Empty Desk Research Articles

Context understanding in computer vision: A survey

Contextual information plays an important role in many computer vision tasks, such as object detection, video action detection, image classification, etc. Recognizing a single object or action out of context could be sometimes very challenging, and context information may help improve the understanding of a scene or an event greatly. Appearance context information, e.g., colors or shapes of the background of an object can improve the recognition accuracy of the object in the scene. Semantic context (e.g. a keyboard on an empty desk vs. a keyboard next to a desktop computer ) will improve accuracy and exclude unrelated events. Context information that are not in the image itself, such as the time or location of an images captured, can also help to decide whether certain event or action should occur. Other types of context (e.g. 3D structure of a building) will also provide additional information to improve the accuracy. In this survey, different context information that has been used in computer vision tasks is reviewed. We categorize context into different types and different levels. We also review available machine learning models and image/video datasets that can employ context information. Furthermore, we compare context-based integration and context-free integration in mainly two classes of tasks: image-based and video-based. Finally, this survey is concluded by a set of promising future directions in context learning and utilization.

The empty desk in class: a metaphor in the lives and classrooms of expelled immigrant children and their teachers

This paper engages with conversations with two teachers who each build socially just pedagogies and engage in minor gestures in response to the socio-educational-political reality they were confronted with – namely, a pupil disappearing from the classroom when her parents’ application for immigration was rejected. In an assemblage connecting the conversations to a transforming picture of an empty desk, to social media posts and online news sources and to post-qualitative literature, we reconfigure the empty desk into polyvocal, continuously moving metaphors and remain attentive to the affective and material forces of the stories that the two teachers tell. The desk functions as (1) a speaking medium and symbol of protest against the violation of children’s rights, (2) a relational force in a broken class group, (3) a part of a pedagogical space for learning democracy, and (4) a mirror on our contemporary society. These metaphors become minor gestures and invite us to fulfill our ability to respond (‘response-ability’) to the violation of rights of ‘invisible children’ and the daily realization of inclusive education for all children in class.

Post-stroke object affordances: An EEG investigation

Rehabilitating upper limb function after stroke is a key therapeutic goal. In healthy brains, objects, especially tools, are said to cause automatic motoric ‘affordances’; affecting our preparation to handle objects. For example, the N2 event-related potential has been shown to correlate with the functional properties of objects in healthy adults during passive viewing. We posited that such an affordance effect might also be observed in chronic-stage stroke survivors. With either dominant or non-dominant hand forward, we presented three kinds of stimuli in stereoscopic depth; grasp objects affording a power-grip, pinch objects affording a thumb and forefinger precision-grip and an empty desk, affording no action. EEG data from 10 stroke survivors and 15 neurologically healthy subjects were analysed for the N1 and N2 ERP components. Both components revealed differences between the two object stimuli categories and the empty desk for both groups, suggesting the presence of affordance-related motor priming from around 100 to 370 ms after stimulus onset. Hence, we speculate that stroke survivors with loss of upper limb function may benefit from object presentation regimes designed to maximise motor priming when attempting movements with manipulable objects. However, further investigation would be necessary with acute stage patients, especially those diagnosed with apraxia.

Reinhard Busse: leader in Germany's health-system development

Reinhard Busse: leader in Germany's health-system development

Objects rapidly prime the motor system when located near the dominant hand

Objects are said to automatically “afford” various actions depending upon the motor repertoire of the actor. Such affordances play a part in how we prepare to handle or manipulate tools and other objects. Evidence obtained through fMRI, EEG and TMS has proven that this is the case but, as yet, the temporal evolution of affordances has not been fully investigated. The aim here was to further explore the timing of evoked motor activity using visual stimuli tailored to drive the motor system. Therefore, we presented three kinds of stimuli in stereoscopic depth; whole hand grasp objects which afforded a power-grip, pinch-grip objects which afforded a thumb and forefinger precision-grip and an empty desk, affording no action. In order to vary functional motor priming while keeping visual stimulation identical, participants adopted one of two postures, with either the dominant or non-dominant hand forward. EEG data from 29 neurologically healthy subjects were analysed for the N1 evoked potential, observed in visual discrimination tasks, and for the N2 ERP component, previously shown to correlate with affordances (Proverbio, Adorni, & D’Aniello, 2011). We observed a link between ERPs, previously considered to reflect motor priming, and the positioning of the dominant hand. A significant interaction was detected in the left-hemisphere N2 between the participants’ posture and the object category they viewed. These results indicate strong affordance-related activity around 300ms after stimulus presentation, particularly when the dominant hand can easily reach an object.

