Amid the surge in generic text-to-video generation, the field of personalized human video generation has witnessed notable advancements, primarily concentrated on single-person scenarios. However, to our knowledge, the domain of two-person interactions, particularly in the context of martial arts combat, remains uncharted. We identify a significant gap: existing models for single-person dancing generation prove insufficient for capturing the subtleties and complexities of two engaged fighters, resulting in challenges such as identity confusion, anomalous limbs, and action mismatches. To address this, we introduce a pioneering new task, Personalized Martial Arts Combat Video Generation. Our approach, MagicFight, is specifically crafted to overcome these hurdles. Given this pioneering task, we face a lack of appropriate datasets. Thus, we generate a bespoke dataset using the game physics engine Unity, meticulously crafting a multitude of 3D characters, martial arts moves, and scenes designed to represent the diversity of combat. MagicFight refines and adapts existing models and strategies to generate high-fidelity two-person combat videos that maintain individual identities and ensure seamless, coherent action sequences, thereby laying the groundwork for future innovations in the realm of interactive video content creation. Website: https://MingfuYAN.github.io/MagicFight/ Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/MingfuYAN/KungFu-Fiesta
Pier Paolo Pasolini va escriure el 1967 l’article «Osservazioni sul piano-sequenza» en el qual equiparava el pla seqüència amb l’acció de viure. El cineasta italià, en el seu escrit, prenia com a cas d’estudi les filmacions de l’assassinat de J. F. Kennedy que es van fer des de diferents punts de vista per diferents espectadors. Afirmava que la mort és allò que permet el muntatge d’aquelles imatges. La fi de l’assassinat permet que aquest pugui entendre, analitzar, ordenar i explicar. Què passa, però, amb els fets que no s’acaben? O, amb els fets que, com a mínim en la nostra vida, no veurem acabar? Com podem representar una vida tan llarga que supera la nostra? En aquestes pàgines es presenten fotogrames del pla seqüència que vaig fer amb la intenció, fallida, de representar una vida que no para de néixer. S’acompanyen d’una veu que reflexiona sobre el text de Pasolini i el reescriu, pensant en el pla seqüència d’aquelles vides que són diferents de les nostres.
We prove that the quantum measurement process contains the same warping mechanism that occurs in categorical perception, a phenomenon ubiquitous in human perception. This warping causes stimuli belonging to the same category to be perceived as more similar, while stimuli belonging to different categories are perceived as more different. As a result of a detailed study of the quantum measurement using the Bloch representation, we identify the natural metric for pure states, namely the Fubini Study metric, and the natural metric for density states, namely the trace class metric. The warping mechanism of categorical perception is then manifested, when the distances between pure states, playing the role of stimuli for the quantum measurement, are warped into the distances between density states, playing the role of percepts for quantum measurement. We work out the example of a two-dimensional quantum model, a qubit, with 'light' and 'dark' as the two eigenstates, and show how the typical contraction and dilation warping of human perception manifest themselves in this example of the quantum measurement model of light and dark.
The purpose of this study is to examine whether there are differences in the perception of the importance of liberal arts education by role and content for each educational consumer and to derive implications for how to reflect these differences in the organization and operation of the liberal arts curriculum. To achieve this, basic statistical analyses and one-way ANOVA were conducted on survey data collected from 1,720 students, faculty, graduates, and industry representatives in Busan, Korea. The results confirmed differences in perception among each educational consumer regarding which role of general education is considered more important. In particular, students perceived all roles of general education except for ‘complementing major education’ as less important compared to other consumer groups. Clear differences were also observed in the importance attributed to specific content areas by each group. While Faculty and industry representatives perceived the importance of humanities most highly, students and graduates prioritized employment-related areas such as practical skills, IT utilization skills, and foreign language abilities. Moreover, they perceived the importance of humanities and social sciences, which correspond to the traditional liberal arts and education areas, as less significant. Based on this difference in perception of the educational consumer groups, four implications for practitioners to consider in the process of development and implementation of liberal arts education were proposed.
