This study explores several of the key factors that led to the visual amplification of Mary in western Europe during the early Middle Ages, with the art of the Ottonian Empire as its focus. Although the twelfth century has long been recognized as a high point for Marian imagery, the brief but rich period of artistic production during the Ottonian Empire (919-1024) yielded a range of images crucial for understanding the growing role of the Virgin in art and devotion. The approach for this work is necessarily thematic; the seeming randomness of Ottonian images of the Virgin has resulted in their exclusion from broad surveys organized by iconographic type or medium. While images of the Virgin in the Ottonian Empire do not form large groups of visually cohesive images, Ottonian manuscript illumination offers an intriguing view into the process by which Marian devotion coalesced in the west. The period has been thought to represent a lacuna for Marian exegesis -- between the Carolingian period and the twelfth century there were no new theological texts written on the Virgin in this region. There was, however, an intensification of interest in Mary in the liturgy, and as I demonstrate, an attempt to formulate exegesis through images. In studying the odd occurrences -- the lone tenth-century image of a Virgin in a Pentecost scene, or the earliest crowned Virgin outside of Italy -- this study locates these works within their liturgical and political environment through considerations of patronage and use.

In this thesis I examine the manuscript collection held at the château of Vincennes during the reign of Charles V of France (1364-1380). From the original collection of fifty-six, dispersed after the king’s death in 1380, ten complete manuscripts and one fragment are extant. Through an analysis of the existing manuscripts and information taken from the 1380 inventory of the king’s collections at Vincennes, I consider these manuscripts as a curatorial grouping that forms its own system of meaning, independent of the king’s larger collection of manuscripts at the Louvre. I argue that this collection conveyed a coherent and concerted collection practice, and examine the ways these manuscripts shaped royal identity and animated social memory Charles V “le Sage” was the third of the Valois kings of France and ruled during the Hundred Years’ War. Interestingly, in this time of relative instability, Charles established what is known as his most lasting cultural achievement, a royal library at the Louvre in 1368. All that remains of Charles’s impressive collection of over a thousand manuscripts are detailed inventories compiled by his court officers as well as a limited selection of surviving manuscripts. The royal inventory describes the contents of each volume, the exterior ornamentation and binding, and the interior illumination. Although these records are not detailed enough to reconstruct books that are now lost, it is clear that this collection was extremely luxurious both in the exterior decoration and interior painting. Among the manuscript paintings in this collection there exists a stylistic continuity, with many of the illustrations either executed by or in the style of Parisian illuminator Jean Pucelle. I maintain that this stylistic continuity, among other characteristics, define these manuscripts as a collection. Furthermore, I present an alternative model for interpreting the manuscripts at Vincennes that emphasizes how the works functioned collectively. I argue that all of the unifying characteristics of this collection carried meaning for the reader or viewer at Vincennes. This includes the fact that, according to the specifics of the inventories, virtually all of these manuscripts were originally intended for a reader other than Charles, suggesting a heretofore-unexplored memorial function of the collection. / text

High mast illumination poles (HMIPs) are tall cantilevered structures used to efficiently illuminate large portions of highways and interchanges. Great interest in the performance of HMIPS has arisen from the discovery of extensive premature cracking at the toes of base plate to pole shaft welds of poles currently in service. These cracks, in some cases, have become so severe that HMIPs have actually collapsed, and therefore present a great threat to public safety. Previous research at the University of Texas at Austin sought to solve the design problems posed by these pole failures by conducting both full-scale and analytical tests on optimized designs of HMIPs for fatigue loads. These studies indicated that using full penetration welds to connect 3" thick base plates to relatively thin shaft walls minimized warping of the base plate during fatigue loading, and maximized fatigue performance. Toward the end of these studies when researchers sought to test an uncoated optimized HMIP back-to-back against a galvanized HMIP of the same design and material, researchers discovered the galvanized specimen had cracked during the galvanizing process. This finding prompted an in-depth study to determine the cause of these cracks, and to determine if practices could be implemented to prevent crack formation. Initially, bend radius, chemistry, and shaft to base plate thickness studies were conducted to find how these parameters affect HMIPs during galvanizing. These parameters were found to play a minor role in the cracking of HMIPs relative to the thermal effects induced during the galvanizing process. Full-scale and analytical tests verified the impact of thermal straining within HMIPs during galvanizing. Instrumenting HMIPs and smaller HMIP stub sections with thermocouples and strain gages provided temperature and initial strain gradients resulting from exposure to the molten zinc bath. This data, as well as observations of cracks in the tested HMIP sections, aided the development of a finite element parametric study comparing HMIPs of the same 150' length and 80 mph design but varying shaft thicknesses. This research concludes that reducing the pole shaft diameter to thickness ratio reduces the likelihood of galvanizing crack formation. / text

