The modern acoustic diffuser has an ability to attract comment, some say they sound good, some say they sound bad; some designs look beautiful and others are ugly. Proper amounts of the right diffusion are credited with contributing to spectacular acoustics, too much of the 'wrong' diffusion gets blamed for ruining one hall, while the lack of scattering in another is held responsible for a poor...

./ Literature and fine art, the 1wo most important and idealistic cultural factors in society, have traditionally been assigned the goals of prcsenting chieHy the two Greek ideals of beauty : the beautiful and the good. Neither, has, however, shied away from picturing the nonpicturesqu e as seen, for exa mple, in .the ugly and often offendin g appearances of major plagues whi ch have left their...

Nanoparticles can be beautiful, as in stained glass windows, or they can be ugly as in wear and corrosion debris from implants. We estimate that there will be about 70,000 papers in 2015 with nanoparticles as a keyword, but only one in thirteen uses the nanoparticle shape as an additional keyword and research focus, and only one in two hundred has thermodynamics. Methods for synthesizing nanopa...

A. Introduction Let me thank the organizers of this conference for the invitation to come to this beautiful place and to attend what is always an intellectually challenging conference. In fact, the challenges today are not just intellectual, but they also have enormously important practical implications. How can we restore growth, and how can we do so in a sustainable way? This paper by Carmen ...

Art is one of life's great joys, whether it is beautiful, ugly, sublime or shocking. Aesthetic responses to visual art involve sensory, cognitive and visceral processes. Neuroimaging studies have yielded a wealth of information regarding aesthetic appreciation and beauty using visual art as stimuli, but few have considered the effect of expertise on visual and visceral responses. To study the t...

Reading is not only "cold" information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such "hot" reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical ...

A new emotion-based image retrieval method is proposed in this paper. Query emotional descriptors called query color code and query gray code are designed on the basis of human evaluation of 13 emotion pairs (“like-dislike”, “beautiful-ugly”, “naturalunnatural”, “dynamic-static”, “warm-cold”, “gay-sober”, “cheerful-dismal”, “unstablestable”, “light-dark”, “strong-weak”, “gaudy-plain”, “hard-sof...

This article argues for an aesthetic approach to resisting oppression based on judgments of bodily unattractiveness. Philosophical theories have often suggested that appropriate aesthetic judgments should converge on sets of objects consensually found to be beautiful or ugly. The convergence of judgments about human bodies, however, is a significant source of injustice, because people judged to...

Fictional characters (FCs) and mediated persons in literature, theater, film, art, TV, and digital media fulfil basic psychological functions, although the processes involved remain unspecified. Departing from identification and empathy hypotheses, a new context-sensitive model draws upon similarity studies, empirical aesthetics, persuasion, emotion and social psychology. The PEFiC-model (Perce...

The nature of humans interacting with interface characters (e.g., embodied agents) is not well understood. The I-PEFiC model provides an integrative perspective on human-character interaction, assuming that the processes of engagement and user interaction exchange information in explaining user responses with interface characters. An experiment using the Sims2-game was conducted to test the eff...