Memento Mori

Memento Mori Diane Seuss (bio) All my life I’ve been writing of it but not from it, directing a bare light bulb at its profile so I may outline its silhouette on tracing paper. Its gifts have been delivered to my door in an unattributable basket, food nameless but nourishing, cook anonymous, recipe untranscribed. I saw my father carried from the couch into the waiting ambulance, which wailed like my mother could not, like I did not, as wailing is an art, its permissions learned. The rotating red emergency light swept across his face like a rash, a red tide. I was not there when he died. I was at school, learning equations, trying not to pee my pants because peeing them meant getting my wet bottom slapped by teacher and carrying the soaked underpants home in a paper bag. Even if I’d been there, if I’d shut down his eyes with my fingers dirty from recess, I’d know nothing more of it than I do now. He was so young, and death froze him in time. If I knew him now I’d be his elder. I could tell him to pick up after himself. To shut the door against the heat or cold. His illness made me conscious of the veins beneath the skin, the blue of a bruise and its gold aura, the bones that rise up through the skin when one has been sick for a long time, unable to wear a suit and tie anymore, wrapped only in a blue robe belted at the waist, and a back brace. He’d take short walks up and down the sidewalk in front of our house, pacing, [End Page 67] my mother called it, a word I contemplated, as I did the word “throb,” until they became part of my consciousness, just as I imagine he contemplated the thing inside him, the thing he was inside, or soon to be, like a man walking the gangplank contemplates the sublime blackness of the sea. Once, I ran from the school bus and leaped into his arms as he paced, like a girl in a movie. Knocked his chin with my skull, made him bite his tongue. He stuck it out to show me the blood my performance had cost him. Blood type O negative, which later I’d seek in other men, his disease, histiocytosis X, which together made tic tac toe. We played it sometimes in the hospital room, but our hearts weren’t in it. Is anyone’s heart in tic tac toe? It’s a game built for hospital rooms. His abdomen was interestingly swollen. His hands strangely cold. My face oddly ugly as I cried looking into a hand mirror. My consciousness growing adverbs, distended with them. Anyway, the transformation was incremental; he’d been sick my whole life, six years, then seven, so what I knew of Father was a body in constant progression, though toward what end I could not imagine. The closest I can come to empathy for that destination is when I was put under for surgery. Ten, nine, eight, gone. No comfort, no embrace, only absent, an empty desk at school, an empty coat hook, a locker resonant with its own hollowness. On the day he died I walked alone up Fulkerson Road to my Brownie meeting, pressed my forehead to the screen door before opening it and heard the girls inside praying for me. Absent but present. Present to my absence. Is this death? For a while I thought it belonged only to my father and family pets. It was months before I understood my mother too would someday die, any time she left the house she could die, like when she went on a three-day bender with her brother and was spotted all over town, flipping burgers [End Page 68] at the Four Square, laughing or crying and dancing at the cemetery, and I lay awake at my grandmother’s house, in the bat-filled dark, waiting for word of my mother’s demise, drunk and hit by a train at the unmarked railroad crossing by the underground house. Even at home...

