Details Of Scene Research Articles

Venus and Mars: Engendering Love and War in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)

Reviews 209 'Mercy, moderation and charity', says the author of the sources, 'do not meet the historian at every turn' (p. 154). Logan himself has incorporated these missing virtues into this most compelling book. Megan Cassidy Department of History University of Melbourne Lynch, Andrew and Philippa Maddern, eds., Venus and Mars: Engendering Love and War in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Nedlands, University of Western Australia Press, 1995; paper; pp. viii, 214; 24 plates; R.R.P. AUS$24.95. The ten essays assembled in this volume derive from the second annual conference of the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group, held in M a y 1993. Individually, the papers cover a wide range of periods and issues; collectively, they leave the reader with a powerful sense of men's long struggle to distance and control the feminine both within and outside themselves. And it is much more 'the feminine' at issue here than actual females. Only Patricia Crawford's 'Friendship and Love between W o m e n in Early M o d e m England' focuses on 'real' women. The friendships that Crawford's painstaking research has uncovered have a pleasant ordinariness; even the exchanges that invoke the language and perhaps even the activity of physical love between w o m e n carry a tone of playfulness and affection alien to the overheated male imaginings surveyed in most of the other papers. This book made m e realise, in a way I had never confronted before, how much Venus as well as Mars is a personification of male fantasies and dilemmas, and how intimately they are related. These essays show how, in using force to establish precise cultural boundaries of maleness and femaleness, men rendered themselves perpetually vulnerable to their own fantasies of female transgression. Perhaps it is some primal guilt for usurping the mother (what could be called an Orestes complex?) that creates the anxiety out of which these fantasies emerge. Any perceived challenge to male power becomes sexualised; any sexual initiative becomes a challenge to male power. The contrast between the woman's perception of her own wholeness and 210 Reviews the male urge to dichotomise and demonise femaleness comes out most starkly in Stephanie Tarbin's '"Pucelle de Dieu" or "Wicche of Fraunce": Fifteenth-Century Perceptions of Joan of Arc' Joan's enemies easily dismissed her as witch and whore, but even her supporters were stymied by her combination of humility, virginity, claims to divine authority, and assumption of male clothes and roles. It would be almost humorous, if it were not also so sad, to hear comrades such as the Duke d'Alencon earnestly testifying that Joan must have been a virgin because the sight of her beauty did not sexually arouse him (p. 135). Paradox, not to mention absurdity, seems endemic to male pronouncements involving gender. Jennifer Smith shows how the medieval homilist John Mirk, in equating spiritual purgation to shaving or circumcision, poses a problem for the female worshippers he is ostensibly eager to save. Sixteenth-century woodcuts, as Charles Zika ably demonstrates, tended to equate witches' desire for power with an unbridled and un-male-oriented sexuality that then naturally, somehow, involved the urge to castrate men or otherwise render them impotent. Zika shows how these gloatingly detailed scenes walk the queasy boundary between nightmare and pornography. Clare Everett closes the volume with a sampling of male denunciations of female transvestism, which disagree freely in their premises but unite in assuming that women dress as men in order to 'point out to the whole world the venerous inclination of their corrupt conversation' (Phillip Stubbes, quoted on p. 194). T w o other excellent articles slip on either side of the Venus-Mars conjunction. Pina Ford's '"A fre liberal wille": Charity in Piers Plowman' masterfully traces Will's search for the meaning of love, in its high, nonVenereal sense of charity. Ordinarily I resist attempts to find philosophical coherence in Langland's vertiginously disjunctive text(s), but Ford eases meaning out of the chaos in a way I found reassuringly convincing (or has it just been too long since I reread Piers?). Andrew Lynch's essay on blood in Malory emphasises...

Gender, Anatomical Knowledge, and Pottery Production: Implications of an Anatomically Unusual Birth Depicted on Mimbres Pottery from Southwestern New Mexico

The anatomical details of a birth scene depicted on Classic Mimbres (A.D. 1000-1150) bowls from southwestern New Mexico can provide clues to gender relations in Classic Mimbres society. The scenes show an infant emerging facing forward (unusual in human birth) with its arms up (virtually unknown in human birth). These details suggest that the scene was painted by someone unfamiliar with the birthing process. Ethnographically, men rarely see human births. Thus, it is likely that the birth scene, and perhaps other Mimbres pottery designs, were painted by men.

