scholarly journals Using a Rotating 3D LiDAR on a Mobile Robot for Estimation of Person’s Body Angle and Gender

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (14) ◽  
pp. 3964
Author(s):  
Dražen Brščić ◽  
Rhys Wyn Evans ◽  
Matthias Rehm ◽  
Takayuki Kanda
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Simulated Data ◽  
Absolute Error ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
The Body ◽  
People Tracking ◽  
Body Angle ◽  
Lidar Measurements ◽  
And Gender ◽  
3D Lidar

We studied the use of a rotating multi-layer 3D Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) sensor (specifically the Velodyne HDL-32E) mounted on a social robot for the estimation of features of people around the robot. While LiDARs are often used for robot self-localization and people tracking, we were interested in the possibility of using them to estimate the people’s features (states or attributes), which are important in human–robot interaction. In particular, we tested the estimation of the person’s body orientation and their gender. As collecting data in the real world and labeling them is laborious and time consuming, we also looked into other ways for obtaining data for training the estimators: using simulations, or using LiDAR data collected in the lab. We trained convolutional neural network-based estimators and tested their performance on actual LiDAR measurements of people in a public space. The results show that with a rotating 3D LiDAR a usable estimate of the body angle can indeed be achieved (mean absolute error 33.5 ° ), and that using simulated data for training the estimators is effective. For estimating gender, the results are satisfactory (accuracy above 80%) when the person is close enough; however, simulated data do not work well and training needs to be done on actual people measurements.

Postcolonial Criticism, Transnational Identifications and the Hegemonies of Dancehall's Academic and Popular Performativities

2008 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Noble
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Public Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
Black Representation ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Personal Consumption ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Dancehall Culture

Despite the unprecedented freedoms that decolonization has brought for many Black1 people – especially in specific regions of the African Diaspora – freedom and its fulfilment, adequate signs and contested meanings remain a preoccupation within Black cultural discourses and practices. At the same time, while political and cultural nationalisms have led to greater political and civil rights, racism has not been eradicated. Furthermore, the new postcolonial globalizations of capital, people and cultures have destabilized the collective identities that framed twentieth-century struggles for national sovereignty and equal citizenship, without necessarily erasing them. Instead, they remain, no longer securely anchored in their old homogenous appearances, but re-configured through the inner differences and contradictions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and religion. This article addresses these internal differences and the ways in which they produce new contestations over race, the meaning of Black representation and postcolonial freedom, negotiations that are increasingly traced on the intimate contours of the body and the self, through practices of personal consumption, erotic hedonism and style as key performances of freedom. It achieves this through examining two localized moments in the transnational and diasporic circulation of Jamaican dancehall culture, understood as a privileged public space for the performance of Black identifications and personal freedom. It argues that the eroticized discourses of ethnicity, race and gender found in dancehall culture articulate the dominance of neo-liberal conceptions of freedom at the same time as they express, resist and comment on new cultural hegemonies not reducible to racism or the power of the West; that is how dancehall expresses the new problematizations of postcoloniality. 1 Except when quoting other writers, I will capitalise the word Black, in order to recognise Black identity as a historically and politically constituted experience and representational category, and not solely denoting skin colour.

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

Morphological Freedom and Medicine: Constructing the Posthuman Body

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luna Dolezal
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Cosmetic Surgery ◽  
The Body ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Gender Reassignment ◽  
Common Parlance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Body Practices ◽  
Health Function ◽  
At Will

The notion that the body can be changed at will in order to meet the desires and designs of its ‘owner’ is one that has captured the popular imagination and underpins contemporary medical practices such as cosmetic surgery and gender reassignment. In fact, describing the body as ‘malleable’ or ‘plastic’ has entered common parlance and dictates common-sense ideas of how we understand the human body in late-capitalist consumer societies in the wake of commercial biotechnologies that work to modify the body aesthetically and otherwise. If we are not satisfied with some aspect of our physicality – in terms of health, function or aesthetics – we can engage with a whole variety of self-care body practices – fashion, diet, exercise, cosmetics, medicine, surgery, laser – in order to ‘correct’, reshape or restyle the body. In addition, as technology has advanced and elective cosmetic surgery has unapologetically entered the mainstream, the notion of the malleable body has become intrinsically linked to the practices and discourses of biomedicine and, furthermore, has become a significant means to assert and affirm identity.

