713 research outputs found

    Effects of municipal smoke-free ordinances on secondhand smoke exposure in the Republic of Korea

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    ObjectiveTo reduce premature deaths due to secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure among non-smokers, the Republic of Korea (ROK) adopted changes to the National Health Promotion Act, which allowed local governments to enact municipal ordinances to strengthen their authority to designate smoke-free areas and levy penalty fines. In this study, we examined national trends in SHS exposure after the introduction of these municipal ordinances at the city level in 2010.MethodsWe used interrupted time series analysis to assess whether the trends of SHS exposure in the workplace and at home, and the primary cigarette smoking rate changed following the policy adjustment in the national legislation in ROK. Population-standardized data for selected variables were retrieved from a nationally representative survey dataset and used to study the policy action’s effectiveness.ResultsFollowing the change in the legislation, SHS exposure in the workplace reversed course from an increasing (18% per year) trend prior to the introduction of these smoke-free ordinances to a decreasing (−10% per year) trend after adoption and enforcement of these laws (ÎČ2 = 0.18, p-value = 0.07; ÎČ3 = −0.10, p-value = 0.02). SHS exposure at home (ÎČ2 = 0.10, p-value = 0.09; ÎČ3 = −0.03, p-value = 0.14) and the primary cigarette smoking rate (ÎČ2 = 0.03, p-value = 0.10; ÎČ3 = 0.008, p-value = 0.15) showed no significant changes in the sampled period. Although analyses stratified by sex showed that the allowance of municipal ordinances resulted in reduced SHS exposure in the workplace for both males and females, they did not affect the primary cigarette smoking rate as much, especially among females.ConclusionStrengthening the role of local governments by giving them the authority to enact and enforce penalties on SHS exposure violation helped ROK to reduce SHS exposure in the workplace. However, smoking behaviors and related activities seemed to shift to less restrictive areas such as on the streets and in apartment hallways, negating some of the effects due to these ordinances. Future studies should investigate how smoke-free policies beyond public places can further reduce the SHS exposure in ROK

    AI: Limits and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence

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    The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and social problems, and present some existing and potential solutions. At the same time, the contributors highlight the societal and attending economic hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias that are associated with the current and future development of artificial intelligence

    Tracing the Creative Influence of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Psychology Notes’: The ‘Three Novels’ and Krapp’s Last Tape

