'True direction': Aspects of aestheticism in New Zealand (1880-1913)

<p>This thesis examines aspects of Aestheticism in New Zealand. Despite the paucity of literature written on Aestheticism in colonial contexts, there is evidence that Aesthetic tendencies flourished in the art and literature of the ‘South Seas’. Aestheticism in Australia and New Zealand has been categorised as ‘insignificant’ within national art histories, overlooking the complex ways whereby aspects of Aestheticism arrived in the antipodes through international exhibitions, touring theatre productions, academically trained artists from Europe, and dispersal through literature. It is a moment in our national art history that should be recognised. My research is the first comprehensive study of Aestheticism and its impact on applied art and the general lifestyles of artists and patrons in New Zealand. With particular focus on James McLauchlan Nairn and Charles Frederick Goldie, this study revises the status of two New Zealand artists who have been viewed as representative of opposing artistic camps—Nairn, a bohemian promoting Impressionist and open air landscape practice, and Goldie, a painter of the ‘Old World’ tradition of academic instruction. I suggest the oppositional status that has been applied to these painters in New Zealand’s art history is no more than a polemical device. By contrast, Aestheticism allows us to understand how both artists are not too dissimilar in certain aspects of their artistic ambition. They were both educated in Paris and this alone provided them with a sense of authority to dictate art and fashion when advising their upper-class clientele in New Zealand. My research has revealed how Nairn and Goldie inhabited similar social circles, in Wellington and Auckland respectively, and integrated aspects of the ‘cult of beauty’ into their art and living environments. Based on this research, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of how local and international tendencies interacted within New Zealand’s art.</p>

'True direction': Aspects of aestheticism in New Zealand (1880-1913)

<p>This thesis examines aspects of Aestheticism in New Zealand. Despite the paucity of literature written on Aestheticism in colonial contexts, there is evidence that Aesthetic tendencies flourished in the art and literature of the ‘South Seas’. Aestheticism in Australia and New Zealand has been categorised as ‘insignificant’ within national art histories, overlooking the complex ways whereby aspects of Aestheticism arrived in the antipodes through international exhibitions, touring theatre productions, academically trained artists from Europe, and dispersal through literature. It is a moment in our national art history that should be recognised. My research is the first comprehensive study of Aestheticism and its impact on applied art and the general lifestyles of artists and patrons in New Zealand. With particular focus on James McLauchlan Nairn and Charles Frederick Goldie, this study revises the status of two New Zealand artists who have been viewed as representative of opposing artistic camps—Nairn, a bohemian promoting Impressionist and open air landscape practice, and Goldie, a painter of the ‘Old World’ tradition of academic instruction. I suggest the oppositional status that has been applied to these painters in New Zealand’s art history is no more than a polemical device. By contrast, Aestheticism allows us to understand how both artists are not too dissimilar in certain aspects of their artistic ambition. They were both educated in Paris and this alone provided them with a sense of authority to dictate art and fashion when advising their upper-class clientele in New Zealand. My research has revealed how Nairn and Goldie inhabited similar social circles, in Wellington and Auckland respectively, and integrated aspects of the ‘cult of beauty’ into their art and living environments. Based on this research, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of how local and international tendencies interacted within New Zealand’s art.</p>

Off-Grid DoA Estimation via Two-Stage Cascaded Neural Network

This paper introduces an off-grid DoA estimation via two-stage cascaded network which can resolve a mismatch between true direction-of-arrival (DoA) and discrete angular grid. In the first-stage network, the initial DoAs are estimated with a convolutional neural network (CNN), where initial DoAs are mapped on the discrete angular grid. To deal with the mismatch between initially estimated DoAs and true DoAs, the second-stage network estimates a tuning vector which represents the difference between true DoAs and nearest discrete angles. By using tuning vector, the final DoAs are estimated by moving initially estimated DoAs as much as the difference between true DoAs and nearest discrete angles. The limitation on estimation accuracy induced by the discrete angular grid can be resolved with the proposed two-stage network so that the estimation accuracy can be further enhanced. Simulation results show that adding the second-stage network after the first-stage network helps improve the estimation accuracy by resolving mismatch induced by the discretized grid. In the aspect of the implementation of machine learning, results also show that using CNN and using PReLU as the activation function is the best option for accurate estimation.

