Thesis (MPH.) -- University of Limpopo, 2019 / The purpose of this study was to profile selected cardiovascular disease risk factors among HIV patients on ART in Bushbuckridge sub-district. Quantitative, crosssectional research was conducted to describe cardiovascular disease risk factors among HIV patients on ART in Bushbuckridge Sub-district. Data collection was done using researcher-administered questionnaires. Adult HIV patient on ART participated in the study (n=328). The study has highlighted cardiovascular disease risk factors and prevalence of cardiovascular disease risk factors among HIV patients on ART. The findings revealed the prevalence of hypertension is 34.6% among HIV patients on ART and men had a higher prevalence compared to women. There is an increase in body mass index and it is seen mostly among women. Alcohol consumption is highest in the young adults (18 to 24 years) both men and women. Health promotion and policymaking interventions need to improve strategies on management and prevention of cardiovascular disease risk factors. Key concepts HIV, ART, cardiovascular disease risk factors, prevalence, body mass index, Bushbuckridge

Finite element human body models have in recent years become widely used in the area of vehicle safety evaluations. They make it possible to predict injury risk in specific areas, down to the organ level in the human body. An existing human body model, SAFER HBM includes a rib cage representing an average male. However, humans have a large variability in rib geometry and material properties leading to uncertainties in non-linear phenomena such as rib fracture risk. Hence, it cannot be known if predictions based on an average male representation are applicable to other similar individuals. In simulation studies with the SAFER HBM, rib cortical bone thickness, rib cross-sectional width, and rib cortical bone material properties have been identified as the most influential for the magnitude of rib strains and thus, they have a large influence on the strain-based rib fracture risk. This means that the predicted injury outcome is sensitive to the particular rib properties of an individual, and in a real-world scenario, a distribution of injury outcomes is expected across a population. Knowledge of the injury risk distribution can aid vehicle designers in developing safer vehicles. This distribution can be found through repeated human body model simulations with various rib properties, but due to the lengthy simulation times, this is not feasible. This thesis aims to predict human body model rib strain histories, given variations in the three biomechanical parameters, rib cortical bone thickness, rib cross-section width and rib cortical bone material with the help of graph neural networks (GNNs) for both single and mixed impact scenarios. Several variations of GNNs were used and implemented with help of PyTorch and PyTorch Geometric. An extensive hyperparameter study was performed on a small part of one human body model rib, to find the optimal combinations of hyperparameters and GNNs. The data used in training and evaluation of the networks was generated in LS-DYNA with SAFER HBM v10 and post-processed in Meta post processor. To be able to generate many training examples, the HBM was subjected to a simplified impact scenario consisting of a pendulum impact to the chest. As final verification, the trained GNNs were applied to predict rib strains in a vehicle impact scenario. Evaluation of the GNNs' prediction accuracy on the whole rib cage for all impact scenarios was made by studying the root mean square error along with differences in predicted and actual peak strain, rib fracture risk, time the peak strain occurs and the euclidean distance between the locations within the rib of real and predicted peak strains. The results showed that it is possible to accurately predict strain histories. Further, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) model consistently achieved the lowest errors in all measurements for mixed impacts. However, the trained model produced slightly unexpected errors for test data extracted from vehicle simulations compared to simplified simulations. This is an indication that retraining the model on data from vehicle simulations may be necessary. In conclusion, this thesis has shown the possibility to predict strain histories from a SAFER HBM rib cage extracted from simplified simulations and simulations including the full vehicle model, the SAFER HBM and all safety systems, to investigate the effects of human variability in the rib cage.

The dissertation thesis, Ornament in Nature, Science and Art, deals with the theme of ornaments in contemporary art, design and architecture. Individual chapters are dedicated to exploring nature and science as sources of inspiration for contemporary art. The chapter, Body and Ornament, is about ornaments for the human bodies and patterns created from the form of human bodies. Art creations by the author and her students make up an integral part of the main text. An individual chapter is dedicated to the Bodyornament project. Bodyornament is a project involving artistic, educational and research elements. Its primary body of work took place as an art performance in the Veletržní palace in Prague. Through the active participation of the students, patterns and ornaments made from their bodies were created. The process was documented by means of photography. The photographs together with the students' written reflections about the experience comprise the primary research documents. In this dissertation, these documents were analyzed and interpreted by using a combination of specific forms of qualitative research and art-based research. Our research model was based on three degree reflexive analysis according to Donald Schön. Through interpretation of the research results, thoughts of possible...

