Image Makers Research Articles

Novel MRI-derived quantitative biomarker for cardiac function applied to classifying ischemic cardiomyopathy within a Bayesian rule learning framework.

Characterization of regional left ventricular (LV) function may have application in prognosticating timely response and informing choice therapy in patients with ischemic cardiomyopathy. The purpose of this study is to characterize LV function through a systematic analysis of 4D (3D + time) endocardial motion over the cardiac cycle in an effort to define objective, clinically useful metrics of pathological remodeling and declining cardiac performance, using standard cardiac MRI data for two distinct patient cohorts accessed from CardiacAtlas.org: a) MESA - a cohort of asymptomatic patients; and b) DETERMINE - a cohort of symptomatic patients with a history of ischemic heart disease (IHD) or myocardial infarction. The LV endocardium was segmented and a signed phase-to-phase Hausdorff distance (HD) was computed at 3D uniformly spaced points tracked on segmented endocardial surface contours, over the cardiac cycle. An LV-averaged index of phase-to-phase endocardial displacement (P2PD) time-histories was computed at each tracked point, using the HD computed between consecutive cardiac phases. Average and standard deviation in P2PD over the cardiac cycle was used to prepare characteristic curves for the asymptomatic and IHD cohort. A novel biomarker of RMS error between mean patient-specific characteristic P2PD over the cardiac cycle for each individual patient and the cumulative P2PD characteristic of a cohort of asymptomatic patients was established as the RMS-P2PD marker. The novel RMS-P2PD marker was tested as a cardiac function based feature for automatic patient classification using a Bayesian Rule Learning (BRL) framework. The RMS-P2PD biomarker indices were significantly different for the symptomatic patient and asymptomatic control cohorts (p<0.001). BRL accurately classified 83.8% of patients correctly from the patient and control populations, with leave-one-out cross validation, using standard indices of LV ejection fraction (LV-EF) and LV end-systolic volume index (LV-ESVI). This improved to 91.9% with inclusion of the RMS-P2PD biomarker and was congruent with improvements in both sensitivity for classifying patients and specificity for identifying asymptomatic controls from 82.6% up to 95.7%. RMS-P2PD, when contrasted against a collective normal reference, is a promising biomarker to investigate further in its utility for identifying quantitative signs of pathological endocardial function which may boost standard image makers as precursors of declining cardiac performance.

François Dallegret: In Conversation with Alessandra Ponte

Francois Dallegret profoundly dislikes interviews. Enchanting, enigmatic, mystifying, he is a master at evading questions, and has an amazing disregard for the spoken or written word (with one notable exception – he loves naming his projects). He also doesn’t seem to believe in history, theory or criticism. But he reveres and worships images. ‘I am an image maker’, he told me repeatedly. Dallegret has portrayed himself to many different and equally baffled journalists in a variety of dissimil...

“Tragicheskaia erotika”: Obrazy imperatorskoi sem′i v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny by Boris Kolonitskii (review)

