoticon. Here, 100% of the participants could identify 13 emotions correctly. The following feelings were the least identified by the participants: bored, thankful, and proud (39%, 43%, and 22%, respectively). Conclusion: This study successfully replicates the emojis' emotions in a culturally adapted version. Our cultural and emotional mechanisms and expressions are highly demanding for clinical implementation.

ALGORITMA NON-PHOTOREALISTIC RENDERING UNTUK KARTUN MENGGUNAKAN K-MEANS DAN CANNY

Cartoons are one type of illustration usually in a non-realistic or semi-realistic style. To make a cartoon drawing manually requires good drawing ability. So, not everyone can make cartoons. This research proposes a non-photorealistic rendering algorithm to create cartoon drawings automatically. The algorithm consists of four phases. First, create an image abstraction using bilateral filtering. Second, using kmeans clustering for abstract image quantization. Third, get the contour lines of the drawing using the canny algorithm. Fourth, contour lines and quantized images are combined. The results show that this algorithm can produce good visualization of cartoon images.

ALGORITMA NON-PHOTOREALISTIC RENDERING UNTUK KARTUN MENGGUNAKAN K-MEANS DAN CANNY

Cartoons are one type of illustration usually in a non-realistic or semi-realistic style. To make a cartoon drawing manually requires good drawing ability. So, not everyone can make cartoons. This research proposes a non-photorealistic rendering algorithm to create cartoon drawings automatically. The algorithm consists of four phases. First, create an image abstraction using bilateral filtering. Second, using kmeans clustering for abstract image quantization. Third, get the contour lines of the drawing using the canny algorithm. Fourth, contour lines and quantized images are combined. The results show that this algorithm can produce good visualization of cartoon images.

Effectiveness of Cartoon Drawings in Reducing Selective Silence (Selective Mutism) Severity of a Sample of Kindergarten Children

This study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of the cartoon drawings strategy in reducing selective silence severity of kindergarten children in Al-Shobak Province. Study sample consisted of 25 children. They were selected by the purposeful sample method. The study used the selective silence tool which consisted of 18 items. It also used pre-experimental methodology using one group with pre/post-test. Results showed the effectiveness of the cartoon drawings strategy in reducing severity of selective silence. The study recommended the focus on integrating cartoon drawings in helping kindergarten children to overcome selective silence.

