Distant View Research Articles

Sonic Epistemologies: Confrontations with the Invisible

Abstract With reference to Steven Feld’s “acoustemology,” his epistemology of sounding and listening, developed in the Bosavi Rainforest in Papua New Guinea, where the trees are too dense to afford a distant view and meaning has to be found up close, on the body with other human and more-than-human bodies, this essay deliberates how sound knows in entanglements and from the in-between: in a being with as a knowing with rather than from a distance. In this way, this essay, from the densities of the rainforest, critiques Western knowledge and its reliance on visual categories, straight lines, and universalising principles that pretend objectivity and a distant view. Instead, it turns to the relational indivisibility of sound that lets us hear interdependencies and confronts us with the invisible of which we are part. In conclusion, it proposes that sound studies as applied, transversal studies enable such a paradigm shift that at once reveals what hegemonic knowledge strands exclude and invites a different dialogue from the in-between of everything.

Esquisse d’une réception critique de l’œuvre d’Hervé Guibert en deux moments: 1990/2001

Initially confidential, Hervé Guibert’s work was revealed to the general public with the publication of À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie in 1990. The confession of his illness and the indiscretions about Michel Foucault’s life made the writer a media phenomenon, and there were few literary pages in French and French-speaking weeklies and dailies that did not report on this novel. However, the treatment of the novel in the newspapers goes beyond the simple literary debate and is crossed by moral and ethical considerations. More than ten years later, in 2001, Le Mausolée des amants, the writer’s diary, appeared posthumously. This shorter media period, circumscribed to this single publication, really gives us a purely critical view, detached from the emotional impact of the author’s illness and imminent death. A more distant view, therefore, but also, perhaps, more accurate in that it focuses more on the work of an author than on the author of a work. It is these two periods of reception of Hervé Guibert’s work that the present article wishes to examine, in order to study the way in which critics seize upon subversive texts that destabilise the bourgeois order and the political correctness.

A Distant View of Novel Research in Sedimentary Geology with Links to India Since Independence

A Distant View of Novel Research in Sedimentary Geology with Links to India Since Independence

Distant Country, Paradise, Wilderness, or Mysterious World: The Changing Image of the South Sea (Nan’yō) Islands in Japanese Science Fiction

For Japan, “Nan’yō” is a geographical concept as well as a historical and cultural one. Taking the mid-Meiji period, post-World War I and II periods, and the beginning of the 21st century as its nodes, this paper examines various texts and compares the historical background of the South Sea Islands as imagined in Japanese science fiction, with a focus on both literature and films. The works of the four periods, through a distant view, close view, reconstruction and retrospection of the South Sea Islands, respectively, portray “Nan’yō” as a distant country for ambitious expansion; an earthly paradise of colonial ideals; a dangerous and exotic foreign land; and a mysterious world overrun with primitive civilization, with the aborigines are portrayed as ignorant and backward, and sometimes even being cast as unfamiliar and potentially threatening Others. Unlike the typical (anti-)utopian narrative, the Japanese “Nan’yō fantasy” is based on the political discourse model of civilization-backwardness, in which the differing attitudes towards the natural environment and primitive tribes reflect Japan’s ambivalence in defining its self-positioning within the cultural crossroads of the East and the West. This portrayal of Nan’yō is a product of the close interconnection between the mass media and the spirit of the times: a reflection of personal ideals and national destiny, as well as a collective vision interacting with social reality.

Comparison of the restorative quality of green spaces between the evening and daytime

Research studies on the restorative quality of environments have grown rapidly; however, the majority of existing literature focuses on daytime landscapes, while the restorative quality of evening landscapes is less studied. In particular, the landscape characteristics and/or lighting features that play an essential role in improving the restorative quality of nightscapes are unknown. To address these gaps, 12 urban green spaces were selected as study sites and the same scene at each site was photographed during the day and evening. The restorative quality and 14 landscape characteristics of all photographs were evaluated quantitatively, and four lighting features of photographs taken during the evening were measured. Statistical analysis indicated that: (a) the restorative quality of daytime landscapes was significantly higher than that of evening landscapes; (b) abundant colours and natural vegetation suggested higher restorative quality during the daytime and (c) increasing the brightness of lighting and setting lighting sources in the distant view of visitors could improve the restorative quality of evening landscapes. Combined with the previous literature, the results suggest that lighting has the ability to redesign nightscapes, which consequently improves their restorative quality by concealing the less restorative features and illuminating the key elements to promote mental restoration.

