258,867 research outputs found
Affective adaptation = effective transformation? Shifting the politics of climate change adaptation and transformation from the status quo
Alarming rates of environmental change have catalyzed scholars to call for fundamental transformations in social-political and economic relations. Yet cautionary tales about how power and politics are constitutive of these efforts fill the literature. We show how a relational framing of adaptation and transformation demands a political, cross-scalar, and socionatural analysis to probe the affects and effects of climate change and better grasp how transformative change unfolds. We bring affect theory into conversation with the literature on adaptation politics, socio-environmental transformations, subjectivity, and our empirical work to frame our analysis around three under investigated aspects of transformation: (i) the uncertain and unpredictable relations that constitute socionatures; (ii) other ways of knowing; and (iii) the affective and emotional relations that form a basis for action. Affective adaptation represents a different ontological take on transformation by reframing the socionatural, normative and ethical aspects as relational, uncertain, and performative. This directs analytical attention to processes rather than outcomes. The emphasis on the encounter between bodies in affect theory points to the need for experiential and embodied ways of knowing climate to effect transformative change. Effective transformation requires recognizing uncertainty and unpredictability as part of transformative processes. This is not because all outcomes are acceptable, but rather because uncertainty and unpredictability are elements which help generate affects (action) and emotional commitment to shared human and more than human relations in action, projects, and policies. This article is categorized under: Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Values-Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptatio
I Don't Want to Think About it Now:Decision Theory With Costly Computation
Computation plays a major role in decision making. Even if an agent is
willing to ascribe a probability to all states and a utility to all outcomes,
and maximize expected utility, doing so might present serious computational
problems. Moreover, computing the outcome of a given act might be difficult. In
a companion paper we develop a framework for game theory with costly
computation, where the objects of choice are Turing machines. Here we apply
that framework to decision theory. We show how well-known phenomena like
first-impression-matters biases (i.e., people tend to put more weight on
evidence they hear early on), belief polarization (two people with different
prior beliefs, hearing the same evidence, can end up with diametrically opposed
conclusions), and the status quo bias (people are much more likely to stick
with what they already have) can be easily captured in that framework. Finally,
we use the framework to define some new notions: value of computational
information (a computational variant of value of information) and and
computational value of conversation.Comment: In Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR '10
Sharing is Airing: Employee Concerted Activity on Social Media After Hispanics United
Section 7 of the United Statesâ National Labor Relations Act allows groups of American workers to engage in concerted activity for the purposes of collective bargaining or for âother mutual aid or protection.â This latter protection has been extended in cases such as Lafayette Park Hotel to workers outside the union context. Starting in 2005, the National Labor Relations Board increasingly signaled to employers that concerted activity may take place on social media such as Facebook. However, the Board proper delivered its first written opinion articulating these rules in the 2012 case of Hispanics United of Buffalo, Inc. There, the Board found the employer in question to have committed multiple unfair labor practices when it fired five employees over a series of Facebook posts due to violating the employerâs zero-tolerance no bullying policy. This article argues that the majority opinion of the Board misapplied Lafayette Park Hotelâs test for whether employer conduct âwould reasonably tend to chill employeesâ from legitimate, protected uses of their §7 rights. This article explains the two largest errors in the Boardâs decision: (1) a failure to identify a missing, important element for concerted activity protection under §7, the nexus between employee discussion and contemplated group action, and (2) asserting an âinferred group intentâ existed that was âimplicitly manifestâ which linked the employeesâ Facebook posts to contemplated group action protected under §7. Members of the entire Board, as well as other legal scholars writing on this topic, have been guilty at different times of simplifying social media to being like a âvirtual water coolerâ for the 21st century. The facts in Hispanics United show why this analogy does not work: rather than a short face-to-face conversation with a finite, known audience in the space of minutes, it was a series of written messages plopped down in sequential order throughout an entire day, written for an audience of unknown size and make-up that may not even include the co-workers it ostensibly addressed. As Hispanics United helps illustrate, the proper handling of employer retaliation on social media remains the sensible application of the established nexus requirement for finding concerted activity
