34028 research outputs found
Sort by
Print It And See
No full textA collection of experimental Letterpress prints created using vintage wood and metal type. Playful and free from the conventions of typography, the letterforms become patterns – repeated, reflected, rotated and layered. The original prints are reproduced at actual size, preserving the textures and characters of the letterpress process, with type that ranges from 10pt metal to large wooden display fonts.</p
Drawings From The Last Museum
No full textDrawings from the Last Museum is an artist’s book by Darren Diss and Barrie Tullett that documents a series of pencil drawings created as conceptual starting points for a new direction in the artist’s ceramic practice.The project begins with Diss’s desire to move beyond the simple, elegant functional vessels that had characterized his earlier studio ceramics. Seeking a contrasting visual language, he produced a collection of intricate drawings that are intentionally dense and “visually busy,” combining imagery drawn from many cultural traditions.Darren–drawingTo develop the imagery, Diss photographed objects at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and used these images as references. Each drawing begins with the outline of a ceramic vessel, which is then filled with layered motifs—faces, animals, ritual objects, symbols, and decorative patterns—assembled like visual collages. These compositions imagine how disparate cultural artifacts might coexist on the surface of a three-dimensional ceramic form.Darren–drawingAlongside the imagery, the drawings include short textual fragments. These words connect or complicate the images and reflect the artist’s engagement with contemporary debates about museums, colonial histories, and cultural appropriation. The book therefore operates both as a design sketchbook and as a reflection on how museums collect, display, and interpret objects from different cultures.Darren–drawingOverall, the book presents a sequence of figurative vessel-like drawings—hybrid, totemic forms composed of symbolic elements—that function as conceptual prototypes for future ceramic sculptures. By collaging motifs from global material cultures and placing them within imagined vessels, Diss explores the relationships between craft, cultural heritage, and the contested legacy of museum collections.</p
Stiffness Modeling of Parallel Robots
No full textThe book focuses on the stiffness modeling of serial and parallel manipulators It presents fundamentals and enhancements for Virtual Joint Modelling (VJM), Matrix Structural Analysis (MSA) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA). The described techniques consider complex kinematics with numerous passive joints, different types of loadings, including essential loadings leading to critical changes in the manipulator configurations, linear and non-linear stiffness analysis, conventional and non-linear compliance error compensation and stiffness parameters estimation from virtual experiments.Presented enhancement for the VJM integrates in the stiffness analysis external force/torque applied to the end-point, internal preloading in the joints, and auxiliary forces/torques applied to intermediate points. The proposed technique includes computing an equilibrium configuration corresponding to the external/internal loading and allows obtaining the full-scale non-linear force-deflection relation for any given workspace point. This enables the designer to evaluate critical forces that may provoke non-linear behaviours of the manipulators, such as sudden failure due to elastic instability (buckling). The presented enhancement to the MSA allows users to carry out stiffness analysis for serial underactuated structures and over-constrained ones with multiple closed loops.To increase the model accuracy of the VJM and MSA techniques a dedicated FEA-based stiffness model parameters identification technique is introduced in the book. It is based on the virtual experiments in the CAD/CAE environment and allows the VJM and MSA to achieve accuracy comparable with FEA, but it essentially reduces the computational effort, eliminating repetitive re-meshing through the workspace. All considered stiffness modelling techniques, kinematic particularities and loading conditions are illustrated with practical examples and related analysis.</p
The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell
No full textThe Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell brings together twenty-five chapters by emerging and established scholars that address Gaskell’s works, networks, contexts, and legacies. Contributors draw on a range of cutting-edge approaches including ecocriticism, queer theory, and studies in emotion. Particular attention is paid to the intersections between race, class, gender and religion in Gaskell’s fiction, as well as to the ongoing afterlife of her work in fiction, film, web-series, and fanfiction.The Companion is divided into three sections. ‘Texts’ showcases 11 innovative readings of individual works, including Gaskell’s well-known novels and biography of Charlotte Brontë, but also less familiar shorter tales, non-fiction pieces, and letters. ‘Themes’ contains 10 chapters that present original perspectives on various combinations of Gaskell’s works in relation to many cultural and literary concerns including the built environment, material and visual culture, abolition, and the rituals of mourning. ‘Legacies’ considers the reception of Gaskell’s writings from the late nineteenth century to the present day, addressing their adaptation into multiple forms and media.The Routledge Companion builds on the 2007 Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (ed. Jill Matus), reflecting a further two decades of scholarly work and the expansion of Gaskell’s popular reputation. With its international and comprehensive scope, this volume attests that Gaskell continues to be a writer worthy of substantial critical attention, and signals new directions in Gaskell studies and Victorian studies more widely.</p
Scientific Evidence and Common Perceptions of Factors Affecting Sugar Content in Pasture Grass: Is There a Link With Pre-existing Horse-Related Experience?
