Academic literature on the topic 'Homeless persons in motion pictures'

Abstract In May 1976, a devastating earthquake of magnitude Ms 6.5 occurred in Friuli, Italy, resulting in 976 deaths, 2000 injured, and 60,000 homeless. It is notable that, at the time of the earthquake, only one station was installed in the affected region. The resulting lack of information, combined with a dearth of mitigation planning for responding to such events, lead to a clear picture of the impact of the disaster being available only after a few days. This region is now covered by nearly 100 seismological and strong-motion stations operating in real time. Furthermore, 30 average-cost strong-motion stations have been recently added, with the goals of improving the density of real-time ground-motion observations and measuring the level of shaking recorded at selected buildings. The final goal is to allow rapid impact estimations to be made to improve the response of civil protection authorities. Today, considering the higher density seismological network, new efforts in terms of the implementation and testing of earthquake early warning systems as a possible tool for mitigating seismic risk are certainly worthwhile. In this article, we show the results obtained by analyzing in playback and using an algorithm for decentralized onsite earthquake early warning, broadband synthetic strong-motion data calculated at 18 of the stations installed in the region, while considering the magnitude and location of the 1976 Friuli earthquake. The analysis shows that the anisotropy of the lead times is related not only to the finite nature of the source but also to the slip distribution. A reduction of 10% of injured persons appears to be possible if appropriate mitigating actions are employed, such as the development of efficient automatic procedures that improve the safety of strategic industrial facilities.

Motion pictures constituted a revolutionary new technology that transformed entertainment—a rival, labor-intensive service—into a non-rival commodity. Combining growth accounting with a new output concept shows productivity growth in entertainment surpassed that in any manufacturing industry between 1900 and 1938. Productivity growth in personal services was not stagnant by definition, as current understanding has it, but instead was unparalleled in some cases. Motion pictures’ contribution to aggregate GDP and TFP growth was much smaller than that of general purpose technologies steam, railways, and electricity, but not insignificant. An observer might have noted that “motion pictures are everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”“So long as the number of persons who can be reached by a human voice is strictly limited, it is not very likely that any singer will make an advance on the £10,000 said to have been earned in a season by Mrs. Billington at the beginning of the last century, nearly as great as that which the business leaders of the present generation have made on the last.”1Alfred Marshall

This article analyses the socio-cultural status of Albinism in Africa and the role unchallenged stereotypes, irrational concepts, and unfounded beliefs play in the lives of persons with albinism. Following some beliefs, persons with albinism” do not die but vanish” to later “return as ghosts to haunt the living.” The author discusses this paradox about persons with albinism identified as hunted victims and simultaneously haunting perpetrators. The research examines the concept of albinism being a curse from dead ancestors or theodicy and its association with supernatural powers. By a comparative and diachronic approach, the study challenges unsubstantiated stereotypes. This study aims at social awareness by demystifying established myths and discussing study cases and examples referring to media, art, performing arts, literature, photography, and motion pictures.

Going to the movies and viewing videos are very popular forms of entertainment. Cinematic stories and characters influence perceptions and opinions of many viewers. Studying film depictions, therefore, provides a unique perspective on society's views of individuals with disabilities. The purpose of this descriptive study was to investigate trends in Academy Award winning films that portray persons with disabilities. Over the decades, there have been an increasing number of awards involving “disability” movies; psychiatric disorders have been most frequently portrayed. Only two of the motion pictures identified presented children or youth with impairments, while none featured learning disabilities. Implications for special education professionals, with particular emphasis on using films for instructional purposes, are discussed.

Dehumanized perception, a failure to spontaneously consider the mind of another person, may be a psychological mechanism facilitating inhumane acts like torture. Social cognition – considering someone’s mind – recognizes the other as a human being subject to moral treatment. Social neuroscience has reliably shown that participants normally activate a social-cognition neural network to pictures and thoughts of other people; our previous work shows that parts of this network uniquely fail to engage for traditionally dehumanized targets (homeless persons or drug addicts; see Harris & Fiske, 2009 , for review). This suggests participants may not consider these dehumanized groups’ minds. Study 1 demonstrates that participants do fail to spontaneously think about the contents of these targets’ minds when imagining a day in their life, and rate them differently on a number of human-perception dimensions. Study 2 shows that these human-perception dimension ratings correlate with activation in brain regions beyond the social-cognition network, including areas implicated in disgust, attention, and cognitive control. These results suggest that disengaging social cognition affects a number of other brain processes and hints at some of the complex psychological mechanisms potentially involved in atrocities against humanity.