Boris Kolonitskii, Tragicheskaia erotika: Obrazy imperatorskoi sem 'i v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Tragic Eroticism: Images of the Imperial Family during World War I). 657 pp., illus. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5867937577. In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's brilliant and underappreciated novel The Red Wheel/Knot II, published in the West as November 1916, the hero, Colonel Vorotyntsev, remarks, in response to his soon-to-be mistress and intellectual interlocutor: a republican, of course, devotion to a monarch is a deplorable stupidity. And without such devotion monarchy turns into a [Vorontyntsev said,] Yes, ... that's just what I mean. Vorotyntsev had difficulty getting his words out. He couldn't, he hadn't wanted to tell her in so many words that the Russian monarchy had become a sham. But that was the fact of the matter. To have a monarch at all you must love him. Without your love, he doesn't exist. Love him and be ready to serve him to the end! (1) Boris Kolonitskii's book is about love of tsar as a cultural and political phenomenon. As in all human relationships, love can turn into its opposite with unpredictable speed and consequence. For Russia, these consequences were plain to see. How did so many people across the political and social landscape go through the World War I process of being mobilized by monarchical patriotism and come out at best as passive observers of the downfall of their monarch and indeed the dynasty itself? (2) The book is a major expansion and deepening of themes raised in two earlier books by the same author. (3) It is deeply researched and beautifully argued. It is among the most important works I have read on late imperial Russia, including the February Revolution. The title comes from the philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, who wrote of his love for the last tsar and described his relationship to that tsar as tragic erotic. This unfulfilled love is central to Kolonitskii's argument, which subverts earlier explanations of the relationship among war, revolution, and monarchy. He wants to undercut the dichotomies of left- and right-wing ideology, high and low culture, and elite and subordinate social groups that have influenced our understanding of the revolution. He succeeds in this ambitious task. This is not just a simple application of models derived from the study of the French Revolution to Russia but something entirely original, deeply rooted in the peculiarities of Russian monarchy and political culture as revealed in a variety of sources. Rumor is central to the analysis. Russia was clearly a society in which rumor not only flourished but played an inordinate political role. For Kolonitskii, rumor is an essential part of Russian political culture and a form of political activity in the autocratic system. In this model, rumor is linked intimately to image. Kolonitskii argues that rumor contributes a psychological, political, and social dynamic to the historical process. All social groups were simultaneously reacting to the images of the royals, filtering and processing these images through the medium of rumor, which in turn nourished the image makers. For students of the revolution, Kolonitskii argues the necessity of understanding the personified images of power within the social consciousness of a transformational epoch (19). This is the story of the sacralization and desacralization of royal power. (4) One of the sources on which Kolonitskii focuses in order to understand the political culture of the time are cases of insult or oskorblenie of the tsar or members of the royal family. Kolonitskii has charted the available cases in police and Ministry of Justice archives, so one can understand the procedures and see the rise and fall in their numbers in relation to the progression of war and revolution. At the same time, he points out that this material does not lend itself to statistical analysis. …

Holograms for the Masses

Traditional holography subject matter has been generally limited to small dead things (SMD). Pulse lasers and the advent of holographic stereography have made it easier to make holograms of scaled objects and those that live (un-SMD), at a cost of single dimensional parallax or monochromaticity. While stunning results have been produced, all of these required access to a lab, expensive lasers and optics, and infinite patience, care and skill to collect and record content. This complexity has generally kept holography out of reach for the masses.The recent introduction of new 3D data sources, free or inexpensive composition and editing software, and fast, consistent print services may make it possible to finally "democratize" holography, and enable image makers to focus on message rather than medium. This paper will outline several photogrammetry-based methods for producing 3D content for holograms (with a camera and mouse finger), software applications for editing, positioning and lighting, and production means that are usable by anyone, from novice to professional. We will present step-by-step examples and display results depicting various subject matter, from color holographic portraits made from smart phone input to holographic maps made from movies collected with remote control airplanes. The aim is to inspire image making, spontaneity, and maybe even social media-based collaboration to make EVERYONE a holographer.

Burning Man, Desire, and the Culture of Empire

A soulful journey through the eight-day festival that claims to be both a social movement and “part of a solution to our modern malaise.”

Gary, the Most American of All American Cities (review)

