Many countries around the world are looking to tourism as a sustainable solution for economic development and many individuals seek business opportunities in the tourism industry. Researchers in the field of anthropology and other disciplines alike have recorded findings of the environmental, economic and cultural impacts of tourism development that are useful both to tourism promoters and new business developers. While there are a number of negative examples of environmental degradation, economic dependency and cultural exploitation resulting from tourism, there are so few positive models that scholars are now questioning whether tourism is a truly sustainable strategy for prosperity. In particular, ecotourism and nature-based tourism have burgeoned from a perceived prospect of increased environmental, economic and cultural sensitivity, but a watershed of criticism has followed in the wake of their emergence. Critics claim that what is touted as eco-sensitive is just another marketing strategy to attract more people to areas of the world vulnerable to hosting a growing number of guests. Overuse of the term ecotourism has parties involved at all levels of tourism development from host communities, to tourism planners, to scholars questioning what is sustainable ecotourism. Due to this ambiguity, a new term, conscientious tourism, is suggested as a euphemism in order to clarify what type of tourism most contributes to sustainability. Cape Scene magazine has evolved as a conscientious tourism product informing guests visiting South Africa how best to interact with the wildlife, environment and local people. The magazine has coupled interesting feature stories and helpful information on navigating around the Western Cape and Cape Town and includes a useful fold out map. The magazine reaches a broad audience of mass tourists, small group tourists and individuals and groups interested in nature, wildlife and cultural experiences. The magazine also informs readers of local conservation and community development projects ongoing in South Africa. This emphasis has created a conscientious tourism product that informs tourists of the country they are visiting while promoting conservation and social development causes that can be benefited by overseas awareness. As mass tourism will never completely give way to smaller conservation minded guided tour groups, the magazine helps to propel conscientious tourism by reaching out to even the most undiscerning holiday maker. The magazine was created by drawing on graduate internship experiences from coastal Oregon, the Micronesian island of Kosrae and Costa Rica. These internships give insights on how conservation, economic and cultural concerns have been and can be better addressed by local people and local businesses in an effort to work towards conscientious tourism and sustainable development. This thesis explores several ecotourism related projects encountered on the way to developing a conscientious tourism product, Cape Scene magazine. The existing body of tourism literature is considered in relation to the projects encountered and current work with Cape Scene magazine. / Graduation date: 2004

The goal of low-level vision is to estimate an underlying scene, given an observed image. Real-world scenes (e.g., albedos or shapes) can be very complex, conventionally requiring high dimensional representations which are hard to estimate and store. We propose a low-dimensional representation, called a scene recipe, that relies on the image itself to describe the complex scene configurations. Shape recipes are an example: these are the regression coefficients that predict the bandpassed shape from bandpassed image data. We describe the benefits of this representation, and show two uses illustrating their properties: (1) we improve stereo shape estimates by learning shape recipes at low resolution and applying them at full resolution; (2) Shape recipes implicitly contain information about lighting and materials and we use them for material segmentation.

My thesis explores the relation of philosophy and theatre that originates in a speech that the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels delivered in 2009 at the National Sun Yat-sen University. The title of the speech is Theatre as Scene of Otherness, in which Waldenfels applies the key notion of his philosophy ¡V Othernesss ¡V to an analysis of theatre. Based on his work The Question of Otherness I first explore his viewpoints of otherness from the experience of Otherness, the question of violence to the dimension of time and body in relation to Otherness. In Waldenfels¡¦ view whenever we effort to get hold of Otherness, the latter just flees us. As a result we can never really get the full knowledge of Otherness. Yet, so long as we cannot but face the challenge of Otherness all the time, the theatre provides us with an opportunity to get a glance at what Otherness is all about. The theatre offers us so to speak a possibility to encounter what is not displayable. In sum, theatre demonstrates itself as a field of Otherness. According to Waldenfels, as long as the theatre is full of experimental traits, it can be hardly generalized. I thus endeavor to explore the Brutal Theatre of Artaud on the basis of Waldenfels¡¦ understanding of theatre. A brief explanation on the local experimental theatre is also illustrated in connection to the notion of Otherness. Keywords: Otherness, theatre, scene, violence, time, body

As digitisation era will come, a large number of multimedia datas (image, video, etc.) are stored in the database by digitisation, and its retrieval system is more and more important. Video is huge in frames amount, in order to search effectively and fast, the first step will detect and examine the place where the scene changes in the video, cut apart the scene, find out the key frame from each scene, regard as analysis that the index file searches with the key frame. The scene changes the way and divides into the abrupt and the gradual transition. But in the video, even if in the same scene, incident of often violent movements or the camera are moving etc. happens, and obscure with the gradual transition to some extent. Thus this papper gets the main component from every frame in the video using principal component analysis (PCA), reduce the noise to interfere, and classify these feauture points with support vector clustering, it is the same class that the close feature points is belonged to. If the feature points are located between two groups of different datas, represent the scene is changing slowly in the video, detect scene change by this.

