Evaluating Hidden Costs of Technological Change: Scaffolding, Agency, and Entrenchment

This paper explores the process by which new technologies supplant or constrain cultural scaffolding processes and the consequences thereof. As elaborated by Wimsatt and Griesemer, cultural scaffolds support the acquisition of new capabilities by individuals or organizations. When technologies displace scaffolds, those who previously acquired capabilities from them come to rely upon the new technologies to complete tasks they could once accomplish on their own. Therefore, the would-be beneficiaries of those scaffolds are deprived of the agency to exercise the capabilities the scaffolds supported. Evaluating how technologies displace cultural scaffolds can ground philosophical assessments of the cultural value of technologies

An analysis of the efficacy of extinction as an intervention in the modification of switching in patients with dissociation identity diorder

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Invariant Structural Features of Retrograde Amnesia Affected Memory

Traumatized individuals may use one or several emotional defensive strategies to cope with their experience; one method is via autobiographical amnesia which may influence the efficacy of amnesiac patients’ psychological adjustment during a sensitive period. Little research has addressed the potential of how emotionally invariant structural features may impact the reconsolidation of autobiographical memory, which in turn may support patients to complete successfully psychotherapeutic treatment or intervention. This phenomenological study addressed how lived experiences (i.e., invariant emotional and behavioral conscious states) may play into patients’ transformational memory of some or all of the traumatizing event details. To answer these questions, this study implemented a qualitative phenomenological design formatted around researcher-generated interview protocols and used memory reconsolidation theory, multiple trace theory, and transactional theory of stress and coping to provide context to this study’s findings. A nationwide call for study participants produced a random selection of 15 eligible clinician or patient participants. The Modified Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen phenomenological analysis method was used. The study essence statement revealed three themes combining emotion and cognitive processes, and behaviors prior to trauma memory recall. Not all of the clinician participants became immediately aware of the patient’s recall during treatment. Positive social change implications may include reducted therapeutic duration, accurate and expedient identification of the return of patients’ autobiographical memories, and lowered risk of sudden or unexpected patient psychological or emotional trauma realization

Crash recovery with partial amnesia failure model issues

Replicated systems are a kind of distributed systems whose main goal is to ensure that computer systems are highly available, fault tolerant and provide high performance. One of the last trends in replication techniques managed by replication protocols, make use of Group Communication Sys- tem, and more specifically of the communication primitive atomic broadcast for developing more eficient replication protocols. An important aspect in these systems consists in how they manage the disconnection of nodes {which degrades their service{ and the connec- tion/reconnection of nodes for maintaining their original support. This task is delegated in replicated systems to recovery protocols. How it works de- pends specially on the failure model adopted. A model commonly used for systems managing large state is the crash-recovery with partial amnesia be- cause it implies short recovery periods. But, assuming it implies arising several problems. Most of them have been already solved in the literature: view management, abort of local transactions started in crashed nodes { when referring to transactional environments{ or for example the reinclu- sion of new nodes to the replicated system. Anyway, there is one problem related to the assumption of this second failure model that has not been completely considered: the amnesia phenomenon. Phenomenon that can lead to inconsistencies if it is not correctly managed. This work presents this inconsistency problem due to the amnesia and formalizes it, de ning the properties that must be ful lled for avoiding it and de ning possible solutions. Besides, it also presents and formalizes an inconsistency problem {due to the amnesia{ which appears under a speci c sequence of events allowed by the majority partition progress condition that will imply to stop the system, proposing the properties for overcoming it and proposing di erent solutions. As a consequence it proposes a new majority partition progress condition. In the sequel there is deDe Juan Marín, R. (2008). Crash recovery with partial amnesia failure model issues [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/3302Palanci

Tales of here and later coded forms of queer counter-visuality

This text and project in its explorations, failures, inquiries and anxiety seeks to feel, touch and animate a working queer space of counter visuality and its sites of resistance against dominant practices of historical visualization. Through a nuanced practice of coding, in bodily performance, language and associations of space and time, queerness has managed to avoid specific associations to historical periods while creating some of the most influential cultural manifestations that have consistantly resisted power structures and the contemporary economies of the image. This paper will explore in detail how we visualize a lived experience – queerness – while further coding it to counter dominant forms of visual language that have a great deal to gain from the monetizing of such an identity. The text while grappling with these structures of language and form will furthernavigate the ambivalence of queer desire, the often unspoken violence in intimacy, and the way outing visibility can be as destructive as it can be productive. These nuanced and often highly personal experiences will take form through a process of cutting, hiding and revealing, using a shifting coded visual language that will haunt the text. This is a refusal of a linear reading as the only productive means of engagement in understanding in full the relationship between each coded layer, between queerness and our bodies, spatial communities and time. These are tales, haunted stories, of a place where body, history and time blend into one another. You will come to know these ghost that haunt as the three sisters, each with a tale of here and later.XL201

