PIWeCS: enhancing human/machine agency in an interactive composition system

This paper focuses on the infrastructure and aesthetic approach used in PIWeCS: a Public Space Interactive Web-based Composition System. The concern was to increase the sense of dialogue between human and machine agency in an interactive work by adapting Paine's (2002) notion of a conversational model of interaction as a ‘complex system’. The machine implementation of PIWeCS is achieved through integrating intelligent agent programming with MAX/MSP. Human input is through a web infrastructure. The conversation is initiated and continued by participants through arrangements and composition based on short performed samples of traditional New Zealand Maori instruments. The system allows the extension of a composition through the electroacoustic manipulation of the source material

Response: An Invitation to a Too-Long Postponed Conversation: Race and Composition by Octavio Pimentel

Octavio Pimentel’s “Racism and Composition: Redesigning the Composition Classroom to be more Culturally Inclusive” critically provokes pedagogical and programmatic questions by focusing on pressing issues of race and language within a historical context relevant to the field of rhetoric and composition

Variations sur la conversation dans Vous les entendez ? de Nathalie Sarraute

À partir d’une lecture de Vous les entendez ? de Nathalie Sarraute, j’interroge le lien entre conversation et sous-conversation, cette dernière étant souvent donnée comme la cause profonde des perturbations de la première. J’examine également les « failles » caractéristiques de la conversation contemporaine. Si, en effet, la conversation innerve ce roman jusque dans sa composition, elle se trouve étrangement reconduite par la parole qui en énonce l’échec. Nathalie Sarraute fait ainsi de la conversation un véritable mode romanesque qui tisse une communauté dialogique là même où il expose de l’intérieur la faillite de l’échange verbal. Si, dans Vous les entendez ?, aucune voix n’entend rien de ce que les autres disent, si nul terrain d’entente ne peut véritablement s’établir, le lecteur du roman est invité à « dresser l’oreille » pour percevoir ce qui sourd dans l’impossible, mais incessante, conversation… C’est cette relance de la conversation dans l’espace romanesque que cette étude propose d’explorer plus avant, cherchant par là ce qui fait de Vous les entendez ? un « roman conversant  ».Based on a reading of Nathalie Sarraute’s Vous les entendez?, I examine the relationship between conversation and sub-conversation, since the latter is often viewed as the underlying cause of disturbance in the former. I also examine the faults and flaws that characterize contemporary conversation. If conversation in fact innervates the novel to its composition, it is oddly renewed by the speech that affirms its failure. Nathalie Sarraute therefore makes conversation a veritable novelistic mode that weaves the threads of a dialogical community at the very place it reveals, from within, the bankruptcy of the verbal exchange. Since, in Vous les entendez?, no voice hears what the others are saying, since no common ground can be genuinely established, the novel’s readers are invited to put an ear to the ground to detect what they can from the impossible, but incessant, conversation... My study proposes to explore further this new start-up of conversation in fictional space with a view to discovering why Vous les entendez? is considered a “conversational novel.

A Spanish bishop remembers the future : Oral traditions and purgatory in Julian of Toledo

Though oral tradition is not usually concerned with texts such as Julian of Toledo's Prognosticon, I hope I have convincingly demonstrated that even here, in a work comprised mostly of remembered quotations of Patristic authors we see the traditions of oral memory and composition at work. The peripheral elements of this text, its titles and glosses, provide evidence of just such a mode of composition. From another perspective, we might want to classify the Prognosticon with such works as Plato's Symposium, which record the purported conversation of a group of friends. Perhaps some will decide that the references to oral composition and conversation are mostly artifice or even a pose, rendered in a strictly literate context. Yet, the evidence of the titles and even the glosses to Julian suggest that we can see in the surviving medieval manuscripts some actual evidence of oral composition and a tradition of commentary aided by memory.Not

E-liquid-related posts to Twitter in 2018: Thematic analysis.

