1,317 research outputs found
Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies
Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world. The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial
Breaking Virtual Barriers : Investigating Virtual Reality for Enhanced Educational Engagement
Virtual reality (VR) is an innovative technology that has regained popularity in recent years. In the field of education, VR has been introduced as a tool to enhance learning experiences. This thesis presents an exploration of how VR is used from the context of educators and learners. The research employed a mixed-methods approach, including surveying and interviewing educators, and conducting empirical studies to examine engagement, usability, and user behaviour within VR. The results revealed educators are interested in using VR for a wide range of scenarios, including thought exercises, virtual field trips, and simulations. However, they face several barriers to incorporating VR into their practice, such as cost, lack of training, and technical challenges. A subsequent study found that virtual reality can no longer be assumed to be more engaging than desktop equivalents. This empirical study showed that engagement levels were similar in both VR and non-VR environments, suggesting that the novelty effect of VR may be less pronounced than previously assumed. A study against a VR mind mapping artifact, VERITAS, demonstrated that complex interactions are possible on low-cost VR devices, making VR accessible to educators and students. The analysis of user behaviour within this VR artifact showed that quantifiable strategies emerge, contributing to the understanding of how to design for collaborative VR experiences. This thesis provides insights into how the end-users in the education space perceive and use VR. The findings suggest that while educators are interested in using VR, they face barriers to adoption. The research highlights the need to design VR experiences, with understanding of existing pedagogy, that are engaging with careful thought applied to complex interactions, particularly for collaborative experiences. This research contributes to the understanding of the potential of VR in education and provides recommendations for educators and designers to enhance learning experiences using VR
Conversations on Empathy
In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice
A Theistic Critique of Secular Moral Nonnaturalism
This dissertation is an exercise in Theistic moral apologetics. It will be developing both a critique of secular nonnaturalist moral theory (moral Platonism) at the level of metaethics, as well as a positive form of the moral argument for the existence of God that follows from this critique. The critique will focus on the work of five prominent metaethical theorists of secular moral non-naturalism: David Enoch, Eric Wielenberg, Russ Shafer-Landau, Michael Huemer, and Christopher Kulp. Each of these thinkers will be critically examined. Following this critique, the positive moral argument for the existence of God will be developed, combining a cumulative, abductive argument that follows from filling in the content of a succinct apagogic argument. The cumulative abductive argument and the apagogic argument together, with a transcendental and modal component, will be presented to make the case that Theism is the best explanation for the kind of moral, rational beings we are and the kind of universe in which we live, a rational intelligible universe
SSC-RS: Elevate LiDAR Semantic Scene Completion with Representation Separation and BEV Fusion
Semantic scene completion (SSC) jointly predicts the semantics and geometry
of the entire 3D scene, which plays an essential role in 3D scene understanding
for autonomous driving systems. SSC has achieved rapid progress with the help
of semantic context in segmentation. However, how to effectively exploit the
relationships between the semantic context in semantic segmentation and
geometric structure in scene completion remains under exploration. In this
paper, we propose to solve outdoor SSC from the perspective of representation
separation and BEV fusion. Specifically, we present the network, named SSC-RS,
which uses separate branches with deep supervision to explicitly disentangle
the learning procedure of the semantic and geometric representations. And a BEV
fusion network equipped with the proposed Adaptive Representation Fusion (ARF)
module is presented to aggregate the multi-scale features effectively and
efficiently. Due to the low computational burden and powerful representation
ability, our model has good generality while running in real-time. Extensive
experiments on SemanticKITTI demonstrate our SSC-RS achieves state-of-the-art
performance.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, IROS202
"Le present est plein de l’avenir, et chargé du passé" : Vorträge des XI. Internationalen Leibniz-Kongresses, 31. Juli – 4. August 2023, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Deutschland. Band 3
[No abstract available]Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)/Projektnr. 517991912VGH VersicherungNiedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur (MWK
UniSeg: A Unified Multi-Modal LiDAR Segmentation Network and the OpenPCSeg Codebase
Point-, voxel-, and range-views are three representative forms of point
clouds. All of them have accurate 3D measurements but lack color and texture
information. RGB images are a natural complement to these point cloud views and
fully utilizing the comprehensive information of them benefits more robust
perceptions. In this paper, we present a unified multi-modal LiDAR segmentation
network, termed UniSeg, which leverages the information of RGB images and three
views of the point cloud, and accomplishes semantic segmentation and panoptic
segmentation simultaneously. Specifically, we first design the Learnable
cross-Modal Association (LMA) module to automatically fuse voxel-view and
range-view features with image features, which fully utilize the rich semantic
information of images and are robust to calibration errors. Then, the enhanced
voxel-view and range-view features are transformed to the point space,where
three views of point cloud features are further fused adaptively by the
Learnable cross-View Association module (LVA). Notably, UniSeg achieves
promising results in three public benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI, nuScenes,
and Waymo Open Dataset (WOD); it ranks 1st on two challenges of two benchmarks,
including the LiDAR semantic segmentation challenge of nuScenes and panoptic
segmentation challenges of SemanticKITTI. Besides, we construct the OpenPCSeg
codebase, which is the largest and most comprehensive outdoor LiDAR
segmentation codebase. It contains most of the popular outdoor LiDAR
segmentation algorithms and provides reproducible implementations. The
OpenPCSeg codebase will be made publicly available at
https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/PCSeg.Comment: ICCV 2023; 21 pages; 9 figures; 18 tables; Code at
https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/PCSe
Deaf children as language learners: The strategies teachers use to support early language development in deaf children in Kenya
Deaf children experience low academic results in comparison to hearing peers despite the fact that deafness is not a learning disability. This is experienced most acutely in the global South where access to early diagnosis and family support mechanisms are limited. Despite a positive inclusive education policy environment, deaf children in Kenya show poor average results in the national exams at the end of primary school indicating that the system is not meeting their educational needs.
Currently there is little academic research that specifically documents the educational challenges facing teachers of deaf primary age children in low resource contexts. This study will explore whether special education teachers in Kenya are equipped to assess and support the early language development needs of deaf children. The study is situated within Skyer’s deaf-centric approach focusing analysis on the extent to which classroom practice pays full attention to the biosocial aspects of young deaf children’s lived reality.
A participant-as-observer, qualitative research approach was used to collect data from early years classroom teachers across three schools for deaf children in Kenya. An interpretive analysis framework was used to determine findings. A novel early language assessment tool was trialled to help teachers identify primary language difficulties amongst their students.
Findings revealed deaf children to be significantly delayed in their primary language capabilities with teachers who were ill-prepared for their specific educational needs. It suggests that pedagogy and curriculum materials were creating confusing language environments that were hindering development of primary language in the deaf children.
This study recommends a mindset change in approach to early years education for deaf children: to move away from viewing signed languages as an impairment accommodation towards a focus on primary language development needs. Deaf-centric approaches should be applied. Internationally, inclusive education programmes must pay attention to this unmet educational need
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