The Aesthetic Politics of Unfinished Media: New Media Activism in Brazil

This article analyzes the role of key visual technologies in contemporary media activism in Brazil. Drawing on a range of media formats and sources, it examines how the aesthetic politics of activists in protests that took place in 2013 opened the way for wider sociopolitical change. The forms and practices of the media activists, it is argued, aimed explicitly at producing transformative politics. New media technologies were remediated as a kind of equipment that could generate new relationships and subjectivities, and thereby access to intentionally undetermined futures

Communities in temporal networks: from theoretical underpinnings to real-life applications

Static aggregations of network activity can unravel attributes of the complex systems they represent. However, they fall short when the structure of the systems changes over time. In some cases, changes are sluggish, such as in power grids, where lines enjoy a lengthy temporal permanence. In others, a high frequency of change is observed, such as on a network of online messages, social contacts, pathogen transmission or ball passing in a soccer game. In these cases, reducing what is inherently a temporal network to a static one, leads necessarily to a loss of information, such as causal relationships, precedence or reachability rules. Temporal networks are thus the main subject of this thesis, centered on the study of network evolution from the point of view of its clusters as significant meso-structures. The thesis has two interrelated parts. In the first, theoretical challenges are addressed and original algorithms, methods and tools are developed that can further the study of network theory. In the second, these developments are applied to the analysis of team invasion sports. A measurement of game dynamics was created based on a temporal network representation of a match, with nodes clustered by spatial proximity. These measurements were found to correlate with match events of known dynamics. Moreover, they reveal unique, multi-level, aspects of the game, from the individual players contributions, to the clusters of interacting players, to their teams and their matches, which is useful for game analysis, training and strategy development.As agregações estáticas das ligações de uma rede podem revelar atributos dos sistemas complexos que representam. Todavia, são insuficientes quando a estrutura dos sistemas se altera com o tempo. Em alguns casos, as transformações são lentas, tais como em redes de transmissão de eletricidade em que as linhas se mantêm inalteráveis por largos períodos de tempo. Noutras, regista-se uma taxa elevada de mudança, como por exemplo numa rede de mensagens em linha, contatos sociais, transmissão de patógenos ou passes num jogo de futebol. Nestes casos, reduzir o que é inerentemente uma rede temporal a uma rede estática, leva a uma perda de informação, tais como relações causais, regras de precedência ou de acessibilidade. Redes temporais são assim o tema desta tese, centrada nos seus agrupamentos, como meso-estruturas significantes. A tese está dividida em duas partes. Na primeira, são considerados problemas teóricos, e são desenvolvidos algoritmos, métodos e ferramentas que avançam o estudo da teoria de redes. Na segunda, estes desenvolvimentos são aplicados à análise de jogos desportivos coletivos de invasão. Foi criada uma medida de dinâmica do jogo, baseada na representação da partida através de uma rede temporal de nós agrupados por proximidade espacial. Os resultados obtidos correlacionam-se com eventos do jogo de dinâmica conhecida. Adicionalmente, esta medida revela aspetos únicos e multi-nível da dinâmica do jogo, desde a contribuição individual do jogador, até aos agrupamentos de jogadores, da equipa e das partidas, útil para a análise do jogo, de treino e de desenvolvimento estratégico

Imaging South Africa: Collection Projects by Siemon Allen

This catalog was published in conjunction with the exhibition Imaging South Africa: Collection Projects by Siemon Allen, August 27-October 31, 2010, and made possible by generous support from the Office of the Dean, VCU School of the Arts. --p. 83.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/anderson_gallery/1000/thumbnail.jp

Soccer and Social Identity in Contemporary German Film and Media

This dissertation analyzes a selection of German soccer films that construct imaginations of German social identity through the populism and simplicity of soccer. These expressions of German identity do not revert to nostalgic, static social identities based on the exclusivity of national or ethnic heritage. Instead, these films frame German identity in the 21st century circumstances of transcultural exchange, cosmopolitan empathy, and pan-European social movements. I argue that examining the social theories and movements of multiculturalism, feminism, and soccer subcultures provides for a more contemporarily informed reading of the connection between soccer-related media and social identity than reverting back to historical forms of German social identity and misreading German soccer fandom as the reemergence of xenophobic nationalism. The intersection of soccer and film produces a particular sort of social commentary. Soccer functions as a filmic narrative tool that guides social commentary to a simplified world of dualities: winners vs. losers, us vs. them, or the political right vs. the left. I describe the narrative structure of soccer, film, and social commentary with statement theory: a structuralist method of examining “statements,” which are the culmination of the filmic form, socio-cultural context, and utopic or dystopic visions of society. I argue that the filmic soccer narrative dictates social commentary into utopic or dystopic statements; statements of idealism that necessarily project a social wish or fear into the future, even if that utopia or dystopia is cinematically depicted in an imagined now. The multicultural, post-multicultural, dystopic, and post-dystopic statements are short forms of narratively and visually mediating social identity

