Forms

Shiva's visual forms, along with perhaps some kind of worship cult, had begun appearing some 5000 years ago. This denotes not only his priority over other gods of India's religious hierarchy but also reveals the fact that his is the imagery and iconography that evolved over a period of five millennia - perhaps the longest period for an image, or worship tradition, to have evolved and sustained through. And, despite such long period, as often breeds complexities and uncompromising contradictions, Shiva's imagery reveals wondrous unity and unique growth perspective.

Human being always tries to make his own signature or presence by developing shelters and settlements. In his first attempt they just learn from nature and use its simpler form of complex nature structural system. They use to understand this complex system by attempt of defining it through mathematical and geometrical tools. Through these attempts they are getting closure to nature structural system. They also learn stability and variability in natural structures are because of potential energy inside the structures.
Biomimicry leads to imitation of living nature that is highly interdisciplinary and involves understanding the functions, structures and principles of various objects in nature that lead to inspired design, adaptation and derivation from living nature.
This paper will focus the evolution of bioinspired design and how it manifests in built-environment through dif erent forms and structures in evolved from nature.
The study has intended to show new approaches to have new era of architecture, by taking inspiration from nature in dif erent perspectives

The quality of a concrete floor or slab is highly dependent on achieving a hard and durable surface that is flat, relatively free of cracks, and at the proper grade and elevation. Properties of the surface are determined by the mixture proportions and the quality of the concreting and jointing operations. The timing of concreting operations-especially finishing and jointing-is critical. Failure to address this issue can contribute to undesirable characteristics in the wearing surface such as cracking, low resistance to wear, dusting, scaling, high or low spots, and poor drainage, as well as increasing the potential for curling.

The heralds' compendia are covering a surprising variety of texts, dealing as well with the heralds and their office itself as well as the different ceremonies of chivalry and the organisation and the symbols of the noble society. Presenting themselves nearly as a kind of manuals for the heralds' office, these manuscripts, until now widely neglected, constitute a veritable "kaleidoscope" of the late medieval noble culture. Because, the duties and interests of the heralds of arms surpassed largely their preoccupation with heraldry in stricto sensu: they consist either in diplomacy and noble representation, especially in the preservation and spreading of the honour of the nobility. The aim of the present study is to introduce this promising group of sources, proposing a preliminary classification and interpretation. Therefore it makes use of two different methods. The first one focuses on the manuscripts as material objects, trying to locate their elaboration and reception in their former concrete historical context. The second one studies the texts they are including, stressing the difference between their instrumental and symbolic meaning to present in detail their eventual use and inherent attraction. By these means, the present thesis achieves to demonstrate how noble readers get appropriate the compendia. It explains this phenomenon by a peculiar image of nobility carried by them, which turns them into witnesses for the transition from the feudal society to the uprising princely state. Finally, this thesis propagates a new comprehension of the singular role played by the heralds at the end of the middle ages.

Les compendia des hérauts d'armes réunissent une diversité de textes étonnante. Ceux-ci traitent aussi bien de l'office d'armes en lui-même, que des cérémonies chevaleresques et de la société nobiliaire en général. Se présentant presque comme des manuels dédiés aux Hérauts d'armes, ces manuscrits, qui passèrent jusque là presque totalement inaperçus, constituent un véritable " kaléidoscope " de la culture nobiliaire de la fin du Moyen-Âge. Car les devoirs et les intérêts du héraut d'armes dépassaient largement l'héraldique au sens propre et s'étendaient non seulement à la diplomatie, mais également au cérémoniel de la cour. Avant tout il leur incombait de préserver et de propager l'honneur de la noblesse. Le but de cette étude était de faire connaître cette source prometteuse et d'en proposer une première classification ainsi qu'une première interprétation. Pour ces raisons, deux méthodes ont été utilisées. La première se consacre aux supports matériels de ces compendia et cherche à replacer chacun des manuscrits conservés dans leur contexte d'élaboration et celui de leur réception. La seconde s'attache au contenu des textes qu'ils referment en tentant de différencier leur enjeu pratique de leur portée symbolique, afin d'éclairer leur usage éventuel leur attrait présumé. La thèse est ainsi parvenue à démontrer comment la noblesse s'appropria ces compendia. Ce phénomène, explicable par une certaine image de la noblesse qu'ils véhiculent, fait de ces compendia des témoins privilégiés de la transition de la société féodale vers l'état princier. Enfin, la thèse illustre d'une façon nouvelle le rôle singulier des hérauts d'armes à la fin du Moyen-Âge.