IntroductionE-liquid is the solution aerosolized by e-cigarette devices to produce vapor. Continuously evolving e-liquids, and corresponding devices, can affect user experiences associated with these products. Twitter conversations about e-liquids can capture salient behavioral, social, and communicative cues associated with e-liquids. We analyzed Twitter data to characterize key topics of conversation about e-liquids to inform surveillance, and regulatory efforts.MethodsTwitter posts containing e-liquid-related terms ("e-liquid(s)," "e-juice(s)") were obtained from 1 January 2018 to 31 December 2018. Text classifiers were used to identify topics of the posts (n = 15,927).ResultsThe most prevalent topic was Promotional at 29.35% followed by Flavors at 24.22%, and Person Tagging at 21.47%. Juice Composition was next most prevalent at 17.61% followed by Cannabis at 16.83%, and Nicotine Health Risks at 6.39%. Quit Smoking was rare at 0.57%.ConclusionThese results suggest that flavors, cannabis, health risks of nicotine, and composition warrant consideration as targets in future surveillance, public policy, and interventions addressing the use of e-liquids. Twitter provides ample opportunity to influence the normalization, and uptake, of e-cigarette-related products among non-smokers and youth, unless regulatory restrictions, and counter messaging campaigns are developed to reduce this risk

ASIME 2018 White Paper. In-Space Utilisation of Asteroids: Asteroid Composition -- Answers to Questions from the Asteroid Miners

In keeping with the Luxembourg government's initiative to support the future use of space resources, ASIME 2018 was held in Belval, Luxembourg on April 16-17, 2018. The goal of ASIME 2018: Asteroid Intersections with Mine Engineering, was to focus on asteroid composition for advancing the asteroid in-space resource utilisation domain. What do we know about asteroid composition from remote-sensing observations? What are the potential caveats in the interpretation of Earth-based spectral observations? What are the next steps to improve our knowledge on asteroid composition by means of ground-based and space-based observations and asteroid rendez-vous and sample return missions? How can asteroid mining companies use this knowledge? ASIME 2018 was a two-day workshop of almost 70 scientists and engineers in the context of the engineering needs of space missions with in-space asteroid utilisation. The 21 Questions from the asteroid mining companies were sorted into the four asteroid science themes: 1) Potential Targets, 2) Asteroid-Meteorite Links, 3) In-Situ Measurements and 4) Laboratory Measurements. The Answers to those Questions were provided by the scientists with their conference presentations and collected by A. Graps or edited directly into an open-access collaborative Google document or inserted by A. Graps using additional reference materials. During the ASIME 2018, first day and second day Wrap-Ups, the answers to the questions were discussed further. New readers to the asteroid mining topic may find the Conversation boxes and the Mission Design discussions especially interesting.Comment: Outcome from the ASIME 2018: Asteroid Intersections with Mine Engineering, Luxembourg. April 16-17, 2018. 65 Pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1612.0070

Conversations : computer mediated dialogue, multilogue, and learning

The purpose of this dissertation is to argue in favor of a "pedagogy of textual conversation," a pedagogy made possible in large part by electronic technology, by computer mediated communication. Informing the argument is a deep philosophical commitment to conversation itself as the primary mode of meaning-making in both social and personal life. Material presented in support of the main argument is drawn from current and past pedagogical and communications theory as well as from ethnographic research conducted in the fall semester of 1994 in which students in an English composition class were linked to students in an education class via a single VAX electronic conference. Actual experiences in the electronic medium are forwarded to suggest that those who engage in extensive textual conversation with one another benefit from improved rhetorical skills, understanding of course content, the ability to make connections between ideas, and a liberalization of ideological views

Embracing Civility, Community, and Citizenship: A Qualitative Study of Multimodal College Composition Classrooms

This thesis will examine ways of teaching college composition through a lens where civility, citizenship, and community are the focus of the composition classroom. By drawing from critical composition pedagogy scholars and rich examples of civil/civic dialogue from the media, I will construct a series of actionable strategies to foster civil dialogue in the multimodal college composition classroom. Using scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition, this classroom-based research project will seek to answer questions such as: How can a first-year college composition class teach civil dialogue and promote understanding in a society where the loudest, shrillest voices win? and How can a university implement and assess civility awareness? This study adds to the conversation regarding the need to work toward a more civil society and explores ways to work toward this by way of the first-year college composition classroom