The Science and Art of Light

Architecture today often is praised for its tectonics, floating volumes, and sensational, gravity-defying stunts of “starchitecture.” Yet, very so often there is a building that inspires descriptions of the sublime, the experiential, and the power of light and architecture to transcend our expectations. The new Meinel Optical Sciences Research Building, designed by Phoenix-based Richärd+Bauer for the University of Arizona, Tucson, is one of these architectural rarities. Already drawing comparisons to Louis Kahn's 1965 Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, the indescribable quality of light that characterizes the best of Kahn's work also resonates in Richärd+Bauer's new building. Both an expansion and renovation of the existing College of Optical Sciences facilities, the Meinel building includes teaching and research laboratories, six floors of offices, discussion areas, conference rooms, and an auditorium. The new 47,000 square-foot cast-in-place concrete structure, wrapped on three-sides in copper-alloy panels, harmonizes with the largely brick vocabulary of the campus while reflecting the ethereal quality of the wide Arizona sky. The façade, however, is merely a prelude for what awaits inside—where light and architecture seamlessly combine to create moments of pure awe.

Highlight: Yale University Art Gallery

Modern architecture, with its exposed concrete, glass, and steel expanses, does not age gracefully. The Yale University Art Gallery, designed by architecture great Louis Kahn, is no exception. As Yale's first modernist building, completed in 1953, and Kahn's first major commission and collaboration with pioneering lighting designer, Richard Kelly, the gallery is an important part of American architecture. Yet, despite its iconic status, the building suffered numerous architectural indignities in the years following its completion, including the insertion of permanent gallery partitions, which divided Kahn's open plan, and the enclosure of an exterior court, which blocked daylight to the lower galleries.

Reengaging, reenacting and reenvisaging discourses of disaster through public space performance: Austerity, art, and the art of protest

This paper offers a mediation on disaster, recovery, resilience, and restoration of balance, in both a material and a metaphorical sense, when ‘disaster’ befalls not the body politic of the nation but the body personal. In the past few decades, of course, artists, activists and scholars have deliberately tried to avoid describing personal, physical and phenomenological experiences of the disabled body in terms of difficulty and disaster. This has been part of a political move, from a medical model, in which disability, disease and illness are positioned as personal catastrophes, to a social model, in which disability is positioned as a social construct that comes from systems, institutions and infrastructure designed to exclude different bodies. It is a move that is responsible for a certain discomfort people with disabilities, and artists with disabilities, today feel towards performances that deploy disability as a metaphor for disaster, from Hijikata, to Theatre Hora. In the past five years, though, this particular discourse has begun rising again, particularly as people with disabilities fact their own anything but natural disasters as a result of the austerity measures now widespread across the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere. Measures that threaten people’s ability to live, and take part in social and institutional life, in any meaningful way. Measures that, as artist Katherine Araniello notes, also bring additional difficulty, danger, and potential for disaster as they ripple outwards across the tides of familial ties, threatening family, friends, and careers who become bound up in the struggle to do more with less. In this paper, I consider how people with disabilities use performance, particularly public space interventionalist performance, to reengage, renact and reenvisage the discourse of national, economic, environmental or other forms of disaster, the need for austerity, the need to avoid providing people with support for desires and interests as well as basic daily needs, particularly when fraud and corruption is so right, and other such ideas that have become an all too unpleasant reality for many people. Performances, for instance, like Liz Crow’s Bedding Out, where she invited people into her bed – for people with disabilities a symbolic space, which necessarily becomes more a public living room restaurant, office and so forth than a private space when poor mobility means they spend much time it in – to talk about their lives, their difficulties, and dealing with austerity. Or, for instance, like the Bolshy Divas, who mimic public and political policy, reports and advertising paranoia to undermine their discourses about austerity. I examine the effects, politics and ethics of such interventions, including examination of the comparative effect of highly bodied interventions (like Crow’s) and highly disembodied interventions (like the Bolshy Diva’s) in discourses of difficulty, disaster and austerity on a range of target spectator communities.

