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The objective of this paper is to propose a reference point in the phenomenology of poltergeists either for people who want to know more about these phenomena or for researchers looking for cases and sources associated with some particular phenomenon. In parallel, an ongoing work is conducted aimed at building a global case repository of poltergeist cases with their phenomenological characteristics and their sources, which will be available soon at www.macropk.org. A historical view of the 50+ qualitative and quantitative studies of the poltergeist phenomenon is presented along with the different authors/researchers and the publications associated. The different types of phenomena observed are studied from four angles: the physical impacts on the environment, the interactions with people, other features such as duration, focus effect, and contagion, and how the phenomena ended. Each type of event is illustrated through different cases extracted from our case repository (about 1250), often with a short extract from (one of) the sources describing some key characteristics. A discussion about the validity of these data is then developed, looking in particular at testimonials, fraud detection, legal impacts, and the similarity of description of unconnected people. These elements tend to give a strong plausibility to the diverse phenomena observed, even the more "bizarre" ones. Considering all these cases and the details associated with them could help to build a more global picture of the phenomenon. This could provide more ideas based on facts to develop current and new hypotheses, as well as new psychophysical models, in order to make progress in comprehending the phenomenon. A list of the 105 cases used in the description of the phenomenology is provided along with their sources and their distribution across historical periods and geographical areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Data Acquisition & Processing / Shu Ju Cai Ji Yu Chu Li is the property of Editorial Department of Journal of Nanjing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Concrete surface crack detection is a critical research area for ensuring the safety of infrastructure, such as bridges, tunnels and nuclear power plants, and facilitating timely structural damage repair. Addressing issues in existing methods, such as high cost, lengthy processing times, low efficiency, poor effectiveness and difficulty in application on mobile terminals, this paper proposes an improved lightweight concrete surface crack detection algorithm, YOLOv8-Crack Detection (YOLOv8-CD), based on an improved YOLOv8. The algorithm integrates the strengths of visual attention networks (VANs) and Large Convolutional Attention (LCA) modules, introducing a Large Separable Kernel Attention (LSKA) module for extracting concrete surface crack and local feature information, adapted for features such as fracture susceptibility, large spans and slender shapes, thereby effectively emphasizing crack shapes. The Ghost module in the YOLOv8 backbone efficiently extracts essential information from original features at a minimal cost, enhancing feature extraction capability. Moreover, replacing the original convolution structure with GSConv in the neck network and employing the VoV-GSCSP module adapted for the YOLOv8 framework reduces floating-point operations during feature channel fusion, thereby lowering computational complexity whilst maintaining model accuracy. Experimental results on the RDD2022 and Wall Crack datasets demonstrate the improved algorithm increases in mAP50 by 15.2% and 12.3%, respectively, and in mAP50-95 by 22.7% and 17.2%, respectively, whilst achieving a reduced model computational load of only 7.9 × 109, a decrease of 3.6%. The algorithm achieves a detection speed of 88 FPS, enabling real-time and accurate detection of concrete surface crack targets. Comparison with other mainstream object detection algorithms validates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses Anderson's notions of national imaginings and calendrical coincidence as theoretical framework and the ideas of selected political economic theorists to examine Zebra Crossing's depiction of precarious illegal crossing of national borders by economically desperate Zimbabweans in the years leading up to the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup held in South Africa. The novel foregrounds issues of identity by depicting challenges encountered by an orphan teenage girl with albinism not only to cross the physical border but her tragic failure to negotiate various socially constructed boundaries that result when destructive post-colonial African national imaginations collide with the global economy's insatiable anti-egalitarian logic of capital accumulation. With varying degrees of success, Zebra Crossing transgresses prevailing contemporary classificatory systems of literary works and many boundaries related to post-colonial African national imaginings as these intersect with the predatory features of contemporary global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) disproportionately affects people who inject drugs (PWID) worldwide. Despite carrying a high HCV burden, little is known about transmission dynamics in low- and middle-income countries. Methods: We recruited PWID from Nairobi and coastal cities of Mombasa, Kilifi, and Malindi in Kenya at needle and syringe programs. Next-generation sequencing data from HCV hypervariable region 1 were analyzed using Global Hepatitis Outbreak and Surveillance Technology to identify transmission clusters. Results: HCV strains belonged to genotype 1a (n = 64, 46.0%) and 4a (n = 72, 51.8%) and were mixed HCV/1a/4a (n = 3, 2.2%). HCV/1a was dominant (61.2%) in Nairobi, whereas HCV/4a was dominant in Malindi (85.7%) and Kilifi (60.9%), and both genotypes were evenly identified in Mombasa (45.3% for HCV/1a and 50.9% for HCV/4a). Global Hepatitis Outbreak and Surveillance Technology identified 11 transmission clusters involving 90 cases. Strains in the two largest clusters (n = 38 predominantly HCV/4a and n = 32 HCV/1a) were sampled from all four cities. Conclusions: Transmission clusters involving 64.7% of cases indicate an effective sampling of major HCV strains circulating among PWID. Large clusters involving 77.8% of strains from Nairobi and Coast suggest successful introduction of two ancestral HCV/1a and HCV/4a strains to PWID, with widely spread progeny. The disruption of the country-wide transmission network is essential for HCV elimination.

