Authenticity Of Objects Research Articles

Application of instrumental neutron activation analysis for the examination of oil pigments

Abstract This study is to investigate the applicability of instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) as a non-destructive examination tool for the quantitative chemical composition analysis associated with authentication, restoration and conservation of art objects in the field of cultural heritage. The quantitative analysis of major, minor and trace elements in Rembrandt´s® oil pigments recently collected at the Korean market as one of the art objects was carried out using INAA facilities of the HANARO research reactor at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute in collaboration with the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea. Analytical quality control was implemented using NIST SRM 2709, certified reference materials and metal standards. The analytical results for seventeen characteristic elements of thirty-one measured elements were statistically treated to identify the characteristic correlations and patterns between color and source of oil pigment and similarity degree of constituents using a cluster and discriminate analysis.

Participation in IAEA proficiency test exercise on major, minor and trace elements in ancient Chinese ceramic (IAEA-CU-2006-06) using low power research reactor

A proficiency test (PT) exercise was offered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for major, minor and trace elements in Chinese ceramic reference material (IAEA-CU-2006-06). Neutron activation analysis (NAA) laboratory at PINSTECH, Pakistan participated in the exercise and submitted the results for 28 elements. The aim of participation was to develop a suitable methodology for accurate measurement of as many elements as possible in ceramic material using a low power reactor (PARR-2) as this would help future investigation in a project on the authenticity of art objects, for provenance, conservation and management of ancient cultural heritage of the country. After receiving the final report of the PT exercise, a critical review of our data and final scoring of each element is made to check the suitability of our methodology and reliability of the acquired data. Most of the reported results passed different statistical evaluation criterion such as relative bias, z-score and u-scores and ratio of our results and IAEA target values. One element (Yb) falls in the unacceptable range of relative bias and z-scores. Hf and Tb showed slightly high z-scores within the questionable range. Ho, Mo and Sn were determined during this study but their results were not submitted to the IAEA. The confidence of accuracy observed for most of the elements in ceramic material has made it mandatory to report their results as information values.

Thinking and practice of animal ethology in study of Cold and Hot nature of traditional Chinese medicine

From the view of macroscopic animal ethology combined with computer and modem image processing technique, by monitoring the temperature tropism of animal affected by traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) with different Cold and Hot natures and obtaining many behavior parameters which were difficult to assess in direct observation, the differences between the Cold and Hot nature of TCM were evaluated and presented. This method could real-time, intuitively and objectively, qualitatively and quantitatively monitor the temperature tropism of experimental animals with no disturbance. Further, the Cold and Hot nature of TCM can be expressed from the whole animal level. This method met to the application peculiarity of TCM and suited for the TCM theoretical system. It is a attempt for the study of drug nature of TCM. It also contributed to elucidate the objective authenticity and scientific connotation of Cold and Hot nature of TCM, and express the inherent connection of this nature and the temperature tropism of animal. In this review, a new point and technology platform was provided for establishing an objective method for evaluating the Cold and Hot nature of TCM, which are corresponding with the feature of the application of TCM.

The use of thermal analysis methods for authentication and conservation state determination of historical and/or cultural objects manufactured from leather

Leather products have been useful materials since the dawn of human history. Many leathers objects are valuable treasures due to the history they represent, and their preservation challenges museum custodians and private collectors alike. In this article, the applications of thermal analysis methods (Micro Hot Table (MHT), thermogravimetry/derivative thermogravimetry (TG/DTG), dynamic scanning calorimetry (DSC), differential thermal analysis (DTA), and dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA)) for the characterization of the recently manufactured and old leathers are presented. These methods can be used for the assessment of deterioration degree of leathers, and, therefore, the data obtained by these techniques could be useful for achievement of the suitable preservation procedures as well as the effects of conservation treatments. In addition, it was pointed out that these methods are suitable for qualitative distinction between the recently manufactured leathers and heritage items.

Dinosaurs in Thai Culture and Tourism

Dinosaurs are extinct, but enjoy a great popularity in contemporary popular culture, as fierce monsters or amiable “dinos.” Various dinosaur sites around the world are popular tourist attractions. While tourists' engagement with living animals has attracted growing attention in tourism studies, “dinosaur tourism” has been little investigated. The article points out the peculiarities of tourist engagement with an extinct species, particularly with regard to the (objective) authenticity of various dinosaur attractions. In a case study of the emergence and development of dinosaur tourism in Thailand, the penetration of the dinosaur culture into the country, the discovery of dinosaur fossils, and the establishment of different types of dinosaur attractions, specifically excavation sites, museums, and theme parks, are discussed. The article focuses on the most popular type of attractions, the dinosaur museums, in which “authentic reproductions” of dinosaurs are exhibited. The museums have been at first established by the national authorities in the vicinity of major dinosaur finds in the Northeast of the country, in an effort to develop tourism to the region. The provinces harboring the principal dinosaur finds, and the Northeast (Isan) region as a whole, were branded Thailand's “Land of Dinosaurs.” The museums became popular with domestic visitors, but failed to attract significant numbers of foreign ones, owing to their relative remoteness and isolation. A recent trend is noted to establish new, more centrally located dinosaur museums, away from the dinosaur excavations, but closer to major population concentrations.

