The Autobiographical Hinge: Revealing the self in architectural drawing

Some argue that the tendency to ignore the self as an aspect of the relationship between architects and their drawings is a consequence of the hegemony of digital modes of representation, others that it is inherent to traditional perspectival and projective techniques. It is in this repressive context that architects struggle to consider their subjectivity in relation to the drawings they produce. This article aims to divert this subjective distance by proposing a method for revealing the unconscious forces that abide between architects and architectural drawings. Through a comparative analysis of this intermediate space with the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s theory of the Transitional Object, the author considers his own relationship to perspective drawing and materializes this through the production of a drawing apparatus titled: the autobiographical hinge. Bilaterally, the conception of this drawing apparatus is founded on examples of visual art practice that challenge the repressive qualities of linear perspective, this includes the work of Penelope Haralambidou (2003); Lawrence Gowing (1965) and Marion Milner (1950). In a time of dissolved agency for the architect, this article presents a method through which to mine one’s own relationship to architectural drawing, through which a disturbance to those codified regimes occurs as a consequence of one’s own subjectivity being recognized.

Obstacles Affect Perceptions of Egocentric Distances in Virtual Environments

Distance perception in humans can be affected by oculomotor and optical cues and a person’s action capability in a given environment, known as action-specific effects. For example, a previous study has demonstrated that egocentric distance estimation to a target is affected by the width of a transparent barrier placed in the intermediate space between a participant and a target. However, the characteristics of a barrier’s width that affect distance perception remain unknown. Therefore, we investigated whether visual and tactile inputs and actions related to a barrier affect distance estimation to a target behind the barrier. The results confirmed previous studies by demonstrating that visual and tactile presentations of the barrier’s width affected distance estimation to the target. However, this effect of the barrier’s width was not observed when the barrier was touchable but invisible nor when the barrier was visible but penetrable. These findings indicate the complexity of action-specific effects and the difficulty of identifying necessary information for inducing these effects.

A Framework for Falsifiable Explanations of Machine Learning Models with an Application in Computational Pathology

In recent years, deep learning has been the key driver of breakthrough developments in computational pathology and other image based approaches that support medical diagnosis and treatment. The underlying neural networks as inherent black boxes lack transparency, and are often accompanied by approaches to explain their output. However, formally defining explainability has been a notorious unsolved riddle. Here, we introduce a hypothesis-based framework for falsifiable explanations of machine learning models. A falsifiable explanation is a hypothesis that connects an intermediate space induced by the model with the sample from which the data originate. We instantiate this framework in a computational pathology setting using label-free infrared microscopy. The intermediate space is an activation map, which is trained with an inductive bias to localize tumor. An explanation is constituted by hypothesizing that activation corresponds to tumor and associated structures, which we validate by histological staining as an independent secondary experiment.

Can the Fe K-alpha Line Reliably Predict Supernova Remnant Progenitors?

The centroid energy of the Fe Kα line has been used to identify the progenitors of supernova remnants (SNRs). These investigations generally considered the energy of the centroid derived from the spectrum of the entire remnant. Here we use XMM-Newton data to investigate the Fe Kα centroid in 6 SNRs: 3C 397, N132D, W49B, DEM L71, 1E 0102.2-7219, and Kes 73. In Kes 73 and 1E 0102.2-7219, we fail to detect any Fe Kα emission. We report a tentative first detection of Fe Kα emission in SNR DEM L71 with a centroid energy consistent with its Type Ia designation. In the remaining remnants, the spatial and spectral sensitivity is sufficient to investigate spatial variations of the Fe Kα centroid. We find in N132D and W49B that the centroids in different regions are consistent with those derived from the overall spectrum, although not necessarily with the remnant type identified via other means. However, in SNR 3C 397, we find statistically significant variation in the centroid of up to 100 eV, aligning with the variation in the density structure around the remnant. These variations span the intermediate space between centroid energies signifying core-collapse (CC) and Type Ia remnants. Shifting the dividing line downwards by 50 eV can place all the centroids in the CC region, but contradicts the remnant type obtained via other means. Our results show that caution must be used when employing the Fe Kα centroid of the entire remnant as the sole diagnostic for typing a remnant.

A Family of Quaternion-valued Pipelined Second-order Volterra Adaptive Filters for Nonlinear System Identification

This paper primarily proposes a family of quaternion Volterra filters based on the feedforward pipelined structure (QPSOVAFs) for nonlinear quaternion system identification to reduce the computational complexity. Then, the strictly nonlinear QPSOVAF (SNL-QPSOVAF), semi-widely nonlinear QPSOVAF(SWNL-QPSOVAF), and widely nonlinear QPSOVAF (WNL-QPSOVAF), are proposed. This architecture consists of several quaternion-valued second-order Volterra (SOV) modules. The structure's nonlinear subsection executes a nonlinear mapping from the input space to an intermediate space using the feedforward SOV; the linear combiner subsection performs a linear mapping from the intermediate space to the output space. Moreover, the theoretical analysis expresses the effectiveness of the proposed QPSOVAFs in a specific condition. Finally, simulation results further prove that the proposed QPSOVAFs have good performance in identifying the quaternion-valued nonlinear system.

Architecture and transformation in Mexico City’s UNAM University Campus

<p>Architecture in permanent transformation is the starting point of this article, focused on the interaction between material and social aspects of a case study on modern Mexican housing, observing the building’s life in relation to its inhabitants. The Multifamily Apartment Building for Teachers (Multifamiliar para maestros), a faculty housing building at the UNAM campus, is a mid-twentieth-century experimental housing project, developed at the beginning of Mexico City´s densification. Today it is registered in UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. The case study sheds some important insights into the transformations of a spatial modern utopia facing inhabitants' needs. Numerous differences were detected between the original idea behind the building’s architecture and the reality of its users today, revealing not only the ambiguous nature of the building but also problems derived from the country’s accelerated modernization. The results show contrasting approaches of the intermediate space between the building’s conception, and the constant process of becoming a home, where the scope of its habitability is negotiated. </p>