Bengali handwritten character recognition using modified syntactic method

Several approaches have been proposed to recognize handwritten Bengali characters using different curve fitting algorithms and curvature analysis. In this paper, a new algorithm (Curve-fitting Algorithm) to identify various strokes of a handwritten character is developed. The curve-fitting algorithm helps recognizing various strokes of different patterns (line, quadratic curve) precisely. This reduces the error elimination burden heavily. Implementation of this Modified Syntactic Method demonstrates significant improvement in the recognition of Bengali handwritten characters.

Virtual product placement as a new approach to measure effectiveness of placements

Product placement is a fast growing multi-billion dollar industry yet measures of its effectiveness, which influence the critical area of pricing, have been problematic. Past attempts to measure the effect of a placement, and therefore provide a basis for pricing of placements, have been confounded by the effect on consumers of multiple prior exposures of a brand name in all marketing communications. Virtual product placement offers certain advantages: as a tool to measure the effectiveness of product placements; assistance with the problem of lack of audience selectivity in traditional product placement; testing different audiences for brands and addressing a gap in the existing academic literature by focusing on the impact of product placement on recall and recognition of new brands.

Dangerous places: A novel

Dangerous Places is a novel about the gap between mythological (or 'dreamed') constructions of reality and actual life. The story centres on V en, a married woman with two young children. Her love for her children is fiercely protective and encompassing, but she feels alienated from her husband and to a certain extent her society; so when her first love, Yanni, re-enters her life,she is strongly tempted to resume her affair with him. She is however seduced more by the memories she has 'mythologized' about him than by his physical reality; in the course of the novel she is forced to come to terms with her own delusions. The subplot of the novel involves other characters who are caught between illusion and reality as well, and who deal with 'truth' in differing ways. The themes of the book are explored using a number of structures which underlie and support the surface story. The Greek myths of Adonis/ Aphrodite and Hades/Persephone are framing agents for the plot, and the setting in contemporary Brisbane and North Stradbroke Island is symbolic.

Combination of Kalman filter and least error square techniques in power system

An algorithm based on the concept of combining Kalman filter and Least Error Square (LES) techniques is proposed in this paper. The algorithm is intended to estimate signal attributes like amplitude, frequency and phase angle in the online mode. This technique can be used in protection relays, digital AVRs, DGs, DSTATCOMs, FACTS and other power electronics applications. The Kalman filter is modified to operate on a fictitious input signal and provides precise estimation results insensitive to noise and other disturbances. At the same time, the LES system has been arranged to operate in critical transient cases to compensate the delay and inaccuracy identified because of the response of the standard Kalman filter. Practical considerations such as the effect of noise, higher order harmonics, and computational issues of the algorithm are considered and tested in the paper. Several computer simulations and a laboratory test are presented to highlight the usefulness of the proposed method. Simulation results show that the proposed technique can simultaneously estimate the signal attributes, even if it is highly distorted due to the presence of non-linear loads and noise.