The aim of the article is to investigate and prove the importance of linguocultural variability in the study of foreign languages. Results. In general, the question “Does language determine culture or culture determins language?” is still definitive as a fundamental question of new studies and investigations. Results show that these and other similar questions, as well as forms of interaction of language and culture, have recently become serious in a wider context, and have been a subject of discussion. As we know, language and culture both give distribution to the process of communication, and this interconnection helps foreign language learners to declare pragmatic, semantic and syntactic meanings in order to cooperate. Scientific novelty. This article is the author’s contribution to the study of the interaction of language and culture as two interrelated social phenomena that develop under conditions of mutual influence. Conclusions. Anyone who prefers to intercommunicate with success through language and culture must be aware of the differences between various cultures. In this example, anyone who evolves such communication should consider sociolinguistic, discourse, grammatical and strategic skills. As a rule, certain concepts may be specific to one culture, and might not be found in other cultures. This case can be considered as one of the crucial reasons of investigating cultural variability of certain language, and this is primary to success in learning foreign languages. While borderlines between languages are very clearly observed and followed, cultural boundaries only originate as a consequence of speakers’ cultural “collision”. Observations give us a chance to make a conclusion that in most countries, multiculturalism exists as a form of equal coexistence of different cultures within the same country. As far as people are related to various cultures, their cultural values are quite different. One can consider that numbers of values exist simply because they “disagree” from each other.
This article summons John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?”, reframing its analysis on human–animal relations under Modernity (with its emphasis on the gaze at a distance) through the entangled reflexivities of listening together with more-than-humans others. If for Berger, animals “in zoos ... constitute[d] the living monument to their own disappearance,” field recording helped enshrine their extinction while archiving their voices. Here, I intend to stress the significance of more-than-human vibrations and sounds as transformative zones of contact, especially in our increasingly impoverished urban biomes. And by arguing for an expansion of vibrational attention to such social-environmental contexts, re-assess listening as an eco-sensible methodology that understands both humans, more-than-humans and technology as part of integrated ecologies.
It has been proposed that the flat rotation curves observed at large radii in disk galaxies can be interpreted as an effect of General Relativity (GR) instead of the presence of dark matter (DM) halos in Newtonian gravity. In Ciotti (2022) the problem is rigorously explored in the special setting of the weak-field, low-velocity gravitomagnetic limit of GR. The rotation curves are obtained for purely baryonic disk models with realistic density profiles, and compared with the predictions of Newtonian gravity for the same disks, in absence of DM. The rotation curves are indistinguishable, with percentual GR corrections at all radii of the order of $\approx 10^{-6}$ or less, so that DM halos are required in gravitomagnetism as in Newtonian gravity. From a more general point of view, a list of the most urgent problems that must be addressed by any proposed GR-based alternative to the existence of DM, is given.
Diederik Aerts, Jonito Aerts Arguëlles, Lester Beltran
et al.
We present a theoretical and empirical investigation of the statistical behaviour of the words in a text produced by human language. To this aim, we analyse the word distribution of various texts of Italian language selected from a specific literary corpus. We firstly generalise a theoretical framework elaborated by ourselves to identify 'quantum mechanical statistics' in large-size texts. Then, we show that, in all analysed texts, words distribute according to 'Bose--Einstein statistics' and show significant deviations from 'Maxwell--Boltzmann statistics'. Next, we introduce an effect of 'word randomization' which instead indicates that the difference between the two statistical models is not as pronounced as in the original cases. These results confirm the empirical patterns obtained in texts of English language and strongly indicate that identical words tend to 'clump together' as a consequence of their meaning, which can be explained as an effect of 'quantum entanglement' produced through a phenomenon of 'contextual updating'. More, word randomization can be seen as the linguistic-conceptual equivalent of an increase of temperature which destroys 'coherence' and makes classical statistics prevail over quantum statistics. Some insights into the origin of quantum statistics in physics are finally provided.
Today we find ourselves immersed in digital environments made available by centralised social media platforms on a daily basis. While these platforms did provide users expanded connectivity and visibility, they also confined the same user in an economic system focused on collection and commodification of personal data for profit, and in return used them as resources of free labour. In light of this analysis, is it possible to carry out an artistic practice within centralised social media platforms, therefore take an active part in them, while remaining critically engaged, in the attempt to highlight some of the structural dynamics and problems of these realities?
In this paper some fundamental aspects of the aforementioned channels will be discussed through the analysis of selected works and two methods utilised by the author to avoid the culture of interveillance.
