Impossible Positions Research Articles

Young Women and Disgust in Contemporary Norwegian Comics: A Close Reading of Ane Barstad Solvang's Frykt & medlidenhet

Young Women and Disgust in Contemporary Norwegian Comics: A Close Reading of Ane Barstad Solvang's <i>Frykt</i> &amp; <i>medlidenhet</i>

A phonetic-phonological study of vowel height and nasal coarticulation in French

ABSTRACTThe majority of previous studies on nasal coarticulation in French find an inversely proportionate relationship between vowel opening and nasality, such that high vowels are the most nasalized, sometimes exceeding 50% nasality. However, it has been unclear whether this is a mechanical or controlled property of French, given the typically short duration of high vowels in natural speech, as well as the aerodynamic and acoustic factors rendering them more susceptible to spontaneous nasalization. This study uses nasometric data to quantify progressive and regressive nasalization in 20 Northern Metropolitan French speakers as a function of vowel height. Furthermore, the relationship between degree of nasal coupling and overall vowel duration serves as a proxy for distinguishing mechanical from controlled nasalization, in the spirit of Solé (1992, 2007). This study finds evidence that high vowel nasalization in French is mechanical in pre-nasal position, but controlled in post-nasal position. Meanwhile, nasalization of mid and low vowels is blocked in pre-nasal position but, at most, mechanical in post-nasal position. In consequence, French appears to block nasalization in otherwise lexically impossible positions (*ṼN), while passively allowing, though not actively requiring, nasalizing in positions where conflation is possible (both NṼ and NV being permitted in the lexicon).

Applying Movement Constraints to BLE RSSI-Based Indoor Positioning for Extracting Valid Semantic Trajectories.

Indoor positioning techniques, owing to received signal strength indicator (RSSI)-based sensors, can provide useful trajectory-based services. These services include user movement analytics, next-to-visit recommendation, and hotspot detection. However, the value of RSSI is often disturbed due to obstacles in indoor environment, such as doors, walls, and furnitures. Therefore, many indoor positioning techniques still extract an invalid trajectory from the disturbed RSSI. An invalid trajectory contains distant or impossible consecutive positions within a short time, which is unlikely in a real-world scenario. In this study, we enhanced indoor positioning techniques with movement constraints on BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) RSSI data to prevent an invalid semantic indoor trajectory. The movement constraints ensure that a predicted semantic position cannot be far apart from the previous position. Furthermore, we can extend any indoor positioning technique using these movement constraints. We conducted comprehensive experimental studies on real BLE RSSI datasets from various indoor environment scenarios. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach effectively extracts valid indoor semantic trajectories from the RSSI data.

Belonging, desire, and queer Iranian diasporic politics

Recent approaches to the study of queer migration politics and diaspora hold significant potential in advancing the study of the geographies of migration. Most notably, they can help illuminate the impossible positions that migrants often occupy; challenge diasporic norms governing cultural authenticity; destabilize conventional understandings of gender, nation, and home; and situate diasporic experiences within present and future possibilities for new ways of expressing intimacy and kinship beyond the limited scope of nationality and citizenship. In this paper, I will argue for a queer intervention on migration studies that critically expands geographic approaches to migration by denaturalizing and complicating approaches to understanding the emotional diasporic experiences of belonging and home. I will think through the usefulness of such approaches in my own ongoing research on debates concerning Iranian diasporic identities and communities in Iranian diasporic cinema. In analyzing two recent films, I argue for the tremendous creative potential of diasporic filmmaking in imagining complex spaces of home and belonging that otherwise seem impossible. Ultimately, I see queer approaches to migration politics and diaspora as having significant creative, critical, and positive potential to understanding how migrants placed in impossible situations create new lives for themselves.

