Natural environments have powerful aesthetic appeal linked to their capacity for psychological restoration. In contrast, disorderly environments are aesthetically aversive, and have various detrimental psychological effects. But in our research, we have repeatedly found that natural environments are perceptually disorderly. What could explain this paradox? We present three competing hypotheses:...

Studies of Marx's theory of history are complicated by the fact that Marx himself never provided a systematic treatment of its central principles. As a result, the task of elaborating historical materialism has fallen to Marx's interpreters, who are required to distill its tenets from Marx's historical writings and from general statements in which he summarized his historical method. Within the...

Most studies that consider the relationship of diatoms andwater quality have focused their attention on the questions and practicalities of water pollution or perturbations in some form or another. Many models and studies have demonstrated the environmental tolerances or changes in structure of diatom communities related to environmental challenges. This focus on the impacted end of the water q...

Image nonlocal self-similarity has been widely adopted as natural image prior in various low-level vision tasks such as image restoration, while the low-rank matrix recovery theory has been drawing much attention to describe and utilize the image nonlocal self-similarities. However, whether the low-rank prior models exist to characterize the nonlocal self-similarity for a wide range of natural ...

The restoration of an incomplete image from a known part and experimental data in the form of the Fourier amplitude squared sums is formulated as a Bayesian estimation problem. This problem is motivated by the structure completion problem in x-ray fiber diffraction analysis. An appropriate prior of uniformly distributed impulses is used. The Bayesian MMSE and MAP estimates are obtained. Simulat...

Community ecological theory may play an important role in the development of a science of restoration ecology. Not only will the practice of restoration benefit from an increased focus on theory, but basic research in community ecology will also benefit. We pose several major thematic questions that are relevant to restoration from the perspective of community ecological theory and, for each, i...