Reviewed by: Gary, the Most American of All American Cities Andrew Highsmith (bio) Gary, the Most American of All American Cities. By S. Paul O'Hara. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Pp. ix+195. $19.95. Over the past generation, scholars have written prolifically on the fate of urban America in the twentieth century. Included in this immense body of work are untold numbers of articles and monographs addressing issues of political economy and the material transformation of metropolitan spaces. As a result of such scholarship, we now know a great deal about the rise of mass suburbs, the decline of urban manufacturing, the persistence of social inequalities in modern American society, and other significant developments. Until very recently, however, work probing the cultural dimensions of metropolitan change has been largely absent from the canon of urban and suburban studies. With Gary, the Most American of All American Cities, historian S. Paul O'Hara offers a deeply researched, carefully narrated corrective that is both insightful and important. O'Hara's account focuses on shifting narrative constructions of Gary, Indiana, from the city's founding in the early twentieth century as a mass-production center for the U.S. Steel Corporation through the waves of "white flight" and deindustrialization that decimated the area's economy in the 1980s. Throughout the book's seven chronologically and thematically arranged chapters, O'Hara emphasizes the contestation over perceptions of Gary, especially among members of the corporate media and privileged outsiders. Building on the works of Peter Fritzsche and Judith Walkowitz, O'Hara persuasively demonstrates that narratives about Gary and its people helped to create a "word city" that profoundly influenced the area's twentieth-century development. "Gary," the author argues, "became what [End Page 710] observers wished it to be" (p. 53). Although O'Hara only rarely strays beyond the city's borders, this is not a local history. Instead, the author attempts to show how the stories people constructed about Gary reflected broader American concerns over the meanings of modernity, (de)industrialization, decline, and empowerment. In the opening two chapters, O'Hara traces the mythology that emerged following Gary's founding in 1909. During the city's first decade, many observers described local steel mills as triumphs of modern technology and planning. Others characterized the city as an urban analog of the western frontier—a place of both danger and opportunity. After the bitter race riots and steel strikes of 1919, however, many of the area's chroniclers jettisoned such notions and began characterizing Gary as a failed model city. Although many working-class residents maintained a sense of pride in their hometown, they were unable to counteract the dominant dystopian narratives purveyed by Chicago journalists and other outsiders. By the time the Depression arrived in 1929, Gary's image had already lost its sheen. Following World War II, the declension accelerated as cultural producers began portraying Gary as a dangerous and polluted ghetto. Despite boosters' efforts to emphasize the city's positive attributes, Gary's reputation sank even further during the deindustrialization crisis of the 1980s. As the author suggests, the emphasis on crime, grime, and pollution became a means of "othering" the hard-luck city and its growing black majority. Without question, O'Hara's work marks an important contribution to the literature on urban cultural history. Although its relative inattention to technology will disappoint some readers of this journal, the author does a splendid job of narrating and analyzing discursive changes over time. In addition, he makes a very persuasive case that cultural products have been as important as material forces in shaping Gary's destiny. Nevertheless, the book suffers from several significant omissions and interpretive lapses. The most serious of these problems stems from the author's disregard for the agency of local actors. Although O'Hara rightly points out that outsiders were powerful image makers, citizens of Gary routinely contested the town's one-dimensional reputation as a wasteland. Nevertheless, local residents—including major figures such as Richard G. Hatcher, the city's first African-American mayor and a powerful symbol of black political power—receive short shrift in this account. A second concern is that O'Hara...

The Craftsmanship Aesthetic: Showing Making at the American Museum of Natural History, 1910–45

The rise of large corporations and unskilled labor in the early twentieth century conspired to separate many Americans from knowledge of and pleasure in their work, and the bewildering specialization of production methods and professional knowledge only intensified this sense of alienation. This article argues that a new popular aesthetic, which celebrated skilled craftsmen laboring within the exotic provinces of specialized production, emerged as a result. This aesthetic of craftsmanship was simultaneously diverting and reassuring, providing viewers with the visual entertainment associated with tourism and consumption while connecting them to craftsmen absorbed in meaningful work. This essay explains how and why this “craftsmanship aesthetic” flourished, using the example of photographs of exhibit making at the American Museum of Natural History between the 1910s and the 1940s. It examines the part this aesthetic played in the museum's public relations campaigns and institutional politics, and explores the ways that the museum's image makers used it to improve their standing within and beyond the museum's halls.

The Signature of the Spirit: An Interview with Chester Higgins

The Signature of the Spirit An Interview with Chester Higgins* Charles Henry Rowell ROWELL: You are a photojournalist for the New York Times. In fact, you have worked for the Times since 1975. But you’re also a fine art photographer. For me, these two are contrary poles—a fine art photographer and a photojournalist. The one is documentation, and the other is art. How do you negotiate between these poles? HIGGINS: [Laughter] Well, good question. I think that I’m torn between two things. One is that I want to get my message out, which is my art . . . when I was a youngster in the South, the most formidable images were those of the Civil Rights struggle, made by Northern photographers, published in the national press. For me, the New York Times is the national press that goes to decision makers. And because I’m an artist as well as a social activist, I’m not content with just sitting back and creating out of my head and having just a small group of people know about it and appreciate it. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to reach exclusive groups—I do. Of course I want to reach that art community. But I also want to reach a larger community: not only the image makers, but also political decision makers. I’ll give an example. In the early 1970s when I was living in the summers in Africa—I would go over every summer—and one year, I think it was around 1974, 1973, I became aware of a hunger crisis happening to the people in Niger. They were suffering a huge drought. I came back to New York and I started fundraising to pay for a trip for me to document this. I returned to Africa to northern Niger and came back with photographs of the suffering. My reason for getting involved is because I knew that the job of trying to save these people’s lives was bigger than what they or their government could handle. They needed outside help. They needed American help. But in order to get the American government involved, I needed a way to reach out to the decision makers. I went to the New York Times with the photographs, and I laid out these many photographs for them. I said, “Look, here is the story on this human tragedy that’s going on. We should do something about it. Our country should do something about it.” My hope was that if we could get the right mixture of my images with text by opinion makers in the Times, we could make a difference. Well, from those pictures, I think two or three op-ed editorials ran. In addition, I paid back my sponsors by making fundraising posters. Those op-ed editorials made a difference. It got the American government engaged. It got USIA engaged. And before long, within a month, shipments of tons and tons of food and seeds were on their [End Page 139] way to a place that, the week before, nobody had even heard of called Niger, way up into the interior of the country, in Agadez. What I did in Niger was in the tradition of using the humanistic image to change how America saw civil rights workers, thus becoming sympathetic to the civil rights movement. The conscious image in the national press makes a difference. I’m concerned about reach. I’m concerned about the art, number one. But I’m also concerned about reach. To me, the New York Times gives me an opportunity to do several things. It gives me an opportunity to project my name, my brand, with the photographs that I produce, allowing me possible influence on people who can make a difference. If I take another example . . . let’s take Kwanzaa. I’ve always been very Afro-centric, or back in the old days, I guess it was called “cultural nationalist.” And the first image of Kwanzaa ever to be made in the national press was made by me for Time magazine back in, I think, 1972/1973. And when I came to the Times, I made sure, because...

