By tracing the historical activities of the Japan-China Society of Architecture and Building Technology (JCSABT, 1973–2003), which was established in Japan in 1973, this study firstly provides an overview of the friendly exchange groups visiting China from Japan over a 30-year period. Drawing upon a systematic review of Nichi-Chu Kenchiku [Japan – China Architecture], the official journal of JCSABT, this study delineates the evolving professional concerns and focal themes of Japanese architects engaged in China. The focus gradually shifted from early concerns with the construction of socialist China to an interest in cultural heritage, particularly Chinese vernacular architecture, and later to friendly visits and international exchanges. These shifts reflect the dynamic interplay between political context, architectural evolution, and cultural exchange. The study concludes that beneath the surface of “friendly diplomacy,” China and Japan each pursued distinct agendas. China seeks to learn advanced techniques from Japan, while Japan, faced with pressing issues such as widening urban-rural disparities and environmental crises, endeavours to learn from China’s urban and rural development models. Above all,“architectural diplomacy” played a crucial role in fostering Sino – Japanese friendship. The interplay among state power, architecture, and socioeconomic forces collectively contributed to strengthening bilateral relations in Cold War era.
This paper presents a practice-based exploratory project focused on the codesign and evaluation of didactic materials for children with developmental disabilities participating in equine-assisted learning interventions. The project was conducted during the 2022/2023 and 2023/2024 academic years through a collaboration between the Art Education Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, the Don Kihot Association and partner organisations. Ten graduate students participated as part of their coursework in the subjects Pedagogy, and Methodology of Fine Arts. The primary aim of the project was to integrate theoretical instruction with artistic practice through project-based learning and gamification, while preparing future teachers to design inclusive didactic materials adapted to the needs of children with developmental disabilities. A secondary aim was to explore how such codesigned materials function in practice during equine-assisted learning sessions. The study adopted a qualitative, practice-oriented approach. Data were collected through student portfolios, teachers’ and collaborators’ reflective notes, and structured evaluation forms completed by practitioners during the application of the didactic materials with three child participants. The project resulted in ten original didactic toys and games. The findings indicate that student engagement and intrinsic motivation increased through real-world, socially relevant design tasks. Practitioner evaluations suggest that the usability and acceptance of didactic toys depend strongly on the child’s specific type of developmental difficulty as well as on task complexity, thus highlighting the importance of adaptability and individualisation. The study contributes to practice-based research in inclusive art education and equine-assisted learning by offering empirically grounded reflections on the design and use of didactic materials.
Leonard Nürnberg, Dennis Bontempi, Suraj Pai
et al.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform medical imaging by automating image analysis and accelerating clinical research. However, research and clinical use are limited by the wide variety of AI implementations and architectures, inconsistent documentation, and reproducibility issues. Here, we introduce MHub$.$ai, an open-source, container-based platform that standardizes access to AI models with minimal configuration, promoting accessibility and reproducibility in medical imaging. MHub$.$ai packages models from peer-reviewed publications into standardized containers that support direct processing of DICOM and other formats, provide a unified application interface, and embed structured metadata. Each model is accompanied by publicly available reference data that can be used to confirm model operation. MHub$.$ai includes an initial set of state-of-the-art segmentation, prediction, and feature extraction models for different modalities. The modular framework enables adaptation of any model and supports community contributions. We demonstrate the utility of the platform in a clinical use case through comparative evaluation of lung segmentation models. To further strengthen transparency and reproducibility, we publicly release the generated segmentations and evaluation metrics and provide interactive dashboards that allow readers to inspect individual cases and reproduce or extend our analysis. By simplifying model use, MHub$.$ai enables side-by-side benchmarking with identical execution commands and standardized outputs, and lowers the barrier to clinical translation.
Designing high-performance neural networks for new tasks requires balancing optimization quality with search efficiency. Current methods fail to achieve this balance: neural architectural search is computationally expensive, while model retrieval often yields suboptimal static checkpoints. To resolve this dilemma, we model the performance gains induced by fine-grained architectural modifications as edit-effect evidence and build evidence graphs from prior tasks. By constructing a retrieval-augmented model refinement framework, our proposed M-DESIGN dynamically weaves historical evidence to discover near-optimal modification paths. M-DESIGN features an adaptive retrieval mechanism that quickly calibrates the evolving transferability of edit-effect evidence from different sources. To handle out-of-distribution shifts, we introduce predictive task planners that extrapolate gains from multi-hop evidence, thereby reducing reliance on an exhaustive repository. Based on our model knowledge base of 67,760 graph neural networks across 22 datasets, extensive experiments demonstrate that M-DESIGN consistently outperforms baselines, achieving the search-space best performance in 26 out of 33 cases under a strict budget.
