Series Of Symbols Research Articles

A novel and cheap method to correlate subjective and objective visual acuity by using the optokinetic response.

To describe a novel optokinetic visual acuity estimator (Oktotype) and to report the preliminary results obtained in poorly and non-collaborative subjects. Eleven series of symbols arranged horizontally and moving from left to right at a constant rate were displayed. In each sequence, the size of the stimuli was reduced logarithmically. By using this paradigm, the objective visual acuity was computed in 26 normal subjects as the minimum size of the symbols able to evoke the optokinetic response. In the preliminary phase, three contrast levels were tested, with white noise added to the first five sequences so as to normalize the overestimate found at the lower-half range of the acuity scale. Subsequently, the correspondence between subjective and objective visual acuity was compared in 10 poorly collaborative subjects, and the agreement between optokinetic and Teller visual acuity was measured in six non-collaborative subjects. The best agreement is provided by the minimum contrast level (20%) (R 2=0.74). The correspondence between the two techniques is satisfying both in the normal and in the poorly collaborative sample (concordance correlation coefficient: 0.85 and 0.83, respectively). In the non-collaborative group, the concordance correlation coefficient between Teller acuity and OKVA ranged between 0.79 (test) and 0.85 (retest). Test-retest reliability was very good for the Oktotype (K: 0.82), and better than the Teller test (K=0.71), even if it was lower compared to Snellen acuity (K=0.95). The Oktotype seems promising to predict Snellen visual acuity in normal and poorly collaborative subjects.

EMD-based steganography techniques for JPEG2000 encoded images

In JPEG2000 standard, the number of bit planes of wavelet coefficients to be used in encoding is dependent on the compression ratio as well as subbands. These significant wavelet bit planes can be utilized to embed bits of secret data as they are retained in the final bit stream after Tier-2 encoding. In proposed techniques, the above mentioned concept have been utilized to embed secret data bits in lowest significant bit planes of the quantized wavelet coefficients of a cover image. In first technique, secret data is converted into a series of symbols using multiple bases notational system. These bases are selected by using the degree of local variation of coefficient values of the cover image so that coefficient of a complex region can potentially carry more secret data bits as compared to coefficients of smooth region. Symbols of secret data are embedded into bit planes of significant quantized wavelet coefficients by using EMD approaches. In second technique, the secret data bits are embedded into significant quantized wavelet coefficients by using modified EMD. Experimental results show that these proposed techniques provide large embedding capacity and better visual quality stego images than existing steganography techniques applicable to JPEG2000 compressed images. It has also been shown that modified EMD-based technique is better than EMD with multiple bases notational system (MBNS)-based technique.

Applicability of the permutation largest slope entropy to strange nonchaotic attractors

We extend the permutation largest slope entropy (PLSE) to the detection of strange nonchaotic attractors (SNA). The initial time series derived from a quasi-periodically forced chaotic map is first transformed into a series of symbols using the order relation. These symbols are thereafter combined into m-length words to obtain quantized ordinal matrices (QOM). Finally, the PLSE is applied to the series of QOM for detecting changes in the behavior of the system. Simulation results show that the QOM transform allows to control the complexity of the time series, hence to reduce the entropy of tori and SNA and to increase that of chaotic motions. This result allows to highlight transitions between the three types of motions, thus showing a nonzero entropy for SNA which nevertheless is smaller than that of chaotic dynamics. The approach is effective for the detection of different routes to SNA from time series.

The covert political ethnicity of the Kulanu party

The Israeli general elections of March 2015 saw the advent of a new middle-class party. Kulanu, headed by Moshe Kahlon, achieved 10 seats for its representatives in the Knesset (Israeli parliament). This article proposes that Kulanu be viewed not only as a middle-class party, but also as a new addition to the list of Mizrahi ethnic parties. Kulanu’s appearance on the political centre-stage in Israel rested, at least among the Jewish population, upon its ability to offer a political wavelength and series of political symbols of upwardly mobile ethnicity in Israel – first and foremost among them the elusive ethnicity of the Mizrahi middle class. Kulanu’s political ethnicity assured widespread legitimacy for its agenda as well as empathy on the part of the source of its power – the Mizrahi middle class.

