This paper is an examination of the production of the thesis film The Confessional. Each of the key areas of the production are examined, including the writing, directing, production design, cinematography, editing, sound, and technology. In each of these areas, many choices came together to form the final version of the film. The paper also includes an analysis of the success of these decisions, based on research and audience feedback.

<p>The farming of insects has been shown to require less land, feed, and water compared to traditional livestock maintenance, while proven to be a source of high-quality protein. The aversion of the Western culture towards edible insects is the major hurdle into their incorporation in the market, unveiling the challenge of integrating them into an existing familiar product. However, studies have shown that merely pulverizing insects into edible “flours” possesses difficulties on itself such as low solubility; severely altering the structural and sensory characteristics of food products upon their addition. Alternatively, scientists have turned to chemical protein isolation techniques to create insect flours with improved functionality. Furthermore, enzymatic proteolysis has shown to aid in extracting the protein bound to insoluble chitin and enhancing techno-functional properties. While this promising technique may open a range of possibilities, no research has been done regarding the incorporation of insect hydrolysates into a food matrix. The purpose of this work was to explore the production of insect hydrolysates with improved techno-functional properties and their impact in the physicochemical, structural, and sensory characteristics on a chosen model matrix: corn tortillas. Crickets (<i>Acheta domesticus</i>) were chosen due to their current relevance in the Western market. </p> <p>Hydrolysates were produced with low (5%), medium (8%), and high (15%) degrees of hydrolysis (DH) either with Alcalase (AL) or Flavourzyme (FL). Alcalase cricket protein hydrolysates (CPH) resulted in higher fat content, which was suspected of possessing surface-activity. Overall, AL peptides displayed significantly (p < 0.05) higher emulsion and foam capacity and stability, suggesting stronger amphiphilic activity. On the other hand, FL peptides were more soluble and had a lower mean molecular weight, demonstrated by their lower glass transition temperatures. Both of these developments may be explained by Alcalase endopeptidase activity and Flavourzyme primarily exopeptidase activity. Treatments resulted in AL-peptides with large and medium size molecular weights that included hydrophobic terminal ends, while FL peptides were smaller and likely contained free amino acids. The difference in molecular weights were seen upon their addition in the raw corn masa, where AL-CPH increased elastic and viscous behavior compared to control, whereas the smaller FL-CPH lowered them due to the plasticizing capability of hydrophilic small peptides. The ability of FL-CPH to interact with corn macromolecules was observed upon thermal treatment, resulting in FL-tortillas with superior strength and extensibility compared to AL-tortillas. In fact, AL-tortillas fragility was seen by the rollability test, showing a complete disintegration of the tortilla structure. Raman spectroscopy further showed the heat-induced intermolecular interactions of FL-peptides with the corn macromolecules. Raman bands at 1049 cm^-1 in FL-tortillas allude to protein-starch complexes and the <i>gauche-gauche</i> region confirmed the presence of disulfide bridges in FL-tortillas, both of these developments were absent in AL-tortillas. Lastly, the formulation of corn chips with these CPH proved to be globally accepted by a population with diverse neophobia levels, confirming theories that consumers are willing to eat insects in an “invisible” format. Flavor and aroma profiles of the chips, quantified by a descriptive analysis study, revealed no commonalities between the two sets of chips. AL-chips were characterized as having corn, shrimp, and roasted peanut notes, while FL-chips were characterized as having tomato, ketchup, and French fry notes. Overall, enzymatic proteolysis was shown to generate cricket peptides with different characteristics, both able to be utilize as a functional ingredient for palatable food products. </p>

Proof planning is a paradigm for the automation of proof that focuses on encoding intelligence to guide the proof process. The idea is to capture common patterns of reasoning which can be used to derive abstract descriptions of proofs known as proof plans. These can then be executed to provide fully formal proofs. This thesis concerns the development and analysis of a novel approach to proof planning that focuses on an explicit representation of choices during search. We embody our approach as a proof planner for the generic proof assistant Isabelle and use the Isar language, which is human-readable and machine-checkable, to represent proof plans. Within this framework we develop an inductive theorem prover as a case study of our approach to proof planning. Our prover uses the difference reduction heuristic known as rippling to automate the step cases of the inductive proofs. The development of a flexible approach to rippling that supports its various modifications and extensions is the second major focus of this thesis. Here, our inductive theorem prover provides a context in which to evaluate rippling experimentally. This work results in an efficient and powerful inductive theorem prover for Isabelle as well as proposals for further improving the efficiency of rippling. We also draw observations in order to direct further work on proof planning. Overall, we aim to make it easier for mathematical techniques, and those specific to mechanical theorem proving, to be encoded and applied to problems.

