Path Of People Research Articles

A General Framework for Tracking Multiple People from a Moving Camera

In this paper, we present a general framework for tracking multiple, possibly interacting, people from a mobile vision platform. To determine all of the trajectories robustly and in a 3D coordinate system, we estimate both the camera's ego-motion and the people's paths within a single coherent framework. The tracking problem is framed as finding the MAP solution of a posterior probability, and is solved using the reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJ-MCMC) particle filtering method. We evaluate our system on challenging datasets taken from moving cameras, including an outdoor street scene video dataset, as well as an indoor RGB-D dataset collected in an office. Experimental evidence shows that the proposed method can robustly estimate a camera's motion from dynamic scenes and stably track people who are moving independently or interacting.

Arboreal Politics in the Knight's Tale

Arboreal Politics in the <i>Knight's Tale</i>

Female paths to adulthood in a country of ‘genderless gender’

In this article the life history of a young Finnish woman, Salla, is explored along with reflections of her best friend and other peers. The analysis is conducted from the perspective of Finland as a country of ‘genderless gender’, where mute or hidden gendering and sexualisation converge with the gender-neutral rhetoric about the individual self. Structural and individual understandings of ambivalence are used to analyse Salla's tensions when she tries to realise her own expectations and those of the Finnish context. Ambivalence appears in relation to education, in relation to heterosexual partnerships, career and family as well as in relation to Finland as a country of genderless gender with a myth of gender equality. The article draws from an ethnographically grounded longitudinal life historical study on young people's paths to adulthood.

The People's Path: Conflict and Cooperation in the Acquisition of the Appalachian Trail

AbstractWhen Congress passed the National Trails Act of 1968, the Appalachian Trail shifted from being a regional grassroots endeavor to being part of the national park system. As the National Park...

Controlling the movement of crowds in computer graphics by using the mechanism of particle swarm optimization

This paper presents a uniform conceptual model to co-operate with particle swarm optimization (PSO) for controlling the movement of crowds in computer graphics. According to the PSO mechanism, each particle in the swarm adopts the information to automatically find a path from the initial position to the optimum. However, PSO aims to obtain the optimal solution instead of the searching path, while the purpose of this work concentrates on the control of the crowd movement, which is composed of the generated searching paths of particles. Hence, in order to generate seemingly natural, appropriate paths of people in a crowd, we propose a model to work with the computational facilities provided in PSO. Compared to related approaches previously presented in the literature, the proposed model is simple, uniform, and easy to implement. The results of the conducted simulations demonstrate that the coupling of PSO and the proposed technique can generate appropriate non-deterministic, non-colliding paths for the use in computer graphics for several different scenarios, including static and dynamic obstacles, moving targets, and multiple crowds.

Resources and (in(ter))dependence

The lives of young people are lived in the context of social changes associated with neo-liberal politics. In neo-liberalism, individuals are considered autonomous units who steer their own futures, and the transition from youth into adulthood is understood as a change from dependence into independence from family ties. It has been assumed that autonomy is the endpoint of this development. Yet this approach has turned out to be too restricted. Several studies suggest that the family still remains a significant component in the social, educational, emotional and material lives of young people. Parents are important resources in young people's paths to adulthood. In this article, we discuss changing reflections of young Finnish women and men on their relationships with their parents. We analyze parents as providers of material resources, as well as emotional and social ones, in order to facilitate the transition to adulthood. We suggest that whilst young people are willing to move from semi-dependence to independence in relation to material resources, in emotional and social terms they strive for interdependence. We came to know these young people in an ethnographic study when they began secondary school. This article draws from re-interviews with the same young people at the ages of 17–18 and 19–20.

School Grades And Other Resources: The “Failing Boys” Discourse Revisited

Worry about the poor school achievement of boys is one of the current travelling discourses that is repeated in one country after another. One of the assumptions that is taken for granted is that school achievement, as it is displayed in school grades, has dramatic effects on young people's paths to further education, the labour market or society at large. It has also been taken for granted that these effects are the same for young men and for young women. I challenge this assumption drawing on the educational paths of a several young people living in Helsinki, following them from the age of 13 to 20–24. I discuss how they themselves construct their lives within the positions that are available, how they interpret their achievements and failures, and what resources they use. I suggest that some resources are gendered. I argue that for young men in the current Finnish educational and political context, school grades are not as important as for young women. This paper draws from an ethnographically grounded longitudinal life history study called Tracing Transitions—Follow‐up Study of Post‐Sixteen Students.

Illuminating cases: understanding the economic burden of illness through case study household research

Understanding the economic burden of illness for households can inform pro-poor health and social protection policy, yet research is in its infancy and appropriate methods require further debate. Quantitative studies are powerful when applied to the right health policy questions, including the measurement of illness cost burden indicators. However, this paper argues that not all dimensions of economic burden can be measured easily, some dimensions relevant to policy, such as social actors' responses to illness and their strategies to cope with illness costs, cannot be reduced to quantitative indicators at all, and large-scale surveys may overlook context-specific processes operating at household level that influence people's paths in and out of poverty as a result of illness. This leaves scope for longitudinal case-study household research to enhance understanding of economic burden and provide additional policy insights on how to better protect households from cost burdens and improve resilience. Drawing on the experience of research in urban Sri Lanka, the paper sets out several comparative advantages of case study research in this area. First, it complemented household survey data by revealing the complex and dynamic nature of illness costs and how these cost patterns (for example, sudden cost peaks) influenced household ability to manage costs. Secondly, it improved understanding of vulnerability or resilience to illness costs by capturing the diverse resources, within and outside the household, used by people to cope with illness costs, and the social institutions and decision-making processes that influenced access to them. Thirdly, the cases enabled the research to develop a picture of the inter-connected factors mediating the impact of illness on livelihood outcomes.

