Immersive Technologies in the Promotion of the Archaeological Heritage of the Novotroitsk Necropolis

Purpose. The modern learning process is impossible to imagine without the involvement of local lore knowledge. The article is devoted to summing up the results of the implementation of the project ‘Science to School’. The article summarizes the experience of integrating the object of archaeological heritage – the Novotroitsky necropolis, into the educational and tourist space of the Talmensky district of the Altai Region. In the process of implementing the project, a set of activities was carried out, including lectures, ‘live lessons’, master classes on the reconstruction of ceramics, clothing, jewelry, a scientific and practical conference, a photo exhibition, an expedition to the excavation sites, and the installation of commemorative signs. Results. The educational and methodological manual ‘Archaeology at School’ prepared within the framework of the project for teachers and students provides a short, illustrated glossary that gives an idea of the appearance and location of various archaeological sites in the Altai territory and educational and methodological developments applicable in the preparation of school research projects on archaeology. It contributes to the expansion of historical and local lore knowledge about the archaeology of the Altai territory and gives them an actual voice in the modern development of the region. In educational activities, the training manual is used as additional literature for the courses ‘Archaeological tourism’, ‘Archaeology of the Altai region’. Alongside the main and additional literature, the educational and methodological manual is recommended for students preparing final qualifying works in pedagogical archaeology. Conclusion. The authors come to the conclusion that a comprehensive museumification of the entire ensemble of the studied site should serve as a full-fledged prospective integration into the tourist space of the Novotroitsky necropolis area. The educational potential of an object of archaeological heritage can be revealed through the use of a meta-subject approach.

Inclusion of a music learner with ASD through play-full intersubjectivity

Through a case study of Jad (pseudonym), a music learner with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), I sought to understand his experiences as he engaged in peer scaffolding activities of a choral ensemble. The study illuminated the role of intersubjectivity (or shared understanding) in socially mediated music learning within an environment of inclusion. Through inclusive, play-full, intersubjective attunement of younger children to Jad, he increasingly took on a role as an empathetic teacher-helper, initially with his younger sister, then with other young children, then with the entire ensemble. Jad also increasingly displayed musical agency through physical movement during music-making, contributing to others’ understanding and musical agency. The findings describe intersections of play with intersubjectivity, focusing on learner attunement to affect and emotion in fostering an inclusive music education experience. Making space for peer scaffolding and playfulness within this music learning environment fostered shared understanding and empathy among all learners, including one with ASD.

Ensemble Perception: A Review of the Field

Ensemble perception refers to the ability of an observer to precisely estimate summary statistics of multiple objects (average, range, numerosity, etc.) at a glance. This article reviews the properties and research methodology of ensemble perception. Further, we consider the theoretical debate around mechanisms of information sampling and summary statistics calculation. One theory suggests a coarse, parallel and exhaustive mechanism, whereas another theory assumes high-precision processing of a small subsample of items to accomplish proxy statistics for the entire ensemble. We describe the evolving view of the internal ensemble representation that initially was viewed as a single magnitude (e.g., average) but later thought of as the entire feature distribution of all items. We also discuss the role of ensemble representations in various perceptual tasks. Finally, we describe potential neural correlates and neurally plausible models of ensemble perception.

Roles of saliency and set size in ensemble averaging

Ensemble statistics are often thought of as a reliable impression of numerous items despite limited capacities to consciously represent each individual. However, whether all items equally contribute to ensemble summaries (e.g., mean) and whether they might be affected by known limited-capacity processes, such as focused attention, is still debated. We addressed these questions via a recently described “amplification effect”, a systematic bias of perceived mean (e.g., average size) towards the more salient “tail” of a feature distribution (e.g., larger items). In our experiments, observers adjusted the mean orientation of sets of items varying in set size. We made some of the items more salient or less salient by changing their size. While the whole orientation distribution was fixed, the more salient subset could be shifted relative to the set mean or differ in range. We measured the bias away from the set mean and the standard deviation (SD) of errors, as it is known to reflect the physical range from which ensemble information is sampled. We found that bias and SD changes followed the shifts and range changes in salient subsets, providing evidence for amplification. However, these changes were weaker than those expected from sampling only salient items, suggesting that less salient items were also sampled. Importantly, the SD decreased as a function of set size, which is only possible if the number of sampled elements increased with set size. Overall, we conclude that orientation summary statistics are sampled from an entire ensemble and modulated by the amplification effect of attention.

Another Necropolitics

Necropolitics is often used to denote how the living is subjected to the power of death and destruction. Omitted from this conceptualisation is the violence that takes as its object the realm of the dead – the corpse, the act of burial, funerary rituals, the graves and cemeteries as sites of burial and commemoration, and forms of mourning and reverence. In this chapter, I examine different forms of postmortem violence directed at insurgent bodies. I focus on the image of the naked and bloody corpse of a woman, later revealed to be a Kurdish militant and guerrilla fighter known as Ekin Wan, leaked to the press in the period of Turkey’s hung parliament in the summer of 2015. I argue that the circulation of her denuded image after being killed in combat with the state’s security forces was a symptom of the end of the peace process and the beginning of Turkey’s new authoritarianism. I theorise violence that targets the realm of the dead as a distinctive and neglected form of necropolitics and necropolitical violence as the entire ensemble of practices that target the dead as a surrogate for, and means of, controlling the living.

