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Facial behaviour forms an important cue for understandinghuman affect. While a large number of existing approaches successfully recognize affect from facial behaviours occurring in daily life, facial behavioursdisplayed in work settings have not been investigated to a greatextent. This paper presents the first study that systematically investigatesthe influence of spatial and temporal facial behaviours on humanaffect recognition in work-like settings. We first introduce a new multisitedata collection protocol for acquiring human behavioural data undervarious simulated working conditions. Then, we propose a deep learningbasedframework that leverages both spatio-temporal facial behaviouralcues and background information for workers’ affect recognition.We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the impact of spatial, temporaland contextual information for models that learn to recognize affect inwork-like settings. Our experimental results show that (i) workers’ affectivestates can be inferred from their facial behaviours; (ii) models pretrainedon naturalistic datasets prove useful for predicting affect fromfacial behaviours in work-like settings; and (iii) task type and task settinginfluence the affect recognition performance.

A 4-year-old boy was diagnosed with intracranial abscess following adequately treated otorrhea and mastoiditis. This is an uncommon finding. He underwent mastoidectomy with drainage of the abscess. In cases where patients clinically deteriorate during treatment for otorrhea and mastoiditis, further examination using CT-scan is recommended.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of “Intertextuality.” How it is understood in India and the West and why is an awareness of resonant texts essential to engaging the poem? The next section surveys ways in which Indian texts have been translated and understood in the West and makes a case for looking at the text through Indian categories as well. The main characteristics of classical Indian literatures are discussed; including ahistorical methodologies of reading, reader-response over a focus on the author, orality, and the evocation of rasa. The chapter ends with an exploration of the incongruity of a cloud carrying a message, which has ever-fascinated both Indian and Western readers of the Meghadūta.

As the Cloud Messenger approaches the city where the Yaksha’s beloved resides (Alakā) the concentric layers of the poetic mandala narrow. The descriptive focus descends along with the Cloud to the city rooftops, the city, and its residents. The Cloud is led to the Yaksha’s home and finally to his beloved. The visual descriptions of the city are stunning, as the text continues to echo the Rāmāyaṇa, citing Hanumān’s display of the Rāma’s ring to Sītā. The ring, as the sign, tries to keep the hope of meeting alive. It offers hints, but itself provides no resolution save that of pointing to its own impossibility. It is this very impossibility, however, that becomes exalted as longing amplifies the mood of separation, and through the deep recognition of this condition, rasa appears.

This chapter follows the imagined journey of the Cloud through varied landscapes of India. The phenomenon of “diversion,” also seen in the epic Mahābhārata, is examined as an associative organizing principle of narrative in which one scenario suggests another (as opposed to linear progression). The arc of the journey is examined through close readings of particular verses that describe fabled sites in India’s mythic geography. These are unpacked and analyzed for their exquisite figurative detail. The repeated stops with mountains and dalliances with rivers are shown to be part of Kālidāsa’s eroticized landscape, and comparisons are made with well-known landscape narratives. The actual poetic figures that the poet employs, and how they work, are examined.

Chapter seven explores the Meghadūta’s ability to depict figurative scenes that are simultaneously accurate in their description of the natural world. Nature is not seen as a backdrop to the human drama, but as an integral part of it. The dynamics of Kālidasa’s landscape are compared to the verses of William Blake and the landscapes of Henry David Thoreau and Ann Dillard. The “fulcrum of loka” (meaning both “place” and “people” in Sanskrit) shows just how multivalent the landscape of the Meghadūta is. Examples are given, as in the Cloud’s visit to the divine abode of Śiva, in which the trees are upraised arms, and the red twilight hue makes the Cloud (thundering as a drum) resemble the god’s red elephant hide drum.

This chapter makes a case for the study of the Meghadūta within the study of world literature and literary visions of the environment. It discusses the sensibilities of classical Indian poetry (kāvya) and gives an overview of the history of studies of Indian poetry in the West. The next section summarizes the plot and structure of the Meghadūta, Kālidāsa’s celebrated lyric poem about the imagined journey of a cloud through the landscape of India to deliver a message from the protagonist (Yaksha) to his absent beloved. The “tantric sensibility” of the text is discussed along with the importance of the poem’s vision of the natural world.

This chapter offers a verse by verse translation of the Meghadūta, which is at once poetic and scrupulously accurate. The translation highlights the landscapes visited by the Cloud, their mytho-historical significance, and the fluid blending of language, image, feeling, and form. The entire journey is taken over the pathos of loss, which accounts for the gently stepping meter of the poem that was said by Sanskrit poeticians to be suitable for “love in separation” and was equated with certain landscapes and seasons of the year. Footnotes are provided that explain names, place, and other references in the poem that may be unfamiliar to an English reader.

