Scene Transition Research Articles

Gender, Race, and an Epistemology of the Abattoir in My Year of Meats

244 Feminist Studies 40, no. 2. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Laura Anh Williams Gender, Race, and an Epistemology oftheAbattoirin My Year of Meats The question, truly, is how does someone become a piece of meat? And the answer is, we really don’t want to know. —Carol J. Adams, The Pornography of Meat1 It’s a bizarre sight to enter a slaughterhouse where the head slaughterer is holding a gun, the prisoners have knives, and the guards of the prisoners have guns. I feel unarmed, along with the animals. —Sue Coe, Dead Meat2 In an episode of the 2007 Showtime documentary television series This American Life titled “Pandora’s Box,” public radio host Ira Glass visits a hog farm in Iowa. The segment focuses on the technologies utilized by an independent farmer to keep up with industrialized slaughterhouses . In his narration, Glass contemplates the ironies of injecting pigs with growth hormones that hasten the animals’ muscle development but also make them less tolerant of cold weather and weaken their immune systems. The pigs’ entire six-month life span is spent indoors in heated pens, where they grow to an average of three hundred pounds before slaughter. As the camera crew captures this portrait of contemporary 1. Carol J. Adams, The Pornography of Meat (New York: Continuum, 2003), 13. 2. Sue Coe, Dead Meat. (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995), 62. Laura Anh Williams 245 pig farming, the show’s sound technician, Eddie, is sickened by what he sees. The scene transitions from a worker sliding halved pig carcasses across a refrigerated room to a close up of a sow giving birth onto the metal grated floor of her pen as Glass, in a voiceover, narrates: It was hard to tell. Did all of this just seem weird to us because we weren’t used to it? Or was it the opposite? Because we weren’t used to it, we were the only ones who could see how truly weird it was. Whatever the case, eventually, everything started to seem unnatural. At one point, we came across a sow delivering piglets, and this, out of everything we’d seen was the straw that broke Eddie’s back.3 Eddie is followed by the cameraman out of the pig barn and is caught doubling over. He explains, “I had vomit in my mask, trying to be cool, and pigs were shooting out the pig’s ass and I threw up. Okay?”4 The remainder of the segment intersperses interviews with “pig improvement ” animal genetics researchers at Iowa State University, shots of the camera crew hanging out in rural Iowa and trying to win a Superman doll from a crane arcade game, the hog farmer discussing teaching his son to farm with a small group of pigs in an old-fashioned outdoor pen, rural landscape scenery, and a shot of one of the crew “flying” the Superman doll out of a car window. Although Glass’s voiced-over narrative wraps up the segment ambivalently discussing the lone hog farmer, nostalgia , and technology, the final shot is a slow motion one of the camera crew inside the hog barn, and the final comment from Glass is that Eddie hasn’t eaten meat since filming. The segment brings together questions of nature and technology, animals and humans, birth and slaughter, appetite and abjection. What the episode seems to leave unspoken, however , is the gendered focus of its gaze. The program includes interviews with male researchers, lingering shots of the male hog farmer and his son, and the white male film crew’s investment in the Superman character. The episode even includes images from catalogs of, as Glass describes, “ridiculously well-endowed boars with names like Big Unit, Four-Wheeler, Hulk, and Total Package.” However , the “unnatural” image that initiates Eddie’s abjection is that of a 3. Ira Glass, “Pandora’s Box,” This American Life, aired April 26, 2007, http:// www.thisamericanlife.org/tv-archives/season-one/pandoras-box. 4. Ibid. 246 Laura Anh Williams sow giving birth to piglets. Eddie’s justification for his queasiness at the image, “pigs were shooting out of the pig’s ass,” equates the birth of piglets...

