Taking empathy online

Despite its long history of investigating sociality, phenomenology has, to date, said little about online sociality. The phenomenological tradition typically claims that empathy is the fundamental way in which we experience others and their experiences. While empathy is discussed almost exclusively in the context of face-to-face interaction, I claim that we can empathetically perceive others and their experiences in certain online situations. Drawing upon the phenomenological distinction between the physical, objective body and the expressive, lived body, I: (i) highlight that empathy involves perceiving the other’s expressive, lived body, (ii) show that the lived body is not tied to the physical body and that empathy can take place outside of face-to-face interactions, and (iii) argue that the lived body can enter online space and is empathetically available to others there. I explore two ways in which the other’s lived body enters online space and can be empathetically perceived: first, in cases where our face-to-face encounter is technologically-mediated over video link and, second, by showing how the other’s texts, as speech, can form part of the other’s lived body. Investigating empathy online not only furthers our understanding of online encounters but also leads to a refined conception of empathy more generally

Scintillator gamma-ray detectors with silicon photomultiplier readouts for high-energy astronomy

Space-based gamma-ray detectors for high-energy astronomy face strict constraints of mass, volume, and power, and must endure harsh operating environments. Scintillator materials have a long history of successful operation under these conditions, and new materials offer greatly improved performance in terms of efficiency, time response, and energy resolution. The use of scintillators in space remains constrained, however, by the mass, volume, and fragility of the associated light readout device, typically a vacuum photomultiplier tube (PMT). Recently developed silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) offer gains and efficiencies similar to those of PMTs, but with greatly reduced mass and volume, high ruggedness, and no high-voltage requirements. We have therefore been investigating the use of SiPM readouts for scintillator gamma-ray detectors, with an emphasis on their suitability for space- and balloonbased instruments for high-energy astronomy. We present our most recent results, including spectroscopy measurements for lanthanum bromide scintillators with SiPM readouts, and pulse-shape discrimination using organic scintillators with SiPM readouts. We also describe potential applications of SiPM readouts to specific highenergy astronomy instrument concepts

Support for global science: Remote sensing's challenge

Remote sensing uses a wide variety of techniques and methods. Resulting data are analyzed by man and machine, using both analog and digital technology. The newest and most important initiatives in the U. S. civilian space program currently revolve around the space station complex, which includes the core station as well as co-orbiting and polar satellite platforms. This proposed suite of platforms and support systems offers a unique potential for facilitating long term, multidisciplinary scientific investigations on a truly global scale. Unlike previous generations of satellites, designed for relatively limited constituencies, the space station offers the potential to provide an integrated source of information which recognizes the scientific interest in investigating the dynamic coupling between the oceans, land surface, and atmosphere. Earth scientist already face problems that are truly global in extent. Problems such as the global carbon balance, regional deforestation, and desertification require new approaches, which combine multidisciplinary, multinational research teams, employing advanced technologies to produce a type, quantity, and quality of data not previously available. The challenge before the international scientific community is to continue to develop both the infrastructure and expertise to, on the one hand, develop the science and technology of remote sensing, while on the other hand, develop an integrated understanding of global life support systems, and work toward a quantiative science of the biosphere

Energetics And Space Use Of Female Moose During Winter In Alaska

Space use and resource selection are a linked processes that are important determinants of individual and population fitness. Knowledge of those processes is important to understanding wildlife-habitat relationships. Knowledge of this information can improve the efficacy of wildlife management programs and provide baseline information in the face of changing environments. I present research findings investigating energetic and space use parameters of a population of female moose inhabiting two distinct, but adjacent, landscape types on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska. I also examine how the inferences we derive from estimated space use patterns are influenced by the metrics we use to model space use by evaluating four contemporary home range models (Brownian bridges, fixed kernels, minimum convex polygons, and local convex hulls)

Interstellar Travel and Tourism: The Possibilities in the Dawn of the New Face of Business and its Structure

Interstellar Travel and Tourism: The Possibilities in the Dawn of the New Face of Business and its Structure By Haley Barber Mentor Dr. Lana Carnes Professor of Corporate Communication & Technology Business faces a new frontier, and it is my argument that there is a possibility that business will develop an entirely new structure to face the space age. I will be investigating the scientific, legal, and business structure currently in place and how these structures intend to adapt or may be abandoned in this quickly developing age. This new frontier will affect everyone on this planet, in the environment, technology, business as a market, and life as we know it. This paper explains the science, law, and business issues that must be dealt with before humans can travel and sustain life on another planet. This is a proposed set of laws and business plan for a mining company that would be placed on Mars and used as a leader for all businesses to come after and a foundation for a colony. There is an established history of law that the current law and future law must be founded in and furthered before effective space business can continue. The science portion of the paper explains what current sustainability looks like and where it can go from there. The business plan is the face of how new companies will look when they are interplanetary and require a space office and an Earth office

