Who isn’t seduced by the idea of an affinity between aging and aesthetics? Yet, when does aging truly begin? What attributes does the aesthetic embrace? Looking into startling photographic art of the past three decades, this book is prompted by such questions and turns them into a meditation on how aesthetics mediates our relation to time. The photographic approach of the corporeal is at the center of the book. Within a phenomenological framework, Cristofovici brings into focus the physical and the psychic body to read aging as a process of change and becoming over time. Her understanding of aging sees beyond difference into larger patterns of perceptions that we share. Offering valuable insights into aging as a process of subject construction, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of visual culture, photography, art history, age studies, and theories of knowledge. This cross-disciplinary study that puts theory to the test of life’s and art’s paradoxes in an evocative style will also appeal to a wider readership interested in how photography and aging illuminate each other.

Understand functional coatings and their role in three key industries of the future Functional coatings play a huge range of roles in industries from automotive to aerospace to electronic and beyond. They offer protection, performance enhancement, corrosion resistance, self-cleaning properties, and more. Recent developments in the field have allowed for ever more precise optimization of functional coatings, with the result that demand for these key tools is only likely to increase. Functional Coatings for Biomedical, Energy, and Environmental Applications offers a comprehensive overview of these coatings and their applications in three explosively productive industries. A team of expert contributors provides chapters analyzing the latest developments in this growing area of production, with a particular focus on the dynamic relationship between functional coatings and their many applications. The result is an interdisciplinary text which will serve as an essential resource for researchers and industry professionals worldwide. Readers will also find: Analysis of functional coatings for dental implants, pool boilers, solar cells, and many more Detailed discussion of coating properties including superhydrophobicity, self-cleaning, controlled drug release, and more Key contributions to the great environmental challenges of the twenty-first century This book is a must-own for researchers in chemistry, engineering, energy, materials science, and more, as well as for industry professionals working with coating and other aspects of research and development in biomedical, energy, or environmental industries.

​This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process linguistic or visual information, and what properties in artworks trigger aesthetic experiences. The examination of the properties of aesthetic experience reveals essential aspects of our perceptual, cognitive, and semiotic capacities. The second issue studied in this volume is related to the ontology of the work of art: Written or visual artworks are a specific type of objects, containing particular kinds of representation which elicit a particular kind of experience. The research question explored is: What properties in artful objects trigger this type of experience, and what characterizes representation in written and visual artworks? The volume sets the scene for state-of-the-art inquiries in the intersection between the psychology and ontology of art. The investigations of the relation between the properties of artworks and the characteristics of aesthetic experience increase our insight into what art is. In addition, they shed light on essential properties of human meaning-making in general.

The two volume sets LNCS 8033 and 8034 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Visual Computing, ISVC 2013, held in Rethymnon, Crete, Greece, in July 2013. The 63 revised full papers and 35 poster papers presented together with 32 special track papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 220 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections: Part I (LNCS 8033) comprises computational bioimaging; computer graphics; motion, tracking and recognition; segmentation; visualization; 3D mapping, modeling and surface reconstruction; feature extraction, matching and recognition; sparse methods for computer vision, graphics and medical imaging; and face processing and recognition. Part II (LNCS 8034) comprises topics such as visualization; visual computing with multimodal data streams; visual computing in digital cultural heritage; intelligent environments: algorithms and applications; applications and virtual reality.

Thanks to the progress made in instruments and techniques, the methods in physical chemistry have developed rapidly over the past few decades, making them increasingly valuable for scientists of many disciplines. These two must-have volumes meet the needs of the scientific community for a thorough overview of all the important methods currently used. As such, this work bridges the gap between standard textbooks and review articles, covering a large number of methods, as well as the motivation behind their use. A uniform approach is adopted throughout both volumes, while the critical comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of each method makes this a valuable reference for physical chemists and other scientists working with these techniques.

People live in indoor environment about 90% of lifetime and an adult inhales about 15 kg air each day, over 75% of the human body’s daily mass intake (air, food, water). Therefore, indoor air quality (IAQ) is very important to human health. This book provides the basic knowledge of IAQ and highlights the research achievements in the past two decades. It covers the following 12 sections: introduction, indoor air chemicals, indoor air particles, measurement and evaluation, source/sink characteristics, indoor chemistry, human exposure to indoor pollutants, health effects and health risk assessment, IAQ and cognitive performance, standards and guidelines, IAQ control, and air quality in various indoor environments. It provides a combination of an introduction to various aspects on IAQ studies, the current state-of-knowledge, various advances and the perspective of IAQ studies. It will be very helpful for the researchers and technicians in the IAQ and the related fields. It is also useful for experts in other fields and general readers who want to obtain a basic understanding of and research advances in the field of IAQ. A group of experts in IAQ research have been recruited to write the chapters. Their research interests and experience cover the scope of the book. In addition, some experienced experts in IAQ field have been invited as advisors or reviewers to give their comments, suggestions and revisions on the handbook framework and the chapter details. Their contribution guarantees the quality of the book. We are very grateful to them. Last but not least, we express our heartfelt thanks to Prof. Spengler, Harvard University, for writing the foreword of the current Handbook of Indoor Air Quality both as a pioneer scientist who contributed greatly to indoor air science and as an Editor-in-chief of Handbook of Indoor Air Quality 2001, 1st ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. In addition to hard copies, the book is also published online and will be updated by the authors as needed to keep it aligned with current knowledge. These salient features can make the handbook fresh with the research development.

This book gathers the proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Computational Science and Technology 2020 (ICCST 2020), held in Pattaya, Thailand, on 29–30 August 2020. The respective contributions offer practitioners and researchers a range of new computational techniques and solutions, identify emerging issues, and outline future research directions, while also showing them how to apply the latest large-scale, high-performance computational methods.

"Perception of the idea within the actual is the true communion of the human being" --Goethe Religious ritual is often seen as a way of bringing divine influences down into the material world. In this profound and stimulating work, Rudolf Steiner and Friedrich Benesch introduce the idea of "reverse ritual"--a way that each of us can raise our souls to the spiritual realm. In this process, the everyday world becomes a portal through which we can enter the dimension of the sacred. Here, each of us can be a "priest," and each of our actions can be a cosmic, ritual act. This stimulating collection of writings on spiritual communion of humanity includes two further lectures by Steiner that show how this process can engage our social lives. Also included are two additional essays as appendices: "Sacramental and Spiritual Communion" by Dietrich Asten and "Human Encounters and Karma" by Athys Floride. The introduction by Christopher Schaefer brings these ideas into focus for modern seekers.