Pastaruoju metu mokslininkų tarpe vis labiau domimasi kūno įvaizdžiu. Tai nulėmė visuomenėje įsivyravę aukšti tobulo kūno standartai, kurių siekimas žmonėms tampa vis svarbesnis. Vis didesnį neramumą kelia paauglių požiūris į save ir santykį su išvaizda. Pastebima, kad jie yra linkę save vertinti kritiškai, vis dažniau yra nepatenkinti savo išvaizda. Įvairūs mokslininkai (Druxman, 2003; Grogan, 2008; Pruskus, 2008) pripažįsta neabejotiną socialinių veiksnių (šeimos, draugų, bendraamžių, žiniasklaidos) įtaką paauglių kūno savivaizdžiui. Tačiau ne visuomet sutariama, kurie veiksniai dažniausiai atlieka didžiausią vaidmenį. Dar svarbesniu klausimu tampa, kurie veiksniai lemia didžiausią neigiamą paauglių kūno vaizdo formavimąsi. / Recently, scientists are increasingly interested in body image. This was caused by high standards of the perfect body prevailing in the society, the pursuit of which is becoming more and more important to people. Adolescent attitude toward themselves and their relation with the appearance are the growing restlessness. It is observed that adolescents tend to evaluate themselves critically, that they are increasingly dissatisfied with their appearance. Various scientists (Druxman, 2003; Grogan, 2008; Pruskus, 2008) acknowledge that social factors (family, friends, peers, media) definitely influence adolescent physical self-images. However, it is not always agreed on what factors mostly play the greatest role. Another important issue is which factors determine the most negative adolescent body image formation.

The thesis presented is an effort to gather all possible information of one particular type of common paint defect the seed defect, from gray scale images of highly specular painted surface. The proposed approach in the thesis utilizes a white light source to illuminate the surface and utilizes a camera to capture its gray scale image at different diffused angles. While attempting to explain the physics of highlight formation in terms of location on the surface of a seed defect, the thesis also extends to utilize this information from gray scale images to accurately predict the parameters of seed defects including the height, size and position in real time. Since the primary highlight in a gray scale image is more defined, contrary to the past researches on diffuse angle images that use both primary / seed highlight and mirror highlight to estimate height of the seed, this thesis formulates a theory of highlight translation and estimates the height of seed based on primary / seed highlight. The other common type of surface defect - crater defect, is also addressed in the thesis.

The surface of the weld pool contains information that can be exploited to emulate a skilled human welder to better understand and control the welding process. Of the existing techniques, the method that uses the pool's specular nature to an advantage and which is relatively more cost effective, and suitable for welding environment is the one that utilizes reflected images to reconstruct 3D weld pool surface by using structured light and image processing techniques. In this thesis, an improvement has been made to the existing method by changing welding direction to obtain a denser reflected dot-matrix pattern allowing more accurate surface measurement. Then, the reflected images, obtained by capturing the reflection of a structured laser dot-matrix pattern from the pool surface through a high-speed camera with a narrow band-pass filter, are processed by a newly proposed algorithm to find the position of each reflected dot relative to its actual projection dot. This is a complicated process owing to the increased density of dots and noise induced due to the harsh environment. The obtained correspondence map may later be used by a surface reconstruction algorithm to derive the three-dimensional pool surface based on the reflection law.

The presidency of Barack Obama has given racial framing in the news media a new salience particularly because of the role that media coverage plays in shaping ideas about race. The racial framing that unfolds through the news media reflects new forms of racism that work to justify and explain racial inequalities without explicit references to race. In this study, I analyze the media discussion of welfare reform following a 2012 Mitt Romney attack advertisement that claimed that President Obama “gutted” welfare reform. I use discourse analysis to analyze the prevalence of controlling imagery, colorblind racist rhetoric, and the white racial frame in 91 prominent newspaper articles and political blogs that discussed this controversial advertisement. This study aims to contribute to sociological knowledge about specific language and strategies used by the media to perpetuate racism, and to demonstrate the relationship between political and social welfare discourse and racial ideologies.