A New Greedy Insertion Heuristic Algorithm with a Multi-Stage Filtering Mechanism for Energy-Efficient Single Machine Scheduling Problems

To improve energy efficiency and maintain the stability of the power grid, time-of-use (TOU) electricity tariffs have been widely used around the world, which bring both opportunities and challenges to the energy-efficient scheduling problems. Single machine scheduling problems under TOU electricity tariffs are of great significance both in theory and practice. Although methods based on discrete-time or continuous-time models have been put forward for addressing this problem, they are deficient in solution quality or time complexity, especially when dealing with large-size instances. To address large-scale problems more efficiently, a new greedy insertion heuristic algorithm with a multi-stage filtering mechanism including coarse granularity and fine granularity filtering is developed in this paper. Based on the concentration and diffusion strategy, the algorithm can quickly filter out many impossible positions in the coarse granularity filtering stage, and then, each job can find its optimal position in a relatively large space in the fine granularity filtering stage. To show the effectiveness and computational process of the proposed algorithm, a real case study is provided. Furthermore, two sets of contrast experiments are conducted, aiming to demonstrate the good application of the algorithm. The experiments indicate that the small-size instances can be solved within 0.02 s using our algorithm, and the accuracy is further improved. For the large-size instances, the computation speed of our algorithm is improved greatly compared with the classic greedy insertion heuristic algorithm.

Motion Classification-Based Fast Motion Estimation for High-Efficiency Video Coding

High efficiency video coding (HEVC), the latest video coding standard, is becoming popular due to its excellent coding performance. However, the significant gain in performance is achieved at the cost of substantially higher encoding complexity than its precedent H.264/AVC, in which motion estimation (ME) is the most time-consuming module that effectively removes temporal redundancy. Test zone search (TZS) is adopted as the default fast ME method in the reference software of HEVC; however, its computational complexity is still too high for real-time applications. Several fast ME algorithms have been recently proposed to further reduce ME complexity; however, these approaches typically lead to non-negligible performance loss. To address this problem, this paper proposes a motion classification-based fast ME algorithm. By exploring the motion relationship of neighboring blocks and the coding cost characteristic, the prediction unit (PU) is first categorized into one of three classes, namely, motion-smooth PU, motion-medium PU and motion-complex PU. Then different search strategies are carefully designed for PUs of each class according to their respective motion and content characteristics. Furthermore, a fast search priority-based partial internal termination scheme is presented to rapidly skip impossible positions that speeds up cost computation during the ME process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves as much as 12.47% and 20.25% reductions in total encoder complexity when compared with TZS under low delay P and random access configuration, respectively, with negligible rate-distortion degradation; thus, it outperforms state-of-the-art fast ME algorithms in terms of both coding performance and complexity reduction.

Introduction: Survival, From the Other End of the Telescope

To survive is messy, elaborate, layered. The metaphysics of deferral are implied by the word's Latinate roots: sur (over) vive (life). Sur-vival, live beyond, implies competition among the living, some who go on and some who, perforce, are survived. Live, survive, preserve, and conserve all share the root vivre, which itself is preserved by its prefixal adaptability. Linguistically, life survives. Its animacy is not merely grammatical but neither is it a guarantee of human living; the root vivre's uptake into multiple frames and fields suggests viral proliferation more than a predictive, grammar-like generation. To survive takes and creates risk, both philologically and materially.If survival has just one affective mode, it might be defiance-the feat and fate of living beings after injury, trauma, war, captivity, and natural disaster. It would also be the survival of words, signals, and germinal states of being in the world that we sometimes call natural, but that also encode the cultural landscape. A topography of ruins, trash, exhaustion, and depletion remains and reminds us of that which lives on after in a state of belatedness that is survival: the afterlife of what was not supposed to remain, that which was to have died, but did not, after all. Survival defies nostalgia, envy, and accusation. Survival in the realm of resources-whether human, animal, or mineral-gives the lie to a necropolitics, forcing the living, those living, and those living on to accede to a call from the future to turn away from that fallen angel of history.Survival is too often the given of living. It is the affordance of the political, that which cannot be not-assumed: no social program welcomes not-surviving. Especially within the contemporary awareness of environ- mental crisis-survival and surviving against the calculations of doom- survival is a directive. It is only in the affirmative, against its negation. And yet, as a combination of instinct and drive, species survival is bound to outlive itself and to produce unrecognizable difference, either through extinction or evolution. Survival contains such impossible positions and awareness. It cannot be properly thought in time, by an individual, or by a species. How does survival work, then, as the never to be negated assumption of a politics? And what is the temporality of survival? It is not predictive, though it is only oriented toward the next moment, a form of future that is not really a future. Ultimately, survival is a will that always fails.To underscore the untimeliness of feminist survival, we revisit for this issue Valerie Solanas's classic SCUM Manifesto (1965). Although hardly in need of rediscovery, SCUM Manifesto has not been understood for its hilarious invocation of a specifically biological rationale for the r/evolutionary (and environmentally salutary) extinction of the male sex. Its winking pseudoscientific language of male genetic abnormality and incompletion (XY is an incomplete XX) and its invitation to enlightened men to relax and enjoy the ride to their demise cast the war of the sexes as one in which gene expression, more than holistically gendered belongings, contends through sexual selection. In this case, women choosing women, the core of lesbian social action, promises an overthrow of sexual reproduction's social power as rooted in patriarchal heterosexuality. Solanas's version of gender essentialism to the death had once challenged even the most radical separatist lesbian-feminism. But to the extent that Solanas's groovy woman-choosing-woman has a contemporary (audience), we might say she has survived her times, only in a ghostly, diminished form. This special issue includes two articles that give SCUM Manifesto new life in the context of feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz's uptake of Darwinian evolution. In Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections of Life, Politics, and Art (2011), Grosz insists on the disruptive potential of female-driven sexual selection as an aesthetic, willful, irrational, noninstrumental force not necessarily coordinate with survival under industrial capitalism, species maintenance, or environmental management. …