Interpretations of the presence of the father’s ghost in the novel Ulysse from Bagdad by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt. By analyzing the shock caused by the death of a loved one, psychologists and psychiatrists have noticed the tendency among those who suffer to refuse to accept the loss, which often leads to the emergence of visions embodying the recently deceased person. Thus, grieving individuals continue to maintain contact with their departed loved ones through these supernatural images that represent them, which they not only see but also hear and actively interact with. This phenomenon of the reappearance of the dead in the form of ghosts is also represented in literature, being one of the key elements of the novel Ulysse from Bagdad by the Franco-Belgian author Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt. In this novel, young Iraqi Saad loses his father, who is shot by Americans in Iraq, but he does not sever the connection with him; instead, he continues to converse with his ghost. The father’s ghost becomes his travel companion, offering him advice and even serving as an alter ego for both Saad and the reader. Interpretări ale prezenței fantomei tatălui în romanul Ulysse from Bagdad de Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt. Analizând șocul cauzat de moartea unei persoane apropiate, psihologii și psihiatrii au observat tendința celor îndurerați de a refuza să accepte pierderea, ceea ce duce adesea la apariția unor viziuni care înfățișează persoana decedată. Astfel, cei aflați în doliu continuă să mențină legătura cu cei dragi care au părăsit lumea celor vii prin intermediul acestor viziuni, pe care nu numai că le văd, dar le și aud și cu care interacționează în mod activ. Acest fenomen al reîntoarcerii morților sub formă de fantomă este reprezentat și în literatură, fiind unul dintre elementele cheie ale romanului Ulysse from Bagdad al autorului franco-belgian Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt. În acest roman, tânărul irakian Saad își pierde tatăl, fiind împușcat de americani în Irak, dar nu întrerupe legătura cu el, ci continuă să converseze cu fantoma acestuia. Astfel, imaginea tatălui devine tovarășul său de călătorie, îi oferă sfaturi și chiar reprezintă un alter ego al lui Saad, dar și al cititorului. Cuvinte-cheie: Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Ulysse, fantomă, călătorie, tată Article history: Received 25 October 2023; Revised 28 August 2024; Accepted 10 September 2024; Available online 30 September 2024; Available print 30 September 2024.

AbstractThis article argues that Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s In Search of Walid Masoud parallels Shakespeare’s Hamlet by exploring various themes and motifs such as the ghost, the gravedigger, Ophelia’s suicide, adultery, chastity, and madness. Through these themes and motifs, Jabra weaves a narrative that simultaneously recalls and reinvents Shakespeare’s classic play in a contemporary, politically-charged context. This article shows that Jabra utilizes Hamlet as a pivotal reference to represent the main concerns of his Palestinian people from a new and distinctive literary perspective. This is explicit in Jabra’s representation of revenge, in particular. In Hamlet, Shakespeare explores the theme of a son’s revenge for his father. Jabra, on the other hand, structures In Search of Walid Masoud around the revenge of a father for his son, which makes the revenge at the heart of the novel not personal but rather collective (the father’s revenge for his motherland/Palestine). This demonstrates Jabra’s proclivity to render the national plight of Palestinian people global and permit the Palestinian struggle to be perceived on a larger scale.