Reverse immigration

This book (256 pages, written in Korean) is a critical essay that reviews, questions, and criticises Korean and Eastern immigrants’ thinking and behaviour styles in Australia from their cultural perspectives, and discuss and proposes a creative cultural dimension for their better life in a multicultural context. Multiculturalism is not supportive of Eastern cultures because of individualistic collection of cultures, while transculturalism facilitates nurture of their culture in a community-oriented way within multicultural circumstances. Korean and Eastern immigrants, sharing oriental cultural systems and values, should approach to the Australian multicultural context with transculturalism which allows creating new cultural values in collaboration with and by participation into local communities. ------------------------------------------------------------ Many Eastern immigrants live in their own ethnic communities without or less interacting with Australian (communities). The author defines this phenomenon as “reverse immigration”. Reverse immigration refers to re-immigrating to their ethnic community in Australia or to their birth country despite they did not anticipate that this would happen to them before immigration to Australia. The author argues that Easterners’ collectivistic culture often devalues individuality and vice versa. Cultural clash between West and East often forces the immigrants to choose reverse immigration because of their lack of understanding of Western culture and their cultural characteristics such as low individuality, high power distance, and high uncertainty avoidance. For example, a vague boundary between individualist and collectivist in a collectivistic context (within their ethnic group) often leads to maladjustment to local communities and enhancement of cultural conservatism. The author proposes that the cultural clash can be overcome by cross-cultural activities named “transculturalism”. To Eastern immigrants, transculturalism can be achieved by acculturation of their two predominant cultures, the third-person perspective and generalised others. In a multicultural context, the former refers to the ability to share another person's feelings and emotions as if they were your own, and the latter does the ability to manage community and public expectations. When both cultural values are used for quality interactions between East and West, they allow Eastern immigrants to be more creative and critical and Australian to be more socially inclusive and culturally tolerant. With these discussions, the author discusses cultural differences throughout the book with four topics (chapters) and proposes transculturalism as a solution to the reverse immigration. ------------------------------------------------------------ Chapter 1 criticises Koreans’ attitudes and methods towards learning English that is less pragmatic and practical, but more likely to be a scholarly study. The author explains that Koreans’ non-pragmatic towards learning English has been firmly built based on their traditional systems and values that Koreans view English as a discipline and an aim of academic achievements rather than a means of communication. Within their cultural context, English can be perceived as more than a language, but something like vastly superior to their language and culture. Their collectivistic culture regards English as an unreachable and heterogeneous one that may threaten their cultural identity, so that “scholarly studying” is only the way to achieve (not learn) it. This discourages the immigrants to engage and involve in daily dialogues by “using” English as a second language. The author further advises the readers to be aware of Eastern collectivistic culture in communication and interaction that sometimes completely reverses private and public topics in a Western context. This leads them to feel that they have no content to talk to natives. ------------------------------------------------------------ Chapter 2 compares between Korea and Australia in terms of their educational systems and values, and proposes how Eastern overseas students can achieve critical and creative thinking within a Western educational setting. Interestingly, this chapter includes an explanation of why Eastern overseas students easily fail assessments including essay writing, oral presentations and discussions. One of the reasons the author explains is that Eastern students are not familiar to criticise others and think creatively, especially when they recognise that their words and ideas may harm the collectivistic harmony. Western educational systems focuses on enhancement of individuality such as self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-expression, while Eastern educational systems foster group-oriented values such as interpersonal relationship, and strong moral and spiritual values. Yet, the author argues that the collectivistic approach to criticism and creativity is often more critical and creative than Western individuals when they know what they are supposed to do for a group (or a community). Therefore, Eastern students need to think their cultural merits and demerits by using an individual perspective rather than generalised others’ perspective. The latter often discourages individual participation in a community, and the generalised others in a Western culture is weaker than Eastern. Furthermore, Western educational systems do not educate students to transform (loose) their individuality to fit into a group or a community. Rather they cultivate individuality for community prosperity. ------------------------------------------------------------ Chapter 3 introduces various cases of reverse immigration in workplaces that many immigrants return to their country or their ethnic community after many trials for acculturation. Reverse immigration is unexpected and not planned before immigration, so that its emotional embarrassment increases such severe social loneliness. Most Eastern immigrant workers have tried to adjust themselves in this new cultural environment at the early stages of immigration. However, their cultural features of collectivism, high power distance, high uncertainty avoidance, and long-term oriented cultures suppress individual initiative and eliminate the space for experiments in ways of acculturation. The author argues that returning to their ethnic community (physically and psychologically) leads to two significant problems: their distorted parenting and becoming more conservatives. The former leads the first generation of immigrants to pressure their children to pursue extrinsic or materialist values, such as financial success, fame and physical appearance, rather than on intrinsic values, while the latter refers to their isolated conservative characters because of their remoteness from the changes of their own country. The author also warns that their ethnic and religious groups actively strengthens immigrants’ social loneliness and systematically discourages immigrants’ interests and desire to be involving into local communities. The ethnic communities and leaders have not been interacting with Australian local communities and, as a result, are eager to conserve outdated cultural systems values. Even they have a tendency to weed out those people who wish to settle down within Australian local communities. They believe that those people can threaten their community’s survival and continuity. ------------------------------------------------------------ Chapter 4 titled multiculturalism argues that Korean and Eastern immigrants should more precisely understand Australia as a multicultural society in a way of collaboratively creating new cultural values. The author introduces multiculturalism with its definitions and history in Australia and argues the limitations of multiculturalism from an Easterner’s perspective. With well known tragedies of the second generations of U.S. immigrants, Cho Seung-Hui, a university student, massacred 32 people on the Virginia Tech before committing suicide and Hidal Hassan, an Army psychiatrist, killed 13 people at Fort Hood and the responses of ethnic community, the author explains that their mental illness may be derived from their parents’ (or ethnic group) culturally isolated attitude and socially static viewpoint of U.S. (Western system and values). The author insists that multiculturalism may restrict Eastern immigrants’ engagement and involvement in local communities. Multiculturalism has been systematically and historically developed based on Western systems and cultural values. In other words, multiculturalism requires high self-confidence and self-esteem that Eastern immigrants less prioritise them. It has been generally known that Easterners put more weight on human relationship than Westerners, but the author claims that this is not true. Within an individualistic culture, Westerners are more interested in building person-to-person connections and relationships. While Easterners are more interested in how individuals can achieve a sense of belonging within a group and a community. Therefore, multiculturalism is an ideology which forces Eastern immigrants to discard their strong desire to be part of a group and does not give a sense of belonging. In a consequence, the author advises that Eastern immigrants should aim towards “transculturalism” which allows them to actively participate in and contribute to their multicultural community. Transculturalism does not ask Easterners to discard their cultural values, but enables them to be a collectivistic individualist (a community leader) who is capable of developing new cultural values in a more creative and productive way. Furthermore, transculturalism encourages Western Australians in a multicultural context to collaborate with ethnic minorities to build a better community.