New books & media

ArtemisSection:ChooseTop of pageArtemis <<David Bohm: Causality and...Soonish: Ten Emerging Tec...The Art of Astrophotograp...The Planet Factory: Exopl... CITING ARTICLES Artemis, Andy Weir, Penguin Random House, 2017, $27.00 In 2014, first-time novelist Andy Weir had an unexpected smash hit with The Martian, a sci-fi adventure about a stranded astronaut who uses his wits and engineering skills to survive on the harsh surface of Mars. Artemis, Weir’s sophomore novel, moves us from Mars to the Moon. Weir’s worldbuilding is top-notch; he’s thought through both the technical and economic challenges of life in the lunar city of Artemis, and the result is a rich and fascinating setting. The characters don’t quite live up to the same standard, unfortunately, and protagonist Jazz Bashara is particularly underdeveloped. Fans of The Martian’s scientific detail, however, will still find much to like here. For a full review and interview with Andy Weir by National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell, visit http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20171215a/full/.—mb David Bohm: Causality and Chance, Letters to Three WomenSection:ChooseTop of pageArtemisDavid Bohm: Causality and... <<Soonish: Ten Emerging Tec...The Art of Astrophotograp...The Planet Factory: Exopl... CITING ARTICLES David Bohm: Causality and Chance, Letters to Three Women, Chris Talbot, ed., Springer, 2017, $199.00 The life and career of US theoretical physicist David Bohm spanned some of the most politically fraught periods in the country’s history. Fired from his position at Princeton University after a federal investigation into his Communist ties, Bohm relocated to Brazil, where he became known for advocating an unusual causal interpretation of quantum mechanics. Editor Chris Talbot, a retired physicist, argues that understanding Bohm’s Marxism is essential to fully appreciating his physics, and offers selections from Bohm’s correspondence to support his thesis. Talbot features three Bohm correspondents in particular: Hanna Loewy, a former girlfriend; fellow physicist Melba Phillips, also a former student of Robert Oppenheimer; and mathematician Miriam Yevick. The fascinating letters deserve publication, but historians will be left wondering if these letters are representative or unusual for Bohm.—mb Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin EverythingSection:ChooseTop of pageArtemisDavid Bohm: Causality and...Soonish: Ten Emerging Tec... <<The Art of Astrophotograp...The Planet Factory: Exopl... CITING ARTICLES Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith, Penguin Random House, 2017, $30.00 Ecologist Kelly Weinersmith and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith (best known for his web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) have joined forces to create this entertaining and highly readable take on cutting-edge scientific innovation. Focusing on 10 emerging fields—including asteroid mining, fusion power, augmented reality, and synthetic biology—the authors discuss the science behind some of the latest technologies, the state of their development, and the possible ramifications should they come to fruition. Aimed at a general audience, the text uses Zach Weinersmith’s whimsical cartoon drawings (left) to illustrate key points.—cc PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSEPPT|High resolution The Art of AstrophotographySection:ChooseTop of pageArtemisDavid Bohm: Causality and...Soonish: Ten Emerging Tec...The Art of Astrophotograp... <<The Planet Factory: Exopl... CITING ARTICLES The Art of Astrophotography, Ian Morison, Cambridge U. Press, 2017, $44.99 (paper) Written for photography enthusiasts who want to capture images of the night sky, The Art of Astrophotography walks the reader through the equipment and techniques required to photograph astronomical phenomena. Author Ian Morison, an emeritus professor of astronomy at the University of Manchester, also provides step-by-step instructions for post-processing the raw photographic data. The book progresses from simple equipment to more elaborate hardware and software. Photographs and images of the equipment illustrate each chapter.—cc The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second EarthSection:ChooseTop of pageArtemisDavid Bohm: Causality and...Soonish: Ten Emerging Tec...The Art of Astrophotograp...The Planet Factory: Exopl... << CITING ARTICLES The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth, Elizabeth Tasker, Bloomsbury Sigma, 2017, $27.00 In 1992, astronomers made the first confirmed detection of a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system. Twenty-five years later, exoplanets have captured the imaginations of scientists and nonscientists alike. In The Planet Factory, astrophysicist Elizabeth Tasker discusses the different ways exoplanets are formed and the techniques used to detect them. She then explores what conditions are required to make a planet Earth-like and why we are so eager to find more. Aimed at a general audience, the book provides an introduction to one of the fastest growing fields in astronomy.—cc Section:ChooseTop of pageArtemisDavid Bohm: Causality and...Soonish: Ten Emerging Tec...The Art of Astrophotograp...The Planet Factory: Exopl... <<CITING ARTICLES© 2018 American Institute of Physics.

Edward Burne-Jones’s The Planets: Luna, A Celestial Sphere

Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98), a Pre-Raphaelite painter, was fascinated with astronomy as noted in his memorials and accounts. In 1879 he executed cartoon drawings for a cycle on the planets for the artisans of the William Morris firm, who would transform them into stained-glass windows. The commission was for the decoration of Woodlands, the Victorian home of Baron Angus Holden (1833–1912), a mayor of Bradford. Presently, seven of the cartoons – The Moon (Luna), Earth (Terra), Sol (Apollo), Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Evening Star) – are in the Torre Abbey Museum in Torquay, UK, while the cartoon for Mars is part of the collection of drawings at the Birmingham Museum of Art, UK, and the drawing Morning Star is located at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, UK. In the creation of the Planets cycle, Burne-Jones was inspired by cultural events of the time, such as British scientific astronomical discoveries and British and Italian humanistic sources in literature and visual arts portraying astronomy. This essay examines – art historically and iconographically – only one of the eight planets, the cartoon of Luna (The Moon) as an astral planetary formation and a celestial sphere. This study is composed of two sections. The first section discusses the history of the artistic commission and the second section explains some of Burne-Jones’s cultural sources for the Planets cycle and the Moon, both of which partake of heavenly and terrestrial realms.

