The development of hand-mouth coordination in early infancy

The aim of the thesis is to offer a comprehensive account of the developmental course of hand-mouth (HM) coordination from birth until a mature form of the coordination is attained. Questions relating both to the structure and function of the coordination were addressed. Three studies are reported. The method of observation was the same in each case; video records of two perpendicular views of the infant were obtained and a micro-analysis of movement structure was carried out. The main question addressed in study 1 was whether spontaneous HM contacts in newborns are related to hunger. HM contacts were compared before and after feeding in a group of newborn babies. There was no change in the relative distribution of locations of contacts on the mouth and face before and after feeding, but anticipatory mouth opening prior to HM contacts only occurred before feeding. Study 2 sought to obtain detailed measures of transitions taking place between 1-5 months in the structure of HM coordination, and to investigate what factors could be responsible for the changes observed. A longitudinal design was employed where babies were observed at monthly intervals. A small object was placed in the hands of infants to promote oral contacts. At 4 months of age, contacts began to be centred on the mouth (as opposed to other parts of the face) and the frequency of contacts was significantly higher when the object was present relative to the frequency of spontaneous contacts. Anticipatory mouth opening only occurred at 5 months of age, suggesting that this aspect of the coordination follows a U-shaped developmental trajectory. There was evidence that vision was playing a role in motivating HM contacts by 5 months of age. Consistent individual differences between babies were found in different aspects of HM coordination raising the possibility that more than one developmental route is followed in the achievement of mature HM coordination. Study 3 investigated HM coordination cross-sectionally between the ages of 5-9 months. The possibility that the development of reaching was influencing the development of HM coordination was investigated. Two situations were compared, one where the infant had to reach for an object prior to transportation to the mouth and another where the object was placed in the hand of the infant. Although HM coordination and reaching and grasping were already integrated at 5 months, the two coordinations appear to develop independently of each other. The development of HM coordination was found to be marked by motivational and structural shifts and apparent regressions. The results are interpreted within a dynamic systems view of development

Autonomous Driving with a Simulation Trained Convolutional Neural Network

Autonomous vehicles will help society if they can easily support a broad range of driving environments, conditions, and vehicles. Achieving this requires reducing the complexity of the algorithmic system, easing the collection of training data, and verifying operation using real-world experiments. Our work addresses these issues by utilizing a reflexive neural network that translates images into steering and throttle commands. This network is trained using simulation data from Grand Theft Auto V~\cite{gtav}, which we augment to reduce the number of simulation hours driven. We then validate our work using a RC car system through numerous tests. Our system successfully drive 98 of 100 laps of a track with multiple road types and difficult turns; it also successfully avoids collisions with another vehicle in 90\% of the trials

Human-like arm motion generation: a review

In the last decade, the objectives outlined by the needs of personal robotics have led to the rise of new biologically-inspired techniques for arm motion planning. This paper presents a literature review of the most recent research on the generation of human-like arm movements in humanoid and manipulation robotic systems. Search methods and inclusion criteria are described. The studies are analyzed taking into consideration the sources of publication, the experimental settings, the type of movements, the technical approach, and the human motor principles that have been used to inspire and assess human-likeness. Results show that there is a strong focus on the generation of single-arm reaching movements and biomimetic-based methods. However, there has been poor attention to manipulation, obstacle-avoidance mechanisms, and dual-arm motion generation. For these reasons, human-like arm motion generation may not fully respect human behavioral and neurological key features and may result restricted to specific tasks of human-robot interaction. Limitations and challenges are discussed to provide meaningful directions for future investigations.FCT Project UID/MAT/00013/2013FCT–Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020