Anthony Browne and the cultural capital of classic fairy tales

Prolific British author/illustrator Anthony Browne both participates in the classic fairy-tale tradition and appropriates its cultural capital, ultimately undertaking a process of self-canonisation alongside the dissemination of fairy tales. In reading Browne’s Hansel and Gretel (1981), The Tunnel (1989) and Into the Forest (2004), a trajectory emerges that moves from broadly intertextual to more exclusively self-referential modes of representation which reward readers of “Anthony Browne”, rather than readers of “fairy tales”. All three books depict ‘babes in the woods’ stories wherein child characters must negotiate some form of threat outside the home in order to return home safely. Thus, they represent childhood agency. However, these visions of agency are ultimately subordinated to logics of capital, which means that child readers of Browne’s fairy-tale books are overtly invited to identify with children who act, but are interpellated as privileged if they ‘know’. Bourdieu’s model of ‘cultural capital’ offers a lens for considering Browne’s production of ‘value’ for his own works within a broader cultural landscape which privileges literary fairy tales as a register of juvenile cultural competency. If cultural capital can be formulated most simply as the symbolic exchange value of approved modes of knowing and being, it is clearly helpful when trying to unpack logics of meaning within heavily intertextual or citational texts. It is also helpful thinking about what kinds of stories we as a culture choose to disseminate, choose to privilege, or choose to suppress. Zipes notes of fairy tales that, “the genre itself becomes a kind of institute that is involved in the socialization and acculturation of readers” (22). He elaborates that, “We initiate readers and expect them to learn the fairy-tale code as part of our responsibility in the civilizing process” (Zipes 29), so it is little wonder that Tatar describes fairy tales as “a vital part of our cultural capital” (xix). Although Browne is clearly interested in literary fairy tales, the most obvious strategies of self-canonisation take place in Browne’s work not in words but in pictures: hidden in plain sight, as illustration becomes self-reflexive citation.

