The globalised village: grounded experience, media and response in Eastern Thailand

Drawing on the fieldwork in a village community in Eastern Thailand, Ban Noen PutsaPluak Ked, this thesis explores the complex relationships between processes of globaIisation, representations in the mainstream media and activist media; and villagers' responses to change. The research, summarised here has three interrelated objectives: First, to examine how globalisation and industrialisation are represented in the mainstream and activist media. Second, to investigate the role played by the activist media in promoting counter visions of possible futures. Thirdly, to investigate the practices and ideas that local people have developed to resist or accept globalisation. The research employs a multi-method approach combining ethnographic methods, a questionnaire survey; textual analysis; and focus groups. The findings point to a complex relationship between mediated representations and visions of modernity. They also demonstrate that villagers' responses are strongly stratified by age, length of residence, and relation to the pivot of the new industriaIisation- a major chemical plant and that they remain strongly influenced by the crucial nexus of traditional Thai society, the patron client system. Additionally, content analysis and critical discourse analysis suggest that Thai news television programmes reproduced both the ideology of globalism and the celebration of consumerism. Moreover, the voices of marginalized groups and local people are also absent from the activist media

A TDRL Model for the Emotion of Regret

To better understand the nature, function and elicitation conditions of emotion it is important to approach studying emotion from a multidisciplinary perspective involving psychology, neuroscience and affective computing. Recently, the TDRL Theory of Emotion has been proposed. It defines emotions as variations of temporal difference assessments in reinforcement learning. In this paper we present new evidence for this theory. We show that regret-a negative emotion that signifies that an alternative action should have been taken given new outcome evidence-is modelled by a particular form of TD error assessment. In our model regret is attributed to each action in the state-action trace of an agent for which-after new reward evidence-an alternative action becomes the best action in that state (the new argmax) after adjusting the action value of the chosen action in that state. Regret intensity is modeled as the difference between this new best action and the adjusted old best action, reflecting the additional amount of return that could have been received should that alternative have been chose. We show in simulation experiments how regret varies depending on the amount of adjustment as well as the adjustment mechanism, i.e. Q-trace, Sarsa-trace, and Monte Carlo (MC) re-evaluation of action values. Our work shows plausible regret attribution to actions, when this model of regret is coupled with MC action value update. This is important evidence that regret can be seen as a particular variation of TD error assessment involving counterfactual thinking