DKTNet: Dual-Key Transformer Network for small object detection

SummaryObject detection is a fundamental computer vision task that plays a crucial role in a wide range of real-world applications. However, it is still a challenging task to detect the small size objects in the complex scene, due to the low resolution and noisy representation appearance caused by occlusion, distant depth view, etc. To tackle this issue, a novel transformer architecture, Dual-Key Transformer Network (DKTNet), is proposed in this paper. To improve the feature attention ability, the coherence of linear layer outputs Q and V are enhanced by a dual-K integrated from K1 and K2, which are computed along Q and V, respectively. Instead of spatial-wise attention, channel-wise self-attention mechanism is adopted to promote the important feature channels and suppress the confusing ones. Moreover, 2D and 1D convolution computations for Q, K and V are proposed. Compared with the fully-connected computation in conventional transformer architectures, the 2D convolution can better capture local details and global contextual information, and the 1D convolution can reduce network complexity significantly. Experimental evaluation is conducted on both general and small object detection datasets. The superiority of the aforementioned features in our proposed approach is demonstrated with the comparison against the state-of-the-art approaches.

The landscape impact of agricultural sheds in rural UNESCO site: Public preferences and mitigation solutions

The mitigation process of agricultural sheds into the landscape is crucial for aesthetic quality of its landscape and architectural integrity. The evaluation of how residents perceive these elements and identifying preferred solutions is crucial for landscape planning. For identifying sets of preferred mitigation solutions and defining shared criteria for landscape planning a representative sample of the population was investigated. We have estimated the willingness to pay for integrating contemporary agricultural sheds in a UNESCO landscape. Data were collected in six Core Zones of “Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato” (North-West Italy). Preferences toward different mitigation measures of the agricultural sheds were investigated using a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) method. The DCE survey was carried out through face-to-face interviews involving 400 residents. The set of mitigation attributes (colour of the walls, colour of the roof, green barriers and plant green walls) was selected by means of a landscape analysis and presented to respondents using a set of images (close and distant views). Our study shows that the presence of green barriers (formal hedge and tree line) and the colour of the wall (green) are considered positive mitigation solutions. These attributes have a positive effect both in the close and the distant view. Our results confirmed that the distance may affect the visual impact of these buildings. Most of the respondents agree with the need to implement mitigation solutions for agricultural sheds, guaranteeing a better aesthetic enjoyment.

Analysis of the Impact of Parental Divorce on Adolescent Confidence

This research is motivated by parental divorce which has an impact on adolescent self-confidence. Based on preliminary observations, it was shown that some teenagers experienced the impact of their parents' divorce on their self-confidence, such as closing themselves off, being shy, having difficulty interacting socially. While the purpose of this study is to describe self-confidence from the aspect of social interaction, independence and an optimistic attitude. The research method used is qualitative with a case study approach. The subject of this research is adolescent victims of parental divorce. How to collect data with non-probability sampling technique with a purposive sampling approach. Data collection techniques in this study are observation, interviews, and documentation. While the data analysis techniques used are data reduction, data presentation, and verification or conclusions. The results of this study from the aspect of social interaction that some teenagers are able to interact socially but some are not. As for the aspect of independence, it shows that in general adolescents are independent in terms of economics, but there are adolescents who are not independent in terms of education. Meanwhile, from the aspect of an optimistic attitude, it shows that teenagers have high optimism to achieve their goals and success in the future, but there are also teenagers who are resigned to the situation that is happening, and do not have a distant view of the future.

