Many contemporary imaging systems share a striking quality: their output need not be limited to images. Instead the raw data such systems collect and generate can just as easily appear as acoustic signals or as text. Furthermore, of those images an unexpected proportion bears the familiar form of the photograph. These two phenomena, I argue, stem from an unconditioned bias towards images, on our behalf, and from the cognitive accessibility of photographic images in particular. This should be seen as a (...) unique epistemic advantage. Arguably, this advantage has not diminished much in the course of the last decades. This is especially surprising given the wide anxiety about the ‘end’ of photography and what will, or has, come after it. Confusingly, this anxiety has given rise to the term analogue photography, which is, I argue, somewhat misguided. Accordingly I propose revised definitions for the terms ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ in respect to photography. These facilitate an alternative understanding of what photographic images are. (shrink)

We propose a novel probabilistic image selection method for the Web image gathering system we proposed before. It employed two-step processing: (1) Gather HTML files of Web pages related to given keywords, analyze them and fetch only Web images expected to be highly related to the keywords. (2) Select only relevant images from the gathered images based on the image-feature-based clustering. In this paper, we propose building a generative model based on the Gaussian mixture model to represent the distribution of (...) image features of images related to the given keywords, and applying it to select images instead of the processing (2). We call the new system ``Probabilistic Image Collector''. We show the effectiveness of our proposed system by the experimental results. (shrink)

In this paper, we describe a generic image classification system with an automatic knowledge acquisition mechanism from the World Wide Web. Due to the recent spread of digital imaging devices, the demand for generic image classification/recognition of various kinds of real world scenes becomes greater. To realize it, visual knowledge on various kinds of scenes is required, and we have to prepare a large number of learning images. Therefore, commercial image collections such as Corel Image Gallery are widely used in (...) conventional studies on generic image classification. However, they are not suitable as learning images for generic image classification, since they do not include various kinds of images. Then, in stead of commercial image collections we propose utilizing of a large number of images gathered from the World-Wide Web by a Web image-gathering system as learning images. Images on the Web have huge diversity in general. So that we take advantage of the diversity of Web images for a generic image classification task, which is the first attempt among this kinds of work. By the experiments, we show that utilizing of Web images as learning images is effective and promising for generic image classification. (shrink)

Transvertebral magnetic stimulation (TVMS) of the human lumbar spinal cord can evoke bilateral rhythmic leg movements, as in walking, supposedly through the activation of spinal locomotor neural circuitry. However, an appropriate stimulus intensity that can effectively drive the human spinal locomotor circuitry to evoke walking-like movements has not been determined. To address this issue, TVMS was delivered over an intervertebral space of the lumbar cord (L1–L3) at different stimulus intensities (10–70% of maximum stimulator output) in healthy human adults. In a (...) stimulus intensity-dependent manner, TVMS evoked two major patterns of rhythmic leg movements in which the left-right movement cycles were coordinated with different phase relationships: hopping-like movements, in which both legs moved in the same direction in phase, and walking-like movements, in which both legs moved alternatively in anti-phase; uncategorized movements were also observed which could not be categorized as either movement type. Even at the same stimulation site, the stimulus-evoked rhythmic movements changed from hopping-like movements to walking-like movements as stimulus intensity was increased. Different leg muscle activation patterns were engaged in the induction of the hopping- and walking-like movements. The magnitude of the evoked hopping- and walking-like movements was positively correlated with stimulus intensity. The human spinal neural circuitry required a higher intensity of magnetic stimulation to produce walking-like leg movements than to produce hopping-like movements. These results suggest that TVMS activates distinct neural modules in the human spinal cord to generate hopping- and walking-like movements. (shrink)

