Psychophysiological measurements in programming task:guidelines for conducting EMG research

Abstract. Programming languages have been studied and developed throughout history of programming. There are lots of different programming languages that are being used in software development, but only core languages are taught in Universities. Programming languages usually have their own syntax, which may differ greatly from each other. Using different programming languages for same task may provoke different emotions in programmers, depending their knowledge on the language. Research on programming and programming languages have generally focused on technical and exterior aspects. More recently, there has been some research on the programmers and their emotions during the programming tasks. This master’s thesis focuses on latter and aims to provide new information of programmers experienced emotions during the programming tasks by using EMG-recordings. This master thesis’ main study focus is in psychophysiology, which combines psychology to physiological research, by finding correlation between physiological activity and emotional phenomenon. This study assessed university students experienced emotions when conducting programming tasks with C and Python programming languages. EMG measurement device was used on the test participants to record signal data from facial based muscles for smiling and frowning activity, which are linked to positive and negative emotions. This study’s results showed small differences with emotional experiences during the programming tasks, but the overall results were not statistically significant. Therefore, more research on this topic is needed for more consistent results. Additionally, this research has provided guidelines on how EMG studies are conducted on laboratory setting and suggestions for future studies

Challenging common sense about nonsense : an integrational approach to schizophrenic language behaviour

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-168).Due to certain fundamental flaws, orthodox linguistics has not succeeded in producing a coherent account of 'schizophrenic language' - the host of symptoms that are alternatively characterised as evidence of formal thought disorder or labelled as disorganised speech, a disorder in itself. The most important of these flaws are its treatment of languages as fixed codes, which doubles as an explanation of how linguistic communication works, and its postulation of the mental structures that would be necessary if languages were indeed fixed codes, and communication a matter of encoding and decoding messages. In particular, orthodox linguistics has bolstered the now-dominant neo-Kraepelinian, biomedical account of schizophrenia, which treats utterances as symptoms that give clues to brain (dis)organisation and (dys) function. Integrational linguistics, which criticises the culturally based assumptions - collectively referred to as 'the language myth' - that are at the heart of the orthodox account of languages and language, provides an alternative. It sympathises with the growing trend in cognitive science and philosophy towards 'embodiment' and 'distributed cognition', which recognises that encultured entities like languages, minds, brains, bodies, and world are intrinsically defined by their co-evolution in the species, and co-emergence during an individual's development. Integrationists argue that by focusing in the first instance on second-order cultural constructs called 'languages', orthodox linguistics fails to give an account of the first-order experience of language users. This thesis approaches the topic of 'schizophrenic language' from a broadly integrationist perspective in order to demonstrate that because orthodox linguistics is so widely taken for granted in psychiatry, its biases inform current mainstream accounts of schizophrenic language, motivate the outright dismissal of interpersonal accounts, past and present, and provide a skewed picture of the phenomenon it purports to be describing, by ultimately constructing an individual-focused, deficit-based account of what is not, as opposed to what is. That is, by holding up orthodox linguistics' idealised version of communication and speakers (which has little applicability even to 'normal' language users), it uses deviation from the ideal as description and explanation, rather than recognising the strategies actually employed by schizophrenics in their attempts to make sense, even if these attempts fail. The alternative argued for here is to apply the tenets of integrationist linguistics to schizophrenic language behaviour, to give a fuller account of communication situations involving schizophrenics and normal interlocutors. As a result, this thesis calls for a reformulation of the idea that incomprehensibility stems from deviant speech, itself the product of an irrational brain. 'Sense', 'deviance' and 'irrationality' are a moment-to-moment metalinguistic appraisals made by language users, second-order cultural constructions that shape the speech community's response to certain individuals. Describing the speech of schizophrenics as 'deviant', 'irrational', or 'nonsensical' constrains their jointly-constructed capability of making sense using the resources (which may include other individual's minds) at their disposal. Integration linguistics thus brings into focus a moral and political dimension to such descriptions which is obscured by an orthodox linguistics-biased biomedical approach

Assessing a 3D digital Prototype for Teaching the Brazilian Sign Language Alphabet: an Alternative for Non-programming Designers

This study aims to analyse the users’ perceptions about a 3D digital artifacts prototype for teaching the fingerspelling alphabet of Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS). For this purpose, a high-fidelity prototype was developed with a non-programming method, and a usability test was conducted using a structured questionnaire with 31 participants, including Deaf and hearing people. Most users (96.7%) rated the learning experience with the tool as positive, with 67.7% rating the experience as "good", 12.9% as "very good", and 16.1% as "excellent". Comparing the evaluation between Deaf and hearing people showed that both target groups mostly rated it positively. However, most hearing people rated it "good," while the majority of the Deaf rated it as "excellent" (29%) or "outstanding" (14%) compared to 13% and 12%, respectively, among the hearing. In summary, considering the variables presented, the experience was well rated and did not encounter solid obstacles or resistance