Die Kompendien der spätmittelalterlichen Herolde vereinen in sich eine erstaunliche Vielfalt von Texten. Sie handeln ebenso vom Heroldsamt selbst, wie von den verschiedenen Zeremonien der Ritterschaft und der Welt des Adels im Allgemeinen. Mögen sie auf den ersten Blick auch wie schlichte Handbücher zur Ausübung des Heroldsberufes erscheinen - tatsächlich stellen sie wahrhaftes « Kaleidoskop » der spätmittelalterlichen Adelswelt dar. Denn die Interessen und Pflichten der Herolde gingen weit über die Heraldik im eigentlichen Sinne hinaus: Sie fanden ebenso in der Diplomatie eine wichtige Rolle wie im höfischen Zeremoniell. Vor allem aber kam es ihnen zu, die Ehre des Adels er bewahren und zu verbreiten. Das Ziel der Studie ist es, diese vielversprechende Quellengruppe zu erschließen und eine erste Klassifikation wie v.a. eine erste Interpretation ihrer Inhalte anzubieten. Hierfür wird auf zwei wesentliche Methoden zurückgegriffen. Die erste widmet sich v.a. den erhaltenen Handschriften als solches und fragt nach dem Kontext der Entstehung und Rezeption der Kompilationen. Die zweite hingegen setzt sich mit den Inhalten der einzelnen darin enthaltenen Texte auseinander und versucht zwischen deren praktischem Wert und symbolischer Bedeutung zu unterscheiden, um so ihren eventuellen Gebrauch und ihre mögliche Attraktivität zu erhellen. Die Arbeit konnte dabei zeigen, wie sehr der Adel selbst sich für diese Kompilationen interessierte und deren Überlieferung an sich zog. Ein, Phänomen, welches sich vor allem durch das ganz eigene, besondere Adelsbild erklären läßt, welches die Heroldskompendien propagierten und sie damit zu herausragenden Zeugnissen des Übergangs von der alten Lehnsgesellschaft zum modernen Fürstenstaat macht. Die Arbeit demonstriert damit auf eine ganz neues Weise die besondere Rolle, welche den Herolde in den gesellschaftlichen Umbrüchen des ausgehenden Mittelalter zukam.

download: http://www.perspectivia.net/content/publikationen/phs/hiltmann_heroldskompendien/at_download/file

For reviews see:
H-Soz-Kult (Klara Hübner): http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/2012-2-048
Sehepunkte (Sven Rabeler): http://www.sehepunkte.de/2012/05/20549.html
Historische Zeitschrift 295 (2012), S. 776f. (Malte Prietzel): http://www.oldenbourg-link.com/doi/pdf/10.1524/hzhz.2012.0594
Das Historisch-Politische Buch 60 (2012), S. 598-600 (Markus Frankl)
Revue historique 664 (2012), S. 950-953 (Karin Becker): http://www.cairn.info/landing_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=RHIS_124_0937
Le Moyen Age 118 (2012), S. 187f. (Henri Simonneau)

Dividing the discipline’s metaphors between technical and conceptual is a reality not fully explored, nor I believe never noticed. In addition to the multidisciplinary relevance and general use of metaphors, metaphoric axioms, arguments in favor of the stasis of why interior design is an art the two realities of the metaphor work separately and together in six  creative ways.  Many of my monographs included analyzing and explaining the syllogism:
• Art[I]  is the making of metaphors
• Interior design  is an art[I]
• Therefore interior design is the making of metaphors.
Art [I] is only when skill is applied with intent and advanced development of some skill.
Till now we did nothing to reason why art [I] is the making of metaphors, nor why interior is an art [I]. Since 1967 I proceeded to analyze the presumptions and find its many applications. This new information in Metaphor and Thought by Andrew Ortony first published in 1979, provides information to support inductive reasoning and to this end each axiom is its own warrant to the inferences of the above syllogism and the answer to questions of why metaphor is the stasis to any of the syllogism’s claims and implications.
The six priciples explain the stasis in terms of metaphor’s two technical and conceptual dimensions.  Both are valid separately and even more acceptable in combination.  But how do they two operate and how does knowing this benefit design, use and evaluation of built works?
The technical is that all art [I], including interior design, expresses one thing in terms of another by its inherent and distinct craft. On the one hand there is the designer who acts as the owsnere’s surrogate  and on the other the fountain of conceptual metaphors which expresses ideas as built conceptual metaphors other wise known as interior desings. Techne is actually a system of practical knowledge as a craft or art informed by knowledge of forms. 
For  example,  the craft of managing a firm ofinterior designers where even virtue is a kind of technê of management and design practice, one that is based on an understanding of the profession, business and market. In this case the technai are such activities as drafting, specifying, managing, negotiating, programming, planning, supervising, and inspection.  By association with these technai, we can include decorationg, funiture selection, color coordianation, writing, and painting.  So much so that the study and practice of design is devoid from the humanities and downplays theories of design;  developing rather the crafts, skill and understandings needed to plan, sketch, draw, delineate, specify, write, and design.
Contemporary interior design is replete with axioms, principles and theorems guiding the geometry, applications of science, use of engineering, and formal logic to produce technical metaphors and justly excluding a whole conversation about the conceptual part of the built metaphor.