Politics During and After Covid-19: Science, Health and Social Protest

Covid-19 represented a total social fact, especially for that part of the world (the so-called Global North and in particular its wealthier component) which is less used to face dramatic crises able to affect fundamental rights and provoke health threats on a daily basis. While acknowledging its enormous impact on individual biographies, political systems and socio-economic equilibria around the planet, however we contrast those interpretations that have tended to naturalize the pandemic event, reading it as unpredictable, unique, disconnected from the dynamics that guide the (mainstream) Western lifestyle and mode of production. On the contrary, the genesis and above all the management of Covid-19 are the result and the mirror of broader dynamics linked to modernity, colonialism, capitalism, in one word of the Capitalocene. For this reason, it is even more correct to speak of a syndemic, to underline the environmental determinants of health, and the social and economic inequalities (re)produced by Covid-19. We therefore consider that interpreting the pandemic/syndemic (and its governance) as a state of exception is at least partial, being instead more useful to identify its unveiling function, able to make some latent or less visible dynamics manifest. Based on such premises, we focus on some nodes of the syndemic governance, highlighting how this contributed to give continuity and accelerate typical dynamics of a neoliberal governance and worldvision. We deal in particular with four key issues: the treatment of "science" by the media; the political history of "public health" and its relationship to the modern state; the construction of legitimate dissent vs. the constructed irrationality of "conspiracy theory"; the outcomes of social protests and in particular their pathologization in the mediatic and public debate. These are also among the main topics which are critically discussed in the thirteen papers that compose this Special Issue, from a variety of disciplinary fields, and with diverse epistemological perspectives and methodological tools

The Italian musicarello : youth, gender, and modernization in postwar popular cinema

The musicarello was a popular Italian film cycle consisting of more than eighty musical films from 1959 through the 1960s, a period that coincided with Italy’s postwar industrialization. During the postwar economic boom, these musical films emerged as a new form of popular cinema that was unique from other Italian postwar genres because of their intended youth audience, and because of their reference to British and North American popular entertainment. The films were primarily star vehicles, promoting and augmenting the careers of emerging young popular musicians such as Mina, Rita Pavone, Caterina Caselli, Gianni Morandi, Adriano Celentano, and Little Tony. This dissertation details how these young stars and their musical film performances represented youth and their consumer and entertainment choices during Italy’s era of modernization and consumerism, and how the films offered empowering representations of marginal, queered, and liminal subjectivities for young Italians. Analyzed within this framework, I argue that the musicarello can be perceived as camp because it represented the way in which youth and gender are performative and fluctuating subjectivities. While there has been an increased attention on popular cinema in Italian film scholarship, there have been few studies on the musicarello in both Italian and English scholarship at large. In this extensive study of the musical films, my methodology consists of close text formal analysis and an engagement with American and Italian film scholarship, cultural studies, and gender/queer theories. My formal analyses focus on film narratives, character development, musical numbers, and star status, alongside my examination of recurring themes, narratives devices, and tropes within the cycle. With a heavy emphasis on socio-historical contextualization and youth culture, my project adds to current scholarship on 1960s Italian youth culture and mass media, thereby filling a void not only in Italian film studies, but also in studies on Italian youth representationFrench and Italia

Interactive Art and the Action of Behavioral Aesthetics in Embodied Philosophy

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Hedge Funds and Herding Behaviour

This chapter examines whether hedge funds herd, how this herding occurs, and any potential market wide effects. Bringing together the mainstream finance literature and that from a more management and sociological perspective, it is shown that hedge funds herd, although there is some evidence this is less than other large institutional investors. Mechanistically, such consensus trades occur because hedge firms communicate within tight knit clusters of trusted and smart managers, who share and analyze trading positions together. This industry structure is a function of the hyper decision-making environment faced by hedge fund managers, coupled with a desire for legitimization and to maintain reputation. Finally, note that hedge fund herding can have market wide effects either directly via network risk and indirectly, as follower institutional investors amplify hedge fund trading patterns

Music Expectation by Cognitive Rule-Mapping

Iterative rules appear everywhere in music cognition, creating strong expectations. Consequently, denial of rule projection becomes an important compositional strategy, generating numerous possibilities for musical affect. Other rules enter the musical aesthetic through reflexive game playing. Still other kinds are completely constructivist in nature and may be uncongenial to cognition, requiring much training to be recognized, if at all. Cognitive rules are frequently found in contexts of varied repetition (AA), but they are not necessarily bounded by stylistic similarity. Indeed, rules may be especially relevant in the processing of unfamiliar contexts (AB), where only abstract coding is available. There are many kinds of deduction in music cognition. Typical examples include melodic sequence, partial melodic sequence, and alternating melodic sequence (which produces streaming). These types may coexist in the musical fabric, involving the invocation of both simultaneous and nested rules. Intervallic expansion and reduction in melody also involve higherorder abstractions. Various mirrored forms in music entail rule-mapping as well, although these may be more difficult to perceive than their analogous visual symmetries. Listeners can likewise deduce additivity and subtractivity at work in harmony, tempo, texture, pace, and dynamics. Rhythmic augmentation and diminution, by contrast, rely on multiplication and division. The examples suggest numerous hypotheses for experimental research