Seamlessly Unifying Attributes and Items: Conversational Recommendation for Cold-Start Users
Static recommendation methods like collaborative filtering suffer from the
inherent limitation of performing real-time personalization for cold-start
users. Online recommendation, e.g., multi-armed bandit approach, addresses this
limitation by interactively exploring user preference online and pursuing the
exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off. However, existing bandit-based methods
model recommendation actions homogeneously. Specifically, they only consider
the items as the arms, being incapable of handling the item attributes, which
naturally provide interpretable information of user's current demands and can
effectively filter out undesired items. In this work, we consider the
conversational recommendation for cold-start users, where a system can both ask
the attributes from and recommend items to a user interactively. This important
scenario was studied in a recent work. However, it employs a hand-crafted
function to decide when to ask attributes or make recommendations. Such
separate modeling of attributes and items makes the effectiveness of the system
highly rely on the choice of the hand-crafted function, thus introducing
fragility to the system. To address this limitation, we seamlessly unify
attributes and items in the same arm space and achieve their EE trade-offs
automatically using the framework of Thompson Sampling. Our Conversational
Thompson Sampling (ConTS) model holistically solves all questions in
conversational recommendation by choosing the arm with the maximal reward to
play. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that ConTS
outperforms the state-of-the-art methods Conversational UCB (ConUCB) and
Estimation-Action-Reflection model in both metrics of success rate and average
number of conversation turns.Comment: TOIS 202
Offering patients choices: A pilot study of interactions in the seizure clinic
Using conversation analysis (CA), we studied conversations between one United Kingdom-based epilepsy specialist and 13 patients with seizures in whom there was uncertainty about the diagnosis and for whom different treatment and investigational options were being considered. In line with recent communication guidance, the specialist offered some form of choice to all patients: in eight cases, a course of action was proposed, to be accepted or rejected, and in the remaining five, a "menu" of options was offered. Even when presenting a menu, the specialist sometimes conveyed his own preferences in how he described the options, and in some cases the menu was used for reasons other than offering choice (e.g., to address patient resistance). Close linguistic and, interactional analysis of clinical encounters can show why doctors may feel they are offering choices when patients report that the decision was clinician dominated. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
GROUNDING IN FACE-TO-FACE CONVERSATION: AN ETHNOGRAPHY STUDY
Grounding is the process of achieving mutual understanding or belief about what was
said between participants in a conversation. Its role is of a paramount important in
communication to succeed. This paper examines the models of grounding styles that
commonly occur among the teens. The study employed qualitative approach to analyze
specific utterances using Clarkâs and Traumâs theories of grounding in communication.
The research has shown the use of tag questions is less than the use of interrogative forms.
The switch of topic dialogue from an uninformative to informative one is another
grounding style that the respondents adopted
Before the consummation what? On the role of the semiotic economy of seduction
The cultural practice of flirtation has been multifariously scrutinized in
various disciplines including sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis and
literary studies. This paper frames the field of flirtation in Bourdieuian terms,
while focusing narrowly on the semiotic economy that is defining of this
cultural field. Moreover, seduction, as a uniquely varied form of discourse
that is responsible for producing the cultural field of flirtation, is posited as
the missing link for understanding why flirtation may be a peculiar case of
non-habitus, contrary to the received notion of cultural field as set of goaloriented
practices and actionable habituses. This argument is pursued by
highlighting the endemic traits of ambivalence and constant reversibility of
signs or multimodal semiotic constellations in the discourse of seduction,
while seeking to demonstrate that seduction, and by implication the cultural
field of flirtation, does not necessarily partake of a teleological framework
that is geared towards the consummation of sexual desire. This thesis is
illustrated by recourse to a scene from the blockbuster âHitchâ
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