Professor Emeritus Leo G Carney Optometry's quiet achiever

Perhaps more than any other sub-discipline in optometry and vision science, the academic field of cornea and contact lenses is populated by an assortment of extroverted and flamboyant characters who constantly travel the world, entertaining clinicians with dazzling audiovisual presentations, informing them about the latest advances in the field and generally promoting their own scientific agendas. The antithesis of this is Leo Carney (Figure 1), a highly accomplished researcher, teacher, mentor and administrator, who has quietly and with great dignity carved out an impressive career in academic optometry. Indeed, Leo Carney is optometry's quintessential ‘quiet achiever’

Comedy hints at the tragedy beneath [REVIEW]

THE Little Dog Laughed. By Douglas Carter Beane. Queensland Theatre Company. Cremorne Theatre, Brisbane. February 11. DOUGLAS Carter Beane's The Little Dog Laughed is a comedy about truth and its consequences. Set mainly in New York, the story follows film star Mitchell Green's developing relationship with Alex, a rentboy he calls one night while drunk and lonely in a hotel room. Scenes in which Mitchell and Alex test the strength of something they seem to have found together are punctuated by monologues from Mitchell's agent Diane and Alex's ex-girlfriend Ellen. We start to see glimpses of their separate lives, what their shared life might look like and, eventually, a crisis that brings all four characters together in the pursuit of a somewhat conflicted set of ideas about what happiness is and what it takes to be happy.

Left vs right in black and white : a review

LIKE much of the work that David Williamson is known for, Let the Sunshine concentrates on tensions between characters who operate mainly as mouthpieces for opposing ideologies. Left-wing documentary-maker Toby and his wife Ros have moved to Noosa to escape the rat race in Sydney and some bad press surrounding one of Toby's projects. Trying to make social connections in town, Ros has reconnected with high school classmate Natasha, now the cosmetically-enhanced wife of wealthy right-wing property developer Ron. The posturing and conflict between Toby and Ron come to a head when the women invite their grown children -- struggling songwriter Rick and stressed corporate lawyer Emma -- to dinner to celebrate Toby's birthday, and the results of this encounter drive the rest of the plot. The scenario of Let the Sunshine is contrived, the characters are stereotyped, and their conflicts are little more than an old clash of ideologies cast loosely across the mainstream news media's characterisation of the sides in debates about development, climate change and the economic crisis.

Teenager loner in a chat room tangled up in guile and guilability : a review

ADAM Cass's I Love You, Bro is an engaging portrayal of just how far some young people can go in constructing fantasy worlds online. The play is, according to Cass, based on the case of two teenage boys in Britain in the early 2000s. Troubled teen Johnny lives at home with his mother and her new partner. Lurking in an online chat room one day, he strikes up a conversation with MarkyMark, a slightly older soccer-playing boy from the popular crowd in his own local town, who mistakes him for a girl. The plot unfolds from this one moment of mistaken identity. Johnny concocts an increasingly tenuous series of characters, plot twists and intrigues to try to maintain his relationship with MarkyMark and deal with the lie at the heart of his first love, eventually conspiring - as he tells us from the first moment - to cause his own murder.

