1,446 research outputs found
A framework for digital sunken relief generation based on 3D geometric models
No full textSunken relief is a special art form of sculpture whereby the depicted shapes are sunk into a given surface. This is traditionally created by laboriously carving materials such as stone. Sunken reliefs often utilize the engraved lines or strokes to strengthen the impressions of a 3D presence and to highlight the features which otherwise are unrevealed. In other types of reliefs, smooth surfaces and their shadows convey such information in a coherent manner. Existing methods for relief generation are focused on forming a smooth surface with a shallow depth which provides the presence of 3D figures. Such methods unfortunately do not help the art form of sunken reliefs as they omit the presence of feature lines. We propose a framework to produce sunken reliefs from a known 3D geometry, which transforms the 3D objects into three layers of input to incorporate the contour lines seamlessly with the smooth surfaces. The three input layers take the advantages of the geometric information and the visual cues to assist the relief generation. This framework alters existing techniques in line drawings and relief generation, and then combines them organically for this particular purpose
H.P. Lovecraft : against the world, against life /
No full text"Michel Houellebecq focuses his considerable analytical skills on H.P. Lovecraft, one of the seminal horror writers of the early 20th century. Houellebecq's insights into the craft of writing illuminate both Lovecraft and Houellebecq's own work. The two are kindred spirits, sharing a uniquely dark worldview. But even as he outlines Lovecraft's rejection of this loathsome world, it is Houellebecq's adulation for the author that drives this work and makes it a love song. This is indispensable reading for anyone interested in Lovecraft, Houellebecq, or the past and future of horror."--Global Books in Print.Includes bibliographical references."Lovecraft's pillow" : an introduction / by Stephen King -- Chronology -- H.P. Lovecraft : against the world, against life / by Michel Houellebeq. Preface -- Another universe -- Technical assault -- Holocaust -- Two short stories / by H.P. Lovecraft. "The call of Cthulhu" -- "The whisperer in darkness.""Michel Houellebecq focuses his considerable analytical skills on H.P. Lovecraft, one of the seminal horror writers of the early 20th century. Houellebecq's insights into the craft of writing illuminate both Lovecraft and Houellebecq's own work. The two are kindred spirits, sharing a uniquely dark worldview. But even as he outlines Lovecraft's rejection of this loathsome world, it is Houellebecq's adulation for the author that drives this work and makes it a love song. This is indispensable reading for anyone interested in Lovecraft, Houellebecq, or the past and future of horror."--Global Books in Print
The story of the Sanatorium, Baarn, designed by H.P. Berlage & T. Sanders
No full textThis study investigates the evolving role of the health and wellness centre Sanatorium Baarn, designed by H.P. Berlage and T. Sanders, through the lens of changing public perception over time. The inquiry is grounded in the central question: 'To what extent has the public reception of the health and wellness centre Sanatorium Baarn, designed by H.P Berlage and Theo Sanders, evolved over time and which factors within and outside the design process have influenced this interpretation and evaluation?'The Sanatorium, envisioned by H.P. Berlage and T. Sanders, aimed to rival European health centres ('Kur') and establish itself within Baarn's community. Surprisingly, it exceeded expectations, becoming a haven for both the rich and ill. Initially embraced, the Sanatorium's architectural intricacies were cherished by the community. Its significance persisted, endorsed by figures like Sergio Polano. However, a gradual transformation unfolded. Neglect, complexities in ownership, wartime disruptions, and post-war decline marred its splendour. Despite rehabilitation, guest numbers dwindled due to factors like car-free days, necessitating closure. Evolving fire safety standards posed further challenges.Amid these changes, public perception endured, keeping it a cherished symbol. Post-war shifts made it political, transitioning into a facility for war victims (BAVO) and Indonesian repatriates. An arson attempt damaged the structure's integrity, but hope remained for revival. After an auction, the building teetered on a second chance, poised for restoration. The city council, eager to preserve it, oversaw demolition and transformation. Yet, challenges arose with the new design by Van den Broek and Bakema. Municipal decisions and communal functions significantly influenced its trajectory. Ultimately, interventions altered its status, reflecting architectural resilience amidst historical shifts.AR2A011Architectural History ThesisArchitecture, Urbanism and Building Science
H.P. Grice's conversational rules: pragmatics or semantics?