The opening verses of the poem reveal very conscious strategy that is less of a beginning then a continuation of Epic and Purāṇic concerns. The entire journey of the Cloud, in fact, follows that of the great epic Rāmāyaṇa. The early verses of the poem also reveal Kālidāsa’s concern with the issue of how language generates meaning, as the Cloud may be viewed as language itself through its changing forms and figures. The conventional theme of the anguished ridden lover, pining in longing for the beloved, is seen through its relationship with specific landscapes. The chapter ends with a metaphysical look at the ways of “truth and silence”: the inability of any form of language to touch reality versus the potential of poetic figures to rise above the literal into greater spheres of signification.

This chapter takes up some of the literary, theoretical issues of the poem: the potentials of figurative language, the use of the Cloud as the poem’s semiotic axis of conversion, the place of the “image and imagination” in literary poetics, the centrality of loss and longing (viraha), the depths of Kālidāsa’s “tantric sensibility,” the understanding of “place,” the poem’s vision, of nature, and the centrality of memory as recapitulation. All of these considerations are taken up in the context of the Indian aesthetic tradition as well as in Western post-structuralist poetics that are strongly resonant with the rasa-dhvani poetic tradition of classical India.

This chapter offers a close reading of the next four of the poem’s opening verses that frame the rest of the work through the address of the Yaksha to the Cloud. These verses are both descriptive and suggestive, focusing on the state of loss, the pining-sorrowful condition of the Yaksha, the surrounding environs, the appearance of the Cloud, and perhaps underneath all this, critical issues concerning the relationship between language and representation. The intertextuality of the Cloud image is discussed, as is its relationship with figurative language, and the correlation of the rainy season with the themes of loss and longing. The critical question of the poem is then considered: “How can an inanimate Cloud transmit a message from a living being?” Other works of Kālidāsa are considered in this regard (Śakuntalā, Raghuvanśa) as is the recurring trope of the reckless lover, alongside that of the silent sage. What is the relationship between the cloud and the message, the form and the content, the sign and the object world? Does figuration reveal through indirection or does it simply magnify an inadequate situation? The answer given is the remainder of the poem itself, one that simultaneously dazzles with visionary capability and demonstrates figurative impossibility.

Chapter three surveys classical Indian literary theory and looks at how rasa (liquid meaning) became considered to be the goal of the literary work of art. The chapter considers a vision of the poetic work of art that is radically different from the models of private, silent reading that most Westerners have been brought up with. The text discusses how rasa is achieved through resonant suggestion, and how the meaning of a poem is understood in terms of its taste. The production of rasa is viewed through classical Indian aesthetics as well as though works of Western literary critics who have put forth resonant ideas. The Meghadūta is seen as an exemplary work in this regard.

The Cloud of Longing is a full-length study and translation of the great Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa’s famed Meghadūta (literally: The Cloud Messenger) with a focus on its interfacing of nature, feeling, figurative language, and mythic memory. While the Meghadūta has been translated a number of times, the last “almost academic” translation was published in 1976 (Leonard Nathan, The Transport of Love: The Meghadūta of Kālidāsa). Barbara Stoler Miller, my graduate mentor at Columbia University, oftentimes remarked that it was time for a new translation of the text. This volume, however, is more than an Indological translation. It is a study of the text in light of both classical Indian and contemporary Western literary theory, and it is aimed at lovers of poetry and poetics and students of world literature. It seeks to widen the arena of literary and poetic studies to include classic works of Asian traditions. It also looks at the poem’s imaginative portrayals of “nature” and “environment” from perspectives that have rarely been considered.

People are increasingly growing older. Growing older is likely to come with, for example, decreasing mobility and therefore increasing dependency. This can reduce the social connected- ness of older people. As an effect, a social challenge is growing: loneliness. In response to this challenge, local governments offer mobility services that the elderly can use to go out. However, from our test bed of a mobility product-service system for seniors, we learned that many such services focus too much on transporting people from A to B, while the user experience of the service leaves room for improvement. In this paper we discuss how a demand responsive transport system, set-up as a social innovation, improves social connectedness, instead of delivering mobility alone. We found that the service itself provides social satisfaction, and that the service was not necessarily used for social activities. Rather, the service was used for activities of daily life.

The results of a measurement of the proton structure function F_2(x,Q^2)and the virtual photon-proton cross section are reported for momentum transfers squared Q^2 between 0.35 GeV^2 and 3.5 GeV^2 and for Bjorken-x values down to 6 10^{-6} using data collected by the HERA experiment H1 in 1995. The data represent an increase in kinematic reach to lower x and Q^2 values of about a factor of 5 compared to previous H1 measurements. Including measurements from fixed target experiments the rise of F_2 with decreasing x is found to be less steep for the lowest Q^2 values measured. Phenomenological models at low Q^2 are compared with the data., Comment: 27 pages, 10 Figures