Building the Monuments of the Future

Author(s):  
Edmund Thomas

The preservation of ancient structures like the house of Alexander at Thebes not only reinforced Romans’ sense of the passing of time, but also encouraged them to aspire to make their monuments last as long or even longer as legendary examples of the past. But the primary influence of historical archetypes was not on monuments’ precise architectural design, but on their identification as monuments by name and the implication of this for their memorializing function. This can be seen most clearly through those buildings that preserved the remains of human beings for future generations, in other words, tomb structures. It has often been argued that the purest form of building is funerary architecture, intended to commemorate and to endure, and not distracted by any social functions. This was the view of the early twentieth-century Moravian architect Adolf Loos, who wrote in his 1910 essay ‘Architektur’ that: ‘Nur ein ganz kleiner Teil der Architektur gehört der Kunst an: das Grabmal und das Denkmal. Alles andere, alles, was einem Zweck dient, ist aus dem Reiche der Kunst auszuschliessen.’ In the Roman world, tomb monuments had more complex functions for the living as well as the dead: they were not only a setting for ritual funerary processions and banquets in commemoration of the deceased, but also a backdrop to a wide range of economic and social activities in the suburbia of Roman cities, such as trade, market-gardening, and new construction. Yet the Antonine age also shows an interest in funerary buildings as a pure form of architecture in their own right. As Loos commented later in the same essay: ‘Wenn wir im Walde einen Hügel finden, sechs Schuh lang und drei Schuh breit, mit der Schaufel pyramidenförmig aufgerichtet, dann werden wir ernst, und es sagt etwas in uns: Hier liegt jemand begraben. Das ist Architektur.’ Potentially cut off from the functions of everyday life, the tomb monument expresses an ideal architecture. Tomb buildings had always been conspicuous monuments in the ancient world, and the biggest and most famous ones inspired others to follow their example.

2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
James Marcel Hegarty

Cardiff UniversityThere is no doubt that the idea of place matters. Human beings have long been willing to fight and die for rights, symbolic and material, over both tangible and intangible places. However, the types of expression and performance that transmit and adapt ideas of place are less well understood than the brute fact of the enduring power of certain charged locations. That is to say, we know that certain places are significant but we are less sure as to the mechanisms of how and why they are made so. In addition, scholarly work in this area has tended to consider the literary and performative construction of place to always be bound up with these determinate locations rather than a variety of social functions. Literary engagements with the category of place, as this volume will demonstrate, encompass a wide range of uses. A suggestive but by no means exhaustive list of those that reflect the analytic content of this volume would have to include: political and religious legitimation, the construction of the significant past, the expression of agreement and dissent in relation to prevailing and emergent ideologies, and the transmission and adaptation of systems of socially significant knowledge in response to a wide variety of historical circumstances. Literatures of place, then, provide an extraordinarily rich source of information as to the ways in which human beings maintain and transform their understandings of not just the world around them, but themselves.


Author(s):  
_______ Archana ◽  
Charu Datta ◽  
Pratibha Tiwari

Degradation of environment is one of the most serious challenges before the mankind in today’s world. Mankind has been facing a wide range of problem arising out of the degradation of environment. Not only the areas under human inhabitation, but the areas of the planet without human population have also been suffering from these problems. As the population increase day by day, the amenities are not improved simultaneously. With the advancement of science and technologies the needs of human beings has been changing rapidly. As a result different types of environmental problems have been rising. Environmental degradation is a wide- reaching problem and it is likely to influence the health of human population is great. It may be defined the deterioration of the environment through depletion of resources such as air, water, and soil. The destruction of ecosystem and extinction of wildlife. Environmental degradation has occurred due to the recent activities in the field of socio-economic, institute and technology. Poverty still remains a problem as the root of several environmental problems to create awareness among the people about the ill effect of environmental pollution. In the whole research it is clear that all factors of environmental degradation may be reduced through- Framing the new laws on environmental degradation, Environment friend policy, Controlling all the ways and means of noise, air, soil and water pollution, Through growing more and more trees and by adapting the proper sanitation policy.  


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 3397
Author(s):  
Gustavo Assunção ◽  
Nuno Gonçalves ◽  
Paulo Menezes

Human beings have developed fantastic abilities to integrate information from various sensory sources exploring their inherent complementarity. Perceptual capabilities are therefore heightened, enabling, for instance, the well-known "cocktail party" and McGurk effects, i.e., speech disambiguation from a panoply of sound signals. This fusion ability is also key in refining the perception of sound source location, as in distinguishing whose voice is being heard in a group conversation. Furthermore, neuroscience has successfully identified the superior colliculus region in the brain as the one responsible for this modality fusion, with a handful of biological models having been proposed to approach its underlying neurophysiological process. Deriving inspiration from one of these models, this paper presents a methodology for effectively fusing correlated auditory and visual information for active speaker detection. Such an ability can have a wide range of applications, from teleconferencing systems to social robotics. The detection approach initially routes auditory and visual information through two specialized neural network structures. The resulting embeddings are fused via a novel layer based on the superior colliculus, whose topological structure emulates spatial neuron cross-mapping of unimodal perceptual fields. The validation process employed two publicly available datasets, with achieved results confirming and greatly surpassing initial expectations.