Portuguese Writers and English Readers: Books by Portuguese Writers Printed before 1640 in the Libraries of Oxford and Cambridge. By T. F. EARLE

ions of Evidence in the Study of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. By Joseph A. Dane. Farnham: Ashgate. 2009. viii + 176 pp. £55. isbn 978 0 7546 6501 4. Joseph Dane’s The Myth of Print Culture (2003) asked us to think about a major problem of critical practice in bibliography: the relationship between the evidence studied by scholars of the book and the framing assumptions they necessarily bring to bear on those books in order to study them. Forcefully and with considerable wit he argued that ‘the gap between material and textual levels in bibliographical discussion is one that can never be closed, and it is one that scholarship, in its own advance, discovers new and more mystifying ways to obscure’ (pp. 3–4). Nominalist in argument, The Myth of Print Culture was also nominalist in form: a book of sepa rate essays, profoundly and usually amusingly sceptical. Reviewing it (in The Library, vii, 5 (2004), 322–25) I wrote that ‘if we accept Dane’s assertion that philoso phical principles are at issue [. . .] we are entitled to ask if the principles he asserts are adequate. [. . .] Dane has difficulty admitting the power of hypothesis to search out truth, because he seems to assume that all hypotheses, and with them all general explanations, are kinds of absolutism.’ Abstractions of Evidence in the Study of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books is a shorter book, and less obviously polemical (it also has more typos), but once again it is a book of essays, and Dane’s resistance to general explanations is unaltered. Indeed, both Introduction and Conclusion suggest that the very concept of evidence itself might be an abstraction. In the Rare Book Room, for example, the visiting scholar may be handed ‘an object that is not quite what was envisioned: a photo facsimile in a dull green cover, a note from a librarian, the word reliure or one of its many variants, an empty desk, a reference to EEBO, the wrong book’ (p. 1). Then there is the catalogue itself, which refers to objects that are ‘not actual books, but rather ideas or descriptions of books’ (p. 3); the catalogue is a generalization, subject to the constant degradation inherent in the frail historical process of bibliographical description. The succeeding essays focus on how that act of abstraction comes about in particular cases of bibliographical description. In Part 1, ‘Inference and Evidence in Medieval Books’, the first chapter (written with Rosemary A. Roberts) applies probability theory to Greg’s account (1910) of 481 The Library, 7.11.4, December 2010 Reviews:Layout 1 08/11/2010 16:22 Page 481

Outstripping Students Again

IN THE late 1990s, Safford Middle School, which is in a rural area of eastern Arizona, adopted a policy prohibiting the nonmedical use, possession, or sale of drugs on school property or at school events. The policy defines drugs as including not only controlled substances but also alcoholic beverages and prescription or over-the-counter drugs except with the permission of school authorities. A stimulus for adopting this policy was an incident in which a student brought a prescription drug to school and distributed it to classmates, one of whom became seriously ill and wound up being hospitalized. On 22 August 2003, the school held a dance to celebrate the beginning of the new academic year. During the dance, several staff members noticed unusually rowdy behavior and the smell of alcohol coming from a small group of students, including Savana, an honor-roll eighth-grader, and her friend Marissa. Later in the evening, staff members found a bottle of alcohol and a package of cigarettes in the girls' restroom. No official action was taken at that time. On 1 October 2003, another student at the school, whose name was Jordan, and his mother requested and participated in a meeting with the principal and vice principal. Jordan's mother explained that a few nights ago her son had become violent with her and was sick to his stomach, a result--according to Jordan--of his having taken some pills a classmate had given to him at school. Jordan reported that specific students had brought drugs and weapons to school. He identified Savana as having served alcohol to her classmates at a party she hosted at her home prior to the August dance. On 8 October 2003, Jordan asked to meet with the vice principal and handed him a white pill that he said Marissa had given to him. He also claimed that a group of students were planning to take pills at lunch. The vice principal took the pill to the school nurse, who identified it as ibuprofen 400 mg, a dosage available only by prescription. Based on this information, the vice principal went to Marissa's classroom to escort her to his office. As she stood up, he noticed a black planner lying on the empty desk next to her. He asked her whether the planner was hers, and she said no. He handed it to the teacher and promised to attempt to find the owner. Soon thereafter, the teacher discovered that the planner contained knives, lighters, a cigarette, and a permanent marker. He promptly conveyed this information to the vice principal. At the office, the vice principal, in the presence of Helen Romero, a female administrative assistant, asked Marissa to turn out her pockets and open her wallet. She complied, producing one blue pill, several white pills, and a razor blade. When asked about the blue pill, which the nurse subsequently identified as Naprosyn 200 mg, an over-the-counter drug used to treat pain and inflammation, Marissa said: I guess it slipped in when she gave me the IBU 400s. When the principal asked her, Who is she? Marissa identified Savana. Upon questioning about the planner, Marissa continued to deny ownership and similarly disclaimed knowledge of its contents. The vice principal then directed Romero to escort Marissa to the nurse's office and conduct a search of her clothing and person for more pills. At the nurse's office, Romero closed the door, which locked automatically, and asked the nurse to observe. Next, she instructed Marissa to 1) remove her shoes and socks, 2) lift up her shirt and pull out her bra band, and 3) take off her pants and pull out the elastic of her underwear. Marissa complied, and no further contraband was found. Meanwhile, the vice principal retrieved Savana from her classroom and escorted her to his office. After stressing the importance of telling the truth, he showed Savana the black planner, and she acknowledged that it was hers but claimed that she had loaned it to Marissa several days earlier to help her hide some things from her parents. …

