Style‐Based Motion Synthesis†

Representing motions as linear sums of principal components has become a widely accepted animation technique. While powerful, the simplest version of this approach is not particularly well suited to modeling the specific style of an individual whose motion had not yet been recorded when building the database: it would take an expert to adjust the PCA weights to obtain a motion style that is indistinguishable from his. Consequently, when realism is required, the current practice is to perform a full motion capture session each time a new person must be considered. In this paper, we extend the PCA approach so that this requirement can be drastically reduced: for whole classes of cyclic and noncyclic motions such as walking, running or jumping, it is enough to observe the newcomer moving only once at a particular speed or jumping a particular distance using either an optical motion capture system or a simple pair of synchronized video cameras. This one observation is used to compute a set of principal component weights that best approximates the motion and to extrapolate in real‐time realistic animations of the same person walking or running at different speeds, and jumping a different distance.     

Evaluation of on-line analytic and numeric inverse kinematics approaches driven by partial vision input

Despite its central role in the constitution of a truly enactive interface, 3D interaction through human full body movement has been hindered by a number of technological and algorithmic factors. Let us mention the cumbersome magnetic equipments, or the underdetermined data set provided by less invasive video-based approaches. In the present paper, we explore the recovery of the full body posture of a standing subject in front of a stereo camera system. The 3D position of the hands, the head and the center of the trunk segment are extracted in real-time and provided to the body posture recovery algorithmic layer. We focus on the comparison between numeric and analytic inverse kinematics approaches in terms of performances and overall quality of the reconstructed body posture. Algorithmic issues arise from the very partial and noisy input and the singularity of the human standing posture. Despite stability concerns, results confirm the pertinence of this approach in this demanding context.     

Testosterone and child and adolescent adjustment: The moderating role of parent-child relationships.

In a sample of established middle- and working-class families with normally developing children and adolescents ranging in age from 6 to 18 years, sons' and daughters' testosterone levels showed little direct connection to risk behavior or symptoms of depression. In contrast, testosterone's positive relation with risk behavior and negative relation with depression were conditional on the quality of parent-child relations. As parent-child relationship quality increased, testosterone-related adjustment problems were less evident. When relationship quality decreased, testosterone-linked risk-taking behavior and symptoms of depression were more in evidence. Few relations were found between parents' testosterone and child behavior. Boys' and girls' ages and stages of pubertal development were important for understanding the expression of hormone-related problem behavior in some cases but not in others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A new chemically defined medium for wine lactic acid bacteria

Growth and activity of lactic acid bacteria is crucial for the production and quality of grape wines but studying their metabolism is difficult in wines or complex laboratory media because of the undefined substrate pools. This work presents a new chemically defined medium that meets the fastidious nutritional requirements of wine lactic acid bacteria and yields rapid and strong growth. The new medium is composed of 44 constituents and a precise protocol is provided for its preparation. Maximum specific growth rates and growth yields of the wine strains studied were comparable to those obtained in common laboratory media, and the new medium allows for various modifications, such as changing the medium pH to the wine range, addition of L-malic acid or utilization of different carbon sources while maintaining growth of wine lactic acid bacteria. The medium was successfully tested with 22 wine strains of the genera Oenococcus, Lactobacillus and Pediococcus. It is suggested that this chemically defined medium be considered for the investigation of the nutritional requirements and metabolism of wine lactic acid bacteria.     

Round-Robin Testing of Three Phase Padmount Transformers

This paper addresses the accuracy of 3-phase transformer loss testing with particular attention to the reliability of manufacturers' certified loss test results. Seven three-phase padmounts, one from each of seven different manufacturers, were used in a round-robin test program. In addition to their original production tests, each of the seven manufacturers performed loss tests on the entire group of transformers. The results of the program indicate an uncomfortably wide range of results.