802 research outputs found
Who Says Pornography Can't Be Art?
No full textThis opening chapter provides the contours of the debate about whether art and pornography are mutually exclusive and is meant as an introduction to the main themes of the book. It begins by looking at some of the classic ways of explaining the difference between art and pornography. Pornography, some have said, is sexually explicit and focuses exclusively on certain body parts, while art possesses emotional and psychological depth and is essentially suggestive. Others have stressed that pornography, unlike art, is inherently formulaic, or that pornography is exploitative in a way that art is not, or that pornography aims for a particular response, sexual arousal, that is incompatible with artistic contemplation or aesthetic experience. Such dichotomies, it is argued, are illuminating insofar as they help us to clarify how typical examples of art differ from typical examples of pornography, yet it would be wrong to see them as absolute distinctions. Whenever one attempts to draw a strict line between the two domains, whether it is on the basis of representational content, moral status, artistic quality, or prescribed response, one can always find examples of art or pornography that would fall on the ‘wrong side’ of the divide. Furthermore, it is argued that a value-neutral definition of pornography is to be preferred over any normative characterisation that stipulates that pornographic works, by definition, lack any significant artistic or aesthetic aspect. Finally, after providing a critical assessment of Christy Mag Uidhir’s incompatibilist account, which contrasts the ‘manner specificity’ of art with the ‘manner inspecificity’ of pornography, Maes highlights some of the practical implications of this philosophical discussion
MAES: A Multi-Agent Systems Framework for Embedded Systems
No full textMiniaturization and cost reduction of hardware components have created a trend in the space industry where the traditional centralized computer is being replaced by distributed computer architecture. However, this trend comes with a cost: the on-board software complexity of the space missions has increased. The complexity has origins in the requirements of the missions where in general, these are coordination and control-related processes. As the coordination and the control of the satellite's activities are not trivial tasks, the Multi-Agent Systems(MAS)-approach has been proposed as a new architectural style due to its distributed nature. There are several existing frameworks for implementing MAS-based applications, however, most of them are neither designed to satisfy real-time requirements nor designed to be implemented in highly-constrained embedded systems. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to develop a new tool for MAS-based applications: A Multi-Agent Framework for Embedded Systems (MAES).The framework was implemented on top of a Real-Time Operating System: TI-RTOS, therefore, applications implemented with MAES have realtime characteristics. Experiments have shown that the execution time of an Attitude Determination algorithm is consistent on each call with a variance value of the order of 10^5 [s^2], demonstrating the predictability of the framework. Furthermore, the user coding effort is reduced as several routines are standardized and encapsulated into MAES' API. However, the predictability and ease-of-use come with a slight cost: experiments have shown that MAES-based applications lead to an increase of 6.7 KB in average in Flash memory and 4.5 KB in average in SRAM memory with respect to its non-agent implementation. Also, the CPU utilization increases as inter-agent communication requires additional processing time, also increasing the power consumption. However, the increase is low as the results have shown that is less than 1% in average
Regulation of Trading in Ginnie Maes
No full textWhile Ginnie Maes have undergone spectacular growth, the trading markets for these government-sponsored securities have spawned a number of financial scandals, thus becoming a cynosure of regulatory scrutiny. The author explores these markets and their problems and analyzes the responses to the problems by regulators and participants
Corrole basicity in the excited states: Insights on structure-property relationships
No full textSteady-state fluorescence measurements and quantum-chemical DFT geometry optimizations are applied to extend the structure-property relationships between the free-base corrole macrocycle conformation and its basicity to the lowest excited S-1 and T-1 states. Direct basicity estimation in the lowest excited S-1 state is demonstrated by means of fluorescence quantum yield measurements. The long wavelength T1 tautomer is found to retain its basicity in the S(1 )state, whereas the short wavelength T2 tautomer shows a noticeable decrease in basicity in the S-1 state, which is related to the in-plane tilting of the pyrrole ring to be protonated. The conformational changes upon going from the ground to the lowest excited T-1 state and the influence of the meso-aryl substitution pattern on the overall degree of distortions and tilting of the pyrrole ring to be protonated are also discussed from the point of view of macrocycle basicity.Prof. W. Maes acknowledges the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO) and Hasselt University for financial support. Prof. M. Kruk, Prof. L. Gladkov and Ass. Prof. D. Klenitsky acknowledge the State Program of Scientific Researches of the Republic of Belarus "Photonics, opto-and microelectronics", grant no.1.3.01, for financial support.Maes, W (corresponding author), Hasselt Univ, Inst Mat Res IMO IMOMEC, Agoralaan 1, B-3590 Diepenbeek, Belgium.