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Promoting Festival Tourism—An Examination of Motives and Perceptions of Chinese Visitors Attending the Oktoberfest in Munich (Germany)

Festivals have been increasingly utilized as cultural tourism attractions and an effective image maker for destinations. In the intensively competitive international tourism market, promotion of events requires in-depth cross-cultural research so that proper marketing strategies can be made based on an improved understanding of tourists from the target market. This study is aimed at identifying motives and perceptions of Chinese visitors to the Munich Oktoberfest from a cross-cultural viewpoint. Potentials of using this German hallmark event to effectively enhance the destination's competitive advantages in China's outbound tourism market and marketing implications are discussed as well in the study.

The image makers

The image makers

Design of a Map and Bus Guide to Teach Transferable Public Transit Skills

In the field of orientation and mobility (O&M), we are presented with the task of teaching transferable skills. This task can be daunting at a state school for students who are blind, where the students are often far from home and unable to easily apply learned skills to their home areas. I work at the California School for the Blind (CSB) in Fremont, California. Having taught travel on public transit to students during my 32 years in the field, this year I decided to create a set of flexible lesson plans to teach bus travel with the hope that I would be able to use the lesson plans with a variety of students. I also hoped that I could offer students information and experiences that would better enable them to apply O&M skills they learned at home. I selected two students for this project, both of whom had some usable vision. One was an 11 year old from a rural part of the state. He had the underlying skills to be an independent bus user, and his family recognized that he might spend time in areas that are more urban than his hometown during different times of his life. The other student was in the mainstream high school program of CSB. He and the 11-year-old student both had the potential, with instruction, to plan and execute bus trips and to solve problems, although perhaps at different levels, given the differences in their ages. GETTING STARTED I began by making a tactile-visual map of the central part of the city. I used 11 x 17-inch pieces of capsule heat-sensitive paper for the Pictures in a Flash machine (PIAF, a tactile graphics image enhancer) backed by cardboard. Two and a half sheets were cut and fit together to indicate main streets in the city, including one highway and a railroad track near the school. Six primary locations were tactilely indicated on the map, including CSB, the nearby rapid-transit station, and the local community college. Street names were indicated by small pieces of Braillable Labels from American Printing House for the Blind. The map measured about 21 inches square. Because of its size, it was therefore meant to be used for travel planning in the classroom, rather than while traveling in the community. The map is pictured in Figure 1. It should be noted that the carbon from the high-carbon pencil used on the capsule paper tends to leave a residue on other parts of the map and on one's fingers. If a different type of map is made (such as out of cardboard, cork, or foam pieces), it would likely be more labor intensive but would not have this effect. Or one could try using a marker instead of a high-carbon pencil on the capsule paper and experiment with results using a PIAF tactile image maker. BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND TASKS FOR THE STUDENT The map I created was accompanied by two spiral-bound notebooks created using the Tiger Software Suite and embosser by View-Plus (technology that allows a user to emboss images as presented on the computer screen, including braille and interlined print or graphics when using a print-capable embosser). One notebook contained basic information about how city bus systems work in a general sense. The information is as follows: * City buses have numbers, such as Number 217. They often also have names referring to the direction they are traveling in or where they will end. * City buses run on A route is a specific fixed course along streets and includes specific places to turn. * City buses make stops at bus stops. Bus stops are identified by poles with signs, bus shelters or benches, painted curbs, or a combination of these items. * Bus stops can be placed before an intersection, after an intersection, or mid-block. * A bus route may cross one or more other bus routes. The bus stop closest to where two bus routes cross is an easy place to transfer from one bus to another. * You may need to walk one or more blocks to transfer from one bus to another if the two routes do not actually cross or meet. …

