(Pro)Motion Pictures: Len Lye in the Thirties

This article examines Len Lye’s film-making in the 1930s within a broader visual arts context, seeking to clarify the nature and extent of his involvement in British documentary film culture at this time. In particular, it demonstrates how Lye's method of fusing 'live action', found footage, and animation techniques created the possibility of a radical documentary practice that could reconcile promotional advertising and commercial art with avant-garde abstraction and kinaesthetic experimentation. In particular, the article focusses on Lye's N. or N.W. (1937, 35mm, b&w, 10 mns), arguing that his work from this period should be regarded as central - and not marginal - to any serious reassessment of Britain's “Documentary Movement” of the inter-war era, and its relations to any history of the cinema and visual culture.

A Novel Approach for Axle Detection in Bridge Weigh-In-Motion Systems

Bridge weigh-in-motion (B-WIM), a system that uses strain sensors to calculate the weights of trucks passing on bridges overhead, requires accurate axle location and speed information for effective performance. The success of a B-WIM system is dependent upon the accuracy of the axle detection method. It is widely recognised that any form of axle detector on the road surface is not ideal for B-WIM applications as it can cause disruption to the traffic (Ojio & Yamada 2002; Zhao et al. 2005; Chatterjee et al. 2006). Sensors under the bridge, that is Nothing-on-Road (NOR) B-WIM, can perform axle detection via data acquisition systems which can detect a peak in strain as the axle passes. The method is often successful, although not all bridges are suitable for NOR B-WIM due to limitations of the system. Significant research has been carried out to further develop the method and the NOR algorithms, but beam-and-slab bridges with deep beams still present a challenge. With these bridges, the slabs are used for axle detection, but peaks in the slab strains are sensitive to the transverse position of wheels on the beam. This next generation B-WIM research project extends the current B-WIM algorithm to the problem of axle detection and safety, thus overcoming the existing limitations in current state-of–the-art technology. Finite Element Analysis was used to determine the critical locations for axle detecting sensors and the findings were then tested in the field. In this paper, alternative strategies for axle detection were determined using Finite Element analysis and the findings were then tested in the field. The site selected for testing was in Loughbrickland, Northern Ireland, along the A1 corridor connecting the two cities of Belfast and Dublin. The structure is on a central route through the island of Ireland and has a high traffic volume which made it an optimum location for the study. Another huge benefit of the chosen location was its close proximity to a nearby self-operated weigh station. To determine the accuracy of the proposed B-WIM system and develop a knowledge base of the traffic load on the structure, a pavement WIM system was also installed on the northbound lane on the approach to the structure. The bridge structure selected for this B-WIM research comprised of 27 pre-cast prestressed concrete Y4-beams, and a cast in-situ concrete deck. The structure, a newly constructed integral bridge, spans 19 m and has an angle of skew of 22.7°.

Directional performance in motion transparency

Motion transparency provides a challenging test case for our understanding of how visual motion, and other attributes, are computed and represented in the brain. However, previous studies of visual transparency have used subjective criteria which do not confirm the existence of independent representations of the superimposed motions. We have developed measures of performance in motion transparency that require observers to extract information about two motions jointly, and therefore test the information that is simultaneously represented for each motion. Observers judged whether two motions were at 90 to one another; the base direction was randomized so that neither motion taken alone was informative. The precision of performance was determined by the standard deviations (S.D.s) of probit functions fitted to the data. Observers also made judgments of orthogonal directions between a single motion stream and a line, for one of two transparent motions against a line and for two spatially segregated motions. The data show that direction judgments with transparency can be made with comparable accuracy to segregated (non-transparent) conditions, supporting the idea that transparency involves the equivalent representation of two global motions in the same region. The precision of this joint direction judgment is, however, 2–3 times poorer than that for a single motion stream. The precision in directional judgment for a single stream is reduced only by a factor of about 1.5 by superimposing a second stream. The major effect in performance, therefore, appears to be associated with the need to compute and compare two global representations of motion, rather than with interference between the dot streams per se. Experiment 2tested the transparency of motions separated by a range of angles from 5 to 180 by requiring subjects to set a line matching the perceived direction of each motion. The S.D.s of these settings demonstrated that directions of transparent motions were represented independently for separations over 20. Increasing dot speeds from 1 to 10 deg/s improved directional performance but had no effect on transparency perception. Transparency was also unaffected by variations of density between 0.1 and 19 dots/deg2

Spanish Golden Age Poetry in Motion: The Dynamics of Creation and Conversation.

The fourteen essays of this volume engage in distinct ways with the matter of motion in early modern Spanish poetics, without limiting the dialectic of stasis and movement to any single sphere or manifestation. Interrogation of the interdependence of tradition and innovation, poetry, power and politics, shifting signifiers, the intersection of topography and deviant temporalities, the movement between the secular and the sacred, tensions between centres and peripheries, issues of manuscript circulation and reception, poetic calls and echoes across continents and centuries, and between creative writing and reading subjects, all demonstrate that Helgerson's central notion of conspicuous movement is relevant beyond early sixteenth-century secular poetics, By opening it up we approximate a better understanding of poetry's flexible spatio-temporal co-ordinates in a period of extraordinary historical circumstances and conterminous radical cultural transformation