Whither the life of online images?

Solid State Physics

Cuts across perceptual psychology, art, television, film, literature, advertising, and political communication to give the reader critical insight into the holistic logic and emotional power of the images that dominate our lives.

The three-volume work Perceiving in Depth is a sequel to Binocular Vision and Stereopsis and to Seeing in Depth, both by Ian P. Howard and Brian J. Rogers. This work is much broader in scope than the previous books and includes mechanisms of depth perception by all senses, including aural, electrosensory organs, and the somatosensory system. Volume 1 reviews sensory coding, psychophysical and analytic procedures, and basic visual mechanisms. Volume 2 reviews stereoscopic vision. Volume 3 reviews all mechanisms of depth perception other than stereoscopic vision. The three volumes are extensively illustrated and referenced and provide the most detailed review of all aspects of perceiving the three-dimensional world. Volume 1 starts with a review of the history of visual science from the ancient Greeks to the early 20th century with special attention devoted to the discovery of the principles of perspective and stereoscopic vision. The first chapter also contains an account of early visual display systems, such as panoramas and peepshows, and the development of stereoscopes and stereophotography. A chapter on the psychophysical and analytic procedures used in investigations of depth perception is followed by a chapter on sensory coding and the geometry of visual space. An account of the structure and physiology of the primate visual system proceeds from the eye through the LGN to the visual cortex and higher visual centers. This is followed by a review of the evolution of visual systems and of the development of the mammalian visual system in the embryonic and post-natal periods, with an emphasis on experience-dependent neural plasticity. An account of the development of perceptual functions, especially depth perception, is followed by a review of the effects of early visual deprivation during the critical period of neural plasticity on amblyopia and other defects in depth perception. Volume 1 ends with accounts of the accommodation mechanism of the human eye and vergence eye movements.

How do common household items such as basic plastic house wares or high-tech digital cameras transform our daily lives? This title considers this question, from the design of products through to their use in the home. It looks at how everyday objects, ranging from screwdrivers to photo management software, are used on a practical level.

First Published in 1991. Knowing any real city, and still more so, knowing what it is to know a city, may be as much about passive as about active experience. What we read in the field-that field of the city in all its bizarre mixture of culture and nature-is bound to determine, to some non-fictional extent, what we know of it, what we imagine it could be, what we fear it may be, or become. These essays are meant to be, albeit in their critical mode, the recountings of knowing something through something else: they are the projected imagination, through reading, of the reading by the self and/or others (a wide range of each) of a city, or cities as such, of what city-knowing or city-thinking is. The city as stage, market, and labyrinth, variously trafficked and aestheticized, dreamt and politicized, as passionately written by authors from Cicero to Kazin, from Wordsworth, Dickens, Whitman, and Woolf, to Williams, Ashbery, and Bonnefoy, is the place the essays play themselves out, through architecture and metaphor.

Citizens of the World investigates an area of eighteenth-century cultural, intellectual, and day-to-day life that many have seen but few have explored: adaptation. Throughout the long eighteenth century, adaptation happened repeatedly and in diverse forms: in the experience of travelers, merchants, and expatriates who made their way in foreign lands; in the adjustment of ancient literary norms to modern themes, concerns, and expectations; in the development of scientific apparatus for the probing of newly-discovered phenomena; in translating; in the adjusting of familiar architecture for new environments; in speculating about and making provision for the future reception of contemporary works; in the tempering and symphonizing of musical instruments; and in dozens of other no less important ways. The eight essays in this book, composed by scholars from Europe, Asia, and North America, provide the first panoramic view of adaptation during the Enlightenment. Essays delve into such diverse forms of adaptation as the representation of cultural interchange on porcelain serving pieces; the attempt to come to terms with the demands of air travel through the often cumbersome technology of ballooning; the relevance of the English Enlightenment to present-day Caribbean literature; piracy as a form of recalibration; Vietnamese verse; Georgic envisioning of ecological stability; and the uncanny interactions of French provincial architecture with both eighteenth-century dwellers and their descendants. Cumulatively, the essays illuminate the process by which eighteenth-century thinkers, artists, and adventurers elevated adaptation from a mere necessity to a stimulating, happily unending cultural project.