Edward Burne-Jones’s The Planets: Luna, A Celestial Sphere

Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98), a Pre-Raphaelite painter, was fascinated with astronomy as noted in his memorials and accounts. In 1879 he executed cartoon drawings for a cycle on the planets for the artisans of the William Morris firm, who would transform them into stained-glass windows. The commission was for the decoration of Woodlands, the Victorian home of Baron Angus Holden (1833–1912), a mayor of Bradford. Presently, seven of the cartoons – The Moon (Luna), Earth (Terra), Sol (Apollo), Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Evening Star) – are in the Torre Abbey Museum in Torquay, UK, while the cartoon for Mars is part of the collection of drawings at the Birmingham Museum of Art, UK, and the drawing Morning Star is located at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, UK. In the creation of the Planets cycle, Burne-Jones was inspired by cultural events of the time, such as British scientific astronomical discoveries and British and Italian humanistic sources in literature and visual arts portraying astronomy. This essay examines – art historically and iconographically – only one of the eight planets, the cartoon of Luna (The Moon) as an astral planetary formation and a celestial sphere. This study is composed of two sections. The first section discusses the history of the artistic commission and the second section explains some of Burne-Jones’s cultural sources for the Planets cycle and the Moon, both of which partake of heavenly and terrestrial realms.

The Neural Correlates of Humor Creativity.

Unlike passive humor appreciation, the neural correlates of real-time humor creation have been unexplored. As a case study for creativity, humor generation uniquely affords a reliable assessment of a creative product’s quality with a clear and relatively rapid beginning and end, rendering it amenable to neuroimaging that has the potential for reflecting individual differences in expertise. Professional and amateur “improv” comedians and controls viewed New Yorker cartoon drawings while being scanned. For each drawing, they were instructed to generate either a humorous or a mundane caption. Greater comedic experience was associated with decreased activation in the striatum and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), but increased activation in temporal association regions (TMP). Less experienced comedians manifested greater activation of mPFC, reflecting their deliberate search through TMP association space. Professionals, by contrast, tend to reap the fruits of their spontaneous associations with reduced reliance on top-down guided search.

Modeling Character Canvases from Cartoon Drawings

We introduce a novel technique for the construction of a 3D character proxy, or canvas , directly from a 2D cartoon drawing and a user-provided correspondingly posed 3D skeleton. Our choice of input is motivated by the observation that traditional cartoon characters are well approximated by a union of generalized surface of revolution body parts, anchored by a skeletal structure. While typical 2D character contour drawings allow ambiguities in 3D interpretation, our use of a 3D skeleton eliminates such ambiguities and enables the construction of believable character canvases from complex drawings. Our canvases conform to the 2D contours of the input drawings, and are consistent with the perceptual principles of Gestalt continuity, simplicity, and contour persistence. We first segment the input 2D contours into individual body-part outlines corresponding to 3D skeletal bones using the Gestalt continuation principle to correctly resolve inter-part occlusions in the drawings. We then use this segmentation to compute the canvas geometry, generating 3D generalized surfaces of revolution around the skeletal bones that conform to the original outlines and balance simplicity against contour persistence. The combined method generates believable canvases for characters drawn in complex poses with numerous inter-part occlusions, variable contour depth, and significant foreshortening. Our canvases serve as 3D geometric proxies for cartoon characters, enabling unconstrained 3D viewing, articulation, and non-photorealistic rendering. We validate our algorithm via a range of user studies and comparisons to ground-truth 3D models and artist-drawn results. We further demonstrate a compelling gallery of 3D character canvases created from a diverse set of cartoon drawings with matching 3D skeletons.

