¿El empleo contra la cohesión social?

This article interprets how the notion of ageing as a justification for a series of social policies has wielded with the resul * Universidad Libre de Bruselas. Artículo traducido por Pablo Meseguer Gancedo. 241 Mateo Alaluf ¿El empleo contra la cohesión social? ting type of government that favours an «open method of coordination» in industrial relations. By placing the decisions taken at the last three European Councils in the framework of social policy, we will attempt to demonstrate how putting the accent on improving unemployment rates could, from that perspective, have a paradoxical effect on social cohesion. The problem of «ageing» presented at the last European Councils as an inexorable threat to the system of social protection makes employment an obligation which, below a semblance of participation, could also lead to exclusion and inequality.En este texto propondremos una interpretación de la movilización del concepto de «envejecimiento» como justificación de una serie de políticas sociales y como consecuencia de una forma de gobernar que privilegia el «método abierto de coordinación» en las relaciones laborales. Situando las decisiones tomadas en los tres últimos Consejos europeos en el marco de las políticas sociales, intentaremos mostrar cómo el acento puesto en la mejora de las tasas de empleo podría tener, desde esta perspectiva, una relación paradójica con la cohesión social. El problema del «envejecimiento», presentado los últimos Consejos europeos como una amenaza inexorable para los sistema de protección social, convierte al empleo en una obligación que puede conducir también a la exclusión y a la desigualdad bajo la apariencia de participación

Les ouvriers au cinéma

Le premier film de l’histoire du cinéma, La sortie de l’usine Lumière (1895), est aussi le premier film sur le travail. Depuis lors, que ce soit par la fiction, le documentaire ou le cinéma direct, le travail, les ouvriers et leur classe ont rythmé toute l’histoire du cinéma. A la différence de la représentation traditionnelle du travail par la figure de l’ouvrier qualifié, masculin de la grande industrie, le cinéma a mis en scène les ouvrières et des activités de travail diversifiées. Le projet de « reproduire » par l’image le réel a pris corps par la représentation des ouvriers au cinéma. Il ne s’agit pas tant, par cette tentative, d’illustrer le travail par des images, ni de penser le travail à partir des images, mais d’essayer de le penser avec des images de manière à faire émerger des images et des pensées nouvelles. Ce cinéma pourrait alors laisser entrevoir les possibilités d’un langage spécifique susceptible d’élargir notre intelligence du monde.The first film in the history (of cinema), La sortie de l’usine Lumière (1895), is also the first film about work. Since then, through fiction, documentary or direct cinema, work, the workmen and their class have given rhythm to all the history of cinema. Unlike the traditional representation of work by the skilled, male, worker of the big industry, cinema put diversified workers and activities on stage. The project to "reproduce" by the image the real world was really shaped by the representation of the workmen in cinema. The question was not, by this attempt, to illustrate work by images, nor to think work starting from the images, but was an attempt to think it with images to create new images and thoughts. Then this cinema could open the possibility of a specific language able to widen our intelligence of the world

Formación

El uso de este término sugiere una educación dirigida hacia el empleo, que se sitúa precisamente en la intersección entre escuela y trabajo. Aunque, sin decir palabra, hemos pasado, solamente por el uso del vocablo, de la educación al trabajo, de la sociología de la educación a la economía del trabajo. La importancia dada al campo de la formación, de ahora en adelante, orienta investigaciones empíricas, alimenta representaciones y justifica discursos y medidas políticas. Los juicios “profanos..

Formação

O uso deste termo sugere uma educação finalizada para o emprego, que se situa precisamente na intersecção entre escola e trabalho. Se bem que, sem dizer palavra, passámos, somente pela utilização do vocábulo, da educação ao trabalho, da sociologia da educação à economia do trabalho. A importância doravante reconhecida ao campo da formação orienta pesquisas empíricas, alimenta representações e justifica discursos e medidas políticas. Os julgamentos “profanos” e “científicos” embatem na focaliz..

ConceptLab: Creative Concept Generation using VLM-Guided Diffusion Prior Constraints

Recent text-to-image generative models have enabled us to transform our words into vibrant, captivating imagery. The surge of personalization techniques that has followed has also allowed us to imagine unique concepts in new scenes. However, an intriguing question remains: How can we generate a new, imaginary concept that has never been seen before? In this paper, we present the task of creative text-to-image generation, where we seek to generate new members of a broad category (e.g., generating a pet that differs from all existing pets). We leverage the under-studied Diffusion Prior models and show that the creative generation problem can be formulated as an optimization process over the output space of the diffusion prior, resulting in a set of "prior constraints". To keep our generated concept from converging into existing members, we incorporate a question-answering Vision-Language Model (VLM) that adaptively adds new constraints to the optimization problem, encouraging the model to discover increasingly more unique creations. Finally, we show that our prior constraints can also serve as a strong mixing mechanism allowing us to create hybrids between generated concepts, introducing even more flexibility into the creative process.Comment: Project page: https://kfirgoldberg.github.io/ConceptLab