Factors promoting nature-based outdoor recreation during the daytime and evening

Urban green spaces are the most common places for nature-based recreational activities. However, the issues on which landscape characteristics during the daytime and lighting features during the evening can encourage recreational activities, and how to enhance the diversity of recreational activity in a place are poorly understood. To address this knowledge gap, 20 sites of urban green spaces were sampled. The same scene at each site was photographed during the daytime and evening. The suitability of 10 nature-based recreational activities was assessed, and 17 characteristics of daytime landscapes and five lighting features in the evening were quantified. For daytime landscapes, the study found that reducing the amounts of man-made elements and vegetation density could encourage walking, improving water quality and reducing aquatic plants could promote fishing, increasing the coverage of waterscape and vegetation promoted chanting, increasing the coverage of waterscape would encourage sightseeing, enhancing the accessibility of waterscape was beneficial to meditating, and reducing the intensity of maintenance encouraged both gathering and tree climbing, but no measures could be identified for jogging, sitting and barbecue. For evening landscapes, setting the lighting sources in the distance of visitors' vision and increasing brightness of lighting could promote walking and jogging, increasing the number of lighting sources encouraged fishing, chanting, sightseeing, sitting, meditating and tree climbing, and the mixture of warm and cold light colors promoted gathering, while no measures were found to encourage barbecue. Decreasing the vegetation coverage could promote the diversity of recreational activity during the daytime, and increasing the number of lighting sources and reducing the brightness of lighting enhanced the diversity of recreational activity during the evening. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to propose the concept “diversity of recreational activity” and explore its driving factors. For daytime landscapes, decreasing the amount of man-made elements and thinning the thick vegetation can encourage walking; improving water quality and reducing the aquatic plants growing on water are convenient for fishing; increasing the coverage of waterscape and vegetation are efficient measures to encourage chanting; increasing the coverage of waterscape and enhancing the accessibility of waterscape can promote sightseeing and meditating, respectively; and reducing the maintenance of vegetation can encourage the activities of gathering and tree climbing. For evening landscapes, setting the lighting sources in the distant view of visitors and increasing the brightness of a place will encourage walking and jogging; increasing the number of lighting sources and setting the lighting sources in the close view of visitors encourage fishing; setting the mixture of warm and cold light can promote gathering, and increasing the number of lighting sources can encourage chanting, sightseeing, sitting, meditating and tree climbing. Decreasing vegetation coverage can enhance the diversity of recreational activities in daytime landscapes, while for evening landscapes, increasing lighting sources and reducing the brightness of lighting will improve the diversity of recreational activities. Based on theoretical analysis, this study suggests that the positive elements for recreational activity in daytime landscapes should be illuminated during the evening and the negative elements could be concealed by the darkness.

Scale-aware stereo direct visual odometry with online photometric calibration for agricultural environment

Vision-based localization and mapping for agricultural environment is challenging due to unstructured scene with less distinguishable landmarks and more repetitive textures, scale drift caused by wide and distant view, illumination variations and abrupt movements. To address these challenges, we propose a scale-aware stereo direct odometry with online photometric calibration for agricultural environment. We first propose a scale-aware stereo direct image alignment method to explicitly capture the scale at tracking stage. Then we optimize the scale and affine brightness parameters of stereo frames to keep the scale consistency in the sliding window. Furthermore, we incorporate online photometric calibration to resist illumination changes and exposure differences of image sequence. The proposed system achieves new state-of-the-art results on two public agricultural datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in challenging agricultural environments.

Corrosion Detection Method of Transmission Line Components in Mining Area Based on Multiscale Enhanced Fusion

Component corrosion is one of the potential safety hazards in transmission lines in mining areas. In order to solve the problem of poor detection accuracy caused by the large proportion of small targets and complex background in the current distant view corrosion inspection task by UAV, we propose a PWR-YOLOV5 detection method for corrosion components based on the YOLOV5 algorithm. Firstly, a new feature fusion network, WA-PANet, is reconstructed on the basis of the path aggregation network (PANet) to make full use of the features at different stages and advance the detection accuracy of small targets in distant view by deepening the process of feature fusion and introducing the skip layer connections and adaptive feature fusion factors. Secondly, the pyramid split attention (PSA) module is introduced into the deep layers of the network to highlight the feature expression of corrosion targets and enhance the ability to detect pixel-level objects. Then, we construct a receptive feature enhancement network (RFENet), which can heighten the feature fusion effect of the WA-PANet and alleviate the problem of the feature expression ability weakening due to the fusion of different receptive field features. Finally, the EIoU Loss is adopted to optimize the loss function and improve the positioning accuracy of the bounding box. The experimental results show that the mAP of the PWR-YOLOV5 algorithm can reach up to 95.37%, which is 5.22% higher than YOLOV5, and the detection speed is 64.9FPS. Compared with the algorithms such as YOLOV4, Faster R-CNN, and YOLOX, the improved algorithm has better overall detection performance for the corrosion components of transmission lines in the mining area.

How Does Greenery on a Nearby Façade Change Perception of a Window View?

Window view is an important parameter of living comfort. In densely urbanized areas, window view is often limited to the nearby façade, without all three visual layers visible and possibility of distant view. The purpose of the study is to examine what reactions are triggered by views of nearby façades, which by definition are not quality window views, and how the reactions of observers are influenced by additional greenery on the façade. A questionnaire survey was used in the study as a method for obtaining research data. Respondents defined reactions to 20 various window views and the reasons for them. The results showed that reactions to window views of nearby façades varied, and that the negative response depended not only on a limited number of visual layers and the distance between buildings, but also on visual aesthetic.Furthermore, added greenery in the window view triggered more positive reactions than did façades without greenery. Measures for greening façades are proposed.

