Kenyon Collegian - October 23, 2020

https://digital.kenyon.edu/collegian/3535/thumbnail.jp

Extracting aspects of determiner meaning from dialogue in a virtual world environment

We use data from a virtual world game for automated learning of words and grammatical constructions and their meanings. The language data are an integral part of the social interaction in the game and consist of chat dialogue, which is only constrained by the cultural context, as set by the nature of the provided virtual environment. Building on previous work, where we extracted a vocabulary for concrete objects in the game by making use of the non-linguistic context, we now target NP/DP grammar, in particular determiners. We assume that we have captured the meanings of a set of determiners if we can predict which determiner will be used in a particular context. To this end we train a classifier that predicts the choice of a determiner on the basis of features from the linguistic and non-linguistic context.Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Rubicon grant, project nr. 446-09-011

Hydrolastic Damping: A Change to the Modern Helmet

High rates of concussion in the NFL suggest that helmet technology is not satisfactory for the athletes, and soft foam padding has dominated the helmet industry since its inception. The team proposed that implementing a fluid-based hydrolastic suspension system in the helmet would reduce the risk of concussions at all levels of competition. After using COMSOL to successfully model fluid flow through the dampers and after physical testing on dampers filled with air and water lead to increased time to stop of an average of 240% when compared to traditional foam padding, the team concluded that the dampers showed promise and the potential to benefit the padding potential of football helmets and decrease the risk of concussion for football athletes

Self-Representation of Black Queer Athletes in the WNBA: Resistance to Misogynoir and Heteronormativity in Women\u27s Basketball

This work is a critical discourse analysis of the media (mis)representations and self-representations of Black queer women athletes in the WNBA. WNBA players have found paths of resistance and self-representation through social media and their relationships with individual journalists in response to continuous misogynoir, colorism, and heteronormativity that pervades sports and sports media. Specifically, this work highlights how WNBA players craft a counter-discourse about themselves, their media representations, and their treatment through their use of social media. By examining Black queer WNBA players use of social media and other tools of self-representation, it is shown that athletes are not only naming the discrimination that they experience within media, by brands, and by the WNBA but they are utilizing social media for self-representation and articulation. While social media can be a liberatory space, these athletes also understand it to be a highly surveilled space that reinforces misogynoir and heteronormativity which makes them selective in how they engage with it. These choices are often driven by the economic strain they face and the potential gain if they can present themselves in ways that produce more economic opportunities. Finally, it is found that players\u27 individual relationships with journalists who are invested in telling their stories are an integral part of athletes\u27 self-representation

“We Got Next”: The Struggle to Make the WNBA

2021 marks the 25th season of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), making it easily the longest running women’s professional league in the United States and defying the predictions of those who doubted that a women’s basketball league could succeed. Though the WNBA constantly faces the pessimistic voices of those who view it as on the brink of collapse, it has matured into a stable, growing league, and the players’ prominent role within social justice movements has sparked a new wave of optimism about the WNBA’s future. Despite this, the WNBA still faces questions about how best to grow the league, and perhaps more broadly, what it means for women to play basketball in the professional yet beleaguered WNBA. This thesis examines the way in which WNBA players perceive themselves and the league, and consequently how their demands for change and respect have grown. It draws upon my ethnographic research with a WNBA team—pseudonymously called the Ravens—as well as my examination of a variety of sources, including news articles, advertising and commercials, and most prominently, the players own construction of their mediated self, particularly through the use of sporting autobiographies and other autobiographical texts. I examine the intersecting forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion to demonstrate the way in which the WNBA’s initial marketing emphasis on heterosexual, respectable femininity was gradually challenged over time by players, who instead pushed for alternative models of female athleticism. I argue that these gendered discourses have constructed a way of playing basketball “like a girl,” which can serve to limit players’ embodied possibilities. Furthermore, I explore what it means to play in a professional league that lacks the resources of other, male sports leagues, and the way in which WNBA players have pushed higher pay and better conditions. Through this examination of WNBA players’ experiences, I argue that it is players’ dedication and commitment to ensuring a sustainable league that has enabled the WNBA to survive in spite of an American sporting landscape hostile to women

Classroom environment and its effect on student achievement in a 3rd grade mathematics classroom: An autoethnographic study.