Cryptic Canada: Unsolved Mysteries from Coast to Coast by N. Hyde

Hyde, Natalie. Cryptic Canada: Unsolved Mysteries from Coast to Coast. Toronto, ON: Owlkids Books, 2012. Print.Many of the ‘unsolved mysteries’ in Cryptic Canada are not mysteries. Most of the chapters are about well-known archaeological or historic sites where there are always more questions to be asked but their main mysteries have been solved. Others fall into the realm of pseudoscience. The ‘mysteries’ presented are: the Oak Island Buried Treasure, the ice mummies of Sir John Franklin’s crew on Beechey Island, L’Anse aux Meadows, the tunnels under Moose Jaw, The Freemasons in Winnipeg, ships sunk in the Great Lakes and the Majorville Stone Circle. The authority of the content of this book is highly variable. For most of the chapters, the facts are well-known, and the material is presented factually. For example, The Great Lakes Triangle, where many ships have ‘disappeared’, is known to have very bad storms and magnetic anomalies that disrupt navigation equipment. The only mystery is the location of the sunken ships. Often the stories are supported by a question and answer with an expert. In the case of the Beechey Island ice mummies, the expert is Dr. Owen Beattie, the distinguished anthropologist who led the excavation. For the Tunnels of Moose Jaw, the expert is the cast director for a group that does re-enactments of the illegal alcohol operations during the Prohibition period. We are not told if that person is an historian. The most disconcerting of the mysteries presented is that of ‘Canada’s Stonehenge’, correctly known as the Majorville Medicine Wheel or by its Siksika name, Omahkiyaahkohtoohp. Hyde presents this as a celestial calendar. Medicine wheels are Indigenous ceremonial structures. They are quite common in Alberta, some of them built in the past century. These “modern Blood Indian structures were built to commemorate the death place of, or the last tipi occupied by, a famous warrior”1 and are unrelated to calendars. The Royal Alberta Museum cites two astronomers who point out that Indigenous prairie people probably timed their ceremonies simply by observing the night sky and would have had no need for a celestial calendar. This book is colourful and nicely designed. Background colours and textures vary and text boxes overlay images. Both Matt Hammill’s cartoon drawings and modern and archival photographs are used to illustrate the text and tell the stories. The text succinctly captures the main concepts of each history/mystery and the language is appropriate to the upper elementary target audience.While this work can be viewed as just a harmless bit of fun, it may be a child’s first introduction to these histories. With the unfortunate distortion of the stories to emphasize as mystery, things which are not mysterious at all, and the unevenness of the authority of some of its resources, this book would be a good choice only as an alternative for libraries that already have authoritative historical texts. “What is a medicine wheel?” Royal Alberta Museum, 2013 http://www.royalalbertamuseum.ca/research/culturalStudies/archaeology/faq.cfmRecommended with Reservations: 2 stars out of 4 Reviewer: Sandy CampbellSandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

Romanian Second Language Learners of English Requests and Apologies

Despite the wealth of literature generated over the past three decades on requests and apologies as a speech act, cross-cultural requests and apologies have been neglected as a research topic in the international press. This cross-sectional mixed method study was designed to examine requests and apologies with the long-term goal of designing a valid teaching application for the ESL and EFL teachers. There were 80 participants that included male and female students within the first through seventh grade population of the International School of Cluj-Napoca, Romania (ISC). Data was collected within the Modified Cartoon Oral Production Tools (MCOPT), which includes 16 cartoon drawings depicting situations in which two characters interact. The research data was gathered in a heterogeneous and a typical setting within north western Romania. The resulting analysis is that the sophistication of speech acts increases with age more than with length of study.