Privacy architectures in social networks’ state-of-the-art survey

The use of social networking has exploded, with millions of people using various web- and mobile-based services around the world. This increase in social networking use has led to user anxiety related to privacy and the unauthorised exposure of personal information. Large-scale sharing in virtual spaces means that researchers, designers and developers now need to re-consider the issues and challenges of maintaining privacy when using social networking services. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the current state-of-the-art privacy in social networks for both desktop and mobile uses and devices from various architectural vantage points. The survey will assist researchers and analysts in academia and industry to move towards mitigating many of the privacy issues in social networks.

Optimal configurations of active fiber composites based on asymptotic torsional analysis - art. no. 641413

Active Fiber Composites (AFC) possess desirable characteristics over a wide range of smart structure applications, such as vibration, shape and flow control as well as structural health monitoring. This type of material, capable of collocated actuation and sensing, call be used in smart structures with self-sensing circuits. This paper proposes four novel applications of AFC structures undergoing torsion: sensors and actuators shaped as strips and tubes; and concludes with a preliminary failure analysis. To enable this, a powerful mathematical technique, the Variational Asymptotic Method (VAM) was used to perform cross-sectional analyses of thin generally anisotropic AFC beams. The resulting closed form expressions have been utilized in the applications presented herein.

A “business researcher” view on opportunities for psychology in entrepreneurship research

In this short essay I offer some “business researcher” advice on how to leverage a strong background in psychology when attempting to contribute to the maturing field of “entrepreneurship research”. Psychologists can benefit from within-discipline research, e.g. on emergence, small groups, fit, and expertise as well as method strengths in, e.g. experimentation, operationalisation of constructs, and multi-level modelling. However, achieving full leverage of these strengths requires a clear conceptualisation of “entrepreneurship” as well as insights into the challenges posed by the nature of this class of phenomena.

Humanitaarisuuden varjossa : Poliittiset tekijät lastensiirroissa Ruotsiin sotiemme aikana ja niiden jälkeen

