Affordances in the Home Environment for Motor Development-Infant Scale, Spanish Translation

The home environment has a critical influence on an infant’s development and well-being. The Affordances in the Home Environment for Motor Development-Infant Scale (AHEMD-IS) is an instrument that has been developed to assess the home environment. This article illustrates the translation, validation, and cultural adaptation process of the AHEMD-IS from English to Spanish. The AHEMD-IS underwent a comprehensive process involving a four-phase translation process: (1) Forward translation, (2) Semantic equivalence, (3) Content equivalence testing, and (4) Final version development. Steps 1 and 2 resulted in linguistic alterations from the initial translation to enhance clarity for general public understanding. In step 3, mothers reported that the instrument was clear and easy to complete. Step 4 involved a final review of the instrument. The final outcome is a validated instrument that may prove beneficial when evaluating the home environment with Spanish speaking populations, particularly those of Mexican descent

At home in and beyond our skin: Posthuman embodiment in film and television

Film and television portrayals of posthuman cyborgs melding biology and technology, simultaneously “animal and machine” abound. Most of us immediately think of iconic characters like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s relentless cyborg assassin in the Terminator series or Peter Weller’s crime-fighting cyborg police officer in Robocop (1987). Or perhaps we recall the many cyborgs populating the Dr. Who, Star Trek, and Star Wars television series and films—including Darth Vader, surely the most famous cinematic cyborg of all time. But lesser-known explorations of cybernetic embodiment have appeared in film and television for many decades. And not all portrayals involve the sort of extreme transformations exemplified by these iconic characters. This chapter considers some of different ways that film and television have explored the transformative relation between embodiment and technology

At Home in and Beyond Our Skin: Posthuman Embodiment in Film and Television

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Palgrave Macmillan via http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137430328

The role of the body in instrumental and vocal music pedagogy : a dynamical systems theory perspective on the music teacher's bodily engagement in teaching and learning

Instrumental and vocal teachers often employ their body in teaching to facilitate sensorimotor engagement with the voice or an instrument. Yet, teacher's bodily engagement in instrumental and vocal education is scarcely addressed in music educational research studies. In our view, this scarcity is related to the lack of a framework about the role of the music teacher's body in instrumental and vocal education. In this article, we will adopt a dynamical systems theory perspective to set first steps in conceptualizing the role of the instrumental and vocal teacher's body in teaching and learning music. From this perspective, learning processes are viewed as emerging from the learner's goal-oriented, situated, adaptive actions in the learning environment. Teachers play a significant role in that environment, due to the different types of constraints (e.g., environmental and task constraints) they can introduce to aid learners in finding a solution for a musical task. In this article, we argue that different types of teacher's bodily engagement can act as constraints in instrumental and vocal music learning, thereby facilitating the learning process in non-verbal ways. To demonstrate this, we describe four types of bodily involvement: physical modeling, action demonstration, pedagogical gestures and touch. In summary, based on existing theoretical and empirical research, the article will present a first conceptualization of the role of the music teacher in instrumental and vocal education viewed from a dynamical systems approach

Situating machine intelligence within the cognitive ecology of the Internet

The Internet is an important focus of attention for the philosophy of mind and cognitive science communities. This is partly because the Internet serves as an important part of the material environment in which a broad array of human cognitive and epistemic activities are situated. The Internet can thus be seen as an important part of the 'cognitive ecology' that helps to shape, support and (on occasion) realize aspects of human cognizing. Much of the previous philosophical work in this area has sought to analyze the cognitive significance of the Internet from the perspective of human cognition. There has, as such, been little effort to assess the cognitive significance of the Internet from the perspective of 'machine cognition'. This is unfortunate, because the Internet is likely to exert a significant influence on the shape of machine intelligence. The present paper attempts to evaluate the extent to which the Internet serves as a form of cognitive ecology for synthetic (machine-based) forms of intelligence. In particular, the phenomenon of Internet-situated machine intelligence is analyzed from the perspective of a number of approaches that are typically subsumed under the heading of situated cognition. These include extended, embedded, scaffolded and embodied approaches to cognition. For each of these approaches, the Internet is shown to be of potential relevance to the development and operation of machine-based cognitive capabilities. Such insights help us to appreciate the role of the Internet in advancing the current state-of-the-art in machine intelligence