Sensationalizing death? Graphic disaster images in the tabloid and broadsheet press

Debates over the extent of graphic imagery of death in newspapers often suffer from generalized assertions that are based on inadequate or incomplete empirical evidence. Newspapers are believed to display death in very graphic ways, with particularly the tabloid press assumedly leading a race to the bottom. This article reports the results of a study of tabloid and broadsheet images of death from the 2010 Haiti earthquake in eight Western European and North American countries. It shows that, far from omnipresent, graphic images of death are relatively rare. While tabloids overall display a larger percentage of graphic images, this was not the case everywhere, with particularly the UK, Canada and the US displaying strong similarities between tabloids and broadsheets. In Austria, Germany, Norway and Switzerland, on the other hand, there were distinct differences between the two types. The article argues that different extents of tabloidization may account for these differences.

Detecting and Analyzing Linear Structures in Biomedical Images : A Case Study Using Corneal Nerve Fibers

Diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN) is one of the most common long-term complications of diabetes. The accurate detection and quantification of DPN are important for defining at-risk patients, anticipating deterioration, and assessing new therapies. Current methods of detecting and quantifying DPN, such as neurophysiology, lack sensitivity, require expert assessment and focus primarily on large nerve fibers. However, the earliest damage to nerve fibers in diabetic neuropathy is to the small nerve fibers. At present, small nerve fiber damage is currently assessed using skin/nerve biopsy; both are invasive technique and are not suitable for repeated investigations.

The visibility of disaster deaths in news images : a comparison of newspapers from 15 countries

The extent to which newspapers display graphic images of death has rarely been studied in relation to the degree of the visibility of bodies, nor do many comparative analyses exist. This has led to a narrow understanding of how and why audiences are exposed to human suffering around the world. In examining newspaper images of the dead from the 2010 Haiti earthquake across 15 countries, this study develops a graphic image content scale to measure such visualizations. It finds significant differences in graphic images across the studied sample, both in terms of the amount of images and the degree of visibility of death. The study argues that major sociocultural influences, such as different religious traditions and societal levels of violence are part of the reason for the differences.

Knitted images : corporeal theorising

Feeling the wool and needles and constructing the knitting is very different to looking at knitting or thinking about knitting. Creating with the material slows everything down enough to enable significant connection with the process. Knitting as a mode for researching involves corporeal activity/philosophy that foregrounds a physical rationality, and this offers critical investigation of knowledge conventions that hierarchize intellectual activity as something that seeks to justify or clarify via a cerebral mode of presenting reasonable and rational arguments...

Knitted images : specimens

Knitting, as a conduit for multiple literacies takes on embodied practice and becomes research, investigation, theorization, and brings about physical and metaphysical theorizing on Deleuzian and Guattarian (1980/1987) concepts of the rhizome: the looping and constructing of the knitted planes prompt thoughts about the project that seem just ‘beyond the level of consciousness’ (Semetsky 2007, p. 200)...

Knitted images : interception

Feeling the wool and needles and constructing the knitting is very different to looking at knitting or thinking about knitting. Creating with the material slows everything down enough to enable significant connection with the process. Knitting as a mode for researching involves corporeal activity/philosophy that foregrounds a physical rationality, and this offers critical investigation of knowledge conventions that hierarchize intellectual activity as something that seeks to justify or clarify via a cerebral mode of presenting reasonable and rational arguments...

Knitted images : drawing patterns

This Arts Based Education Research (Eisner 2008) work provides potent opportunity to consider different problems and challenges that impact on the progress of research (art as data making) and the theories being explored. It provides opportunity to transport ideas across between research activity, and teaching practices...

Knitted images : cartographies

Through the making of these works I research teachers. Here, I push a/r/tography (Irwin & Springgay 2008) into ca/r/tography - a process of mapping that is multitexural, mutable; moving between theorization, creation, process, research, and mapped by me as I wander between artist, researcher, teacher...

