Developing situation awareness capacity to improve executive judgment and decision making under stress

This study examined multiple factors that underlie a key component of leadership resilience, situation awareness (SA), and its role in executive judgment and decision making under stress. SA, researched for over 30 years in military and critical incident professions by researchers from the field of Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM), has increasing relevance to leaders in organizations, particularly those who are challenged by high uncertainty and accelerating change, traditionally addressed by the field of organization development (OD). The study specifically examines the Transcendental MeditationTM technique within the context of a 10-week intervention for developing SA capacity in emerging leaders (N = 35), for which pre- and post-data were collected and analyzed. The research approach involved an intervention group (n = 18) trained in the twice-daily practice of the Transcendental MeditationTM technique and a control group (n = 17) with no intervention. Participants in both groups completed three instruments, Trail Making B, Wisconsin Card Sort Test, and Constructive Thinking Inventory, as a means to measure the three elements of SA (perception, comprehension, projection). Analyses of covariance (ANCOVA) showed that TM practice produced significant effects (p levels ranged from .033 to .047) on two of the three measures, specifically, perception and projection. The results of the study support a positive relationship between the Transcendental Meditation technique on the improvement of SA capacity in emerging leaders, and advances the body of research on the use of meditation as an intervention in leadership resilience development programs to prepare leaders for high-demand settings

Product Development within Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Legal Risk

This open-access-book synthesizes a supportive developer checklist considering sustainable Team and agile Project Management in the challenge of Artificial Intelligence and limits of image recognition. The study bases on technical, ethical, and legal requirements with examples concerning autonomous vehicles. As the first of its kind, it analyzes all reported car accidents state wide (1.28 million) over a 10-year period. Integrating of highly sensitive international court rulings and growing consumer expectations make this book a helpful guide for product and team development from initial concept until market launch

Product Development within Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Legal Risk

This open-access-book synthesizes a supportive developer checklist considering sustainable Team and agile Project Management in the challenge of Artificial Intelligence and limits of image recognition. The study bases on technical, ethical, and legal requirements with examples concerning autonomous vehicles. As the first of its kind, it analyzes all reported car accidents state wide (1.28 million) over a 10-year period. Integrating of highly sensitive international court rulings and growing consumer expectations make this book a helpful guide for product and team development from initial concept until market launch

Faith at the edge: religion after God in four novels by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland’s novels offer a broad critique of specific cultural conditions on the North American west coast. His primarily suburban characters suffer from identity crises, social fragmentation, family dysfunction, uncreative working conditions, a lack of meaning and a lack of political agency. In Generation X, Life after God, Girlfriend in a Coma and Hey Nostradamus!, the four novels on which I focus in this thesis, Coupland positions his characters on the edge in manifold ways: on the edge of madness, on the geographical margin of the continent, at the threshold of the end of time, and on the verge of great, transcendent truth. This thematic liminality defines the specific culture about which he writes: middle-class, young, North American, disillusioned suburbanites. The central questions this thesis raises are primarily psychological and political rather than religious. What, after God in this culture is dead, can replace the cathartic and transcendent psychological functions that religion once filled? What can stand in for the sense of agency and social connectedness that ideology founded on religious certainty once conferred? In teasing out Coupland’s answers to these questions I examine the multiple layers of spirit in Coupland’s imaginative universe: tendencies to romantic notions of environmental paganism, the residual effects of dominant and hierarchical religion, and his tentative probing into an altogether new basis of belief and agency. In the first chapter of this thesis, I examine the psychological crises of Coupland’s characters through the lens of Kristevan analysis. Julia Kristeva’s conception of the subject as founded on language, constantly in flux, and always threatened by the return of the abject is uniquely suited to illuminating the post-religious intrapsychic conflicts of Coupland’s characters. There is a remarkable parallel between their work: what Kristeva sets out in theory, Coupland’s characters play out in narrative. Chapter two reads the spiritual significance in Coupland’s locations with theoretical counterpoint from various postmodern thinkers, primarily Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard who have distinct visions of the future. The Louis Greenberg 9100531P PhD Abstract: Faith at the Edge 2 third chapter of the thesis looks closely at the apocalyptic themes in Coupland’s novels. Apocalypse in Coupland’s work refers both to the teleological, religious apocalypse of manifest destiny, and to the literal end of the world and the death of its people. The final chapter is a meditation on the potential for the post-religious religion which Coupland has knitted into his novels. I attempt to express this potential for belief more directly than Coupland has in order to test it against current philosophical and scientific discoveries and collate it with long-standing cross-religious mystical traditions. I find that Coupland’s novels do indeed contain the raw material for a coherent expression of a powerful, transcendent belief after God. I argue that fictional narrative, because it is constantly revised and never categorical, a wave-pattern of potentiality rather than a vehicle for singular, static meaning, is the ideal method for expressing and disseminating this new belief. Coupland’s very indecisiveness and refusal to settle on a definitive stance makes his deployment of narrative uniquely suited to the task of expressing this new belief