Impact of fresh fruit smoothie consumption on apparent health of Asian faces

Skin carotenoid coloration has been proposed as a valid cue to health in humans, reflecting fruit and vegetable intake, and enhancing apparent health. Supplementation with a carotenoid-rich fruit and vegetable smoothie affects skin colour, but it is not known if this skin color change enhances healthy appearance. In three experiments, we examine the effects of skin color change induced by supplementation with a carotenoid-rich fruit smoothie (25mg carotenoids/d) on the apparent health of Malaysian Chinese faces. In experiment 1, observers were asked to identify the healthier looking of pairs of photographs of the same subject taken pre- and post-supplementation (or pre- and post-placebo), choosing the pre-supplementation (or pre-placebo) images. When confounding due to facial expression was eliminated in experiment 2, observers showed no preference for unmodified pre-supplementation photograph or the same image with skin color manipulated to simulate a level of smoothie-induced color change associated with 4 weeks of supplementation. In experiment 3, observers manipulated the skin color of face photographs along the smoothie-induced color change axis to optimize healthy appearance. Observers chose to induce a color change approximately equivalent to one third of the change induced by daily consumption of our carotenoid rich smoothie. This suggests that the skin color change induced by the supplementation enhanced apparent facial health, however the dose and duration of the supplementation overshot the optimal healthy-looking color of Malaysian Chinese skin. This suggests that there is an optimal carotenoid color for healthy appearance, and that this optimal level may be constrained by preferences for averageness, by the association between very yellow skin and ill health, or by negative health impacts of very high doses of carotenoids

A Neural Space-Time Representation for Text-to-Image Personalization

A key aspect of text-to-image personalization methods is the manner in which the target concept is represented within the generative process. This choice greatly affects the visual fidelity, downstream editability, and disk space needed to store the learned concept. In this paper, we explore a new text-conditioning space that is dependent on both the denoising process timestep (time) and the denoising U-Net layers (space) and showcase its compelling properties. A single concept in the space-time representation is composed of hundreds of vectors, one for each combination of time and space, making this space challenging to optimize directly. Instead, we propose to implicitly represent a concept in this space by optimizing a small neural mapper that receives the current time and space parameters and outputs the matching token embedding. In doing so, the entire personalized concept is represented by the parameters of the learned mapper, resulting in a compact, yet expressive, representation. Similarly to other personalization methods, the output of our neural mapper resides in the input space of the text encoder. We observe that one can significantly improve the convergence and visual fidelity of the concept by introducing a textual bypass, where our neural mapper additionally outputs a residual that is added to the output of the text encoder. Finally, we show how one can impose an importance-based ordering over our implicit representation, providing users control over the reconstruction and editability of the learned concept using a single trained model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over a range of concepts and prompts, showing our method's ability to generate high-quality and controllable compositions without fine-tuning any parameters of the generative model itself.Comment: Project page available at https://neuraltextualinversion.github.io/NeTI

Skin color preferences in a Malaysian Chinese population

Facial skin color influences the perceived health and attractiveness of Caucasian faces, and has been proposed as a valid cue to aspects of physiological health. Similar preferences for skin color have previously been found in African participants, while different preferences have been found among mainland Chinese participants. Here, we asked Malaysian Chinese participants (ethnic Chinese living in an Asian country with high levels of exposure to Western culture) to manipulate the skin color of Malaysian Chinese, Caucasian, and African faces to make them “look as healthy as possible.” Participants chose to increase skin yellowness to a greater extent than to increase skin redness to optimize healthy appearance. The slight reduction in skin lightness chosen was not statistically significant after correction for multiple comparisons. While broadly in line with the preferences of Caucasian and African participants from previous studies, this differs from mainland Chinese participants. There may be a role for culture in skin color preferences, though methodological differences mean that further research is necessary to identify the cause of these differences in preferences

Modes in silver-iodide-lined hollow metallic waveguides mapped by terahertz near-field time-domain microscopy

Thin dielectric layers inside hollow metallic waveguides are used to improve the waveguide transmission characteristics as the dominant waveguide mode changes into the hybrid HE11 mode. We investigate the effect of 1 μm thick silver iodide (AgI) coatings on the fundamental modes in cylindrical waveguides at terahertz (THz) frequencies, in the regime of the dielectric layer being thinner than the optimal thickness hopt(2 THz) ̃ 20 μm. In the region of 1-3.2 THz, the lowest-order modes are similar in profile to the TE11 and TM11 modes, as determined by the timeresolved near-field measurements and verified numerically. Higher-order modes are detected experimentally as mode mixtures due to the multimode propagation. Numerical electromagnetic modeling is applied to resolve the mode structure ambiguity, allowing us to correlate experimentally detected patterns with a superposition of the TM11 and the higher-order mode, TE12. Mode profiles determined here indicate that in the regime of ultrathin dielectric (h c 0.1γeff ), the dielectric layer does not transform the dominant mode into the low-loss HE11 mode. Experimental mode patterns similar to the HE11 and the TE01 modes nevertheless can be formed due to mode beating. The results indicate that the Ag/AgI waveguides can be used for guiding THz waves in the TE01 mode or the TE12 mode with high discrimination against other modes. © 2012 Optical Society of America