Copyright of Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences & Arts / Glasnik Etnografskog Instituta SANU is the property of Institute of Ethnography, SASA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the VR optical system, the pancake optics faces the problem of ghost, which is more serious than the conventional aspherical/Fresnel optics. The causes of pancake ghosts are different, thus the performance of pancake ghosts in the image is also different. Some of them can be clearly imaged, but some exist in the form of light spots. The presence of these ghosts seriously affects the image contrast. In this paper, ghost measurement and simulation methods are proposed, which obtains the Virtual image distance, position and brightness of the ghost image, and the cause of the ghost image is obtained by combining the simulation and measurement. Finally, ghost intensity was reduced from 4.68% to 2.39% using the ghost image mitigation methods. A pancake optical system was optimized and prototype was demonstrated, with a field of view of 108°, an exit pupil diameter of 10mm, and a ghost image intensity of less than 2.39%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación is the property of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseno y Comunicacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In queer German director Monika Treut’s film Ghosted (2009), a plethora of screen apparatuses, including cameras, laptops, and cellphones, mediate encounters among the German protagonist, Sophie Schmitt; her Taiwanese girlfriend, Ai-ling; and Ai-ling’s spectral doppelgänger, Mei-li. Examining how the screen bestows visibility on the otherwise elusive figure of the queer Asian woman while limiting her freedom, this article explores how the comparatively more fluid apparitional lesbian challenges the domesticating effect of racially charged looks by destabilizing various borders between life and death, past and present, the real and the imaginary. Although Treut valorizes the ghost’s unfathomable nature as its source of power, a full acceptance of the spectre’s opacity and epistemological differences inherently conflicts with the desire to bridge German and East Asian cultures.

The co-authored text by Luka Šešo and Danilo Trbojević represents a unique comparative analysis of ethnographic material, relating to the form, role, and status of demonological traditions in rural communities of Croatia and Serbia. The research focuses on the relationship between folklore and the belief systems woven into the traditions of rural communities with varying demographic structures, historical experiences, cultural identities, and social realities centered around the ideas of local ontologies defined by coexistence with supernatural beings and phenomena. These communities are, in the context of this study, viewed through the lens of adaptability to coexistence with the global cultural flows of the postmodern world. Through understanding the impact of the broader social, political, and cultural context on the cultural identity of local communities, the authors aim to contribute to the understanding of the influence of changes (both local and global) in the cultural and social environment on the needs, aspirations, and logics of community members crucial for the survival, form, and status of the world of supernatural beings in rural imagination.

To address the limited resources of mobile devices and embedded platforms, we propose a lightweight pose recognition network named HR-LiteNet. Built upon a high-resolution architecture, the network incorporates depthwise separable convolutions, Ghost modules, and the Convolutional Block Attention Module to construct L_block and L_basic modules, aiming to reduce network parameters and computational complexity while maintaining high accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that on the MPII validation dataset, HR-LiteNet achieves an accuracy of 83.643% while reducing the parameter count by approximately 26.58 M and lowering computational complexity by 8.04 GFLOPs compared to the HRNet network. Moreover, HR-LiteNet outperforms other lightweight models in terms of parameter count and computational requirements while maintaining high accuracy. This design provides a novel solution for pose recognition in resource-constrained environments, striking a balance between accuracy and lightweight demands.

Surface defect inspection of metal components plays a critical role in ensuring product quality, enhancing production efficiency, and reducing costs, with particular emphasis on the detection of small-sized surface defects to ensure the safety and reliability of metal components during their usage. Existing detection methods for small size defects on the surfaces of metal components have some shortcomings, such as low precision and poor real-time performance. To solve these two problems, this paper proposes a real-time defect detection method based on improved YOLO. Firstly, the LSandGlass (LSG) module is used to replace the residual module in the backbone network, which reduces information loss, eliminates the low-resolution feature layer, and minimizes semantic loss. The network then uses a lightweight Ghost convolution at the neck to extract the network features. In addition, the convolutional block attention mechanism (CBAM) module is added to improve the detection precision of small-size defects. Finally, soft intersection over union (SIoU) is used to further enhance target detection capability. The experiment was carried out a self-made hexagonal bolt data set of typical commonly used metal components. The experimental results show that compared to the original YOLOv5, the mAP (0.5) is improved by 5.7% to 95.50%, and the reasoning FPS is improved by 21 fps to 95 fps. These results indicate that the proposed LCG-YOLO improves the real-time detection performance of metal component surface defects.