TOWARDS A PRETERITE THEOLOGY: RESISTANCE AND SPIRITUALITY IN THE NOVELS OF THOMAS PYNCHON

This thesis will explore how the American writer Thomas Pynchon creates a functioning, working theological model for the “preterite” communities and spaces with three of his novels: Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland and Against the Day. Building on John McClure’s postsecular reading of Pynchon in Partial Faiths and religious readings of the texts by Dwight Eddins and Kathryn Hume, this thesis expands on the themes and theories presented in these critical works. In this thesis I posit that the theological material of Pynchon is largely underrepresented in Pynchon criticism, and what work there is does not engage with Pynchon as a complete religious writer. Through a socio-historical perspective, this work endeavours to express how important religious modes are to a variety of topics in the corpus, from politics, to history and Pynchon’s engagement with power structures and oppression. In exploring how religions inter-relate with both each other and more secular concerns, I analyse how Pynchon, across these three texts, fashions a dialogue of resistance that endorses the importance of spirituality. I build on McClure’s theories of a “partial” conversion narrative within the texts, and take this further to express a total commitment to spiritual systems that effects Pynchon’s wider concerns with resistance, liberation and transcendent spaces and possibilities. This thesis explores Pynchon’s valorisation of pluralism and a heterodox approach to religious consumption, but also how he critiques it, creating a double quality that constantly shifts and morphs the spiritual discourse of the text. I argue that Pynchon’s ‘serious’ take on the spiritual dimensions within these novels shows him building a complex ethical and social system around preterition and resistance, and that resistance within the text is reliant on such spiritual discourse. Through this reading, this thesis posits that Pynchon’s spiritual framework cannot be considered as a mere aspect of his work, but core to a plethora of his social and political concerns

Twilight of virtualities: Imagining and playfulness in an ambiguous virtual reality

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.This thesis aims to challenge current critical visions of virtual reality and their drive for immersive experiences. Academic literature and popular culture are predominantly interested in how the technology of virtual reality can convince users they are in a different world. This steers contemporary technological design, improving the VR experience, as that it supports futuristic fantasies of for instance the Metaverse, with Mark Zuckerberg being one of its latest advocates. To virtually exist elsewhere. This thesis argues that the immersive goals of virtual reality rely on a problematic conceptual leap of the imagination: virtual realms and experiences are persistently imagined to be somewhere else, completely disconnected from being here. This separative thinking, which is shaped by modern ideas about technology and the imagination, creates a rift between virtual experiences and everyday experiences. To address this discrepancy, this thesis looks to reconceptualise virtual reality and ask what virtual technology can do for imagining in everyday life. Its conceptual analysis uses the historical framework of modernity to show alternative modes of virtual thinking. It presents the idea of a phenomenological virtual reality, which, based on the philosophical definition of the virtual, describes the ambiguous way consciousness and everyday surroundings interconnect with each other. To virtually exist here. Through the novel concept of aspersion, an alternative to immersion, the thesis argues for a cognitive sprinkling, in which imagining fleetingly overlaps with memory and sensory impressions. Virtual technology can playfully support such an aspersive experience and help us becoming closer to our everyday surroundings. This conceptual approach is furthermore strongly transcultural: Japanese technological, cultural, and philosophical perspectives are used to reconsider virtual reality. They help to deepen the conceptual language of this thesis’s alternative virtual framework, as that they bring about a better symbiosis of cognition and virtual technology in modern everyday life.University of Wolverhampto