KAMPANYE DAN TELEVISI (Analisis Pemberitaan Kampanye Pemilu Legislatif 2009 di TV Borobudur)

In the context of the current information age, media power is great considered in the flow of information spread quickly and widely. The political elite use media to socialize the political agenda. Institutions of mass media like television and newspapers is believed to have ability in organizing the production, reproduction and distribution of knowledge significantly. A series of symbols that gives meaning of the reality of "there" and experience in life, can be transformed in the public sphere of mass media, which can be accessed by members of society. Public trust what was presented in the media. Media does have a significant force in the conduct of production and reproduction of political image and content of media as a reality that has been constructed (constructed reality).

REPRESENTASI IDIOM BUDAYA LOKAL DALAM IKLAN ROKOK DI TELEVISI

Local culture, as the cultural heritage of a nation, was originally adhered to and believed to be a set of rules and norms to be upheld in traditional community life. In a traditional community, individuals tend not to have many choices through which they can formulate their identity, and are inclined to experience difficulty in breaking free from the shackle of normative values which exist in their socio-cultural and socio-religious environment and are adhered to like a doctrine. With the onset of modernity and globalization, the values which were formally a point of reference in a traditional community become worn away until old symbols gradually become weakened and eventually replaced by new symbols provided by the global cultural market. Today, local culture is nothing more than a series of symbols which are packaged as a commodity and have a high market value. Commercial advertisements appear using local cultural idioms as a strategy for their communication. Local culture is presented through verbal and visual language with the aim of creating a positive image of the product on offer. This huge problem is the basic idea of this research. Through a case study approach, the research aims to uncover various aspects which go into the making of an advertisement, or in other words, why is an advertisement created in such an attractive way? Why is the image of an advertisement so important in building the strength of a brand name? The advertisement used as the case study for this research is a cigarette advertisement which can be seen on Indonesian television stations. The main focus of this thesis is visual communication strategy through local cultural representation. This will then show the relationship between culture, image, and the mass media as the agent which conveys the message. The research uses an interpretative method of analysis as a tool for viewing the depth of meaning of the advertisement. Keywords: local culture, advertisement, representation, television

The p-adic Shintani modular symbol and evil Eisenstein series

We compute the p-adic L-functions of evil Eisenstein series using an explicit Eisenstein modular symbol constructed from Shintani cocycles.

Predictability of road traffic and congestion in urban areas.

Mitigating traffic congestion on urban roads, with paramount importance in urban development and reduction of energy consumption and air pollution, depends on our ability to foresee road usage and traffic conditions pertaining to the collective behavior of drivers, raising a significant question: to what degree is road traffic predictable in urban areas? Here we rely on the precise records of daily vehicle mobility based on GPS positioning device installed in taxis to uncover the potential daily predictability of urban traffic patterns. Using the mapping from the degree of congestion on roads into a time series of symbols and measuring its entropy, we find a relatively high daily predictability of traffic conditions despite the absence of any priori knowledge of drivers' origins and destinations and quite different travel patterns between weekdays and weekends. Moreover, we find a counterintuitive dependence of the predictability on travel speed: the road segment associated with intermediate average travel speed is most difficult to be predicted. We also explore the possibility of recovering the traffic condition of an inaccessible segment from its adjacent segments with respect to limited observability. The highly predictable traffic patterns in spite of the heterogeneity of drivers' behaviors and the variability of their origins and destinations enables development of accurate predictive models for eventually devising practical strategies to mitigate urban road congestion.

Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process Synthetic Evaluation Models for the Health Monitoring of Shield Tunnels

AbstractMany uncertainties remain in tunnel health evaluation due to a lack of specific information, data scarcity, misleading or conflicting information due to the complex nature of geo‐materials, and even the ambiguity in the concept of tunnel health. This article addresses the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) synthetic evaluation models, which merge different types of data from multiple sensors to map them into the health rating scores of shield tunnels. A piecewise distribution was chosen for membership functions, and an exponential scale was introduced for a better characterization of the scales for weight sets. A series of fuzzy operation symbols, namely fuzzy operators, were defined to yield the fuzzy synthetic evaluation indexes (FSEIs) for monitoring factors. The fuzzy‐AHP evaluation procedure applied to the models was demonstrated. Moreover, a case study on Nanjing Yangtze River Tunnel was presented to verify the feasibility and efficiency of the models and the procedure. The fuzzy‐AHP health evaluations for monitoring factors, segments, rings, and the whole tunnel were implemented in succession using the models and following the procedure. The calculated FSEIs were compared with the rating scales to determine the corresponding action strategies. The segments with poor health conditions can then be identified for administrative maintenance or repairing measures. Such evaluation results will enhance the knowledge of designers and aid them for optimization when they are designing similar tunnels. The investigations indicate that the proposed fuzzy‐AHP models characterize the fuzziness of tunnel health well and will be useful for clarifying the tunnel health evaluation uncertainties to both designers and administrators.

El templo de Colohete (Honduras) y su significado simbólico

<span>El artículo aborda la singularidad del templo colonial del pueblo indígena de San Manuel de Colohete, Honduras, antigua encomienda de la familia Lara que por la influencia que pudo haber tenido en él se extraen cuidadosamente sus raíces hasta remontar a un presunto principado judío medieval en la ciudad de Narbona, Francia. El enfoque está puesto sobre su simbología que al parecer está relacionada con la “Tradición del Templo” (tradición arquitectónica asociada con el Templo de Salomón). Esta tradición Andrés Cassard la advierte en el palacio del Escorial, España construido en el siglo XVI. Martha Fernández hace lo mismo respecto a la arquitectura virreinal de Nueva España. La referencia a las tradiciones de constructores está plasmada en su fachada con una serie de símbolos que incluyen la escuadra y el compás. Ello lleva a plantearse la existencia de la tradición masónica operativa entre algunos de los constructores coloniales del área.</span>

Reptiles and Amphibians of the Pacific Islands, by George R. Zug. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. 306 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-520-27496-9. £24.95.

Subtitled ‘A Comprehensive Guide’, this book's ambitious comprehensiveness derives from attempting to include all of the herpetofauna that occurs today within its area of coverage, which is basically the oceanic part of ‘Oceania’ (Polynesia, Micronesia, and oceanic islands of Melanesia) plus the Galapagos and the oceanic islands off Central and South America. The New Zealand region is not included because it is partly composed of ‘fragments of the supercontinent Pangaea’. Yet New Zealand is culturally part of Polynesia and its inclusion would have been at least as easily justified as the Galapagos, the herpetofauna of which was derived from South America. The book is intended as ‘an identification guide’ for ‘avid naturalists who live on or visit Pacific islands’. One may question why so much of the species accounts consists of 19th century-style morphological descriptions. Most ‘avid naturalists’ would doubtless have preferred succinct discussions of ‘distinguishing characters’ and ‘similar species’ to the number of lamellae on the underside of the 4th toe, which is seldom diagnostic at the species level. Each species is illustrated by one or more generally adequate to excellent photographs, although only the anterior portion is shown for many lizards. These will not necessarily be sufficient for accurate identification in the case of closely similar species, or in such instances as the Green Anole, shown only as bright green, when the same individual under different circumstances might be dark brown. Because of its vast extent and the very small size of most islands, maps of the Pacific, even when the region is subdivided, are difficult to construct and reproduce and at small size are usually unsatisfactory, those in this book being no exception. The overall map does not extend far enough east to encompass the Galapagos, nor is there a map of that archipelago with the names of the islands. An important feature of the book are 40 herpetofaunal lists of geographical areas. These may be as diverse as the Fiji or Galapagos archipelagos to individual islands as small as Johnston Atoll or Clipperton Island. The five major taxonomic groups (frogs, lizards, snakes, turtles, crocodilians) are listed for all 40, even when absent. So ‘Crocodiles (Crocodilia) None’ appears 38 times. Such hyperassiduousness is simply a waste of space. Insufficient emphasis is placed on human translocations of the Pacific herpetofauna, the philosophy being that the book is intended to be about what is there now, not how or when it got where it is. It is never made clear, for example, that there are no native non-marine reptiles or amphibians in the Hawaiian Islands, all 31 species being human-introduced, mostly in post-European times. It would have been helpful to devise a series of symbols to indicate species endemic to the coverage area, those completely alien to the Pacific, those whose true pre-human distribution is uncertain, etc. There is no bibliography, only a list of 14 ‘selected references’, even though mention is made of journal publications, without date, in the text: e.g. Crombie and Pregill and Bauer and Watkins-Colwell (p. 207). The indexes are next to worthless. That for ‘common English names’ is indexed only by the first word of the full English name, e.g. ‘Dark-bellied Copper-striped Skink’. If you want to look up ‘blindsnake’, ‘iguana’, or ‘tortoise’, you are out of luck. The index of scientific names contains only the current genus-species combinations. Herpetologists frequently change generic designations, so it is usually only the species name that would allow you to relate any of the previous literature to this book, yet the species names are not indexed. Just within the Galapagos, the well-entrenched names Geochelone for tortoises and Tropidurus for lava lizards have both disappeared. Even the familiar bullfrog is no longer Rana catesbiana, but neither ‘bullfrog’ nor ‘catesbiana’ is indexed. Page numbers for the main accounts are not indicated, as by boldface, which a disadvantage for species such as Emoia cyanura, cited on 30 pages. In the text, it would also have been helpful to include author and year as part of the scientific name as this often conveys interesting historical information and more accurately identifies the binomial. For whatever it might have been, however, this book has no real predecessor and no competitor. The amount of effort taken to compile information on so many species over such a wide expanse has to be acknowledged as admirable and commendable. The scholar may lament the paucity of source material and biogeographical insight, but this book will doubtless long be the first reference to which almost anyone will turn regarding Pacific reptiles and amphibians.

