Radial Symmetry

Katherine Larson is the winner of the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. With "Radial Symmetry," she has created a transcendent body of poems that flourish in the liminal spaces that separate scientific inquiry from empathic knowledge, astute observation from sublime witness. Larson's inventive lyrics lead the reader through vertiginous landscapes - geographical, phenomenological, psychological - while always remaining attendant to the speaker's own fragile, creaturely self. An experienced research scientist and field ecologist, Larson dazzles with these sensuous and sophisticated poems, grappling with the powers of poetic imagination as well as the frightful realization of the human capacity for ecological destruction. The result is a profoundly moving collection: eloquent in its lament and celebration. Metamorphosis [an excerpt]: We dredge the stream with soup strainers and separate dragonfly and damselfly nymphs - their eyes like inky bulbs, jaws snapping at the light as if the world was full of tiny traps, each hairpin mechanism tripped for transformation. Such a ricochet of appetites insisting life, life, life against the watery dark, the tuberous reeds.

This book integrates art production, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics into 56 lessons for middle school classes. There are also 17 reproducible pages on art concepts to use as study guides. (Adapted from back cover).

Designed for a one or two semester non-majors course in introductory biology taught at most two and four-year colleges. This course typically fulfills a general education requirement, and rather than emphasizing mastery of technical topics, it focuses on the understanding of biological ideas and concepts, how they relate to real life, and appreciating the scientific methods and thought processes. Given the authors' work in and dedication to science education, this text's writing style, pedagogy, and integrated support package are all based on classroom-tested teaching strategies and learning theory. The result is a learning program that enhances the effectiveness & efficiency of the teaching and learning experience in the introductory biology course like no other before it.

Modern finite element analysis has grown into a basic mathematical tool for almost every field of engineering and the applied sciences. This introductory textbook fills a gap in the literature, offering a concise, integrated presentation of methods, applications, software tools, and hands-on projects. Included are numerous exercises, problems, and Mathematica/Matlab-based programming projects. The emphasis is on interdisciplinary applications to serve a broad audience of advanced undergraduate/graduate students with different backgrounds in applied mathematics, engineering, physics/geophysics. The work may also serve as a self-study reference for researchers and practitioners seeking a quick introduction to the subject for their research.

The two volume set LNCS 5875 and LNCS 5876 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Visual Computing, ISVC 2009, held in Las Vegas, NV, USA, in November/December 2009. The 97 revised full papers and 63 poster papers presented together with 40 full and 15 poster papers of 7 special tracks were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 320 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computer graphics; visualization; feature extraction and matching; medical imaging; motion; virtual reality; face processing; reconstruction; detection and tracking; applications; and video analysis and event recognition. The 7 additional special tracks address issues such as object recognition; visual computing for robotics; computational bioimaging; 3D mapping, modeling and surface reconstruction; deformable models: theory and applications; visualization enhanced data analysis for health applications; and optimization for vision, graphics and medical imaging: theory and applications.

Looking beyond the boundaries of various disciplines, the author demonstrates that symmetry is a fascinating phenomenon which provides endless stimulation and challenges. He explains that it is possible to readapt art to the sciences, and vice versa, by means of an evolutionary concept of symmetry. Many pictorial examples are included to enable the reader to fully understand the issues discussed. Based on the artistic evidence that the author has collected, he proposes that the new ars evolutoria can function as an example for the sciences.The book is divided into three distinct parts, each one focusing on a special issue. In Part I, the phenomenon of symmetry, including its discovery and meaning is reviewed. The author looks closely at how Vitruvius, Polyclitus, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci and Durer viewed symmetry. This is followed by an explanation on how the concept of symmetry developed. The author further discusses symmetry as it appears in art and science, as well as in the modern age. Later, he expounds the view of symmetry as an evolutionary concept which can lead to a new unity of science. In Part II, he covers the points of contact between the form-developing process in nature and art. He deals with biological questions, in particular evolution.The collection of new and precise data on perception and knowledge with regard to the postulated reality of symmetry leads to further development of the evolutionary theory of symmetry in Part III. The author traces the enormous treasure of observations made in nature and culture back to a few underlying structural principles. He demonstrates symmetry as a far-reaching, leading, structuring, causal element of evolution, as the idea lying behind nature and culture. Numerous controllable reproducible double-mirror experiments on a new stereoscopic vision verify a symmetrization theory of perception.

Image processing is fast becoming a valuable tool for analyzing multidimensional data in all areas of natural science. Since the publication of the best-selling first edition of this handbook, the field of image processing has matured in many of its aspects from ad hoc, empirical approaches to a sound science based on established mathematical and p

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Multimedia Content Representation, Classification and Security, MRCS 2006. The book presents 100 revised papers together with 4 invited lectures. Coverage includes biometric recognition, multimedia content security, steganography, watermarking, authentication, classification for biometric recognition, digital watermarking, content analysis and representation, 3D object retrieval and classification, representation, analysis and retrieval in cultural heritage, content representation, indexing and retrieval, and more.