SPECIFICITY OF THE ARCHITECTURAL AND SPATIAL ORGANIZATION OF THE PETROGRAD SIDE OF ST. PETERSBURG

The preservation of the historical, urban planning and architectural heritage of the central territories of St. Petersburg requires a special approach to solving the problems of reconstruction and renovation of the historical urban environment. The modern period, characterized by active reconstruction of the historical center, puts forward new requirements for the preservation of cultural heritage sites. The att itude to history as an experience, on which modern practice should be based, presupposes the disclosure of historical architectural and urban planning processes on the basis of systematization of existing and fi lling in missing information. This allows us to analyze the spatial and temporal transformations that the city underwent in the course of its development. Revealing the internal laws of the genesis of these processes is of great importance. The article analyzes the state of urban landscapes within the boundaries of the historical territories of the Petrogradsky district of St. Petersburg.

Biparietal meander expansion technique for sagittal suture synostosis in patients older than 1 year of age—technical note

Objective Sagittal suture synostosis (SSS) is the most common form of craniosynostosis. For older patients, the strategy for surgical correction needs to consider diminished growth dynamics of the skull and an active reconstruction cranioplasty aims to sustain stability for the active child. We describe our technique of biparietal meander expansion (BME) technique for SSS for patients older than 1 year and retrospectively reviewed the perioperative course as well as the subjective experience of patients and caregivers during follow-up. Methods The BME technique incorporates bilateral serpentine craniotomies and fixation of the consecutively expanded bone tongues with crossing sutures for patients with SSS older than 12 months of age at surgery. We reviewed patients undergoing this surgical technique for correction of SSS and collected data about the clinical course and performed a patients reported outcome measure (PROM) for patients or caregivers to evaluate subjective experience and outcome after surgical treatment. Results BME was performed in 31 patients (8 females; median age: 43 months; range 13–388). The mean length of operation was 172.7±43 minutes (range 115–294). Patients experienced no immediate complications or neurological morbidity after surgery. Considering a total of 21 completed PROM questionnaires, the head shape after surgery was evaluated as either “better” (57%) or “much better” (43%) compared to preoperatively. Eighty-one percent of patients or caregivers answered that the patient experiences no limitation in daily activities. Although 42.8% perceived the hospital as strenuous, 90.5% would choose to undergo this treatment again. Conclusion BME is a feasible technique for older SSS patients resulting in immediate stability of the remodelled calvarium with a more normal head shape. The survey among caregivers or patients revealed a favourable subjectively experienced outcome after this type of surgical treatment of SSS in the more complex context of an older patient cohort.

Active reconstruction of the spiritual world

The spiritual world is constrained passively by primitive urges. Similar to an uncultivated wasteland, it will necessarily breed messy plants. Most of the time we are imprisoned by the social environment, a narrow understanding of ourselves, and our own desires. This makes it difficult for life itself to truly shine and enjoy authentic vitality. People are the foundation of society. The fact that individuals are unable to rebuild the spiritual world makes it difficult for human society to achieve true growth. It is difficult for people to obtain real happiness and it is difficult for the rulers to achieve their long-cherished wishes. This article first presents an argument for why reconstruction is needed, accompanied by a proposal that faith is the basis for reconstruction. Additionally, I propose the concept of the Objective Belief of Nature. The crucial component of this belief is the need to pay less attention to ourselves and use love together with the laws of nature to promote the beautiful development of society. The purpose is to make people truly love themselves, so that they may enjoy vitality in their lives and achieve happiness (in the passive sense of happiness). Similarly, society has vitality because of the blossoming of everyone's life. Likewise, a society filled with vitality further promotes the blooming of everyone's life. Such a belief provides ideological and theoretical support for humankind's further development. The Objective Belief of Nature mainly emphasizes a belief; it does not reject or privilege any given form.

Differences in memory for what, where, and when components of recently-formed episodes

An integral feature of human memory is the ability to recall past events. What distinguishes such episodic memory from associative and semantic memories is the joint encoding and retrieval of “what,” “where,” and “when” (WWW) of events. Here, we investigated whether the WWW components of episodes are retrieved with equal fidelity. Using a novel task where human participants were probed on the WWW components of a recently-viewed synthetic movie, we found fundamental differences in mnemonic accuracy between these components. The memory of “when” had the lowest accuracy and was most severely influenced by primacy and recency. Further, the memory of “when” and “where” were most susceptible to interference due to changes in memory load. These findings suggest that episodes are not stored and retrieved as a coherent whole. Rather, memory components preserve a degree of independence, suggesting that remembering coherent episodes is an active reconstruction process.

An active reconstruction algorithm based on partial prior information

Active reconstruction is an intelligent perception method that achieves object modeling with few views and short motion paths by systematically adjusting the parameters of the camera while ensuring model integrity. Part of the object information is always known for vision tasks in real scenes, and it provides some guidance for the view planning. A two-step active reconstruction algorithm based on partial prior information is presented, which includes rough shape estimation phase and complete object reconstruction phase, and both of them introduce the concept of active vision. An information expression method is proposed that can be used to manually initialize the repository according to specific visual tasks, and then the prior information and detected information are used to plan the next best view online until the object reconstruction is completed. The method is evaluated with simulated experiments and the result is compared with other methods.

Active Object Reconstruction Using a Guided View Planner

Inspired by the recent advance of image-based object reconstruction using deep learning, we present an active reconstruction model using a guided view planner. We aim to reconstruct a 3D model using images observed from a planned sequence of informative and discriminative views. But where are such informative and discriminative views around an object? To address this we propose a unified model for view planning and object reconstruction, which is utilized to learn a guided information acquisition model and to aggregate information from a sequence of images for reconstruction. Experiments show that our model (1) increases our reconstruction accuracy with an increasing number of views (2) and generally predicts a more informative sequence of views for object reconstruction compared to other alternative methods.

Young children on the stages

In this article, I approach day care centers as stages upon which various small stories are constructed and performed by young children and other interlocutors. The aim of the article is two-fold. Methodologically, the paper is a tentative application of Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective onto narrative research with children. Empirically, the aim is to explore day care centers as narrative environments that constitute children’s lives and identities. I anchor my analysis and interpretation of research material, collected in two groups of children, in three perspectives. Firstly, I focus on the spatial practices of the day care centers, framing the construction of small stories. Secondly, I deal with the production of small stories between cultural routines and active reconstruction. Finally, I draw attention to children’s identity construction as a continuous process influenced by a variety of individual, material, contextual, cultural, and interactional factors.