Statues, Stelai, and Turning Posts in Greece, c.565–c.465 BCE

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-98
Author(s):  
Richard Neer

This essay is about Greek sculpture of the Archaic and Classical periods but addresses larger issues of method. It argues that iconography, while indispensable, is a limited way to study sculpture. As an alternative, it addresses some of the ways in which Greek sculptural monuments could intervene in landscapes. It examines the connections between statues, stelai, turning posts and boundary stones in the Greek imagination. A secondary goal is to advocate an approach to Greek epigraphy that goes beyond semantics to include the connotative aspects of visual features such as mise en page and the difference between epigraphic and metrical line breaks. Examples include the class of “Man-and-Dog” stelai, the “Mourning Athena” from the Athenian Acropolis, and inscriptions from Athens, Eleusis, Troezen, and elsewhere.

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 16-23
Author(s):  
Alexey Medyntsev ◽  
◽  
Alena Kogan ◽  
Pavel Sabadosh ◽  
Olga Dyatlova ◽  
...  

One of the main research questions related to creativity is the dilemma of specificity vs. non-specificity of the mechanisms underlying insight solutions as compared to analytical solutions of a problem. The first goal of our study was to verify insight solution specificity on solving anagram tasks. The second goal was to test a hypothesis about the existence of unconscious processing prior to insight solutions. We presented two types of stimuli to participants: anagrams and pseudowords. During the experiment, participants had to perform two successive tasks. First they had to judge whether they were being shown an anagram or a pseudoword, and then they had to solve the anagram. Anagrams and pseudowords differed in some visual features, of which the participants were not aware. It was expected that unconscious processing (if it exists) would be influenced by the implicit difference between the appearance of stimulus categories. During the solving process, participants had to rate how close they were to a solution. After a successful solution, they also had to indicate which way they found it: analytically or with insight. Our results showed that prior to an insight solution, participants felt that they were farther from the final solution than in the case of an analytical solution. These results confirm Metcalfe and Wiebe’s (1987) conclusions on the difference between insight and analytical solutions. According to these data, we can propose different specific mechanisms for insight solutions and analytical solutions in anagram tasks. At the same time, the presence of visual differences between stimulus categories did not influence the anagram solving process. The current results did not show evidence for an important role of unconscious processing before insight solutions of anagrams


Author(s):  
Tianyuan Liu ◽  
Jinsong Bao ◽  
Junliang Wang ◽  
Yiming Zhang

Abstract Machine vision has a wide range of applications in the field of welding. The rise of convolutional neural network (CNN) provides a new way to extract visual features of welding. Due to the limitation of the small size of our molten pool dataset, the regularization of the CNN model is necessary to prevent overfitting. We propose a coarse-grained regularization method for convolution kernels (CGRCKs), which is designed to maximize the difference between convolution kernels in the same layer. The algorithm performance was tested on our self-made dataset and other public datasets. The results show that the CGRCK method can extract multi-faceted features. Compared with L1 or L2 regularization, the proposed method works great on CNNs and introduces little overhead cost to the training.


Author(s):  
Zibo Meng ◽  
Shizhong Han ◽  
Min Chen ◽  
Yan Tong

Recognizing facial actions is challenging, especially when they are accompanied with speech. Instead of employing information solely from the visual channel, this work aims to exploit information from both visual and audio channels in recognizing speech-related facial action units (AUs). In this work, two feature-level fusion methods are proposed. The first method is based on a kind of human-crafted visual feature. The other method utilizes visual features learned by a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). For both methods, features are independently extracted from visual and audio channels and aligned to handle the difference in time scales and the time shift between the two signals. These temporally aligned features are integrated via feature-level fusion for AU recognition. Experimental results on a new audiovisual AU-coded dataset have demonstrated that both fusion methods outperform their visual counterparts in recognizing speech-related AUs. The improvement is more impressive with occlusions on the facial images, which would not affect the audio channel.


Author(s):  
Abhishek De ◽  
Gregory D Horwitz

The spatial processing of color is important for visual perception. Double-opponent (DO) cells likely contribute to this processing by virtue of their spatially opponent and cone-opponent receptive fields (RFs). However, the representation of visual features by DO cells in the primary visual cortex of primates is unclear because the spatial structure of their RFs has not been fully characterized. To fill this gap, we mapped the RFs of DO cells in awake macaques with colorful, dynamic white noise patterns. The spatial RF of each neuron was fitted with a Gabor function and three versions of the Difference of Gaussians (DoG) function. The Gabor function provided the more accurate description for most DO cells, a result that is incompatible with the traditionally assumed center-surround RF organization. A non-concentric version of the DoG function, in which the RFs have a circular center and a crescent-shaped surround, performed nearly as well as the Gabor model thus reconciling results from previous reports. For comparison, we also measured the RFs of simple cells. We found that the superiority of the Gabor fits over DoG fits was slightly more decisive for simple cells than for DO cells. The implications of these results on biological image processing and visual perception are discussed.


