Ecological Landscape Planning : A Gaming Approach in Education

An understanding of the complex problems of land use competition requires an appreciation of natural processes, cultural values, economic imperatives and political agendas. This integrated understanding is an important component of the study program for tertiary students about to complete their professional qualification in landscape architecture at the Queensland University of Technology. This paper introduces a repertoire of game templates as an initial step in formulating a conceptual framework for the curriculum/games designer to explore the potential of play in ecological landscape planning. The concepts of social action space, permissible action space and motivational action space are used to investigate the qualities of each template for further game design development. The abstraction of these concepts may assist the designer to move beyond the usability of games into viewing their value as a learning method

Spatiotemporal neurodynamics of automatic temporal expectancy in 9-month old infants

open2noAnticipating events occurrence (Temporal Expectancy) is a crucial capacity for survival. Yet, there is little evidence about the presence of cortical anticipatory activity from infancy. In this study we recorded the High-density electrophysiological activity in 9 month-old infants and adults undergoing an audio-visual S1-S2 paradigm simulating a lifelike "Peekaboo" game inducing automatic temporal expectancy of smiling faces. The results indicate in the S2-preceding Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) an early electrophysiological signature of expectancy-based anticipatory cortical activity. Moreover, the progressive CNV amplitude increasing across the task suggested that implicit temporal rule learning is at the basis of expectancy building-up over time. Cortical source reconstruction suggested a common CNV generator between adults and infants in the right prefrontal cortex. The decrease in the activity of this area across the task (time-on-task effect) further implied an early, core role of this region in implicit temporal rule learning. By contrast, a time-on-task activity boost was found in the supplementary motor area (SMA) in adults and in the temporoparietal regions in infants. Altogether, our findings suggest that the capacity of the human brain to translate temporal predictions into anticipatory neural activity emerges ontogenetically early, although the underlying spatiotemporal cortical dynamics change across development. © 2016 The Author(s).openMento, Giovanni; Valenza, EloisaMento, Giovanni; Valenza, Elois

Body image distortions following spinal cord injury

Background: Following spinal cord injury (SCI) or anaesthesia, people may continue to experience feelings of the size, shape, and posture of their body, suggesting that the conscious body image is not fully determined by immediate sensory signals. How this body image is affected by changes in sensory inputs from, and motor outputs to the body remains unclear. Methods: We tested paraplegic and tetraplegic SCI patients on a task that yields quantitative measures of body image. Participants were presented with an anchoring stimulus on a computer screen and told to imagine that the displayed body part was part of a standing mirror image of themselves. They then identified the position on the screen, relative to the anchor, where each of several parts of their body would be located. Veridical body dimensions were identified based on measurements and photographs of participants. Results: Compared to age-matched controls, paraplegic and tetraplegic patients alike perceived their torso and limbs as elongated relative to their body width. No effects of lesion level were found. Conclusions: The common distortions in body image across patient groups, despite differing SCI levels, imply that a body image may be maintained despite chronic sensory and motor loss. Systematic alterations in body image follow SCI, though our results suggest these may reflect prolonged changes in body posture and wheelchair use, rather than loss of specific sensorimotor pathways. These findings provide new insight into how the body image is maintained, and may prove useful in treatments that intervene to manipulate the body image