To address the limited resources of mobile devices and embedded platforms, we propose a lightweight pose recognition network named HR-LiteNet. Built upon a high-resolution architecture, the network incorporates depthwise separable convolutions, Ghost modules, and the Convolutional Block Attention Module to construct L_block and L_basic modules, aiming to reduce network parameters and computational complexity while maintaining high accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that on the MPII validation dataset, HR-LiteNet achieves an accuracy of 83.643% while reducing the parameter count by approximately 26.58 M and lowering computational complexity by 8.04 GFLOPs compared to the HRNet network. Moreover, HR-LiteNet outperforms other lightweight models in terms of parameter count and computational requirements while maintaining high accuracy. This design provides a novel solution for pose recognition in resource-constrained environments, striking a balance between accuracy and lightweight demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nueva Revista del Pacífico is the property of Universidad de Playa Ancha de Ciencias de la Educacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Michaël Ferrier's work, the color white primarily symbolizes absence and death. However, by writing the blank, Ferrier chooses to reveal it and bring to light what has disappeared. The absence thus materialized can no longer be ignored. The writer uses white as a memory tool that allows him to rehabilitate those forgotten by History, those he calls ghosts. Ferrier uses the shades of white but also the colors that compose it to bring his ghosts back to life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Pasteurella multocida is a pathogen that can infect humans and animals. A ghost is an empty bacterial body devoid of cytoplasm and nucleic acids that can be efficiently presented by antigen-presenting cells. To study a novel ghost vector vaccine with cross-immune protection, we used bacteriophage PhiX174 RF1 and Pasteurella multocida standard strain CVCC393 as templates to amplify the split genes E and OmpH to construct a bidirectional expression vector E’-OmpH-pET28a-ci857-E. This is proposed to prepare a ghost Escherichia coli (engineered bacteria) capable of attaching and producing Pasteurella multocida OmpH on the inner membrane of Escherichia coli (BL21). The aim is to assess the antibody levels and the effectiveness of immune protection by conducting a mouse immunoprotective test. The bidirectional expression vector E’-OmpH-pET28a-ci857-E was successfully constructed. After induction by IPTG, identification by SDS-PAGE, western blot, ghost culture and transmission electron microscope detection, it was proven that the Escherichia coli ghost anchored to Pasteurella multocida OmpH was successfully prepared. The immunoprotective test in mice showed that the antibody levels of Pasteurella multocida inactivated vaccine, OmpH, ghost (aluminum glue adjuvant) and ghost (Freund’s adjuvant) on day 9 after immunization were significantly different from those of the PBS control group (P

The subject of the article is the representation of ideas about the paranormal in the media. This issue is often brought up by psychologists, who directly point to the leading role of the media in the formation of such representations in present-day time. The author points out the kinship of research in the field of “paranormal psychology” with the studies of induced phenomena by Vladimir Bekhterev, who directly pointed out the role of mass media in the formation of induced ideas. The empirical part of the work consists in the analysis of a sample of media reports on the presence of ghosts, catalogued by the author. The main research question is how the features of the localization of the ghost phenomenon stated in the media can provoke its representation. The author concludes that the media are not only conductors of paranormal ideas, as noted by other researchers, but also partially demonstrate the causal relationships underlying the formation of paranormal ideas. The author underlines the close connection between a particular location, its history and the very report of paranormal phenomena in it. The author identifies the main descriptive techniques of the media associated with paranormal ideas, as well as shows the specifics of their distribution in the media environment. In fact, the article is intended to fill a kind of “information vacuum”, which has formed in the studies of ideas about the paranormal both in the Russian and foreign scientific environment, which makes this study very relevant.