Contemporary take on deconstructed Medea : a review

THEATRE: The New Dead: Medea Material. By Heiner Muller. Stella Electrika in association with La Boite Theatre Company, Brisbane, November 19. THERE has been a lot of intensity in independent theatre in Brisbane during the past year, as companies, production houses and producers have begun building new programs and platforms to support an expansion of pathways within the local theatre ecology. Audiences have been exposed to works signalling the diversity of what Brisbane theatre makers want to see on stage, from productions of new local and international pieces to new devised works, and the results of residencies and development programs. La Boite Theatre Company closes its inaugural indie season with a work that places it at the contemporary, experimental end of the spectrum. The New Dead: Medea Material is emerging director Kat Henry's interpretation of Heiner Muller's 1981 text Despoiled Shore Medea Material Landscape with Argonauts. Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar. End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar. Muller is known for his radical adaptations of historical dramas, from the Greeks to Shakespeare, and for deconstructed texts in which the characters - in this case, Medea - violently reject the familial, cultural and political roles society has laid out for them. Muller's combination of deconstructed characters, disconnected poetic language and constant references to aspects of popular culture and the Cold War politics he sought to abjure make his texts challenging to realise. The poetry entices but the density, together with the increasing distance of the Cold War politics in the texts, leaves contemporary directors with clear decisions to make about how to adapt these open texts. In The New Dead: Medea Material, Henry works with some interesting imagery and conceptual territory. Lucinda Shaw as Medea, Guy Webster as Jason and Kimie Tsukakoshi as King Creon's daughter Glauce, the woman for whom Jason forsakes his wife Medea, each reference different aspects of contemporary culture. Medea is a bitter, drunken, satin-gowned diva with bite; Jason - first seen lounging in front of the television with a beer in an image reminiscent of Sarah Kane's in-yer-face characterisation of Hippolytus in Phaedra's Love - has something of the rock star about him; and Glauce is a roller-skating, karaoke-singing, pole-dancing young temptress. The production is given a contemporary tone, dominated by Medea's twisted love and loss, rather than by any commentary on her circumstances. Its strength is the aesthetic Henry creates, supported by live electro-pop music, a band stage that stands as a metaphor for Jason's sea voyage, and multimedia that inserts images of the story unfolding beyond these characters' speeches as sorts of subconscious flashes. While Tsukakoshi is engaging throughout, there are moments when Shaw and Webster's performances - particularly in the songs - are diminished by a lack of clarity. The result is a piece that, while slightly lacking in its realisation at times, undoubtedly flags Henry's facility as an emerging director and what she wants to bring to the Brisbane theatre scene.

Ecology and behavior of first instar larval Lepidoptera

Neonate Lepidoptera are confronted with the daunting task of establishing themselves on a food plant. The factors relevant to this process need to be considered at spatial and temporal scales relevant to the larva and not the investigator. Neonates have to cope with an array of plant surface characters as well as internal characters once the integument is ruptured. These characters, as well as microclimatic conditions, vary within and between plant modules and interact with larval feeding requirements, strongly affecting movement behavior, which may be extensive even for such small organisms. In addition to these factors, there is an array of predators, pathogens, and parasitoids with which first instars must contend. Not surprisingly, mortality in neonates is high but can vary widely. Experimental and manipulative studies, as well as detailed observations of the animal, are vital if the subtle interaction of factors responsible for this high and variable mortality are to be understood. These studies are essential for an understanding of theories linking female oviposition behavior with larval survival, plant defense theory, and population dynamics, as well as modern crop resistance breeding programs.

Death by Drowning : Gary Bryson's Turtle [A Review]

Accused of being autobiographical, as many debut novels often are, Turtle, upon first reading and further prying, does read as a story wrenched out of Gary Bryson’s own life. In a recent interview with Mandy Sayer, however, he was quick to deny all sorts of archetypal allegations. “Any resemblance to turtles living or dead”, Bryson explained, “is entirely coincidental”. Regardless of the many parallels that align author with protagonist—both were born and raised in a grey-skied Glasgow, both grew up in self-described dysfunctional families, and both returned to the colourless city to attend their mothers’ funerals—the narrative combines bruising black comedy with moments of magic realism. The result is an unlikely but often surprising concoction of twists and turns, each of which mixes the fallibility of memory with the slippery nature of truth. This playfulness between the material world and its metaphorical counterpart raises questions, not only about the curse that poisons its characters, but about the ethical implications of blurring fact and fiction...