This thesis represents a tolerance near set approach to detect similarity between digital images. Two images are considered as sets of perceptual objects and a tolerance relation defines the nearness between objects. Two perceptual objects resemble each other if the difference between their descriptions is smaller than a tolerable level of error. Existing tolerance near set approaches to image similarity consider both images in a single tolerance space and compare the size of tolerance classes. This approach is shown to be sensitive to noise and distortions. In this thesis, a new tolerance-based method is proposed that considers each image in a separate tolerance space and defines the similarity based on differences between histograms of the size of tolerance classes. The main advantage of the proposed method is its lower sensitivity to distortions such as adding noise, darkening or brightening. This advantage has been shown here through a set of experiments.

This thesis develops a self-adaptive architecture for image understanding that addresses certain kinds of lack of robustness common in image understanding programs. The architecture provides support for making image understanding programs that can manipulate their own semantics and thereby adjust their structure in response to changes in the environment that might cause static image understanding systems to fail. The general approach taken has been to explore the ideas of self-adaptive software and implement an architectural framework that addresses a class of problems that we term "interpretation problems" common in image understanding. Self-adaptive software is a relatively new idea and this thesis represents one of the first implementations of the general idea. The general idea is that to make programs robust to changing environmen- tal conditions that they should be "aware" of their relationship with the environment and be able to restructure themselves at runtime in order to "track" changes in the environment. The implementation takes the form of a multi-layered reflective interpreter that ma- nipulates and runs simple agents. The interpreter framework utilizes Monte-Carlo sam- pling as a mechanism for estimating most likely solutions, uses Minimum Descriptin Length (MDL) as a central coordinating device, and includes a theorem prover based compiler to restructure the program when necessary. To test the architectural ideas developed in the thesis a test domain of interpreting aerial images was chosen. Much of the research described in the thesis addresses issues in that problem domain. The task of the program is to segment, label, and parse aerial images so as to produce an image description similar to descriptions produced by a human expert. An image corpus is developed that is used as the source of domain knowledge. The first processing stage of the program segments the aerial images into segments similar to those found in the annotated corpus. To accomplish this a new segmentation algorithm that we call semantic segmentation was developed that not only used MDL as a principle to drive the low-level segmentation but also allows higher level semantics to influence the segmentation. In our usage of the algorithm those semantics take the form of labeling and parsing the resulting segmentation. The second stage labels the regions and parses the regions into a parse tree. To do this we develop a 2D statistical parser. Rules of grammar are induced from the corpus and an MDL parser finds approximations to the most probable parse of the regions of the segmented image.

This thesis offers a multi-faceted exploration of image worship theology and practice within a Vaishnava Hindu theistic devotional tradition founded in the sixteenth century, flourishing today largely in north and northeast India and, since recently, spreading worldwide. The thesis serves two aims. First, it augments existing scholarship on Hindu temple image worship and Caitanya (Gaudīya) Vaishņavism by focusing on two contemporary temple communities one in the north Indian pilgrimage centre Vrindavan, the second near Watford, outside London. These represent, respectively, an "embodied community" and a "missionizing tradition," following Barbara Holdrege's typology in her studies of Hindu and Jewish traditions. By considering the practice of worship (mūrti-sevā) in terms of two persistent themes, namely rule-governed practice (vaidhī-sādhana) and emotion-driven practice (rāgānuga-sādhana), I show how the elements of "embodiment" and "missionizing" blend to produce variations on the overarching theme of Krsna bhakti, devotion to Kŗşna as the supreme divinity. Second, by focusing on the divine image in these two temples and the practice of worship, I offer one study of how "religious truth" is understood within these communities in terms of three dimensions of truth proposed by the Comparative Religious Ideas Project at Boston University (1995-1999; Robert C. Neville, et al., Religious Truth, State University of New York Press, 2001). At the same time I offer an attempt to extend the scope of that project by adding the dimensions of physical image and ritual practice to its existing dimension, religious ideas. I show how the central notion of devotion to Kŗşna as God (bhagavān) entails a complex web of discursive, ritual, and narrative expression to sustain image worship as a truth of embodiment/practice (the opposite of failure) which is also expressive truth (the opposite of deceit) that follows from propositional/epistemological truth (the opposite of error).