Picturing natural girlhoods: nature, space and femininity in girls’ school promotions

This paper furthers a discussion about the ways in which idealised versions of gender permeate the aesthetic presentation and impression management strategies of elite private schools. Specifically, we consider how the written text, layout and images used in 12 Australian private girls' school prospectuses function in constructing discourses of ‘natural’ femininity. Far from being merely factual sources of information, we see school prospectuses as strategic texts that idealise and commodify gendered subjectivities that are likely to appeal to the perceived clientele of a particular school. Drawing on feminist and poststructuralist theoretical frames and utilising social semiotic techniques, we analyse how these promotional texts align the feminine subject with nature and the natural world. This alignment serves the dual function of constituting femininity as naturally beautiful, fragile, passive and vulnerably at-risk, while at the same time ameliorating such risk through more empowered (yet constrained) notions of interconnectedness. The tensions between such contradictory discourses of traditional and neoliberal femininity create impossible subject positions for girls, as in order to succeed with one version of femininity, they must simultaneously fail at another.

Developmental changes of the biomechanical effect in motor imagery

Motor imagery has been investigated in childhood and early adolescence, but not across adolescence stages; moreover, available evidence did not clarify whether the involvement of motor information in mental rotation of body parts becomes stronger or weaker during development. In the present study, we employed the hand laterality task to assess motor imagery in ninety-seven typically developing adolescents divided into three age groups (i.e., 11-12, 14-15, and 17-18 years); mental rotation of objects and letters were also assessed. As a specific marker of the motor involvement in mental rotation of body parts, we assessed the so-called biomechanical effect, that is, the advantage for judging hand pictures showing physically comfortable positions with respect to hand pictures showing physically impossible or awkward positions. Results demonstrated that the biomechanical effect did not significantly affect early adolescents' performance, whereas it became significant in 14- to 15-year-old participants and even more stronger in 17- to 18-year-old participants; this pattern did not depend on an increase in processing speed to mentally rotate both corporeal and non-corporeal (objects and letters) stimuli. The present findings demonstrated that: (1) motor imagery undergoes a continuous and progressive refinement throughout adolescence, and (2) full exploitation of motor information to mentally transform corporeal stimuli can be attained in late adolescence only.