Population and dwelling unit estimates from space.

"To increase the utility of satellite imagery as a source of cheap and current information for planning and managing cities some problems have to be resolved.... One answer is to adopt interpretation methods that use the increased information in a more detailed scene. This paper reports on attempts to measure the morphological patterns in an urban satellite scene and to use these for image interpretation. The interpretation task addressed is the estimation of residential dwelling units from the patterns discernible in high resolution satellite images of cities. The practical results include dwelling estimates that can be aggregated to any geographical unit of analysis, population estimates for cities and a dwelling density surface that can be categorised into any number of residential land-use classes."

A Comparison of Methods for Promoting Geographic Knowledge in Simulated Aircraft Navigation

In two experiments we evaluated different techniques for flight rehearsal to develop navigational knowledge about a region. In Experiment 1 different groups of pilots studied a map of a region, actively flew an IRIS simulator through the same region, or passively viewed the same dynamic screen as flown by the active participants. The latter two groups were subdivided into those that trained with high and low levels of scene detail. All pilots then transferred to a high-image-fidelity simulation to fly the same route. The transfer results indicated no effect of scene detail and that the active group performed best, the passive group worst, and the map group at an intermediate level. In Experiment 2 the workload of training was increased, and half the participants were required to train with a north-up map. These changes degraded the transfer performance of the active training group relative to the other two. The implications of the results for workload during rehearsal flights and the kinds of geographical knowledge acquired are discussed.

Sandro Botticelli's Drawings for Dante's "Inferno": Narrative Structure, Topography, and Manuscript Design

The manuscript of the Dante's Commedia rewritten by Nicolaus Mangona was embellished by 92 drawings made by Sandro Botticelli between ca 1485 and 1495. It is characterized by the very tight connection between the text parts and the adequate illustrations depicting the scenes in the fullest detail, what reminds the cedexes. A number of the structural innovations were introduced in the volume. Each canto, illustrated by one all-page set of drawings, is contained on one page what was allowed by removal of the commentary. Book was probably opened vertically what is understandable from the practical reasons. This also gave a special significance to the miniatures of the Plan of Hell and Lucifer clasping the book's course. General project of the manuscript's form is due to S. Botticelli who used here the ideas first introduced in his designs of the engravings for the Florentine edition of Commedia (1481).

Effects of three types of flight simulator visual scene detail on detection of altitude change.

The effects of three types of flight simulator visual scene detail on detection of altitude change were evaluated in three experiments. Across all experiments and with a variety of tasks and display conditions, speed and accuracy of detecting altitude change improved with increases in the density of vertical objects in scenes. Adding detail to individual objects to increase their natural appearance produced no consistent effects on performance. In Experiment 3 complex texture distributed globally on terrain surfaces improved detection of altitude change but did not alleviate the need for high object density. These results indicate that available computer image generator processing capacity would be used more effectively by increasing the density of objects in scenes, rather than by increasing the complexity and detail of individual objects. Complex texture is used more effectively when distributed globally on terrain surfaces, rather than when allocated to individual objects.

Visual Augmentation and Scene Detail Effects in Flight Training

Flight students were taught landings in a flight simulator with a visual landing display to examine the effects of scene detail, visual augmentation (prediction and guidance), and speed of roll response on the acquisition and transfer of landing skills. Transfer was from moderate-detail and low-detail scenes; from constant, adaptive, and no visual augmentation; and from fast, normal, and slow roll response. Transfer was assessed in the simulator with a moderate-detail pictorial scene, no visual augmentation, and a normal roll response. Training with visual augmentation was superior to training without it, although a Scene Detail x Visual Augmentation interaction revealed that the nonpredictive guidance augmentation enhanced transfer only when it was combined in training with the low-detail scene. Transfer from a low-detail, unaugmented display was poor, and there was some evidence of poor transfer from a fast roll response.

