Grasping Things

Grasping Things PDF

Author: Simon J. Bronner

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0813182743

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America stocks its shelves with mass-produced goods but fills its imagination with handmade folk objects. In Pennsylvania, the "back to the city" housing movement causes a conflict of cultures. In Indiana, an old tradition of butchering turtles for church picnics evokes both pride and loathing among residents. In New York, folk-art exhibits raise choruses of adoration and protest. These are a few of the examples Simon Bronner uses to illustrate the ways Americans physically and mentally grasp things. Bronner moves beyond the usual discussions of form and variety in America's folk material culture to explain historical influences on, and the social consequences of, channeling folk culture into a mass society.

DSmT Decision-Making Algorithms for Finding Grasping Configurations of Robot Dexterous Hands

DSmT Decision-Making Algorithms for Finding Grasping Configurations of Robot Dexterous Hands PDF

Author: Ionel-Alexandru Gal

Publisher: Infinite Study

Published:

Total Pages: 26

ISBN-13:

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In this paper, we present a deciding technique for robotic dexterous hand configurations. This algorithm can be used to decide on how to configure a robotic hand so it can grasp objects in different scenarios. Receiving as input, several sensor signals that provide information on the object’s shape, the DSmT decision-making algorithm passes the information through several steps before deciding what hand configuration should be used for a certain object and task.

Grasping Reality

Grasping Reality PDF

Author: Hans Lenk

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 9812380248

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Grasping Reality addresses the methodology of a sophisticated realistic approach to scientific as well as everyday recognition by using schemes and interpretive constructs to analyze theories and the practice of recognition from a hypothesis-realistic vantage point. An appendix provides an overview regarding a realistic and pragmatic philosophy of technology, including the so-called new information technologies.

Grasping Shadows

Grasping Shadows PDF

Author: William Chapman Sharpe

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-08-04

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0190682264

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What's in a shadow? Menace, seduction, or salvation? Immaterial but profound, shadows lurk everywhere in literature and the visual arts, signifying everything from the treachery of appearances to the unfathomable power of God. From Plato to Picasso, from Rembrandt to Welles and Warhol, from Lord of the Rings to the latest video game, shadows act as central players in the drama of Western culture. Yet because they work silently, artistic shadows often slip unnoticed past audiences and critics. Conceived as an accessible introduction to this elusive phenomenon, Grasping Shadows is the first book that offers a general theory of how all shadows function in texts and visual media. Arguing that shadow images take shape within a common cultural field where visual and verbal meanings overlap, William Sharpe ranges widely among classic and modern works, revealing the key motifs that link apparently disparate works such as those by Fra Angelico and James Joyce, Clementina Hawarden and Kara Walker, Charles Dickens and Kumi Yamashita. Showing how real-world shadows have shaped the meanings of shadow imagery, Grasping Shadows guides the reader through the techniques used by writers and artists to represent shadows from the Renaissance onward. The last chapter traces how shadows impact the art of the modern city, from Renoir and Zola to film noir and projection systems that capture the shadows of passers-by on streets around the globe. Extending his analysis to contemporary street art, popular songs, billboards, and shadow-theatre, Sharpe demonstrates a practical way to grasp the "dark side" that looms all around us.

Fewer, Better Things

Fewer, Better Things PDF

Author: Glenn Adamson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2018-08-07

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1632869640

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From the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, a timely and passionate case for the role of the well-designed object in the digital age. Curator and scholar Glenn Adamson opens Fewer, Better Things by contrasting his beloved childhood teddy bear to the smartphones and digital tablets children have today. He laments that many children and adults are losing touch with the material objects that have nurtured human development for thousands of years. The objects are still here, but we seem to care less and know less about them. In his presentations to groups, he often asks an audience member what he or she knows about the chair the person is sitting in. Few people know much more than whether it's made of wood, plastic, or metal. If we know little about how things are made, it's hard to remain connected to the world around us. Fewer, Better Things explores the history of craft in its many forms, explaining how raw materials, tools, design, and technique come together to produce beauty and utility in handmade or manufactured items. Whether describing the implements used in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, the use of woodworking tools, or the use of new fabrication technologies, Adamson writes expertly and lovingly about the aesthetics of objects, and the care and attention that goes into producing them. Reading this wise and elegant book is a truly transformative experience.

