Media, and particularly TV media, have a great impact on the general public. In recent years, spatial patterns of information and the relevance of intangible geographies have become increasingly ...important. Gatekeeping plays a critical role in the selection of information that is transformed into media. Therefore, gatekeeping, through national media, also co-forms the generation of mental maps. In this paper, correspondence analysis (a statistical method) combined with cloud lines (a new visual analytics technique) is used to analyze how individual major regional events in one of the post-communist countries, the Czech Republic, penetrate into the media on a national scale. Although national news should minimize distortions about regions, this assumption has not been verified by our research. Impressions presented by the media of selected regions that were markedly influenced by one or several events in those regions demonstrate that gatekeepers, especially news reporters, functioned as a filter by selecting only a few specific, and in many cases, unusual events for dissemination.
Agriculture represents one of the most important economic activities that co-creates the qualities of landscapes. While topics such as food production, land utilization, or the development of rural ...regions are typically taken into account when analysing agriculture, regionally differentiated media portrayals of agriculture constitute a largely innovative approach. The main objective of this paper is to analyse and interpret agriculture-oriented news about individual self-governing regions in Czechia that were broadcasted in the framework of the national TV reporting. The paper is conceived as a historical study of the creation of the image of agriculture in the period from 2004 to 2011, which we define as the period of adaptation of Czech agriculture to the EU. The article includes both quantitative and qualitative dimensions. In summary, the media portrayals of agriculture largely differ from real conditions in Czech self-governing regions. Important themes, such as common agricultural policy or organic farming, have been mostly ignored within regionally focused national TV coverage. On the contrary, TV news is typically focused on one or a few phenomena of unusual or negative character, which is consistent with the gatekeeping conception.
Theoretical and practical advances in time-frequency analysis, in general, and the continuous wavelet transform (CWT), in particular, have increased over the last two decades. Although the Morlet ...wavelet has been the default choice for wavelet analysis, a new family of analytic wavelets, known as generalized Morse wavelets, which subsume several other analytic wavelet families, have been increasingly employed due to their time and frequency localization benefits and their utility in isolating and extracting quantifiable features in the time-frequency domain. The current paper describes two practical applications of analysing the features obtained from the generalized Morse CWT: (i) electromyography, for isolating important features in muscle bursts during skating, and (ii) electrocardiography, for assessing heart rate variability, which is represented as the ridge of the main transform frequency band. These features are subsequently quantified to facilitate exploration of the underlying physiological processes from which the signals were generated.
This article is part of the theme issue 'Redundancy rules: the continuous wavelet transform comes of age'.
•Addresses the need for intuitive websites to facilitate precision agriculture in emerging areas.•Contributes to research into interactive visual analytics.•Proposes innovative multiresolution and ...correlation graphics for agricultural data.•Presents a case study in agricultural community-based participatory research.•Contributes to research in using drone and other imagery for precision agriculture.
Agriculture in northern Ontario, Canada, has not yet reached the level of development of the southern regions of the province. In spite of the increasing desirability of the former region for agricultural expansion, northern agricultural producers – as well as other producers in “emerging” areas – have less access to information and decision support services relative to more established agricultural regions. At the same time, geographic information systems (GIS) are now being integrated into precision agriculture to assess field variability, to ensure optimal use of information, to maximize output, and to increase efficiency. To address this trend, a community-based research initiative based on an interactive web-based information visualization and GIS decision support system has been deployed with the aim of providing northern Ontario producers with access to the data they need to make the best possible decisions concerning their crops. This system employs citizen science and community-based participatory research to build a mutually beneficial partnership between agricultural producers, researchers, and other community stakeholders.