Transfer Effects of Scene Content and Crosswind in Landing Instruction

Transfer of landing skills was tested from a high-detail pictorial, low-detail pictorial, or symbolic scene and from a zero, moderate, or high level of crosswind to a high-detail pictorial scene and a moderate level of crosswind. There were significant differential transfer effects as assessed by measures of accuracy and stability in lateral control. Training with pictorial scenes (whether of high or low detail) was superior to training with a symbolic scene, but there was no general transfer advantage from training with high versus low scene detail. Not was there any general advantage of training with the transfer level of crosswind. In contrast to the prediction of a high-fidelity theory of transfer, the data show that values of crosswind higher or lower than the transfer value can be advantageous in certain circumstances.

Forensic Photography and Nighttime Visibility Issues

Abstract Photographic demonstrative evidence can be of great value in bringing an understanding to the court regarding visibility issues involved in a nighttime scene. However, there are a number of criteria that must be satisfied to ensure the results accurately represent the visibility conditions. The use of a slide duplicating film results in good contrast fidelity and an extended luminance range. With appropriate calibration, the resulting slides can be projected with neutral-density filters used to reduce the projector output such that the luminance of the screen image is made equal to the luminance that would have existed at the scene. This is important because the thresholds of vision are heavily dependent upon adaptation level. Angular fidelity is achieved by calculating the viewing distance, which will give all scene objects their true angular size. A procedure is described that allows a numerical evaluation of the fidelity of the resulting projected images with respect to threshold observation of scene detail. This numerical evaluation procedure may also be useful in seeking the exclusion of nighttime photos that do not meet the criteria.

Using Velocity Control to Navigate 3D Graphical Environments: A Comarison of three Interfaces

Three velocity control interfaces to three dimensional virtual environments are compared. The interface devices are: a six degree of freedom position sensor, a six degree of freedom isometric joystick, and a conventional mouse in conjunction with a soft control panel displayed on the monitor. In each interface the devices are used to control velocity, and all make use of a quadratic function to map the input to the viewpoint velocity. We use two structured exploration tasks to assess the usability of the different interfaces. In the first task an interviewing technique is used in conjunction with an exploration task which involved examining widely spaced details of the 3D scene. The second task is designed to reveal how well users can interact at different scales using the different devices. Subjects are required to navigate through a tube which varies over four orders of magnitude in size. The results show that subject's behavior is highly constrained by the local size of the tube: they maintained a constant velocity relative to the local size of the tube. They also showed differences in the effectiveness of the different devices in determining traversal rate that the positioning device and the control panel were about equally effective for fast navigation, and both are better than the isometric joystick.

Design and modeling with schema grammars

Graphical scene modeling is usually a time-consuming, tedious and expensive manual activity. This paper proposes an approach to partially automating the process through a paradigm for cooperative user-computer scene modeling that we call cooperative computer-aided design (CCAD). Formal grammars, referred to as schema grammars , are used to imbue the modeling system with an elementary ‘understanding’ of the kinds of scences to be created. The grammer interpreter constructs part or all of the scene after accepting from the user partially completed scence components and descriptions of scence properties that must be incorporated into the final scene. This approach to modeling harnesses the power of the computer to construct scene detail, thereby freeing the human user to focus on essential creative decisions. This paper describes the structure and interpretation of schema grammars, and provides techniques for controlling the combinatorial explosion that can result from the undirected interpretation of the grammars. CCAD is explored in the context of two experimental systems—FLATS, for architectural design, and LG, for modeling landscapes.

Criminal personality profiling: An outcome and process study.

In this work we examine outcome and process differences in criminal personality profiling among groups of profilers, detectives, psychologists, and students, using closed police cases—one sex offense and one homicide. Two major questions guide this research: (1) Are professional profilers more accurate than nonprofilers in generating personality profiles and correctly identifying offender features from crime scene details? and (2) Is the process that the profilers use qualitatively different from that of the nonprofilers? In the written profile task, the task that is most representative of what profilers actually do, profilers write richer, more detailed, and more valid profiles than the nonprofilers for both the sex offense case and homicide case. An analysis of correct responses concerning the known offender for the sex offense case revealed that the profilers scored significantly better than the other three groups in a variety of measures; similar results were not revealed for the homicide case. Profilers, however, do not appear to process this material in a way qualitatively different from any other group.