Proceedings of Mathsport international 2017 conference

Proceedings of MathSport International 2017 Conference, held in the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, June 26-28, 2017. MathSport International organizes biennial conferences dedicated to all topics where mathematics and sport meet. Topics include: performance measures, optimization of sports performance, statistics and probability models, mathematical and physical models in sports, competitive strategies, statistics and probability match outcome models, optimal tournament design and scheduling, decision support systems, analysis of rules and adjudication, econometrics in sport, analysis of sporting technologies, financial valuation in sport, e-sports (gaming), betting and sports

Some Dumb Girl Syndrome: Challenging and Subverting Destructive Stereotypes of Female Attorneys

This Essay considers ways in which female attorneys confront sexism and stereotyping in the legal profession and in life, and strongly endorses embracing feminism, and wearing comfortable shoes

A constructive theory of automated ideation

In this thesis we explore the field of automated artefact generation in computational creativity with the aim of proposing methods of generation of ideas with cultural value. We focus on two kinds of ideas: fictional concepts and socially embedded concepts. For fictional concepts, we introduce a novel method based on the non-existence-conjectures made by the HR automated theory formation system. We further introduce the notion of typicality of an example with respect to a concept into HR. This leads to methods for ordering fictional concepts with respect to three measurements: novelty, vagueness and stimulation. We ran an experiment to produce thousands of definitions of fictional animals and then compared the software's evaluations of the non-fictional concepts with those obtained through a survey consulting sixty people. The results showed that two of the three measurements have a correlation with human notions.For socially embedded concepts, we apply a typicality-based classification method, the Rational Model of Classification (RMC), to a set of data obtained from Twitter. The aim being the creation of a set of concepts that naturally associate to an initial topic. We applied the RMC to four sets of tweets, each corresponding to one of four initial topics. The result was a set of clusters per topic, each cluster having a definition consisting of a set of words that appeared recurrently in the tweets. A survey was used to ask people to guess the topic given a set of definitions and to rate the artistic relevance of these definitions. The results showed both high association percentage and high relevance scores. A second survey was used to compare the rankings on the social impact of each of the definitions. The results obtained show a weak positive correlation between the two rankings. Our experiments show that it is possible to automatically generate ideas with the purpose of using them for artefact generation. This is an important step for the automation of computational creativity because most of the available artefact generation systems do not explicitly undertake idea generation. Moreover, our experiments introduce new ways of using the notion of typicality and show how these uses can be integrated in both the generation and evaluation of ideas.Open Acces

Solving residual spaces: a template for cities in envisaging disregarded public space into places that encourage and promote socio-economic development and prioritise pedestrianism

This document intends to chronicle a narrative working process which is the basis of this urban design project. The research involves a sixmonth investigation into current urban design theory and practice applied to the city as well as site scale. The design commences with an intention which is informed by a combination of theoretical, surrogate, factual and contextualised factors. The process has been one of reconciling the blurred boundaries between conflicting ideas of a design that is economically realisable in the short term and experimenting with new and largely unexplored ways of city-making in radically changing cities in which urban land is scarce and increasingly valuable. Parts One and Two of this document are intended to be independent of Parts Three and Four. The initial chapters are an investigation into challenges of any modern city and the final chapter is an illustration of a solution to only chosen site

Boxing and mixed martial arts: sociocultural cues, ego enhancement, and aggression

This work explores two sports in the world of fight media, boxing and mixed martial arts. Employing the use of social cognitive theory, cultivation theory, and critical race theory as the frameworks from which the following analysis is based, this research positions prizefighting as a sports culture in need of communicative examination. The present study investigates how the representation of concepts such as religiosity, hypermasculinity, and physical violence permeate these two sports. A content analysis examining a total of 46 pre-fight press conferences taking place between 2012 and 2017, all derived from Home Box Office (HBO), Showtime, and the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC) was conducted. There were a variety of variables that proved to be significant in analyzing differences based on the racial/ethnic representation in the press conference, and the fight type. Some of these findings include Black fighters being overrepresented as displaying physical materialism as well as familial responsibility as compared to chance expectations. Additionally, White (non-Hispanic) fighters were overrepresented as perpetuating verbal aggression, a finding that was also significant for fight type; with mixed martial arts being overrepresented and boxing being underrepresented.Includes bibliographical reference