Concrete surface crack detection is a critical research area for ensuring the safety of infrastructure, such as bridges, tunnels and nuclear power plants, and facilitating timely structural damage repair. Addressing issues in existing methods, such as high cost, lengthy processing times, low efficiency, poor effectiveness and difficulty in application on mobile terminals, this paper proposes an improved lightweight concrete surface crack detection algorithm, YOLOv8-Crack Detection (YOLOv8-CD), based on an improved YOLOv8. The algorithm integrates the strengths of visual attention networks (VANs) and Large Convolutional Attention (LCA) modules, introducing a Large Separable Kernel Attention (LSKA) module for extracting concrete surface crack and local feature information, adapted for features such as fracture susceptibility, large spans and slender shapes, thereby effectively emphasizing crack shapes. The Ghost module in the YOLOv8 backbone efficiently extracts essential information from original features at a minimal cost, enhancing feature extraction capability. Moreover, replacing the original convolution structure with GSConv in the neck network and employing the VoV-GSCSP module adapted for the YOLOv8 framework reduces floating-point operations during feature channel fusion, thereby lowering computational complexity whilst maintaining model accuracy. Experimental results on the RDD2022 and Wall Crack datasets demonstrate the improved algorithm increases in mAP50 by 15.2% and 12.3%, respectively, and in mAP50-95 by 22.7% and 17.2%, respectively, whilst achieving a reduced model computational load of only 7.9 × 109, a decrease of 3.6%. The algorithm achieves a detection speed of 88 FPS, enabling real-time and accurate detection of concrete surface crack targets. Comparison with other mainstream object detection algorithms validates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.

This paper attempts to define the grotesque and its primary literary features before examining the grotesque components in two Victorian authors' works with the goal of separating their approaches to the grotesque based on gender. The most well-known novelist of the Victorian era, Charles Dickens will be one of the authors covered in this paper through his story To be Taken with a Grain of Salt, and the other one is Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s story Eveline’s Visitant. Dickens and Braddon particularly make use of the grotesque elements to convey their ideas and ideals through satire, comedy, tragedy, suspense, and a sense of fear, gloom, and obscurity. The research results show that both tales can be regarded as significant Victorian grotesque literature since they share, in various ways, elements of the grotesque notion. The real meaning of the grotesque is only exposed by itself-contradictory nature with the opposite, which is in this sense the ideal. Both stories are based on the main contrast between the spiritual and material worlds. They attempt to persuade us that there is yet another mysterious force that, despite the efforts to conceal it in the physical world, it exposes human wrongdoing. Thus, abnormal human beings, ghostly figures, and terrifying events will be detected through which grotesque elements are found.

Copyright of Revista de Psicoterapia y Psicosomática is the property of Instituto de Estudios Psicosomaticos & Psicoterapia Medica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Insulators on transmission lines can be damaged to different degrees due to extreme weather conditions, which threaten the safe operation of the power system. In order to detect damaged insulators in time and meet the needs of real-time detection, this paper proposes a multi-defect and lightweight detection algorithm for insulators based on the improved YOLOv5s. To reduce the network parameters, we have integrated the Ghost module and introduced C3Ghost as a replacement for the backbone network. This enhancement enables a more efficient detection model. Moreover, we have added a new detection layer specifically designed for small objects, and embedded an attention mechanism into the network, significantly improving its detection capability for smaller insulators. Furthermore, we use the K-means++ algorithm to recluster the prior boxes and replace Efficient IoU Loss as the new loss function, which has better matching and convergence on the insulator defect dataset we constructed. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. Compared to the original algorithm, our model reduces the number of parameters by 41.1%, while achieving an mAP@0.5 of 94.8%. It also achieves a processing speed of 32.52 frames per second. These improvements make the algorithm well-suited for practical insulator detection and enable its deployment in edge devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In keeping with the focus of this special edition of Humanities on the political child, this article builds on investigations into constructions of the child body in literature and society to examine how portrayals of the child body in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book repeatedly slip under the varying perspectives of the adults; that is, how adult politics are always at play in understandings of children and childhood both within and outside of the text. In taking this approach, this article focuses on two key texts in literary discussions of spectrality, bodies, and signification—Hamlet and 'Fors'—to consider how the paradoxical child body in Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is both constructed within the adult perspective and constantly slips from it, and how Gaiman approaches the issue at the heart of this analysis: that of who gets to decide who or what a child is, should be, or can be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term ''ghost'' refers to residual fibrous tissue that remains within the cardiovascular system following the removal of implanted device leads. In this case, a 75-year-old male underwent a transvenous lead extraction procedure prompted by an infection. After the procedure, transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) revealed a stable ''ghost'' in the right atrium. Figures and videos dynamically depicted the ghost's morphology, clearly showing that one end of this spectral entity was firmly attached to the atrial wall, while the other end displayed unrestrained mobility within the bloodstream. After undergoing a thorough evaluation that confirmed the benign nature of the ''ghost'', there was evidently no need for medical intervention. In summary, the article portrayed a rare yet intriguing ''ghost'' observed during the perioperative period. Furthermore, this study emphasizes the crucial significance of accurately distinguishing between these ''ghosts'' and genuinely pathological structures. Such differentiation holds immense importance in preventing unnecessary medical interventions.