The Government of Nature by Afaa Michael Weaver (review)

Reviewed by: The Government of Nature by Afaa Michael Weaver Stacey Waite (bio) Afaa Michael Weaver. The Government of Nature. University of Pittsburgh Press. At the end of his poem “The Impossible,” a poem that unflinchingly recounts a memory of sexual abuse, Bruce Weigl writes, “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.” I’ve always had a contentious relationship with this line—feeling both its truth and its impossibility at the same time, and, of course, that’s part of the point. And this line was a kind of echo as I read Afaa Michael Weaver’s The Government of Nature, a book of narrative meditations that look bravely and, at times, with striking clarity, at the memory of childhood abuse— the poems falling down on the memory itself like so much rain. But these poems don’t point only to themselves—their reach extends out, developing a deep politics of suffering, survival, and family history. Weaver’s poems are crisp in their narrative telling, and also rich with the lyrical complexity that is the pillar of Weaver’s work. In “Washing the Car with My Father,” Weaver ends the poem: He tells me not to miss a spot, to openthe hood when I’m done so he can checkthe oil, the vital thing like blood, bloodof kinship, blood spilled in the streetsof Baltimore, blood oozing from the soulof a son walking prodigal paths leadingto gutters. Years later I tell him the storiesof what his brother-in-law did to me, and he wipes a tear from the corner of his eye,wraps it in a white handkerchief for church,walks up the stairs with the aluminumcrutch to scream at the feet of black Jesusand in these brittle years of his old age wegrow deeper, talk way after midnight,peeping over the rail of his hospital bedas we wash the twilight blue Chevy. One of Weaver’s remarkable strengths in this narrative is the seamlessness of the metaphor. The car, the oil becoming blood—these are beyond vivid details or powerful descriptions. They gather meaning as the poem moves, as Weaver renames the blood over and over. The brilliance of the craft in a poem like this is that the poem doesn’t seem made at all, the metaphor not built, just there in the experience. Some poems say, look what I am making and some, the most powerful, just say look. And The Government of Nature requires that we look. However simple looking may seem, in Weaver’s collection looking is an act of survival, a deeply committed and complicated political act. [End Page 181] This poem’s closing marks the tenderness with which Weaver approaches the subject of family, as the conversation between father and son becomes the washing of the car, except in this future moment the two are able to recognize one another with more precision—the way we recognize one another when we are running out of moments to do so. Weaver’s poems mark the body, contending with its mortality, something he names “a throat jammed with a good-bye” in the poem “When My Heart Fails.” In this poem Weaver writes, “I have come to have a high noon with the past.” This moment reveals, for me, Weaver’s ability to take a familiar idiom, like “high noon,” and pull the phrase’s meaning into the realm of the unfamiliar. Several times in the collection, the abuser is imagined as “cowboy,” so that when we come upon the phrase “high noon,” we hear the unsettling haunting of a childhood. But, as in much of Weaver’s prior work, a “high noon” with the past is not only a personal necessity but also a deeply historical one. In this sense, while Weaver’s book is profoundly personal in its subject matter, it is also a social and political critique that calls on us to look at our personal and collective histories as reflective and therefore inseparable. In the notes section of this book (which guide the reader through a series of Buddhist and Daoist symbols and references from the...