Simulator Design and Instructional Features for Air-to-Ground Attack: A Transfer Study

A transfer experiment was conducted to define simulator design requirements and instructional procedures for an air-to-ground attack trainer. Two levels of scene detail, three levels of field of view, and three levels of simulator training trials were manipulated. Student naval aviators were pretrained in the Visual Technology Research Simulator (VTRS) on a 30-deg bombing maneuver before their performances were assessed in their standard weapon training course. Other students not pretrained in the VTRS were used for control comparisons. Prior experience in the VTRS helped student pilots use their weapon flight time more effectively. The most substantial transfer gains were produced by the first 24 simulation training trials; there was little additional benefit from further training. There was no evidence of differential transfer from the different simulator conditions. These trends indicate that physical fidelity is not a requirement for positive transfer and lend further support to the need for a concept such as psychological fidelity or functional equivalence.

The role of prior knowledge in coherent image processing

Models that encode prior knowledge about a scene provide a means for interpreting image data from that scene in more detail than would otherwise be so. Information about both background clutter and target characteristics should be included in this prior knowledge. We demonstrate the use of a generalized noise model to represent a variety of naturally occurring random terrain clutter textures observed in high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In addition a similar approach is adopted for the simulation of such textures. Having established the background properties we next introduce prior knowledge about any target within the scene and exploit this in achieving a cross-section reconstruction having improved resolution compared with the original image. Examples of such a super-resolution method based on singular value decomposition are demonstrated and the limits of the technique are indicated.

Osman Lins: Plowman "Histórico e mítico"

Osman Lins once made a telling comment on his art as a novelist: Triunfo do romancista num romance que nao pretende ser ilusionista.1 Osman Lins' complex novel Avalovara (1973) concerns another sort of illusion: the bourgeois life of Abel and his three loves: Roos, Cecilia, and O. Time is simultaneously past and present. The main action is confined to one day in O's apartment, with unmodulated shifts to other times, places, events, and viewpoints. Detailed scenes, often described with lyric intensity, override characterization. Personalities disintegrate and reintegrate, changing age, sex, and identity, as in dreams. To help stitch these disparate elements together, Lifts patterns his novel upon a geometric structure, organized around a palindrome whose squares are superimposed on a spiral. Each square signifies a character or theme that make up a series of recurrent chapters (instead of constructing chapters around action and place). Rather like a needle

Simulator Design Features for Helicopter Shipboard Landings

The Vertical Takeoff and Landing Simulator (VTOL) at the Naval Training Systems Center's (NTSC) Visual Technology Research Simulator (VTRS) was used to study the effects of simulator design features on pilot performance in helicopter shipboard landings. The research was designed to evaluate the effects of current design features on the SH—60B Operational Flight Trainer (OFT) used to train helicopter shipboard landing and four proposed simulator design modifications. These were: (1) scene detail (SH—60B OFT scene versus an upgraded VTRS scene), (2) field-of-view (VTRS wide versus a smaller SH—60B OFT field-of-view), (3) dynamic seat cueing (on versus off), and (4) dynamic inflow (standard rotor model available in existing trainers versus an updated rotor model). These factors were tested across two levels of seastate. On the basis of the factors studied in the experiment, the wider field-of-view, the more detailed scene and the updated rotor model are recommended for use. The dynamic seat cueing evaluated in this study is not recommended at this time.