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    Sammendrag Avhandlingens hovedargument er at notatkorpuset om psykologiske og spesielt psykoanalytiske emner som Samuel Beckett utarbeidet i 1934-1935 mens han var i terapi hos Wilfred Bion representerer en sentral og vedvarende innflytelse pĂ„ hans litterĂŠre verk. Den umiddelbare anvendelsen av disse psykologinotatene i arbeidet med romanen Murphy er velkjent, men avhandlingen gjennomgĂ„r denne opprinnelige kreative bruken pĂ„ nytt for Ă„ vise hvordan Beckett etablerer en form for parodisk overdrevet bruk av det lĂŠrebokaktige sprĂ„ket i mange av kildene som han hentet sine notater fra. Dette indikerer en kritisk avstandstagen fra psykoanalysen som disiplin, som ogsĂ„ fĂžrte til en plutselig avslutning av det terapeutiske forholdet til Bion in 1935. De to fĂžrste kapitlene i avhandlingen diskuterer konteksten for komposisjonen av psykologinotatene og diskuterer en rekke kreativt sentrale tematikker for Beckett. En ledetrĂ„d for diskusjonen er at Becketts tilnĂŠrming til det psykoanalytiske lĂŠreboksprĂ„ket fungerte bĂ„de tiltrekkende og motstandsgivende for ham som forfatter. PĂ„ den ene siden finner vi bĂ„de i Becketts tekster og i psykoanalysen en fascinasjon for det avskyvekkende, mens pĂ„ den annen side kan vi spore hos Beckett en bevisst motstand mot psykoanalysens forpliktelse til Ă„ sĂžke mot helbredelse, kontroll og meningsfullhet. Becketts tekster iscenesetter en avvisning av det psykoanalytiske sprĂ„ket som et feilslĂ„tt medium for Ă„ skrive om selvet, gjennom sin ironiske undergraving av psykoanalysens kognitive, autoritetsbaserte og terapeutiske utgangspunkt. Implikasjonene av dette utvikles i avhandlingen gjennom en nĂŠrlesing av romanene Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’Innommable/The Unnamable, og det korte teaterstykket Krapp’s Last Tape. I denne lesningen behandles Becketts psykologinotater som genetisk kildemateriale som fortsatt ble anvendt kreativt lenge etter de opprinnelig ble komponert. Avhandlingen tar utgangspunkt i en mest mulig empirisk etterprĂžvbar og manuskriptgenetisk tilnĂŠrming til kildene, med utstrakt bruk av Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project og andre arkivressurser som stĂžtte for sin argumentasjon. Men et pragmatisk forhold til behandlingen av tekstlig innflytelse som gĂ„r utover det som kan fĂžres sikre bevis for er ogsĂ„ nĂždvendig, for en viss grad av usikkerhet er umulig Ă„ unngĂ„. Likevel fastslĂ„r avhandlingen at en nylesning av disse verkene av Beckett med utgangspunkt i hans egne psykologinotater kan bĂ„de utvide og korrigere fokuset i den eksisterende faglitteraturen. Videre har det kritiske fokuset og opptreningen som denne avhandlingen presenterer ogsĂ„ et potensiale til Ă„ kunne generere en ny litteraturkritisk tilnĂŠrming til alle verkene i Becketts karriere som ble skrevet etter psykologinotatene.Abstract This study argues that the corpus of notes on psychological and especially psychoanalytic topics composed by Samuel Beckett in 1934-1935 during his therapy with Wilfred Bion represents a crucial and continuous creative influence on his literary work. While the immediate use of the ‘Psychology Notes’ in the writing of Murphy is well established, it is revisited here to suggest that this initial creative deployment is characterized by a parodic over-indulgence in the ‘textbook’ language of the sources Beckett was drawing on. This indicates a critical distancing from the discipline of psychoanalysis that also manifested itself in a sudden disruption of his therapy with Wilfred Bion in 1935. Drawing on the original context of the composition of the Notes, and developing a taxonomy of creatively important themes for Beckett, the first two chapters of the thesis trace a formative attraction-repulsion ambivalence in Beckett’s approach to the use of psychoanalytic textbook language in his writing. On the one hand, there is a shared obsession with ‘abjection’ between Beckett’s texts and the discipline of psychoanalysis, whereas on the other, the commitment to cure, control and meaning in psychoanalysis is being resisted in Beckett’s texts. Beckett’s later texts stage the rejection and failure of the psychoanalytic language as medium of writing the ‘self’ by ironically subverting its cognitive, authoritative and therapeutic purposes. This argument is developed through detailed close readings of the ‘Three Novels’ (Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’Innommable/The Unnamable) and the short play Krapp’s Last Tape, treating the ‘Psychology Notes’ as genetic source material that continued to be actively deployed long after its initial composition and creative impact. While the thesis is based on an empirical, genetic approach, making extensive use of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and other archival sources, its approach is also pragmatic in its approach to influence, recognizing that conclusive evidence of intertextual relationships is not always possible to establish. Nonetheless, re-reading these Beckett works with the Notes to hand can both expand upon and correct the emphases of previous scholarship on these texts. Ultimately, the critical focus and training provided by this thesis is therefore intended to provide a scholarly tool for re-engaging all of Beckett’s post-Notes work.Doktorgradsavhandlin

    The mad manifesto

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    The “mad manifesto” project is a multidisciplinary mediated investigation into the circumstances by which mad (mentally ill, neurodivergent) or disabled (disclosed, undisclosed) students faced far more precarious circumstances with inadequate support models while attending North American universities during the pandemic teaching era (2020-2023). Using a combination of “emergency remote teaching” archival materials such as national student datasets, universal design for learning (UDL) training models, digital classroom teaching experiments, university budgetary releases, educational technology coursewares, and lived experience expertise, this dissertation carefully retells the story of “accessibility” as it transpired in disabling classroom containers trapped within intentionally underprepared crisis superstructures. Using rhetorical models derived from critical disability studies, mad studies, social work practice, and health humanities, it then suggests radically collaborative UDL teaching practices that may better pre-empt the dynamic needs of dis/abled students whose needs remain direly underserviced. The manifesto leaves the reader with discrete calls to action that foster more critical performances of intersectionally inclusive UDL classrooms for North American mad students, which it calls “mad-positive” facilitation techniques: 1. Seek to untie the bond that regards the digital divide and access as synonyms. 2. UDL practice requires an environment shift that prioritizes change potential. 3. Advocate against the usage of UDL as a for-all keystone of accessibility. 4. Refuse or reduce the use of technologies whose primary mandate is dataveillance. 5. Remind students and allies that university space is a non-neutral affective container. 6. Operationalize the tracking of student suicides on your home campus. 7. Seek out physical & affectual ways that your campus is harming social capital potential. 8. Revise policies and practices that are ability-adjacent imaginings of access. 9. Eliminate sanist and neuroscientific languaging from how you speak about students. 10. Vigilantly interrogate how “normal” and “belong” are socially constructed. 11. Treat lived experience expertise as a gift, not a resource to mine and to spend. 12. Create non-psychiatric routes of receiving accommodation requests in your classroom. 13. Seek out uncomfortable stories of mad exclusion and consider carceral logic’s role in it. 14. Center madness in inclusive methodologies designed to explicitly resist carceral logics. 15. Create counteraffectual classrooms that anticipate and interrupt kairotic spatial power. 16. Strive to refuse comfort and immediate intelligibility as mandatory classroom presences. 17. Create pathways that empower cozy space understandings of classroom practice. 18. Vector students wherever possible as dynamic ability constellations in assessment

