Beauty

Summary

Beauty is commonly described as a feature of objects that makes these objects pleasurable to perceive. Such objects include landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of aesthetics, one of the major branches of philosophy. As a positive aesthetic value, it is contrasted with ugliness as its negative counterpart. One difficulty in understanding beauty is because it has both objective and subjective aspects: it is seen as a property of things but also as depending on the emotional response of observers. Because of its subjective side, beauty is said to be "in the eye of the beholder". It has been argued that the ability on the side of the subject needed to perceive and judge beauty, sometimes referred to as the "sense of taste", can be trained and that the verdicts of experts coincide in the long run. This would suggest that the standards of validity of judgments of beauty are intersubjective, i.e. dependent on a group of ju

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty

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People's perceptions of the cultural ecosystem services of the Sava river in the Balkans: the contribution of participatory mapping

Constance Brouillet

Many rivers in the Balkan Peninsula are recognised at the European level for the biodiversity they host and their strong cultural heritage. However, they are experiencing significant anthropogenic changes, where their biodiversity and cultural values are often not considered in decision-making. While research has studied the biodiversity of rivers in the Balkans, very little has been done to assess their cultural and social values. The goal of my research was to evaluate people’s perception of the importance of cultural ecosystem services (CES) of the Sava river. I used a combination of participatory methods, engaging the public at different stages, from semi-structured interviews to an online participatory mapping and questionnaire. The evaluation of the CES revealed the general high importance of the six CES considered for the participants. The participants’ valuation of the CES was influenced by certain social characteristics, such as location of residence and gender. ‘Contact with nature’, ‘recreation and tourism’ and ‘nature beauty’ were perceived the most important CES and were also most frequently mapped. Participatory mapping showed that certain services can be experienced together and several hotspots of CES were identified. Recreational facilities, accessibility, protected areas, and certain river hydromorphological features (such as sand banks) were found to influence the spatial distribution of the CES. Finally, my approach showed the advantages of using an online approach to evaluate and map the CES. It allowed me access a significant sample of participants in a limited period of time and interact with citizens to gain deep understanding of their perceptions of the CES. However, this approach also highlighted strong challenges.

2020

Verso un'oggettività della bellezza. L'insegnamento dei Grigioni.

Luca Conti, Marco Svimbersky, Stefano Zerbi

Contemporary society is based on a perpetual evolution of personal opinions and likings. The transmission of knowledge is questioned, but if the education and teaching about a critical vision is considered an essential instrument, so the schools and the masters still have the possibility to contribute to it. So it is necessary to give a common cultural value to the term venustas in order to make beauty a collective project and the logical answer to a need, to a requirement. The example used to illustrate this hypothesis is the case of the Swiss canton Graubünden. Its recent architecture is not based on the formal result, but on the processes generating forms, which are beautiful because of their adequacy and aptness.

2010

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The major low-level perceptual components that influence the beauty ratings of video are color, contrast, and motion. To estimate the beauty ratings of the NHK dataset, we propose to extract these features based on supervoxels, which are a group of pixels that share similar color and spatial information through the temporal domain. Recent beauty methods use frame-level processing for visual features and disregard the spatio-temporal aspect of beauty. In this paper, we explicitly model this property by introducing supervoxel-based visual and motion features. In order to create a beauty estimator, we first identify 60 videos (either beautiful or not beautiful) in the NHK dataset. We then train a neural network regressor using the supervoxel-based features and binary beauty ratings. We rate the 1000 videos in the NHK dataset and rank them according to their ratings. When comparing our rankings with the actual rankings of the NHK dataset, we obtain a Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.42.

2013