THE IMPORTANCE OF 1959-1967 PERIOD IN JAZZ HISTORY

The focus of this study is on the history of jazz music between 1959 and 1967. The 1950s was a period of intense creativity in jazz, defined by emerging styles such as third stream, cool jazz and hard bop. The end of that decade, 1959, is considered to be a watershed year in which some of jazz’s most influential recordings were made and also effected the free jazz movement, which dominated until 1967, known as the "year that jazz music died". Therefore, 1959 becomes a bridge between the stylistic homogeneity of first half of the century and an outpouring of creativity in the second half. The echoes of the pre-fusion period 1959-1967 are still influential on the musical output of jazz in the twenty first century. This study aims to convey the variety of jazz styles between 1950 and 1967 by looking at the foundational elements that create the musical understanding of these styles by means of a descriptive methodology. Keywords: Jazz, Free Jazz, Hard Bop, 1959, Third Stream, Cool Jazz, Avant-Garde

The European Parliament

The European Parliament (EP) has experienced an unprecedented transformation since its first direct elections in 1979 and developed into one of the most powerful legislatures in the world. It started as a talking shop assembly of legislators seconded from the national parliaments of the European Communities’ member states who met twice a year. Now it co-decides on nearly all European Union (EU) legislation, approves the EU budget together with member state governments represented by the EU Council, scrutinizes the EU executive (i.e., the European Commission), and needs to give its consent for any new international trade agreement of the EU. This spectacular evolution has stimulated prolific research on the EP’s elections, internal organization, relations with other EU institutions, and policy impact. This bibliographical review does not purport to include all the important contributions but rather offers a map of this rich scholarly work. This article summarizes EP research into four streams. First, scholars have investigated the ability of the EP election to effectively link the EU to its citizens and increase its legitimacy and accountability. Second, an extensive body of work analyzes party competition and cooperation in the EP. A related third stream of literature studies the parliamentary organization and committees. Fourth, scholars have developed elaborate theoretical models and empirical tools to investigate the power relations between the EP and other EU institutions. These debates are discussed after a brief review of major data sources used in EP studies as well as key textbooks and journal venues for research on the EP.

Spotting DeepFakes and Face Manipulations by Fusing Features from Multi-Stream CNNs Models

Deepfake is one of the applications that is deemed harmful. Deepfakes are a sort of image or video manipulation in which a person’s image is changed or swapped with that of another person’s face using artificial neural networks. Deepfake manipulations may be done with a variety of techniques and applications. A quintessential countermeasure against deepfake or face manipulation is deepfake detection method. Most of the existing detection methods perform well under symmetric data distributions, but are still not robust to asymmetric datasets variations and novel deepfake/manipulation types. In this paper, for the identification of fake faces in videos, a new multi-stream deep learning algorithm is developed, where three streams are merged at the feature level using the fusion layer. After the fusion layer, the fully connected, Softmax, and classification layers are used to classify the data. The pre-trained VGG16 model is adopted for transferred CNN1stream. In transfer learning, the weights of the pre-trained CNN model are further used for training the new classification problem. In the second stream (transferred CNN2), the pre-trained VGG19 model is used. Whereas, in the third stream, the pre-trained ResNet18 model is considered. In this paper, a new large-scale dataset (i.e., World Politicians Deepfake Dataset (WPDD)) is introduced to improve deepfake detection systems. The dataset was created by downloading videos of 20 different politicians from YouTube. Over 320,000 frames were retrieved after dividing the downloaded movie into little sections and extracting the frames. Finally, various manipulations were performed to these frames, resulting in seven separate manipulation classes for men and women. In the experiments, three fake face detection scenarios are investigated. First, fake and real face discrimination is studied. Second, seven face manipulations are performed, including age, beard, face swap, glasses, hair color, hairstyle, smiling, and genuine face discrimination. Third, performance of deepfake detection system under novel type of face manipulation is analyzed. The proposed strategy outperforms the prior existing methods. The calculated performance metrics are over 99%.

The Fragmentation of Jazz Styles

In the post–World War II years, jazz started to split off into many different directions, spurring a fragmentation that expanded the creative range of the idiom but caused long-lasting divisions among artists and fans (the so-called jazz wars). The first fault lines emerged between traditional and modern jazz exponents, but during the 1950s and early 1960s, many different styles emerged—including cool jazz, hard bop, soul jazz, West Coast jazz, modal jazz, Third Stream jazz, and various experimental approaches. This chapter traces these stylistic developments, and their leading exponents. It looks at the life and work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Stan Getz, Charles Mingus, and Bill Evans, among other major jazz stars of the era, and assesses key albums such as Kind of Blue, Mingus Ah Um, and Giant Steps.