Cultural Production as Self-Surveillance: Making the Right Impression

Cultural Production as Self-Surveillance: Making the Right Impression Gordon Downie Part 1: Image Consultants First Impressions, Style Doctors, Total Image Consultants, Impact Factory, Image Maker, Appearance Management, Lasting Impres sions, Talking Image, QC Image Consultancy, Colour Me Beautiful, The Divine Image. THIS LIST represents a few of the scores of image consultancies that offer advice on personal and corporate branding, inter-personal behavior and business etiquette, successful small-talk and networking strategies, body language, and corporate hospitality. Their advice is Cultural Production as Self-Surveillance 195 oriented towards soft or aesthetic skills and includes recommendations on dress codes and wardrobe planning, cosmetics, style counseling, communication styles, dressing for the media, grooming, and profes sional profile management. The corporate website of First Impressions asks: Do your staff convey the right messages and echo your brand values? (First Impressions 2006a) and states that: What differentiates a successful organization is itspeople. Effective, professional and motivated staffare key to gaining the competitive edge and personal image plays a vital role in achieving this. First Impressions has an extensive corporate client list and has helped many individuals and organisations to get ahead. They continue: First impressions count. Your appearance and behaviour speak vol umes about who you are. Knowing how to convey the right image can make all the difference to your personal and career success. Whether you want to fitinor stand out from the crowd, boost your confidence or maximise your career prospects, our professional objective advice really helps. (First Impressions 2006b) First Impressions offers awide selection of courses that include: Impression Management?creating a positive and memorable professional profile Do the right thing?business etiquette in today's workplace. Personal Image and Impact?creating a positive first impression every time Testimonials and case studies claim that former clients no longer "have to worry about what to put on each day, as anything I take out of my wardrobe will be fine!," and "with the consultant's help I learned how to disguise my bad points." 196 PerspectivesofNew Music with writeWords you can write the rightmusic with the rightwords lhi?inra? albomiti ids inni(smni!b@[rs anirsa soonttastt At writeWords we have over 20 years experience delivering tailor-made program-note solutions to clients as diverse as the music they compose. Remember!You only get one chance to make thatall-important first impression. Studies have shown thatpeople make up their minds about someone within moments of meeting them. It's the same with a new pieceofmusic. Sowhy takechances? Whyget left behind? Commentary 1: Image Consultants Image consultants offer individuals or organizations advice on how to manage the impressions they give to others in order to achieve their goals, be successful, and maximize their strategic advantage inmarket society. From the perspective of an individual actor or employee, this advice is structured to enable the subject to adopt a repertoire of behav iors thatwill maximize their chances of achieving personal success within corporate environments, such as obtaining promotion, increased remu neration, or some other strategic advantage. From the perspective of an organization, this advice is structured to enable the corporate entity to impose a repertoire of behaviors upon itsworkforce in order for that workforce to conform to the corporation's brand identity and to those behavioral norms associated with corporate culture. Such advice may include recommendations on dress codes, discourse management, or successful networking skills. In all cases, personality and identity is recal ibrated, remodeled, and restructured in order to make workers more marketable and increase theirproductivity. This is achieved by the adoption Cultural Production as Self-Surveillance 197 of impression management techniques that control the image individuals and corporations present to others. This process represents the expan sion of Taylorization or scientificmanagement away from the types of menial task optimization characteristic of assembly lines, fast-food restaurants, and supermarket checkouts, to the detailed specification and penetration of worker psychology and identity.With the expansion of free-market neo-liberalization in the form of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics?a process continued in the policies of subsequent adminis trations of whatever political orientation?those performance measures associated with commodity form and behavior have spread to encompass not only public sector services such as health care...

