Wild Appearance Research Articles

Apeniny we wspomnieniach Anieli Walewskiej

Kilka chwil we Włoszech w latach 1847 i 1848 [A few Moments in Italy in 1847 and 1848], a volume of memoirs published in 1850 and written by Aniela Walewska — a forgotten author of the Romantic era — is a historically, culturally and socially interesting travel account which, in addition to notes devoted to the political situation at the time, also features descriptions of cultural and natural landscapes which Walewska had an opportunity to admire during her Italian voyage. Particularly worthy of note are her reflections concerning mountain landscapes reflecting the author’s romantic sensibility as well as her emotional and aesthetic attitude to new places. Spending a few weeks in the Tuscan resort of Bagni di Lucca, Aniela Walewska had an opportunity to admire the Apennines, which generated admiration and lofty feelings in her and prompted her to engage in existential, philosophical and religious reflection. Using a variety of means of literary expression, the writer sought to convey the varied aspects of the mountains: solemn beauty, picturesque charm, severe and wild appearance. Yet despite her lively interest in the Apennine landscapes, the Polish traveller was preoccupied primarily with the political situation in her distant homeland, which determined her perception of and feeling for the mountains so much that her observations often departed from purely aesthetic evaluation in favour of patriotic associations. However, the descriptions in her memoirs are vivid, full of admiration and rapture, which makes them worthy of being brought back from obscurity and analysed thoroughly. As evidence of individual and feminine way of experiencing the world of nature, they certainly make a valuable contribution to the Romantic travel literature and expand our knowledge of the history of mountain voyages of Polish women in that period.

Deep pose consensus networks

In this paper, we address the problem of estimating a 3D human pose from a single image, which is important but difficult to solve due to reasons, such as self-occlusions, wild appearance changes, and inherent ambiguities of 3D estimation from a 2D cue. These difficulties make the problem ill-posed, which have become requiring increasingly complex estimators to enhance the performance. On the other hand, most existing methods try to handle this problem based on a single complex estimator, which might not be good solutions for 3D human pose estimation. In this paper, to resolve this issue, we propose a multiple-partial-hypothesis-based framework for the problem of estimating 3D human pose from a single image, which can be fine-tuned in an end-to-end fashion. We first select several joint groups from a human joint model using the proposed sampling scheme, and estimate the 3D pose of each joint group separately based on deep neural networks. After that, the estimated poses are aggregated to obtain the final 3D pose using the proposed robust optimization formula. The overall procedure can be fine-tuned in an end-to-end fashion, resulting in better estimation performance. In the experiments, the proposed framework shows the state-of-the-art performances on popular benchmark data sets, namely Human3.6M and HumanEva, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

In Midnight's Children, the Subalterns Speak!

My main point in this article is to suggest that even though the subalterns “do not speak directly in archival documents which are usually produced by the ruling classes” (Chakrabarty, “Small History” 478), they speak nonetheless in bits and traces within the elite discourses. Wherever the elite speak, the subaltern speaks as well because “supplementarity” is the condition of their possibility.1 “Man is aristocratic,” Antonio Gramsci argues, “because he is the servant of the soil” (80). Just like other structural opposites, the subaltern constitutes the elite not by being outside the domains of modern knowledge production but by inhabiting them. It is, therefore, hard to imagine the one without imagining the “other.” I do not at all mean to suggest, however, that the subalterns are able to speak for themselves or to suggest that the intellectuals’ role is now over, but to submit that there is a more complicated nexus between the rulers and the subalterns than it is often thought. In his article “The Impossibility of Subaltern History,” the critic Gyan Prakash argues that the subaltern refuses to be outside modernity, and the discourse that puts him or her outside history is indicative of the will of those who practice such exclusionary discourse. He further contends,

Razorbacks: Feral Pigs as Agricultural Pests, Disruptors of Ecosystems, Reservoirs of Contagion, and Favored Game for Sport and Subsistence Hunters: A Review of the Literature, 2005–2011

Whether they are called “razorbacks,” as is common in the southern United States (and where they are notably the official sports mascots of the University of Arkansas), or “wild boar,” in much of the rest of the world, feral pigs are interbreeding subtypes of Sus scrofa, the same pig domesticated over 5,000 years ago. Once they have become established in the wild, these formerly manageable animals rapidly undergo a dramatic reversion to a wild appearance, may display aggression toward humans, engage in agriculturally and ecologically damaging behaviors, and spread diseases to both livestock and humans. They are the targets of many ongoing, increasingly sophisticated, science-based, eradication efforts.