The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona

Literary individualism manifested itself in the twelfth century both trivially and profoundly. Word puzzles and overt self-naming within a literary work, and discussions of the nature of poetry and the role of the poet in the world, increasingly considered the purpose and efficacy of writing and ultimately of language per se. Poets asserted themselves in their works not so much for the sake of self-promotion, in a modern sense, but to address and modulate contemporary intellectual and spiritual issues. Speculative grammar, nominalism and realism, often provided the material for poets such as Guillem IX, Marcabru, Dante, Chaucer and Langland. As literacy and Aristotelian logic became widespread, these poets contributed to a distinction being made between history and fiction; they employed contemporary ideas about language and its relationship to experience as both metaphor and theme. They elaborated a Western sensibility that had been articulated at least as early as Plato, Paul, and especially Augustine who essentially viewed the world as a text. This basic metaphor ultimately formed the later medieval outlook; text, and language and/or discourse maintained fluid interrelationships. Moreover, Anselm had set aside Augustine\u27s criterion of intentionality as the most important factor when determining falsehoods. Anselm recognized the separateness of language; statements could have a natural integrity despite their lack of objective reference. This autonomy of language formed the ground for individual poetic identity. In the face of a hierarchical authority inherited from the past, poets insisted upon their presence as individuals by aligning themselves with their texts. Marcabru writes about his difficulties in forging an eloquent text that will always be at a remove from him. Dante undertakes this theme through a fictional persona, who resembles himself and discourses with Virgil about the possibility of enunciating truth. Langland, finally, aligns author and persona with poetic theme in the name Will. In measuring dream and allegory against actual experience, Langland discusses the individual writer\u27s will and his hope for salvation

Unveiling the frontiers of deep learning: innovations shaping diverse domains

Deep learning (DL) enables the development of computer models that are capable of learning, visualizing, optimizing, refining, and predicting data. In recent years, DL has been applied in a range of fields, including audio-visual data processing, agriculture, transportation prediction, natural language, biomedicine, disaster management, bioinformatics, drug design, genomics, face recognition, and ecology. To explore the current state of deep learning, it is necessary to investigate the latest developments and applications of deep learning in these disciplines. However, the literature is lacking in exploring the applications of deep learning in all potential sectors. This paper thus extensively investigates the potential applications of deep learning across all major fields of study as well as the associated benefits and challenges. As evidenced in the literature, DL exhibits accuracy in prediction and analysis, makes it a powerful computational tool, and has the ability to articulate itself and optimize, making it effective in processing data with no prior training. Given its independence from training data, deep learning necessitates massive amounts of data for effective analysis and processing, much like data volume. To handle the challenge of compiling huge amounts of medical, scientific, healthcare, and environmental data for use in deep learning, gated architectures like LSTMs and GRUs can be utilized. For multimodal learning, shared neurons in the neural network for all activities and specialized neurons for particular tasks are necessary.Comment: 64 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

From the Voice to the Violent Act: Language and Violence in Contemporary Drama

Aleks Sierz coined the phrase In-Yer-Face Theatre to categorize a new generation of plays written by a group of upstart playwrights in Britain and America. In addressing these plays, I draw upon recent contributions within the social sciences in order to understand better the interstices of language and violence in this drama. This interdisciplinary approach underscores the social considerations at the heart of these plays. Although frequently criticized for a perceived lack of social consciousness and a seemingly gratuitous use of profanity, prurient sexuality, and graphic violence, these writers in fact continue, and contribute to, a tradition of theater that is serious, ethically based, and socially aware. Specifically, the language represented in these plays is symptomatic of, and complicit in, the violence depicted on stage. I first argue that coercive institutional language subjects the characters in David Mamet\u27s 0leanna to systematic violence long before the infamous moment of violence that concludes the play. The reifying language of consumer capitalism in the plays of Patrick Marber and Mark Ravenhill precipitates violence by rewriting the cultural codes that inform subjectivity and the way that interpersonal relationships are conceived and experienced. Examining the work of David Harrower, Bryony Lavery, David Eldridge, and Tracy Letts, I identify examples of public language and show how they hamper intellectual development and maturity and disengage the cognitive mechanisms that allow individuals to regulate their behavior. I explore the allegiance on the part of those in subcultures of violence to the heavily gendered constructions of identity facilitated by their subcultural languages, and I address the linguistic mechanisms by which the characters in Rebecca Prichard\u27s Fair Game create the sense that violence is necessary. In addition, I interrogate the formal nature of hyper-masculine violence. Finally, in the plays of Martin McDonagh, Judy Upton, and Rebecca Prichard, I discuss the adoption of traditionally male forms of violence by women, focusing on language\u27s role in determining the likelihood and the nature of the violence committed both by and against women

Brian Ferneyhough : the logic of the figure

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Compounding in Namagowab and English: (exploring meaning creation in compounds)

This essay investigates compounding in Namagowab and English, which belong to two widely divergent groups of languages, the Khoesan and Indo-European, respectively. The first motive is to investigate how and why new words are created from existing ones. The reading and data interpretation seeks an understanding of word formation and an overview of semantic compositionality, structure and productivity, within the broad context of cognitive, lexicalist and distributed morphology paradigms. This coupled with history reading about the languages and its people, is used to speculate about why compounds feature in lexical creation. Compounding is prevalent in both languages and their distance in terms of phylogenetic relationships should allow limited generalizing about these processes of formation. Word lists taken from dictionaries in both languages were analyzed by entering the words in Excel spreadsheets so that various attributes of these words, such as word type, compound class (Noun, Verb, Preposition, Adjective and Adverb) and constituent class could be counted, and described with formulae, and compound and constituent meaning analyzed. The conclusion was that socio historical factors such as language contact, and aspects of cognition such as memory and transparency, account for compounding in a language in addition to typology