Switchable video error concealment using encoder driven scene transition detection and edge preserving SEC

Error concealment, a decoder based technique, attempts to reconstruct the corrupted regions of a video frame, using spatial and/or temporal correlation. For sequences with high temporal correlations, the performance of Temporal Error Concealment (TEC) techniques are better than Spatial Error Concealment (SEC) techniques in terms of PSNR of the reconstructed frames. However, the performance of TECs deteriorate drastically at the scene boundary due to low temporal correlation with the reference frame. In this paper, we propose a novel encoder controlled transition detection scheme which would facilitate selection of concealment strategy, that makes a choice between our newly proposed edge-direction based SEC technique and a TEC scheme. Exploiting Motion Vector (MV), Sum of Absolute Difference (SAD), and Motion Compensated Histogram Difference (MCHD), scene transition is detected at the encoder. A single bit transition status flag per frame is then sent to the decoder as a part of the header information to select the concealment policy between TEC and SEC. The present work also proposes a new edge-directed spatial error concealment, termed as "Directional Edge Based Spatial Error Concealment" (DEBSEC), which outperforms existing techniques in terms of PSNR and SSIM of the concealed frame.

Parallel programming of saccades during natural scene viewing: Evidence from eye movement positions

Previous studies have shown that saccade plans during natural scene viewing can be programmed in parallel. This evidence comes mainly from temporal indicators, i.e., fixation durations and latencies. In the current study, we asked whether eye movement positions recorded during scene viewing also reflect parallel programming of saccades. As participants viewed scenes in preparation for a memory task, their inspection of the scene was suddenly disrupted by a transition to another scene. We examined whether saccades after the transition were invariably directed immediately toward the center or were contingent on saccade onset times relative to the transition. The results, which showed a dissociation in eye movement behavior between two groups of saccades after the scene transition, supported the parallel programming account. Saccades with relatively long onset times (>100 ms) after the transition were directed immediately toward the center of the scene, probably to restart scene exploration. Saccades with short onset times (<100 ms) moved to the center only one saccade later. Our data on eye movement positions provide novel evidence of parallel programming of saccades during scene viewing. Additionally, results from the analyses of intersaccadic intervals were also consistent with the parallel programming hypothesis.

Scene Boundary Detection from Movie Dialogue: A Genetic Algorithm Approach

Movie scripts are a rich textual resource that can be tapped for movie content analysis. This article describes a mechanism for fragmenting a sequence of movie script dialogue into scene-wise groups. In other words, it attempts to locate scene transitions using information acquired from a sequence of dialogue units. We collect movie scripts from a web archive. Thereafter, we preprocess them to develop a resource of dialogues. We feed the dialogue sequence from a script to a Genetic Algorithm (GA) framework. The system fragments the sequence into adjacent groups of dialogue units or output 'scenes'. We use SentiWordnet scores and Wordnet distance for dialogue units to optimize this grouping so that adjacent scenes are semantically most dissimilar. Then we compare the resulting fragmented dialogue sequence with the original scene-wise alignment of dialogue in the script.

A Multi-Aspect Modeling Method for Service Flow Simulation Using Scene Transition Nets (STNs)

Recently, a new academic field, ”service engineering” has been very actively investigated. However, there are few effective methods and tools to simulate and evaluate services designed based on the concept of service engineering. In the past, the authors proposed a service flow simulation method using scene transition nets (STNs) which is a graphic modeling and simulation method for discrete-continuous hybrid systems. However, this method does not consider how to model and simulate complex service flows including multiple layered, parallel, and interrupted structures and it is difficult to construct STN models of such complex systems using the existing STN concepts. In this paper, the authors propose a new STN modeling method using“multi-aspect STN modeling”concepts in order to provide easy methods for modeling of such complex services. The experimental results for the modeling and simulation of a nursing service demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The Tesserae Project: intertextual analysis of Latin poetry