By bringing together the history of spiritualism and contemporary art, this article aims to link transidentity issues, particularly transgender issues, and the figure of the ghost. I construct a parallel between spirit apparitions and gender transitions, with mediumistic or transgender bodies as central elements, in order to highlight similar issues, contexts and conditions. From the transgressive dimension of the spiritualist doctrine to the modalities of apparitions and disappearances of identity, I shine a light on a heritage that is still little explored and pose a queer gaze on the ghostly state, the condition of displacements and the issues specific to transidentities. By searching for its traces in the practices of transgender or queer artists, I would like to propose a renewal of the artistic and iconographic vocabulary where the figure of the ghost, exceeding the simple role of symbol, would become a key of comprehension of the transidentitarian process.

I have always considered Kate Bush my Hecate and PJ Harvey my Circea..., fantasized, that is. From one to the other, it is magicians and witches that I would like to focus on here, or rather their becoming, in a "research experiment" that takes these women-artists as materials to work with, to think about. I thus would like to link them to the yardstick of the witches/sorcery studies and the haunting – even of a witches/sorcery studies of the haunting. Through them and through their appetite for the obscure, the magical, the transgressive, the secretive, I would like to draw a path where creation, text, sound, body, voice, image, presence, but also freedom, resistance, empowerment, form a feminine praxis, without concession, where spells do work.

Although Susan Hill has become a prolific writer of ghost narratives in the last decades, it was at a particularly momentous stage of her life as a woman writer that she published The Woman in Black (1983), which is considered her first ghost novel. Evoking the Victorian past, The Woman in Black engages intertextually with Victorian novels within the Gothic genre. The character of the Woman in Black comprises features pertaining to different Victorian Gothic archetypes, such as the ghost, the vampire, and the double. Some of the traits pertaining to these literary archetypes echoed Victorian anxieties about aging that are recovered and reinterpreted in Hill's novel. Furthermore, in analogy with a Gothic romance, the encounter between the narrator as a young man, Arthur Kipps, and a spectral aging woman, the Woman in Black, unleashes the hero's process of coming of age, which he recollects in his old age as he is writing his narrative. Narratological features pertaining to the Gothic genre, like the use of a frame narrative that blends past and present, underscore the dynamics of aging, since processes of interrupted aging and premature aging disrupt the boundaries that conventionally distinguish life stages. This article approaches Hill's The Woman in Black as a contemporary ghost novel that evokes and subverts Victorian discourses of aging and gender, at the same time that, from a contemporary perspective, it vindicates the figure of the Victorian fallen woman as an aging mother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pasteurella multocida is a pathogen that can infect humans and animals. A ghost is an empty bacterial body devoid of cytoplasm and nucleic acids that can be efficiently presented by antigen-presenting cells. To study a novel ghost vector vaccine with cross-immune protection, we used bacteriophage PhiX174 RF1 and Pasteurella multocida standard strain CVCC393 as templates to amplify the split genes E and OmpH to construct a bidirectional expression vector E'-OmpH-pET28a-ci857-E. This is proposed to prepare a ghost Escherichia coli (engineered bacteria) capable of attaching and producing Pasteurella multocida OmpH on the inner membrane of Escherichia coli (BL21). The aim is to assess the antibody levels and the effectiveness of immune protection by conducting a mouse immunoprotective test. The bidirectional expression vector E'-OmpH-pET28a-ci857-E was successfully constructed. After induction by IPTG, identification by SDS-PAGE, western blot, ghost culture and transmission electron microscope detection, it was proven that the Escherichia coli ghost anchored to Pasteurella multocida OmpH was successfully prepared. The immunoprotective test in mice showed that the antibody levels of Pasteurella multocida inactivated vaccine, OmpH, ghost (aluminum glue adjuvant) and ghost (Freund's adjuvant) on day 9 after immunization were significantly different from those of the PBS control group (P < 0.01). The immune protection rates were 100%, 80%, 75%, and 65%, respectively, and the PBS negative control was 0%, which proved that they all had specific immune protection effects. Therefore, this study lays the foundation for the further study of ghosts as carriers of novel