Student achievement in mathematics is a concern of policy-makers as well as those who teach the subject. Due to concern regarding lagging mathematical achievement in the United States that began with a series of events that include the launch of Sputnik in the 1950s, the federal report A Nation At Risk, and the Third International Mathematics and Science Study have sparked a fervent desire for school children to succeed and compete mathematically with our global neighbors. Although policy-makers are striving to improve educational practices of mathematics by formulating curriculum plans to foster mathematical achievement and a joy of mathematics, one element has been given little consideration, though it plays a significant role in accomplishing these goals and that is the classroom environment. First, to create a classroom environment that promotes student achievement, it is necessary to understand the social and educational milieu. To document the events of this study, I utilized an autoethnographic approach to social research through self-reflection. The students that I observed made strides in mathematics and developed positive affect for mathematics. The results of this study concluded that the classroom environment created through the interpersonal relationships between a teacher and students plays a significant role in her students’ achievement in mathematics

The Anchor, Volume 99.04: September 25, 1986

The Anchor began in 1887 and was first issued weekly in 1914. Covering national and campus news alike, Hope College’s student-run newspaper has grown over the years to encompass over two-dozen editors, reporters, and staff. For much of The Anchor\u27s history, the latest issue was distributed across campus each Wednesday throughout the academic school year (with few exceptions). As of Fall 2019 The Anchor has moved to monthly print issues and a more frequently updated website. Occasionally, the volume and/or issue numbering is irregular

Simulated role-playing from crowdsourced data

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-178).Collective Artificial Intelligence (CAl) simulates human intelligence from data contributed by many humans, mined for inter-related patterns. This thesis applies CAI to social role-playing, introducing an end-to-end process for compositing recorded performances from thousands of humans, and simulating open-ended interaction from this data. The CAI process combines crowdsourcing, pattern discovery, and case-based planning. Content creation is crowdsourced by recording role-players online. Browser-based tools allow nonexperts to annotate data, organizing content into a hierarchical narrative structure. Patterns discovered from data power a novel system combining plan recognition with case-based planning. The combination of this process and structure produces a new medium, which exploits a massive corpus to realize characters who interact and converse with humans. This medium enables new experiences in videogames, and new classes of training simulations, therapeutic applications, and social robots. While advances in graphics support incredible freedom to interact physically in simulations, current approaches to development restrict simulated social interaction to hand-crafted branches that do not scale to the thousands of possible patterns of actions and utterances observed in actual human interaction. There is a tension between freedom and system comprehension due to two bottlenecks, making open-ended social interaction a challenge. First is the authorial effort entailed to cover all possible inputs. Second, like other cognitive processes, imagination is a bounded resource. Any individual author only has so much imagination. The convergence of advances in connectivity, storage, and processing power is bringing people together in ways never before possible, amplifying the imagination of individuals by harnessing the creativity and productivity of the crowd, revolutionizing how we create media, and what media we can create. By embracing data-driven approaches, and capitalizing on the creativity of the crowd, authoring bottlenecks can be overcome, taking a step toward realizing a medium that robustly supports player choice. Doing so requires rethinking both technology and division of labor in media production. As a proof of concept, a CAI system has been evaluated by recording over 10,000 performances in The Restaurant Game, automating an Al-controlled waitress who interacts in the world, and converses with a human via text or speech. Quantitative results demonstrate how CAI supports significantly more open-ended interaction with humans, while focus groups reveal factors for improving engagement.by Jeffrey David Orkin.Ph.D

It is in our DNA : Athlete Activism and Social Media Discourse During the 2020 WNBA Season

This dissertation analyzes the athlete activism in the WNBA, the use of social media for activism, and the social media discourse during the 2020 basketball season. I applied Critical Discourse Analysis to a defined set of texts including social media posts from Instagram and Twitter, user comments on social media, news articles from sports and non-sports publications, and a documentary, all related to the activism of the WNBA athletes. I chose the 2020 season because it is an exceptional case study of athlete activism and the use of social media for activism because the season was played in a single site location due to the global pandemic. Other cultural and political factors made the season unique such as the increasingly apparent systemic racism in the United States and the impending elections in 2020. Throughout the season, the WNBA athletes devoted their activism to Breonna Taylor, the #SayHerName campaign, Black women victims of police violence, Jacob Blake, Black Lives Matter, and the Georgia Senate race between Atlanta Dream co-owner Kelly Loeffler and Rev. Raphael Warnock. The athletes used their platform and social media to immerse themselves in the political, social, and cultural events happening at the time, fought for social justice issues, and became a voice for the voiceless during the 2020 season. Through the social media discourse, I found there was a backlash towards the activism throughout the season, including consistent themes of racism, white supremacy, misogyny, and patriotism. Even though the athletes\u27 activism contributed to Warnock winning the Senate race and becoming the first Black Senator in Georgia, there have been significant impacts of their activism seen in the changes to social media platforms that may make it more difficult for athletes\u27 voices to be heard and for social media to be a place for activism