This thesis addresses the problem of generating a range of natural sounding pitch contours for speech synthesis to convey the specific meanings of different intonation patterns. Where other models can synthesise intonation adequately for short sentences, longer sentences often sound unnatural as phrasing is only really considered at the sentence level. We build models within a framework of prosodic structure derived from the linguistic analysis of a corpus of speech. We show that the use of appropriate prosodic structure allows us to produce better contours for longer sentences and allows us to capture the original style of the corpus. The resulting model is also sufficiently flexible to be adapted to suitable styles for use in other domains. To convey specific meanings we need to be able to generate different accent types. We find that the infrequency of some accent and boundary types makes them hard to model from the corpus alone. We address this issue by developing a model which allows us to isolate the parameters which control specific accent type shapes, so that we can reestimate these parameters based on other data.

Call number: LD2668 .P7 1975 H35

The intention of most film editing is to create the impression of continuous action (“continuity”) by presenting discontinuous visual information. The techniques used to achieve this, the continuity editing rules, are well established yet there exists no understanding of their cognitive foundations. This thesis attempts to correct this oversight by proposing that “continuity” is actually what perceptual and developmental psychologists refer to as existence constancy (Michotte, 1955): “the experience that objects persist through space and time despite the fact that their presence in the visual field may be discontinuous” (Butterworth, 1991). The main conclusion of this thesis is that continuity editing ensures existence constancy by creating conditions under which a) the visual disruption created by the cut does not capture attention, b) existence constancy is assumed, and c) expectations associated with existence constancy are accommodated after the cut. Continuity editing rules are shown to identify natural periods of attention withdrawal that can be used to hide cuts. A reaction time study shows that one such period, a saccadic eye movement, occurs when an object is occluded by the screen edge. This occlusion has the potential to create existence constancy across the cut. After the cut, the object only has to appear when and where it is expected for it to be perceived as continuing to exist. This spatiotemporal information is stored in a visual index (Pylyshyn, 1989). Changes to the object’s features (stored in an object file; Kahneman, Treisman, & Gibbs, 1992), such as those caused by the cut, will go unnoticed. A duration estimation study shows that these spatiotemporal expectations distort due to the attention withdrawal. Continuity editing rules show evidence of accommodating these distortions to create perceived continuity from discontinuous visual information. The outcome of this thesis is a scientific understanding of filmic continuity. This permits filmmakers greater awareness of the perceptual consequences of their editing decisions. It also informs cognitive scientists of the potential of film as an analogue for real-world perception that exposes the assumptions, limitations, and constraints imposed upon our perception of reality.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-134). / by Xiang Chen. / M.S.

The following report covers the genesis of the story, covering the development of its characters, its transformation from a feature script to a short script, and the pre-production, production, and post-production stages of the thesis film, "Ol’Daddy." Also included are the film’s final shooting script and call sheets as supplemental materials. / text

Sleep Paralysis was written to be performed by a chamber orchestra of 17 performers total. The piece runs between 11 and 12 minutes and has a distinct programmatic approach. This piece attempts to convey the emotions and feelings one might experience when he or she is stricken with sleep paralysis—a condition where one wakes up during sleep but cannot move. Thus, this piece is set up as a dream gone badly. Harmonic and rhythmic tension increase throughout the piece until it reaches a moment of “paralysis” where the harmonies are static and melodies and themes appear in a dream-like fashion. Eventually, the ever-mounting tension resolves to free the listener of the paralysis; however, one should not assume that the paralysis is gone forever. / text

This thesis is an investigation of "Using POMDP-based Reinforcement Learning for Online Optimization of Teaching Strategies in an Intelligent Tutoring System". A challenge in building an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is to create and maintain an optimal teaching strategy. We cast an ITS as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and apply a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to learn the optimal teaching strategy through interactions between the system and the students. The optimal teaching strategy is chosen correctly and e ciently in tutoring a student, it is also learned and maintained in an online model. We present an RL algorithm based on POMDP for learning optimal teaching strategy, then describe the experiments and analyse the experimental results. The experiment has showed that the technique can remarkably improve an ITS's teaching performance / Using POMDP-based Reinforcement Learning for Online Optimization of Teaching Strategies in an Intelligent Tutoring System