vaccine-presenting proteins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines different strategies for staging García Lorca as a presence, either through physical or invisible embodiment, in plays that draw on his own works for inspiration. Ernesto Caballero's Pepe el Romano (2000) incorporates a character called Federico García in a social structure of toxic masculinity. Alberto Conejero echoes Doña Rosita la soltera in an eerie scenario where an allegedly missing body is searched for Conejero's Todas las noches de un día (2015), while it also refracts Lorca's death through alternative political bodies in La piedra oscura (2016) and El sueño de la vida (2019). Both authors acknowledge Lorca's status as cultural icon and symbol of the country's unresolved past, while they participate in a search for ways to take the author's literary legacy beyond biographical determinism. My analysis considers ideas of heritage performance that theorize the body as an archive and as spectre, and also cultural policy as vehicle for reframing legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is a text about haunting on many levels: Hawthorne himself is haunted by his family history and by the literary influence of British gothic; the house is haunted by literal ghosts, signaling the unresolved nature of past events; the novel's characters are haunted by the family history and their own unfulfilled futures. The book is also haunted by the Pyncheon nostalgia for the old aristocratic order, as well as by capitalist exploitation of racial and class others. This paper uses Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology to explore those different facets of the ghostly. As a result, the reading of Gables' ghosts reveals a tension at the heart of the novel between a pessimistic and an optimistic reading of human life and how much it is determined by the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) have the disadvantage of light leakage, resulting in low contrast ratio (CR). Dual‐layer LCDs can greatly improve CR by bonding two layers of LC panels. However, there is a certain distance between the two LC panels, and the ghost may appear when viewing off‐axis. At present, the solutions for this problem cannot achieve a good balance on processing time and display quality. In this paper, convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to optimize dual‐layer display as well as control processing time. The residual blocks are included in the network to improve the quality of the output image. The two output images that correspond to two layers of LC panels are reconstructed from different viewing angles to make comparisons with other methods in terms of processing time and display quality. The simulation results show that compared with other methods, the proposed CNN method can greatly reduce the processing time while maintaining high display quality, which presents high practicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We fabricated a 1.50‐inch, 3207‐ppi OLED microdisplay with an oxide semiconductor LSI/silicon LSI backplane and a novel pancake lens. Patterning an OLED layer by lithography allows fabrication of an ideal display having low power consumption, an ultra‐high aperture ratio and a wide color gamut. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Process-based hydrological models are useful tools to understand the mechanisms responsible for extreme floods and droughts and thus facilitate watershed management. This paper describes a watershed model, based on the coupled surface–subsurface distributed model Penn State Hydrologic Model (PIHM), to capture the hydrologic response of large watersheds over decades. Mathematical models for coupling surface–subsurface fluxes were developed to achieve mass conservation in multi-year simulations. A Voronoi technique was implemented to improve accuracy and computational efficiency. The model was used to simulate the Cedar River Watershed, IA, from 2003 to 2018. Model predictions were compared against streamflow observations at four gauging stations. Results show good model performance with average Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency values greater than 0.70. The model results helped to identify the main hydrologic processes that contributed to the historic 2008 flood in the Cedar River Watershed. In addition to heavy storms, several other factors played an important role, including snowmelt and rainstorms in the spring, as well as low evapotranspiration values associated with traditional row crop agriculture in the first half of the year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an active ground-surveillance radar system, which can observe targets regardless of time and weather. Passenger aircrafts are important targets for SAR, as it is of great importance for accurately recognizing the type of aircraft. SAR can provide dynamic monitoring of aircraft flights in civil aviation, which