Search results for "Alien"
showing 10 items of 553 documents
Crisis y renovación en el cine de animación argentino. el caso de el empleo
2016
Los procesos de crisis modifican el imaginario social e influyen en la creación artística y en los productos culturales. El objetivo de este trabajo es averiguar la incidencia de la crisis Argentina de 2001 en el cine de animación. A partir del análisis audiovisual de la película El empleo (Santiago Grasso, 2008), buscamos qué elementos se problematizan y qué tipo de discurso plantea. Las conclusiones del trabajo pretenden ampliar la cobertura de los estudios académicos centrados en el impacto de la crisis sobre los productos culturales también al ámbito del cine de animación contemporáneo.
Citizen science projects for monitoring alien macrophytes
2016
To understand the invasive potential and the spread dynamics of an alien species, any newly colonized area needs to be quickly detected. Therefore, regular monitoring programs and public awareness campaigns are essential. Since intensive monitoring activities involving scientists are expensive, the occurrence and spread of marine species could remain undetected or could be detected only years after the initial colonization. Citizen Science initiatives, a potential solution to this problem providing supplemental information that would otherwise be lost, are able to involve different groups of volunteers: students, tourists, divers, underwater photographers, amateurs and fishermen. Volunteers…
Civil Society in Making: <i>Challenges of the Somali Diaspora Organizations</i>
2013
This article contributes to the discussion on migrants and civil society by directing attention towards the importance of transnational processes. Somali organizations in Finland will be addressed against the state-failure and conflict in Somalia. Among the Somalis, an NGO largely remains an alien and donor-driven concept, whereas clan, religious affiliations and associational structures may be blurred in complex ways. There is a need to rethink the concept of ‘civil society’ and how it could be analytically used in understanding transnational civic participation. The data comprises interviews with INGOs as well as observations and discussions with Somali associations.
Contesting Category Salience: A study of the perceptions of the sides involved in the Persian Gulf War
2001
AbstractPrevious studies of political rhetoric in general, and the rhetoric surrounding the Gulf war in particular, have suggested that social categories are not defined by perceptual features of context, but rather rhetorically constructed and contested for the purposes of mass mobilisation. Thus western leaders portrayed the conflict as ‘Civilisation against Saddam Hussein’ in order to maximise the pro-war constituency, while leaders of the western anti-war movements portrayed it in terms of ‘Western leaders against ordinary (Iraqi) people’ in order to minimise the pro-war constituency. However these studies focus exclusively on leaders and fail to show whether ordinary people differ in t…
Spatio-temporal saliency detection in dynamic scenes using color and texture features
2014
Visual saliency is an important research topic in the field of computer vision due to its numerouspossible applications. It helps to focus on regions of interest instead of processingthe whole image or video data. Detecting visual saliency in still images has been widelyaddressed in literature with several formulations. However, visual saliency detection invideos has attracted little attention, and is a more challenging task due to additional temporalinformation. Indeed, a video contains strong spatio-temporal correlation betweenthe regions of consecutive frames, and, furthermore, motion of foreground objects dramaticallychanges the importance of the objects in a scene. The main objective o…
An eye tracking comparison of external pointing cues and internal continuous cues in learning with complex animations
2010
Abstract Two experiments used eye tracking to investigate a novel cueing approach for directing learner attention to low salience, high relevance aspects of a complex animation. In the first experiment, comprehension of a piano mechanism animation containing spreading-colour cues was compared with comprehension obtained with arrow cues or no cues. Eye tracking data revealed differences in learner attention patterns between the different experimental conditions. The second experiment used eye tracking with synchronized and non-synchronized cues to investigate the role of dynamic direction of attention in cueing effectiveness. Results of Experiment 1 showed that spreading-colour cues resulted…
Too Much or Too Little Messaging? Situational Determinants of Guilt About Mobile Messaging
2021
Abstract Mobile messaging has been associated with guilt. Guilt about too much messaging may result from self-control failures during goal conflicts. Conversely, guilt about too little messaging may result from violating the salient norm to be available. This research considers both boundary conditions of guilt about mobile communication—goal conflicts and availability norm salience—simultaneously for the first time. We conducted two preregistered experiments to investigate their interplay. Results from a vignette experiment, but not from a laboratory experiment, support the hypotheses that goal conflicts trigger guilt about using messengers and that guilt about not using messengers arises …
The Mediatization of E-Campaigning: Evidence From German Party Websites in State, National, and European Parliamentary Elections 2002-2009
2012
The rise of e-campaigning is often associated with its ability to circumvent journalistic principles of news selection and presentation. By this, parties and candidates are said to free themselves from the discretionary power of the mass media and to reach voters in an unfiltered way. This conventional wisdom is tested through a comparative content analysis of German party websites in state, national, and European parliamentary elections between 2002 and 2009. The results show that e-campaigns in all elections adhere in their messages to the media logic. Specifically, they replicate those patterns of offline coverage that have been held accountable for rising political alienation and civic …
Convolutional Neural Network for Blind Mesh Visual Quality Assessment Using 3D Visual Saliency
2018
In this work, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) framework to estimate the perceived visual quality of 3D meshes without having access to the reference. The proposed CNN architecture is fed by small patches selected carefully according to their level of saliency. To do so, the visual saliency of the 3D mesh is computed, then we render 2D projections from the 3D mesh and its corresponding 3D saliency map. Afterward, the obtained views are split to obtain 2D small patches that pass through a saliency filter to select the most relevant patches. Experiments are conducted on two MVQ assessment databases, and the results show that the trained CNN achieves good rates in terms of corre…
ChiLab4It system in the QA4FAQ competition
2017
ChiLab4It is the Question Answering system (QA) for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) developed by the Computer-Human Interaction Laboratory (ChiLab) at the University of Palermo for participating to the QA4FAQ task at EVALITA 2016 competition. The system is the versioning of the QuASIt framework developed by the same authors, which has been customized to address the particular task. This technical report describes the strategies that have been imported from QuASIt for implementing ChiLab4It, the actual system implementation, and the comparative evaluations with the results of the other participant tools, as provided by the organizers of the task. ChiLab4It was the only system whose score re…