39,397 research outputs found

    Modelling complexity of gender as an agent of change

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    Social inclusion continues to develop as a key issue in responsible design practices. To date, we have witnessed change in the development of inclusivity for the aged, and the physically and mentally challenged, but little more than exploration by certain minorities has been achieved concerning gender diversity and fluidity. A key reason for this is cultural complexity, in terms of differences in social constructs, and conflicts with personal constructs, but there is a perceived need for change, towards more inclusive perceptions and behaviours. The commonly held ‘binary’ model may have appeared to offer society a natural method of controlling complexity, by reducing mental effort involved in social decision-making. However, in terms of innovation, the use of such stereotyping may be seen as acting against originality and individualism, certainly not encouraging of positive change and diversity. The traditions attached to the binary model permeate our language, constraining our perceptions and thinking. To present an alternative perspective, this project developed a more inclusive model of gender to recognize diversity and fluidity, while maintaining a level of simplicity to ensure effective comprehension and application. This paper’s presentation of the ‘Gender Fluidity Cube’, seeks to describe the context for a more inclusive view of gender, sex and sexuality, as three dimensions which enable inclusion of any individual or group within its volume. Through a more indepth study this dimensional model may offer creative opportunities to a number of professions including design, marketing and education, as a stepping-stone ‘population’ model, to inform more effective ‘causal’ models for systems thinking

    Unmasking quality: exploring meanings of health by doing art

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    This paper arises from a presentation at the ‘Quality in Healthcare’ symposium at Cumberland Lodge, England, in 2013. MK, CR and SH conceived the paper and led the writing of the manuscript. JF, JL-D, AC, DE contributed substantially to the intellectual content of the paper through providing critical commentary and interpretation. All authors read and approved the final manuscript

    Literacy teachers as reflexive agents? Enablers and constraints

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    The recasting of education as an economic rather than a social good means that governments around the world will continue to pursue agendas to show that schooling systems are effective in raising standards. Literacy is a key area of comparison on the world stage, placing literacy educators under enormous pressure to perform in this culture of accountability and visibility. We use Archer’s theory of reflexivity and morphogenesis to identify the work of nine literacy teachers and leaders in Australia as both enabling and constraining with personal, structural and cultural emergent properties needing to be constantly negotiated. Our findings show that mediation of these emergent properties occurred in different ways. Mostly teachers acted in ways that accepted ‘the way things are’ rather than mobilising as corporate agents or social actors to enact change. We argue that literacy educators can find ways to harness enablements to reclaim their professional autonomy

    Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) Enhances Groupwise Deliberation

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    Real-time conversational deliberation is a critical groupwise method for reaching decisions, solving problems, evaluating priorities, generating ideas, and producing insights. Unfortunately, real-time conversations are difficult to scale, losing effectiveness as groups grow above 5 to 7 members. Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) is a new technology modeled on the dynamics of biological swarms. It aims to enable networked groups of any size to hold productive real-time deliberations that converge on unified solutions. CSI leverages the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) in a unique and powerful way, allowing real-time dialog among small local groups while simultaneously enabling efficient content propagation across much larger populations. In this way, CSI combines the benefits of small-scale deliberative reasoning and large-scale collective intelligence. In this study, we compare deliberative groups of 48 people using standard online chat to the same sized groups using a prototype chat-based CSI system called Thinkscape. Results show that participants using CSI contributed 51% more content (p<0.001) than those using standard chat, and the deliberations using CSI showed 37% less difference in contribution quantity between the most active vs least active members, indicating more balanced dialog. And finally, a large majority of participants preferred deliberating using the CSI system over standard chat (p<0.05) and re-ported feeling more impactful when doing so (p<0.01). These results suggest that Conversational Swarm Intelligence is a promising technology for enabling large-scale deliberation.Comment: Accepted for publication: 7th International Joint Conference on Advances in Computational Intelligence (IJCACI 2023). Oct 14, 2023. New Delhi, India. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2309.0322

    The emergence of information systems: a communication-based theory

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    An information system is more than just the information technology; it is the system that emerges from the complex interactions and relationships between the information technology and the organization. However, what impact information technology has on an organization and how organizational structures and organizational change influence information technology remains an open question. We propose a theory to explain how communication structures emerge and adapt to environmental changes. We operationalize the interplay of information technology and organization as language communities whose members use and develop domain-specific languages for communication. Our theory is anchored in the philosophy of language. In developing it as an emergent perspective, we argue that information systems are self-organizing and that control of this ability is disseminated throughout the system itself, to the members of the language community. Information technology influences the dynamics of this adaptation process as a fundamental constraint leading to perturbations for the information system. We demonstrate how this view is separated from the entanglement in practice perspective and show that this understanding has far-reaching consequences for developing, managing, and examining information systems

    Weaving a fabric of socially aware agents

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    The expansion of web-enabled social interaction has shed light on social aspects of intelligence that have not been typically studied within the AI paradigm so far. In this context, our aim is to understand what constitutes intelligent social behaviour and to build computational systems that support it. We argue that social intelligence involves socially aware, autonomous individuals that agree on how to accomplish a common endeavour, and then enact such agreements. In particular, we provide a framework with the essential elements for such agreements to be achieved and executed by individuals that meet in an open environment. Such framework sets the foundations to build a computational infrastructure that enables socially aware autonomy.This work has been supported by the projects EVE(TIN2009-14702-C02-01) and AT (CSD2007-0022)Peer Reviewe
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