The Alchemist

Reviewed by: The Alchemist Sophia Richardson The Alchemist Presented by Red Bull Theater at New World Stages in New York, NY. 7 November–19 December 2021. Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher. Directed by Jesse Berger. Scene design by Alexis Distler. Costume design by Tilly Grimes. Lighting design by Cha See. Original music and sound design by Greg Pliska. Wig and makeup design by Tommy Turzman. Production stage manager Rebecca McBee. With Manoel Felciano (Jeremy/Face), Reg Rogers (Subtle), Jennifer Sánchez (Dol Common), Nathan Christopher (Abel Drugger), Stephen DeRosa (Ananais), Carson Elrod (Dapper), Teresa Avia Lim (Dame Pliant), Jacob Ming-Trent (Sir Epicure Mammon), Louis Mustillo (Surly), and Allen Tedder (Kastril). Red Bull Theater’s production of The Alchemist was already in rehearsal in early winter 2020, but production was paused as the pandemic brought the world to a grinding halt. The irony of the situation was not lost on the company: Ben Jonson’s 1610 comedy takes a similar plague-induced shutdown as its premise. In Jonson’s London, the well-to-do have fled the city to escape the rising case count of bubonic plague, leaving the less fortunate to fend for themselves with the trickery and con-artistry that drive the play. Red Bull Theater took full advantage of the perverse timeliness of its non-opening, with a delayed limited run in fall 2021 full of references to the ongoing pandemic. Among the contemporary updates in Jeffrey Hatcher’s quite freely adapted script, topical references to the current pandemic garnered the biggest laughs. When the lights first went down on the house, a deep voice rang out to caution us against duplicitous Londoners, many of whom “wear masks, just as you do.” Glancing at the many ushers in the aisles holding “mask up” signs in the dimming lights, the audience laughed appreciatively. Later, in a play on the ubiquitous discourse about “essential workers” in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, naïve tobacconist Abel Drugger (Nathan Christopher) got a big laugh when he explained that, while most shops had been closed for the plague, his business “was deemed essential.” The throughlines between old and new continued as a fruitful source of humor throughout the play. Gleeful anachronism not only garnered a handful of solid plague jokes but furnished other successes as well. The production played to a hometown crowd by reimagining Mammon’s cynical sidekick Surly (Louis Mustillo) as a no-bullshit Brooklynite with a strong accent and an even stronger disdain for credulous gulls. Old weapons [End Page 292] met new aesthetics as swordplay devolved into slow-motion combat, with the absurdly lethargic action movie-like moment milked to the last drop for grotesque expressions and unlikely stunts. Dol Common (Jennifer Sánchez) showed up for her role as the “Fairy Queen” with laced-up bodice and lute in hand, quickly improvising an operatic introduction in full neo-Renaissance mode, but she turned up a little later strutting like a Bond girl extraordinaire in thigh-high golden boots as she belted out the iconic strains of Goldfinger. Similarly, Sir Epicure Mammon (Jacob Ming-Trent) presented a triumph of cross-century prancing, at once capturing the twee performativity of the Jacobean court and the sultry strut of contemporary drag. Click for larger view View full resolution Subtle (Reg Rogers), Dol Common (Jennifer Sánchez), Face (Manoel Felciano), and Dapper (Carson Elrod) in The Alchemist, dir. Jesse Berger. Red Bull Theater, 2021. Photo by Carol Rosegg, courtesy of Red Bull Theater. Other instances of this cross-temporal sensibility carried over into the set and costume design. Alexis Distler’s set masterfully transported the Red Bull audience to a Tudor interior, complete with period-appropriate windows, dark wooden paneling, and decorative portraits, but the actors periodically jolted us out of the historical illusion by invoking the larger theatrical surroundings, joking about “unpleasant looking” people in the front row, or the more distant view from the mezzanine. The costuming was likewise evocative of Elizabethan garb, but more as a gesture than as a bid for historical accuracy. The cast mostly appeared in the kinds [End Page 293] of undershirts, jerkins, bodices, hose, and hats that code productions as “Renaissance...

Scene Adaptive Segmentation for Crowd Counting in Population Heterogeneous Distribution

Crowd counting is an important part of crowd analysis and has been widely applied in the field of public safety and commercial management. Although researchers have proposed many crowd counting methods, there is little research on non-uniform population distribution. In this research, a new scene adaptive segmentation network (SASNet) is proposed that can focus on crowd area to estimate accurately crowd density in population heterogeneous distribution. First, an image segmentation module is designed that can adaptive horizontal segment an image according to different density levels, and then obtains a close-up view image and a distant view image. Second, a dual branches network based on convolution neural network (CNN) is exploited that contains a distant view network (DVNet) and a close-up view network (CVNet), so as to extract different scales of image features and then generate density maps by each branch, respectively, so that the crowd counting module has robustness on different scales of target. Finally, a comparative experiment on three well-known crowd counting datasets shows that SASNet achieved stabilized performance and robustness in population heterogeneous distribution.