Cover Picture: Eur. J. Immunol. 9/11

This month's cover depicts, by virtue of the scales, the balance of experts' opinions that are provided in the featured Macrophage Viewpoint series. Superimposed on the scales are cartoon drawings of the different macrophage subtypes (classical, alternative and regulatory) discussed by Fleming and Mosser (pp. 2498-2502); the background is kindly provided by Joan Stein-Streilein and is reprinted with permission from Faunce, D. E. et al., J. Immunol. 2001. 166: 313-321 (© 2001 The American Association of Immunologists, Inc.). The background shows migrating F4/80(+) APCs (pink) forming clusters with NKT and B cells in the marginal zone of mouse spleen, in the ACAID model of peripheral tolerance. The F4/80 antigen is discussed in the Viewpoint by Siamon Gordon et al. (pp. 2472-2476), and the paper first describing the F4/80 antibody features as one of the EJI classics on the EJI homepage (www.eji-journal.eu)

In this issue

In this issue

Tethered Monte Carlo: Managing Rugged Free-Energy Landscapes with a Helmholtz-Potential Formalism

Tethering methods allow us to perform Monte Carlo simulations in ensembles with conserved quantities. Specifically, one couples a reservoir to the physical magnitude of interest, and studies the statistical ensemble where the total magnitude (system+reservoir) is conserved. The reservoir is actually integrated out, which leaves us with a fluctuation-dissipation formalism that allows us to recover the appropriate Helmholtz effective potential with great accuracy. These methods are demonstrating a remarkable flexibility. In fact, we illustrate two very different applications: hard spheres crystallization and the phase transition of the diluted antiferromagnet in a field (the physical realization of the random field Ising model). The tethered approach holds the promise to transform cartoon drawings of corrugated free-energy landscapes into real computations. Besides, it reduces the algorithmic dynamic slowing-down, probably because the conservation law holds non-locally.

Who Do I See? by S. Yoon

Yoon, Salina. Who Do I See? New York: Random House, 2011. Print. Identifying five adorable animals and remembering five eye-catching colours are the challenges for toddlers and preschool children in Yoon’s book, Who Do I See?. The colourful illustrations are simple two dimensional cartoon drawings of familiar creatures including a fish, a tiger, a turtle, a ladybug, and a parrot. The illustrations of the animals are framed, and partially hidden, by cleverly placed cut out windows. The cut out windows allow readers to feel the shiny foil on the animal illustration such as scales on a fish, and, because the rest of the animal is hidden until the reader flips the page, children can try identifying the animal by thinking about common animal colours and shapes such as the black spots and red wings found on a ladybug. The text does not rhyme but playful repetition of the question and of the typical colours found on these animals will keep children engaged. The thick cardboard pages ensure that the book is not easily damaged. This interactive, guessing-game book will assist children in learning about different animals and different colours. Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Tami Oliphant Tami works as a research librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries and for the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. She earned her Master of Library and Information Studies from the University of Alberta and her doctorate from the University of Western Ontario. She has worked in academic libraries, public libraries, communications and planning, and as a sessional lecturer and researcher at the University of Alberta and the University of Western Ontario.

A new measure for assessing executive function across a wide age range: children and adults find happy‐sad more difficult than day‐night

Two experiments examined 4- to 11-year-olds' and adults' performance (N = 350) on two variants of a Stroop-like card task: the day-night task (say 'day' when shown a moon and 'night' when shown a sun) and a new happy-sad task (say 'happy' for a sad face and 'sad' for a happy face). Experiment 1 featured colored cartoon drawings. In Experiment 2, the happy-sad task featured photographs, and pictures for both measures were gray scale. All age groups made more errors and took longer to respond to the happy-sad versus the day-night versions. Unlike the day-night task, the happy-sad task did not suffer from ceiling effects, even in adults. The happy-sad task provides a methodological advance for measuring executive function across a wide age range.