Structure of the emission field of ensemble of ultra-wideband chaotic sources

The structure of the emission field of ensemble of independent ultra-wideband chaotic sources in collective emission mode is investigated analytically and numerically, including power density, directivity, and far zone border. The waves emitted by independent individual sources are incoherent; hence in the reception point the created incoherent fields are summed by power, and this summation gives no additional directivity to the ensemble emission pattern. If all the individual antennas are equal, emission pattern of the entire ensemble is the same as the emission pattern of any of the individual emitters.

Una mezquita en Valencia: capilla del Grupo Benéfico San Francisco Javier, A. Gómez Davó

In Valencia there was a large building complex, the Grupo Benéfico San Francisco Javier in the district of Campanar, built in Spanish neo-colonial style, now disappeared. Among many of its endowments was a chapel designed in Maghrebi style (1941), which, of the entire ensemble, is the only construction currently left standing. The article, written with unpublished material, reveals the building and analyses the author, the Valencian architect Antonio Gómez Davó, to verify whether or not he acted with archaeological rigor in its design. For this, its building elements and parameters have been compared with other existing religious buildings in North Africa. This analysis shows efficiency in the floor plan and other parameters, for its use as a Catholic church. There is, on the other hand, a Maghrebi archaeological project rigor; in terms of its construction system, its forms and its decoration. We must also highlight the wise decision of including in the chapel a missing Spanish historical architectural element, such as the roof of the convent of San Juan de la Penitencia de Toledo. This non-Islamic element was skillfully integrated into the Maghreb environment of the Campanar chapel.

Induced Subgraph Game for Ensemble Selection

Ensemble methodology has proved to be one of the strongest machine learning techniques. In spite of its huge success, most ensemble methods tend to generate unnecessarily large number of classifiers, which entails an increase in memory storage, computational cost, and even a reduction in the generalization performance of the ensemble. Ensemble selection addresses these shortcomings by searching for a fraction of individual classifiers that performs as good as, or better than the entire ensemble. In this paper, we formulate ensemble selection problem as a coalitional game played on a graph. The proposed game aims at capturing two crucial concepts that affect the performance of an ensemble: accuracy and diversity. Most importantly, it ranks every classifier based on its contribution in keeping a proper balance between these two notions using Shapley value. To demonstrate the validity and the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we carried out experimental comparisons with some major selection techniques based on 35 UCI benchmark datasets. The results reveal that our approach significantly improves the original ensemble and performs better than the other methods in terms of classification accuracy, pruning ratio, and computational cost.

The structural evolution of the Albula Pass region, Graubünden, eastern Switzerland: the origin of the various vergences in the structure of the Alps

The Albula Pass region lies between the Lower Austroalpine Err Nappe and the Middle Austroalpine Silvretta Nappe. They will be treated here as the frame of the non- to gently metamorphic sedimentary units between the two during the Alpide times. Sedimentation started on a metamorphic Hercynian basement during the latest Carboniferous(?) and continued into the Permian. Then a sequence from the Alpine Buntsandstein to the medial Jurassic to early Cretaceous Aptychenkalk (=Maiolica) and radiolarites were deposited in an environment of rifting and subsidence. The succeeding Palombini clastics were laid down after the Aptychenkalk and mark the onset of shortening in the Alpine realm. The initial structures that formed were at least two north-dipping normal faults which formed before the deposition of the Jurassic sedimentary rocks. When shortening set in, the first structure that came into being was the south-vergent Elalbula Nappe, bending the normal faults into close antiforms. It became further dismembered into two pieces creating parts of the future Ela and Albula nappes in the Albula region. This motion was later reversed, when the entire ensemble became bulldozed by the immense body of the Silvretta Nappe along numerous, closely spaced thrust faults, some of which only very locally followed horizontal bits of the old normal faults, but in principle they determined their own course. No evidence for westerly motion could be identified, although microstructures in the structural fabric were not studied. The reason for this may be the pre-orogenic fabric in the bounding tectonic units.

The Origins of Planetary Nebulae in the Inner and Outer Disks of M 31

The planetary nebulae (PNe) of M 31 are receiving considerable attention as probes of its structure and chemical evolution in a galactic environment that is putatively similar to the Milky Way. We have obtained deep spectra for about 30 luminous PNe in M 31’s inner disk and beyond (Rgal < 105 kpc). The entire ensemble of PNe exhibit O/H ~ 2/3 solar with no discernible radial gradient, in stark contrast to the H ii regions of M 31. This suggests that the outer PNe in M 31 formed from a common O-rich ISM at least 5 GY ago. We infer that the outer PNe and the underlying stellar population have little common history in M 31, and that the formation of the O-rich PNe preceded any putative encounter with M 33 ~2–3 Gy ago.