Seedings, Issue Five -- Spring, 2018

Jorgenrique Adoum (translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez), ʿĀ'ishah al-Bāʿūnīyah (translated by Th. Emil Homerin), Rachel Tzvia Back, Dan Bellm, Luis Enrique Belmonte (translated by Guillermo Parra), Daniel Borzutzky, George Economou, Sa rah Tuss Efrik (translated by Johannes Göransson), Paul Éluard (translated by Carlos Lara), Luis Felipe Fabre (translated by Dan Bellm), Lupe Gómez (translated by Erín Moure), Johannes Göransson, Hagiwara Sakutaro (translated by Sho Sugita), Tahir Hamut (translated by Joshua L. Freeman), Alexis Iparraguirre (translated by Emily Toder), Carlos Lara, Aditi Machado – Friederike Mayröcker (translated by Jonathan Larson), Mark McMorris, Andrei Molotiu, Sawako Nakayasu, María Negroni (translated by Michelle Gil-Montero), Vaan Nguyen (translated by Adriana X. Jacobs), Joseph Noble, John Olson, Omar Pérez (translated by Kristin Dykstra), Virgilio Piñera (translated by Dan Bellm), Tóroddur Poulsen (translated by Randi Ward), Andrew Schelling, Ryoko Sekiguchi (translated by Lindsay Turner), ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād (translated by James Montgomery with Richard Sieburth), Brian Strang, Harriet Tarlo, Khal Torabully (translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson), Matt Turner, Randi Ward, Mark Weiss, Peter Weiss (translated by Michael Lipkin), Jeffrey Yan

Muscle activation patterns in shoulder impingement patients

Introduction: Shoulder impingement is one of the most common presentations of shoulder joint problems 1. It appears to be caused by a reduction in the sub-acromial space as the humerus abducts between 60o -120o – the 'painful arc'. Structures between the humeral head and the acromion are thus pinched causing pain and further pathology 2. Shoulder muscle activity can influence this joint space but it is unclear whether this is a cause or effect in impingement patients. This study aimed to observe muscle activation patterns in normal and impingement shoulder patients and determine if there were any significant differences. Method: 19 adult subjects were asked to perform shoulder abduction in their symptomatic arm and non-symptomatic. 10 of these subjects (age 47.9 ± 11.2) were screened for shoulder impingement, and 9 subjects (age 38.9 ± 14.3) had no history of shoulder pathology. Surface EMG was used to collect data for 6 shoulder muscles (Upper, middle and lower trapezius, serratus anterior, infraspinatus, middle deltoids) which was then filtered and fully rectified. Subjects performed 3 smooth unilateral abduction movements at a cadence of 16 beats of a metronome set at 60bpm, and the mean of their results was recorded. T-tests were used to indicate any statistical significance in the data sets. Significance was set at P<0.05. Results: There was a significant difference in muscle activation with serratus anterior in particular showing a very low level of activation throughout the range when compared to normal shoulder activation patterns (<30%). Middle deltoid recruitment was significantly reduced between 60-90o in the impingement group (30:58%).Trends were noted in other muscles with upper trapezius and infraspinatus activating more rapidly and erratically (63:25%; 60:27% respectively), and lower trapezius with less recruitment (13:30%) in the patient group, although these did not quite reach significance. Conclusion: There appears to be some interesting alterations in muscle recruitment patterns in impingement shoulder patients when compared against their own unaffected shoulders and the control group. In particular changes in scapula control (serratus anterior and trapezius) and lateral rotation (infraspinatus), which have direct influence on the sub-acromial space, should be noted. It is still not clear whether these alterations are causative or reactionary, but this finding gives a clear indication to the importance of addressing muscle reeducation as part of a rehabilitation programme in shoulder impingement patients