Reading is an important skill for developing second language competence. The success of a learning a second language is by taking the power of reading. In the classroom, we will face many techniques applied to the students under the expectation that they are able to or easy to understand the lesson. For a teacher, it is necessary to find new teaching media to overcome the problems and not to forget to motivate the students. In this paper, the writer wants to know the effect of picture as a media to improve students’ reading comprehension. The purpose of this research is to find out whether the use of pictures can improve students’ reading comprehension or not. To make the students easily understand about the reading material, teacher needs to have a teaching media. Then, the writer chooses visual media that is picture to increase students’ reading mastery. Pictures are considered as the best media in teaching reading because using picture as a teaching media are able to give the students a clear illustration regarding the correlated topics in texts, tell the students what is going on, and what are the persons in the text are talking about. Nowadays, the pictures and the technologies are becoming more and more advanced. In this decade, we can already materialize a more advanced picture that added by motion and sounds by using simple applications provided in home personal computer. Moreover, the students now are quite used and interested to apply any high tech media. Based on the result of discussion, it can be concluded that pictures are theoretically can be a good media to help the students enhancing their reading comprehension. Therefore in this view, it is justifiable to hypothetically conclude that using pictures for strengthening students’ visual sense can help them to understand a text.

Io che quasi pastor tra questi boschi. A Discussion of Two favola in musica-Prologues by Ottavio Rinuccini The essay deals with the famous Florentine author and courtier Ottavio Rinuccini (1562–1621), more specifically with his librettos. Following an outline of Rinuccini’s career as a dramatist in the period 1579–1621, the prologues to his successful La rappresentazione di Dafne (1594/95) and his never performed Il Narciso (1608) are discussed. In both, Rinuccini departs from the standard procedure of having an allegorical or mythological person perform the prologue. Instead, he employs a clever coup-de-théâtre, consisting in the use of real persons, the Roman author Ovid in La rappresentazione di Dafne, and the Roman composer, singer and theoretician Giulio Caccini in Il Narciso. In the first instance, Rinuccini creates an organic connection between the prologue and the following drama since Ovid wrote the text Rinuccini dramatized. In the second play Rinuccini is even more daring, since Caccini (referred to by his well-known artistic alias Giulio Romano) would in fact have been played by himself, as far as we know a unique deployment of a trick now often used in motion pictures.

AbstractPerson Recognition based on Gait Model (PRGM) and motion features is are indeed a challenging and novel task due to their usages and to the critical issues of human pose variation, human body occlusion, camera view variation, etc. In this project, a deep convolution neural network (CNN) was modified and adapted for person recognition with Image Augmentation (IA) technique depending on gait features. Adaptation aims to get best values for CNN parameters to get best CNN model. In Addition to the CNN parameters Adaptation, the design of CNN model itself was adapted to get best model structure; Adaptation in the design was affected the type, the number of layers in CNN and normalization between them. After choosing best parameters and best design, Image augmentation was used to increase the size of train dataset with many copies of the image to boost the number of different images that will be used to train Deep learning algorithms. The tests were achieved using known dataset (Market dataset). The dataset contains sequential pictures of people in different gait status. The image in CNN model as matrix is extracted to many images or matrices by the convolution, so dataset size may be bigger by hundred times to make the problem a big data issue. In this project, results show that adaptation has improved the accuracy of person recognition using gait model comparing to model without adaptation. In addition, dataset contains images of person carrying things. IA technique improved the model to be robust to some variations such as image dimensions (quality and resolution), rotations and carried things by persons. Results for 200 persons recognition, validation accuracy was about 82% without IA and 96.23 with IA. For 800 persons recognition, validation accuracy was 93.62% without IA.

Abstract Currently 1.7 million people in Germany are living with dementia and two out of three such persons are nursed at home. Considering this challenging situation, we started in 2010 the project “moment! - motor learning and mental training for people with an incipient dementia”. Our aim was to develop a special qualification for people who are interested in conducting physical exercise groups for persons suffering from dementia. It has been scientifically proven that physical exercises show a positive impact on people with dementia: Training in groups is motivating and influences the emotional state in a positive way. Furthermore, social contacts are supported and maintained and prevent from social isolation. Therefore, a higher life fulfillment can be increased temporarily, and self-confidence is growing as well. Socio political goals are the integration of affected persons into existing social structures like sports associations, the raise of public awareness for dementia, and to strengthen the possibilities of integrating people suffering from dementia into regular social life. All scientific analysis proves that motion has a positive impact on the process of dementia and is a successful prophylactic and therapeutic support of the common medical treatment. The project includes a qualification for multipliers such as care assistants, trainers in local sport associations, nursing staff and volunteers in care organisations in order to support people suffering from dementia. This training consists of five days (and a total of 40 learning units) and is offered as an attendance seminar. During the course the participants will be trained in basic knowledge and clinical pictures of dementia, above all they receive many ideas for practical motor and mental exercises. Additionally, all participants receive a workbook and a music CD for the rhythm and dance lessons. Within the last 10 years we have qualified about 440 people in 27 trainings. Many “moment!” training-groups have been built - most of them in nursing homes and a few in cooperation with a local sports club.