Kruk, MM (corresponding author), Belarusian State Technol Univ, Phys Dept, Sverdlov Str 13a, Minsk 220006, BELARUS.
[email protected]; [email protected]
Verdi als politiek theater: Peter Konwitschny regisseert Aida en Don Carlos
No full textPeter Konwitschny is a German stage director who belongs to the modern tradition of "Regie-Theater". His opera productions are notoriously provocative. In this paper, the author examines two of his Verdi productions, Aida and Don Carlos, in order to demonstrate that his radical stagings go to the core of the works with unprecedented vividness and richness of meaning. Konwitschny's work is governed by a profound challenge of the patriarchal political relationships that are thematized in an exemplary way in Verdi's operas
Wat verstaan we onder operakritiek?
No full textThis chapter aims to define opera criticism in the context of the modern operatic practice, characterized by innovative stagings that appear to contradict the original operatic text at different levels. The author argues that such radical productions should nevertheless be considered in the light of an opera's history and reception, confronting the meaning of the opera as a historical text with its functioning in a contemporary vision. The aim of opera criticism is precisely to bridge these two levels in the construction of the meaning of an operatic text
Data for "Association between adolescents’ family socioeconomic status and working memory updating functioning: role of parental educational involvement"
No full textThe research (doi: 10.1111/jora.12848) related to these data concerned a study on the association between the socioeconomic status (SES) of the family of young adolescents and working memory updating ability of the adolescents, and whether this association is (partly) mediated by different aspects of parental educational involvement. A total of 260 Chinese young adolescents completed questionnaires about their family’s SES, the intellectual, behavioral, and emotional involvement of the mother and father in the education of the adolescent, two versions of a computerized running memory task, Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) test, and questions about additional demographic characteristics. The results revealed a positive association between family SES and working memory updating task performance, and between working memory updating and RSPM performance. This SES-updating association was partly mediated by behavioral educational involvement of the mother (indirect effect with a positive coefficient) and the mother’s intellectual involvement (indirect effect with a negative coefficient). The three aspects of the father’s educational involvement did not play a significant mediating role.These results might inform interventions aimed at enhancing cognitive skills of children with a poor SES background.The data file concerns an SPSS data file. The data consist of each participant’s score on the outcome measure for each of the demographic and socioeconomic variables, the mother’s and father’s intellectual, behavioral, and emotional educational involvement (questionnaires), the different items of the RSPM, and the working memory updating tasks (two versions of a running memory task with different stimulus-presentation times). These scores were used in analyses of variance, correlational analyses, and regression (mediation) analyses, to assess the relations between SES, working memory updating ability, and aspects of parental educational involvement, as described in the target article. The meaning of each column in the data file is described under the tap Variable View --> Label. The raw data of the running memory tasks (in eprime format) on which the corresponding pre-processed data are based are available from the corresponding author upon request
Single-component organic solar cells-Perspective on the importance of chemical precision in conjugated block copolymers
No full textThe author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The authors acknowledge financial support from Hasselt University, the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO Vlaanderen; projects W000620N, I006320N, and 1S99620N), and the European Research Council (ERC; grant agreement 864625)
Qualitative employment relationships for Ph.D. students in the EU?
No full textThis contribution intends to shed light on the working conditions of Belgian and Italian Ph.D.The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article
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