5,644,401 research outputs found

    Is online course-taking helping or hindering students with disabilities in U.S. community colleges?

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    Students with disabilities in U.S. community colleges continue to disproportionately experience lower degree attainment compared to students without disabilities. Furthermore, students with disabilities are twice as likely to choose community colleges for postsecondary education compared to four-year colleges. Students with disabilities in postsecondary education endure learning barriers including inflexible instruction, inaccessible content, and intimidating and unsafe learning environments. The purpose of this study is to address the increasing achievement gaps for students with disabilities in community colleges. Specifically, this study intended to answer the question to what extent, if at all, does online course-taking impact degree attainment for students with disabilities in U.S. community colleges? Even though the current study did not find statistically significant results, there was a directionality for the odds of positive degree attainment when students with disabilities participated in online course-taking, specifically for certificate and associate’s degree. Since online course-taking can be a conceivable option to help students with disabilities, the researcher points to previous research for educational policy makers to consider: online learning can provide flexible instruction, accessible content, and a safe learning environment. Recommendations for postsecondary education policies are discussed. Implications of this study has global impact because the number of people with disabilities around the world are increasing. Because disabilities disproportionately impact poor and developing countries, it is proposed that globally responsible organizations consider online learning to be a part of existing inclusive education initiatives such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4. Recommendations for global education policies are discussed

    Creative approaches to emotional expression animation

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    In facial expression research, it is well established that certain emotional expressions are universally recognized. Studies into observer perception of expressions have built upon this research by highlighting the importance of particular facial regions, actions, and movements to the recognition of emotions. In many studies, the stimuli for such studies have been generated through posing by non-experts or performances by trained actors. However, character animators are required to craft recognizable, believable emotional facial expressions as a part of their profession. In this poster, the authors discuss some of the creative processes employed in their research into emotional expressions, and how practice-led research into expression animation might offer a new perspective on the generation of believable emotional expressions

    Music jamming as a participatory design method. A case study with disabled musicians

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    We propose a method that uses music jamming as a tool for the design of musical instruments. Both designers and musicians collaborate in the music making process for the subsequent development of individual “music performer’s profiles” which account for four dimensions: (i) movements and embodiment, (ii) musical preferences, (iii) difficulties, and (iv) capabilities. These profiles converge into proposed prototypes that transform into final designs after experts and performers' examination and feedback. We ground this method in the context of physically disabled musicians, and we show that the method provides a decolonial view to disability, as its purpose moves from the classical view of technology as an aid for allowing disabled communities to access well-established instruments, towards a new paradigm where technologies are used for the augmentation of expressive capabilities, the strengthening of social engagement, and the empowerment of music makers

    Linguistic Expression with Referrence to Semiotic in Ulos of Wedding Ceremony of Batak Toba

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    This study was deal with linguistic expression, in semiotics of ulos in wedding ceremony of batak toba. This research used qualitative method which concerned with developing explanations of experience or on data. The source of the data was taken from the ulos in wedding ceremony of batak toba, and relevant with the transcript of interviewing by three informants with some criterias, that is the most dominant population in three different surename in Tarutung, at the age of 45 to 55 years old and have the recognition from each surename. The instruments that is used in this study was tape recorder, camera, and also the book which relevant to the data. In technique of analyzing data, descriptive qualitative data analysis stage is identifying the ornament, reducing the ornament which are not relevant, classifying, interpreting, analyzing and concluding the findings. There are three kinds of ulos used in wedding ceremony of Batak Toba, they are ulos ragidup, ulos ragihotang, and ulos sadum. Each ulos have topi sokkar which explain that everything in this world have the limit and the color depend to the ceremony that is performed. In ulos ragidup, there are hatir symbolized of wealth, sigumang symbolized the hope of the giver of this ulos for the receiver to works right and efficient also, batu ni ansimun symbolizing the health, sisik ni ikan symbolizing a good life, tidy life, even in a crowded of life, and also jungkit symbolizing in having an organized life well. In ulos ragihotang there are unok-unok, symbolized be a wise person like the humus, and jungkit. In ulos sadum, there is torna where this symbol to remind the people that Batak people come from mountain