Nude through the lens of two male photographers and two female photographers: Jan Saudek, Robert Vano, Tereza of Davle, Michaela Brachtlová Presented diploma thesis deals with display of the female and male nude in photography from the perspective of four selected photographers, which are Jan Saudek, Robert Vano, Tereza of Davle and Michaela Brachtlová. This work is mainly focused on their photographic work, which is primarily focused on this photographic genre.The purpose of this work is to compare and evaluate the similarities and differences in the display of naked male and female body by the lens these men and women. I will focus on the issues of eroticism, vulgarity or influence a sexual orientation to above mentioned artists on their photographic work. The work will contain an interview with these artists and artist.

Autour d'une question fondamentale comme celle de la présence, nous mobilisons une littérature interdisciplinaire grâce à laquelle les contributions de l'anthropologie et de la géographie sociale, de la théorie du théâtre et du cinéma, des performance studies, de la psychanalyse et de la sociologie, sont articulées dans la perspective de la phénoménologie et des sciences de l'information et de la communication. Notre façon d'habiter le monde a changé : l'être-en-ligne se révèle alors comme étant la nouvelle condition existentielle. La connexion au réseau, le web, les applications, dans leur ensemble, disposent les choses et les personnes selon des relations opérationnelles de proximité spatio-temporelle. Notre espace est un espace performatif, car il se produit à partir de nos actions, nos postures et nos gestes, gestes photo-graphiques, éminemment réflexifs, qui créent la mise en scène numérique. En allant au-delà du modèle de « l'interface », cette mise en scène est devenue la spatialité de raccordement de tous nos espaces d'action. Nous identifions alors la performativité du direct et de l’enregistrement, la performativité de l’être en train de…, de l’attention présentielle et du « suspens gestuel », la performativité des algorithmes et des notifications, la performativité des emoji et de tout ce qui «fait visage»; et encore, la performativité des questions et des messages automatiques derrière lesquels parfois il y quelqu’un et d’autres fois il n’y a personne (comme lorsqu’on sonne à la porte dans une scène de La cantatrice chauve). A la lumière d'une analyse socio-sémiotique de la gestuelle numérique, des écrans, du graphisme propre aux réseaux sociaux et aux applications de messagerie instantanée tout comme des « protocoles de la vie quotidienne », nous décrivons la présence comme étant toujours l'effet d'une médiation. Cette médiation est, à la fois, disjonction et fiction, car elle se manifeste dans l'écart et dans la différence aussi bien que dans la fiction de l'hypermédiatété. Il y a de la présence, en somme, s'il y a du jeu, au sens spatiale de l'expression « il y a du jeu » mais aussi au sens fictionnel et ludique du jouer à.…. Comme le garçon du café décrit par Sartre, nous jouons, fictionnons et de-fictionnons le réel, en faisant « comme si » était vrai ce qui, par ailleurs, l'est vraiment. / Around the fundamental question of presence, I draw on interdisciplinary literature whose contributions from the fields of anthropology and social geography, theatre and cinema theory, performance studies, psychoanalysis and sociology are articulated from the perspective of phenomenology and information and communication sciences. Our way of inhabiting the world has changed: online-being is the new fundamental existential condition. Our space is a performative space, because it is produced through our actions, our gestures, eminently reflexive photographic gestures, which create our digital mise en scène. This space has become the space which links together all of our active and social spaces. Here, I single out live and recorded performativity, the performativity of do-ing, the performativity of algorithms and of questions, of emojis and of all that which “fait visage”. After a socio-semiotic analysis of digital gestures, screens, the graphics of social networks and presence protocols, I describe presence as always being a mediation effect. This mediation is at once disjunction and fiction, beacause it works as a difference and as the fiction of hypermediality. Presence exists where there is play (jeu) as in the french expression “il y a du jeu”, refering to space, and in its fictional sense of play-acting. As with Sartre's café waiter, we play act in order to create reality and consciousness through fiction.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Human-looking computer interfaces, including humanoid robots and animated humans, may elicit in their users eerie feelings. This effect, often called the uncanny valley, emphasizes our heightened ability to distinguish between the human and merely humanlike using both perceptual and cognitive approaches. Although reactions to uncanny characters are captured more accurately with emotional descriptors (e.g., eerie and creepy) than with cognitive descriptors (e.g., strange), and although previous studies suggest the psychological processes underlying the uncanny valley are more perceptual and emotional than cognitive, the deep roots of the concept of humanness imply the application of category boundaries and cognitive dissonance in distinguishing among robots, androids, and humans. First, laddering interviews (N = 30) revealed firm boundaries among participants’ concepts of animated, robotic, and human. Participants associated human traits like soul, imperfect, or intended exclusively with humans, and they simultaneously devalued the autonomous accomplishments of robots (e.g., simple task, limited ability, or controlled). Jerky movement and humanlike appearance were associated with robots, even though the presented robotic stimuli were humanlike. The facial expressions perceived in robots as improper were perceived in animated characters as mismatched. Second, association model testing indicated that the independent evaluation based on the developed indices is a viable quantitative technique for the laddering interview. Third, from the interviews several candidate items for the eeriness index were validated in a large representative survey (N = 1,311). The improved eeriness index is nearly orthogonal to perceived humanness (r = .04). The improved indices facilitate plotting relations among rated characters of varying human likeness, enhancing perspectives on humanlike robot design and animation creation.