Inferring spatial relations from textual descriptions of images

[EU]Gizaki-makina elkar-ulertzea eskatzen duten hainbat atazetarako ezinbestekoa da objektuen arteko erlazio espazialak ulertzea, eta hauen distribuzio espazialen jakintza izatea. Irudiek, bertan agertzen diren objektuen arteko erlazio espazialak gordetzen dituzte, baina baita irudien testuzko deskribapenek ere. Irudien testuzko deskribapenek erlazio espazialei buruzko informazio esplizitua erakutsi arren; kasu askotan, informazio inplizitua gordetzen dute. Inplizituki agertzen den informazio hau ulertzeko, ezinbestekoa da objektuen eta testuinguruaren oinarrizko jakintza izatea. Aurrez garatutako proiektuek, subjektu, erlazio eta objektuen arteko interakzioa baliatuz, objektuaren kaxa inguratzailea (Bounding Box) iragartzea izan dute helburu. Hirukotea osatzen duten hitzak ontologia bateko kontzeptuak izanik. Proiektu honetan testuzko deskribapenek objektua irudian kokatzeko baliagarria den informazio gordetzen dutela erakutsiko da; lehenengo aldiz, eskuz etiketatutako kontzeptu hirukoetan emaitzak hobetuz. Relations in Captions (REC-COCO) datu multzoa sortu da frogapen hau egiteko. Datu multzo hau MS-COCO eta V-COCO datu multzoen uztarketaren emaitza da. Hau sortzeko irudietan agertzen diren objektuen, eta testuzko deskribapenetan agertzen direnen arteko lotura egin da. Proiektu honetan ondorengoa frogatu da: (1) testuzko deskribapenetatik lortutako hirukoteei testuzko deskribapenaren informazioa gehitzean, ontologiako kontzeptu hirukoetan errendimendua hobetzen da; (2) hobekuntza mantendu egiten da subjektu eta objektua soilik erabiltzean, esplizituki adierazi gabe zein den bi hauen arteko erlazioa. Beste modu batera esanda, testuzko deskribapena eta objektu-subjektu erreferentzia izanik, eredua gai da objektuaren posizioa eta tamaina zehazteko.[EN]Understanding spatial relations between objects and their distribution in space is essential for human-machine collaboration in general and for specific tasks such as composing sketched scenes, or image generation from textual descriptions (captions). Textual descriptions include explicit spatial relations, but often spatial information is implicit and relies on a common understanding of objects and their context. Previous work on extracting spatial relations from text has predicted bounding boxes using (subject, relation, object) triplets of ontology concepts as input. We show for the first time that the captions encode background information which is useful to place objects in an image, yielding better results than manually defined concept triplets. To prove this we have built Relations in Captions (REC-COCO), a dataset derived from MS-COCO which contains associations between words in a caption and the corresponding bounding boxes in the image. We have adapted a well-known model to the task, with the results showing that: (1) the use of the full text of the caption in addition to the textual triplet allows to improve over manual concept triplets; (2) the improvement also holds when only using the subject and object, without explicitly detecting which is the textual relation. From another perspective, our work shows that given a caption, a reference subject and the object in the caption, the system can assign a location and a size to the object using the information in the caption alone.This project was partially supported by the project DeepReading (RTI2018-096846-BC21) supported by the Spanish Government, the Basque Government excellence research group (IT1343-19) and Etorkizuna Eraikiz 201

Artisanal knowledge

This essay is about the ensuing problem that in general it is nothelpful to talk about non-standard knowledge practices as modeled after our Western ideas of what knowledge is. It negotiates this problem by arguing that artisanal knowledge is an independent and self-contained mode of knowledge and is arranged in three parts. In the first part an outline is given of the key assumptions of the interactionist conception of knowledge that needs to be put in place as an alternative to the basically Kantian mixture of empiricist and rationalist assumptions of the folk model of Western academic thinking about knowledge. In this interactionist conception of knowledgeartisanal knowledge gets center stage. In the second part, the notion of craftknowledge is opened up as much as possible. The third and final part takes upthe question whether craft knowledge is a cultural universal

Technology and the dis-placing of learning in educational futures

Common visions of online education entail radically re-configuring the experience of learning: a technological displacement from the spatial order of classrooms into the more diffuse arena of digital networks. One assumption seems to be that the very spatial order of classrooms creates an undesirably rigid sense of place for schooling, one that is depressingly impervious to change; and that the attendant solution is to escape the realm of the ‘physical’ altogether – into an online realm more supportive of collaboration and free of face-the-front conventions. In the present paper we seek to challenge this oppositional view. We consider several ways in which digital technology can restructure the traditional spaces of educational practice, and identify design dynamics that may be neglected in the wake of ‘virtualisation’. Discussion first highlights two theoretical perspectives that will inform many such designs: namely, situativity and sociality in learning. Three examples are then provided of how digital technology can intersect with learning space design to create novel interpersonal frameworks for learning and to destabilise conventional senses of ‘place’ in those settings. The examples concern, respectively, the organisation of collaborative, expository, and community-based social structures for learning. Those examples represent an illustrative counterpoint to models of online schooling and illustrate a potentially productive synergy between the opportunities afforded by digital technologies, the desires of those who wish to dis-place learning online, and a well-established interest in learning space design