Si bien es cierto que la proximidad temporal impide valoraciones definitivas, se puede afirmar que en 2008 emergió una política emancipadora a escala planetaria que tuvo su momento culminante en 2011. Esta emergencia supuso, en el ámbito de lo urbano, la intensificación de la relación entre arquitectos, sociólogos, artistas, y los propios vecinos así como la incorporación de prácticas colaborativas y asamblearias provenientes de los movimientos de base en la construcción de los procesos de regeneración urbana, como respuesya a la acentuación de la crisis del capitalismo neoliberal.
El presente artículo ejemplificará este modus operandi en el Comboi a la Fresca, encuentro de la red Arquitecturas Colectivas que tuvo lugar en Valencia en 2011. Se parte de la idea de que las micropolíticas emancipadoras que se dieron lugar en Valencia, lejos de caer en el olvido por ser producto de un estado de ensoñación, articularon una dinámica de transformación subjetiva construida desde el cuestionamiento de las propias prácticas.
Modernist propositions long have been understood as atemporal—somehow outside of time—or insistently hailing the future. This temporal framework suppresses the contributions of those excluded from modernist canons, particularly Black women. In this article, visual and material analysis of sculptural works produced in the 1970s and 1980s by U.S. Black women artists Beverly Buchanan, Senga Nengudi, and Betye Saar reveal how Black feminists have engaged with modernist protocols in order to redress cultural erasures of Black women. These practices exemplify <i>Black feminist modernisms</i>, or creative practices that unsettle the racist and sexist logics of dominant cultural institutions. Each of these artists utilizes haptic surfaces as a method for defying institutional modernism’s obfuscation of the past. The analysis focuses on Buchanan’s defiance of memorial erasures, Nengudi’s reenactment of labor, including in its historical forms, and Saar’s adaptation of generational memory-making processes. Ultimately, these artists’ rejection of a “timeless” modernism demands that viewers understand the present moment in relationship to a still-evolving past. In this way, Buchanan, Nengudi, and Saar position the present as an accumulation, rather than transcendence, of historical occurrences.
This paper aims to examine the literary strategies and political perspectives of Somnuek Chusil, a renowned Nora artist in the Southern Thai region. Contrast to recent international and Thai research on Nora dance that focused on the aspect of ritual, social function, and adaptation under the condition of global modernity, the authors’ analysis centers on the noted Nora artist’s lyrical composition, encompassing 40 of lyrics, to understand his political worldview and literary strategy as part of local experience to the changing of Thai society. The findings reveal four language strategies employed by Somnuek—simile, hyperbole, the use of idioms, and incorporation of the Southern Thai dialect. Of particular note is the dialect’s distinctive role in critiquing political figures and instilling a sense of awareness regarding rights, freedom, and democratic citizenship. Despite the diverse interpretations of political concepts in global academia, Somnuek skillfully harnesses various dialects and writing techniques making him being locally competent interlocutor, and ascending to the status of a famous folk artist in southern Thailand.
The geographical nature of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is distinguished by its environmental diversity and its climatic conditions, in addition to the richness and diversity of cultural legacies that appear clearly in the spaces interior design of the traditional Jordanian houses.This architectural heritage, is considered one of the most important elements in preserving the special characteristics of peoples and nations and the distinctive cultural differences. And with the growing interest in the environmental design elements, it was found that many of the old designs carry a lot of elements and treatments that exploited or employed the available environmental elements to provide the highest levels of comfort in houses design. This is because it works to enhance the internal environment by employing the available environmental elements to reduce and limit the negative impacts on the environment and construction, in addition to using the natural environment to enhance the internal environment, which works to provide the highest levels of comfort in designing, reducing energy consumption and preserving the environment.The study will examine the green design, the concept of green architecture, the features of green buildings and the foundations on which the green design is based, in order to identify the suitability of the interior design of these buildings with green architecture.The research depends on monitoring and analyzing the similarities and differences between the heritage houses in some areas of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and its internal spaces, to reach the most important points that must be restored and preserved. thus, listing them and developing proposals for ways to restore and preserve them.