All about language (review)

Reviewed by: All about language James R. Hurford All about language. By Barry J. Blake. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xvii, 322. ISBN 9780199238498. $29.95. Barry Blake’s book is an introduction ‘aimed at the general reader and at students of language and linguistics’ (vi). It covers a lot of very familiar ground. In tone and coverage it resembles Fromkin and Rodman’s best seller An introduction to language (1974; now in its eighth edition, Fromkin et al. 2006). It is obviously aimed at being adopted as a textbook, as can be seen from the systematic coverage of the traditional introductory linguistics curriculum—form classes, morphology, lexical change, lexical semantics, syntax, discourse, phonetics, phonology, writing systems, language variation, historical linguistics, language acquisition, language processing, and language origins. Each of these topics gets a chapter of about twenty-five pages. The written style is lightly academic, not too heavy, but not the popularizing style of Gary Marcus or Steven Pinker. Chapters end with suggestions for further reading and with sets of problem exercises to stimulate active thought. There is a very thorough (thirty-four-page) glossary of terms at the end of the book. The publishers have invested more money than usual in presentation. There are many useful diagrams and illustrations in almost all chapters. The font color switches to green for headings and most examples. Like Fromkin & Rodman, B’s book also tries to lighten up the text’s mood with cute cartoon drawings, but these are poorly drawn and unfunny. In the publicity blurb on the back, Fritz Newmeyer is quoted as saying he would adopt B’s book as an introductory text in linguistics. I think I would give it a try, too. The title All about language cleverly hides the writer’s dilemma. Certainly the entire book is about language, but it is not about all of language—how could it be? Everything in this book, apart from minor factual details, will be familiar to any academic linguist who has been in the business for a decade or more. It thus presents a very standard view of what the core and scope of the subject are, on the whole a very similar overall view to Fromkin and Rodman’s, but with some more up-to-date facts included. To me, this shows how little the enduring core of basic knowledge about language has changed in the last fifty years. Much of the same ground was covered in Hockett’s Course in modern linguistics (1958). The chapter on ‘Meaning of words’ rehearses the same distinctions as Lyons’s Semantics (1977). As expected, Grice’s maxims get three pages, and speech acts another page, and so on, across the whole broad spectrum of linguistics as we have come to know it. B’s book belongs in a fine pedagogical tradition in linguistics, and in terms of his command of the field, is a worthy addition to it. As a twenty-year-old, reading such introductory texts opened up a whole new world of interest to me. That was over forty years ago. I would guess (and certainly hope) that by now, more scientific knowledge about language has filtered down into high school education, so that a book such as B’s would not be such an eye-opener to the current generation of twenty-year-olds. [End Page 912] Interested students will have read Pinker 1994 and other popular books, and browsed Crystal’s Encyclopedia of language (1987), not to mention using the amazing resources of the internet. The book steers clear of controversy, which is in some sense a pity. We don’t want to kill students’ interest with pessimistic accounts of apparently irreconcilable differences between theorists. One solution, which B generally adopts, is pas devant les enfants. For example, there is a standard account of ‘The phoneme’ covered in ten pages. No one would guess by reading this that Chomsky and Halle (1968) had dismissed the classical phonemic level as not being a significant level of linguistic structure. Think what you like about the phoneme, but there is an issue here, and B’s book does not open it up. In the section on phonetics...

LazyBrush: Flexible Painting Tool for Hand‐drawn Cartoons

AbstractIn this paper we present LazyBrush, a novel interactive tool for painting hand‐made cartoon drawings and animations. Its key advantage is simplicity and flexibility. As opposed to previous custom tailored approaches [SBv05, QWH06] LazyBrush does not rely on style specific features such as homogenous regions or pattern continuity yet still offers comparable or even less manual effort for a broad class of drawing styles. In addition to this, it is not sensitive to imprecise placement of color strokes which makes painting less tedious and brings significant time savings in the context cartoon animation. LazyBrush originally stems from requirements analysis carried out with professional ink‐and‐paint illustrators who established a list of useful features for an ideal painting tool. We incorporate this list into an optimization framework leading to a variant of Potts energy with several interesting theoretical properties. We show how to minimize it efficiently and demonstrate its usefulness in various practical scenarios including the ink‐and‐paint production pipeline.