Direct imaging methods recover the presence, position, and shape of the unknown obstacles in time-harmonic inverse scattering without a priori knowledge of either the physical properties or the number of disconnected components of the scatterer, i.e., on the boundary condition. However, most of these methods require multi-static data and only obtain partial information about the obstacle. These qualitative methods are based on constructing indicator functions defined on the domain of interest, which help determine whether a spatial point or point source lies inside or outside the scatterer. This paper explains the main themes of each of these methods, with emphasis on highlighting the advantages and limitations of each scheme. Additionally, we will classify each method and describe how some of these methods are closely related to each other.
Alberto Quílez-Robres, N. Moyano, Alejandra Cortés-Pascual
Academic achievement has been linked to executive functions. However, it is necessary to clarify the different predictive role that executive functions have on general and specific academic achievement and to determine the most predictive executive factor of this academic achievement. The relationship and predictive role between executive functions and their components (initiative, working memory, task monitoring, organization of materials, flexibility, emotional control, inhibition, self-monitoring) with academic achievement are analyzed in this study, both globally and specifically in the areas of Language Arts and Mathematics, in 133 students from 6 to 9 years of age. The relationship obtained in Pearson’s correlation analysis does not differ substantially between overall achievement (r = 0.392) and specific achievement (r = 0.361, r = 0.361), but task monitoring (r = 0.531, r = 0.455, r = 0.446) and working memory (r = 0.512, r = 0.475, r = 0.505) had a greater relationship with general and specific achievement. Finally, regression analyses based on correlation results indicate that executive functions predict general academic performance (14.7%) and specific performance (12.3%, 12.2%) for Language Arts and Mathematics, respectively. Furthermore, working memory and task supervision represent 32.5% of general academic performance, 25.5% of performance in Language Arts, and 27.1% of performance in Mathematics. In conclusion, this study yielded exploratory data on the possible executive functions (task supervision and working memory) responsible for good general academic achievements and specific academic achievements in Mathematics and Language Arts.
Although consensus on a definition of Arts Entrepreneurship (AE) is helpful, formal theories are needed to help AE researchers and educators explain what the general AE process is and why it matters. As discussed in this article, such theories can help us understand the relationship between art innovation, art market creation and art value exchange in Artworlds. Such theories can also help AE educators in particular clarify distinctions and similarities between the systematic practice of AE and business entrepreneurship, challenge past and present assumptions about AE and may encourage AE educators to pivot towards new pedagogical directions.
This article will investigate a general concern with the practical implementation of inclusion as recommended in policy documents in art education in general and the Nordic Community School of Music and Arts (NCSMA) specifically. We ask: What do policy documents mean by inclusion? In what way can or do art educators practice inclusionary strategies? We consider homogeneity in this field and the need for pluralism in this institutional framework. We will diffract discourses through words and images in threads from a post-colonial perspective, critical race and Whiteness studies. Struggling through our blind spots in knowledge production, we seek to understand how Other perspectives received in the NCSMA can emerge. The three research scholars from the field of education and art embody different educational and geographical starting points and differing but shifting power positions in various contexts. This triangle of embodied knowledge allows us to investigate these conflicting positions and perform intentional antiracist response-ability in research related to the NCSMA as an educational institution. Our analysis shows a discrepancy between general intentions of inclusion and practical outcomes.
The paper discusses two eighteenth-century magnates’ residences, the architecture of which functioned as a political statement, drawing on cultural codes rooted in the ancient tradition and borrowing from the model of Versailles. The palaces of Jan Klemens Branicki (1689–1771) in Białystok and of Eustachy Potocki (1720–1768) in Radzyń were built in the mid-eighteenth century. The analysis of their forms, spatial design and sculptures sheds light on their function as a ceremonial space serving political purposes. Our study focuses on the examination of the entrance gates, façade decoration and the sculptures located in the vestibules, which play a key role in the symbolic structures of the residences, as well as the gardens with their pavilions and sculptures. Together these elements constituted the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) of these magnates dreaming of being elected king.
Este artigo aborda como a relação entre arte e verdade (pode a arte expressar a verdade?) é colocada
pela primeira vez no mundo ocidental em Platão, com isso se esboçando o horizonte possível de
desenvolvimento e interpretação da questão. Objetiva destacar sua relevância para o início da
discussão teórica sobre o que é arte, sua função, conceito e como pode ser entendida. Cabe observar
que esta abordagem é construída em perspectiva hermenêutico-fenomenológica, a partir do diálogo,
sobretudo, com o pensamento de Martin Heidegger.