No full textBackground: Several equine conditions are associated with and exacerbated by increased high-sugar grass intake. Knowing how climatic and biotic factors affect sugar content in grasses is important for decision-making by those involved in the management of equines.
Objectives: (1) To characterise equine owners’ knowledge and perceptions of the factors affecting sugar content in grasses to inform in the management of grasses and equines. (2) To identify associations between pre-existing horse-related experience and level of knowledge about equine nutrition and health conditions.
Methods: A questionnaire was developed and distributed online to characterise the perceptions of those involved in the management of equines and their knowledge of the environmental factors known to impact grass Non-Structural Carbohydrate (NSC) levels, describing also the extent to which these factors associated with participants’ level of experience in equine management.
Results: 194 self-declared equine owners or responsible for equines completed the survey. Our results indicate that participants were relatively well informed regarding only some of the environmental factors known to affect sugar content in grasses, and less so in relation to how the presence of fungi, overgrazing/rotational stocking might influence NSC, indicating a significant gap in knowledge. The level of previous experience with equines was not associated with more accurate knowledge, highlighting the need for facilitating more knowledge exchange activities between stakeholders and the scientific community.
Conclusions: We suggest that enhancing the dissemination of the effects of plant-fungal interactions and rotational stocking on NSC within the equine community may further improve their understanding around NSC content in grasses and its management, as fungi could be used to manage grass establishment and growth in paddocks and the grass sugar content. </p
Density dependence impacts our understanding of population resilience
No full textCurrent metrics of demographic resilience (e.g., resistance, recovery) summarize how populations respond to the frequent, varied disturbances that ecological systems experience. Much of the ap plication of these metrics has focused on the potential response of populations represented by time-invariant, density-independent structured population models to hypothetical disturbances. Here, we show that density dependence has profound and complex impacts on our understand ing of resilience. We examine resilience measures in a flexible structured model with five vital rate parameters (juvenile survival, adult survival, juvenile progression, adult retrogression, and adult reproductive output) with density dependence operating on one vital rate at a time. De pending on which vital rate was subject to density effects, existing measures of demographic resilience (compensation, resistance, and recovery time) either increased or decreased with population density. Moreover, the density-independent model under-predicted the recovery time of the corresponding density-dependent model, with a greater offset for species with longer generation times and higher iteroparity. Our findings demonstrate the importance of underlying non-linear processes when examining demographic resilience, particularly if we hope to predict how natural populations will respond to real disturbances.</p
Automated Video Analysis for Wearable Eye Tracking Devices: a Strawberry Harvesting Use Case
No full textEye tracking and egocentric vision technologies have emerged as powerful tools for analysing human behaviour, offering deep insights into attention patterns, decision-making processes, and mental workload. These tools have been successfully applied in diverse fields such as medicine, marketing, and human-computer interaction, yet their potential remains largely unexplored in the agricultural domain. Thus, this study investigates for the first time the feasibility and effectiveness of leveraging eye tracking and egocentric video analysis to assess human performance in soft fruit harvesting tasks, specifically focusing on strawberry as a use case. This work employs mobile eye-tracking glasses worn by workers as they navigate dynamic farm settings. The unstructured and fast-paced nature of harvesting, along with the small size of fruits and their frequent overlap with other objects, makes the annotation of the resultant eye-tracking data complex and time-consuming. To address this problem, this work introduces an egocentric vision system designed to automate the spatial and temporal annotation of key events and interactions relevant to fruit harvesting. Validated with field recordings of professional pickers, the system achieved substantial inter-rater agreement with human coders (mean Fleiss’ kappa score of 0.692 with a standard deviation of 0.06). Moreover, when fine-tuning its behaviour to match human manual annotations, the automatic reached an average accuracy of 0.845 with an average F1 score of 0.735. These results show that the system generates annotations with accuracy comparable to that of human coders while reducing processing time from several hours to just minutes, demonstrating its potential for scalable use in agricultural labour analysis and training.</p
Eyes don’t lie: Eye-tracking reveals whether an eyewitness saw the crime