In another time when kingdoms created their dynasty’s iconic buildings, the architect and artisans took their ques from the reigning monarch. In our modern pluralistic society the free reign of ideas and opinions as to contexts and their meanings are diverse. As the doctor takes the Hippocratic oath, the lawyer vows to defend all so there is one whose call is to capture the ethos (4.0 The Oxford English Dictionary, is defined as "the characteristic spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment, of a people or community” ) of his time into built metaphors, he is called architect. Not only is my childhood quest relevant but the essence of the responsibility of today’s architect who not only reasons the technical but individually reasons the conceptual. It is to the architect that society turns to be informed about the shape and form of the context in which life will be played. With this charge the need to know that we know and do by reasoning what science verifies by the scientific method to know that we know about the buildings, parks, and places we set into the environment. It is a public and private charge included in the contract for professional services but unspoken as professional life’s experience; to prove the relevant, meaningful and beneficial metaphors that edify encourage and equip society as well as provide for its’ health, safety and welfare. So it is critical to realize, control and accept as commonplace that the role of the architect is to do much more than build but build masterfully.

Prompt #2: In Phaedo and Republic, Plato presents Socrates explicitly distinguishing between the intelligible and the sensible. In other dialogues, however, this distinction is often less obvious. Discuss how Socrates' refutations in Euthyphro and/or Meno depend implicitly upon this distinction.

Twenty eight dominant axioms and 54 sub-dominant axioms (total of 82) are evidence of the case that architecture is an art resolved that architecture was the making of metaphors because it (architecture) made metaphors, personified by metaphor stasis’ two technical and conceptual dimensions. Both are valid separately and even more usual in combination. But how do these two work, and, how does this knowledge benefit design, use and evaluation of built works? The axioms were derived by examining Andrew Ortony’s Metaphor and Thought’s evidence and works by Paul Weiss, William J.J. Gordon and the Yale lecture series titled architecture as the making of metaphors. . Prior monographs were steeped in deductive reasoning since there was no new information (evidence) pertaining to metaphors. Therefore the previous articles included analyzing and explaining the syllogism:
• Art [G] is the making of metaphors
• Architecture is an art [G]
• Therefore architecture is the making of metaphors.

Early monographs were steeped in deductive reasoning since we could not find new information pertaining to metaphors. This included analyzing and explaining the syllogism:
• Art[I]  is the making of metaphors
• Architecture (design)  is an art [I]
• Therefore architecture (design) is the making of metaphors.
Till now we did nothing to reason why art [I] is the making of metaphors nor why architecture is an art. Since 1967 I proceeded to analyze the presumptions and find its many applications. This new information by Andrew Ortony first published in 1979, provides information to support inductive reasoning and to this end each axiom is its own warrant to the inferences of the above syllogism and the answer to why metaphor is the stasis to any of the syllogism’s claims and implications. The axioms are presented in labeled paragraph and subparagraphs format for easy reference and applications.
Keywords:
metaphor, architecture, thought, commonality, commonplace, dubbing, cognitive, knowing, stasis, art , [I]  linguistic analogy, equilibrium, equipoise, topoi, top-down, frame conflict, appreciate, conduit, parte, design system, modified culture, mapping, structure, domain, signs, apparatus, spaces, volumes, shapes, forms, metaphorical mappings, invariance principle, alive, dead, onomatopeics, surrogates, appetite, desire, mind, indirect use, direct use, vision, gestalt, formulae, grand design, psychological, processes, metaphor comprehension, memory, mnemonics, encoding, mapping, categorizing, inference, assimilation, accommodation, attribution, inferential import,  structured programming, stability, referential specificity, general acceptance of terms, vividness thesis, difference, identity, comparison sensible, communications.