scholarly journals Governing Nonconformity: Gender Presentation, Public Space, and the City in New Order Indonesia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hegarty
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Gender Nonconformity ◽  
The Body ◽  
New Order ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Gender Presentation ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

The regulation of public space is generative of new approaches to gender nonconformity. In 1968 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, a group of people who identified as wadam—a new term made by combining parts of Indonesian words denoting “femininity” and “masculinity”—made a claim to the city's governor that they had the right to appear in public space. This article illustrates the paradoxical achievement of obtaining recognition on terms constituted through public nuisance regulations governing access to and movement through space. The origins and diffuse effects of recognition achieved by those who identified as wadam and, a decade later, waria facilitated the partial recognition of a status that was legal but nonconforming. This possibility emerged out of city-level innovations and historical conceptualizations of the body in Indonesia. Attending to the way that gender nonconformity was folded into existing methods of codifying space at the scale of the city reflects a broader anxiety over who can enter public space and on what basis. Considering a concern for struggles to contend with nonconformity on spatial grounds at the level of the city encourages an alternative perspective on the emergence of gender and sexual morality as a definitive feature of national belonging in Indonesia and elsewhere.

scholarly journals Estimation of Motion and Respiratory Characteristics during the Meditation Practice Based on Video Analysis

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3771
Author(s):  
Alexey Kashevnik ◽  
Walaa Othman ◽  
Igor Ryabchikov ◽  
Nikolay Shilov
Keyword(s):  
Respiratory Rate ◽  
Evaluation System ◽  
Body Movement ◽  
Absolute Error ◽  
The Body ◽  
Meditation Practice ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Mental Health Training ◽  
Negative Thoughts ◽  
The Mean

Meditation practice is mental health training. It helps people to reduce stress and suppress negative thoughts. In this paper, we propose a camera-based meditation evaluation system, that helps meditators to improve their performance. We rely on two main criteria to measure the focus: the breathing characteristics (respiratory rate, breathing rhythmicity and stability), and the body movement. We introduce a contactless sensor to measure the respiratory rate based on a smartphone camera by detecting the chest keypoint at each frame, using an optical flow based algorithm to calculate the displacement between frames, filtering and de-noising the chest movement signal, and calculating the number of real peaks in this signal. We also present an approach to detecting the movement of different body parts (head, thorax, shoulders, elbows, wrists, stomach and knees). We have collected a non-annotated dataset for meditation practice videos consists of ninety videos and the annotated dataset consists of eight videos. The non-annotated dataset was categorized into beginner and professional meditators and was used for the development of the algorithm and for tuning the parameters. The annotated dataset was used for evaluation and showed that human activity during meditation practice could be correctly estimated by the presented approach and that the mean absolute error for the respiratory rate is around 1.75 BPM, which can be considered tolerable for the meditation application.

Living with Barren Truths: A Tale of Triumphalism and Tribulations of a Technology

2021 ◽  
pp. 097168582110159
Author(s):  
Sital Mohanty ◽  
Subhasis Sahoo ◽  
Pranay Kumar Swain
Keyword(s):  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

Science, technology and human values have been the subject of enquiry in the last few years for social scientists and eventually the relationship between science and gender is the subject of an ongoing debate. This is due to the event of globalization which led to the exponential growth of new technologies like assisted reproductive technology (ART). ART, one of the most iconic technological innovations of the twentieth century, has become increasingly a normal social fact of life. Since ART invades multiple human discourses—thereby transforming culture, society and politics—it is important what is sociological about ART as well as what is biological. This article argues in commendation of sociology of technology, which is alert to its democratic potential but does not concurrently conceal the historical and continuing role of technology in legitimizing gender discrimination. The article draws the empirical insights from local articulations (i.e., Odisha state in eastern India) for the understandings of motherhood, freedom and choice, reproductive right and rights over the body to which ART has contributed. Sociologically, the article has been supplemented within the broader perspectives of determinism, compatibilism alongside feminism.

scholarly journals Casa de la Asegurada: A Collective Housing Facility for Women Development in Mexico

