CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE CLIENT KIND
Am I ready for this? What will they be like? What will I be like? Nothing is more equally exciting and frightening for a young anthropologist than entering into the field for the first time. As I imagine Margaret Mead daydreamed about the exotic South Pacific before she arrived in person, I fantasize about the corporate world with both excitement and horror. What will it be like? Am I ready?
BEYOND RESEARCH: ADDING VALUE AS AN ANTHROPOLOGIST
Many anthropologists are employed outside of academia, and much as someone would expect, our day-to-day work lives look vastly different from those of our academic peers. This is because we are affected by, and work within, different circumstances. For example, the jobs of private sector practitioners are influenced by limited timelines and budgets, employers who are focused on profit rather than contributing to a greater knowledge base, and a lack of pressure and support to publish (in fact, it is sometimes discouraged). In order for a practicing anthropologist to be successful in the private sector, one must play multiple roles, understand the business context as it relates to the research, and work within multi-disciplinary teams. Our roles vary because of these circumstances as well: practicing anthropologists must prove their value to projects; they must evangelize for research within organizations and sell research to prospective clients and ensure that the research findings will be useful to their ...
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.