Recovering Hyperbole:

AbstractHyperbole is an easily misunderstood and misused trope, and it is largely unexplored in current rhetorical studies. Yet, at moments within thought and discourse, the excessiveness of hyperbole elicits a constructive, transformative ambiguity that can reveal alternative epistemological and ontological insights. Indeed, hyperbole is often the most effective way of trying to express seemingly impossible and inexpressible positions. I argue for the reexploration and critical examination of hyperbole, and I offer a theoretical framework from which to view texts and discourse from a hyperbolic perspective. I identify the metafunction of hyperbole, and I offer two specific functions of hyperbole. Hyperbole is more than simply an obvious and intentional exaggeration and thus can benefit from an exploration that considers it beyond its traditional tropological limits. It can be engaged as a mode of inquiry in order to delve into the complexities and paradoxes of theo-philosophical discourse, and it can also be appropriated as a critical position from which one might, for example, propose interpretations of various textual expressions that differ from their more normative interpretations.

The State of Play in City Claims against Financial Firms

In 2006, before the subprime mortgage crisis and the collapse of the financial markets, I wrote an article titled Do Cities Have Standing? Redressing the Externalities of Predatory Lending. In the article, I addressed the possibility that cities had standing to recover for the damage that predatory lenders were inflicting on their communities. At the time, exploitative lenders were putting unsophisticated borrowers in loans they could not afford, and many of those borrowers have since lost or will lose their homes.Municipalities were in impossible positions. They were powerless to prevent abusive lending. Only state and federal legislatures and regulators had the authority to restrict unfair loan products; yet the cities bore the burden of unaffordable loans in the form of abandoned property, displaced families, increased demands for police and fire protection, and declining tax revenues.The focus of my article was analyzing the availability of (1) parens patriae standing to cities and (2) city standing based on direct injuries in claims against lenders who engaged in predatory lending. In the course of the article, I also identified potential claims cities could bring and argued for broader municipal standing. Jonathan Entin and Shadya Yazback wrote an article in response to Do Cities Have Standing, in which they echoed my analysis of city standing as parens patriae and as claimants for injuries to their proprietary interests. They also explored the potential for claims under the Fair Housing Act and discussed the role that preemption has played in limiting cities’ ability to directly regulate lenders.Eight years later, we now know more about the role of lenders in exploiting borrowers. We also know more about the impact that exploitative and unfair lending has had on communities. And, most importantly for this essay, several cities have brought lawsuits that test some of the theories I put forth in my original article.

Impaired Imagery for Upper Limbs

The brain processes associated with mental imagery have long been a matter of debate. Neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies have yielded diverging evidence of mental transformation activating the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere, or both. Here, using a mirror/normal discrimination task with rotated body parts (BPs) and external objects (EOs), we describe the case of a patient who developed a selective deficit in mental imagery of such BPs due to left posterior parietal brain damage. In addition, the patient's deficit predominated for pictures of right arms (i.e., arms corresponding to the patient's imagined contralesional arm) and was further characterised by an inability to distinguish between anatomically possible and impossible arm positions. This neuropsychological deficit was corroborated by neuroimaging evidence revealing the absence of activation in the left parietal lobe for the mental rotation of body parts as shown in healthy participants. In contrast, his behavioural performance and brain activation for EOs were similar to those of healthy participants. These data suggest that mental imagery of BPs and EOs relies on different cognitive and neural mechanisms and indicate that the left posterior parietal lobe is a necessary structure for mental transformations of human BPs.

Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture Ian Balfour Tilottama Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky, editors. Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture. SUNY Press2004. 262. US $50.00 A good many people who come terms with Romantic philosophy and literature (which is here understood almost exclusively as German) are divided on the question of Hegel, wanting to distance themselves from any number of impossible or embarrassing positions and postulates in Hegel's corpus, on the one hand, and yet finding in the very same oeuvre a more or less endless source of insight and speculative rigour, not least as the premier thinker of difference. For most of the distinguished contributors to this volume, what is true of Hegel is true to a greater – or usually lesser – extent for the other thinkers addressed here (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Hölderlin, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, etc.): the only palatable idealism would be one shorn of its commitment to or [End Page 146] faith in the Absolute, or even more extreme and almost as unlikely, an idealism looking rather more like what formerly had been its opposite: materialism. Whereas the volume as a whole generally stops or falls short of what Tilottama Rajan calls 'critical materialism,' the contributors are often attentive to the textuality or rhetoric of idealistic thought, reading with and against the grain of their authors, and thus, in theory, are in keeping with what Paul de Man thought of as 'materiality.' Space does not permit even cursory attention to all of the essays in this volume, so I shall highlight some of the more compelling and symptomatic among them. Andrjez Warminski's 'Allegories of the Symbol: On Hegel's Aesthetics' is a probing analysis of that massively influential set of lectures (whose status as a text remains in flux to this day). By concentrating on how the text is structured and on certain confluences among disparate 'moments,' the Greek and the Romantic, the symbolic and the Romantic, Warminksi can show how the performance of the text belies some of its overt pronouncements, as in Hegel's – and the period's – promotion of symbol over allegory. He demonstrates the complexity of Hegel's simultaneous theory and history of aesthetics, though we perhaps wonder whether it is Hegel or just Hegel's more flat-footed readers who have missed the point(s). Tilottama Rajan's 'Toward a Cultural Idealism: Negativity and Freedom in Kant and Hegel' turns productively to the aesthetic, for it is in the aesthetic, alternately marginal and strangely central in Idealism, that a certain 'materiality' cannot be avoided. Rajan succeeds in showing how the twin forces of negativity and freedom work against and with the overarching demands for totality in both thinkers. Philosophy, it seems, cannot 'free' itself from either its fascination with or its dependence on art, and it is art that, pre-eminently, can never completely shed its materiality. In a related vein, Jochen Schulte-Sasse coins the term mediality to focus on how in the Hegel of the Phenomenology truth, which he provocatively calls a 'relative concept' in Hegel, is so inexorably bound up with the negativity and the work of (self-) consciousness and their unfolding in language such that Hegel's thinking of the medium, of mediality, recasts older notions of ontology almost altogether. To the volume's central preoccupation with Hegel, any number of counter-Hegelian figures constitute a refreshing contrast: Gary Hand-werk stresses the anti-foundation character of Friedrich Schlegel's historiography, and Joel Faflak underscores Schopenhauer's insistence on the body, which, as a seething mass of impulses and desires, poses a threat to any totalizing philosophy that would operate only in the ethereal realm of 'spirit.' Jan Plug points us, following Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, and before them, Maurice Blanchot, to the destabilizing force of the new concept of 'literature' in the period, which, by absolutizing itself, [End Page 147] threatened to render obsolete the time-honoured renditions of what used to pass as the Absolute. Still, it is the de-absolutizing of Hegel, as in Arkady Plotnitsky's intriguing reading of him in relation to Deleuze's vision of the baroque, that remains the core of this volume and...

Epilogue: Global Football

The Prologue to this collection of essays ended rather tongue‐in‐cheek with the suggestion that being against global capitalism and pro‐football were two impossible positions to maintain. If there ...

Exercise, effort, and limb position sense

The importance of the sense of proprioception (literally, the perception of position) was made most forcefully in the book by Jonathon Cole about a patient who, overnight, lost his sense of where his limbs were in relation to his body ([1][1]). The title of this fascinating book, Pride and a Daily

Cerebral processes in mental transformations of body parts: Recognition prior to rotation

There is growing evidence that the visual processing of human body stimuli is particular and distinct from that of other objects. This is due to implicit knowledge of anatomical and biomechanical constraints of the human body. The question arises whether body stimuli in which biomechanical constraints are violated are processed in the same way as realistic bodies. This study investigated the neural mechanisms of anatomically plausible and implausible body stimuli. Event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded in healthy participants during mental rotation of body parts. Subjects were shown pictures of body parts or whole bodies in which one element (finger, arm) could be anatomically accurate or inaccurate (e.g., left forearm attached to right upper arm). Furthermore, the body parts were rotated in 7 different orientations, from 0° to 180° in 30° increments, resulting in some possible and some impossible positions of the body parts. Analysis of the 123-channel ERPs was carried out by determining the successive segments of stable map topographies and comparing them between conditions. A particular segment appeared in the case of anatomically impossible postures at 190–230 ms followed by a segment reflecting mental rotation at 310–380 ms. Anatomically implausible positions are thus detected at a very early stage, before mental rotation occurs. Source estimations derived from the topographic data indicated that left occipital, bilateral frontal and two medial areas were activated in the case of impossible postures, whereas left parietal regions were strongly activated during mental rotation. This result contrasts with mental rotation of objects, which is considered to be a right parietal process.