Napoleon, David: The Image Enthroned (review)

Napoleon, David:The Image Enthroned Tony Osborne Napoleon, David: The Image Enthroned (2005) Written and directed by Patric Jean. Distributed by First Run / Icarus Films, www.frif.com 51 minutes. On December 2, 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte endeavored to legitimate his claim to absolute power by stage-managing a magnificent pageant in Notre Dame Cathedral that transmogrified ancient myths, church rituals, and symbols of empire and monarchy. The five-hour ceremony, a disjointed pairing of a secular coronation with a pre-Revolutionary papal anointment, culminated in an act of audacious ritual usurpation: at the moment of consecration, Napoleon trampled papal sanctity and crowned himself Emperor, publicly humiliating Pope Pius VII, whose authority—toppled by the Revolution—Bonaparte had restored specifically for this unprecedented royal anointment. However, as Patric Jean reveals in Napoleon, David: the Image Enthroned (2005), this "surprise" denouement had been prearranged, capping four months of bitter papal negotiations. In return for an opportunity to proselytize in France, the Pope agreed to journey to Paris to play a supplicant role in a public spectacle that placed the Vatican beneath the Emperor of the French People. Looking down from a lavishly draped spectator's box, Jacques-Louis David, the premiere neo-classical painter of the age, sketched this epochal moment and filled his notebooks with impressions of the royal entourage. David set up his studio in the chapel, and guided by mock-ups and clay figurines, completed Napoleon's Coronation in two years. Upon inspecting the finished work—one of four that Napoleon had commissioned to commemorate his ascendancy—the Emperor exclaimed, "It is not a painting. There are people walking in this picture. Life is everywhere. David, I salute you. You have made me a French knight." Resplendent with 150 life-sized figures, this enormous canvas (some 660 square feet), which now hangs in the Louvre, is the organizing motif of Napoleon, David. The Coronation painting is on screen for nearly 15 minutes of Jean's 51-minute film about the ritual machinations of power and image. Jean explores the painting's terrain inch by inch—close enough to reveal canvas dimples beneath the paint. As the camera drinks in characters, colors, and gestures from multiple angles, Jean exposes the Coronation's distortions of fact, both delicate and gross. Originally, David had painted Napoleon crowning himself with a golden laurel wreath. However, to render the Emperor more chivalrous, David recast him crowning a kneeling Josephine. A close-up reveals the after-image of the original composition, a ghostly crown floating above an unsuspecting churchman. David gave 41-year-old Josephine a maiden's rosy, unlined face. Napoleon's mother, who loathed Josephine, snubbed the event, remaining in Rome. On Napoleon's orders, David conspicuously placed her in the main tribune. David had painted a passive Pope, hands in his lap. This displeased Napoleon: "I didn't have him travel this far to sit idly." Hence, for posterity, the pontiff is blessing the moment. Napoleon, David portrays the Emperor as a consummate propagandist who understood the primacy of image in sustaining power. In the 1799 Syrian campaign, Napoleon deserted the sick and wounded and ultimately lost half his army. To squelch rumors, Josephine commissioned Antoine-Jean Gros to reframe history. Thus, in Napoleon at the Penthouse at Jaffa (1804), impervious to infection, like some god, the benevolent leader comforts bubonic plague victims. In David, Napoleon found the perfect image maker, a republican whose allegorical paintings—such as The Oath of the Horatii (1784), commissioned [End Page 80] by Louis XVI—inculcated Roman virtue. In Napoleon, David found the ideal subject, a conqueror with the perfect visage and an imperious flair for grandiosity. "What a fine face he has," David said during a sitting in 1798. "It is pure. It is grand. Like antiquity." Napoleon sought to dissemble naked power in reverence for the past. Thus, his Coronation featured a pastiche of ritual objects and costumes, some invented—such as the ersatz crown of Charlemagne. Napoleon's white silk tunic, embroidered with bees, a symbol of empire, a hive with one leader, was genuinely emblematic of Charlemagne. The red velvet robes, the yards and yards of ermine and gold trim, recalled the...

Peers and Spheres of Influence: Situating Rob Kling

In this article we employ a number of bibliometric techniques to capture Rob Kling's intellectual impact and influences over the course of his varied career. We analyze his many publications in terms of type, topic, impact, and rate of co-authorship. We provide a detailed deconstruction of his citation identity (all those scholars whom he cited) and also his citation image makers (all those scholars who cited his work). In addition, we analyze acknowledgment data to gain deeper insights into the sociocognitive networks that sustained, and were sustained by Kling throughout his career.