Inside a Mediterranean scenario of population asymmetries, this paper talks about and ongoing research that aims to highlight issues, identify a working method and tools able to support sustainable regenerative design strategies for abandoned historical small(er) towns and their landscapes, especially in inlands contexts. With these objectives, the research chooses Basilicata region, in the South of Italy, as emblematic for its structural marginality- morphological, infrastructural, social and economic -, bio-cultural diverse and diffused heritage and its seemingly unreversible depopulation process. Aging, low birth rates and high level of emigration has produced the abandonment of small(er) towns, of rural areas and, by the contrary, an increasing wilderness, changing the millennial settlement structure and impacting on socio-ecological resilience. Inside the theoretical framework of landscape/ecological urbanism and related design- oriented experimentations, the constellation of abandoned small(er) towns are interpreted as urban densities of a performative bio-cultural green infrastructure that could support, through design, the contemporary challenge of sustainable development, with a relational and glocal approach. Small(er) towns regeneration is view inside a more complex, interdisciplinary and holistic frame in which inter-scalarity, flux, dynamic and time variability are crucial. Performative bio-cultural green infrastructure, through the multiplication of public space, could support sustainable processes, in an ecological, economic and social sense. From an applicational point of view, the research intends to build a dynamic atlas for the regeneration of abandoned small(er) towns; the atlas is conceived both as a reading and a design tool able to support polyphonic and open process of sustainable regeneration.
Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology, Architecture
Inlaid art has undergone alternations from the beginning of its existence in Iran until the present era. Companionship in inlaid art can be examined from several perspectives; the first is the association of this art with the nature of its raw materials, which takes on a diverse shape and form due to the characteristics of these materials; second, the role of wood art accompaniment as an art complement to inlaid art from the point of view of technique and procedure, however, the most significant of these are the effects of traditional patterns on inlaid art in terms of design and the developments that occur in the field of contemporary inlay and so far comprehensively has not been purposefully studied. This research is accomplished via a descriptive and analytical methods by the means of library data. The findings of the research indicate that these accompaniments have always been associated with remarkable innovations and developments in contemporary inlaid art, and this research focuses on the analysis of traditional motifs in contemporary inlays in order to achieve changes in the inlaid art by relying on the contemporary artworks of Tehran; in such a way that the influence of traditional motifs in achieving luxurious formulations can be achieved. It is certain that inlaid art, due to the inherent need for role and design, has continuously benefited from the combination of beautiful and executable designs and designs in each period throughout history, and in the contemporary period with artistic developments in Tehran and the presence of prominent artists in the capital. Art has also manifested itself with new, valuable and glorious innovations and formulations that are unprecedented in the history of Iranian inlay.
Research aims:
1. A study of traditional motifs in Iranian inlaid art.
2. An overview on the widespread effects of designs on contemporary Iranian inlay.
Research questions:
1. What is the role of traditional patterns in the "design" of the magnificent works of contemporary inlay?
2. How are the bases for using traditional motifs in contemporary inlay formed?
Let $K$ be a knot in the 3-sphere, viewed as the ideal boundary of hyperbolic 4-space $\mathbb{H}^4$. We prove that the number of minimal discs in $\mathbb{H}^4$ with ideal boundary $K$ is a knot invariant. I.e.\ the number is finite and doesn't change under isotopies of $K$. In fact this gives a family of knot invariants, indexed by an integer describing the extrinsic topology of how the disc sits in $\mathbb{H}^4$. These invariants can be seen as Gromov--Witten invariants counting $J$-holomorphic discs in the twistor space $Z$ of $\mathbb{H}^4$. Whilst Gromov--Witten theory suggests the general scheme for defining the invariants, there are substantial differences in how this must be carried out in our situation. These are due to the fact that the geometry of both $\mathbb{H}^4$ and $Z$ becomes singular at infinity, and so the $J$-holomorphic curve equation is degenerate, rather than elliptic, at the boundary. This means that both the Fredholm and compactness arguments involve completely new features.
پژوهش پیش رو، که به روش تحلیلی- توصیفی انجام شده است، به زن به مثابه ابژه، موضوع و عنصر مهم درون آثار هنری میپردازد. تمرکز پژوهش حاضر بر چگونگی سیر تحول مفهوم زن در قلمروِ هنر عکاسی و به دنبال آن، موج عظیم جنبش پاپآرت در عصر تولید و مصرفگرایی است؛ و به منظور نشان دادنِ تغییر معنای هویت زن در این دوره، از نظریه «شکست هاله» والتر بنیامین در بیان مفهوم بازتولیدپذیری در دوران پستمدرن استفاده شده است. با بررسی دیدگاه بازتولید و تبدیل «معنای والا» یا «هاله معنایی آثار هنری»، میتوان به محورهای این پژوهش، شامل چگونگی تغییر هویت، اصالت و هاله معنای سنتی زن، و تبدیل آن به کالا و ابژهای جذاب در تبلیغات مدرن و پست مدرن پاسخ داد. همچنین، میتوان دید که، آیا این موج تحول و تبدیلِ مبتذلِ مفهوم زن به کالاگونگی و شکست هالهِ آن، به رغم محدودیتهای نمایش زن در تبلیغات به هدف حفظ شان و هویت والای او، در ایران نیز رسوخ کرده است یا خیر.