Tesserae is a web-based tool for automatically detecting allusions in Latin poetry. Although still in the start-up phase, it already is capable of identifying significant numbers of known allusions, as well as similar numbers of allusions previously unnoticed by scholars. In this article, we use the tool to examine allusions to Vergil's Aeneid in the first book of Lucan's Civil War. Approximately 3,000 lin- guistic parallels returned by the program were compared with a list of known allusions drawn from commentaries. Each was examined individually and graded for its literary significance, in order to benchmark the program's performance. All allusions from the program and commentaries were then pooled in order to examine broad patterns in Lucan's allusive techniques which were largely unapproachable without digital methods. Although Lucan draws relatively con- stantly from Vergil's generic language in order to maintain the epic idiom, this baseline is punctuated by clusters of pointed allusions, in which Lucan frequently subverts Vergil's original meaning. These clusters not only attend the most sig- nificant characters and events but also play a role in structuring scene transitions. Work is under way to incorporate the ability to match on word meaning, phrase context, as well as metrical and phonological features into future versions of the program.

Unsupervised scene detection and commentator building using multi-modal chains

This paper presents a novel unsupervised method for identifying the semantic structure in long semi-structured video streams. We identify chains, i.e., local clusters of repeated features from both the video stream and audio transcripts. Each chain serves as an indicator that the temporal interval it demarcates is part of the same semantic event. By layering all the chains over each other, dense regions emerge from the overlapping chains, from which we can identify the semantic structure of the video. We present two clustering strategies that accomplish this task, and compare them against a baseline Scene Transition Graph approach. We then develop a commentator that provides a semantic labeling of the resultant video segmentation.

Audiovisual texture in scene transition

Audiovisual texture in scene transition

Fixation durations during scene transitions

Fixation durations during scene transitions

Temporal Video Segmentation to Scenes Using High-Level Audiovisual Features

In this paper, a novel approach to video temporal decomposition into semantic units, termed scenes, is presented. In contrast to previous temporal segmentation approaches that employ mostly low-level visual or audiovisual features, we introduce a technique that jointly exploits low-level and high-level features automatically extracted from the visual and the auditory channel. This technique is built upon the well-known method of the scene transition graph (STG), first by introducing a new STG approximation that features reduced computational cost, and then by extending the unimodal STG-based temporal segmentation technique to a method for multimodal scene segmentation. The latter exploits, among others, the results of a large number of TRECVID-type trained visual concept detectors and audio event detectors, and is based on a probabilistic merging process that combines multiple individual STGs while at the same time diminishing the need for selecting and fine-tuning several STG construction parameters. The proposed approach is evaluated on three test datasets, comprising TRECVID documentary films, movies, and news-related videos, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed approach in comparison to other unimodal and multimodal techniques of the relevant literature and highlight the contribution of high-level audiovisual features toward improved video segmentation to scenes.

1301 場面遷移ネットに基づくサービスのマルチアスペクトモデリング手法(OS9-2 ライフサイクル設計とサービス工学II)

Recently, a new academic field, "service engineering" has been very actively investigated. However, there are few effective methods and tools to simulate and evaluate services designed based on the concept of service engineering. In the past, the authors proposed a service flow simulation method using scene transition nets (STNs) which is a graphic modeling and simulation method for discrete-continuous hybrid systems. However, this method does not consider how to model and simulate complex service flows including multiple layered, parallel, and interrupted structures and it is difficult to construct STN models of such complex systems using the existing STN concepts. In this paper, the authors propose a new STN modeling method using "multi-aspect STN modeling" concepts in order to provide easy methods for modeling of such complex services. The experimental results for the modeling and simulation of a nursing service demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

1303 不確実要素を考慮したサービスコストシミュレーション手法(OS9-2 ライフサイクル設計とサービス工学II)

Services include various uncertainties. Especially, service failures from service providers in service processes, which can be categorized as the uncertainties, have enormous amount of negative influence on costs of services. It is difficult for service designers to figure out the costs of services considering such uncertainties by simple numerical calculations. It is necessary to model various uncertainties and to simulate services cost in consideration of the uncertainties. In this study, the authors develop a service process simulator using scene transition nets (STNs) considering service failures of providers in service processes. We propose a modeling and simulation method to construct models of the service failures using service FTA and to estimate the providers' working time that impacts heavily on costs of services.