Combining three major facets of Alfonso's final and most personal work, this holistic study utilizes a philological approach involving codicology, hermeneutics, history of art, iconology, paleography, and philosophy. Like his Cantigas de Santa María, with its vast musical, poetic and artistic dimensions, the Book of Games is a largely unexplored multi-media treasure trove of knowledge about thirteenth-century games, art and symbolism as well as personal information about the Wise King himself. Chapter I explains the historical chess, dice, backgammon and mill games ands offers the first complete English translation of the Book. Descriptions and diagrams of all 144 games, including PowerPoint presentations of all 103 chess problems using a font specially designed to match the original manuscript exactly, are presented in an international format which brings these challenging and entertaining games to life. Chapter II surveys all 151 illuminations, exploring their cultural value and identifying portraits of Alfonso, his wife, his lover, his children, his friends and his sources. Alongside traditional medieval iconography, these may represent some of the earliest known likenesses in medieval portraiture and some of the first private, non-iconographic images of a Spanish king. Chapter III interprets the literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical meanings of each game according to the Hermetic principle "As above, so below" as well as the numerological symbolism and didactic structure reflected in the book's Scholastic structure. Each game in the Libro de los juegos contains a clue "pora los entendudos e mayormientre pora aquellos que saben la Arte de Astronomia" (fol. 95r) for understanding the connection between astrology and human affairs. At the end of his ill-starred life Alfonso saw reflected in the microcosm of these games, the determinism inherent in the workings of the universe. By studying the patterns in these games, Alfonso hoped to discover how best to play the game of life using both his "seso," or skill, and his lucky number seven. The numerological and astrological significance of the numbers seven and twelve, present in the entire work's structure and especially the concluding games, relate the Book of Games to the Alfonsine legal, scientific and religious corpus.

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer if left untreated. Incidence rates of melanoma have been increasing, especially among young adults, but survival rates are high if detected early. Unfortunately, the time and costs required for dermatologists to screen all patients for melanoma are prohibitively expensive. There is a need for an automated system to assess a patient's risk of melanoma using photographs of their skin lesions. Dermatologists could use the system to aid their diagnosis without the need for special or expensive equipment. One challenge in implementing such a system is locating the skin lesion in the digital image. Most existing skin lesion segmentation algorithms are designed for images taken using a special instrument called the dermatoscope. The presence of illumination variation in digital images such as shadows complicates the task of finding the lesion. The goal of this research is to develop a framework to automatically correct and segment the skin lesion from an input photograph. The first part of the research is to model illumination variation using a proposed multi-stage illumination modeling algorithm and then using that model to correct the original photograph. Second, a set of representative texture distributions are learned from the corrected photograph and a texture distinctiveness metric is calculated for each distribution. Finally, a texture-based segmentation algorithm classifies regions in the photograph as normal skin or lesion based on the occurrence of representative texture distributions. The resulting segmentation can be used as an input to separate feature extraction and melanoma classification algorithms. The proposed segmentation framework is tested by comparing lesion segmentation results and melanoma classification results to results using other state-of-the-art algorithms. The proposed framework has better segmentation accuracy compared to all other tested algorithms. The segmentation results produced by the tested algorithms are used to train an existing classification algorithm to identify lesions as melanoma or non-melanoma. Using the proposed framework produces the highest classification accuracy and is tied for the highest sensitivity and specificity.

The purpose of this study was to examine the school environment in the municipalities of Malå and Norsjö. The study focused on cleaning, ventilation, classroom noise and illumination which are the most important factors for a good indoor climate and a good working environment in school. The study was performed by inspection of school buildings, questionnaire among school children and measurements of CO2. The result showed that all the visited schools did not meet the Swedish standards for cleaning and ventilation, also sound environment and the illumination had inadequacies in some of the classes. The result also showed that the majority of the pupils were satisfied with the indoor climate and working environment. Of the total percentage of pupils surveyed, 35% of the pupils were unsatisfied with the cleanliness of the toilets and 44% reported that the sound level is perceived as disturbing. The measurements of CO2 showed that all schools had concentrations (ranging from 541-926 ppm) below the Swedish standard (1 000 ppm), nevertheless there was indications that these concentrations may increase during a day. In conclusion this study showed that the indoor environment in the visited schools had inadequacies which may have a negative impact of the pupils. To avoid unhealthy, and from a public health perspective, these inadequacies should be attended.

Spatial intensity variation introduced by illumination changes is a challenging problem for image segmentation and classification. Many techniques have been proposed which focus on removing this illumination variation by estimating or modelling it. There is limited research on developing an illumination invariant classification technique which does not use any preprocessing. A major focus of this research is on automatically classifying synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. These are large satellite images which pose many challenges for image classification including the incidence angle effect which is a strong illumination variation across the image. Mapping of full scene satellite images of sea-ice is important for navigational purposes for ships and also for climate research. The images obtained from the RADARSAT-2 satellite are dual band, high quality images. Currently, sea ice chart are produced manually by ice analysts at the Canadian Ice Service. However, this process can be automated to reduce processing time and obtain more detailed pixel-level ice maps. An automated classification algorithm to achieve sea ice and open water separation will greatly help the ice analyst by providing sufficient guidance in the initial stages of creating an ice map. It would also help the analyst to improve the accuracy while finding ice concentrations and remove subjective bias. The existing Iterative Region Growing by Semantics (IRGS) algorithm is not effective for full scene segmentation because of the incidence angle effect. This research proposes a "glocal" (global as well as local) approach to solve this problem. The image is divided in a rectangular grid and each rectangle is segmented using IRGS. This is viewed as an over-segmentation of the original image. Finally, IRGS is used globally to glue together the over-segmented regions. This method yields acceptable results with the denoised images. The proposed technique can also be used for general image classification purposes. Extensive testing was done to investigate the best set of parameters for the proposed approach. Images were simulated with the SAR illumination variation and multiplicative speckle noise. The technique was effective for general classification and attained accurate results for full scene SAR segmentation.

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / On title page: MA in Klassieke Letterkunde. Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 120-124). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (doctoral)--Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität zu München, 1932. / Includes index of artists. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-78).