One of the writers of this paper visited America at the end of the ‘90s and came across a curious translation dilemma as a foreigner. In some of the seemingly inauspicious districts of the city, there were signs saying “No Loitering” on the displays of shops or walls of residencies. These signs were causing anxiety for her, because she did not know the actual meaning of the phrase of “No Loitering”. (Her dictionary was still packed away.) Apart from being curious about the meaning of the phrase, she was rather afraid of performing “the act of loitering” since she had no idea what it meant. When she was settled she looked up to the meaning of the term “loitering”: “waiting, hanging around, lingering, dallying, etc…” (Oxford Encyclopedia). The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English defined “to loiter” as “to stand in a public place, usually with no particular or obvious purpose.” Based on this, if a person spends time hanging around or dallying in a public place with no purpose, the act of this person is called “loitering”. In the eyes of the newcomer, we suggest that “loitering” might be equal to more or less “doing nothing”. A person who is acting in the way described is almost inactive. When we view the issue from this framework, the person does not seem to be doing anything dangerous or precarious. In essence, what right or reason does someone have to command another “do not stand here”? Actually, a person who comes across such a warning can comfortably (if ironically) say that they are doing “nothing”. Loitering as a Sign of “Doing Nothing” From a semiological point of view, loitering can be seen as an honest act that reveals its intent of doing nothing by itself, because by definition loitering indicates to a lack of purpose and inactivity. On the other hand, loitering does not conjure up innocence associated with a natural state of inactivity. In fact, it conjures up possible danger, threat and crime. It does not signify doing nothing, but on the contrary it points to the possibility of being able to do “a very bad thing”. Closest to its definition, loitering might seem like an honest act; it can also be considered as the interval between inactivity and possible negative action. In this respect, loitering can be seen as the double-layered mythological sign of Barthes: namely, loitering at a denotative level is coded as innocent and honest – doing nothing signifies doing nothing. However, ideologically at a connotative level, loitering reveals itself as an action by which doing nothing is turned into doing something. Within this setting, if we accept that the subject does loiter with a “bad intention”, we can observe that the seemingly innocent acts of “lingering” and “dallying” can easily turn into proper camouflage instruments that conceal these “bad intentions”. Doing nothing can be considered to function as a curtain that briefly conceals the act of doing something or the possibility of doing something. Within this scope, loitering can also be a direct representation of a slippery possibility. We recall a specific type of postcards which was once quite fashionable. The characteristic of these postcards is to allow us to see two different images on the same surface. When those postcards are viewed from a definite angle you can see a picture of, for example, New York which is taken in daylight, and when viewed from another angle, this time the night vision of the same setting can be observed. When loitering is in question, there is a similar mechanism at work. The idea that we want to point out is that, due to the slippery nature of the category of the term loitering, neither of these pictures – each one depicting one side of the term – can be absolute. This is because of the permeable nature of these pictures. In fact, what is “real” is the very act of changing the angle while viewing the pictures: to be able to see the two pictures/definitions simultaneously. Loitering is a real conjunction point, a transformation point that we can not grasp between the two pictures/definitions: an interval point of innocent acts of dallying, lingering, and a threatening act of crime. In other words, between being a mythological and a denotative sign, loitering is the sign of possibility itself. The dominant paradigm of modern urban life defines “non-functionality” as inauspicious, immobile and therefore risky. Loitering can also be coupled with non-functionality, and this association would have two consequences: firstly the perception of the term alters toward a negative tone; secondly it opens up an area where we can discuss the body, the city and the concept of movement respectively: The loitering human body which is alive but non-functional in the public space brings to mind a series of possibilities that originate from a potential energy which is not in use. This is usually taken to be something “bad”. Namely, a person who loiters is not expected to give money to a beggar, but is often seen as likely to seize money from another person by violence. A city is a system depending on flow. In other words, it is a system depending on the flow of vehicles, people, goods, money and waste. For such a system depending on movement there is no place for stability. Thus, individuals should either take part in this flow or they should not act as a point of resistance that would be an obstacle to the movement. The late capitalist period has a “psychic” effect on urban life and individuals. Recently, this effect has been discussed with other approaches within discussions around the concept of Risk Society. Risk Society starts where the systems of security norms do not function against the threats (Beck). It is located in a new definition of modernity in which risks that are related to economic initiatives, security of employment, health and environment have increased intensively. Abundance of possibilities and uncertainties, and polysemy in Risk Society, create an intensive agenda. Concerning the psychological implications of Risk Society on individuals and their acts, Beck argues that our horizon also darkens due to risks. Hence, risks say what should not be done, but not what should be done. Risk management demands that precaution is taken through avoidance. A person who designs the world as a risk loses their ability to act in the end. The remarkable aspect of this development is that the increase in the intention of control