Latin American "free-trade unionism" and the cold War: an analysis based on educational policies

The political education of workers and their leaders was viewed as a strategic concern in the cold war period’s bipolar world. This article discusses how this issue was dealt with by Latin American reformist trade unions grouped together in the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT, for its Spanish acronym), analyzing the educational policies promoted by its Inter-American Institute for Labor Studies (IIES), focusing specifically on its educational program for trade union instructors. We argue that the nature of the education provided changed, shifting from a rationale based on explicit ideological confrontation to a more focalized technical type of training. We claim that this shift started in the early 1960s, when the Alliance for Progress was launched.Fil: Scodeller, Gabriela Noemi. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Ciencias Humanas, Sociales y Ambientales; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentin

Prevalence of haptic feedback in robot-mediated surgery : a systematic review of literature

© 2017 Springer-Verlag. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of Robotic Surgery. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11701-017-0763-4With the successful uptake and inclusion of robotic systems in minimally invasive surgery and with the increasing application of robotic surgery (RS) in numerous surgical specialities worldwide, there is now a need to develop and enhance the technology further. One such improvement is the implementation and amalgamation of haptic feedback technology into RS which will permit the operating surgeon on the console to receive haptic information on the type of tissue being operated on. The main advantage of using this is to allow the operating surgeon to feel and control the amount of force applied to different tissues during surgery thus minimising the risk of tissue damage due to both the direct and indirect effects of excessive tissue force or tension being applied during RS. We performed a two-rater systematic review to identify the latest developments and potential avenues of improving technology in the application and implementation of haptic feedback technology to the operating surgeon on the console during RS. This review provides a summary of technological enhancements in RS, considering different stages of work, from proof of concept to cadaver tissue testing, surgery in animals, and finally real implementation in surgical practice. We identify that at the time of this review, while there is a unanimous agreement regarding need for haptic and tactile feedback, there are no solutions or products available that address this need. There is a scope and need for new developments in haptic augmentation for robot-mediated surgery with the aim of improving patient care and robotic surgical technology further.Peer reviewe

Designing technologies for intimate care in women

PhD ThesisDesigning for intimate care remains an underexplored area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): while technologies for health and wellbeing might be plentiful, technologies for intimate care are limited. Intimate care is associated with personal hygiene, bodily functions and bodily products, and is a lifetime practice that requires well-defined interventions – by the self, or supported by others. With a move to experience, HCI has explored and responded to some of the concepts of intimate care in recent research, by addressing taboo and life disruptions. However, a wider understanding and conceptualization of intimate care work is missing from the broader HCI discourse on health and wellbeing, as well as a distinct framework for negotiating the design of technologies of intimate care. Addressing this space is noteworthy, within a field that designs technologies to support, enhance, and improve human life (Kannabiran et al. 2011). It is possible that this is related to uncertainty regarding the challenges that technology might bring to intimate interactions, particularly the challenges faced in practices that encompass bodywork and proximity to hidden parts of the body, and the impact of troublesome topics upon wellbeing education. The aim of this research is to enquire into the integration of digital technologies and intimate care towards the development of technologies for engagement with intimate care practices in women. I seek to investigate a methodological approach with a focus on the woman to understand the challenges of designing for and with intimate care; explore the qualities of such woman-centered approach in practice. In this thesis I present three case studies that incorporate empirical methods and new designs that I developed throughout this programme of research. These include 1) ethnographic observations of women’s health physiotherapy within a clinic to understand the components of intimate care within a professional setting; 2) a design toolkit that explores e-textiles for teaching female pelvic fitness, delivered through a series of workshops in which discussions that blended humour and laughter made it entertaining and less embarrassing to ask questions and to express curiosity about intimate bodies; 3) Labella, a probe/intimate wearable for self-learning about hidden parts of the female body and a technology which encompasses embodied interaction, that aims to contribute to breaking down the taboo of looking at oneself to help reduce the barrier of selfcare. Furthermore, Labella aims to support knowledge of the other, while exploring perceptions of esteem and reliance towards practices of care within the body. These three case studies begin to explore and offer insights on how designing for intimate care is entwined in woman-centered approaches to design. ! iv! This thesis contributes to interaction design research and outlines a framework for designing technologies for and with intimate care in women. The research highlights how intimate care pervades personal and professional settings, and its significance throughout the lifecourse. Specifically, I contribute to an underexplored area of HCI, women’s health (outside maternal health) by focusing on a woman-centered methodological approach. In doing this, I explore this approach in practice through challenging existing practices of care within women’s health and by offering novel design concepts and devices, in which I explore humour in design as a method to support learning of sensitive topics and as a tool to diminish the taboo nature of the interactions. Lastly, I propose woman-centered design as a novel form of inquiry in design practice research

Impact of an augmented reality system on students' motivation for a visual art course

