Nelson Goodman’s general theory of symbols: can it help characterise some educational concerns?

Nelson Goodman was active between 1941 and the end of the century. From 1968 he was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. He died in 1998 at the age of 92 having made contributions in the field of logic and analytical philosophy. His unremitting nominalism led to a radical constructivist or irrealist position. He was a constructivist not only in the sense of acknowledging the constitutive nature of our classifications of things, ultimately amounting to versions of the world, but also in the way that, following Carnap, he saw it as part of the responsibility of philosophy to construct robust and consistent systems of statements that serve as correctives to the logical disarray of natural language. He also took to its logical conclusions another of Carnap’s principles namely that the truth of a statement is dependent on a particular frame of reference... In this paper I consider how Goodman's analysis of the forms of reference might fruitfully be applied to some educational concerns. He identifies two main species of reference, denotation and exemplification, and two main sub-species, representation and expression. Symbols may be labels or samples. I first present his theory of notation and then the operation of labels and samples in turn and consider how we might use them to describe teaching and learning. I further apply them to explain the role that experience plays in a teacher’s professional development and how they might help to characterise the personal dimension of teaching. I then present his theory of metaphor and expression and finally suggest ways in which these and his other concepts may help theorise parental choice of school as part of a re-conceptualised theory of social practice

Eye center localization and gaze gesture recognition for human-computer interaction

© 2016 Optical Society of America. This paper introduces an unsupervised modular approach for accurate and real-time eye center localization in images and videos, thus allowing a coarse-to-fine, global-to-regional scheme. The trajectories of eye centers in consecutive frames, i.e., gaze gestures, are further analyzed, recognized, and employed to boost the human-computer interaction (HCI) experience. This modular approach makes use of isophote and gradient features to estimate the eye center locations. A selective oriented gradient filter has been specifically designed to remove strong gradients from eyebrows, eye corners, and shadows, which sabotage most eye center localization methods. A real-world implementation utilizing these algorithms has been designed in the form of an interactive advertising billboard to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for HCI. The eye center localization algorithm has been compared with 10 other algorithms on the BioID database and six other algorithms on the GI4E database. It outperforms all the other algorithms in comparison in terms of localization accuracy. Further tests on the extended Yale Face Database b and self-collected data have proved this algorithm to be robust against moderate head poses and poor illumination conditions. The interactive advertising billboard has manifested outstanding usability and effectiveness in our tests and shows great potential for benefiting a wide range of real-world HCI applications

Subject Identity And School Knowledge.

This thesis examines the nature of the pedagogic subject identity from the perspective of a participating observer who eventually became an observing participant. What has been written is an 'insider' account of the secondary school teacher's subject identity yet even the act of writing this thesis resulted in the insider becoming an outsider: his knowledge was no longer appropriate to his identity. An examination of the way in which one's social identity of research personna and subject practitioner interact as a result of the knowledge held by virtue of these socially located positions leads on to an awareness of the rhetorics of knowledge. The performances of the actor are constrained by the knowledge, appropriate to this identity since the appropriateness of the one knowledge necessarily limits access to other knowledge. Furthermore, the knowledge each party holds of the other will be more or less accurate according to the processual aspects of the identity. One consequence of this view is to challenge the view that research accounts are more credible than those of the participating actors. It may be different, and this will be so because of the different location of the salient identity. The researcher has no reason to exempt himself from the same theoretical and pragmatic perspective with which he views the approached group since other groups also theorise about the meanings for them of such strangers

Gender and gaze gesture recognition for human-computer interaction

© 2016 Elsevier Inc. The identification of visual cues in facial images has been widely explored in the broad area of computer vision. However theoretical analyses are often not transformed into widespread assistive Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems, due to factors such as inconsistent robustness, low efficiency, large computational expense or strong dependence on complex hardware. We present a novel gender recognition algorithm, a modular eye centre localisation approach and a gaze gesture recognition method, aiming to escalate the intelligence, adaptability and interactivity of HCI systems by combining demographic data (gender) and behavioural data (gaze) to enable development of a range of real-world assistive-technology applications. The gender recognition algorithm utilises Fisher Vectors as facial features which are encoded from low-level local features in facial images. We experimented with four types of low-level features: greyscale values, Local Binary Patterns (LBP), LBP histograms and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). The corresponding Fisher Vectors were classified using a linear Support Vector Machine. The algorithm has been tested on the FERET database, the LFW database and the FRGCv2 database, yielding 97.7%, 92.5% and 96.7% accuracy respectively. The eye centre localisation algorithm has a modular approach, following a coarse-to-fine, global-to-regional scheme and utilising isophote and gradient features. A Selective Oriented Gradient filter has been specifically designed to detect and remove strong gradients from eyebrows, eye corners and self-shadows (which sabotage most eye centre localisation methods). The trajectories of the eye centres are then defined as gaze gestures for active HCI. The eye centre localisation algorithm has been compared with 10 other state-of-the-art algorithms with similar functionality and has outperformed them in terms of accuracy while maintaining excellent real-time performance. The above methods have been employed for development of a data recovery system that can be employed for implementation of advanced assistive technology tools. The high accuracy, reliability and real-time performance achieved for attention monitoring, gaze gesture control and recovery of demographic data, can enable the advanced human-robot interaction that is needed for developing systems that can provide assistance with everyday actions, thereby improving the quality of life for the elderly and/or disabled