Simulator Design and Instructional features for Air-to-Ground Attack: Transfer Study

A transfer-of-training experiment was conducted to provide guidelines for simulator design and training procedures for air-to-ground attack. Two levels of scene detail (complex day scene versus a low detail dusk scene), three levels of field of view (160H X 80V, 135H X 60V, 103H X 60V), and three levels of simulator training trials (24, 48, 72) were tested in the experiment. Student Naval Aviators (SNAs) were trained in the Visual Technology Research Simulator (VTRS) in 30-degree bombing prior to their standard weapon training phase. Other students, not pretrained in the VTRS, were used for control comparisons. Training in the VTRS helped SNAs use their weapons flight time in the TA-4J more effectively. Forty-eight simulator trials were recommended as adequate pretraining for 30-degree bombing. There was no evidence of differential transfer for the scene detail and field-of-view factors. The least expensive field of view option tested was recommended. However, there were methodological problems with the scene type comparison and the apparent transfer equivalence of the two scenes may not fully indicate their relative training effectiveness. Data from other VTRS experiments suggest the superiority of the day scene and it was recommended.

Use Of Speckle For Determining The Response Characteristics Of Doppler Imaging Radars

The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) aboard Seasat in 1978 demonstrated a unique sensitivity to oceanic and geologic features imaged over a 100 km swath with 25 m resolution. The ability of the remote sensor to resolve the fine details of large environmental systems resulted in the orbiting of a similar system, the Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR-B), aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger during October 1984. Coherent speckle noise observed for these Doppler imaging-radar systems is caused by random correlations of the illuminating radar chirp with the surface reflectance downrange. Radar speckle is similar to optical speckle in that respect, but it is also influenced by along-track sampling statistics. The Rayleigh statistics of coherent scattering and the Poisson statistics of radar pulse detection are employed to model the speckle observed in spatially random data samples. Speckle degradation of a radar scene may obstruct interpretations of scene detail, but it can also be useful in determining the spatial response of the remote sensor and scene correlator. Randomly speckled scenes that are otherwise featureless provide a white-noise input to the Doppler imaging process. Several such scenes have been processed with fast Fourier transform methods to estimate the point spread function and its Fourier-domain equivalent, the wavenumber response function. These measure-ments of spatial resolution are used to compare the Seasat SAR and the Challenger SIR-B remote sensors. In addition, two ground-scene correlators are compared in terms of the point spread estimate of spatial resolution for common input data from the SIR-B sensor.

Memory for scenes in stroke patients. Hemisphere processing of semantic organization in pictures.

Twenty-one patients with cerebrovascular lesions in posterior regions of the left or right cerebral hemispheres and nonfluent aphasics with damage in anterior regions of the left hemisphere were administered a specially designed multiple-object pictorial test which measured long-term memory for scenes depicting real world schemata versus jumbled unorganized scenes. The units in the pictures were familiar figures. Memory was tested separately for single details and for whole scenes. The results showed that within the left posterior group there was significantly poorer memory for unorganized relative to organized stimuli, especially for whole scenes. There was also a selective dissociation between the left and right posterior patients on the detail versus whole scene probes in the unorganized stimuli. At the same time, organized scenes depicting real world schemata were not selectively impaired in any of the patient groups. Further, the overall memory scores on the Memory for Pictorial Scenes Test obtained by the aphasic patients were not significantly lower than those obtained by the control subjects, while scores of both posterior groups were lower than the control group. Taken together, the data suggest the following. Pictorial semantics, like linguistic semantics, are functions processed by the left posterior cortex. While the posterior region in the left hemisphere plays a special role in remembering visual situational schemata that are newly encountered, familiar visual situational schemata may be bilaterally represented.

Quality Improvement by Adaptive Inter-/Intraframe Processing in Pal TV Receivers

Conceptions for digital colour TV receivers open the way to substantially improved TV pictures. Utilizing field or frame store units, it will be possible to realize three-dimensional filters, which exploit special properties of PAL-or NTSC-signals for an efficient reduction of present disturbances [1]. These impairments, mainly caused by-cross effects between luminance and chrominance information-noise of various sources, and-flicker effects, can be completely eliminated for lots of picture contents. However, with special scene detail, this elimination is not sufficient, moreover, three-dimensional filtering will evoke additional disturbing effects, for an example blurring of edges. Therefore, an adaptively controlled use of these complex filters is necessary to avoid additional degradation and to achieve overall good performance.