What should we make of the passage in the Sophist at 247d-e, in which the Eleatic Stranger declares that being is whatever has the power (du-namis) to act or be affected, even if only once, in the smallest way? Does this proposal about being, the dunamis proposal, express the view of the Stranger's interlocutors, the giants, or is the Stranger speaking in his own voice and so representing Plato's view? If the latter, how could the proposal be seen to survive the encounter with the 'friends of the Forms', and be applicable to immutable Forms? Is the employment of 'horos' and 'horizein' at 247e3 meant to indicate that a mere mark of being is offered in the proposal, or the very definition of being? Contemporary readers of the dialogue have argued either that the Stranger is simply articulating the giants' ontology in the dunamis proposal, or that he is presenting his own (and so Plato's) view of a mark or criterion of being, though not one that is significant to the puzzles about being and not-being from 254c onwards. An alterative reading is that Plato endorsed the dunamis proposal and subsequently developed it and put it to work in the later sections of the dialogue. In this paper my aim is to show that the case for this alternative view is considerably stronger than has generally been supposed, and moreover, to suggest that the proposal expresses a definition of being. I shall argue that in the Sophist Plato has the Stranger forge the definition — that whatever has the power to act or be affected is a being — by distinguishing relations of causation (or poiesis) from relations of change.

Twenty eight dominant axioms and 54 sub-dominant axioms (total of 82) are evidence of the case that architecture is an art resolved that architecture was the making of metaphors because it (architecture) made metaphors, personified by metaphor stasis’ two technical and conceptual dimensions. Both are valid separately and even more usual in combination. But how do these two work, and, how does this knowledge benefit design, use and evaluation of built works? The axioms were derived by examining Andrew Ortony’s Metaphor and Thought’s evidence and works by Paul Weiss, William J.J. Gordon and the Yale lecture series titled architecture as the making of metaphors. . Prior monographs were steeped in deductive reasoning since there was no new information (evidence) pertaining to metaphors. Therefore the previous articles included analyzing and explaining the syllogism:
• Art [G] is the making of metaphors
• Architecture is an art [G]
• Therefore architecture is the making of metaphors.

Human being always tries to make his own signature or presence by developing shelters and settlements. In his first attempt they just learn from nature and use its simpler form of complex nature structural system. They use to understand this complex system by attempt of defining it through mathematical and geometrical tools. Through these attempts they are getting closure to nature structural system. They also learn stability and variability in natural structures are because of potential energy inside the structures.
Biomimicry leads to imitation of living nature that is highly interdisciplinary and involves understanding the functions, structures and principles of various objects in nature that lead to inspired design, adaptation and derivation from living nature.
This paper will focus the evolution of bioinspired design and how it manifests in built-environment through different forms and structures in evolved from nature.
The study has intended to show new approaches to have new era of architecture, by taking inspiration from nature in different perspectives.

L'essai souhaite proposer quelques réflexions sur l’histoire de l’image en noir et blanc au début du XXème siècle: en concomitance avec l’importance toujours plus grande prise par l’image analogique dans l’univers de la culture visuelle, le noir et blanc s’est peu à peu affirmé comme le mode de vision privilégié de la modernité de début de siècle.

We describe a web application that takes advantage of new computer vision techniques to allow the user to make searches based on visual similarity of color and texture related to the object of interest. We use a supervised neural network strategy to segment different classes of objects. A strength of this solution is the high speed in generalization of the trained neural networks, in order to obtain an object segmentation in real time. Information about the segmented object, such as color and texture, are extracted and indexed as text descriptions. Our case study is the online commercial offers domain where each offer is composed by text and images. Many successful experiments were done on real datasets in the fashion field.

Vengono presentate le modalità operative per la predisposizione di modelli tridimensionali esplorabili interattivamente.
La tecnica utilizzata si chiama texture baking e prevede la disposizione, nello spazio digitale 3D, di una serie di sorgenti luminose che interagiscono con i modelli in virtù delle caratteristiche fisiche e materiche.
Il lavoro è parte di una ricerca nazionale, denominata V.I.A. – Virtual Interactive Architecture, finanziata dal Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca per il biennio 2005 – 2006. Vengono esplorate alcune tra le procedure oggi disponibili e vengono illustrati, nel dettaglio, i passi necessari per giungere al risultato.