A finite element human body model (FE HBM) is a detailed virtual model of the human body that, for example, is used for simulating traffic accidents. A problem with HBMs is that there is no simple way to position the HBMs in non-standard positions. As different postures during an impact will affect the body in different ways it is vital to have the ability to position the HBMs. In this project it was investigated if it is possible to position a HBM from THUMS, by first positioning only the skin and skeleton, as control points, in the 3D-graphics program Blender. Thereafter a radial basis function interpolation is utilised to morph the rest of the HBM into the new position. The results indicate that in theory, it is possible to position a HBM using a 3D-graphics software. However, the method developed in this project resulted in a disfigurement of the morphed model. The disfigurement is possibly due to the change in distance between the skin and skeleton when positioning those body parts in Blender. / En finit element människokroppsmodell (FE HBM) är en detaljerad virtuell modell av människokroppen som exempelvis används för att simulera trafikolyckor. Ett problem med HBM:er är att det inte finns något enkelt sätt att positionera dem i annat än standardpositioner. Eftersom olika kroppsställningar påverkar kroppen på olika sätt under en kollision är det viktigt att ha möjlighet att kunna positionera en HBM. I detta projekt undersöktes om det är möjligt att positionera en HBM från THUMS, genom att först positionera endast huden och skelettet, som kontrollpunkter, i 3D-grafikprogrammet Blender. Därefter användes en radiell basfunktionsinterpolation för att flytta resten av HBM till den nya positionen. Resultaten indikerar att det är möjligt att positionera en HBM med hjälp av ett 3D-grafikprogram. Metoden som utvecklades i detta projekt resulterade dock i en deformering av den positionerade modellen. Deformeringen beror möjligen på att avståndet mellan hud och skelett ändrades vid positioneringen av dessa kroppsdelar i Blender.

The range of missions performed by Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) has been steadily growing in the past decades thanks to continued development in several disciplines. The goal of increasing the autonomy of UAS's is widening the range of tasks which can be carried out without, or with minimal, external help. This thesis presents methods for increasing specific aspects of autonomy of UAS's operating both in outdoor and indoor environments where cameras are used as the primary sensors. First, a method for fusing color and thermal images for object detection, geolocation and tracking for UAS's operating primarily outdoors is presented. Specifically, a method for building saliency maps where human body locations are marked as points of interest is described. Such maps can be used in emergency situations to increase the situational awareness of first responders or a robotic system itself. Additionally, the same method is applied to the problem of vehicle tracking. A generated stream of geographical locations of tracked vehicles increases situational awareness by allowing for qualitative reasoning about, for example, vehicles overtaking, entering or leaving crossings. Second, two approaches to the UAS indoor localization problem in the absence of GPS-based positioning are presented. Both use cameras as the main sensors and enable autonomous indoor ight and navigation. The first approach takes advantage of cooperation with a ground robot to provide a UAS with its localization information. The second approach uses marker-based visual pose estimation where all computations are done onboard a small-scale aircraft which additionally increases its autonomy by not relying on external computational power.