    Rethinking Film Festivals in the Pandemic Era and After

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    ‘Rethinking Film Festivals’ explores how COVID-19 intervened in the film festival circuit by disrupting regular industry cycles and allowing new ways of reaching audiences to flourish. Films found other distribution channels, often online, while the festival format proved particularly vulnerable in a one-half-meter society. The search for a full-fledged substitute for live events and shared experiences involved all kinds of experimentation and an acceleration of digital developments that were already underway. The book documents how different festivals in different local contexts were affected differently by the pandemic and reacted differently to it as well. At the same time, the case studies confirm the interconnectedness and transnational relationships inherent in globalised media systems. Finally, the book seizes the momentum of the crisis to make the case for sustainable interventions: festivals must address their ecological footprint, decolonise their organisations, and ensure that their history and heritage is safeguarded for the future

    Evaluating Copyright Protection in the Data-Driven Era: Centering on Motion Picture\u27s Past and Future

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    Since the 1910s, Hollywood has measured audience preferences with rough industry-created methods. In the 1940s, scientific audience research led by George Gallup started to conduct film audience surveys with traditional statistical and psychological methods. However, the quantity, quality, and speed were limited. Things dramatically changed in the internet age. The prevalence of digital data increases the instantaneousness, convenience, width, and depth of collecting audience and content data. Advanced data and AI technologies have also allowed machines to provide filmmakers with ideas or even make human-like expressions. This brings new copyright challenges in the data-driven era. Massive amounts of text and data are the premise of text and data mining (TDM), as well as the admission ticket to access machine learning technologies. Given the high and uncertain copyright violation risks in the data-driven creation process, whoever controls the copyrighted film materials can monopolize the data and AI technologies to create motion pictures in the data-driven era. Considering that copyright shall not be the gatekeeper to new technological uses that do not impair the original uses of copyrighted works in the existing markets, this study proposes to create a TDM and model training limitations or exceptions to copyrights and recommends the Singapore legislative model. Motion pictures, as public entertainment media, have inherently limited creative choices. Identifying data-driven works’ human original expression components is also challenging. This study proposes establishing a voluntarily negotiated license institution backed up by a compulsory license to enable other filmmakers to reuse film materials in new motion pictures. The film material’s degree of human original authorship certified by film artists’ guilds shall be a crucial factor in deciding the compulsory license’s royalty rate and terms to encourage retaining human artists. This study argues that international and domestic policymakers should enjoy broad discretion to qualify data-driven work’s copyright protection because data-driven work is a new category of work. It would be too late to wait until ubiquitous data-driven works block human creative freedom and floods of data-driven work copyright litigations overwhelm the judicial systems

    The Black Panther's Aesthetics: An Exploration of the Importance of Visual Elements as Part of an Afrofuturistic Multimedia Narrative

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    This thesis aims to explore the ways in which visual elements of the 2018 Marvel film Black Panther affects its narrative, and how it reinforces the themes regarding identity, heritage, and Afrofuturism. By putting an emphasis on its aesthetics within the context of important aspects of the current political and cultural climate, this paper encourages a reconsideration of the power superhero narratives can have, and its capability to unite and educate. It is particularly interesting to investigate how an Afrofuturistic work like this can inspire change in the real world, and how we see ourselves in the film’s characters

    You Don't Want to Know: The Fear of Adventure in Reading and Writing, Teaching and Learning

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    Building on the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond and Toril Moi mobilize the concept of adventure to bring into view a collection of reading and writing practices that fall short of their own possibility—for example, through a lapse of attention, or imagination, or love, or courage, or openness, or conviction. Missing the adventure of a text involves shielding ourselves from the risk involved in allowing it to work on, or to educate, our experience in unexpected and unpredictable ways. The result is a devaluing of our connection to both literature and philosophy, one in which the capacity of texts to transform is reduced to the capacity to teach us only what we already want to know. This dissertation project articulates how the concept of adventure may be extended from practices of reading and writing to acts of teaching and learning. I begin by showing how adventurous forms of teaching and learning are radically at odds with the modern understanding of education as a “fence against the world” (Locke), in which the accumulation of scientific knowledge is viewed as a primary form of protection against the surprises of nature. I then suggest that our tendency to miss the adventure of literary and philosophical texts is rooted in our fear of participating in pedagogical relationships that operate outside the logic of the master–novice opposition. Through close readings of Wolfgang Köhler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques RanciĂšre, and J. M. Coetzee, I argue that reimagining dominant pictures of teaching and learning can enable a more adventurous understanding of many everyday concepts at stake in modern philosophy and literature, including translation, imagination, experience, and description
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