Texture modeling and separation of structure in images are treated in synergy. A variational image decomposition scheme is formulated using explicit texture reconstruction constraints from the outputs of linear lters tuned to different spatial frequencies and orientations. Relevant to the texture image part information is reconstructed using modulation modeling and component selection. The general formulation leads to a u + Kv model of K + 1 image components, with multiple texture subcomponents.

The richness of natural images makes the quest for optimal representations in image processing and computer vision challenging. The latter observation has not prevented the design of image representations, which trade off between efficiency and complexity, while achieving accurate rendering of smooth regions as well as reproducing faithful contours and textures. The most recent ones, proposed in the past decade, share an hybrid heritage highlighting the multiscale and oriented nature of edges and patterns in images. This paper presents a panorama of the aforementioned literature on decompositions in multiscale, multi-orientation bases or dictionaries. They typically exhibit redundancy to improve sparsity in the transformed domain and sometimes its invariance with respect to simple geometric deformations (translation, rotation). Oriented multiscale dictionaries extend traditional wavelet processing and may offer rotation invariance. Highly redundant dictionaries require specific algorithms to simplify the search for an efficient (sparse) representation. We also discuss the extension of multiscale geometric decompositions to non-Euclidean domains such as the sphere or arbitrary meshed surfaces. The etymology of panorama suggests an overview, based on a choice of partially overlapping "pictures". We hope that this paper will contribute to the appreciation and apprehension of a stream of current research directions in image understanding.

The article is devoted to the theory and techniques of the young people civic education. It also deals with the problems of students' civic consciousness and civic qualities formation. The purpose of the research was to study and diagnose civic consciousness of Technical University Students, to ground theoretically and test experimentally pedagogical conditions of students' civic consciousness formation in foreign language classes. The results of the definition and specification of the notion of "civic education" are also introduced in the article. Forms and methods of efficient work in classroom and extra-curricular work with students while studying a foreign language are revealed and experimentally checked. The efficiency of testing, dialogue around, role-playing games, press conferences, debates in civic consciousness formation is approved.

In the present project, the research team is conducting cognitive and statistical analyses of an existing research-based mathematics assessment using the theories and procedures of Kikumi and Curtis Tatsuoka, including Q-Matrix theory, the Rule Space Method (K. K. Tatsuoka, 2009), and poset-based adaptive testing methodologies (C. Tatsuoka & Ferguson, 2003).

A technique is proposed for the investigation of discrete internal representations assumed to be formed by the visual system in response to pattern stimuli. The proposed technique involves applying a local 1-parameter group of spatial transformations to a pattern to generate a "continuum" of patterns. The visual discriminability of pairs of perturbed patterns corresponding to small fixed increments in the transformation parameter is determined at various points in the parameter range. By means of a simple rule, the characteristics of this discrimination performance are then related to the probability density functions assumed to underlie the hypothesized discrete internal representations. Two experimental applications of the proposed technique are described. The first is concerned with a discrete internal representation involving the specification of the collinearity or noncollinearity of the points in a pattern; the second is concerned with a discrete internal representation involving the specification of the acuteness or obtuseness of the angle between two lines in a pattern.

The richness of natural images makes the quest for optimal representations in image processing and computer vision challenging. The latter observation has not prevented the design of image representations, which trade off between efficiency and complexity, while achieving accurate rendering of smooth regions as well as reproducing faithful contours and textures. The most recent ones, proposed in the past decade, share an hybrid heritage highlighting the multiscale and oriented nature of edges and patterns in images. This paper presents a panorama of the aforementioned literature on decompositions in multiscale, multi-orientation bases or dictionaries. They typically exhibit redundancy to improve sparsity in the transformed domain and sometimes its invariance with respect to simple geometric deformations (translation, rotation). Oriented multiscale dictionaries extend traditional wavelet processing and may offer rotation invariance. Highly redundant dictionaries require specific algorithms to simplify the search for an efficient (sparse) representation. We also discuss the extension of multiscale geometric decompositions to non-Euclidean domains such as the sphere or arbitrary meshed surfaces. The etymology of panorama suggests an overview, based on a choice of partially overlapping "pictures". We hope that this paper will contribute to the appreciation and apprehension of a stream of current research directions in image understanding.