No full textThe subject of the paper is the interaction of the functional aspects of language, i.e. of semantics and pragmatics. The author assumes that the interdependence of semantics and pragmatics determines the fuzzy border of these basic language categories. This fact is reflected in the research practices: the pragmatic phenomena are described in terms of semantics and, conversely, the semantic phenomena are described in terms of pragmatics. Additionally, substitution of terms, i.e. interpretation of semantic phenomena in the pragmatic field is also possible. As an example of this type of manipulation the concept of H.P. Grice's conversational rules is considered in more detail
H.P. Lovecraft and real person fiction: the pulp author as subcultural avatar
No full textThe last ten years have witnessed the influence of Lovecraft and his writing permeate the U.S. comic book industry to a previously unheard of level. From the Lovecraftian themes of Mike Mignola’s immensely popular Hellboy series, to the references that pepper Joe Hill’s Locke and Key (2008 – present), right up to the full-blown Cthulhu Mythos of comic maestro Alan Moore’s Neonomicon (2010) Lovecraft’s cultural cache in the field of horror comics has never been higher. The proposed chapter will examine a sub-sector of this contemporary spate of comic books and graphic novels: focusing on those examples that incorporate a version of H.P. Lovecraft in a quasi-biographical manner (a process traceable back to Robert Bloch’s 1936 short story “The Dark Demon”). In particular, I will analyse the often post modern appropriation of Lovecraft as a fictional character in titles based on or around his stories and explore why this form of pseudo-biographical narrative has become one of the defining modes of recent Lovecraftian graphic fiction. Centring on Mac Carter’s successful comic book mini-series The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft (2010), but referring to other examples such as Hans Rodionoff’s Lovecraft (2004) and Bruce Brown’s series of ‘children’s’ Howard Lovecraft volumes, the chapter will argue that such incarnations consciously utilise many of the coded practices of fan-fiction in order to meet an increasing desire amongst fans to re-assert Lovecraft’s sub-cultural capital in light of the growing mainstream (and academic) acceptance of the author and his writings. Furthermore, through close textual study I will analyse how these incarnations of Lovecraft prioritise the author’s outsider status; as pulp writer, as clinically insane, as a lonely child, in order to position him in opposition to the bourgeois familial, business and religious structures of the hegemonic mainstream
Optimal international debt and endogenous time preference in a demographically divided world.
No full textUnderstanding H.P. Lovecraft's Anxiety Narratives through Medical Humanities
No full textThe aim of this dissertation is to analyze H.P. Lovecrafts psychological
problems and traumas to understand the true meaning behind his narratives that he wrote between the years 1905
and 1935. Lovecrafts narratives, stemming directly from the authors life, fears, anxieties, and traumas, are more
than fiction and can be considered as a means to reach the hidden corners of his complex mind. Therefore, I argue
that deciphering these writings as anxiety narratives will be giving a new insight about the author as well as mental
illness in general.To do so, Lovecrafts life and his literary philosophy, cosmicism, are explored, with a specific
attention to the concepts of (existential) anxiety, fear, and phobia, which were predominant themes/affects in both
Lovecrafts life and his narratives
Reduction of computing time for seismic applications based on the Helmholtz equation by Graphics Processing Units
No full textThe oil and gas industry makes use of computational intensive algorithms to provide an image of the subsurface. The image is obtained by sending wave energy into the subsurface and recording the signal required for a seismic wave to reflect back to the surface from the Earth interfaces that may have different physical properties. A seismic wave is usually generated by shots of known frequencies, placed close to the surface on land or close to the water surface in the sea. Returning waves are usually recorded in time by hydrophones in a marine environment or by geophones during land acquisition. The goal of seismic imaging is to transform the seismograms to a spatial image of the subsurface. Migration algorithms produce an image of the subsurface given the seismic data measured at the surface. In this thesis we focus on solving the Helmholtz equation which represents the wave propagation in the frequency domain. We can easily convert from the time domain to the frequency domain and vice-versa using the Fourier transformation. A discretization with second-order finite differences gives a sparse linear system of equations that needs to be solved for each frequency. Two- as well as three-dimensional problems are considered. Krylov subspace methods such as Bi-CGSTAB and IDR(s) have been chosen as solvers. Since the convergence of the Krylov subspace solvers deteriorates with an increasing wave number, a shifted Laplacian multigrid preconditioner is used to improve the convergence. Here, we extend the matrix-dependent multigrid method to solve complex-valued matrices in three dimensions. As the smoother, we have considered parallelizable methods such as weighted Jacobi (?-Jacobi), multi-colored Gauss-Seidel and damped multi-colored Gauss-Seidel (?-GS). The implementation of the preconditioned solver on a CPU (Central Processing Unit) is compared to an implementation on the GPU (Graphics Processing Units or graph- ics card) using CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). The results show that in two dimensions the preconditioned Bi-CGSTAB method on the GPU as well as the pre- conditioned IDR(s) method on a single GPU are about 30 times faster than on a single- threaded CPU. To achieve double precision accuracy on the GPU we have used the iterative refinement in Chapter 2. However, problems of realistic size are too large to fit in the memory of one GPU. One solution for this is to use multiple GPUs. A currently widely used architecture consists of a multi-core computer connected to one or at most two GPUs. Moreover, those GPUs can have different characteristics and memory sizes. A setup with four or more identical GPUs is rather uncommon, but it would be ideal from a memory point of view. It would imply that the maximum memory is four times more than on a single GPU. How- ever GPUs are connected to a PCI