"Questions of Seeing": Images and the Culture of Environmental Reform

"Questions of Seeing":Images and the Culture of Environmental Reform Thomas Robertson (bio) Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform. By Finis Dunaway. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 246 pages. $37.00 (cloth). American reformers have often used visual images to spotlight their causes, sometimes with tremendous effect. Think of Lewis Hine's images of children in textile mills and Jacob Riis's pictures of crowded tenement rooms during the Progressive Era, Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" during the Depression, and the images of African American schoolchildren facing water cannons and attack dogs in Birmingham during the civil rights movement. But perhaps no reformers have relied more on images, argues Finis Dunaway in Natural Visions, than environmental reformers of the twentieth century. This held true, he stresses, not just in the fledgling years of post–World War II environmentalism, when Ansel Adams's grand vistas of the U.S. West and NASA's Earth shots gained iconic status, but also during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, two pivotal earlier moments of environmental reform. Using both still and moving images to create a powerful new form of environmental storytelling, Dunaway contends in this carefully researched and elegantly written book, these reformers transformed key environmental issues into "questions of seeing" (xvii). In Natural Visions, Dunaway takes us on a cultural tour of many of the most politically powerful environmental images of the twentieth century, using a richly biographical approach to situate images within their full contexts. He focuses mostly on highbrow image makers and art meant to transform spiritually and politically, not the popular visual culture of everyday life; Natural Visions is a study of professional artists who care primarily about nature, not of Disney films and the millions of images of nature made by everyday Americans using inexpensive cameras. Dunaway's tour emphasizes figures familiar to anyone who has studied environmental politics—such as filmmaker Pare Lorentz, director of The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), and Sierra Club [End Page 239] executive director David Brower, the main force behind the slew of influential coffee-table books that the Sierra Club produced in the fifteen years before the first Earth Day in 1970—and lesser-studied figures, such as the early-twentieth-century photographer Herbert Gleason, whose work illustrated the twenty-volume 1906 edition of The Writings of Thoreau and became a key weapon in the landmark 1910s battle to prevent the damming of Yosemite National Park's Hetch Hetchy Valley, and Eliot Porter, a postwar pioneer of color photography and contributor to many Sierra Club projects. Dunaway ends by discussing photographers such as Charles Pratt, who, unlike Gleason and Porter, rejected the tradition of celebrating supposedly people-less wilderness landscapes in favor of illuminating human interrelations with nature in cities and rural landscapes. On his tour of environmental photographs and films, Dunaway is less interested in engaging recent theoretical and methodological debates in visual cultural studies than in showing how taking certain environmental photographs and films seriously as evidence can shift the historiography of twentieth-century environmental politics. Although he offers thought-provoking points about the camera as a "technology of memory" that appeared to capture reality and suspend change, allowing reformers to create "visual monuments to vanishing places," Dunaway devotes most of his energy to contextualizing environmental images culturally and politically (xviii). This is more a cultural history of environmental reform using unusual sources than a historical study of visual culture. That said, Dunaway is not naive methodologically. Indeed, using environmental images and textured biography, he deftly weaves together cultural and political history. On each stop of his tour, Dunaway introduces us to one or more key artists and the issues they engage, draws our attention to the cutting-edge aesthetic features of their images, and, unlike many guides, shows the impact of their work on American life at the time. Placing each image in its full environmental, intellectual, and political context, Dunaway's book is less a tour through a museum of two-dimensional images than a journey through a series of multilayered historical re-creations in which the images and their makers are actors in a much larger and more lively...

Shanghai love: courtesans, intellectuals, and entertainment culture, 1850-1910

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Modeling the Modern: Courtesan Fashion, Furniture, and Manners in Late-Nineteenth-Century Shanghai 2. Shanghai Love: New Rules of the Game 3. Playground Shanghai: Reenacting Dream of the Red Chamber 4. Image Makers: The Settlements' Men of Letters and Shanghai Print Entertainment 5. The Public Flower of the City and the Media Star 6. The Image of the Shanghai Courtesan in Late Qing Illustrated Fiction 7. Guides to Paradise: Entertainment in the Formation of Shanghai's Identity 8. Conclusion Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