Introduction In the Manichaean Ms. M538 (verso), corresponding to ag3 in A Reader in Manichaean Middle Persian and Parthian (Boyce, 1975, 92) there is a sentence which was translated by scholars with some added words or phrases as well as few comments laid in round brackets by them; so that, in the sentence in question, because of the ambiguity of the meaning followed by the obscurity of the syntax, we see no more than uncertain translation. In the present article, the phrase that is the subject of discussion contains a difficult word in a short sentence, the inexplicable syntactical structure of which has not been unlocked in any way. This word is the Parthian semi-hapax “pdm’dg /padmādag/” and it is the very basic element causing some obscurity in the meaning of that phrase. But, by scrutinizing any available evidence of “pdm’d(g)” in Parthian, and only one (pym’d /paymād) in Manichaean middle Persian, which we have, the problem in that case is to be solved to provide us the relatively exact meaning (as far as possible) of this word, then, it might resolve the unclear concept of that phrase and sentence in Ms. M538. There is also another word (pd /pad/) that fairly clears up the phrase but those scholars who took this text into consideration did not pay much attention to it. 2. Methodology Although there are five or six samples in Manichaean Parthian and Middle Persian fragments for “pdm’d” and its derivatives, due to badly preserved texts, either the two side of this word is lost, or by studying the remnant of the phrase, it is impossible to approach the logical concept of the matter related by the author; therefore, every word like these are in the same situation like a hapax. Thus, alongside considering the precious academic studies done by scholars, we have to scan all of the fragmentary evidence of “pdm’dg” to make an inference about the original proper meaning of this word in the phrase M538, which one of the literal meanings of “pdm’dg” could approximately fit with it. This means that according to this plan every direct fragment must be exhibited here, and any related suggestions made by scholars need to be under discussion. 3. Discussion Ten lines of Ms. M538 recto is about veneration of Father of Greatness and the rest lines have been distorted. The verso begins with blessing of twelve Aeons and then ether, praised earth and shiny inhabitants of [light world] are venerated; in this part it runs: “kādūš kādūš ō šahrān rōšnān, kē pad tō wuzurgīft radanīn padmādag ahēnd”. Only the last part of this was translated by Boyce as: “who are apportioned (?) (as) Jewels (?)” (Boyce, 1975: 92). Mirfakhraie rendered it into “holy, holy to realms of light which are appointed by your greatness jewels” (Mirfakhraie, 2008: 87). By adding a word to his translation, Klimkeit translated it with passive voice without any explanation about that; then (in note no.6) he made reference to a view proposed by Sundermann who pointed it out to him (Klimkeit, 1993, 30, 33). It seems that there is no disagreement between scholars about inflection and the meaning of “padmādag”; this word is past participle of “padmād-” “measure”, but for several reason mentioned above, its syntactical role in M538 has remained still unknown. In Mirfakhraie and Boyce’s translations “kē” which refers to “šahrān” is the subject of the sentence and “padmādag” becomes predicate of that. In Klimkeit’s, the translation is unclear, but in the comment suggested by Sundermann “padmādag” has been rendered two times: once as a past simple verb (appointed) and later as an adjective (fitting) for “radanīn”; so, by this latter interpretation, “padmādag” is not predicate but adjective for the predicate (= radanīn). The simplified form of this sentence is “šahrān pad tō wuzurgīft radanīn padmādag ahēnd”. Now considering this, there are two notes offered below: 1) as it has been recognized by Sundermann, in this sentence, “padmādag” is an adjective and not the predicate. 2) Therefore, the matter in this phrase is “to fit jewels” into the Greatness of Father, and this is that significance which was presumably stressed by the author, thus “padmādag” in that case is not predicate here but adjective for the predicate. By this analysis, it can be said that the Aeons placed on the Greatness of Father are actually “implanted jewels set up on (pad) or situated within Greatness of you (oh, Father!)”. Moreover, in Manichaean texts (like ax2 or al3; see Boyce, 1975: 107, 96), the Aeons are addressed as jewels [of + adjective, or appositive]. By art of jewelry-making and facet, a jewel-maker who measures and places gems on precious metal is known as “stone-setter”; thus, in that phrase the suitable translation for “padmādag” could be some synonym words like “implanted, placed, appointed”. Thus, by this explanation, syntactical structure of the phrase became properly complete, so that without any added or omitted words, or frequent usage of question marks and parenthesis, the whole concept of the sentence would be unveiled: “holy, holy to shiny Aeons who are the placed jewels on your Greatness [oh, Father!]”