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This chapter details a practice-based investigation of a 19th-century astronomical device known as ‘Janssen’s apparatus’. It questions traditional narratives of linear technological advancement and ‘sole inventor’ to reframe the historical artefact as a site which makes visible a network of technological knowledge interconnecting astronomy and visual culture. Approached from this perspective, the Janssen artefact is reframed as an ‘intersite of knowledge’, exploring how the various know-how contained within the device is located across disciplines rather than within a single field. Originally developed to calculate the Astronomical Unit during the 1874 Transit of Venus, Janssen’s apparatus failed in its endeavour as a measuring instrument, but its motion mechanism was successfully adapted into early cinema technologies. This chapter applies praxis through the development of a prototype artwork and the concept of ‘techne’ as speculative means of understanding how this mechanism was transferred from astronomy to the Western cultural realm. It proposes that the development of the apparatus was partially gleaned from moving image techniques already in use within 19th-century visual culture. The development of the prototype artwork is discussed in relation to the specific timing mechanism of the Janssen apparatus and how it establishes its own ‘intersite of knowledge’ relevant to its contemporary context. Finally, this chapter elaborates on how witnessing the Janssen mechanism in motion provided unique insight and how creating a dialogue between historical and contemporary apparatus facilitates a reconsideration of how galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] and other host institutions that contain artefacts might share their hidden stories.

Published by the Science and Technology Division of the Library of Congress since 1972, the Tracer Bullet series is an underused reference source available in many library and government documents collections. The Tracer Bullets cover a wide variety of subjects in the natural and physical sciences and technology. Each one is devoted to a specific topic and is designed “to help a reader begin to locate published material on a subject about which he or she has only general knowledge.” Developed in the style of a library pathfinder, each explores the resources available, listing texts, handbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, bibliographies, government documents, and journal articles. Addresses and telephone numbers of relevant organizations are also included as are appropriate Library of Congress subject headings to use in locating additional material.

Nowadays, most methods of illusion garment evaluation are based on the subjective evaluation of experienced practitioners, which consumes time and the results are too subjective to be accurate enough. It is necessary to explore a method that can quantify professional experience into objective indicators to evaluate the sensory comfort of the optical illusion skirt quickly and accurately. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method to objectively evaluate the sensory comfort of optical illusion skirt patterns by combining texture feature extraction and prediction model construction.

Firstly, 10 optical illusion sample skirts are produced, and 10 experimental images are collected for each sample skirt. Then a Likert five-level evaluation scale is designed to obtain the sensory comfort level of each skirt through the questionnaire survey. Synchronously, the coarseness, contrast, directionality, line-likeness, regularity and roughness of the sample image are calculated based on Tamura texture feature algorithm, and the mean, contrast and entropy are extracted of the image transformed by Gabor wavelet. Both are set as objective parameters. Two final indicators T1 and T2 are refined from the objective parameters previously obtained to construct the predictive model of the subjective comfort of the visual illusion skirt. The linear regression model and the MLP neural network model are constructed.

Results show that the accuracy of the linear regression model is 92%, and prediction accuracy of the MLP neural network model is 97.9%. It is feasible to use Tamura texture features, Gabor wavelet transform and MLP neural network methods to objectively predict the sensory comfort of visual illusion skirt images.

Compared with the existing uncertain and non-reproducible subjective evaluation of optical illusion clothing based on experienced experts. The main advantage of the authors' method is that this method can objectively obtain evaluation parameters, quickly and accurately obtain evaluation grades without repeated evaluation by experienced experts. It is a method of objectively quantifying the experience of experts.

The cruise sector has undergone a significant transformation over the past decades, rendering it amongst the fastest growing tourism segments. Nevertheless, cruise holidays represent a relatively small fraction of the entire tourism sector; and so do their economic impacts and externalities. The cruise business has emerged as a result of technological developments in passenger air-transportation and the resulting decline of passenger-shipping. While the increased visibility and over-exposure of its market and product developments may have enabled the re-invention and growth of the cruise sector, they are also amplifiers for its economic and sustainability risks. The purpose of this paper is to relativise both the potential risks and benefits to contribute to more pragmatism in future destination development investments and policies.

Based on a brief historical analysis of cruising and current trends, a realistic future is painted where the passenger and capacity growth rates of cruise tourism gradually level out.

Moreover, the cruise business becomes increasingly technologically driven to maintain profitability and establish its position in the wider experience portfolio of holiday consumers.