Grasping at Water

Grasping at Water PDF

Author: Carmel Bendon

Publisher: Odyssey Books

Published: 2018-09-18

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1925652424

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When a young, unidentified woman is pulled alive and well from Sydney Harbour in 2013, the connections to another woman - found in similar circumstances forty years earlier - present psychiatrist Kathryn Brookley with a terrible decision as the events of the present and past begin to mirror each other and the gap between truth and illusion shrinks. When the young woman goes further and declares that she has lived continuously since coming to 'understanding' in the 14th century, her vivid accounts of life, love, childbirth, and loss in the Middle Ages seem so authentic that they test Kathryn's scientific objectivity to the limit. As Kathryn delves she discovers that she is not the only one whose habitual assumptions about life have been torn asunder by an apparent experience of the miraculous in relation to the mystery woman. But it is the emotional, spiritual and mystical insights that emerge from the linking of all the facets of this mystery that affect Kathryn and others most profoundly, reflecting the commonality of human experience across the ages and the deep yearnings within all of us.

Grasp

Grasp PDF

Author: Sanjay Sarma

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2021-08-10

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 110197415X

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How do we learn? And how can we learn better? In this groundbreaking look at the science of learning, Sanjay Sarma, head of Open Learning at MIT, shows how we can harness this knowledge to discover our true potential. Drawing from his own experience as an educator as well as the work of researchers and innovators at MIT and beyond, in Grasp, Sarma explores the history of modern education, tracing the way in which traditional classroom methods—lecture, homework, test, repeat—became the norm and showing why things needs to change. The book takes readers across multiple frontiers, from fundamental neuroscience to cognitive psychology and beyond, as it considers the future of learning. It introduces scientists who study forgetting, exposing it not as a simple failure of memory but as a critical weapon in our learning arsenal. It examines the role curiosity plays in promoting a state of “readiness to learn” in the brain (and its troublesome twin, “unreadiness to learn”). And it reveals how such ideas are being put into practice in the real world, such as at unorthodox new programs like Ad Astra, located on the SpaceX campus. Along the way, Grasp debunks long-held views such as the noxious idea of “learning styles,” equipping readers with practical tools for absorbing and retaining information across a lifetime of learning.

Prehension

Prehension PDF

Author: Colin McGinn

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2015-08-07

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0262029324

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"This book is a hymn to the hand. In 'Prehension,' Colin McGinn links questions from science to philosophical concerns to consider something that we take for granted : the importance of the hand in everything we do. Drawing on evolutionary biology, anatomy, archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, among other disciplines, McGinn examines the role of the hand in shaping human evolution. He finds that the development of our capacity to grasp, to grip, to take hold (also known as 'prehension') is crucial in the emergence of Homo sapiens'"--Book jacket.

The Grasping Hand

The Grasping Hand PDF

Author: C.L. MacKenzie

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 1994-02-03

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 9780080867588

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The simple task of grasping objects has been studied for centuries by scientists, therapists and engineers who have tried to understand and duplicate the versatility of the human hand. Using an interdisciplinary approach and new framework for looking at prehension, the authors uncover the subleties of the amazing interaction between the hand and the brain. They draw from such diverse fields as experimental psychology, kinesiology, robotics, neural networks, artificial intelligence, neuropsychology and rehabilitation. A triangle strategy is presented, starting from conceptual models that suggest both experimental and computational models. Chapters describe the multiple postures established by the hand, phases in the dynamic process of reaching for, grasping and manipulating various objects, and the constraints acting on such activity. Appendices provide the complete anatomy of the upper limb, the basics of computational modelling, and the fundamentals of prosthetic and dextrous robot hands. The ultimate goal of this book is to develop a common vocabularly for multidisciplinary researchers who strive to understand a system as complex as the hand under the control of the human brain.