. Further evidence of this word is listed below in brief: 1. In well-preserved M6040, line 9, there is the infinitive form “padmādan” which means “make measurement, pouring (something) into a vessel” (Sundermann, 1981, 87). 2. In M8100, line 14, the past participle “padmād” can be rendered as verb, past simple tense, 3rd sg. (as plur.) pass., which means “[the Aeons] was measured”; or adjective which means “fitted, adorned [Aeones]”. 3. In M101h, line 5, “padmād” is past simple verb, 3rd sg., and it possibly means “placed, settled” in: “the earth settled trees and spring with …”(cf. Henning’s translation: “keep measured the mixture (?)”, for “zamīg” had been read by him as “wimēg”; see Henning, 1943: 63). According to Sundermann’s view, in M101h we do not have a single word as “pdm’d /padmād/”, and this transliteration might be wrong; for actually there are two words which must be transliterated separately to “pd /pad/” and “m’d /mād/” (mother), since there is a significant gap between these; then he gives an incomplete unrelated example with a question mark denoting his uncertainty (Sundermann, 1975, 299, n. 18). 4. In M433a, line 4, we see the only remained form (pymʼd /paymād/) in Manichaean middle Persian fragments; but in this case the syntactical structure of the phrase is not comprehensible at all. Although this fragment is a very small fraction of a paper, but “paymād” must be past simple verb, 3rd singular, having “š” as agent; therefore, here it means “he measured”. 4. Conclusion An analysis of the entire fragmentary texts indicates that M538 and M6040 contain the best possible complete evidence (verb, participle and infinitive forms) existing in M.Parth. and M.Mper. manuscripts. Thus at first step the researcher has to base his study almost entirely on these fragments, then, he can, if needed, apply other evidence to check the meaning and significance of “pdm’d(ag)”, and see how much his translation is in accordance with the real concept of the text. Since there is no sufficient evidence of “padmādag” to approach or find out the close significance of this word, we necessarily have to rely upon syntactical analyzing of the phrase. According to this attitude, it is proposed here that in M538, “padmādag” is the adjective for the predicate and here this adjective means “placed, implanted, appointed” or so on. g. re.
Organizational behaviour, change and effectiveness. Corporate culture, Fine Arts
We derive a new margin-based regularization formulation, termed multi-margin regularization (MMR), for deep neural networks (DNNs). The MMR is inspired by principles that were applied in margin analysis of shallow linear classifiers, e.g., support vector machine (SVM). Unlike SVM, MMR is continuously scaled by the radius of the bounding sphere (i.e., the maximal norm of the feature vector in the data), which is constantly changing during training. We empirically demonstrate that by a simple supplement to the loss function, our method achieves better results on various classification tasks across domains. Using the same concept, we also derive a selective sampling scheme and demonstrate accelerated training of DNNs by selecting samples according to a minimal margin score (MMS). This score measures the minimal amount of displacement an input should undergo until its predicted classification is switched. We evaluate our proposed methods on three image classification tasks and six language text classification tasks. Specifically, we show improved empirical results on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet using state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and BERT-BASE architecture for the MNLI, QQP, QNLI, MRPC, SST-2 and RTE benchmarks.
In 1985 Bayer and Billera defined a flag vector $f(X)$ for every convex polytope $X$, and proved some fundamental properties. The flag vectors $f(X)$ span a graded ring $\mathcal{R}=\bigoplus_{d\geq0}\mathcal{R}_d$. Here $\mathcal{R}_d$ is the span of the $f(X)$ with $\dim X=d$. It has dimension the Fibonacci number $F_{d+1}$. This paper introduces and explores the conjecture, that $\mathcal{R}$ has a counting basis $\{e_i\}$. If true then the equation $f(X) = \sum g_i(X)e_i$ conjecturally provides a formula for the Betti numbers $g_i(X)$ of a new homology theory. As the $g_i(X)$ are linear functions of $f(X)$, we call the new theory linear homology. Further, assuming the conjecture each $g_i$ will have a rank $r\geq0$. The rank zero part of linear homology will be (middle perversity) intersection homology. The higher rank $g_i$ measure successively more complicated singularities. In dimension $d$ we will have $\dim\mathcal{R}_d$ linearly independent Betti numbers. This paper produces a basis $\{e_i\}$ for $\mathcal{R}$, that is conjecturally a counting basis. Warning: Conjecture withdrawn in version 2.