In this dissertation, we conducted a stereoscopic eye tracking experiment using naturalistic stereo images. We analyzed low level 2D and 3D scene features at binocular fixations and randomly selected places. The results reveal that humans tend to fixate on regions with higher luminance variations, but lower disparity variations. Because of the often observed co-occurrence of luminance and depth changes in natural environments, the dichotomy between luminance features and disparity features inspired us to study the accurate statistics of 2D and 3D scene properties. Using a range map database, we studied the distribution of disparity in natural scenes. The natural disparity distribution has a high peak at zero, and heavier tails that are similar to a Laplace distribution. The relevance of natural disparity distribution to other studies in neurobiology and visual psychophysics are discussed in detail. We also studied luminance, range and disparity statistics in natural scenes using a co-registered luminance-range database. The distributions of bandpass 2D and 3D scene features can be well modeled by generalized Gaussian models. There are positive correlations between bandpass luminance and depth, which can be captured by varying shape parameters in the probability density functions of the generalized Gaussians. In another study on suprathreshold luminance and depth discontinuities, we show that observing a significant luminance edge at a significant depth edge is much more likely than at homogeneous depth surfaces. It is also true that a significant depth edge happens at a significant luminance edge with a greater probability than at homogeneous luminance regions. Again, the dependency between luminance and depth discontinuities can be modeled successfully by generalized Gaussians. We applied our statistical models in 3D natural scenes to stereo correspondence. A Bayesian framework is proposed to incorporate the bandpass disparity prior, and the luminance-disparity dependency in the likelihood function. We compared our algorithm with a classical simulated annealing method based on heuristically defined energy functions. The computed disparity maps show great improvements both perceptually and objectively. / text

In the early 1970s a collection of singer-songwriters, musicians, and music business operatives captured the imagination of a national audience and launched Austin's reputation as a powerful and prolific international music scene. At the beginning of this seminal decade, the songs, the sounds, and the identities that took shape in Austin's music venues, studios, and back rooms gained traction in the national marketplace by cultivating a cross-cultural, cross-generational musical hybrid that came to be known as "progressive country." This dissertation tells the story of this music scene and explains why it's a story worth recounting in the course of American popular culture. The story begins by focusing on the meaning and utility of a music scene. To this end, I review a series of scholarly scene studies in an attempt to identify common currents of "sceneness" that I contrast with my findings as a participant observer in the Austin musical scene from 1967 to the present. The study then surveys the extant sources on Austin's music history, a commonly accepted history that I'm calling the "creation myth." This "myth" is expanded by introducing new voices, new interpretations, and new developments that have been under emphasized or overlooked in previous accounts. This analysis establishes the foundation for the unifying theme of this study, a theme based on the seminal significance, power, and durability of the song in the Austin music scene. The song was the driving force behind Austin's remarkable climate of musical creativity. The study then focuses on the local scene of the late 1960s as a precursor to the decade of the singer-songwriters. This was a highly productive era in Austin's creative history and although overshadowed by the popular splash of the 1970s, this period provided the underpinnings for music making in Austin for years to come. In the next section, the song is revisited by examining its history and its role in Western culture. Stated simply, songs are important—songs matter. They may mean different things to different people and play different roles in different societies, but they are an essential component of civilization. The discussion then expands from the efficacy of the popular song to the essence of their creators by examining the early professional careers of three prominent Austin-based songwriters—Steven Fromholz, Michael Martin Murphey and Jerry Jeff Walker. Weighing the differences in their respective styles and considering their commonalities help illuminate the process by which the song permeated the creative fabric of the period. The dissertation then explores the creative output of the Austin music scene by focusing on what I'm calling "cultural products." Certainly the songs of the era are prime examples of cultural products and are addressed throughout the dissertation. In this final segment however, I single out four examples of cultural products that are rooted in the 1970s that have either played a notable role in the historical current of Austin music or that continue to contribute to American popular culture in the 21st century. / text