is helpful for the efficient management of airports. Due to the unique imaging characteristics of SAR, traditional target-detection algorithms have poor generalization ability, low detection accuracy, and a cumbersome recognition process. Target detection in high-resolution SAR images based on deep-learning methods is currently a major research hotspot. You Only Look Once v5 (YOLOv5) has the problems of missed detection and false alarms. In this study, we propose an improved version of YOLOv5. A multiscale feature adaptive fusion module is proposed to adaptively assign different weights to each scale of the feature layers, which can extract richer semantic and textural information. The SIOU loss function is proposed to replace the original CIOU loss function to speed up the convergence of the algorithm. The improved Ghost structure is proposed to optimize the YOLOv5 network to decrease the parameters of the model and the amount of computation. A coordinate attention (CA) module is incorporated into the backbone section to help extract useful information. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved YOLOv5 performs better in terms of detection without affecting calculation speed. The mean average precision (mAP) value of the improved YOLOv5 increased by 5.8% compared with the original YOLOv5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrast ratio is the ratio of the brightest part to the darkest part of the image, which can reflect the picture hierarchy. In VR head‐mounted display (HMD), many scenes need to realistically simulate rooms or night environments. High contrast ratio helps to better display details in dark scenes, giving people the ultimate sense of immersion. There are many ways to measure contrast ratio, but still no effective standard to evaluate this indicator. In particular, many VR HMD adopt the emerging solution of folded optical path pancake. Due to the refraction and reflection of light on different interfaces, the pancake module will cause "ghosting", then affect the visual experience. Therefore, it becomes our focus to evaluate the contrast ratio of pancake VR HMD. We present a way to evaluate the contrast ratio of VR HMD by a near‐eye display measurement system, and compares the measurement results of different test methods. It can systematically and objectively evaluate the contrast of VR head‐mounted display devices and provide a useful reference for VR device evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The power sum polynomial associated to a multi-subset of the projective plane PG (2 , q) is the sum of the (q - 1) -th powers of the Rédei factors of the points in the multi-subset. The classification of multi-subsets having the same power sum polynomial passes through the determination of those multi-subsets associated to the zero polynomial, called ghosts. In this paper we provide new classes of ghosts and compute the dimension of the ghost subspace by exploiting the linear code generated by the lines of PG (2 , q) and its dual. Moreover, we explicitly enumerate and classify ghosts for planes of order 2, 3, 4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within debates surrounding "Levi's Paradox"--the idea that through their survival, survivors are not necessarily the "complete witnesses" of the Holocaust--the Muselmann is frequently posited as able to reconcile this conundrum. Within testimonial literature, these emaciated prisoners were perceived as ghost-like entities who were neither alive nor dead but somehow between life and death. The observed absence left in witness narratives thereby appears to be testimony from inside the experience of these Muselmänner. What is ubiquitously overlooked in such analyses is that the Muselmann primarily functions as a metaphor--rendering the absent dead legible in language. Ignoring this risks instrumentalizing the Muselmann, which threatens to allow the metaphor to become shorthand for something more generic--obfuscating the reality that Muselmänner signify real Holocaust victims. However, all metaphors contain a potential for semantic flexibility. Cannot the Muselmann's ability to pollute rigid dichotomies therefore be approached productively and more ethically when refocalizing him as a ghostly entity in testimonial literature? By examining passages from Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After, this article asks: if the Muselmann is viewed as a ghostly or spectral metaphor--a haunting force within the Holocaust's literary corpus--how might this spectral witness be able to draw attention to erasure and historical blind spots? Constituting an ethical and an interpretive undertaking, this refocalization simultaneously allows one to speak with the Muselmann and enables these anonymous victims to manifest themselves anew as haunting forces through literary testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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