Barcode Localization using Curvelet Transform and Neural Network

Barcode localization is the main challenge in developing an imagebased barcode reading system. Bar codes are able to carry both explicit information and a database key, by encoding a series of characters or symbols. This paper deals with localization of European Article Number-13 (EAN-13) barcode in an image. A new approach for detecting and locating bar-codes is introduced here, which is based on the curvelet transform. All extracted feature by curvelet transform are applied to the neural network for training and testing. The performance of the proposed work shows efficient result.

Rejecting the Root

Investigations of Frederick Douglass’s religiosity too frequently neglect his 1845 Narrative, perhaps because readers continue to accept that the Narrative should be understood as a critique of specific individuals or denominations rather than a challenge to core Christian principles. But in the Narrative Douglass deploys a series of subtle biblical symbols to rewrite the Bible and subvert “Christianity proper.” Most controversially, I claim that the root that Douglass eventually rejects as an impotent totem of “ignorant slaves” is both a representation of hoodoo rootwork and, crucially, Jesus Christ; nineteenth-century readers of the Narrative, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, recognized the atheistic potency of this symbol, but biblical illiteracy has elided it from modern readings.

Sustentabilidade urbana e as certificações ambientais na construção civil

Ainda é grande o debate que envolve as questões de sustentabilidade, sobretudo sustentabilidade urbana. Este artigo procura estabelecer uma crítica aos modelos de cidades sustentáveis e de cidade pós-moderna estruturada pelo modelo de cidade dispersa produzida pela lógica do capital, trata-se de um esforço teórico metodológico de confrontar dois modelos de cidades, o modelo capitalista de produção do espaço e o modelo sustentável de cidade, ou seja, o modelo de cidade dispersa contra um modelo de cidade compacta. Para isso foi utilizado como exemplo as certificações ambientais para a construção civil que denotam um rotulo de construção sustentável quando na verdade articulam uma série de simbolismos que mascaram e reafirmam os processos de produção da cidades na perspectiva do capital.

Contesting the optic of (under)development: Tire dié and the emergence of independent documentary cinema in Argentina, ca. 1958

This paper explores the relations between the film that ushered a new era of political documentary filmmaking in Argentina – Fernando Birri and the Santa Fe Documentary School's Tire dié [Throw me a dime] (1960) – and development theories, which sought to produce ‘underdevelopment’ as an object of knowledge within the geopolitical context of the late 1950s. Tire dié draws its title from a sequence showing dozens of shantytown children shouting this phrase while running alongside a train. Instead of situating the conditions for the making of Tire dié strictly within the trajectory of Argentine cinema's political radicalization, this article links them to development theories originating in the US and in supranational institutions. Although focused on development, these theories also defined underdevelopment by elaborating a series of premises, equivalencies and symbols. When adopted and modified by Argentine political discourse, these theories came to constitute a new prism through which to examine and show social and economic marginality, equating it with underdevelopment. This article demonstrates that Tire dié deploys a documentary gaze on social and economic marginality that, while taking up characteristic categories of development discourse, both subverts its original connotations and critiques the false promise embodied in capitalist development.