Hollow Men: Colonial Forms, Irish Subjects, and the Great Famine in Modernist Literature, 1890-1930

This dissertation traces the impact and influence of Ireland\u27s Great Famine (145-1852) on the formal developments of Irish and British modernism. The Famine is arguably the founding event for colonial Ireland\u27s entry into modernity. This forceful event and forced legacy allows us to rethink modernism\u27s developmental trajectory; rather than a movement deriving out of metropolitan experimentation, I argue for modernism\u27s colonial roots. Colonial events like the Famine or what I term colonial atrocities are marked by mass death and cultural degradation, and further facilitated by the technological, ideological, and exploitative practices deriving from modernity. Representative practices that arise in response to atrocity---like stream of consciousness, fragmentation, large and elusive allusions---precede and develop ahead of the later consolidation of these practices as modernism .;At its most ambitious, this dissertation\u27s philosophical, postcolonial, and formal emphases allow us to rethink the ontological notions of modernity and postcolonial theory while also recasting the relations between colonialism and modernism as generative rather than antagonistic. For writers composing in the aftermath of colonial atrocities, a viable anti-colonial and resistant narrative can be fashioned once the atrocity as pitfall of despair and victimization is seen in another light. My conception of atrocity becomes a mode of analysis that fits Alain Badiou\u27s philosophy of the event. The Famine, then, is the event that generates truth and revolutionary subjects capable of shifting atrocity\u27s legacies from victimization and dehumanization to an egalitarian force opposed to colonial hegemony. On a textual level, I see these revisionary Famine legacies played out in the formal practices of Bram Stoker\u27s Dracula, Rudyard Kipling\u27s Kim, and James Joyce\u27s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

Transcriptomics of learning

Learning is a basic and important component of behavior yet we have very little empirical information about the interaction between mechanisms of learning and evolution. In our work, we are testing hypotheses about the neurogenetic mechanisms through which animal learning abilities evolve. We are able to test this directly by using experimentally evolved populations of flies, which differ in learning ability. These populations were previously evolved within the lab by creating worlds with different patterns of change following theoretically predicted effects on which enhanced learning will evolve. How has evolution acted to modulate genes and gene expression in the brain to accomplish the behavioral differences observed in these populations? We report results from work characterizing the differences in gene expression in the brains of populations of Drosophila that evolved in environments favoring learning from paired populations evolving under control conditions. Using olfactory conditioning in the t-maze, we first show that flies which evolved enhanced learning in an oviposition context also have a generalized enhanced learning ability. We dissected brains from flies following experience learning in the tmaze and analyzed pooled samples using RNAseq. We completed a factorial design of comparing the brains of flies from high learning populations with control populations and in each of two conditions: after conditioning and without conditioning. Following differential gene expression analysis, we found differences within known suites of genes as well as novel transcripts. We have also found evidence of predicted trade-offs between immune response and cognitive capacity. We present these data, as well as results from gene ontology analyses. Combining predictions from behavioral ecology with experimental evolution is a powerful approach to assessing the suites of genetic and neurological changes associated with the evolution of complex behavioral traits, like learning. By analyzing the genomic mechanisms of what has evolved under experimental conditions, we can make a great step forward in understanding the evolution of learning and of plasticity in general

Working memory : is it associated with socioeconomic status?

It is well known that crystallized measures of intelligence are highly susceptible to educational, resource, language and socio-economic influences, and that the implications of using these kinds of measures are manifold affecting school and university entrance as well as employment opportunities. In South Africa, wherein tests are regarded with suspicion as a consequence of test misuse during the Apartheid era, there is an urgent need for the development of measures which are resilient to these influences. In answer to this, working memory measures have been identified as possible measures which minimize these biases. Consequently the following study investigated whether working memory tests were less susceptible to socioeconomic influences than the more traditional, crystallized measures of vocabulary and non-verbal IQ in a volunteer sample of 60 grade one learners from schools identified as high and low in socioeconomic status. The results demonstrated that working memory measures were consistently less affected by socio-economic status as compared to the traditional vocabulary and non-verbal IQ measures. However, socioeconomic status and language were found to be so closely correlated that it is not clear whether test performance in the vocabulary measures, was related one or both of these variables. In light of the fact that this study was correlational in nature, it is recommended that future studies focus on limiting the impact of extraneous variables to better understand the impact of socioeconomic status on test performance. Furthermore future studies should test children in their home language to avoid language contamination effects

Archaeology of the Moving Image (Volume 1, Summer 2022)

A compilation of postgraduate student research projects written between 2017 and 2021 for a module titled Archaeology of the Moving Image in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Archaeology of the Moving Image is a course that encourages students to undertake independent investigations of the relationship between the past, present and future of moving image culture