Rossinow revisits the period between the 1880s and the 1940s, when reformers and radicals worked together along a middle path between the revolutionary left and establishment liberalism. He takes the story up to the present, showing how the progressive connection was lost and explaining the consequences that followed.

Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 offers a panoramic view of reflections on progress in modern China. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the discourses on progress shape Chinese understandings of modernity and its pitfalls. As this in-depth study shows, these discourses play a pivotal role in the fields of politics, society, culture, as well as philosophy, history, and literature. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that the Chinese ideas of progress, their often highly optimistic implications, but also the criticism of modernity they offered, opened the gateway for reflections on China’s past, its position in the present world, and its future course.

How does the brain piece together the information required to achieve object recognition, figure-ground segmentation, object completion in cases of partial occlusion and related perceptual phenomena? This book focuses on principles of Gestalt psychology and the key issues which surround them, providing an up-to-date survey of the most interesting and highly debated topics in visual neuroscience, perception and object recognition. The volume is divided into three main parts: Gestalt and perceptual organisation, attention aftereffects and illusions, and color vision and art perception. Themes covered in the book include: - a historical review of Gestalt theory and its relevance in modern-day neuroscience - the relationship between perceptive and receptive fields - a critical analysis of spatiotemporal unity of perception - the role of Gestalt principles in perceptual organization - self-organizing properties of the visual field - the role of attention and perceptual grouping in forming non-retinotopic representations - figural distortions following adaptation to spatial patterns - illusory changes of brightness in spatial patterns - the function of motion illusions as a tool to study Gestalt principles in vision - conflicting theories of color vision and the neural basis of it - the role of color in figure-ground segmentation - chromatic assimilation in visual art and perception - the phenomena of colored shadows. Including contributions from experts in the field, this book will provide an essential overview of current research and theory on visual perception and Gestalt. It will be key reading for researchers and academics in the field of visual perception and neuroscience.

Pattern recognition is a central topic in contemporary computer sciences, with continuously evolving topics, challenges, and methods, including machine learning, content-based image retrieval, and model- and knowledge-based - proaches, just to name a few. The Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recog- tion (CIARP) has become established as a high-quality conference, highlighting the recent evolution of the domain. These proceedings include all papers presented during the 15th edition of this conference, held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in November 2010. As was the case for previous conferences, CIARP 2010 attracted parti- pants from around the world with the aim of promoting and disseminating - going research on mathematical methods and computing techniques for pattern recognition, computer vision, image analysis, and speech recognition, as well as their applications in such diverse areas as robotics, health, entertainment, space exploration, telecommunications, data mining, document analysis, and natural language processing and recognition, to name only a few of them. Moreover, it provided a forum for scienti?c research, experience exchange, sharing new kno- edge and increasing cooperation between research groups in pattern recognition and related areas. It is important to underline that these conferences have contributed sign- icantly to the growth of national associations for pattern recognition in the Iberoamerican region, all of them as members of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).

Tania Martín-Pérez, Ángel Criado-Fornelio, Manuel Ávila-Blanco, and Jorge Pérez-Serrano begin this book by reviewing studies that propose species identification should be established on complete gene sequence rather than small fragments that might be unreliable. Afterwards, Eva García Millán, Ana Castro-Balado, Anxo Fernández-Ferreiro, and Francisco J. Otero-Espinar suggest that soft contact lenses have potential to be used as drug delivery systems by way of a medicated lens. Next, Maria J Giraldez, Ph.D., Carlos Garcia-Resua, Ph.D., and Eva Yebra-Pimentel, Ph.D. examine the properties of contact lenses in order to determine a means of reducing microbial contamination. Pablo J Franco, Pablo H Sande, Florencia González Fleitas, Julián D Devouassoux, Georgia Milnes, Hernán H Dieguez, Marcos L Aranda, Damián Dorfman, and Ruth E. Rosenstein present research that shows biologic treatments could be used in uveitis treatment. Following this, Rodrigo Mora-Martínez and Ernesto Suaste-Gómez, Ph.D. explore the impact of chromatic stimuli on various pupillary phenomena to reveal divergences between separate chromaticities. Frederick R Burgess and Roly Megaw provide an overview of the known literature on mesenchymal stem cells physiology. Then, David Lozano Giral, MD, Enrique Graue-Hernández, MD, and Alejandro Navas MD, Ph.D. review the cornea and its properties. Sivan M Elyashiv and Richard B Rosencompare in face OCT images with OCT angiograms in an effort to identify the level of capillary dropout, remodelling, and the development of neo-vascularisation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2015, held in Montevideo, Uruguay, in November 2015. The 95 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 185 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applications on pattern recognition; biometrics; computer vision; gesture recognition; image classification and retrieval; image coding, processing and analysis; segmentation, analysis of shape and texture; signals analysis and processing; theory of pattern recognition; video analysis, segmentation and tracking.