The evacuation of Finnish children to Sweden during WW II has often been called a small migration . Historical research on this subject is scarce, considering the great number of children involved. The present research has applied, apart from the traditional archive research, the framework of history-culture developed by Rüsen in order to have an all-inclusive approach to the impact of this historical event. The framework has three dimensions: political, aesthetic and cognitive. The collective memory of war children has also been discussed. The research looks for political factors involved in the evacuations during the Winter War and the Continuation War and the post-war period. The approach is wider than a purely humanitarian one. Political factors have had an impact in both Finland and Sweden, beginning from the decision-making process and ending with the discussion of the unexpected consequences of the evacuations in the Finnish Parliament in 1950. The Winter War (30.11.1939 13.3.1940) witnessed the first child transports. These were also the model for future decision making. The transports were begun on the initiative of Swedes Maja Sandler, the wife of the resigned minister of foreign affairs Rickard Sandler, and Hanna Rydh-Munck af Rosenschöld , but this activity was soon accepted by the Swedish government because the humanitarian help in the form of child transports lightened the political burden of Prime Minister Hansson, who was not willing to help Finland militarily. It was help that Finland never asked for and it was rejected at the beginning. The negative response of Minister Juho Koivisto was not taken very seriously. The political forces in Finland supporting child transports were stronger than those rejecting them. The major politicians in support belonged to Finland´s Swedish minority. In addition, close to 1 000 Finnish children remained in Sweden after the Winter War. No analysis was made of the reasons why these children did not return home. A committee set up to help Finland and Norway was established in Sweden in 1941. Its chairman was Torsten Nothin, an influential Swedish politician. In December 1941 he appealed to the Swedish government to provide help to Finnish children under the authority of The International Red Cross. This plea had no results. The delivery of great amounts of food to Finland, which was now at war with Great Britain, had automatically caused reactions among the allies against the Swedish imports through Gothenburg. This included the import of oil, which was essential for the Swedish navy and air force. Oil was later used successfully to force a reduction in commerce between Sweden and Finland. The contradiction between Sweden´s essential political interests and humanitarian help was solved in a way that did not harm the country´s vital political interests. Instead of delivering help to Finland, Finnish children were transported to Sweden through the organisations that had already been created. At the beginning of the Continuation War (25.6.1941 27.4.1945) negative opinion regarding child transports re-emerged in Finland. Karl-August Fagerholm implemented the transports in September 1941. In 1942, members of the conservative parties in the Finnish Parliament expressed their fear of losing the children to the Swedes. They suggested that Finland should withdraw from the inter-Nordic agreement, according to which the adoptions were approved by the court of the country where the child resided. This initiative failed. Paavo Virkkunen, an influential member of the conservative party Kokoomus in Finland, favoured the so-called good-father system, where help was delivered to Finland in the form of money and goods. Virkkunen was concerned about the consequences of a long stay in a Swedish family. The risk of losing the children was clear. The extreme conservative party (IKL, the Patriotic Movement of the Finnish People) wanted to alienate Finland from Sweden and bring Finland closer to Germany. Von Blücher, the German ambassador to Finland, had in his report to Berlin, mentioned the political consequences of the child transports. Among other things, they would bring Finland and Sweden closer to each other. He had also paid attention to the Nordic political orientation in Finland. He did not question or criticize the child transports. His main interest was to increase German political influence in Finland, and the Nordic political orientation was an obstacle. Fagerholm was politically ill-favoured by the Germans, because he had a strong Nordic political disposition and had criticised Germany´s activities in Norway. The criticism of child transports was at the same time criticism of Fagerholm. The official censorship organ of the Finnish government (VTL) denied the criticism of child transports in January 1942. The reasons were political. Statements made by members of the Finnish Parliament were also censored, because it was thought that they would offend the Swedes. In addition, the censorship organ used child transports as a means of active propaganda aimed at improving the relations between the two countries. The Finnish Parliament was informed in 1948 that about 15 000 Finnish children still remained in Sweden. These children would stay there permanently. In 1950 the members of the Agrarian Party in Finland stated that Finland should actively strive to get the children back. The party on the left (SKDL, the Democratic Movement of Finnish People) also focused on the unexpected consequences of the child transports. The Social Democrats, and largely Fagerholm, had been the main force in Finland behind the child transports. Members of the SKDL, controlled by Finland´s Communist Party, stated that the war time authorities were responsible for this war loss. Many of the Finnish parents could not get their children back despite repeated requests. The discussion of the problem became political, for example von Born, a member of the Swedish minority party RKP, related this problem to foreign policy by stating that the request to repatriate the Finnish children would have negative political consequences for the relations between Finland and Sweden. He emphasized expressing feelings of gratitude to the Swedes. After the war a new foreign policy was established by Prime