Chinese writing system and learning to read

One of the obvious characteristics of the Chinese writing system is its visual complexity. How do children develop their reading and writing ability in such a system? The areas we address in the present study include: (1) The basic unit in character recognition and writing of Chinese children. (2) The role of familiarity of components and the position frequency of components in character recognition and writing. In the first experiment, the subjects were first‐, second‐, fourth‐, and sixth‐graders. Children were asked to delay copy five types of characters: familiar single characters, familiar compound characters, unfamiliar compounds with familiar components, unfamiliar compounds with unfamiliar components, and noncharacters, with the components in impossible positions. The results show that older children were affected more by the familiarity and the position frequency of components in the delayed copy task. In the second experiment, the subjects were from the same grades. Children were asked to carry out lexical decision for five types of characters: real compound characters, pseudocharacters with well‐formed structure and real components, noncharacters with ill‐formed structure but real components, and noncharacters with well‐formed structure but nonreal components. The results show that children can be aware of the ill‐formed structure early, and become aware of well‐formed structure but nonreal components as they grow older. The results suggest that the component of character is the basic unit in children's lexical representation. Familiarity of components and the position frequency of components in characters affect children's character recognition and writing.

The body-inversion effect.

Researchers argue that faces are recognized via the configuration of their parts. An important behavioral finding supporting this claim is the face-inversion effect, in which inversion impairs recognition of faces more than nonface objects. Until recently, faces were the only class of objects producing the inversion effect for untrained individuals. This study investigated whether the inversion effect extends to human body positions, a class of objects whose exemplars are structurally similar to each other. Three experiments compared the recognition of upright and inverted faces, houses, and body positions using a forced-choice, same/different paradigm. For both reaction time and error data, the recognition of possible human body postures was more affected by inversion than the recognition of houses. Further, the recognition of possible human body postures and recognition of faces showed similar effects of inversion. The inversion effect was diminished for impossible body positions that violated the biomechanical constraints of human bodies. These data suggest that human body positions, like faces, may be processed configurally by untrained viewers.

Representation of anatomical constraints in motor imagery: Mental rotation of a body segment

Classically, the mental rotation paradigm has shown that when subjects are asked to judge whether objects that differ in orientation are spatially congruent, reaction times increase with angular discrepancy, although some reports have shown that this is not always the case. Would similar results be obtained with realistic figures of body segments? In this work, the mental rotation of a hand attached to its forearm and arm in anatomically possible and impossible starting positions is compared with the mental rotation of a hammer. The main results show that reaction times increase monotonically with the angle of discrepancy for both stimuli and that the speed of rotation is higher for anatomically possible orientations in the case of the hand. Thus, mental rotation of body segments follows the same empirical rules as objects of another nature, and biomechanical constraints imposed to the motility of these segments can be considered as attributes of the mental representation.

Computer aided shot reconstructions by means of individualized animated three-dimensional victim models

In cases of lethal firearm injuries with indefinite indications concerning self-versus third-party infliction a computer enhanced reconstruction with the aim of an anatomical feasibility study can provide significant clues concerning the course of the traumatic event. To this end an exact three-dimensional geometrical model of the victim including all relevant anatomical data as well as the careful documentation of the injuries and a three-dimensional model of the characteristic outlines of the weapon true to scale is generated with the help of an animation program (POSER Version 4, Meta Creation, Egisys AG). With this animated digital three-dimensional model of the victim and the weapon a series of simulation sequences is created by variation of the body positions and the grasp of the weapon. Anatomically impossible positions in view of the physical characteristics of the victim and the site and direction of the bullet path are automatically excluded from the reconstruction. An exact match of the simulation sequence and the real injuries is a statement for a possible self-infliction of the gunshot wound.