Biomedical image registration, or geometric alignment of two-dimensional and/or three-dimensional (3D) image data, is becoming increasingly important in diagnosis, treatment planning, functional ...studies, computer-guided therapies, and in biomedical research. Registration based on intensity values usually requires optimization of some similarity metric between the images. Local optimization techniques frequently fail because functions of these metrics with respect to transformation parameters are generally nonconvex and irregular and, therefore, global methods are often required. In this paper, a new evolutionary approach, particle swarm optimization, is adapted for single-slice 3D-to-3D biomedical image registration. A new hybrid particle swarm technique is proposed that incorporates initial user guidance. Multimodal registrations with initial orientations far from the ground truth were performed on three volumes from different modalities. Results of optimizing the normalized mutual information similarity metric were compared with various evolutionary strategies. The hybrid particle swarm technique produced more accurate registrations than the evolutionary strategies in many cases, with comparable convergence. These results demonstrate that particle swarm approaches, along with evolutionary techniques and local methods, are useful in image registration, and emphasize the need for hybrid approaches for difficult registration problems.
Environmental and limnological monitoring is of interest to government agencies, researchers, and the general public. In communities that rely on and are heavily affected by lakes and their ...watersheds, accessible and intuitive presentation of lake properties influences and aids decision-making, interventions, and the formulation of environmentally sound policies. In this paper, interactive web-based visualizations are employed as a mechanism to communicate environmental information collected from a commercial cruise vessel. A pilot study is presented for monitoring Lake Nipissing, a large culturally and environmentally important lake in northeastern Ontario, Canada. This example of community-based participatory research suggests that: (1) policy makers and researchers can quickly gain insight into what is happening in the lake through visualizations, which helps to direct subsequent, detailed investigations; and (2) through accessible, visual presentation, community members may be encouraged to become involved in contributing to environmental policies that directly affect them, thereby supporting environmental "citizen science".
New computational architectures, such as multi-core processors and graphics processing units (GPUs), pose challenges to application developers. Although in the case of general-purpose GPU ...programming, environments and toolkits such as CUDA and OpenCL have simplified application development, different ways of thinking about memory access, storage, and program execution are required. This paper presents a strategy for implementing a specific signal processing technique for blind-source separation: infomax independent component analysis (ICA). Common linear algebra operations are mapped to a low cost programmable graphics card using the OpenCL programming toolkit. Because many components of ICA are inherently parallel, ICA computations can be accelerated by low cost parallel hardware. Experimental results on simulated and speech signals indicate that efficiency gains and scalability are achievable through general-purpose GPU implementation, and suggest that important applications in telecommunications, speech processing, and biomedical signal analysis can benefit from these new architectures. The utilization of low cost GPUs for programming may potentially facilitate real-time applications of previously offline algorithms.
Theoretical and practical advances in time–frequency analysis, in general, and the continuous wavelet transform (CWT), in particular, have increased over the last two decades. Although the Morlet ...wavelet has been the default choice for wavelet analysis, a new family of analytic wavelets, known as generalized Morse wavelets, which subsume several other analytic wavelet families, have been increasingly employed due to their time and frequency localization benefits and their utility in isolating and extracting quantifiable features in the time–frequency domain. The current paper describes two practical applications of analysing the features obtained from the generalized Morse CWT: (i) electromyography, for isolating important features in muscle bursts during skating, and (ii) electrocardiography, for assessing heart rate variability, which is represented as the ridge of the main transform frequency band. These features are subsequently quantified to facilitate exploration of the underlying physiological processes from which the signals were generated.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Redundancy rules: the continuous wavelet transform comes of age’.
The K distribution is an accurate model for ultrasonic backscatter. A neural approach is developed to estimate K distribution parameters. Accuracy and consistency of the estimates from simulated K ...and envelope data compare favorably with other techniques. Neural networks can potentially be used as a complementary technique for tissue characterization.
Role-based collaboration (RBC) is an adaptive computational methodology that uses roles as underlying mechanisms to facilitate and analyze system behavior for entities that collaborate and coordinate ...their activities with or within these systems. In dynamic environments, including those that occur in large-scale simulations, visualization provides insights into complex systems behaviors. This article presents a visual analytics (VA) approach to studying dynamics involved in adaptive collaboration (AC) for large, multiagent simulation model using new open-source tools. The results show that time-varying systems can be steered for optimal performance and assessing adaptations using VA dashboards.
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