Minister (1944 1946) and later President (1946 1956) Juho Kusti Paasikivi. The main cornerstone of this policy was to establish good relations with the Soviet Union. The other, often forgotten, cornerstone was to simultaneously establish good relations with other Nordic countries, especially Sweden, as a counterbalance. The unexpected results of the child evacuation, a Swedish initiative, had violated the good relations with Sweden. The motives of the Democratic Movement of Finnish People were much the same as those of the Patriotic Movement of Finnish People. Only the ideology was different. The Nordic political orientation was an obstacle to both parties. The position of the Democratic Movement of Finnish People was much better than that of the Patriotic Movement of Finnish People, because now one could clearly see the unexpected results, which included human tragedy for the many families who could not be re-united with their children despite their repeated requests. The Swedes questioned the figure given to the Finnish Parliament regarding the number of children permanently remaining in Sweden. This research agrees with the Swedes. In a calculation based on Swedish population registers, the number of these children is about 7 100. The reliability of this figure is increased by the fact that the child allowance programme began in Sweden in 1948. The prerequisite to have this allowance was that the child be in the Swedish population register. It was not necessary for the child to have Swedish nationality. The Finnish Parliament had false information about the number of Finnish children who remained in Sweden in 1942 and in 1950. There was no parliamentary control in Finland regarding child transports, because the decision was made by one cabinet member and speeches by MPs in the Finnish Parliament were censored, like all criticism regarding child transports to Sweden. In Great Britain parliamentary control worked better throughout the whole war, because the speeches regarding evacuation were not censored. At the beginning of the war certain members of the British Labour Party and the Welsh Nationalists were particularly outspoken about the scheme. Fagerholm does not discuss to any great extent the child transports in his memoirs. He does not evaluate the process and results as a whole. This research provides some possibilities for an evaluation of this sort. The Swedish medical reports give a clear picture of the physical condition of the Finnish children when arriving in Sweden. The transports actually revealed how bad the situation of the poorest children was. According to Titmuss, similar observations were made in Great Britain during the British evacuations. The child transports saved the lives of approximately 2 900 children. Most of these children were removed to Sweden to receive treatment for illnesses, but many among the healthy children were undernourished and some suffered from the effects of tuberculosis. The medical inspection in Finland was not thorough. If you compare the figure of 2 900 children saved and returned with the figure of about 7 100 children who remained permanently in Sweden, you may draw the conclusion that Finland as a country failed to benefit from the child transports, and that the whole operation was a political mistake with far-reaching consequenses. The basic goal of the operation was to save lives and have all the children return to Finland after the war. The difficulties with the repatriation of the children were mainly psychological. The level of child psychology in Finland at that time was low. One may question the report by Professor Martti Kaila regarding the adaptation of children to their families back in Finland. Anna Freud´s warnings concerning the difficulties that arise when child evacuees return are also valid in Finland. Freud viewed the emotional life of children in a way different from Kaila: the physical survival of a small child forces her to create strong emotional ties to the person who is looking after her. This, a characteristic of all small children, occurred with the Finnish children too, and it was something the political decision makers in Finland could not see during and after the war. It is a characteristic of all little children. Yet, such experiences were already evident during the Winter War. The best possible solution had been to limit the child transports only to children in need of medical treatment. Children from large and poor families had been helped by organising meals and by buying food from Denmark with Swedish money. Assisting Finland by all possible means should have been the basic goal of Fagerholm in September 1941, when the offer of child transports came from Sweden. Fagerholm felt gratitude towards the Swedes. The risks became clear to him only in 1943. The war children are today a rather scattered and diffuse group of people. Emotionally, part of these children remained in Sweden after the war. There is no clear collective memory, only individual memories; the collective memory of the war children has partly been shaped later through the activities of the war child associations. The main difference between the children evacuated in Finland (for example from Karelia to safer areas with their families) and the war children, who were sent abroad, is that the war children lack a shared story and experience with their families. They were outsiders . The whole matter is sensitive to many of such mothers and discussing the subject has often been avoided in families. The war-time censorship has continued in families through silence and avoidance and Finnish politicians and Finnish families had to face each other on this issue after the war. The lack of all-inclusive historical research has also prevented the formation of a collective awareness among war children returned to Finland or those remaining permanently abroad.. Knowledge of historical facts will help war-children by providing an opportunity to create an all-inclusive approach to the past. Personal experiences should be regarded as part of a large historical entity shadowed by war and where many political factors were at work in both Finland and Sweden. This means strengthening of the cognitive dimension discussed in Rüsen´s all-inclusive historical approach.