Adaptive Bright and Dark Channel Combined with Defogging Algorithm Based on Depth of Field

Aiming at the problem that the dark channel prior algorithm is not ideal in removing fog at the distant view and the sudden change of depth, this paper proposes an adaptive bright and dark channel combined with defogging algorithm based on the depth of field. The algorithm divides the image into a distant area and a near area based on the depth of field. The near area uses the dark channel to remove the fog, and the distant area uses the bright channel to remove the fog, combined with the use of adaptive superpixel segmentation to give the content-based local area division and defogging control factor based on depth of field. It better solves the problem of large transmittance deviation and defogging distortion under content changes and sudden depth of field changes. From the subjective and objective indicators, the algorithm in this paper has achieved a good defogging effect, and the main indicators and comprehensive defogging quality are better than common algorithms.

Oplontis: Villa A (“of Poppaea”) at Torre Annunziata, Italy. Volume 2, The Decorations: Painting, Stucco, Pavements, Sculptures Edited by John R. Clarke and Nayla K. Muntasser (ACLS Humanities E-Book). New York: American Council of Learned Societies 2019. Reflowable; approx. 1, 594 pp. Open access at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.90048. ISBN 9781628201383 (e-book).

<i>Oplontis: Villa A (“of Poppaea”) at Torre Annunziata, Italy. Volume 2, The Decorations: Painting, Stucco, Pavements, Sculptures</i> Edited by John R. Clarke and Nayla K. Muntasser (ACLS Humanities E-Book). New York: American Council of Learned Societies 2019. Reflowable; approx. 1, 594 pp. Open access at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.90048. ISBN 9781628201383 (e-book).

Multiview Running and Walking Gait Analysis using the First and Third Person Data

Gait recognition, which allows to recognise someone from a distance, has a lot of applications. The gait of a person is commonly used as a biometric approach to identify or categorise them by gender and age. Biometric systems are a fast-growing subject that necessitates the development of creative solutions to problems that have plagued previous attempts. By initially looking at the design of a gait detection system, two different types of gait datasets have been reported and presented in this paper. While running at the same time, the first person (FP) data containing the camera motion gathered from the movement of the volunteer’s body and the third person (TP) data captured from a distant view were recorded. The dataset contains a total of 23 participants (14 males and 9 females). The discussion is expanded to include a comparison of the results obtained using TP and FP data, as well as an examination of the physiological motions recorded while running and walking.

Holographic 3D Display Using Depth Maps Generated by 2D-to-3D Rendering Approach

Holographic display has the potential to be utilized in many 3D application scenarios because it provides all the depth cues that human eyes can perceive. However, the shortage of 3D content has limited the application of holographic 3D displays. To enrich 3D content for holographic display, a 2D to 3D rendering approach is presented. In this method, 2D images are firstly classified into three categories, including distant view images, perspective view images and close-up images. For each category, the computer-generated depth map (CGDM) is calculated using a corresponding gradient model. The resulting CGDMs are applied in a layer-based holographic algorithm to obtain computer-generated holograms (CGHs). The correctly reconstructed region of the image changes with the reconstruction distance, providing a natural 3D display effect. The realistic 3D effect makes the proposed approach can be applied in many applications, such as education, navigation, and health sciences in the future.

The impact of skills and training on local development

The impact of skills and training on local development

Inflammatory Lesions: Cyclic Arginine–Glycine–Aspartate‐Decorated Lipid Nanoparticle Targeting toward Inflammatory Lesions Involves Hitchhiking with Phagocytes (Adv. Sci. 13/2021)

In article number 2100370, Alexandros Marios Sofias, Sjoerd Hak, and co-workers, report that cRGD-decorated lipid nanoparticles target inflammatory lesions via hitchhiking with phagocytes. Through a complementary approach including state-of-the-art intravital microscopy, it is identified that neutrophils and monocytes take up cRGD-decorated liposomes and nanoemulsions in circulation and subsequently home to the inflammatory lesion. Cover art: flowers (red) resemble phagocytes loaded with cRGD-decorated lipid nanoparticles in the inflammatory lesion, grass (green) resembles the inflammatory lesion, foot-path (yellow) resembles a blood vessel proximal to the inflamed tissue. Top-right: distant view of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) campus.