1,115,996 research outputs found

    Can Computers Create Art?

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    This essay discusses whether computers, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), could create art. First, the history of technologies that automated aspects of art is surveyed, including photography and animation. In each case, there were initial fears and denial of the technology, followed by a blossoming of new creative and professional opportunities for artists. The current hype and reality of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for art making is then discussed, together with predictions about how AI tools will be used. It is then speculated about whether it could ever happen that AI systems could be credited with authorship of artwork. It is theorized that art is something created by social agents, and so computers cannot be credited with authorship of art in our current understanding. A few ways that this could change are also hypothesized.Comment: to appear in Arts, special issue on Machine as Artist (21st Century

    The effect of new technologies on civic participation models

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    The development of new technologies will enable decentralization and freedom of communication for large numbers of people, by overcoming the barriers that once rendered direct participation of society unfeasible. The continued development of information and communication technologies (ICT) makes it possible for people to participate in political life. Today, the use of e-tools is becoming a way of adapting democracy to the needs of contemporary states and strengthening civil society. The aim of this paper is to answer questions about the essence of ICT and forms of civic engagement through electronic forms of participation. The author seeks answers to the following questions: How does ICT influence political processes? How do electronic communication systems create the conditions for the political engagement of citizens? Can the use of information technologies have a real impact on participation

    The Internet and Civic Engagement

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    Based on a survey, analyzes how socioeconomic status and other demographics correlate with online and offline political and civic engagement. Explores suggestions that younger generations' political use of social media may alter such patterns

    Regulating Shadows: Financial Regulation and Responsibility Failure

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    In the modern financial architecture, financial services and products increasingly are provided outside of the traditional banking system—and thus without the need for bank intermediation between capital markets and the users of funds. Most corporate financing, for example, no longer is dependent on bank loans but raised through special-purpose entities, money-market mutual funds, securities lenders, hedge funds, and investment banks. This shift, referred to as “disintermediation” and described as creating a “shadow banking” system, is so radically transforming finance that regulatory scholars need to rethink their assumptions. Two of the fundamental market failures underlying shadow banking—information failure and agency failure—were also prevalent in the bank-intermediated financial system. By amplifying systemic risk, however, disintermediation greatly increases the importance of what scholars long have viewed as a third market-failure category: externalities. Viewing externalities as a distinct category of market failure is misleading, though: externalities are fundamentally consequences, not causes, of failures; and all market failures can result in externalities. Focusing on externalities also obscures who should be responsible for causing the externalities. This article argues that the third market-failure category should be reconceptualized as a “responsibility failure”: a firm’s ability to externalize a significant portion of the costs of taking a risky action. That not only would more precisely describe the market failure but also would help to illuminate that sometimes the government itself, not merely individual firms, should bear responsibility for causing externalities, and that exercising this responsibility may require the government to enact laws that require firms to internalize those costs

    Testing of disability identification tool for schools

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    There has been an ongoing concern about the lack of reliable data on disabled children in schools. To date there has been no consistent way of identifying and categorising disabilities. Schools in England are currentlyrequired to collect data on children with Special Educational Need (SEN), but this does not capture information about all disabled children. The lack of this information may seriously restrict capacity at all levels of policy and practice to understand and respond to the needs of disabled children and their families in line with Disability Discrimination Act (2005) and the single Equality Act (2010). The aim of the project was to test the draft tools for identifying disability and accompanying guidance in a sample of all types of maintained schools in order to assess their usability and reliability and whether they resulted in the generation of robust and consistent data that could reliably inform school returns for the annual School Census

    The maker not the tool: The cognitive significance of great ape manual skills

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    Tool-use by chimpanzees has attracted disproportionate attention among primatologists, because of an understandable wish to understand the evolutionary origins of hominin tool use. In archaeology and paleoanthropology, a focus on made-objects is inevitable: there is nothing else to study. However, it is evidently object-directed manual skills, enabling the objects to be made, that are critical in understanding the evolutionary origins of stone-tool manufacture. In this chapter I review object-directed manual skills in living great apes, making comparison where possible with hominin abilities that can be inferred from the archaeological record. To this end, ‘translations’ of terminology between the research traditions are offered. Much of the evidence comes from observation of apes gathering plants that present physical problems for handling and consumption, in addition to the more patchy data from tool use in captivity and the field. The living great apes, like ourselves, build up novel hierarchical structures involving regular sequences of elementary actions, showing co-ordinated manual role differentiation, in modular organizations with the option of iterating subroutines. Further, great apes appear able to use imitation of skilled practitioners as one source of information for this process, implying some ability to ‘see’ below the surface level of action and understand the motor planning of other individual; however, that process does not necessarily involve understanding cause-and-effect or the intentions of other individuals. Finally I consider whether a living non-human ape could effectively knap stone, and if not, what competence is lacking.Postprin

    Translation and human-computer interaction

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    This paper seeks to characterise translation as a form of human-computer interaction. The evolution of translator-computer interaction is explored and the challenges and benefits are enunciated. The concept of cognitive ergonomics is drawn on to argue for a more caring and inclusive approach towards the translator by developers of translation technology. A case is also made for wider acceptance by the translation community of the benefits of the technology at their disposal and for more humanistic research on the impact of technology on the translator, the translation profession and the translation process

    Employing culturally responsive pedagogy to foster literacy learning in schools

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     In recent years it has become increasingly obvious that, to enable students in schools from an increasingly diverse range of cultural backgrounds to acquire literacy to a standard that will support them to achieve academically, it is important to adopt pedagogy that is responsive to, and respectful of, them as culturally situated. What largely has been omitted from the literature, however, is discussion of a relevant model of learning to underpin this approach. For this reason this paper adopts a socio-cultural lens (Vygotsky, 1978) through which to view such pedagogy and refers to a number of seminal texts to justify of its relevance. Use of this lens is seen as having a particular rationale. It forces a focus on the agency of the teacher as a mediator of learning who needs to acknowledge the learner’s cultural situatedness (Kozulin, 2003) if school literacy learning for all students is to be as successful as it might be. It also focuses attention on the predominant value systems and social practices that characterize the school settings in which students’ literacy learning is acquired. The paper discusses implications for policy and practice at whole-school, classroom and individual student levels of culturally-responsive pedagogy that is based on a socio-cultural model of learning. In doing so it draws on illustrations from the work of a number of researchers, including that of the author
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