Orpheus Ascending: Music, Race, and Gender in Adrienne Kennedy's She Talks to Beethoven

A drienne recent play She Talks to Beethoven first appeared in Antaeus in the spring of 1991 and was subsequently included as the first of the Alexander Plays published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1992. Alisa Solomon's observation in the foreword to the Alexander Plays that Kennedy's plays scare off theatre producers (xiv) is unfortunately true regarding She Talks. First staged in an unnoticed production by River Arts in Woodstock in 1989, the play received a Kennedydirected student reading at Harvard University in 1989 (Kolin, Kennedy interview)--and thus ends She Talks' brief production history. Sorry to say, the play was not performed at the Kennedy Festival at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in March 1992, despite the fact that the longest of the Alexander plays--the Ohio State Murders--received an exemplary production directed by Gerald Freedman (Kolin, Adrienne 85). In spite of its sparse stage history to date--one hopes for many spirited productions--She Talks to Beethoven is a central play in the Kennedy canon, since it marks a new direction, I believe, for the playwright and her work. She Talks has all the earmarks of earlier Kennedy plays, but this work offers healing consolation instead of the nightmarish world of fragmentation that has characterized surreal theatre in the past. Unique in the Kennedy canon, She Talks assures happy conjugal closure and promotes racial reconciliation. Set in Accra, Ghana, in 1961, soon after independence (She Talks 4), the plot deals with the forced separation of Suzanne Alexander, an American writer, from her physician/artist husband David, whom, it is feared, has been kidnapped or driven into hiding to protect his sick wife. As in so many other Kennedy plays, historical personages appear alongside fictional ones. Beethoven talks and travels with Suzanne, heroine. As in other Kennedy plays, such as Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) or The Owl Answers (1965), a festering wound is associated with a decaying whiteness, a horrifying fistula of miscegenation. Suzanne suffers from a wound which results in part of her arm and shoulder being wrapped or bandaged in gauze (5), and the color of this surgical wound is deathly pale white. But the suffering of black heroine/protagonist in She Talks is matched, if not exceeded, by the suffering of the great white composer Beethoven, with whom she communicates throughout the play. The characteristic betrayal and suffering of black women characters are thus shared with a white male. Additionally, the wild hair that marks many of own protagonists, and perhaps reflects her concern about her own personal appearance (Kolin, LeBlanc interview 308), is transferred to the white composer-The neglect of his person which he exhibited gave him a somewhat wild appearance. His features were strong and prominent; his eye was full of rude energy; his hair, which neither comb nor scissors seemed to have visited for years, overshaded his brow in a quantity and confusion to which only the snakes of Gorgon's head offer a parallel (8). This description of the white composer, with its emphasis on the gory and the exaggerated, would seem more appropriate to a Kennedy black female. The violence we have come to associate with a Kennedy play--for example, the bloody cleft in Patrice Lamumba's head in Funnyhouse of a Negro or the heinous tortures in A Rat's Mass--also occurs in She Talks, but it is in the background, not foregrounded with bloody props and graphic detail. We only hear about the violence in Beethoven's Vienna or Suzanne's Accra through reportage; it is not represented with gripping horror. For example, Suzanne reads from one of Beethoven's published diaries: ... the war with Napoleon escalated .... the Russians have retreated as far as Saint Polten. Vienna is in great danger of being swept over by marauding Chasseurs (6), and a little later we hear an account by Barron of events in Vienna before the premiere of Fidelio: To make matters worse, [Beethoven's] lodging was next to the city wall, and as Napoleon had ordered its destruction, blasts had just been set off under his windows (11). …

The genetics of “rogues” among culinary peas ( Pisum sativum )

In 1915 we described observations and experiments on rogue peas. Our results up to the end of 1914 were as follows:— (1) Rogues arise sporadically from self-fertilised seeds of various races of typical high-class peas. (2) These rogues are characterised by pointed leaflets and upward-curving pods. Their foliar organs, stipules, leaflets, sepals, petals, and carpels are all narrower than those of the types. It is especially characteristic of rogues that their leaflets end in points instead of the emarginate apices proper to the types. Their seeds are, on an average, slightly smaller. Such plants have a curiously wild appearance, which contrasts greatly with the ampler proportions of the types.

A Dancing Disease of Madagascar. (Brit. Med. Journ., Feb. 17th, 1900.)

Attention is drawn to Lasnet's notes on the Sakalavas or West Coast Malagasies published in the Annales d'Hygiène et de Médecine Coloniales, which include the description of a curious epidemic nervous affection met with amongst the natives. It begins suddenly, and consists of incessant shaking of the body, accompanied by irregular movements, incoherent speech, and delirium; the patients indulge in wild bacchanalian dances, finally falling to the ground panting and foaming at the mouth. Some clamber up the rocks, while others pass whole days in pools or rivers, declaring that they are forced to remain there by spirits. They present meanwhile a most wild appearance, and, if not dancing, walk straight before them with head erect and eyes constantly rolling. It is very communicable.