Author(s):  
Gonca YAYAN ◽  
Vildan EVSEL

In every geography where people live, besides their efforts to meet their mandatory needs, people also put forward their first artistic products. While carving the rocks, the first humans expressed their feelings, what they thought, saw, and lived, and made various descriptions. Thus, the foundations of the art of painting were laid and the colors discovered. In fact, human beings, who are innately creative, have searched for permanent ways to express their feelings, thoughts and wishes as well as their battles and successes, and transfer them to the future generations. In this way, various artistic works that developed from simple pictures to symbolic forms and letter sequences were created. The communication established in this way with art also started a process of exchange of messages between individuals and groups. This exchange, which plays an active role in the interaction of people with each other, has appeared in every situation as a social consequence of being a receiver and a giver. Because the most important elements of communication are formed with these forms of expression, which are realized in written, verbal, visual and auditory terms between the receiver and the transmitter. Today, many artists create works by using the universal language of symbols, by attributing their own meanings to many contents with commonsymbolism, objects and colors. Effective communication between societies with art is also ensured through the symbolic forms used. With this research, it is aimed to examine and evaluate the works of artist Muhsin Kut, who presents different thematic perspectives with his paintings with and without figures containing social themes, in terms of their technical and aesthetic features. The research was carried out with document analysis (literature review) method, which is one of the qualitative research types. Today, many artists create works by using the universal language of symbols by attributing their own meanings to many content with common symbolism, objects and colors. Through the symbolic forms used, an effective communication between societies with art is also ensured. With this research, it is aimed to examine and evaluate the works of the artist Muhsin Kut, who presents different thematic perspectives with his social paintings with and without figures, in terms of their technical and aesthetic features.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farhan Ali ◽  

Thinking creatively, is a necessary condition of the Design process to transform ideas into novel solutions and break barriers to creativity. Although, there are many techniques and ways to stimulate creative thinking for designers, however, this research paper adopts SCAMPER; which is acronym of: Substitute- Combine-Adapt- Modify or Magnify-Put to another use-Eliminate-Reverse or Rearrange- to integrate the sustainability concepts within architectural design process. Many creative artifacts have been designed consciously or unconsciously adopting SCAMPER strategies such as rehabilitation and reuse projects to improve the functional performance or the aesthetic sense of an existing building for the better. SCAMPER is recognized as a divergent thinking tool are used during the initial ideation stage, aims to leave the usual way of thinking to generate a wide range of new ideas that will lead to new insights, original ideas, and creative solutions to problems. The research focuses on applying this method in the architectural design, which is rarely researched, through reviewing seven examples that have been designed consciously or unconsciously adopting SCAMPER mnemonic techniques. The paper aims to establish a starting point for further research to deepen it and study its potentials in solving architectural design problems.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Benjamin Knisely ◽  
Monifa Vaughn-Cooke

Abstract Human beings are physically and cognitively variable, leading to a wide array of potential system use cases. To design safe and effective systems for highly heterogeneous populations, engineers must cater to this variability to minimize the chance of error and system failure. This can be a challenge because of the increasing costs associated with providing additional product variety. Most guidance for navigating these trade-offs is intended for late-stage design, when significant resources have been expended, thus risking expensive redesign or exclusion of users when new human concerns become apparent. Despite the critical need to evaluate accommodation-cost trade-offs in early stages of design, there is currently a lack of structured guidance. In this work, an approach to function modeling is proposed that allows the simultaneous consideration of human and machine functionality. This modeling approach facilitates the allocation of system functions to humans and machines to be used as an accessible baseline for concept development. Further, a multi-objective optimization model was developed to allocate functions with metrics for accommodation and cost. The model was demonstrated on a design case study. 16 senior mechanical engineering students were recruited and tasked with performing the allocation task manually. The results were compared to the output of the optimization model. Results indicated that participants were unable to produce concepts with the same accommodation-cost efficiency as the optimization model. Further, the optimization model successfully produced a wide range of potential product concepts, demonstrating its utility as a decision-aid.