Roman Ingarden’s Objectivity vs. Subjectivity as a problem of Translatability

Ingarden (1962, 1964) postulates that artworks exist in an “Objective purely intentional” way. According to this view, objectivity and subjectivity are opposed forms of existence, parallel to the opposition between realism and idealism. Using arguments of cognitive science, experimental psychology, and semiotics, this lecture proposes that, particularly in the aesthetic phenomena, realism and idealism are not pure oppositions; rather they are aspects of a single process of cognition in different strata. Furthermore, the concept of realism can be conceived as an empirical extreme of idealism, and the concept of idealism can be conceived as a pre-operative extreme of realism. Both kind of systems of knowledge are mutually associated by a synecdoche, performing major tasks of mental order and categorisation. This contribution suggests that the supposed opposition between objectivity and subjectivity, raises, first of all, a problem of translatability, more than a problem of existential categories. Synecdoche seems to be a very basic transaction of the mind, establishing ontologies (in the more Ingardean way of the term). Wegrzecki (1994, 220) defines ontology as “the central domain of philosophy to which other its parts directly or indirectly refer”. Thus, ontology operates within philosophy as the synecdoche does within language, pointing the sense of the general into the particular and/or viceversa. The many affinities and similarities between different sign systems, like those found across the interrelationships of the arts, are embedded into a transversal, synecdochic intersemiosis. An important question, from this view, is whether Ingardean’s pure objectivities lie basically on the impossibility of translation, therefore being absolute self-referential constructions. In such a case, it would be impossible to translate pure intentionality into something else, like acts or products.

The Art of Adaptation : A study on the Europeanization of Finland's foreign and security policy

This study examines how Finnish foreign and security policy has been influenced by the European Union and its Common Foreign and Security Policy. It points to a growing interplay and misfit between the external expectations originating from the European level and the domestic expectations and traditional ways-of-doing-things. It is concluded that the deepening European integration in the sphere of foreign, security and defence policy has played a significant role in a number of transformations in the Finnish policies since 1995. New, more European, meanings have been attached to the key concepts of Finnish foreign and security policy. Neutrality and traditional peacekeeping have been replaced by a minimalist reading of military non-alignment and participation in crisis management operations and EU battle groups. Traditional small state identity has been recast more and more as small member stateness . At the same time Finland has entered an era of post-consensus in national foreign and security policy. A key theoretical argument in the background of the study is that collective understandings attached to European policies, when not resonating well with domestic understandings, cause adaptation pressures on domestic-level processes and may lead to changes in the way interests and identities are constructed. This means that Europeanization is principally seen as identity reconstruction. Consequently, the theoretical framework of the study builds on the Europeanization research literature and constructivist IR theory on state identity. Foreign and security policy is defined as the practice in which state identity is reproduced, and the key foreign and security policy concepts are seen as the vehicles of identity production. It is concluded that for Finland, participation in the EU s foreign, security and defence policies represents not only a tool for responding to the changes in the international security environment but also a new means of self-identification. Concerning the Finnish attempts of projecting national interests on the European security policy agenda, it is concluded that they mainly relate to the compatibility of the potential development of EU s defence dimension with the Finnish military non-alignment. Although neutrality was cast aside in the official security policy when Finland joined the EU, the analysis shows that its impact has continued in the domestic political debate and in the mind-set of the decision-makers. The primary research material includes official Finnish foreign and security policy documentation and the related parliamentary debates from 1994 to 2007. This study serves also as a comprehensive empirical overview on Finland s reactions and contributions to the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy.

Holographic optical elements: State-of-the-art review: Part 2

This is the second part of a two part review on the state-of-the-art in holographic optical elements (HOEs). The aspects of fabrication, evaluation, and applications of HOEs, are discussed in this part. It details the direction of future efforts towards finding work-horse type recording media, developing new methods for the evaluation of HOE, and identifying the areas of application where HOEs are to be considered as indispensable components/tools. Finally a summary of all the suggestions for future work made in the two parts is displayed in Table 2 of this part of the review.