In this paper, the authors show that augmented reality technology has a positive impact on the motivation of middle-school students. The Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS) (Keller, 2010) based on the ARCS motivation model (Keller, 1987a) was used to gather information; it considers four motivational factors: attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction. Motivational factors of attention and satisfaction in an augmented-reality-based learning environment were better rated than those obtained in a slides-based learning environment. When the impact of the augmented reality system was analyzed in isolation, the attention and confidence factors were the best rated. The usability study showed that although this technology is not mature enough to be used massively in education, enthusiasm of middle-school students diminished most of the barriers found. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.This research has been partially supported by the Spanish national projects Learn3 (grant TIN2008-05163/TSI) and EEE (grant TIN2011-28308-C03-01) and the Madrid regional project eMadrid (grant S2009/TIC-1650).Publicad

Assessment of surgical performance

Surgical patient outcomes are related to technical and non-technical skills of the surgeon. Trauma patient operative and management experience has declined since trainee duty-hour restrictions were mandated in 2003 resulting in less experience in technical surgical skills. The Advanced Surgical Skills for Exposure in Trauma (ASSET) cadaver-based course, teaching vascular exposure and haemorrhage control, was developed to fill this training gap. The aim of this Thesis is to develop surgeon performance metrics and to test surgeons before and after taking the ASSET course to determine whether such training improves performance of peripheral vascular control. The importance of training in surgical vascular control in both civilian and military practice, and a description of current surgical training for trauma are described in Chapter 1. Reviews of existing trauma training courses and surgical performance metrics are provided in Chapters 2 and 3, and show limited testing of training courses and lack of trauma surgical performance metrics. Data collection methods, evaluator training and analysis are described in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 evaluates self-confidence of surgeons performing the vascular control procedures in cadavers compared to the performance evaluated by trained evaluators. Preliminary validation of vascular-control performance metrics and testing of a standardized script with item analysis and inter-rater reliability are discussed in Chapter 6. Testing 40 surgeons performing 3 extremity vascular control procedures before and after training is reported in Chapter 7. ASSET training improves performance, but large performance variability, repeated errors and no improvements were found in some surgeons. Chapter 8 reports how blind video analysis checklist, global rating metrics, error occurrence and recovery show convergent validity with co-located evaluators. Chapter 9 identifies the key findings and implications, innovation of the work described in the Thesis and concludes with the potential impact on military readiness and my personal reflection on what I learnt.  Open Acces

Bodies of Knowledge: An Anatomy and Kinesiology of the American Prison Nation, \u27Human\u27-making, and Twenty-first-century Techno-gods

The social production of hegemonic knowledge has historically been legitimized in relation to the sanctioned status of the ‘Human’.[1] Beginning with the American Prison Industrial Complex and what sociologist Beth E. Richie conceptualizes as the “prison nation,” I will show the ‘human’ as a contingent and composite status appearing along a spectrum of Flesh, Body, and ‘Human’ (Flesh-Body-‘Human’) statuses and subjectivity. Bringing this ‘Human’ continuum into conversation with twenty-first-century media, (micro)computational technologies, and contemporary knowledge and social economies, I expand the notion, reach, and scale of the American “prison nation.” Following Mark Hansen’s treatment of twenty-first-century digital media, I posit that the contemporary, technologically mediated and “datafied” prison nation,[2] like digital media, performs a further displacement of the ‘Human’ as “the privileged arbiter of experience.”[3] This displacement has various effects which I explore in terms of what I call a techno-apotheosis in the advent of techno-gods. I propose that subjectivity is affected and should be rethought in terms of networked assemblages of subject positions and thing positions, or ‘human’ selves and thing selves.[4] With this, a technologically mediated and transnationally competitive economy of the ‘Human’ emerges. (Re)produced as it is circulated through social institutions of neoliberal, law-and-order governance, this globalizing ‘Human’ economy situates each social entity—human and other-than-human, organic and inorganic, material and immaterial—within relational, networked, epistemological and ontological continua operational as the twenty-first-century “datafied” “prison nation.” [1] Throughout, I am deploying Brian Massumi’s conceptualization of the “social” as an articulation of the cofunctioning of the cultural, political and economic, and which, following Gilles Deleuze among others, includes human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, material and immaterial entities and processes as efficacious actants within these enmeshed spheres. [2] For Patricia Ticineto Clough and Mark Hansen “datafication” refers to the full digital landscape of data analysis and computation the scale and capacity of which is unprecedented. This digital landscape includes ‘big-data’, data mining, tracking, surveillance, capture, and affect-based ‘predictive’, anticipatory, biometric, and environmental measure and modulation at unprecedented scales of molecular and molar ‘visibility’ and ‘sense-ability’. [3] See Mark Hansen’s work, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (Hansen 50-52). [4] For a rich engagement with thingness see Patricia Ticineto Clough’s forthcoming Introduction to The User Unconscious, which picks up and expands Sue Grand’s work on trauma and split subjectivity in “Unsexed and Ungendered Bodies: The Violated Self,” 2003