Peripersonal space: a multisensory interface for body-object interactions

Research in the last four decades has brought a considerable advance in our understanding of how the brain synthesizes information arising from different sensory modalities. Indeed, many cortical and subcortical areas, beyond those traditionally considered to be ‘associative,’ have been shown to be involved in multisensory interaction and integration (Ghazanfar and Schroeder 2006). Visuo-tactile interaction is of particular interest, because of the prominent role played by vision in guiding our actions and anticipating their tactile consequences in everyday life. In this chapter, we focus on the functional role that visuo-tactile processing may play in driving two types of body-object interactions: avoidance and approach. We will first review some basic features of visuo-tactile interactions, as revealed by electrophysiological studies in monkeys. These will prove to be relevant for interpreting the subsequent evidence arising from human studies. A crucial point that will be stressed is that these visuo-tactile mechanisms have not only sensory, but also motor-related activity that qualifies them as multisensory-motor interfaces. Evidence will then be presented for the existence of functionally homologous processing in the human brain, both from neuropsychological research in brain-damaged patients and in healthy participants. The final part of the chapter will focus on some recent studies in humans showing that the human motor system is provided with a multisensory interface that allows for continuous monitoring of the space near the body (i.e., peripersonal space). We further demonstrate that multisensory processing can be modulated on-line as a consequence of interacting with objects. This indicates that, far from being passive, the monitoring of peripersonal space is an active process subserving actions between our body and objects located in the space around us.

‘The Making of the Book’: Roy Fisher, the Circle Press and the poetics of book art

Between 1972 and 2001, the English late-modernist poet Roy Fisher provided the text for nine separate artist's books produced by Ron King at the Circle Press. Taken together, as Andrew Lambirth has written, the Fisher-King collaborations represent a sustained investigation of the various ways in which text and image can be integrated, breaking the mould of the codex or folio edition, and turning the book into a sculptural object. From the three-dimensional pop-up designs of Bluebeard's Castle (1973), each representing a part of the edifice (the portcullis, the armoury and so on), to ‘alphabet books’ such as The Half-Year Letters (1983), held in an ingenious french-folded concertina which can be stretched to over a metre long or compacted to a pocketbook, the project of these art books is to complicate their own bibliographic codes, and rethink what a book can be. Their folds and reduplications give a material form to the processes by which meanings are produced: from the discovery, in Top Down, Bottom Up (1990), of how to draw on both sides of the page at the same time, to the developments of The Left-Handed Punch (1987) and Anansi Company (1992), where the book becomes first a four-dimensional theatre space, in which a new version of Punch and Judy is played out by twelve articulated puppets, and then a location for characters that are self-contained and removable, in the form of thirteen hand-made wire and card rod-puppets. Finally, in Tabernacle (2001), a seven-drawer black wooden cabinet that stands foursquare like a sculpture (and sells to galleries and collectors for over three thousand pounds), the conception of the book and the material history of print are fully undone and reconstituted. This paper analyses how the King-Fisher art books work out their radically material poetics of the book; how their emphasis on collaboration, between artist and poet, image and text, and also book and reader – the construction of meaning becoming a co-implicated process – continuously challenges hierarchies and fixities in our conception of authorship; and how they re-think the status of poetic text and the construction of the book as material object.

Atividades estruturais de equações polinomiais numa abordagem histórica por meio de e-book

The present study investigates how the inter-relationship of the content of polynomial equations works with structured activities and with the history of mathematics through a sequence of activities presented in an e-book, so that the result of this research will proceed will result in a didactic and pedagogic proposal for the teaching of polynomial equations in a historical approach via the reported e-book. Therefore, we have considered in theoretical and methodological assumptions of the History of Mathematics, in structured activities and new technologies with an emphasis on e-book tool. We used as a methodological approach the qualitative research, as our research object adjusts to the objectives of this research mode. As methodological instruments, we used the e-book as a synthesis tool of the sequence of activities to be evaluated, while the questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and participant observation were designed to register and analyze the evaluation made by the research, participants in the structured activities. The processing and analysis of data collected though the questionnaires were organized, classified and quantified in summary tables to facilitate visualization, interpretation, understanding, and analysis of these data. As for participant observation was used to contribute to the qualitative analysis of the quantified data. The interviews were synthetically transcribed and qualitatively analyzed. The analysis ratified our research objectives and contributed to improve, approve and indicate the use of e-book for the teaching of polynomial equations. Thus, we consider that this educational product will bring significant contributions to the teaching of mathematical content, in Basic Education

Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns

The rapid growth of object-oriented development over the past twenty years has given rise to many object-oriented systems that are large, complex and hard to maintain. Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns addresses the problem of understanding and reengineering such object-oriented legacy systems. This book collects and distills successful techniques in planning a reengineering project, reverse-engineering, problem detection, migration strategies and software redesign. The material in this book is presented as a set of "reengineering patterns" --- recurring solutions that experts apply while reengineering and maintaining object-oriented systems. The principles and techniques described in this book have been observed and validated in a number of industrial projects, and reflect best practice in object-oriented reengineering.