The aim of this dissertation is to compare German and Swedish textbooks in socialscience focused on how democracy takes form in the text. What kind ofrepresentations appears through texts and illustrations? What is said and how is itsaid? What is emphasized? What is excluded? How does the text present differentconcepts and relate them to democracy? The study also focuses on how knowledgeand learning is described and to whom the text is addressed.This dissertation has a semiotic-didactic perspective based on the dialogicalprinciple that emanates from Bakhtin’s theoretical perspective and Bakhtin’sthoughts of how to analyze texts.The empirical material consists of textbooks in social science, published since 1950.The study is restricted to books written for upper secondary school and books havebeen selected to achieve variation in the descriptions of democracy.The analysis has focused on themes and concepts appearing in the textbooks.Different themes appearing in the text are the basis for the creation of a time-line.Four different periods have been found in each country, but the division of time isslightly different.The dominant themes in German textbooks are “the good and the evil”, “thegood and bad democracy”, “action groups – to be or not to be” and “unity oreminance”. There is more than one theme in Swedish textbooks, but the mostdominant themes are “governing and obedience”, “governing and autonomy”, “theautonomous citizen”, and “governing or empowerment”.There are many representations of democracy in the textbooks and most of therepresentations are vague and full of contradictions. Some of the images evencontradict the official image of democracy. Citizens in German textbooks aredescribed as active, autonomous and responsible, but the only way to influencepoliticians is through participation in elections. Citizens described in Swedishtextbooks are portrayed as passive, ignorant and irresponsible, except when voting.The dominant view of knowledge and learning is reproductive. Knowledge isportrayed as monological and the students are expected to learn some basics facts,without being able to reflect and deliberate on issues. However, texts can be openand create opportunities for students to reflect and take a stance on their own. Anopen and dialogical text is more common in German textbooks than in Swedishtextbooks.

国立情報学研究所で電子化したコンテンツを使用している。

By the 1960s-70s, most Western commentators agreed that Japan had rehabilitated itself from World War II, in the process becoming on the whole a reliable member of the international community. From the late 1970s onwards, however, as Japan’s economy continued to rise, this premise began to be questioned. By the late 1980s, a new ‘Japan Problem’ had been identified in Western countries, although the presentation of Japan as a dangerous ‘other’ was nevertheless familiar from past historical eras. The term ‘Japan-bashing’ was used by opponents of this negative view to suggest that much of the critical rhetoric about a ‘Japan Problem’ could be reduced to an unwarranted, probably racist, assault on Japan. This thesis argues that the invention and popularisation of the highly-contested label ‘Japan-bashing’, rather than averting criticism of Japan, perversely helped to exacerbate and transform the moderate anti-Japanese sentiment that had existed in Western countries in the late 1970s and early 1980s into a widely disseminated, heavily politicised and even encultured phenomenon in the late 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, when the term ‘Japan-bashing’ spread to Japan itself, Japanese commentators were quick to respond. In fact, the level and the nature of the response from the Japanese side is one crucial factor that distinguishes ‘Japan-bashing’ in the 1980s and 1990s from anti-Japanese sentiment expressed in the West in earlier periods. Ultimately, the label and the practice of ‘Japan-bashing’ helped to transform intellectual and popular discourses about Japan in both Western countries and Japan itself in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, in doing so, it revealed crucial features of wider Western and Japanese perceptions of the global order in the late twentieth century. Debates about Japan showed, for example, that economic strength had become at least as important as military power to national discourses about identity. However, the view that Western countries and Japan are generally incompatible, and share few, if any, common values, interests or goals, has been largely discarded in the early twenty-first century, in a process that demonstrated just how constructed, and transitory, such views can be.