A Satellite Selection Algorithm for Achieving High Reliability of Ambiguity Resolution with GPS and Beidou Constellations

Reliability of carrier phase ambiguity resolution (AR) of an integer least-squares (ILS) problem depends on ambiguity success rate (ASR), which in practice can be well approximated by the success probability of integer bootstrapping solutions. With the current GPS constellation, sufficiently high ASR of geometry-based model can only be achievable at certain percentage of time. As a result, high reliability of AR cannot be assured by the single constellation. In the event of dual constellations system (DCS), for example, GPS and Beidou, which provide more satellites in view, users can expect significant performance benefits such as AR reliability and high precision positioning solutions. Simply using all the satellites in view for AR and positioning is a straightforward solution, but does not necessarily lead to high reliability as it is hoped. The paper presents an alternative approach that selects a subset of the visible satellites to achieve a higher reliability performance of the AR solutions in a multi-GNSS environment, instead of using all the satellites. Traditionally, satellite selection algorithms are mostly based on the position dilution of precision (PDOP) in order to meet accuracy requirements. In this contribution, some reliability criteria are introduced for GNSS satellite selection, and a novel satellite selection algorithm for reliable ambiguity resolution (SARA) is developed. The SARA algorithm allows receivers to select a subset of satellites for achieving high ASR such as above 0.99. Numerical results from a simulated dual constellation cases show that with the SARA procedure, the percentages of ASR values in excess of 0.99 and the percentages of ratio-test values passing the threshold 3 are both higher than those directly using all satellites in view, particularly in the case of dual-constellation, the percentages of ASRs (>0.99) and ratio-test values (>3) could be as high as 98.0 and 98.5 % respectively, compared to 18.1 and 25.0 % without satellite selection process. It is also worth noting that the implementation of SARA is simple and the computation time is low, which can be applied in most real-time data processing applications.

Status of the world's remaining closed forests : an assessment using satellite data and policy options

Historically, it appears that some of the WRCF have survived because i) they lack sufficient quantity of commercially valuable species; ii) they are located in remote or inaccessible areas; or iii) they have been protected as national parks and sanctuaries. Forests will be protected when people who are deciding the fate of forests conclude than the conservation of forests is more beneficial, e.g. generates higher incomes or has cultural or social values, than their clearance. If this is not the case, forests will continue to be cleared and converted. In the future, the WRCF may be protected only by focused attention. The future policy options may include strategies for strong protection measures, the raising of public awareness about the value of forests, and concerted actions for reducing pressure on forest lands by providing alternatives to forest exploitation to meet the growing demands of forest products. Many areas with low population densities offer an opportunity for conservation if appropriate steps are taken now by the national governments and international community. This opportunity must be founded upon the increased public and government awareness that forests have vast importance to the welfare of humans and ecosystems' services such as biodiversity, watershed protection, and carbon balance. Also paramount to this opportunity is the increased scientific understanding of forest dynamics and technical capability to install global observation and assessment systems. High-resolution satellite data such as Landsat 7 and other technologically advanced satellite programs will provide unprecedented monitoring options for governing authorities. Technological innovation can contribute to the way forests are protected. The use of satellite imagery for regular monitoring and Internet for information dissemination provide effective tools for raising worldwide awareness about the significance of forests and intrinsic value of nature.

Unintended consequences : satellite policy and Indigenous television

This article examines two instances of media policy involving satellite transmission and Indigenous television: the introduction of the Viewer Access Satellite Television (VAST) platform in 2010 and the introduction of AUSSAT in the mid-1980s. The government’s failure to provide community and Indigenous broadcasters with an access regime at the time of AUSSAT resulted in Australia’s first and only Indigenous commercial television licensee, Imparja. Over a quarter of a century later, Imparja now forms part of the joint-venture company that runs VAST, a key component of Australia’s digital switchover planning. During the passage of the legislative amendments required to establish VAST, the issue of access resurfaced – this time in relation to Australia’s national and community Indigenous television channels. The article recounts the events leading up to the 2010 Bill, and examines the intended and unintended consequences of satellite policy in relation to Indigenous media, including equalisation and transparency of government funding programs.