Electronic Communications as a Distinct and Unique Object of Regulation

The present paper is an abridged version of the first chapter to the book EC Electronic Communications and Competition Law (London: Cameron May, 2007). It is intended to pinpoint the contours of the communications sector as an object of regulation - an exercise that is essential to any thoughts on appropriate regulatory design. The communications sector is defined through its salient features of being (i) network-bound; (ii) dynamic; (iii) converging; (iv) sensitive to regulation and society’s reactions; and as one (v) with special societal role and as (vi) part of the new economy.

Illuminating faith : the Bute Book of Hours

"The Bute Book of Hours, an English manuscript dating to c. 1500 in The Berger Collection at the Denver Art Museum, has received cursory attention from scholars in the past. This paper is the first to conduct a comprehensive examination of the object, evaluating its style, iconography, content, religious significance, and patronage. Careful study has revealed that the Bute Book is greatly indebted to early engravings for its imagery, perhaps more than any other known manuscript. The suffrages to saints were selected based on their powers against the plague, Tudor religious preferences, and regional significance. Special attention has been given to more unusual insertions such as Sts. Armel and Ninian, and Henry VI. The Bute Book of Hours was created for a wealthy Englishman, most likely with Yorkshire connections, and it illustrates the tenor of a nation undergoing rapid political, social and religious changes"

Researching XBRL as a socio-technical object

The Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is a grammar based on XML that is defined and described in the XBRL 2.1 specification. Instance documents are created by combining XBRL taxonomies and linkbases with data (facts) for a particular context. An alternative view is, XBRL is a mechanism for communicating information for decision-making between interested parties based on a generally accepted way of representing and digitally transmitting symbols of actions and events. XBRL may be both of these and many other things depending on how we frame our methodological understanding for the purposes of research. In this section we present an approach that conceives XBRL as a socio-technical object in the tradition of post-social perspectives (Knorr Cetina 1997; Latour 1996, 1999). © Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag GWV Fachverlage GmbH, Wiesbaden 2007.

Modeling geometric rules in object based models:an XML / GML approach

Most object-based approaches to Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have concentrated on the representation of geometric properties of objects in terms of fixed geometry. In our road traffic marking application domain we have a requirement to represent the static locations of the road markings but also enforce the associated regulations, which are typically geometric in nature. For example a give way line of a pedestrian crossing in the UK must be within 1100-3000 mm of the edge of the crossing pattern. In previous studies of the application of spatial rules (often called 'business logic') in GIS emphasis has been placed on the representation of topological constraints and data integrity checks. There is very little GIS literature that describes models for geometric rules, although there are some examples in the Computer Aided Design (CAD) literature. This paper introduces some of the ideas from so called variational CAD models to the GIS application domain, and extends these using a Geography Markup Language (GML) based representation. In our application we have an additional requirement; the geometric rules are often changed and vary from country to country so should be represented in a flexible manner. In this paper we describe an elegant solution to the representation of geometric rules, such as requiring lines to be offset from other objects. The method uses a feature-property model embraced in GML 3.1 and extends the possible relationships in feature collections to permit the application of parameterized geometric constraints to sub features. We show the parametric rule model we have developed and discuss the advantage of using simple parametric expressions in the rule base. We discuss the possibilities and limitations of our approach and relate our data model to GML 3.1. © 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

A flexible, extensible object oriented real-time near photorealistic visualization system:the system framework design

In this paper we describe a novel, extensible visualization system currently under development at Aston University. We introduce modern programming methods, such as the use of data driven programming, design patterns, and the careful definition of interfaces to allow easy extension using plug-ins, to 3D landscape visualization software. We combine this with modern developments in computer graphics, such as vertex and fragment shaders, to create an extremely flexible, extensible real-time near photorealistic visualization system. In this paper we show the design of the system and the main sub-components. We stress the role of modern programming practices and illustrate the benefits these bring to 3D visualization. © 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.