Determination of contribution from the metachronous components of magnetization to the Precambrian paleomagnetic of the Karelian craton

The secondary (metachronous) component of magnetization isolated in the Precambrian complexes of the Karelian craton have been analyzed. The mean directions of high temperature components (deviations from the true direction) depending on the contribution of secondary magnetization components resulting from uneven-aged tectono-magmatic events. It has been shown that the Precambrian key poles often coincide with the vector sum of the ages of Phanerozoic component of magnetization. The conclusion about the primary/secondary origin of the Precambrian paleomagnetic poles must be set on the basis of the integrated petro-paleomagnetic and isotopic data and geological correlations, not only tests of paleomagnetic reliability.

Aging and the Visual Perception of Motion Direction: Solving the Aperture Problem

An experiment required younger and older adults to estimate coherent visual motion direction from multiple motion signals, where each motion signal was locally ambiguous with respect to the true direction of pattern motion. Thus, accurate performance required the successful integration of motion signals across space (i.e., accurate performance required solution of the aperture problem) . The observers viewed arrays of either 64 or 9 moving line segments; because these lines moved behind apertures, their individual local motions were ambiguous with respect to direction (i.e., were subject to the aperture problem). Following 2.4 seconds of pattern motion on each trial (true motion directions ranged over the entire range of 360° in the fronto-parallel plane), the observers estimated the coherent direction of motion. There was an effect of direction, such that cardinal directions of pattern motion were judged with less error than oblique directions. In addition, a large effect of aging occurred—The average absolute errors of the older observers were 46% and 30.4% higher in magnitude than those exhibited by the younger observers for the 64 and 9 aperture conditions, respectively. Finally, the observers’ precision markedly deteriorated as the number of apertures was reduced from 64 to 9.

The Aperture Problem

The accurate visual perception of an object’s motion requires the simultaneous integration of motion information arising from that object along with the segmentation of motion information from other objects. When moving objects are seen through apertures, or viewing windows, the resultant illusions highlight some of the challenges that the visual system faces as it balances motion segmentation with motion integration. One example is the barber pole Illusion, in which lines appear to translate orthogonally to their true direction of emotion. Another is the illusory perception of incoherence when simple rectilinear objects translate or rotate behind disconnected apertures. Studies of these illusions suggest that visual motion processes frequently rely on simple form cues.

Properties of pattern and component direction-selective cells in area MT of the macaque

Neurons in area MT/V5 of the macaque visual cortex encode visual motion. Some cells are selective for the motion of oriented features (component direction-selective, CDS); others respond to the true direction of complex patterns (pattern-direction selective, PDS). There is a continuum of selectivity in MT, with CDS cells at one extreme and PDS cells at the other; we compute a pattern index that captures this variation. It is unknown how a neuron's pattern index is related to its other tuning characteristics. We therefore analyzed the responses of 792 MT cells recorded in the course of other experiments from opiate-anesthetized macaque monkeys, as a function of the direction, spatial frequency, drift rate, size, and contrast of sinusoidal gratings and of the direction and speed of random-dot textures. We also compared MT responses to those of 718 V1 cells. As expected, MT cells with higher pattern index tended to have stronger direction selectivity and broader direction tuning to gratings, and they responded better to plaids than to gratings. Strongly PDS cells also tended to have smaller receptive fields and stronger surround suppression. Interestingly, they also responded preferentially to higher drift rates and higher speeds of moving dots. The spatial frequency preferences of PDS cells depended strongly on their preferred temporal frequencies, whereas these preferences were independent in component-selective cells. Pattern direction selectivity is statistically associated with many response properties of MT cells but not strongly associated with any particular property. Pattern-selective signals are thus available in association with most other signals exported by MT.

Sparse Array Angle Estimation Using Reduced-Dimension ESPRIT-MUSIC in MIMO Radar

Sparse linear arrays provide better performance than the filled linear arrays in terms of angle estimation and resolution with reduced size and low cost. However, they are subject to manifold ambiguity. In this paper, both the transmit array and receive array are sparse linear arrays in the bistatic MIMO radar. Firstly, we present an ESPRIT-MUSIC method in which ESPRIT algorithm is used to obtain ambiguous angle estimates. The disambiguation algorithm uses MUSIC-based procedure to identify the true direction cosine estimate from a set of ambiguous candidate estimates. The paired transmit angle and receive angle can be estimated and the manifold ambiguity can be solved. However, the proposed algorithm has high computational complexity due to the requirement of two-dimension search. Further, the Reduced-Dimension ESPRIT-MUSIC (RD-ESPRIT-MUSIC) is proposed to reduce the complexity of the algorithm. And the RD-ESPRIT-MUSIC only demands one-dimension search. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.