Designing Digital Preservation Solutions: A Risk Management-Based Approach

Digital preservation aims to keep digital objects accessible over long periods of time, ensuring the authenticity and integrity of these digital objects. In such complex environments, Risk Management is a key factor in assuring the normal behaviour of systems over time. Currently, the digital preservation arena commonly uses Risk Management concepts to assess repositories. In this paper, we intend to go further and propose a perspective where Risk Management can be used not only to assess existing solutions, but also to conceive digital preservation environments. Thus, we propose a Risk Management-based approach to design and assess digital preservation environments, including:• the definition of context and identification of strategic objectives to determine specific requirements and characterize which consequences are acceptable within the identified context;• the identification, analysis and evaluation of threats and vulnerabilities that may affect the normal behaviour of a specific business or the achievement of the goals and conformance to the requirements identified in the context characterization; and, • definition of actions to deal with the risks associated with the identified threats and vulnerabilities.We generalize and survey the main requirements, threats, vulnerabilities and techniques that can be applied in the scope of digital preservation.

Revisiting authenticity: A Social Realist Approach

MacCannell’s thesis of tourism incorporates two implied inter-linked concepts of authenticity, which we refer to as relationship and object authenticities. Underpinned by the social realist perspective, we argue for authenticity to be conceptualized solely as object authenticity, delinked from other concepts. The concept is developed through critically examining MacCannell’s thesis and Cohen’s development of it; explicating the concept and scrutinizing the various senses of the word authenticity pertaining to it; extending the scope of tourist objects beyond the social-cultural-historical horizon; and explaining how the concept can accommodate a role for construction and discourse. The concept is then situated within the contemporary discursive field in tourism research concerning authenticity, underlining the importance of recognizing the different natures of the various conceptions.

Secure embedded verification of print signatures

This work aims to embed an object authentication process in a secure electronic architecture for distant verification via imaging. Firstly, the extraction of print signatures [1] is revisited for an implementation in a logical hardware system. Secondly, a protocol scheme to authenticate the verification device and to ensure its integrity is suggested.

‘The truth is out there! Not!’: Shameless and the moral structures of contemporary social realism

This paper will examine the British drama series Shameless (C4, 2004–) within the context of British social realism, particularly as it was reflected in British television drama. In doing so, it will trace social realism's origins in 1930s documentaries through to its incarnation in television soap opera like Coronation Street (Granada, 1960–), single plays like Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966), and to the newer forms of ‘contemporary social realism’ found in more recent examples such as Clocking Off (BBC, 2000–2003). It will particularly focus on the narrative and filmic perspective of traditional social realism, arguing that it tended to create a portrayal of the British working class from the point of view of the social outsider or ‘cultural tourist’. In contrast, it will argue that Shameless is an example of a new kind of TV drama that attempts to portray the working class (or more accurately, the post-industrial ‘underclass’) from the point of view of the ‘insider’, self-reflexively drawing attention to its own ambiguous claims of verisimilitude. In particular, it will show how the drama's construction of various narrative perspectives means that the objective authenticity of its view of life on this northern ‘sink-estate’ is consistently undermined; the very notion of an objective and impartial ‘reality’ challenged by a number of contrasting and contradictory discourses that profoundly distinguish it from the original moral structures that defined British social realism in the past.

EXPERIENCING FILM TOURISM: Authenticity & Fellowship

Authenticity, existential authenticity, sincerity, hyperreality and simulacra are overlapping concepts often used in accounting for the tourist experience. This study discusses these concepts in the context of a case study of Lord of the Rings film-induced tourism to New Zealand. Findings support an elaborated and extended version of authenticity that incorporates aspects of object and existential authenticity, sincerity of relationships and embodied experiences of place. These factors underpin tourists’ judgments and experiences of authenticity. Links are drawn between this analysis and the theoplacity framework for religious pilgrimage. It is concluded that value emanates not only from objects or sights but also from the moments of embodied interaction with place and others, which actively constitute those objects and sights.