Syfte: Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka ambulanssjuksköterskors upplevelser av arbete på skadeplats med en till fyra drabbade personer. Metod: Fyra män och fyra kvinnor, med en erfarenhet mellan två och elva år av ambulanssjukvård, deltog i studien. Semistrukturerade intervjuer genomfördes och data analyserades med innehållsanalys. Resultat: Sju kategorier identifierades: Kommunikation, Ledarskap, Medicinskt omhändertagande, Rutiner och riktlinjer, Organisation, Personlighet och relationer, samt Samverkan. Skadeplatsarbetet sker utanför sjukhusets kontrollerade verksamhet. Att varje gång anpassa sig till situationen, omhänderta, leda och organisera arbetet är det som krävs av en ambulanssjuksköterska. Samtidigt ställs stora krav på den omkringliggande organisationen inklusive alla övriga resurser, på att kunna samarbeta och fungera som grupp. Slutsats: Skadeplatsarbetet kräver en organisation som måste fungera i minsta detalj och samtidigt alltid förbättra sig. Då många av de upplevda problemen ansågs bero på personlighet och relationer så kräver det dessutom att personalen är stresstålig, ödmjuk, social, kreativ och noggrann. / Aim: The aim with this study was to analyze the ambulance nurses experiences from working at the trauma scene, with up to four injured patients. Method: four men and four women, with a two to eleven years time of experience in the ambulance service, participated. Data from qualitative interviews were analyzed with content analysis. Result: Seven categories were identified: Communication, Leadership, Medical treatment, Routines and guidelines, Organization, Personalities and relations, and finally Cooperation. An ambulance nurse needs to be able to adapt to any given situation. To nurse and treat, to lead and organize the activity at the trauma scene, is some things that could be asked from the nurse. A great requirement is also put on the surrounding organization, including all other resources, to cooperate and to function as a team. Conclusion: Professional work at the trauma scene demands an organization that needs to function in any unique situation. At the same time it’s just as important that this organization continuously improves. Experiences from problems in prehospital work could be related to personalities and relations between colleagues. This shows the importance of personnel that can handle stress, show humbleness, empathy and skills of being creative, social and precise.

We have a strong intuition that people's eyes are unique, socially informative stimuli. As such, it is reasonable to propose that humans have developed a fundamental tendency to preferentially attend to eyes in the environment. The empirical evidence to support this intuition is, however, remarkably thin. Over the course of eight chapters, the present thesis considers the area of social attention, and what special role (if any) the selection of eyes has in it. Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate that when observers are shown complex natural scenes, they look at the eyes more frequently than any other region. This selection preference is enhanced when the social content and activity in the scene is high, and when the task is to report on the attentional states in the scene. Chapters 4 and 5 establish that the bias to select eyes extends to a variety of tasks, suggesting that it may be fundamental to human social attention. In addition, Chapter 5 shows that observers who are told that they will have to remember the scenes look more often at the eyes than observers who are unaware of the forthcoming memory test; moreover this difference between groups persists to scene recognition. Chapter 6 examines whether the preference for eyes can be explained by visual saliency. It cannot. Chapter 7 compares the selection of eyes to another socially communicative cue, the arrow. The results shed light on a recent controversy in the social attention field, and indicate again that there is a fundamental bias to select the eyes. Collectively the data suggest that for typically developing adults, eyes are rich, socially communicative stimuli that are preferentially attended to relative to other stimuli in the environment.

Image based scene reconstruction from multiple views is an interesting challenge, with many ambiguities and sources of noise. One approach to scene reconstruction is Voxel Colouring, Seitz and Dyer [26], which uses colour information in images and handles the problem of occlusion. Culbertson and Malzbender [11], introduced Generalised Voxel Colouring (GVC) which uses projection and rasterization to establish global scene visibility. Our work has involved investigating the use of ray traversal as an efficient alternative. We have developed two main approaches along this line, Ray Images and Ray Buckets. Comparisons between implementations of our algorithms and variations of GVC are presented, as well as applications to areas of optimisation colour consistency and level of detail. Ray traversal seems a promising approach to scene visibility, but requires more work to be of practical use. Our methods show some advantages over existing approaches in time use. However we have not been as succesful as an- ticipated in reconstruction quality shown by implementation of optimisation colour consistency.

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