Buildings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 236
Author(s):  
Lucía Martín López ◽  
Rodrigo Durán López
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
Mexican Families ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Collective Housing ◽  
Mexican Architecture ◽  
The Impact

While several women’s movements that aimed to modify their relationship with public space were taking place across the world, in 1956, the Mexican Social Security Institute founded the program Casa de la Asegurada, the subject of this study, as a tool for improving the social security of Mexican families through the input of cultural, social, artistic, and hygienic knowledge for women. The program’s facilities, Casas de la Asegurada, are located in the large Mexican housing complexes, articulating themselves to the existing city. Despite the impact on the lives of Mexican families, these have been ignored throughout the history of Mexican architecture. The main objective of this paper is to show the state of the art of Casa de la Asegurada and its facilities located in Mexico City. To achieve this, the greatest number available of primary sources on the topic was compiled through archive and document research. Sources were classified identifying information gaps to explain, in three different scales (program, facilities, and a case study), how they work through their objectives, performed activities, and evolved through time, so that the gathered information is analyzed with an urbanistic, architectural, and gender approach to contribute new ideas in the building of facilities that allow women empowerment.

scholarly journals Food consumption, habitus and the embodiment of social change: Making class and doing gender in urban Vietnam

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 681-701
Author(s):  
Judith Ehlert
Keyword(s):  
Food Consumption ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Nutrition Transition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Doing Gender ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Investment Capital ◽  
And Gender

This article draws on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a means to analyse social distinction and change in terms of class and gender through the lens of food consumption. By focusing on urban Vietnam, this qualitative study looks into the daily practices of food consumption, dieting and working on the body as specific means to enact ideal body types. Economically booming Vietnam has attracted growing investment capital in the fields of body and beauty industries and food retail. After decades of food insecurity, urban consumers find themselves manoeuvring in between growing food and lifestyle options, a nutrition transition, and contradicting demands on the consumer to both indulge and restrain themselves. Taking this dynamic urban context as its point of departure and adopting an intersectional perspective, this article assesses how eating, dieting and body performance are applied in terms of making class and doing gender. It shows that the growing urban landscape of food and body-centric industries facilitates new possibilities for distinction, dependent not only on economic capital but on bodily and cultural capital also, and furthermore, how social habitus regarding food–body relationships are gendered and interlaced with class privilege.

scholarly journals Turkey’s queer times: an introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Cenk Özbay ◽  
Kerem Öktem
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Queer Culture ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
And Gender

Today Turkey is one of the few Muslim-majority countries in which same-sex sexual acts, counternormative sexual identities, and expressions of gender nonconformism are not illegal, yet are heavily constrained and controlled by state institutions, police forces, and public prosecutors. For more than a decade Turkey has been experiencing a “queer turn”—an unprecedented push in the visibility and empowerment of queerness, the proliferation of sexual rights organizations and forms of sociabilities, and the dissemination of elements of queer culture—that has engendered both scholarly and public attention for sexual dissidents and gender non-conforming individuals and their lifeworlds, while it has also created new spaces and venues for their self-organization and mobilization. At the point of knowledge production and writing, this visibility and the possible avenues of empowerment that it might provide have been in jeopardy: not only do they appear far from challenging the dominant norms of the body, gender, and sexuality, but queerness, in all its dimensions, has become a preferred target for Islamist politics, conservative revanchism, and populist politicians.

scholarly journals Sex and gender differences in nutrition research: considerations with the transgender and gender nonconforming population

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Whitney Linsenmeyer ◽  
Jennifer Waters
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Validity And Reliability ◽  
Nutrition Interventions ◽  
Step Method ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
Nutrition Research ◽  
Surveillance Programs ◽  
And Gender

AbstractA sex- and gender-informed approach to study design, analysis and reporting has particular relevance to the transgender and gender nonconforming population (TGNC) where sex and gender identity differ. Notable research gaps persist related to dietary intake, validity and reliability of nutrition assessment methods, and nutrition interventions with TGNC populations. This is due in part to the conflation of sex and gender into one binary category (male or female) in many nutrition surveillance programs worldwide. Adoption of the Sex and Gender Equity In Research (SAGER) guidelines and the two-step method of querying sex and gender has the potential to exponentially increase the body of research related to TGNC health.

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