Nanomaterials ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 978 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lian-Hua Fu ◽  
Qing-Long Gao ◽  
Chao Qi ◽  
Ming-Guo Ma ◽  
Jun-Feng Li

Silver-based antimicrobial nanomaterials are considered as the most promising antibacterial agents owing to their outstanding antimicrobial efficacy and their relatively low toxicity to human beings. In this work, we report on a facile and environment-friendly microwave-hydrothermal method to prepare cellulose/Ag nanocomposites using hemicellulose as the reductant. The influences of the microwave-hydrothermal heating time and temperature, as well as the hemicellulose concentration on the formation of cellulose nanocomposites, were investigated in detail. Experimental results indicated that the hemicellulose was an effective reductant for silver ions, with higher temperature and longer heating time favoring the formation of silver with higher crystallinity and mass content in the nanocomposites. Moreover, the antimicrobial properties of the as-prepared cellulose/Ag nanocomposites were explored using Gram-positive S. aureus ATCC 6538 and Gram-negative E. coli HB 101 by both disc diffusion method and agar dilution method, and the nanocomposites showed excellent antibacterial activity. These results demonstrate that the as-prepared cellulose/Ag nanocomposites, as a kind of antibacterial material, are promising for applications in a wide range of biomedical fields.


1982 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-315
Author(s):  
Mortimer J. Adler

✓ In his 1982 Cushing oration, a distinguished philosopher, author, and discerning critic presents a distillate of his phenomenally wide range of personal experience and his familiarity with the great books and teachers of the present and the past. He explores the differences and relationships between human beings, brute animals, and machines. Knowledge of the brain and nervous system contribute to the explanation of all aspects of animal behavior, intelligence, and mentality, but cannot completely explain human conceptual thought.


2004 ◽  
pp. 147-176
Author(s):  
Stanimir Rakic

In this paper I examine compound names of plants, animals, human beings and other things in which at least one nominal component designates a part of the body or clothes, or some basic elements of houshold in Serbian and English. The object of my analysis are complex derivatives of the type (adjective noun) + suffix in Serbian and componds of the type noun's + noun, noun + noun and adjective + noun in English. I try to show that there is a difference in metaphorical designation of human beings and other living creatures and things by such compound nouns. My thesis is that the metathorical designation of human beings by such compounds is based on the symbolic meaning of some words and expressions while the designation of other things and beings relies on noticed similarity. In Serbian language such designation is provided by comples derivatives praznoglavac 'empty-headed person', tupoglavac 'dullard' debolokoiac 'callos person', golobradac 'young, inexperienced person' zutokljunac 'tledling' (fig), in English chicken liver, beetle brain birdbrain, bonehead, butterfingers, bigwig, blackleg, blue blood bluestocking, eat's paw, deadhead,fat-guts,fathead, goldbrick (kol) hardhat, hardhead, greenhorn, redcoat (ist), redneck (sl), thickhead, etc. Polisemous compounds like eat's paw lend support for this thesis because their designation of human beings is based on symbolic meaning of some words or expressions. I hypothesize that the direction and extend of the possible metaphorization of names may be accounted for by the following hierarchy (11) people - animals - plants - meterial things. Such hierarchy is well supported by the observations of Lakoff (1987) and Taylor (1995) about the role of human body in early experience and perception ofthe reality. Different restrictions which may be imposed in the hierarchy (11) should be the matter of further study, some of which have been noted on this paper. The compounds of this type denoting people have metaphorically meaning conected with some pejorative uses. These compounds refer to some psychological or characteral features, and show that for the classification of people such features are much more important than physical properties. While the animals and plants are classified according to some charecteristics of their body parts, people are usually classified according to psychollogical characteristics or their social functions. I have also noted a difference in structure between compounds designation animals and those designating plants and other things. The designation of animals relies more on metonymy, and that of plants and other things on metaphor based on comparision of noticed similarities. In the compounds designating animals, the nominal component relatively seldom refers to the parts of plants or other things. I guess that the cause may be the fact that the anatomy of plants is very different from the anatomy of animals. As a consequence the structure adjective + noun is much more characteristic of the compounds designating animals in English than the structure noun's + noun, and the same holds, although in a lesser degree for the compounds designating humans. It is also noticeable that in English compounds whose second component a part of body or clothes the first component rarely designates animals. On the other hand the compounds (9), in which the nominal head refers to some superordinate species, the first component often designates animal species, but usually of a very different kind. These data seem to lend support for Goldvarg & Gluksberg's thesis (1998) that metaforical interpretation is favoured if the nominal constituents denote quite different entities.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 97-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suhaib Rehaman Abdul ◽  
Robin George

Klebsiella organisms are known to cause a wide range of clinical syndromes in human beings which include pneumonia, urinary tract infection, abdominal infection, surgical site infection, soft tissue infection and infection of intravascular devices. The incidence is higher among immunocompromised individuals and those with chronic debilitating diseases like diabetes, alcoholism etc. This case report is regarding an elderly diabetic male who developed necrotizing fasciitis of leg following local application of steroids. The causative organism was Klebsiella, which is an unusual pathogen.Asian Journal of Medical Sciences Vol.7(5) 2016 97-99


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document