    Fictional Instruments, Real Values: Discovering Musical Backgrounds with Non-Functional Prototypes

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    The emergence of a new technology can be considered as the result of social, cultural and technical process. Instrument designs are particularly in uenced by cultural and aesthetic values linked to the speci c contexts and communities that produced them. In previous work, we ran a design ction workshop in which musicians created non-functional instrument mockups. In the current paper, we report on an online survey in which music technologists were asked to speculate on the background of the musicians who designed particular instruments. Our results showed several cues for the interpretation of the artefacts' origins, including physical features, body-instrument interactions, use of language and references to established music practices and tools. Tacit musical and cultural values were also identi- ed based on intuitive and holistic judgments. Our discussion highlights the importance of cultural awareness and context-dependent values on the design and use of interactive musical systems

    Beholden to Our Tools: Negotiating with Technology while Sketching Digital Instruments

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    Digital musical instrument design is often presented as an open-ended creative process in which technology is adopted and adapted to serve the musical will of the designer. The real-time music programming languages powering many new instruments often provide access to audio manipulation at a low level, theoretically allowing the creation of any sonic structure from primitive operations. As a result, designers may assume that these seemingly omnipotent tools are pliable vehicles for the expression of musical ideas. We present the outcomes of a compositional game in which sound designers were invited to create simple instruments using common sensors and the Pure Data programming language. We report on the patterns and structures that often emerged during the exercise, arguing that designers respond strongly to suggestions o ered by the tools they use. We discuss the idea that current music programming languages may be as culturally loaded as the communities of practice that produce and use them. Instrument making is then best viewed as a protracted negotiation between designer and tools

    Mirroring the past, from typewriting to interactive art: an approach to the re-design of a vintage technology

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    Obsolete and old technologies are often used in interactive art and music performance. DIY practices such as hardware hacking and circuit bending provide e ective methods to the integration of old machines into new artistic inventions. This paper presents the Cembalo Scrivano .1, an interactive audio-visual installation based on an augmented typewriter. Borrowing concepts from media archaeology studies, tangi- ble interaction design and digital lutherie, we discuss how investigations into the historical and cultural evolution of a technology can suggest directions for the regeneration of obsolete objects. The design approach outlined focuses on the remediation of an old device and aims to evoke cultural and physical properties associated to the source object

    2D-to-3D facial expression transfer

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    © 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Automatically changing the expression and physical features of a face from an input image is a topic that has been traditionally tackled in a 2D domain. In this paper, we bring this problem to 3D and propose a framework that given an input RGB video of a human face under a neutral expression, initially computes his/her 3D shape and then performs a transfer to a new and potentially non-observed expression. For this purpose, we parameterize the rest shape --obtained from standard factorization approaches over the input video-- using a triangular mesh which is further clustered into larger macro-segments. The expression transfer problem is then posed as a direct mapping between this shape and a source shape, such as the blend shapes of an off-the-shelf 3D dataset of human facial expressions. The mapping is resolved to be geometrically consistent between 3D models by requiring points in specific regions to map on semantic equivalent regions. We validate the approach on several synthetic and real examples of input faces that largely differ from the source shapes, yielding very realistic expression transfers even in cases with topology changes, such as a synthetic video sequence of a single-eyed cyclops.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

    New expression for the functional transformation of the vector Cramér-Rao lower bound

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    Assume that it is desired to estimate α = f(θ), where f(·) is an r-dimensional function. This paper derives the general expression for the functional transformation of the vector Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB). The derived bound is a tight lower bound on the estimation of uncoupled parameters, i.e., parameters that can be estimated separately. Unlike previous results in the literature, this new expression is not dependent on the inverse of the Fisher's information matrix (FIM) of the untransformed parameters, θ. Thus, it can be applied to scenarios where the FIM for θ is ill-conditioned or singular. Finally, as an application, the derived transformation is applied to determine the exact CRLB for estimation of channel parameters in amplify-and-forward relaying networks.This research was supported under Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP110102548)
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