A Protean Look at the Russian Proteus: Pushkin Studies in Its Maturity

Stephanie Sandler's new book, which covers vast tracts of cultural and literary history through the optic of Pushkin veneration, is big and ambitious and, one is tempted to say, polymorphous. Refusing to dodge the first-person pronoun in its engagement with an awesome cultural institution, it comfortably spills over its boundaries as strict scholarly tome. At the same time, Commemorating Pushkin seems ever aware, in a tone both respectful and probing, of who and what has come before along this people's path that is anything but overgrown with the weeds of neglect. Pushkin museums; Pushkin anniversaries; films about Pushkin; the Pushkin studied (and created) by later poets and writers; ingenious interventions into classic texts; a viewpoint that chooses as interlocutors the finest commentators and thinkers from two centuries and two quite different cultural backgrounds and epistemes (Russian/Western, philological/postmodern, and so on)-it is all here. Sandler's writing is mature, confident, humane. Another distinct pleasure of this book is that it comes buttressed with a massive scholarly apparatus: a hundred pages of reference matter, replete with scores of subtly argued explanatory notes that alone are worth the price of admission. At a time when scholarly publishing is seriously ailing (if not worse), Commemorating Pushkin gives us some reason to hope. Structurally, Commemorating Pushkin breaks down into an Introduction, seven chapters, and an Afterword. Introduction sets the stage, skillfully pointing out the paradoxes inherent in the Pushkin myth-the obsession with the poet's death versus the insistence that he lives, the public (our) Pushkin versus the private (my) Pushkin, etc. It then gets things started with readings of two poems, The Prophet (Prorok, 1826) and I have built myself a monument (Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig, 1836), that themselves have played key roles in mythologizing their author. Does Pushkin see himself as prophet (A la Soloviev), as poet tout court (a secular being), or as somehow straddling both? Chapter 1 establishes an immediate posthumous context by examining elegies of Lermontov (The Death of the Poet [Smert' poeta, 1837]), Zhukovsky (He was lying

When Parallel Lives Intersect: Experiencing Multiple Perspectives in Our Own Journeys

As we travel through life, our journeys offer myriad observations, relationships, and experiences. By chance and choice, our journeys align closely with and are guided by other people's journeys; from these associations we form a sense of our individual cultural characteristics and self-identities. Simultaneously, our journeys follow courses that remain distant and distinct from other people's paths; yet our observations and interpretations from afar also contribute strongly to the formulation of individual cultural characteristics and self-identities. Throughout life's dynamic encounters and events, each of us continues to formulate, reformulate, and negotiate our self-identities as we traverse what seems like parallel paths-journeys that appear distant and distinct from other journeys, yet encountering equally powerful influences shaping our thoughts, beliefs, and actions. Rarely are we afforded the opportunities to investigate these parallel paths and communicate honestly with individuals who seemed far away and foreign; seldom can we truly experience multiple perspectives and cross-cultural relationships in our own journeys. This article presents the unique intersection of two parallel lives and the authentic exchange of multiple perspectives reported through narrative or personal life histories. The authors serendipitously met at a National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) conference and by chance shared their childhood stories. The authors were raised in similar environments but from opposite lifestyles -lifestyles that paralleled one another and contributed significantly to their individual understanding of cultural characteristics and self-identity. Here they share their histories spanning 50 years while providing insights and guidelines for teachers and teacher educators to learn from our pasts and reshape our futures.

Storytelling Neighborhood

This article develops and tests a communication infrastructure model of belonging among dwellers of urban residential environments. The concept of a communication infrastructure—a storytelling system set in its communication action context—is discussed. Storytelling neighborhood, the communication process through which neighborhood discussion transforms people from occupants of a house to members of a neighborhood, is proposed as an essential component of people's paths to belonging, an attachment to a residential area that is evidenced in everyday exchange behaviors. A multimethod research design is employed to study seven residential areas in Los Angeles through the use of multilingual data collection to discover the relevant factors that determine belonging in new and old immigrant communities. A communication infrastructure model that posits storytelling as an intervening process between structural location and belonging is proposed and tested. Overall, the most important factor in creating belonging was found to be an active and integrated storytelling system that involves residents, community organizations, and local media. The diagnostic potentials of the communication infrastructure approach and the policy implications of the findings are discussed.

Pathways to Opportunity: The Role of Race, Social Networks, Institutions, and Neighborhood in Career and Educational Paths for People on Welfare

The ongoing struggle over welfare reform hinges on debate over which factors cause joblessness and poverty. Conservative scholars blame lack of work experience and a culture of poverty while liberals focus on lack of skills and structural inequality. Through a synthesis of six interrelated research studies conducted between 1992 and 1996, this paper examines the relationship between macro- and micro-level factors in the career and training paths of welfare recipients. The study illustrates the utility of a holistic, anthropological approach to the study of poverty. The studies found four distinct groups: 1) limited work experience; 2) low-skill workers; 3) displaced workers; and 4) immigrants and refugees. Social networks played a powerful role in the life histories of each group. Using a combination of statistics and ethnography, the article discusses different career and training paths for each group. The relationship between training and work experience for each group shows the nuances among training p...