Motor Skill Development Using Motion Recognition based on an HMM

The purpose of this study is to propose an original method that enables the recognition of a swinging motion. Furthermore, we apply the method for supporting skill development. In this study, we use an optical-motion capture system to monitor a human's motion. The captured data are transformed into series of symbols by using a feature quantity. The feature quantity is height of hands. The symbol sequence is learned and recognized by a Hidden Markov Model (hereinafter HMM). An evaluation was performed with five subjects. The target motions are the batting and pitching of a baseball and, the motor actions of tennis, such as swinging in service, forehand and backhand. The accuracy of evaluation with the dataset is more than 80% recognition.

Shape-based alignment of genomic landscapes in multi-scale resolution

Due to dramatic advances in DNA technology, quantitative measures of annotation data can now be obtained in continuous coordinates across the entire genome, allowing various heterogeneous ‘genomic landscapes’ to emerge. Although much effort has been devoted to comparing DNA sequences, not much attention has been given to comparing these large quantities of data comprehensively. In this article, we introduce a method for rapidly detecting local regions that show high correlations between genomic landscapes. We overcame the size problem for genome-wide data by converting the data into series of symbols and then carrying out sequence alignment. We also decomposed the oscillation of the landscape data into different frequency bands before analysis, since the real genomic landscape is a mixture of embedded and confounded biological processes working at different scales in the cell nucleus. To verify the usefulness and generality of our method, we applied our approach to well investigated landscapes from the human genome, including several histone modifications. Furthermore, by applying our method to over 20 genomic landscapes in human and 12 in mouse, we found that DNA replication timing and the density of Alu insertions are highly correlated genome-wide in both species, even though the Alu elements have amplified independently in the two genomes. To our knowledge, this is the first method to align genomic landscapes at multiple scales according to their shape.

Effects of quantization on detrended fluctuation analysis

Detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) is a method foro estimating the long-range power-law correlation exponent in noisy signals. It has been used successfully in many different fields, especially in the research of physiological signals. As an inherent part of these studies, quantization of continuous signals is inevitable. In addition, coarse-graining, to transfer original signals into symbol series in symbolic dynamic analysis, can also be considered as a quantization-like operation. Therefore, it is worth considering whether the quantization of signal has any effect on the result of DFA and if so, how large the effect will be. In this paper we study how the quantized degrees for three types of noise series (anti-correlated, uncorrelated and long-range power-law correlated signals) affect the results of DFA and find that their effects are completely different. The conclusion has an essential value in choosing the resolution of data acquisition instrument and in the processing of coarse-graining of signals.

Scaling properties and fractality in the distribution of coding segments in eukaryotic genomes revealed through a block entropy approach

Statistical methods, including block entropy based approaches, have already been used in the study of long-range features of genomic sequences seen as symbol series, either considering the full alphabet of the four nucleotides or the binary purine or pyrimidine character set. Here we explore the alternation of short protein-coding segments with long noncoding spacers in entire chromosomes, focusing on the scaling properties of block entropy. In previous studies, it has been shown that the sizes of noncoding spacers follow power-law-like distributions in most chromosomes of eukaryotic organisms from distant taxa. We have developed a simple evolutionary model based on well-known molecular events (segmental duplications followed by elimination of most of the duplicated genes) which reproduces the observed linearity in log-log plots. The scaling properties of block entropy H(n) have been studied in several works. Their findings suggest that linearity in semilogarithmic scale characterizes symbol sequences which exhibit fractal properties and long-range order, while this linearity has been shown in the case of the logistic map at the Feigenbaum accumulation point. The present work starts with the observation that the block entropy of the Cantor-like binary symbol series scales in a similar way. Then, we perform the same analysis for the full set of human chromosomes and for several chromosomes of other eukaryotes. A similar but less extended linearity in semilogarithmic scale, indicating fractality, is observed, while randomly formed surrogate sequences clearly lack this type of scaling. Genomic sequences always present entropy values much lower than their random surrogates. Symbol sequences produced by the aforementioned evolutionary model follow the scaling found in genomic sequences, thus corroborating the conjecture that "segmental duplication-gene elimination" dynamics may have contributed to the observed long rangeness in the coding or noncoding alternation in genomes.