Holographic optical elements — State-of-the-art review:Part I

A state-of-the-art review on holographic optical elements (HOE) is presented in two parts. In Part I a conceptual overview and an assessment of the current status on the design of HOE have been included. It is pointed out that HOE development based on the use of squeezed light, speckle, non-linear recording, comparative studies between optics and communication approaches, are some of the promising directions for future research in this vital area of photonics.

Systematic bias in MODIS dust aerosol retrieval at Kanpur (AERONET), Indo-Gangetic Basin - art.no.640816

We have compared the spectral aerosol optical depth (AOD) and aerosol fine mode fraction (AFMF) derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) with those of Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) at Kanpur (26.45N, 80.35E), northern India for the pre-monsoon season (March to June, 2001-2005). We found that MODIS systematically overestimates AOD during pre-monsoon season (known to be influenced by dust transport from north-west of India). The errors in AOD were correlated with the MODIS top-of-atmosphere apparent surface reflectance in 2.1 mu m channel (rho*(2.1)). MODIS aerosol algorithm uses p*(2.1) to derive the surface reflectance in visible channels (rho(0.47), rho(0.66)) using an empirical mid IR-visible correlation (rho(0.47) = rho(2.1)/4, rho(0.66) = rho(2.1)/2). The large uncertainty in estimating surface reflectance in visible channels (Delta rho(0.66)+/- 0.04, Delta rho(0.47)+/- 0.02) at higher values of p*(2.1) (p*(2.1) > 0.18) leads to higher aerosol contribution in the total reflected radiance at top-of atmosphere to compensate for the reduced surface reflectance in visible channels and thus leads to overestimation of AOD. This was also reflected in the very low values of AFMF during pre-monsoon whose accuracy depends on the aerosol path radiance in 0.47 and 0.66 mu m channels and aerosol models. The errors in AOD were also high in the scattering angle range 110 degrees-140 degrees, where the effect of dust non-spherity on its optical properties is significant. The direct measurements of spectral surface reflectance are required over the Indo-Gangetic basin in order to validate the mid IR-visible relationship. MODIS aerosol models should also be modified to incorporate the effect of non-spherity of dust aerosols.

Real-time image denoising algorithm in teleradiology systems - art.no.606304

Denoising of medical images in wavelet domain has potential application in transmission technologies such as teleradiology. This technique becomes all the more attractive when we consider the progressive transmission in a teleradiology system. The transmitted images are corrupted mainly due to noisy channels. In this paper, we present a new real time image denoising scheme based on limited restoration of bit-planes of wavelet coefficients. The proposed scheme exploits the fundamental property of wavelet transform - its ability to analyze the image at different resolution levels and the edge information associated with each sub-band. The desired bit-rate control is achieved by applying the restoration on a limited number of bit-planes subject to the optimal smoothing. The proposed method adapts itself to the preference of the medical expert; a single parameter can be used to balance the preservation of (expert-dependent) relevant details against the degree of noise reduction. The proposed scheme relies on the fact that noise commonly manifests itself as a fine-grained structure in image and wavelet transform allows the restoration strategy to adapt itself according to directional features of edges. The proposed approach shows promising results when compared with unrestored case, in context of error reduction. It also has capability to adapt to situations where noise level in the image varies and with the changing requirements of medical-experts. The applicability of the proposed approach has implications in restoration of medical images in teleradiology systems. The proposed scheme is computationally efficient.

Novel composite coded pattern for small angle measurement using imaging method -art.no.62891D

A novel approach for measurement of small rotation angles using imaging method is proposed and demonstrated. A plane mirror placed on a precision rotating table is used for imaging the newly designed composite coded pattern. The imaged patterns are captured with the help of a CCD camera. The angular rotation of the plane mirror is determined from a pair of the images of the pattern, captured once before and once after affecting the tilt of the mirror. Both simulation and experimental results suggest that the proposed approach not only retains the advantages of the original imaging method but also contributes significantly to the enhancement of its measuring range (+/- 4.13 degrees with accuracy of the order of 1 arcsec).