Ecology - As I See It

Dr. Jane Claire Dirks-Edmunds summarizes her research experiences on Saddleback Mountain in Oregon. Several handwritten corrections are included. Dirks-Edmunds began studying the area in 1933 with her advisor at Linfield College, Dr. James A. Macnab. In 1940, the research site was logged and her study switched from detailing an existing Douglas fir community to tracking its regrowth. Dr. Dirks-Edmunds graduated from Linfield College in 1937; she returned to teach in the Biology department at Linfield from 1941-1974

I see what you mean

The ability to understand and predict others' behavior is essential for successful interactions. When making predictions about what other humans will do, we treat them as intentional systems and adopt the intentional stance, i.e., refer to their mental states such as desires and intentions. In the present experiments, we investigated whether the mere belief that the observed agent is an intentional system influences basic social attention mechanisms. We presented pictures of a human and a robot face in a gaze cuing paradigm and manipulated the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance by instruction: in some conditions, participants were told that they were observing a human or a robot, in others, that they were observing a human-like mannequin or a robot whose eyes were controlled by a human. In conditions in which participants were made to believe they were observing human behavior (intentional stance likely) gaze cuing effects were significantly larger as compared to conditions when adopting the intentional stance was less likely. This effect was independent of whether a human or a robot face was presented. Therefore, we conclude that adopting the intentional stance when observing others' behavior fundamentally influences basic mechanisms of social attention. The present results provide striking evidence that high-level cognitive processes, such as beliefs, modulate bottom-up mechanisms of attentional selection in a top-down manner

"I cannot see my way clear. I cannot see the blackboard": Deconstructing personal failure stories

In this article, a failure identity story of a student counsellor is deconstructed. Self-data on the experiences of her six-year-old self in a school were generated through an outsider witness ceremony, as suggested by White (2007) in Maps of Narrative Practice. The data take the form of a rescued speech poem, as proposed by Speedy (2005). The article reflects on the process of data generation and of using a failure conversation map, as discussed by White (2002) in his paper “Addressing personal failure,” to analyse and deconstruct the failure identity/ies available to the student counsellor. The process of the research, the writing, and the analyses of the failure story contributed to the development of an ethical counselling practice by the student counsellor

Do you see what I mean?

Visualizers, like logicians, have long been concerned with meaning. Generalizing from MacEachren's overview of cartography, visualizers have to think about how people extract meaning from pictures (psychophysics), what people understand from a picture (cognition), how pictures are imbued with meaning (semiotics), and how in some cases that meaning arises within a social and/or cultural context. If we think of the communication acts carried out in the visualization process further levels of meaning are suggested. Visualization begins when someone has data that they wish to explore and interpret; the data are encoded as input to a visualization system, which may in its turn interact with other systems to produce a representation. This is communicated back to the user(s), who have to assess this against their goals and knowledge, possibly leading to further cycles of activity. Each phase of this process involves communication between two parties. For this to succeed, those parties must share a common language with an agreed meaning. We offer the following three steps, in increasing order of formality: terminology (jargon), taxonomy (vocabulary), and ontology. Our argument in this article is that it's time to begin synthesizing the fragments and views into a level 3 model, an ontology of visualization. We also address why this should happen, what is already in place, how such an ontology might be constructed, and why now

I See You, \u27N Double You

When asked to spell his name, Will Wood would willfully respond with Double U - I - Double L, Double U - Double O - D . Imperturbable clerks would, with surprising accuracy, dutifully write down Will Wood. You wonder, however, about the decipherment of, say, a Mr. Ruud\u27s reply. Does his R - Double U - D exist in county records as Ruud or Rwd

TUGS: I feel what you see

This article identifies how navigation aids can assist a wide range of visually impaired individuals, particularly focussing on the currently available GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) linked mobile technology systems. Some of the problems with these systems are identified (audio messaging masking critical ambient sound signals) and describes the design and development of a passive tactile interface, which uses the body as the method of communicating navigational information to the user