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Gobbe-Sabz (Green Cupola) is one of the most important and prominent build­ings in Kerman, Iran, dating back to the Qara-khitai dynasty (1222–1306 AD). It was a huge complex of buildings that was almost totally destroyed in an earthquake. Every building during its lifecycle from creation to deterioration acquires values that are important in making any decision about restoration. Brandi’s theory of restoration considers ruins as a work of art, claiming that they are the result of a unique, creative process. He asserts it is necessary to have a creative process for restoration to reclaim its significance in the human consciousness. Although there remains only a small part of Gobbe-Sabz, many remarkable heritage values have been added over time that could be helpful in the creative process for its conservation. The present situation of Gobbe-Sabz precludes rebuilding it as active and complete architecture, determining the process of rehabilitating its original condition. Moreover, some heritage values and meanings have been added to it across the years which are a collection of ideas and concepts that can be useful in deciding the conservation process. In this regard, this research proposes conservation strategies and a conceptual framework for the reha­bilitation of the historic ruins based on their current situation. Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage, Vol 18 (2018)

Due to the digitization of fine art collections, pictures of fine art objects stored at museums and art galleries became widely available to the public. It created a demand for efficient software tools that would allow rapid retrieval and semantic categorization of art. This paper introduces a new, two-stage image classification approach aiming to improve the style classification accuracy. At the first stage, the proposed approach divides the input image into five patches and applies a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to train and classify each patch individually. At the second stage, the outcomes from the individual five patches are fused in the decision-making module, which applies a shallow neural network trained on the probability vectors given by the first-stage classifier. While the first stage categorizes the input image based on the individual patches, the second stage infers the final decision label categorizing the artistic style of the analyzed input image. The key factor in improving the accuracy compared to the baseline techniques is the fact that the second stage is trained independently on the first stage using probability vectors instead of images. This way, the second stage is effectively trained to compensate for the potential mistakes made during the first stage. The proposed method was tested using six different pre-trained CNNs (AlexNet, VGG-16, VGG-19, GoogLeNet, ResNet-50, and Inceptionv3) as the first-stage classifiers, and a shallow neural network as a second-stage classifier. The experiments conducted using three standard art classification datasets indicated that the proposed method presents a significant improvement over the existing baseline techniques.

The global internet antiquities market exists in a complex cultural heritage framework, comprised of international law and domestic legislation. In this paper, the questions I seek to answer are the following: how do internet antiquities dealers engage with their legal obligations, and how is this engagement translated to the ethics of their businesses? This paper presents a comparative examination of 45 antiquities dealers split across three categories—internet dealers, eBay dealers and social media dealers—revealing three key insights about the internet antiquities market: firstly, that the level of legal literacy in the market is depicted as being quite poor; secondly, that the performance of legal awareness does not always correspond with ethical dealer practices; and finally, some dealers utilise a suite of justifications for their behaviours, practices and values (known as neutralisation techniques) to undermine their legal obligations. Such results confirm existing claims of the failure of self-regulation in the internet antiquities market and reveal a demand for educational campaigns targeted at raising consumer awareness by challenging misleading market narratives and highlighting the ethical and legal issues involved with the trade of cultural heritage.

This article examines two strands of discourse on wild capture fisheries; one that focuses on resource sustainability and environmental impacts, another related to food and nutrition security and human well-being. Available data and research show that, for countries most dependent on fish to meet the nutritional requirements of their population, wild capture fisheries remain the dominant supplier. Although, contrary to popular narratives, the sustainability of these fisheries is not always and everywhere in crisis, securing their sustainability is essential and requires considerable effort across a broad spectrum of fishery systems. An impediment to achieving this is that the current research and policy discourses on environmental sustainability of fisheries and food security remain only loosely and superficially linked. Overcoming this requires adoption of a broader sustainability science paradigm to help harness synergies and negotiate tradeoffs between food security, resource conservation, and macroeconomic development goals. The way society chooses to govern fisheries is, however, an ethical choice, not just a technical one, and we recommend adding an ethical dimension to sustainability science as applied to fisheries.

Preparing data from artefact catalogues of previously published German excavation reports, in the project 'Engendering Roman Spaces', required ongoing refinement of data translation and digital manipulation using a variety of software packages. This process included the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, spreadsheets, database and graphics programs, and the final presentation of the data in ArcGIS as an interpretative tool. With each step, a number of challenges were encountered relating to the quality of the data and original cataloguing processes, and the limitations of the software packages being used. Excavation reports of four Roman military sites - the forts of Vetera I, Ellingen, Oberstimm and Rottweil - are used in this article to highlight the range of problems encountered and solutions arrived to resolve them, a process requiring constant revision and refinement.

AbstractThe country of Solomon Islands, like most Pacific island nations, has a legally pluralistic regime. That is, customary law operates in parallel with the common law, a legacy of Solomon Islands' colonial past. Legal pluralism raises significant difficulties, including in the way cultural heritage is protected and managed. To date, the courts have rarely been called on to deal with such issues, but in 2010 the High Court had to examine legislation designed to regulate the recovery and export of World War II relics. This seemingly innocuous case raised a number of issues concerning the rights of different stakeholders to this material. Moreover, it raised a foundational question as to whether these relics might be considered cultural heritage, and if so, just whose heritage it was. A consideration of this case and the legislation that applies to this heritage serves to illustrate some of the difficulties that arise in protecting cultural heritage within pluralistic legal systems.

AbstractVast amounts of clinically relevant text-based variables lie undiscovered and unexploited in electronic medical records (EMR). To exploit this untapped resource, and thus facilitate the discovery of informative covariates from unstructured clinical narratives, we have built a novel computational pipeline termed Text-based Exploratory Pattern Analyser for Prognosticator and Associator discovery (TEPAPA). This pipeline combines semantic-free natural language processing (NLP), regular expression induction, and statistical association testing to identify conserved text patterns associated with outcome variables of clinical interest. When we applied TEPAPA to a cohort of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma patients, plausible concepts known to be correlated with human papilloma virus (HPV) status were identified from the EMR text, including site of primary disease, tumour stage, pathologic characteristics, and treatment modalities. Similarly, correlates of other variables (including gender, nodal status, recurrent disease, smoking and alcohol status) were also reliably recovered. Using highly-associated patterns as covariates, a patient’s HPV status was classifiable using a bootstrap analysis with a mean area under the ROC curve of 0.861, suggesting its predictive utility in supporting EMR-based phenotyping tasks. These data support using this integrative approach to efficiently identify disease-associated factors from unstructured EMR narratives, and thus to efficiently generate testable hypotheses.