An Institutional Framework for Creating Authentic Digital Objects

In the future, a scholar or researcher will want to know that a digital object is trusted - that it is authentic and reliable. Digital objects can be surrogates, resulting from a digitization process, or they can be objects whose only form is digital. Much has been accomplished in existing open source digital library platforms to provide capabilities for preserving digital objects including now ubiquitous features such as persistent identifiers, integrity checks, audit trails, and versioning. However, achieving a level of digital object authenticity will require a multi-dimensional approach involving policies, processes, and continued technological innovation. This paper proposes steps that the institution can take to insure the availability of authentic digital objects in the future. In this proposal, authenticity is based on definitions from archival diplomatics and relies on methods from public key cryptography for digitally signing an object with a secure time stamp. Trustworthy processes, re-definition of traditional roles, and the implementation of technologies to support authenticity are all required to meet the needs of digital scholarship. Implementation and policy issues are discussed with specific attention to transformations required of the archival institution and the professional archivist.

Study and progress of the thermoluminescence dating of the ancient pottery and porcelain

Two standard methods, the “fine-grain technique” and the “quartz inclusion technique”, and a new method, the pre-dose saturation exponential technique in thermoluminescence (TL) dating of ancient pottery and porcelain were reviewed, especially for the measurement of the paleodose and the annual dose. The two standard methods have been acknowledged in domain of TL dating and are used widely for age determination in archaeology and geology. As a dating tool the TL technique has been of great success in authentication of ancient ceramic art objects. However, a few complicated factors limit the precision and accuracy in age determination. These complicated factors are analyzed and discussed. Therefore, although ceramic TL dating can in general solve the problem of authentication of ancient ceramics, there are still complexities that require further research and study.

Laser induced micro-photoluminescence of marble and application to authenticity testing of ancient objects

For the last 70 years, the authenticity of disputable marble objects has been tested by using a black light lamp. According to empirical observations “fresh marbles are purple while ancient ones are blue under the lamp”. This discrimination lacks scientific basis but is very popular because sculptured stone dating is impossible. This work aims to test the reliability of the “UV method” by studying the laser excited photoluminescence (PL) of marble surfaces. An argon ion laser beam was focused through a microscope objective onto the sample, offering a PL spatial resolution of 3 μm. Newly-cut marbles show an intense emission at 610 nm ascribed to Mn2+ and a less intense one at 390 nm. Excavated surfaces show the 610 nm emission and a broadband (380–530 nm) one. Similar broadband emissions due to humic (HAs) and fulvic acids (FAs) are typical in soil PL spectra and were observed in the spectra of samples taken from the soil surrounding the excavated surfaces. Additionally, electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectra of excavated surfaces show a peak at g=2.0045, typical in calcite doped with humic acids. We presume that the 380–550 nm emission originates from HA and FA salts existing in the infiltrated soil or the recrystallised calcite developed in marble patinas. Finally, the application of the “UV method” on twelve ancient and modern surfaces proved that the technique is only partly reliable and should be used together with other analytical techniques.

Commentary: Beyond Authenticity: Exploring Intimacy in the Touristic Encounter in Thailand

ABSTRACT This paper explores various interpretations of authenticity as they are described by the actors involved in hill-tribe trekking tourism in northern Thailand. By considering the ways that tourists interpret authenticity through their own experiences, it may be possible to gain a deeper understanding about the curious motivations for participation in the lives of Others. This research has shown that how tourists interpret an ‘authentic’ experience is highly correlated with their ability to procure an intimate encounter with the toured Karen people. Ultimately, the intimate experience supersedes the desire for object authenticity, which may be perceived as superficial or secondary to the more humanist desire for reciprocal interaction.

Confrontations/Accommodations: German-Jewish Literary and Cultural Relations from Heine to Wassermann (review)