No full textPast research has suggested that eye movements can be used to uncover perpetrators of a crime to some extent (around 65% accuracy). We extended this work to examine whether similar or better results could be obtained for eyewitnesses by employing a data-driven eye-tracking approach. We expect that participants who saw the crime before: (1) look more at where the crime happened, (2) differ in the frame-by-frame viewing location, and (3) differ in the frame-by-frame variability in viewing location, compared to non-exposed participants when viewing the now-empty crime scene. Machine learning was used to classify the eye movements of exposed participants (who had seen the knife crime the day before, n =34) and non-exposed participants (who had not seen the crime before, n =25) while both groups viewed a video of the now-empty crime scene. Eye-tracking showed that participants who saw the crime previously were more consistent in their viewing patterns and looked more at the perpetrator regions when viewing the same, but empty, crime scene. Fixated regions predicted group membership with moderate accuracy (AUC = 0.758), but the consistency in viewing patterns led to very good classification of observers into exposed and non-exposed participants (AUC = 0.898), although some group differences remained while and after viewing the crime. These results suggest that eye movement patterns can be primed by previous observations, persisting after two days. While currently theoretical, these results may be developed as an implicit measure for detecting previous crime scene exposure through visual attention patterns.</p
Exploring Patient-Reported Gingival Health in Adults Using Standardised International FDI Oral Health Observatory Data
No full textBackground: Periodontitis is known to negatively affect oral health-related quality of life. Fewer studies have considered self-reported impacts of gingival health, despite evidence it can affect most people’s daily lives. Data limitations have also meant it was previously not possible to assess self-perceived gum health internationally. This study aimed to explore differences in the associations between gum health, socio-demographics, measures of health, wellbeing and oral health-related impacts in six countries using standardised international datasets among a nonprobabilistic sample of patients attending dental services.Methods: Linked patient-reported and dentist-reported data were collected from the World Dental Federation (FDI) Oral Health Observatory. Descriptive statistics and chi-square tests were used to analyse data from China (n = 2241), Colombia (n = 1029), India (n = 999), Italy (n = 711), Japan (n = 1271) and Lebanon (n = 798). Prevalence of patients reporting spitting or seeing blood when brushing and categorical periodontal status were the dependent variables, with age, sex, education, self-rated oral and general health, wellbeing, life satisfac?tion and oral health-related impacts included as independent variables.Results: Spitting or seeing blood when brushing was associated with education in five countries, while dentist-reported periodontal status worsened with age, lower education levels and among males. Worsening of both dependent variables was associated with poorer self-rated oral and general health in all countries, having a greater effect on oral health. Mixed results were seen for the association between spitting and seeing blood and wellbe?ing. In all countries worsening of the dependent variables was associated with life being less satisfying. Similar patterns were seen with oral health-related impacts in most cases. Country-specific patterns and variations were also detected.Conclusion: The exploratory findings can act as a basis for further research into country-specific patterns which are important for contextualising the findings, and for advocacy and understanding gingival health-related impacts and needs of patients in the countries investigated to date.Clinical relevance: This study found a number of associations between both patient and den?tist-reported gum health and socio-demographic variables, measures of wellbeing, life satis?faction and oral health-related impacts. In particular, the importance of considering patient-?reported outcomes and effects on daily life should be considered alongside clinical variables.</p
Advancing Green Human Resource Management Aspects and Practices in Organisations: The Power of Fuzzy Importance Performance Analysis
No full textDrawing on intersections between the Ability–Motivation–Opportunity (AMO) framework and the Resource-Based View of the Firm (RBV-F), this research critiques key convergent and divergent theoretical aspects on Green HRM. This approach led to the formulation and implementation of a Fuzzy Importance–Performance Analysis (FIPA) method to evaluate and rank GHRM into aspects and practices that foster sustainable performance in organisations. A mixed-method approach, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative techniques was employed to evaluate data from 363 key Bangladeshi apparel manufacturing industry experts and analysed using Fuzzy Importance and Performance Analysis (FIPA). The findings indicate that companies acknowledge the strategic significance of GHRM but failed in their effective implementation. The findings revealed the criticality of green recruitment and selection, and green performance management. These were analysed at Level 1 leading to a second analytical level which highlighted six critical implementation practices. We surface how these can practically create a greener competitive advantage for individual and organisational performance. The research theoretically contributes to both AMO and RBV-F by elucidating the synergy between green human capital and organisational skills in promoting sustainability within resource-constrained environments. Methodologically, it pioneers an illustration of the efficacy of the fuzzy IPA technique in ranking sustainability-oriented HR activities in developing and developed economy organisations. The findings offer actionable implications for managers and policymakers to enhance resource allocation and foster sustainable competitiveness particularly in emerging economies and the increasing use of AI.</p