Random Gabor based templates for facial expression recognition in images with facial occlusion

Robust facial expression recognition (FER) under occluded face conditions is challenging. It requires robust algorithms of feature extraction and investigations into the effects of different types of occlusion on the recognition performance to gain insight. Previous FER studies in this area have been limited. They have spanned recovery strategies for loss of local texture information and testing limited to only a few types of occlusion and predominantly a matched train-test strategy. This paper proposes a robust approach that employs a Monte Carlo algorithm to extract a set of Gabor based part-face templates from gallery images and converts these templates into template match distance features. The resulting feature vectors are robust to occlusion because occluded parts are covered by some but not all of the random templates. The method is evaluated using facial images with occluded regions around the eyes and the mouth, randomly placed occlusion patches of different sizes, and near-realistic occlusion of eyes with clear and solid glasses. Both matched and mis-matched train and test strategies are adopted to analyze the effects of such occlusion. Overall recognition performance and the performance for each facial expression are investigated. Experimental results on the Cohn-Kanade and JAFFE databases demonstrate the high robustness and fast processing speed of our approach, and provide useful insight into the effects of occlusion on FER. The results on the parameter sensitivity demonstrate a certain level of robustness of the approach to changes in the orientation and scale of Gabor filters, the size of templates, and occlusions ratios. Performance comparisons with previous approaches show that the proposed method is more robust to occlusion with lower reductions in accuracy from occlusion of eyes or mouth.

Automatic classification of human epithelial type 2 cell indirect immunofluorescence images using cell pyramid matching

This paper describes a novel system for automatic classification of images obtained from Anti-Nuclear Antibody (ANA) pathology tests on Human Epithelial type 2 (HEp-2) cells using the Indirect Immunofluorescence (IIF) protocol. The IIF protocol on HEp-2 cells has been the hallmark method to identify the presence of ANAs, due to its high sensitivity and the large range of antigens that can be detected. However, it suffers from numerous shortcomings, such as being subjective as well as time and labour intensive. Computer Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems have been developed to address these problems, which automatically classify a HEp-2 cell image into one of its known patterns (eg. speckled, homogeneous). Most of the existing CAD systems use handpicked features to represent a HEp-2 cell image, which may only work in limited scenarios. We propose a novel automatic cell image classification method termed Cell Pyramid Matching (CPM), which is comprised of regional histograms of visual words coupled with the Multiple Kernel Learning framework. We present a study of several variations of generating histograms and show the efficacy of the system on two publicly available datasets: the ICPR HEp-2 cell classification contest dataset and the SNPHEp-2 dataset.

Self assembly of plasmonic core-satellite nano-assemblies mediated by hyperbranched polymer linkers

The morphology of plasmonic nano-assemblies has a direct influence on optical properties, such as localised surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) and surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) intensity. Assemblies with core-satellite morphologies are of particular interest, because this morphology has a high density of hot-spots, while constraining the overall size. Herein, a simple method is reported for the self-assembly of gold NPs nano-assemblies with a core-satellite morphology, which was mediated by hyperbranched polymer (HBP) linkers. The HBP linkers have repeat units that do not interact strongly with gold NPs, but have multiple end-groups that specifically interact with the gold NPs and act as anchoring points resulting in nano-assemblies with a large (~48 nm) core surrounded by smaller (~15 nm) satellites. It was possible to control the number of satellites in an assembly which allowed optical parameters such as SPR maxima and the SERS intensity to be tuned. These results were found to be consistent with finite-difference time domain (FDTD) simulations. Furthermore, the multiplexing of the nano-assemblies with a series of Raman tag molecules was demonstrated, without an observable signal arising from the HBP linker after tagging. Such plasmonic nano-assemblies could potentially serve as efficient SERS based diagnostics or biomedical imaging agents in nanomedicine.