Stories from beyond the frame dilemas and contradictions of photojournalism in a digitized and globalized world

To engage in the practice of photojournalism is to occupy a position of privilege, because the practice involves entering, albeit for a short while, the lives of others. But with this privilege comes the burden of representation. In this sense I believe that photojournalism is currently in crisis. This crisis concerns the decontextualization of the image in media outlets and the relegation of the photojournalist to the role of merely a hunter/gatherer rather than a storyteller. In other words, photojournalists have become alienated from the process of re-presentation of their own stories. To some extent it has always been thus.

Through the frame & beyond the gaze

In Fiction in the Age of Photography[i], Nancy Armstrong examines the impact of photography on the way in which the nineteenth century novelists represented society. In particular she asks 'But what do we make of the fact that the novel's turn to pictorialism coincided with the sudden ubiquity of photographic images in the culture at large? Why did pictures begin to speak louder than words?

The cost of storing checkpoints to multiple volatile storage locations using at-least-k semantics

Using the volatile memory of other computers within a system to store checkpoints is an alternative to the traditional approach of using stable storage. The objective of this study is to develop a storage mechanism using at-least-k delivery semantics. This semantics allows data to be saved to a minimum number of computers simultaneously using group communications, without requiring that each group computer successfully acknowledge the receipt. The new storage mechanism is implemented in the GENESIS checkpointing facility v2.0. The results showed that at-least-k storage mechanisms provide low storage latency times; however, the incurred execution overheads on the applications executing within the system are higher than that when using remote stable storage to store checkpoints.

Robustness in health research : do differences in health measures, techniques, and time frame matter?

Survey-based health research is in a boom phase following an increased amount of health spending in OECD countries and the interest in ageing. A general characteristic of survey-based health research is its diversity. Different studies are based on different health questions in different datasets; they use different statistical techniques; they differ in whether they approach health from an ordinal or cardinal perspective; and they differ in whether they measure short-term or long-term effects. The question in this paper is simple: do these differences matter for the findings? We investigate the effects of life-style choices (drinking, smoking, exercise) and income on six measures of health in the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) between 1992 and 2002: (1) self-assessed general health status, (2) problems with undertaking daily tasks and chores, (3) mental health indicators, (4) BMI, (5) the presence of serious long-term health conditions, and (6) mortality. We compare ordinal models with cardinal models; we compare models with fixed effects to models without fixed-effects; and we compare short-term effects to long-term effects. We find considerable variation in the impact of different determinants on our chosen health outcome measures; we find that it matters whether ordinality or cardinality is assumed; we find substantial differences between estimates that account for fixed effects versus those that do not; and we find that short-run and long-run effects differ greatly. All this implies that health is an even more complicated notion than hitherto thought, defying generalizations from one measure to the others or one methodology to another.

Image retrieval based on semantics of intra-region color properties

Traditional image retrieval systems are content based image retrieval systems which rely on low-level features for indexing and retrieval of images. CBIR systems fail to meet user expectations because of the gap between the low level features used by such systems and the high level perception of images by humans. Semantics based methods have been used to describe images according to their high level features. In this paper, we performed experiments to identify the failure of existing semantics-based methods to retrieve images in a particular semantic category. We have proposed a new semantic category to describe the intra-region color feature. The proposed semantic category complements the existing high level descriptions. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

(Post)colonial ambivalences : Christina Stead and Janet Frame

This thesis is an evaluative comparison of two significant writers, the Australian Christina Stead, and New Zealander Janet Frame. In a detailed analysis of the novels, the writerly ambivalences of each author are explored. Their writings are revealed to be creative of new possibilities for female (post)colonial agency.

Frame rate improvement for the VFX1 headset in virtual reality applications

Concentrates on reducing the processing time to enhance the visual component of the experience in virtual reality. Investigates the use of two co-processing cards, each with their own microprocessor providing parallel processing to the host computer. Concludes that the frame rates of a single computer running the virtual reality system could be improved by up to 35% by the use of parallel processing.