The Veiled Statuary: A Lesson from Sculpture to Vision Psychology

Visual artists can be considered the precursors of students of the visual system. Paintings and graphic arts have been attentively examined by vision scientists, while sculpture has been considered less. Here we intend to fill this gap by illustrating how artists faced what seems an impossible challenge: to carve a stone so that it looks like a transparent veil. The success of the artists in reproducing the veil can be assessed by exploring the hundreds of Internet pages dedicated to ‘veiled statuary’. We chose some of the most admired statues and tried to ‘glean’ the sculptor’s technique. Two of these artworks are the work of Greek artists, the other statues were carved by baroque and modern sculptors. We did not find a single technique but, rather, a diversity of solutions, as is to be expected in an exploration in which opposites must be reconciled: an observer has to catch the presence of something elastic, thin, and transparent in a surface made of a rigid and opaque material. We checked the ability of the sculptor to render such properties by submitting samples of veiled statues to some observers who were asked to judge the strength of the veiling effect, and to categorize the perceived materials and features, such as transparency and thinness. The results confirm the artists’ knowledge of visual cues that are able to convey a complex set of information and meanings: material categorization, materials properties, perceptual decomposition of surfaces, completion of perceptual fragments into unitary percepts.

Indefinite article + possessive + noun in Spanish: A case of refunctionalization?

The phenomenon under discussion is an example of a grammatical change that can be explained by refunctionalization, and as such, can be understood as the acquisition of a new meaning by an ‘endangered’ grammatical construction, which is reassigned to express another value. Refunctionalization involves the development of a new function (in this case a syntactic-semantic one). When an item loses its function, or is marginal within a system, it can be lost (as happens with the construction under study in Standard Spanish), it can be ‘saved’ as a marginal element (as in some areas of American Spanish varieties) or it can be reused for other purposes (as in the Central American Spanish varieties). The latter case presents new discursive values. Hence, this construction should be understood as an example of reusing grammatical functionally opaque material for new purposes.

Wall Cladding Effects and Occupants’ Perception of Indoor Temperature of Typical Student Apartments in Surabaya, Indonesia

Three types of apartment claddings in Surabaya, Indonesia were studied to analyze their effect into bedroom temperature. They were glass windows in a niche, glass door in a balcony, and glass windows on a plain wall with glass door in a balcony. On-site temperature measurement was recorded and complemented with questionnaire surveys of occupants’ perception regarding room temperature. The study showed that an apartment cladding with the largest proportion of opaque material combined with a balcony offered an indoor temperature of up to 9 °C lower than the outdoor compared to the other cladding types. Nevertheless, 72 % of occupants participated in this study, who use air conditioners during night time, including one with the cladding with the largest temperature difference claimed that the indoor temperature before air-conditioners was still too warm, which triggered air-conditioners initial time more than 10 minutes to achieve the desired indoor temperature. It indicated that the opaque material time lag played a significant role in heating the room during night time when the air-conditioner is about to be operated.

Microfossils from the Lower Devonian Rhynie Chert with suggested affinities to the peronosporomycetes

A conspicuous silicified microfossil, Frankbaronia polyspora n. gen. n. sp., occurs in plant litter and as an inhabitant of microbial mats from the Lower Devonian Rhynie chert, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Specimens are elongate-cylindrical, oval, or spherical, thin-walled, and may possess conical or column-like surface projections. Most specimens occur isolated, some are arranged in pairs or short chains. Each specimen contains several small spheres, each in turn with a (sub)centric opaque inclusion. Immature specimens indicate that ontogenesis in this fossil includes the formation of a single centric body of opaque material that subsequently is apportioned among the developing small spheres. Frankbaronia polyspora is quite similar in size and morphology to the oogonia containing oospores seen in certain extant members of the Peronosporomycetes. The Rhynie chert is known to contain the oldest fossil evidence of the Peronosporomycetes but only a single form (Hassiella monospora) has previously been documented. The discovery of a second putative representative of this group of organisms proves that this paleoecosystem is still an important source of new information on the paleodiversity of microbial life.