The human body is a central part of a person and includes many different parts. The purpose of the study is to contribute with knowledge about preschool teachers’ view of the human body as a work area in preschool. The study is based on a phenomenographic approach. The method used is semi-structured interviews where six preschool teachers from a small town in Sweden participated. The results show that preschool teachers believe that much can be linked to the work with the human body. These are anatomy, body norms, integrity and also health and well-being. The preschool teachers did not consider that the preschool curriculum described the work with the human body clearly, instead they described it as something who is interpretable. The preschool teachers still considered that the human body could be related to many goals in the preschool curriculum. The results of the study also show that preschool teachers have many ways of working with the human body in preschool activities. For example, the results of the study showed that the preschool teachers used different materials, worked with experiments of different kinds, did investigations together with the children and used spontaneous conversations in everyday life. The results of the study can be used as a starting point for reflections about the own pedagogical activities and discussion about how different curriculum goals are interpreted within the work team. / Människokroppen är en central del av människan och innefattar många olika delar. Syftet med studien är att bidra med kunskap om förskollärares syn på människokroppen som arbetsområde i förskolan. Studien tar utgångspunkt i en fenomenografisk ansats. Metoden som använts är semistukturerade intervjuer där sex förskollärare från en mindre stad i Sverige deltog. Resultatet visar att förskollärarna anser att mycket kan kopplas till arbetet med människokroppen. Dessa delar är anatomi, kroppsnormer, integritet samt hälsa och välbefinnande. Förskollärarna ansåg inte att förskolans läroplan tydligt beskrev arbetet med människokroppen, de beskrev det i stället som tolkningsbart. Förskollärarna ansåg trots detta ändå att människokroppen kunde relateras till många mål i förskolans läroplan. Studiens resultat visar även att förskollärarna har många olika sätt att arbeta med människokroppen i förskolans verksamhet. Exempelvis framkom det i studiens resultat att förskollärarna använde sig av olika material, arbetade med experiment av olika slag, gjorde undersökningar tillsammans med barnen samt använde sig av spontana samtal i vardagen. Resultatet av studien kan användas som utgångspunkt för reflektion kring den egna verksamheten och diskussion kring hur de olika läroplansmålen tolkas inom arbetslaget.

In this dissertation, we address the problem of understanding human activities in videos by developing a two-pronged approach: coarse level modeling of scene activities and fine level modeling of individual activities. At the coarse level, where the resolution of the video is low, we rely on person tracks. At the fine level, richer features are available to identify different parts of the human body, therefore we rely on the body joint tracks. There are three main goals of this dissertation: (1) identify unusual activities at the coarse level, (2) recognize different activities at the fine level, and (3) predict the behavior for synthesizing and tracking activities at the fine level. The first goal is addressed by modeling activities at the coarse level through two novel and complementing approaches. The first approach learns the behavior of individuals by capturing the patterns of motion and size of objects in a compact model. Probability density function (pdf) at each pixel is modeled as a multivariate Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), which is learnt using unsupervised expectation maximization (EM). In contrast, the second approach learns the interaction of object pairs concurrently present in the scene. This can be useful in detecting more complex activities than those modeled by the first approach. We use a 14-dimensional Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) that captures motion and size of concurrently tracked objects. The proposed models have been successfully used to automatically detect activities like unusual person drop-off and pickup, jaywalking, etc. The second and third goals of modeling human activities at the fine level are addressed by employing concepts from theory of chaos and non-linear dynamical systems. We show that the proposed model is useful for recognition and prediction of the underlying dynamics of human activities. We treat the trajectories of human body joints as the observed time series generated from an underlying dynamical system. The observed data is used to reconstruct a phase (or state) space of appropriate dimension by employing the delay-embedding technique. This transformation is performed without assuming an exact model of the underlying dynamics and provides a characteristic representation that will prove to be vital for recognition and prediction tasks. For recognition, properties of phase space are captured in terms of dynamical and metric invariants, which include the Lyapunov exponent, correlation integral, and correlation dimension. A composite feature vector containing these invariants represents the action and will be used for classification. For prediction, kernel regression is used in the phase space to compute predictions with a specified initial condition. This approach has the advantage of modeling dynamics without making any assumptions about the exact form (polynomial, radial basis, etc.) of the mapping function. We demonstrate the utility of these predictions for human activity synthesis and tracking.