turns this intention into its opposite (Beck). In this context, loitering can be considered as one of the risks in everyday life due to its ambiguous definition and perception. Returning to the earlier quote from Beck, the visuality of the “No Loitering” sign which tells what should be avoided or what should not be done in a commanding tone identifies a “risk zone”. In fact, while this sign functions to warn people concerning the area that the act of loitering can take place, it also embodies, constructs and strengthens the possibility of risk. Is Loitering a Crime? The prejudice supposing that loitering is dangerous reveals itself strikingly in legal matters. The “Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering” law, which was approved in 1992, allowed police to arrest persons who “remain in any one place with no apparent purpose” (“High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law”) in the presence of a suspected gang member and who then fail to disperse satisfactorily when warned by police. Thus, it is possible for perceived loiterers to be arrested under the same law, although it is not proven that these people had been previously convicted of a crime, had committed a crime before their arrest, or were planning to commit an offence. “Before lower courts found the law unconstitutional in 1995, Chicago police issued 89,000 dispersal orders under the ordinance and made 42,000 arrests. The majority of people arrested were black or Latino” (“High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law”). A group of justices considers the freedom to loiter a part of constitutional right. For example, Justice John Paul Stevens said, ‘the freedom to loiter for innocent purposes is part of the liberty’ protected by the U.S. Constitution. People in Chicago who stop to ‘engage in idle conversation or simply enjoy a cool breeze on a warm evening’ should not be subject to police commands. (“High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law”) The second group claims that “Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering” law did not focus on specific criminal conduct and suggests that Chicago city lawyers redrafted this law to make it illegal to loiter, to “establish control over identifiable areas or to intimidate others from entering those areas” (“High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law”). They argue that the lawyers are obliged to bring onto the agenda a better definition of the conduct for it to be accepted as a criminal act. A U.S. Constitutional Court abolished the “Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering” law in 1999, with ongoing discussions over the complicated nature of the issue. The legal uncertainty in the concept of loitering proves that the foreigner who had difficulties in understanding the notion was right in her concerns. All these things strikingly point to the possibility that somebody who is hanging around, chatting or lingering on a beautiful day can be arrested at any moment. The main reason the term “loiter” is obscure to the foreigner is not only because of the definitive meaning of loitering, but because the ambiguity of the term is still preserved after that. Thus, the person still has some hesitations about whether her behavior belongs to this category. The reason for her hesitation is based on the suspicion she has: she only intended to relax, dally and hang around (loiter); however, all those behaviors could be read (perceived) to suggest that she is about to engage in a criminal “bad” act. While the concept of social perception, which refers to the initial stage of evaluating the intentions of others using their body movements, hand gestures, facial expressions, and other biological motion cues (Allison, Puce and McCarthy), would explain the reason behind this reading, it is also possible to suggest that this kind of reading is conveyed by broader social norms. So, the problem which the foreigner experienced is the difficulty to create signs of doing nothing differentiating from the behaviors which are perceived as socially unacceptable. Last Word Nothing is the definition of a void. The aim of this essay is to discuss how loitering makes this void visible and representable. As defined earlier, a sign is a surface of meaning, an interface. Doing nothing, which is an intellectual or philosophical category, is represented in different ways in different cultures by some acts which form interfaces, and sometimes it is made visible. When signs of doing nothing are being discussed, one of the most important problems is related to defining and naming the acts. As congruent with the purpose of doing nothing, loitering would be the best representation of doing nothing. However, even if loitering does not include an intention to harm, it is considered that the state of danger continues since it is rather difficult to make this visible and comprehensible through bodily signs. Loitering is a state of inactivity, incapable of creating the signs that will make its intention obvious. Yet it signifies the storm itself by being perceived as the silence before the storm. References Allison, Truett, Aina Puce, and Gregory McCarthy. “Social Perception from Visual Cues: Roles of the STS region”. Trends in Cognitive Science 4 (2000): 267-278. Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1990. Beck, Ulrich. The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order. Trans. M. Ritter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. “High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law” 17 July 2006. http://www.ndsn.org/summer99/courts3.html>. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. Ed. J. Crowther. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Oxford Encyclopedia English-Turkish Dictionary. Ä°stanbul: Sabah, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Timur, Sebnem, and Melike Turkan Bagli. "A Bodily Sign of “Doing Nothing”: Loitering or the Silence before the Storm." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/05-timur-bagli.php>. APA Style Timur, S., and M. Bagli. (Jul. 2006) "A Bodily Sign of “Doing Nothing”: Loitering or the Silence before the Storm," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/05-timur-bagli.php>.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2005. Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture.
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