Video scene analysis in 3D wavelet transform domain

This paper proposes a novel scene analysis algorithm based on three-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (3D DWT). Based on the correlation among the adjacent frames, video frames can be considered as four categories: abrupt scene transition, motion scene, gradual scene transition and static scene, which are ranked from low to high according to the strength of the correlation. Through the investigation of the particular temporal and spatial distribution of each category, the correlation among adjacent frames could be described by the 3D DWT coefficients related statistical features, which are the energy of high-frequency coefficients difference, the sum of high-frequency coefficients magnitudes and the difference of low-frequency coefficients magnitudes. The energy of high-frequency coefficients difference is first used to detect the abrupt scene transition including cut and flashlight. Then all the three features are input to SVM for the purpose of analyzing the residual scenes and detecting the gradual scene transition, such as dissolve and fade. Experimental results show the method to be effective not only for the abrupt scene transition detection, but also for the gradual scene transition detection.

サービス工学に基づくサービスCADシステムの構築（第76報）場面遷移ネットを用いたマルチエージェントシミュレーションによるサービス評価手法の提案

サービス工学に基づくサービスCADシステムの構築（第76報）場面遷移ネットを用いたマルチエージェントシミュレーションによるサービス評価手法の提案

2411 サービスブループリントに基づくサービスシミュレーション手法(OS12-3 ライフサイクル設計とサービス工学III,OS12 ライフサイクル設計とサービス工学)

Service flow simulation visualizes the process of complex services and helps service designers to improve service offering processes. However, it is difficult to develop simulation models of complex services since methods and guidelines for simulation modeling of service offering processes are unspecified. In this paper, the authors propose a modeling method of Scene Transition Net (STN) for service flow simulation based on the service blue print scheme that visualizes service offering processes and the relationships between service providers and customers. In addition, the authors propose how to simulate the service offering process in which unstable service elements are taken into consideration based on the developed simulation model.

1404 場面遷移ネットを用いたサービスのマルチエージェントシミュレーション(OS12-1 ライフサイクル設計とサービス工学I:サービス設計と価値表現,OS12 ライフサイクル設計とサービス工学)

Recently, a new academic field, "service engineering" has been very actively investigated. However, there are few effective software tools to simulate and evaluate services designed based on the concept of service engineering. In the past, the authors proposed a service flow simulation method using scene transition nets(STN) which is a graphic modeling and simulation method for discrete-continuous hybrid system. However, this method does not consider how to model and simulate complex service flows including interactions between agents in services. In this paper, the authors propose some extensions for service modeling and implement their functions to the STN GUI simulator. The experimental results of simulation of a DVD rental service shop and an online DVD rental service including agents' interactions and some stochastic elements showed the availability of tour method.

Real-Time Frame-Layer H.264 Rate Control for Scene-Transition Video at Low Bit Rate

An abrupt scene-transition frame is one that is hardly correlated with the previous frames. In that case, because an intra-coded frame has less distortion than an inter-coded one, almost all macroblocks are encoded in intra mode. This breaks up the rate control flow and increases the number of bits used. Since the reference software for H.264 takes no special action for a scene-transition frame, several studies have been conducted to solve the problem using the quadratic R-D model. However, since this model is more suitable for inter frames, they are unsuitable for computing the QP of the scene-transition intra frame. In this paper, a modified algorithm for detecting scene transitions is presented, and a real-time rate control scheme accounting for the characteristics of intra coding is proposed for scene- transition frames. The proposed scheme was validated using 16 test sequences. The results showed that the proposed scheme performed better than the existing H.264 rate control schemes. The PSNR was improved by an average of 0.4-0.6 dB and a maximum of 1.1-1.6 dB. The PSNR fluctuation was also improved by an average of 18.6 %.1

Sudden scene change detection in compressed video using interpolated macroblocks in B-frames