A History of Obesity, or How What Was Good Became Ugly and Then Bad

Chronic food shortage and malnutrition have been the scourge of humankind from the dawn of history. The current worldwide epidemic of obesity, now recognized as a public health crisis, is barely a few decades old. Only after the technological advances of the eighteenth century did a gradual increase in food supply became available. The initial effect of these advances in improved public health and amount, quality, and variety of food was increased longevity and body size. These early favorable outcomes of technological advances notwithstanding, their incremental effect since the Second World War has been an overabundance of easily accessible food, coupled with reduced physical activity, that accounts for the recent increased prevalence of obesity. Obesity as a chronic disease with well-defined pathologic consequences is less than a century old. The scarcity of food throughout most of history had led to connotations that being fat was good, and that corpulence and increased "flesh" were desirable as reflected in the arts, literature, and medical opinion of the times. Only in the latter half of the nineteenth century did being fat begin to be stigmatized for aesthetic reasons, and in the twentieth century, its association with increased mortality was recognized. Whereas early reports listed obesity as a risk factor for mortality from "chronic nephritis," the subsequent recognition of the more common association of obesity with diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease altered the listings and questioned its being a risk factor for kidney disease. An enlarging body of evidence, accrued over the past decade, now indicates a direct association of obesity with chronic kidney disease and its outcomes.

Postcards as affective image makers: An idle agent in destination marketing

Image is a key factor in the travelers’ destination choice and evaluation process. Understanding and managing destination image sources affecting prospective travelers’ thinking and feeling is thus vital. Holiday postcards—the most widely disseminated tourist icon—received from friends and/or relatives can be one of the important image creators. Despite their wide use, a review of the literature reveals no or limited research assessing effectiveness of postcards in generating favorable affective image and attitudes toward a destination. Present research therefore explores whether images depicted by postcards evoke positive emotions and whether postcard-induced emotions affect recipients’ consideration of the destination for a holiday. Strong associations were evident between postcard-induced emotions and desire to travel. Marketing implications for destinations are discussed.

TU‐E‐224A‐03: Image and Dosimetric Verification of Positioning Accuracy for Helical Tomotherapy Intensity Modulated Stereotactic Radiosurgery

Purpose: To investigate the accuracy of Helical Tomotherapy for intracranial radiosurgery using Mega‐voltage CT (MVCT) image fusion. Method and Materials: Tomotherapy generates a set of MVCT images which are fused to the treatment planning KVCT to facilitate the patient setup. For intracranial lesions, mutual information matching program using bony anatomy automatically generates the lateral, longitudinal, vertical, pitch, roll and yaw adjustments that are necessary to align the MVCT to KVCT images. In our study, a pReference head phantom immobilized by Nomos Talon system was used to verify the positioning accuracy of MVCT fusion. Three gold‐filled titanium markers inside the head phantom and the localization tip in the Talon system were used as the independent imaging makers to verify the MVCT positioning accuracy. In addition, dosimetric analysis was performed with a 0.015cc pinpoint ion chamber placed inside the phantom during KVCT simulation. A tomotherapy SRS plan with ion chamber sensitive volume as the target was generated and delivered. After MVCT to KVCT auto registration, dosimetric profiles in three directions were measured by stepping the couch away from the registered position. If the registration was perfect, the dose profile peak position should correspond to the registered position. The distance from the maximum dose to the registered location provides the ultimate accuracy of the system, including MVCT imaging accuracy and radiation dose delivery accuracy. Results: The average localization differences between the MVCT and KVCT were 0.92mm in lateral, 0.82mm in longitudinal and 0.60mm in vertical directions. Dosimetric measurements showed 1.3mm offset laterally and 0mm offset in the other two directions. The relative large setup error in the lateral direction is partially due to the manual couch adjustment with mechanical scale in that direction. Conclusions: The MVCT image fusion can be used to setup SRS patients within accuracy comparable to the current SRS standard.

An ego-centric citation analysis of the works of Michael O. Rabin based on multiple citation indexes

The primary goal of this study was to carry out an ego-centric citation and reference analysis of the works of the mathematician and computer scientist, Michael O. Rabin. Until recently only a single citation database was available for such research – the ISI Citation Indexes. In this study we utilized and compared three major sources that provide citation data: the Web of Science, Google Scholar and Citeseer. Most cited works, citation identity, citation image makers and coauthors were identified. The citation image makers acquired through these sources differ considerably. Advantages and shortcomings of each of the tools are discussed in the context of computer science. A major issue in computer science is multiple manifestations of a work, i.e., its publication in several venues (technical reports, proceedings, journals, collections). The implications of multiple manifestations for citation analysis are discussed.