NEW BELGRADE AFTER 1999: Spatial Violence as De-Socialisation,De-Romanisation,and De-Historisation

New Belgrade after 1999 is associated with the transition from a socialist and single-party state to a consumer capitalist and multi-party system, these latter features perceived as indicators of democracy. This text asks if and how this transitional period points to NATO's 1999 bombing campaign still being in-operation through spatial violence by other means, with these means related to the negation of difference and the transformation of everyday life and social values. Might this spatial violence be even more coercive than that of the war as it manifests through the convergence of military, legal, governmental, and economic entities of international “redevelopment” agencies working in the name of “security” along with the Serbian government? The focus here is on the post-1999 transformation and re-modernisation of New Belgrade as an elimination of difference through processes of de-socialisation, de-Romanisation, and de-historisation connected with neo-liberal privatisation.     

Personality and social characteristics of Facebook non-users and frequent users

Facebook is currently the largest social networking website with an estimated one billion of monthly active users in 2012. While most of the prior research has explored characteristics of Facebook users, less is known about the characteristics of individuals who do not use Facebook. The current study examined personality and social factors that might influence the decision to use Facebook and explored differences between Facebook non-users and frequent users. Online questionnaires examining levels of trust and self-disclosure, number of intimate friendships, peer usage of Facebook and scores on overt and covert narcissism were used for the purpose of the study. The results showed that non-users and frequent users differed on several social and personality characteristics. Facebook non-users had lower tendency to self-disclose, fewer peers participating in the social network and higher covert narcissistic traits. Frequent Facebook users scored higher on overt narcissism and reported more intimate friendships than non-users, indicating that close friendships might actually extend to social networks and contribute to a feeling of closeness and intimacy between friends in both an online and offline context.     

Motion anomaly detection and trajectory analysis in visual surveillance

Motion anomaly detection through video analysis is important for delivering autonomous situation awareness in public places. Surveillance scene segmentation and representation is the preliminary step to implementation anomaly detection. Surveillance scene can be represented using Region Association Graph (RAG), where nodes represent regions and edges denote connectivity among the regions. Existing RAG-based analysis algorithms assume simple anomalies such as moving objects visit statistically unimportant or abandoned regions. However, complex anomalies such as an object encircles within a particular region (Type-I) or within a set of regions (Type-II). In this paper, we extract statistical features from a given set of object trajectories and train multi-class support vector machines (SVM) to deal with each type of anomaly. In the testing phase, a given test trajectory is categorized as normal or anomalous with respect to the trained models. Performance evaluation of the proposed algorithm has been carried out on public as well as our own datasets. We have recorded sensitivity as high as 86% and fall-out rate as low as 9% in experimental evaluation of the proposed technique. We have carried out comparative analysis with state-of-the-art techniques to benchmark the method. It has been observed that the proposed model is consistent and highly accurate across challenging datasets.     

Structural similarity-based object tracking in multimodality surveillance videos

This paper addresses the problem of object tracking in video sequences for surveillance applications by using a recently proposed structural similarity-based image distance measure. Multimodality surveillance videos pose specific challenges to tracking algorithms, due to, for example, low or variable light conditions and the presence of spurious or camouflaged objects. These factors often cause undesired luminance and contrast variations in videos produced by infrared sensors (due to varying thermal conditions) and visible sensors (e.g., the object entering shadowy areas). Commonly used colour and edge histogram-based trackers often fail in such conditions. In contrast, the structural similarity measure reflects the distance between two video frames by jointly comparing their luminance, contrast and spatial characteristics and is sensitive to relative rather than absolute changes in the video frame. In this work, we show that the performance of a particle filter tracker is improved significantly when the structural similarity-based distance is applied instead of the conventional Bhattacharyya histogram-based distance. Extensive evaluation of the proposed algorithm is presented together with comparisons with colour, edge and mean-shift trackers using real-world surveillance video sequences from multimodal (infrared and visible) cameras.     

Comparative structural studies of poly(heptamethylene p,p′‐bibenzoate) by X‐ray diffraction,positron annihilation and microhardness

The structure of quenched samples of a polybibenzoate with a spacer containing seven methylene units has been studied by wide angle X‐ray scattering (WAXS), microhardness (MH) methods and positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS). It was established that the quenched samples of poly(heptamethylene p,p′‐bibenzoate) (P7MB) contain three phases simultaneously: smectic liquid crystalline, amorphous, and a small amount of crystalline one. The d‐spacing of the crystal peaks, together with the crystal and smectic domain dimensions in the direction normal to the mesogen planes and the factor of paracrystallinity, were calculated. The average distance between macromolecules determined from the position of the amorphous halo correlates with the open pore diameter obtained by the PALS analysis. On the basis of MH measurements it was considered that the phases are not uniformly distributed in the depth of the sample, so that the smectic phase prevails in the surface layer while the inner layers are partially crystalline. © 2003 Society of Chemical Industry