Voice onset time and vowel formant measures in online testing and laboratory-based testing with(out) surgical face masks

Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, conducting experiments online is increasingly common, and face masks are often used in everyday life. It remains unclear whether phonetic detail in speech production is captured adequately when speech is recorded in internet-based experiments or in experiments conducted with face masks. We tested 55 Spanish–Basque–English trilinguals in picture naming tasks in three conditions: online, laboratory-based with surgical face masks, and laboratory-based without face masks (control). We measured plosive voice onset time (VOT) in each language, the formants and duration of English vowels /iː/ and /ɪ/, and the Spanish/Basque vowel space. Across conditions, there were differences between English and Spanish/Basque VOT and in formants and duration between English /iː/–/ɪ/; between conditions, small differences emerged. Relative to the control condition, the Spanish/Basque vowel space was larger in online testing and smaller in the face mask condition. We conclude that testing online or with face masks is suitable for investigating phonetic detail in within-participant designs although the precise measurements may differ from those in traditional laboratory-based researchThis work was supported by institutional grants from the Basque Government [BERC 2022–2025 program] and the Spanish State Research Agency [BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation CEX2020-001010/AEI/10.13039/501100011033] awarded to the BCBL. This project has also received funding from the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation program [Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 843533 awarded to AS]; the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program [grant agreement No 819093 to CDM]; the Spanish State Research Agency [BES-2017- 082500 to CS; PID2020-113926GB-I00 to CDM; PID2021- 123578NA-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE, & FJC2020-044978-I to AS]; and by the Basque Government’s Department of Education [Predoctoral training program for research staff PRE_2021_2_0006 awarded to TT]

Novel deep learning methods for track reconstruction

For the past year, the HEP.TrkX project has been investigating machine learning solutions to LHC particle track reconstruction problems. A variety of models were studied that drew inspiration from computer vision applications and operated on an image-like representation of tracking detector data. While these approaches have shown some promise, image-based methods face challenges in scaling up to realistic HL-LHC data due to high dimensionality and sparsity. In contrast, models that can operate on the spacepoint representation of track measurements ("hits") can exploit the structure of the data to solve tasks efficiently. In this paper we will show two sets of new deep learning models for reconstructing tracks using space-point data arranged as sequences or connected graphs. In the first set of models, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are used to extrapolate, build, and evaluate track candidates akin to Kalman Filter algorithms. Such models can express their own uncertainty when trained with an appropriate likelihood loss function. The second set of models use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for the tasks of hit classification and segment classification. These models read a graph of connected hits and compute features on the nodes and edges. They adaptively learn which hit connections are important and which are spurious. The models are scaleable with simple architecture and relatively few parameters. Results for all models will be presented on ACTS generic detector simulated data.Comment: CTD 2018 proceeding

MorDIFF: Recognition Vulnerability and Attack Detectability of Face Morphing Attacks Created by Diffusion Autoencoders

Investigating new methods of creating face morphing attacks is essential to foresee novel attacks and help mitigate them. Creating morphing attacks is commonly either performed on the image-level or on the representation-level. The representation-level morphing has been performed so far based on generative adversarial networks (GAN) where the encoded images are interpolated in the latent space to produce a morphed image based on the interpolated vector. Such a process was constrained by the limited reconstruction fidelity of GAN architectures. Recent advances in the diffusion autoencoder models have overcome the GAN limitations, leading to high reconstruction fidelity. This theoretically makes them a perfect candidate to perform representation-level face morphing. This work investigates using diffusion autoencoders to create face morphing attacks by comparing them to a wide range of image-level and representation-level morphs. Our vulnerability analyses on four state-of-the-art face recognition models have shown that such models are highly vulnerable to the created attacks, the MorDIFF, especially when compared to existing representation-level morphs. Detailed detectability analyses are also performed on the MorDIFF, showing that they are as challenging to detect as other morphing attacks created on the image- or representation-level. Data and morphing script are made public: https://github.com/naserdamer/MorDIFF.Comment: Accepted at the 11th International Workshop on Biometrics and Forensics 2023 (IWBF 2023