Body and Hand–Object ROI-Based Behavior Recognition Using Deep Learning

Behavior recognition has applications in automatic crime monitoring, automatic sports video analysis, and context awareness of so-called silver robots. In this study, we employ deep learning to recognize behavior based on body and hand–object interaction regions of interest (ROIs). We propose an ROI-based four-stream ensemble convolutional neural network (CNN). Behavior recognition data are mainly composed of images and skeletons. The first stream uses a pre-trained 2D-CNN by converting the 3D skeleton sequence into pose evolution images (PEIs). The second stream inputs the RGB video into the 3D-CNN to extract temporal and spatial features. The most important information in behavior recognition is identification of the person performing the action. Therefore, if the neural network is trained by removing ambient noise and placing the ROI on the person, feature analysis can be performed by focusing on the behavior itself rather than learning the entire region. Therefore, the third stream inputs the RGB video limited to the body-ROI into the 3D-CNN. The fourth stream inputs the RGB video limited to ROIs of hand–object interactions into the 3D-CNN. Finally, because better performance is expected by combining the information of the models trained with attention to these ROIs, better recognition will be possible through late fusion of the four stream scores. The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)-Activity3D dataset was used for the experiments. This dataset contains color images, images of skeletons, and depth images of 55 daily behaviors of 50 elderly and 50 young individuals. The experimental results showed that the proposed model improved recognition by at least 4.27% and up to 20.97% compared to other behavior recognition methods.

Factors affecting researcher participation in technology commercialisation: A South African university case study

Background: Research universities in South Africa are well-recognised sources of new knowledge and their contributions to innovation are manifested through the creation, transfer and commercialisation of new technologies originating from academic research. Research collaboration between universities, industry and the community offer various benefits, which include funding for students and researchers and third-stream income for universities. Additionally, industry can gain access to new technologies to incorporate in improved products and services.Aim: The aim of this study was to identify the factors that encourage academic researchers’ involvement in technology commercialisation.Setting: The growth in university technology transfer in South Africa can be attributed to the South African Intellectual Property Rights from the Publicly Financed Research and Development Act (Act 51 of 2008). The establishment of Technology Transfer Offices at universities across South Africa, aims to involve researchers in commercialisation activities, champion the innovation conversation within universities and to progress innovations from concept to application in society.Methods: The study followed a positivistic research philosophy and a deductive approach. Researchers (n=38) in two faculties at the Nelson Mandela University participated in this exploratory study and completed an online survey. The respondents were selected through purposeful sampling. Results: The findings indicate that a combination of incentives is necessary to enable and to encourage researcher involvement in the commercialisation of research. A set of recommendations based on the findings and implementation suggestions are proposed.Conclusion: A combination of monetary and non-monetary incentives are required to enable academics’ involvement in commercialisation activities.

Review of Non-Destructive Civil Infrastructure Evaluation for Bridges: State-of-the-Art Robotic Platforms, Sensors and Algorithms

The non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of civil infrastructure has been an active area of research in recent decades. The traditional inspection of civil infrastructure mostly relies on visual inspection using human inspectors. To facilitate this process, different sensors for data collection and techniques for data analyses have been used to effectively carry out this task in an automated fashion. This review-based study will examine some of the recent developments in the field of autonomous robotic platforms for NDE and the structural health monitoring (SHM) of bridges. Some of the salient features of this review-based study will be discussed in the light of the existing surveys and reviews that have been published in the recent past, which will enable the clarification regarding the novelty of the present review-based study. The review methodology will be discussed in sufficient depth, which will provide insights regarding some of the primary aspects of the review methodology followed by this review-based study. In order to provide an in-depth examination of the state-of-the-art, the current research will examine the three major research streams. The first stream relates to technological robotic platforms developed for NDE of bridges. The second stream of literature examines myriad sensors used for the development of robotic platforms for the NDE of bridges. The third stream of literature highlights different algorithms for the surface- and sub-surface-level analysis of bridges that have been developed by studies in the past. A number of challenges towards the development of robotic platforms have also been discussed.

Storytelling, space and power: An Arendtian account of subjectivity in organizations

Drawing on Arendt’s work, this article develops a storytelling account of subjectivity and politics in organizations. Storytelling is understood as the process through which actors reconstruct their experiences and appear in a collective space. Storytelling is thus enacted within and from spaces and is a means for political action. Three theoretical consequences are drawn. First, storytelling implies the ever-present possibility of a ‘space of appearance’ in which the subject is an originator of action. Second, the notion of storytelling as a spatial practice implies focusing on how stories are shaped through interactions and collective engagements, or ‘emplacement’. Third, a material and embodied reconfiguration of Arendt’s notion of action shows how material relations offer important affordances to change organizations. Because storytelling is both a process of engaging with ourselves and the power relations that we are part of, Arendt’s notion of storytelling is helpful for understanding how and in what circumstances we can act politically in organizations. In particular, the article argues that Arendt’s account is useful for framing an interventionist third stream of critical management studies, or ‘critical performativity’.