Psychodrama is a therapeutic method in which the stage is used to enact and reenact life events with the aim of instilling, among other positive changes, hope and empowerment in a wide range of populations suffering from psychological duress. The therapeutic process in psychodrama moves away from the classic treatment of the individual in isolation to treatment of the individual in the context of a group. In domestic violence situations, in which abusive men seek to socially isolate their victims from (...) family and friends, the social support that psychodrama provides can positively influence the psychological health and well-being of the participants. This qualitative study examines the manner in which psychodramatic treatment can empower abused women residing in domestic violence shelters and help them regain control of their lives. An action research study of domestic violence survivors living in a women's shelter in Israel, over a 12-month period, demonstrates the role of psychodrama therapy in promoting the reduction of anxiety, stress, guilt, and self-blame, while reinforcing perceptions of self-worth and confidence. These findings contribute to our understanding of the potential of psychodrama in helping reshape life roles and reframe experiences within a creative process, with the aim of facilitating a transition from powerlessness to powerfulness among vulnerable populations. (shrink)

Review of: Photography from the Turin Shroud to the Turing Machine, Yanai Toister (2020)Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, p/bk, 215 pp.,ISBN 978-1-78938-156-6, p/bk, £37.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Japanese Things and Words:An Answer to Heidegger's QuestionMichael F. MarraIt has been over thirty years since my high school teacher of philosophy, Professor Dino Dezzani, recommended a book from which to begin my study of philosophy: Martin Heidegger's (1889-1976) Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the way to language [1959]). Evidently he was aware of my interest in literature and thought that Heidegger's discussion of words, things, and poetic language (...) would give some sort of direction to my naïve and youthful questions of what literature is about and what I should hope to find in it.The impact that Heidegger's book had on this young student was much greater than my professor could ever have imagined. I would hardly have committed myself to the study of Japan were it not for my reading of "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer," which appears in On the Way to Language. The dialogue is a fictional reconstruction of an actual meeting that Heidegger had with Tezuka Tomio (1903-1983), a Japanese scholar of German literature who visited the German philosopher in Freiburg at the end of March 1954.1 In the dialogue the Inquirer (Heidegger) formulates a central question that, in my opinion, should be of fundamental interest to anyone seriously concerned with the study of Japan. The question is deceptively simple, at least compared with the difficulty of coming up with the answer-an answer that, as a matter of fact, the reader will not find fully formulated in the dialogue. The question is: "What is the Japanese word for 'language' "? The Japanese visitor (Tezuka in Heidegger's recollection) appears to have been caught off guard, as we can see from Heidegger's parenthetical remark: "after further hesitation." Had Heidegger posed the same question to a Frenchman or an Italian, the answer would have been immediate: "langue" or "lingua." The challenge for Tezuka was definitely higher since he had a variety of words from which to choose. He could have used, for example, the expression gengo, a combination of two Chinese characters indicating "the speech of words." Instead, he used an ancient Japanese word derived from the native Yamato vocabulary: kotoba, which literally means "the foliage of speech."2There should be little doubt that Tezuka's choice was prompted by his desire to please Heidegger by playing the philosopher's own game-something that Tezuka totally succeeded in doing, as Heidegger's dialogue attests. Tezuka introduced a term that lent itself to etymological play-an enterprise very close to the heart of Heidegger, and one that was also very popular among Japanese thinkers.3 In fact, the expression kotoba incorporates the word koto, which means both "thing" and [End Page 555] "word" and which is found in the basic concepts of Japanese ontology: Mikoto (God, or "the honorable thing"), makoto (truth, or "the true word"), kotodama (soul, or "the spirit of words"), and kotowari(reason, or "the splitting of things"). The association of "words" and "things" in the Japanese word for "language" must have been of particular interest to Heidegger, who, four years before his meeting with Tezuka, had written "Das Ding" (The thing), a major lecture on the notion of things interpreted in light of the fourfold earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. In the dialogue Heidegger refers to this essay, in which "things" are presented in their objectified presence-the disparaged things that modernity and technology have dispossessed of their Being (Sein). Heidegger points out that never has the distance between things and Sein been as great as in modernity, when all distances in space and time have shrunk.4 Given the unflattering position that Heidegger had taken on the notion of "things," Tezuka was forced to come to the rescue of the Japanese word kotoba by endowing koto with the meaning of two Heideggerian keywords: "event" (kotogara) and "affair" (Sache). The thingly component of kotoba was not simply an objectifiable presence that can be counted, analyzed, and disposed of, but rather a poietic "act" that has the power to create a reality by transforming the named thing (koto) into a real thing (koto).In "A Dialogue... (shrink)