This is a study on grain-scale micromechanics of polycrystal surfaces during plastic straining. We use Al-Mg-Si sheets (alloy AA6022) as model material. The work aims at understanding the relationship between microstrain heterogeneity and surface roughness in plastically strained polycrystals in terms of the surface and through-thickness microstructure. Experiments were conducted on polycrystals with identical composition but different processing and microstructures. We performed tensile and bending tests on sheet samples cut in transverse and rolling directions. We investigated the plastic surface microstrains (photogrametry), surface topography (confocal microscopy), particle distribution (metallography, SEM), microtexture (EBSD), and grain size distribution (EBSD) in the same sample regions. We also conducted in-situ straining experiments where the microtexture, surface topography, and stress-strain behavior were simultaneously determined. The results reveal a relationship between the heterogeneity of plastic surface microstrains, roughness, and microstructure. In particular a correlation could be established between microstrains and banded microtexture components (Cube, Goss, {111}[uvw]).

Current state-of-the-art methods in variational image segmentation using level set methods are able to robustly segment complex textured images in an unsupervised manner. In recent work, [18,19] we have explored the potential of AM-FM features for driving the unsupervised segmentation of a wide variety of textured images. Our first contribution in this work is at the feature extraction level, where we introduce a regularized approach to the demodulation of the AM-FM -modelled signals. By replacing the cascade of multiband filtering and subsequent differentiation with analytically derived equivalent filtering operations, increased noise-robustness can be achieved, while discretization problems in the implementation of the demodulation algorithm are alleviated. Our second contribution is based on a generative model we have recently proposed [18,20] that offers a measure related to the local prominence of a specific class of features, like edges and textures. The introduction of these measures as weighting terms in the evolution equations facilitates the fusion of different cues in a simple and efficient manner. Our systematic evaluation on the Berkeley segmentation benchmark demonstrates that this fusion method offers improved results when compared to our previous work as well as current state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract
Capital is defined mathematically as the abstract meaning brought to life in the two phases of the development of 'transferable representations,' which are the legal, financial, and scientific instruments we take for granted in almost every aspect of our daily routines. The first, conceptual and gestational, and the second, parturitional and maturational, phases in the creation and development of capital are contrasted. Human, social, and natural forms of capital should be brought to life with at least the same amounts of energy and efficiency as have been invested in manufactured and liquid capital, and property. A mathematical law of living capital is stated. Two examples of well-measured human capital are offered. The paper concludes with suggestions for the ways that future research might best capitalize on the mathematical definition of capital.

La presente caracterización de las prácticas evaluativas de la Institución Educativa Emiliano RestrepoEchavarría se centra en los aspectos relacionados con sus concepciones teóricas, criterios, propósitos,formas, estrategias, instrumentos, frecuencia, implicaciones prácticas, espacios físicos y roles, todos ellosvistos desde la documentación de la institución y desde la percepción de docentes, estudiantes y padresde familia. Se destaca la subjetividad detrás de las prácticas evaluativas contenidas en los documentosinstitucionales, en los registros de quienes participan en una Comisión de Evaluación y Promoción o en unareunión de Consejo Académico. En especial se tienen en cuenta las percepciones de los docentes sobrela evaluación en relación con los estudiantes y padres de familia. El artículo es resultado de la investigacióndesarrollada en la Línea “Evaluación Educativa” de la Maestría en Educación de la Universidad Santo Tomás.

This paper presents a pilot project on the usage of SDL and related commercial SDL support tool for the validation of a railway signalling system. The lessons learned show the importance of formal specification and verification tools in lowering development costs of software for safety-critical systems, while increasing reliability, in conformance to international regulations.

"Vengono presentate le modalità operative per la predisposizione di modelli tridimensionali esplorabili interattivamente. La tecnica utilizzata si chiama texture baking e prevede la disposizione, nello spazio digitale 3D, di una serie di sorgenti luminose che interagiscono con i modelli in virtù delle caratteristiche fisiche e materiche. Il lavoro è parte di una ricerca nazionale, denominata V.I.A. – Virtual Interactive Architecture, finanziata dal Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca per il biennio 2005 – 2006. Vengono esplorate alcune tra le procedure oggi disponibili e vengono illustrati, nel dettaglio, i passi necessari per giungere al risultato."

Direct marketing companies systematically dispatch the offers under consideration to a limited sample of potential buyers, rank them with respect to their performance and, based on this ranking, decide which offers to send to the wider population. Though this pre-testing process is simple and widely used, recently the direct marketing industry has been under increased pressure to further optimize learning, in particular when facing severe time and space constraints. Taking into account the multimedia nature of offers, which typically comprise both a visual and text component, we propose a two-phase learning strategy based on a cascade of regression methods. This proposed approach takes advantage of visual and text features to improve and accelerate the learning process. Experiments in the domain of a commercial Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) show the effectiveness of the proposed methods that improve on classical learning techniques.