Drawing, Handwriting Processing Analysis: New Advances and Challenges

International audienceDrawing and handwriting are communicational skills that are fundamental in geopolitical, ideological and technological evolutions of all time. drawingand handwriting are still useful in defining innovative applications in numerous fields. In this regard, researchers have to solve new problems like those related to the manner in which drawing and handwriting become an efficient way to command various connected objects; or to validate graphomotor skills as evident and objective sources of data useful in the study of human beings, their capabilities and their limits from birth to decline

Euclid and the scientific thought in the third century B.C.

The criticism on the texts of Euclid, even assuming different positions, starts generally from the previous assumption that the author of the Elements is  totally inside the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition. The thesis affirmed in this paper is that many of the gaps and contradictions found by the criticism have their root in this assumption. The authors assert that Euclid was a scientist that belonged in a full way to the new cultural climate of the Hellenistic Kingdoms, and particularly of the Alexandria’s Museum. In this climate, characterized by lively philosophical disputes, the scientists, and in particular Euclid, tend to obtain coherent and stable results, voluntarily omitting to give their opinion on the real being of the scientificobject and on the truth of the principles

The repertory grid: a critical appraisal

George Kelly claims a scientific status for Personal Construct Theory, but I argue that it is more appropriately characterised among the interpretive human sciences. Examination of the theory from the point of view of the grid user discloses a number of weaknesses, the most directly relevant being Kelly's assumption of the dichotomous nature of constructs. Even when this assumption is weakened by allowing grading between oppositional poles, the grid matrix retains a positivism that appears at variance with the main thrust of Kelly's theorising. The central chapters appraise technical aspects of grid methodology, dealing sequentially with elements, constructs, bipolarity, the completion of a grid matrix, analysis, and the stability of grid data. Analysis of underlying assumptions, reflection upon the 'grid literature', and some empirical studies indicate that grid methodology is often flawed in both conceptualisation and practice. While some improvements may be made regarding technique, element X construct interactions radically undermine the grid as a research instrument, as does Kelly's later claim for the importance of events. I further argue that short verbal labels are inadequate to bear the load of meaning that respondents wish to convey, and that grid methodology excludes the richness of figurative language: developments based upon fuzzy set theory are unlikely to improve matters. If, as I suggest, communication of meaning is a prime requirement of construct theory research, then alternative approaches to the elicitation of constructs are necessary. I conclude by sketching a possible response to the criticisms that have been advanced, and argue for a 'personal construct hermeneutics' in which theory and method are brought into a closer alignment. Indications are given of how this might be operationalised in terms of 'accounts methodology' and of some of the implications for the conduct of research in the human sciences

Repetitive mild traumatic brain injury causes optic nerve and retinal damage in a mouse model

There is increasing evidence that long-lasting morphologic and functional consequences can be present in the human visual system after repetitive mild traumatic brain injury (r-mTBI). The exact lo- cation and extent of the damage in this condition are not well un- derstood. Using a recently developed mouse model of r-mTBI, we assessed the effects on the retina and optic nerve using histology and immunohistochemistry, electroretinography (ERG), and spectral- domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) at 10 and 13 weeks after injury. Control mice received repetitive anesthesia alone (r-sham). We observed decreased optic nerve diameters and increased cellularity and areas of demyelination in optic nerves in r-mTBI versus r-sham mice. There were concomitant areas of decreased cellularity in the retinal ganglion cell layer and approximately 67% decrease in brain- specific homeobox/POU domain protein 3AYpositive retinal ganglion cells in retinal flat mounts. Furthermore, SD-OCT demonstrated a de- tectable thinning of the inner retina; ERG demonstrated a decrease in the amplitude of the photopic negative response without any change in a- or b-wave amplitude or timing. Thus, the ERG and SD-OCT data correlated well with changes detected by morphometric, histologic, and immunohistochemical methods, thereby supporting the use of these noninvasive methods in the assessment of visual function and morphology in clinical cases of mTBI

The measurement of occupational identity.

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