1962 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 149-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. L. Ruskol

The difference between average densities of the Moon and Earth was interpreted in the preceding report by Professor H. Urey as indicating a difference in their chemical composition. Therefore, Urey assumes the Moon's formation to have taken place far away from the Earth, under conditions differing substantially from the conditions of Earth's formation. In such a case, the Earth should have captured the Moon. As is admitted by Professor Urey himself, such a capture is a very improbable event. In addition, an assumption that the “lunar” dimensions were representative of protoplanetary bodies in the entire solar system encounters great difficulties.


1997 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 491-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Westall

AbstractThe oldest cell-like structures on Earth are preserved in silicified lagoonal, shallow sea or hydrothermal sediments, such as some Archean formations in Western Australia and South Africa. Previous studies concentrated on the search for organic fossils in Archean rocks. Observations of silicified bacteria (as silica minerals) are scarce for both the Precambrian and the Phanerozoic, but reports of mineral bacteria finds, in general, are increasing. The problems associated with the identification of authentic fossil bacteria and, if possible, closer identification of bacteria type can, in part, be overcome by experimental fossilisation studies. These have shown that not all bacteria fossilise in the same way and, indeed, some seem to be very resistent to fossilisation. This paper deals with a transmission electron microscope investigation of the silicification of four species of bacteria commonly found in the environment. The Gram positiveBacillus laterosporusand its spore produced a robust, durable crust upon silicification, whereas the Gram negativePseudomonas fluorescens, Ps. vesicularis, andPs. acidovoranspresented delicately preserved walls. The greater amount of peptidoglycan, containing abundant metal cation binding sites, in the cell wall of the Gram positive bacterium, probably accounts for the difference in the mode of fossilisation. The Gram positive bacteria are, therefore, probably most likely to be preserved in the terrestrial and extraterrestrial rock record.


1994 ◽  
Vol 144 ◽  
pp. 421-426
Author(s):  
N. F. Tyagun

AbstractThe interrelationship of half-widths and intensities for the red, green and yellow lines is considered. This is a direct relationship for the green and yellow line and an inverse one for the red line. The difference in the relationships of half-widths and intensities for different lines appears to be due to substantially dissimilar structuring and to a set of line-of-sight motions in ”hot“ and ”cold“ corona regions.When diagnosing the coronal plasma, one cannot neglect the filling factor - each line has such a factor of its own.


Author(s):  
Jules S. Jaffe ◽  
Robert M. Glaeser

Although difference Fourier techniques are standard in X-ray crystallography it has only been very recently that electron crystallographers have been able to take advantage of this method. We have combined a high resolution data set for frozen glucose embedded Purple Membrane (PM) with a data set collected from PM prepared in the frozen hydrated state in order to visualize any differences in structure due to the different methods of preparation. The increased contrast between protein-ice versus protein-glucose may prove to be an advantage of the frozen hydrated technique for visualizing those parts of bacteriorhodopsin that are embedded in glucose. In addition, surface groups of the protein may be disordered in glucose and ordered in the frozen state. The sensitivity of the difference Fourier technique to small changes in structure provides an ideal method for testing this hypothesis.


Author(s):  
P. Maupin-Szamier ◽  
T. D. Pollard

We have studied the destruction of rabbit muscle actin filaments by osmium tetroxide (OSO4) to develop methods which will preserve the structure of actin filaments during preparation for transmission electron microscopy.Negatively stained F-actin, which appears as smooth, gently curved filaments in control samples (Fig. 1a), acquire an angular, distorted profile and break into progressively shorter pieces after exposure to OSO4 (Fig. 1b,c). We followed the time course of the reaction with viscometry since it is a simple, quantitative method to assess filament integrity. The difference in rates of decay in viscosity of polymerized actin solutions after the addition of four concentrations of OSO4 is illustrated in Fig. 2. Viscometry indicated that the rate of actin filament destruction is also dependent upon temperature, buffer type, buffer concentration, and pH, and requires the continued presence of OSO4. The conditions most favorable to filament preservation are fixation in a low concentration of OSO4 for a short time at 0°C in 100mM sodium phosphate buffer, pH 6.0.


Author(s):  
Y. H. Liu

Ordered Ni3Fe crystals possess a LI2 type superlattice similar to the Cu3Au structure. The difference in slip behavior of the superlattice as compared with that of a disordered phase has been well established. Cottrell first postulated that the increase in resistance for slip in the superlattice structure is attributed to the presence of antiphase domain boundaries. Following Cottrell's domain hardening mechanism, numerous workers have proposed other refined models also involving the presence of domain boundaries. Using the anomalous X-ray diffraction technique, Davies and Stoloff have shown that the hardness of the Ni3Fe superlattice varies with the domain size. So far, no direct observation of antiphase domain boundaries in Ni3Fe has been reported. Because the atomic scattering factors of the elements in NijFe are so close, the superlattice reflections are not easily detected. Furthermore, the domain configurations in NioFe are thought to be independent of the crystallographic orientations.


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