bus and in some cases two GPUs share the same PCI bus, which creates data transfer limitations. To summarize, using multi-GPUs increases the total memory size but data transfer problems appear. Therefore, in Chapter 3 we consider different multi-GPU approaches and understand how data transfer affects the performance of a Krylov subspace solver with shifted Laplace multigrid preconditioner for the three-dimensional Helmholtz equation using CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). Two multi-GPU approaches are considered: data parallelism and split of the algorithm. Their implementations on a multi-GPU architecture are compared to a multi-threaded CPU and single GPU implementation. The results show that the data parallel implementation suffers from communication between GPUs and the CPU, but is still a number of times faster compared to many-cores. The split of the algorithm across GPUs limits communication and delivers speedups comparable to a single GPU implementation. As a geophysical application which requires an efficient numerical method we con- sider 3-D reverse time migration with the constant-density acoustic wave equation in Chapter 4. The idea of migration in the time domain is to calculate the forward wave- field by injecting the source wavelet. Secondly, we compute the wavefield backward in time by injecting the recorded signal at the receiver locations. Subsequently, we cross- correlate the forward and backward wavefields at given timesteps. An explicit finite- difference scheme in the time domain is a common choice. However, it requires a significant amount of disk space to store the forward wavefields. The advantage of migration with a frequency domain solver is that it does not require large amounts of disk space to store the snapshots. However, a disadvantage is the memory usage of the solver. As GPUs have generally much less memory available than CPUs, this impacts the size of the problem significantly. The frequency-domain approach simplifies the correlation of the source and receiver wavefields, but requires the solution of a large sparse linear system of equations. The question is whether migration in the frequency domain can compete with a time-domain implementation when both are performed on a parallel architecture. Both methods are naturally parallel over shots, but the frequency-domain method is also parallel over frequencies. If we have a sufficiently large number of compute nodes, we can compute the result for each frequency in parallel and the required time is dominated by the number of iterations for the highest frequency. Here, GPUs are used as accelerators and not as independent compute nodes. We optimize the throughput of the latter with dynamic load balancing, asynchronous I/O and compression of snapshots. Since the frequency- domain solver employs a matrix-dependent prolongation, the coarse grid operators required more storage than available on GPUs for problems of realistic sizes. An alternative to the depth migration is least-squares migration (LSM). LSM was introduced as a bridge between full waveform inversion and migration. Like migration, LSM does not attempt to retrieve the background velocity model, however, like full wave- form inversion the modeled data should fit the observations. In Chapter 5 an efficient LSM algorithm is presented using several enhancements. Firstly, a frequency decimation approach is introduced that makes use of the redundant information present in the data. It leads to a speedup of LSM, whereas the impact on accuracy is kept minimal. Secondly, to store the sparse discretization and matrix-dependent prolongation matrices efficiently, a new matrix storage format VCRS (Very Compressed Row Storage) is presented. This format is capable of handling lossless compression. It does not only reduce the size of the stored matrix by a certain factor but also increases the efficiency of the matrix-vector computations. The study shows that the effect of lossless and lossy compression with a proper choice of the compression parameters are positive. Thirdly, we accelerate the LSM engine by GPUs. A GPU is used as an accelerator, where the data is partially transferred to a GPU to execute a set of operations, or as a replacement, where the complete data is stored in the GPU memory. We demonstrate that using GPU as a replacement leads to higher speedups and allows us to solve larger problem sizes. Summarizing the effects of each improvement, the resulting speedup can be at least an order of magnitude compared to the original LSM method.Delft Institute of Applied MathematicsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
Lovecraft\u27s Legacy: The Intertwinement of H.P. Lovecraft\u27s Life and Work
No full textMagistrsko delo obravnava življenje in delo H.P. Lovecrafta ter zagovarja tezo, da ju ni mogoče ločiti med seboj, saj so avtorjevi strahovi, prepričanja ter grožnje, ki jih je zaznaval, odločilno vplivali na njegov opus. Na podlagi analize kratke zgodbe “The Rats in the Walls” magistrska naloga identificira temo atavizma, oziroma avtorjevega strahu pred mentalno regresijo, ki izhaja iz krhkega duševnega zdravja prednikov. Temu sledi analiza kratke zgodbe “The Horror at Red Hook”, ki vsebuje Lovecraftove izbruhe rasnih predsodkov do priseljencev. Avtorjeva ksenofobija je še posebej prišla do izraza v času njegovega bivanja v New Yorku, ko je prišel v neposreden stik z Drugim. Analiza tretje Lovecraftove zgodbe “The Shadow over Innsmouth” razkrije avtorjev strah pred miscegenacijo in njegovo obsesijo z etnično čistostjo. Osebni strahovi H.P. Lovecrafta niso prevladali le nad njegovim življenjem, temveč so mu služili tudi kot navdih za ustvarjanje grozljive fikcije.This thesis argues that in the case of H.P. Lovecraft it is not possible to separate the person from the author, as his personal fears, beliefs and perceived threats decisively shape his body of work. I show this especially through the analysis of the story “The Rats in the Walls,” which reveals the author’s atavistic fear of mental deterioration, which originates from the family’s fragile mental disposition. Next, the story “The Horror at Red Hook” marks Lovecraft’s outbursts of racial prejudice towards immigrants, which came to the fore when he came in contact with the Other during his stay in New York. Finally, the analysis of the story “The Shadow over Innsmouth” points out Lovecraft’s fear of miscegenation and his obsession with a pure ethnic line. Not only did Lovecraft’s personal fears dominate his life, he also channelled them to become an inspiration for his eldritch weird fiction
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