A tribute to Corrie Bakels on the occasion of her 65th birthday

This is a special issue of Vegetation History and Archaeobotany (VHA) and therefore gets a special introduction: as some of you may realise, Prof. Dr. C. C. Bakels, Corrie to friends and colleagues, will celebrate her 65th birthday this year. We therefore thought it would be appropriate to honour her with this issue of VHA. It is composed of articles written by a selection of her students at Leiden University and from colleagues with whom she has co-operated closely. Of course there are many more students, friends and colleagues who could have contributed, but the number of pages available was limited! Corrie Bakels was born on the 17th of December 1942 in Heerlen, in the south of the Netherlands. She went to High School (Gymnasium B) and wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a mining engineer. During her Biology study at Leiden University, by pure coincidence (she was ‘‘filling in gaps’’ in her program) she became acquainted with archaeology. Shortly after her Cum Laude graduation in 1967, when she was working on water sewerage systems, Corrie was asked by Prof. Dr. P. J. R. Modderman to set up an archaeobotanical laboratory at the Institute for Prehistory at Leiden University. Starting with nothing but a chair, an empty desk and a bare bookshelf, she turned it into a prosperous unit. Her first important find was from Hienheim (Germany), where Prof. Dr. P. J. R. Modderman was excavating a Linear Bandkeramik (LBK) site. In the fills of pit 414 she saw charred peas and demanded that the contents should be sieved. This was the start of many samples to come! Pisum was not her favourite species though; Papaver came first and this was connected with her speciality: LBK. In May 1978, she defended her thesis entitled ‘‘Four Linear Bandkeramik sites and their environment’’. Soon she expanded both in period (Mesolithic up to modern Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00334-007-0117-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The rising cost of an empty desk

The rising cost of an empty desk

The Ecology of Public Library Reference Rooms

A study was done of the effects of the interior physical design on preferences and behavior of public library users. The research was conducted in reference rooms of urban public libraries, whose clients are not as homogenous a population as other libraries' clients, and includes many adolescents. The research tools were questionnaires that were filled in by users studying at the reference rooms, and observations that were made in order to build a behavioral map of these reference rooms users. A clear preference to choose seats in the peripheral parts of the library was revealed. The reasons given for seating preference were quiet, privacy, and ability to concentrate. Most of those who come alone tended to choose seats at an empty desk. Forty-four percent of those who came to study came with a friend(s) -a phenomenon that is common among adolescents. However, those who came accompanied also preferred hidden and peripheral seats. Therefore, there is a need for varied, separated, small study areas scattered through the reference room. Also, the differences between modular and fixed-function libraries were studied. No difference was found in seating preferences. However, differences appeared in the clients' perceptrons of the room space, in problems with noise and movement of people and in greater exposure of the clients in modular hbraries to other activities and services of the library.