68,851 research outputs found
Improving Quality of Life with a Narrative Robot Companion: II - Creating Group Cohesion via Shared Narrative Experience
One of the most difficult things for social robots is to enter the realm of human social relations. Here, we exploit recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) that provide robots access to human experience, which can allow them to enter into human social relations. When people are put together in arbitrary conditions, as in a home for the elderly, it can be difficult for them to share experience. To address this, we use recent advances in NLP to allow the robot to discover shared narratives between such group members. Our narrative companion extends the human capability to make social narrative links for building group coherence through sharing experience.Requirements are identified for a narrative companion to allow individuals within a group to focus their interactions on shared experiences and interests, to improve group coherence. The system should collect and organize members' experiences, and should discover semantic similarity between different members' experiences in order to create a group narrative. It should then accompany the group in their cohesion-enhancing experience of this narrative. Based on these requirements, and extending our previous work, we implement the V2.0 narrative companion on the Pepper robot.The system is validated in a case study where participants provide 5 favorite photographs and short answers to questions. The Narrative Semantic Similarity Analysis System (NarSim) generates a meaningful trajectory of narrative linking people and events depicted in the photographs. With this, Pepper then accompanies the group and prompts group members to enrich the shared narrative, to further enhance the group pleasure and cohesion. Results are presented, and future applications for improved quality of life are discussed.T. Uchida, H. Ishiguro and P. F. Dominey, "Improving Quality of Life with a Narrative Robot Companion: II â Creating Group Cohesion via Shared Narrative Experience*," 2020 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), Naples, Italy, 2020, pp. 906-913, doi: 10.1109/RO-MAN47096.2020.9223600.The 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication [31 AUG - 04 SEPT, 2020
Time, tide and narrative: adapting chronology in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
This paper is concerned with the 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and with the book â or more accurately â books from which it is adapted. The filmâs source material comes from novelist Patrick OâBrian who, between 1969 and his death in 2000, wrote 20 completed novels, plus one unfinished work. While no single text manifests a glaring temporal anomaly, taken as a whole it is apparent that numerous factors including the age of characters, aspects of their backstory, and especially the cumulative duration of several epic sea journeys do not cohere. It is not the object of this paper to treat this distortion as a failure. Rather, it is to focus on how the single screen adaptation engages with this aspect of its literary predecessors
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Currents of Progress, Toy Store for Tourists: Nineteenth-Century Mexican Liberals View the Niagara Falls
The essay addresses the depiction of the Niagara Falls as an ambivalent symbol of progress in nineteenth-century Mexican travel accounts of the United States. At that time, various Mexican intellectuals spent some time in the USA. In diaries and travelogues, some of them articulated their views of their host country but also reflected on their own society through the contrast with their northern neighbor. The Mexican visitors expressed a particular fascination with signs of modernity in the United States. Interestingly, such signifiers included not only political and social institutions and economic and industrial advancements, but also the Niagara Falls as a site of both natural and technological wonders. Examining the depiction of the Falls in major nineteenth-century Mexican travelogues of the United States, the essay illuminates some of the metaphorical âuses of natureâ for articulating socio-political ideas as well as experiences of mobility
Problematising upstream technology through speculative design: the case of quantified cats and dogs
There is growing interest in technology that quantifies aspects of our lives. This paper draws on critical practice and speculative design to explore, question and problematise the ultimate consequences of such technology using the quantification of companion animals (pets) as a case study. We apply the concept of âmoving upstreamâ to study such technology and use a qualitative research approach in which both pet owners, and animal behavioural experts, were presented with, and asked to discuss, speculative designs for pet quantification applications, the design of which were extrapolated from contemporary trends. Our findings indicate a strong desire among pet owners for technology that has little scientific justification, whilst our experts caution that the use of technology to augment human-animal communication has the potential to disimprove animal welfare, undermine human-animal bonds, and create human-human conflicts. Our discussion informs wider debates regarding quantification technology
Religion, Psychology and Globalisation Process: Attitudinal Appraisal
A key consequence of globalisation is the integrative approach to reality whereby emphasis is placed on interdependence. Religion being an expression of human culture is equally affected by this cultural revolution. The main objective of this paper is to examine how religious affiliation, among Christians, influences attitudes towards the application of psychological sciences to the assuagement of human suffering. The sociological theory of structural functionalism was deployed to explain attitudinal appraisal. Ethnographic methodology, through quantitative analysis of administered questionnaire, was also used. The study reveals that religious tenets largely shape attitudinal appraisal and redefine the borders of globalisationâs metanarratives
Measuring quality in the therapeutic relationship-Part 2: subjective approaches
Publisher version: http://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/19/6/479.ful
Knowledge as Culture
Culture must not be seen as something that merely reflects an organizationâs social reality: rather, it is an integral part of the process by which that reality is constructed. Knowledge management initiatives, per se, are not culture change projects; but, if culture stands in the way of what an organization needs to do, they must somehow impact
Moffett and rhetoric
This examination of Moffett's contribution to a theory of school English concentrates on his understanding of rhetoric. It is suggested that the impetus for Teaching the Universe of Discourse is dialectical: he was running against currents in English teaching at the time that were literary and technical, as well as the specific practices of sentence combining and embedding. His introduction of rhetoric into debates about school English was a key move, as rhetoric had been seen by American contemporaries as related to higher education and public discourse (and drawing on classical models). Moffett's more generous notion of rhetoric as the âarts of discourseâ helped him chart a âlarger rhetoric of behaviourâ and map out his curriculum and development model. It is a rhetoric that moves beyond the definition of the âart of persuasionâ to one based in drama, dialogue and dialectic
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