This paper addresses an important area in video processing, namely compressed domain processing. For video indexing, video scene transition detection is an essential step to segment the video. Current techniques for scene change detection tend to suffer from a major limitation as most of them cannot identify scene transitions in the compressed domain. Since most video is expected to be stored in the compressed domain, scene transition detection in this domain is highly desirable. In this paper an algorithm for video scene change detection is proposed to overcome this limitation. In this scheme, properties of the B-frames are used as it is capable of measuring the correlation between two adjacent reference frames. The results show that this scheme performs better than schemes based on P-frames. Proposed scheme can be directly applied with compressed data with minimum decompression and hence it is computationally efficient and makes real time implementations possible. Results show that video scene transitions can be identified satisfactorily with the proposed scheme.

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. Susan J. Douglas &amp; Meredith W. Michaels

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. Susan J. Douglas & Meredith W. Michaels. New York: Free Press. 2004. 383 pp. ISBN 0-7432-5999-8. $15.00 (paper). This is a fun read. Susan Douglas (professor of communications at University of Michigan and of one) and Meredith Michaels (philosopher at Smith College and of five) have written a very funny and very powerful book about the new momism, a set of ideals, norms, and practices that sets standards of success that are impossible to meet, requiring a combination of selflessness (devoting herself 24/7 to her children) and professionalism (the skills of a therapist, pediatrician [Dr. Mom], consumer products safety inspector, and teacher). The opening passages contrast familiar reality of everyday childrearing with expectations of mothering. They begin with this scene-you are standing in a checkout line in a grocery store with a 3-year-old having a meltdown because you did not buy him latest Lunchables, surrounded by magazines with cover stories featuring gorgeous, moms who gush about how is sexy and how they love getting up in middle of night to feed or sooth him, while your teenager, who has not spoken in days except to say you've ruined my life, followed by everyone else has one, is sulking in car with a new rap-metal band Piss on Parentals blasting). This hellish scene transitions seamlessly into what a good would do once she got home (transform process of putting groceries away into a fun game with up-beat Raffi songs playing in background. Then while you steam broccoli and poach chicken breasts in Vouvray and Evian water, you and kids would do a jigsaw puzzle in shape of United Arab Emirates. Your husband returns home so overcome with admiration for how well you do it all that he looks lovingly into your eyes, kisses you and presents you with a diamond anniversary bracelet ... children chattering away happily, help set table and then eat their broccoli. After dinner, you all go out and stencil driveway with autumn leaves). This opener provides a taste of what is to come, both in terms of style and themes. Douglas and Michaels, both self-avowed mothers with an attitude problem, argue convincingly that this intensive mothering is just a new, hipper version of the feminist mystique. They also show how image of new, improved mom is contingent on images of delinquent, bad Indeed, one of most interesting passages describes history and import of linguistic shift from mother to mom with infantilizing/patronizing term now norm for soccer moms, stay at home moms, or celebrity moms, while mother is reserved for bad ones-single, teen, welfare, or working mothers. Because of witty style, original scholarship on which it is based is not immediately obvious. Douglas and Michaels did content analyses of news, women's magazines, television shows, Hollywood movies, and parenting manuals. Any one of these studies (imagine watching 30 years worth of news coverage on motherhood) would be impressive, and they have a lot of material to work with as they so amply show motherhood has been a media obsession since mid-80s. …

Scene Transition Net Simulation in a Distributed Environment

Scence Transition Net (STN) is a discrete/continuous hybrid system model which has been developed by one of the authors. In this paper, we attempt to develop a new simulation method of STNs in a distributed environment. For the purpose, we extend the definition of STN and propose the concept of a distributed net. The distributed nets communicate with each other in order to notify them of information about firing transitions. Furthermore, we point out that excessive communication overhead is required when multiple distributed nets decide if a transition fires. We show that restructuring these distributed nets avoid such situation. As an example of distributed STN simulation, we illustrate an integrated simulation of a manufacturing system which consists of 2 processing lines and transfer system in a distributed environment.