Confrontations/Accommodations: German-Jewish Literary and Cultural Relations from Heine to Wassermann, edited by Mark H. Gelber. Conditio Judaica, vol. 46. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004. 288 pp. euro66.00. The essays collected in this volume honor Jeffrey L. Sammons on the occasion of his retirement from Yale University. The Leavenworth Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures since 1979 and a faculty member at Yale since 1964, Sammons has written widely and wisely on topics dealing primarily with German literature of the nineteenth century, although he has also contributed a volume on the seventeenth-century mystic writer Angelus Silesius, essays on various authors from the eighteenth century, and a monograph on literary sociology. The focus in his scholarship has not been exclusively German-Jewish authors, but his extensive preoccupation with one of the greatest Jewish authors in the German canon, Heinrich Heine, justifies a Festschrift devoted to the confrontations and accommodations of Jews in Germany. Appropriately the first eight of the fourteen essays deal with Heine or events and authors contemporary with Heine. In the opening essay on Lessing and Heine, Jocelyn Kolb takes exception to the recent trend in Heine scholarship that explores the writer's Jewish identity, directing our attention instead to the figurative sense in which Heine identified with his Jewish heritage, one that entails wit and critique, and that places Heine in the proximity of both Nathan, Lessing's exemplary Jewish hero, and Nathan's creator. Dealing with the writings of Heine's last years, Roger Cook proposes that Heine did not affirm a Judeocentric view in his late works, but rather rethought the modern world from the perspective of his own diasporic existence. The volume's editor, Mark Gelber, demonstrates how Heine-and antisemitic writers later in the century-participates in the construction of the noble Sephardic Jew as an alternative to the degenerate or degenerating Ashkenaz in The Rabbi from Bacherach. The director of the Heinrich-Heine Institute in Dusseldorf, Joseph Kruse, provides insight on the difficulties of ascertaining the authenticity of objects and documents that can shed light on Heine's biography, in particular his early years, about which we know relatively little. And Hiroshi Kiba examines the criticism leveled against Goethe in the writings of Heine and his contemporary, Ludwig Borne, speculating that their relationship to Goethe was affected by problems of Jewish emancipation in early nineteenth-century Germany. Dieter Lamping's essay is the first to abandon the exclusive focus on Heine, but it does remain within the period during which Heine wrote. Lamping is concerned with Bornes internationalism as the most important facet of his political critique. Mark Webber's contribution is more historical in nature. He examines a dispute known as the Kolner Kirchenstreit (Cologne Church Dispute), which dealt ostensibly with controversies between Catholics and Protestants, and which was initiated to some extent by the conservative Catholic Joseph Gorres. …

Reconceptualizing object authenticity

The study of tourism has made authenticity a scholarly issue but without even a hint of consensus about what the concept represents. Is it a property of toured objects and events, or a state of mind, or a mode of being toward tourism? Is it objective or experiential, universal or personal, in the eye of the beholder or defined by hosts or marketers? This paper explores all these questions by surveying tourism literature. It focuses on object authenticity, a term used for the genuineness of artifacts and events. It concludes that scholars should abandon the concept and the term because there is no common ground as to their existence, meaning, or importance.

An Adaptive Compressed MPEG-2 Video Watermarking Scheme

Digital watermarking is becoming more and more important for protecting the authenticity of multimedia objects as they become easier to copy, exchange, and modify. Several watermarking schemes have been proposed in recent years, but most of them deal with still images, only some being extended over to the temporal domain for video watermarking. But again most of those approaches are applied to uncompressed video processing domain. In the subject paper, a new compressed video watermarking procedure is proposed. The developed method embeds several binary images, decomposed from a single watermark image, into different scenes of a video sequence. The spatial spread spectrum watermark is embedded directly into the compressed bit streams by modifying discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients. In order to embed the watermark with minimum loss in image fidelity, a visual mask based on local image characteristics is incorporated. Extensive experimental simulations demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme is substantially more effective and robust against spatial attacks such as scaling, rotation, frame averaging, and filtering, besides temporal attacks like frame dropping and temporal shifting.

Preserving the Authenticity of Contingent Digital Objects

Preserving the Authenticity of Contingent Digital Objects

Integrated procedure of meteorological classification of objects and estimation of their information parameters

Considered are the results of investigation of classification of methods and algorithm with given authenticity of meteorological objects received by radar sounding with point or interval estimation of the parameters of surveillance objects (for example, rain clouds). Shown is the use of method of statistic theory of hypothesis checking for classification of rain and shower clouds. The results of investigation can be used for working out conditions of radar remote sounding, calibration and testing of designed instruments and programme parts, means of maintenance support systems of radar sounding meteorological objects

A new technique in retrospective TL dosimetry: Pre-dose effect in the 230°C TL glow peak of porcelain

We have observed that the 230°C TL glow peak in porcelain possesses the same pre-dose properties as the 110°C TL glow peak in quartz. The pre-dose effect is the increase in TL radiation sensitivity observed after irradiation and subsequent heating of quartz and the increase is proportional to the total absorbed radiation dose prior to heating. It is a useful technique in dating and authentication of art objects as well as in retrospective dosimetry after radiation accidents. The disadvantage of the 110°C pre-dose peak is that it rapidly becomes non-linear and can only be used for doses less than 1 Gy. Porcelain contains quartz and exhibits both the 110°C TL glow peak and a peak at 230°C. Both peaks are observed to have approximately the same amplitude when using narrow band blue filters. The thermal activation properties, radiation dose response and dosimetric applicability of 230°C pre-dose TL glow peak of porcelain were investigated, and we found that it has the same TL properties as the 110°C peak but has advantages for dose evaluation due to its longer half-life and linearity up to a dose of 3 Gy.