Traditionally, the relevance argument for cruise tourism research is based on the reported sector's growth rates and corresponding impacts, positive and negative, on destinations. Yet, the mere reproduction of growth rates and passenger numbers in isolation may well foster a misconception and even an overstatement of the cruise sector's significance and role within the wider tourism context. Arguably, the historical analysis and the comparative statistics contained in this paper paint a much-needed realistic picture and contribute to a deeper understanding of the sector's current dynamics.

When designing a performance involving people and mobile robots, the required functions and shape of the robot must be considered. However, it can be difficult to account for all of the requirements. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a mobile robot in the shape of a ball that is used in theatrical performances.

The paper proposes a mobile robot that can give the audience the optical illusion of the unique movements of a sphere by mounting a spherical light-emitting diode (LED) display on a high-agility wheeled robot.

It was found that movements that are difficult to implement with existing mechanisms can nonetheless be visualized through the use of light.

The paper proposes the concept of using pseudo-physical movements in performances with robots. The authors built a robot that visually reproduces the movements of a rolling sphere and is capable of faster movements and easier position estimations in comparison with previous spherical robots.

This study aims to test the effectiveness of a training intervention based on the psychology of perception, delivered to young Italian workers and employees, with low education, hired with an apprenticeship contract and involved in a compulsory training course (duration 32 h; the training intervention reported in the paper covers the first 8 h) whose aim was to let them develop such relational competencies as communication and cooperation with others.

By making use of optical-geometric illusions and ambiguous figures, participants were accompanied through a training intervention with the dual purpose of undermining their naive certainties about why they see what they see and increasing their awareness of how the perceptual processes work. At the beginning of the intervention, at the end of the 32 h (that is, after about a month) and after about one year from the end of the course, participants were administered a questionnaire to monitor the results of the training course by measuring their “perception awareness”.

“Perception awareness” increased from the beginning to the end of the course and still scored higher after one year. “Perception awareness” was positively related to communication and cooperation.

Although the literature is full of training courses delivered to improve communication and cooperation with others, little research has been carried out on perception-based training interventions delivered to young adults with low education hired with an apprenticeship contract for which this kind of training is compulsory.

This paper aims to set out to demonstrate the need for an integrated model that was titled, after the famous optical illusion (Hill, 1915), “Like My Wife and Mother-in-Law”, addressing three prevalent definitions of consumers’ communities: subculture, neo-tribe and brand community. It shows how it is only the use made of insights gleaned from all three that can faithfully describe the world of local and global meanings found in a computer game-based consumer community of children.

The analysis relies on a semiotic analysis of this computer game’s contents as well as on information obtained by a way of ethnography performed among group members, 9-11-year-olds. The combination of methods proves appropriate in tackling this model’s complexity, allowing to describe the interaction offered by the game, and the type of conduct attending it, online as well as offline.

Like the optical illusion where one can see two images in a single picture, this analysis shows that the participant children demonstrate complex, conflictual attitudes to the website’s effort to market subscriptions and products. Despite the game’s high popularity among children, a tension was identified between developers’ intentions and the game’s nature in practice.

Previous works seek to describe the experience of a given consumer community by opting for one of the three definitions. Unlike this approach, the author intends to show how the three-dimensional model offers a richer view of the consumers’ experience. Communicating this view may also prevent marketing misguided approaches when targeting consumer communities, based on a single-dimensional characterization of audiences.

This paper aims to investigate the decision-making on new ventures of eight directors or managers of Brazilian accelerators, aiming to understand if the Einstellung effect – mental rigidity – operates during the judgment of new ventures to accelerate.

Through a quasi-experiment design, the study was conducted with directors or managers of Brazilian accelerators, who were separately interviewed and responded to a psychological test, previously consented, as well as to a simulated decision-making questionnaire.

The selection process, with the criteria for decision-making, functions as a “template” for the recognition of potentially successful companies and is, indeed, subject to various cognitive biases, among which, the Einstellung effect, characteristic of mental rigidity.

The main contribution of the present study is to identify the cognitive mechanisms, which can negatively affect the evaluation of innovative projects and propose ways that can counteract or mitigate them.

The psychological approach to decision-making, usually studied in chess game context or problem-solving, was applied to a relatively unexplored field that is startups to accelerate. Its originality remains at the interdisciplinary approach, combining knowledge from psychology, decision-making and entrepreneurship.