Constructing safety in scuba diving : a discursive psychology study

Scuba diving has been around for years and has its origins in history many centuries ago. It has been widely explored and researched as a subject of scientific, medical, and recreational interest. More recently, with the development of sport psychology, it has become the focus of a few social scientists. This research is intended on making a contribution not only to such research in the field of sport psychology and scuba diving, but also that of discursive psychology. This study was executed from a discursive position, using ideas and methods from discursive analysis and applying them to the concept of diving safety. An attempt was made to view discourse as talk, and as such analyze talk as that what is being said. While most research on diving safety focus on how panic and fear are inner entities that drive behaviour leading to accidents, injury and death, this research wanted to look at those inner states as ways of talk and how they are interactionally constructed in talk. The context within which the diving course took place can be divided into three contexts, namely the classroom, the pool and the open water environment. Research was conducted within in the classroom and pool environment, and data consisted of voice recordings of natural conversations in the training context. This research wants to offer alternative explanations in psychology and sport, through explicating what subjects are saying, relating their talk to their situations and actions, and showing how specific situations incite certain types of talk. In conclusion, this was not only a study using naturalistic conversations, but also a study of conversations.Dissertation (MA (Counselling Psychology))--University of Pretoria, 2004.Psychologyunrestricte

Coastal Resource Management in the Wider Caribbean: Resilience, Adaptation, and Community Diversity

The Caribbean Sea is the second largest sea in the world, including more than 30 insular and continental countries with an approximate population of 35 million. In addition to its highly fractionalized territory, it is characterized by a great linguistic and cultural diversity, a phenomenon enhanced by increasing internal migrations and the expansion of tourism. The implementation of coastal management programs, often embedded in top-down approaches, is therefore faced with a series of ecological and social constraints, explaining why they have had only limited success. This book presents an alternative look at existing coastal management initiatives in the North America (Caribbean); focusing on the need to pay more attention to the local community. Emphasizing the great heterogeneity of Caribbean communities, the book shows how the diversity of ecosystems and cultures has generated a significant resilience and capacity to adapt, in which the notion of community itself has to be re-examined. The concluding chapter presents lessons learned and a series of practical recommendations for decision-makers

Making effective use of healthcare data using data-to-text technology

Healthcare organizations are in a continuous effort to improve health outcomes, reduce costs and enhance patient experience of care. Data is essential to measure and help achieving these improvements in healthcare delivery. Consequently, a data influx from various clinical, financial and operational sources is now overtaking healthcare organizations and their patients. The effective use of this data, however, is a major challenge. Clearly, text is an important medium to make data accessible. Financial reports are produced to assess healthcare organizations on some key performance indicators to steer their healthcare delivery. Similarly, at a clinical level, data on patient status is conveyed by means of textual descriptions to facilitate patient review, shift handover and care transitions. Likewise, patients are informed about data on their health status and treatments via text, in the form of reports or via ehealth platforms by their doctors. Unfortunately, such text is the outcome of a highly labour-intensive process if it is done by healthcare professionals. It is also prone to incompleteness, subjectivity and hard to scale up to different domains, wider audiences and varying communication purposes. Data-to-text is a recent breakthrough technology in artificial intelligence which automatically generates natural language in the form of text or speech from data. This chapter provides a survey of data-to-text technology, with a focus on how it can be deployed in a healthcare setting. It will (1) give an up-to-date synthesis of data-to-text approaches, (2) give a categorized overview of use cases in healthcare, (3) seek to make a strong case for evaluating and implementing data-to-text in a healthcare setting, and (4) highlight recent research challenges.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figures, book chapte

Experiences and meaning of the aquatic environment for individuals with physical disabilities

This study examines the experiences and meaning of physical activity in the aquatic environment to enhance social, cultural and political understanding of its impact in the lives of individuals with physical disabilities. Interviews, lived experience descriptions and artifacts present an explanation of the felt sense oftheir bodies as they engage in swimming or scuba diving. 11 Combining written, verbal and visual descriptions generated by informants provides a detailed account of the unique qualities of physical activity in the water for those with physical disabilities. Participants' descriptions highlight that context is an important aspect of physical activity among individuals with physical disabilities through discussion of motility and the role of the lived body. Aspects of the aquatic environment create a setting that facilitates forgetfulness of the lived body's presence. Instructors and participants alike will benefit from learning the difference between the object body and the lived body, listening to the body's voice as they participate in physical activity

Sounding the reef: comparative acoustemologies of underwater noise pollution / Pejling af revet: komparativ akustemologi af undersøisk støjforurening

Matthew Buttacavoli studied the development and detection of the category of underwater noise pollution in the Great Barrier Reef. He examined the phenomenon using a multi-species ethnographic approach. He found that bodily affordances and species’ boundaries that make sensing underwater noise difficult, can be overcome through technology and skilled practice. [Extract from Danish abstract] Denne afhandling vælger en etnografisk strategi til at undersøge, hvordan interesserede lyttere forsøger at opfatte og rekonstruere det akustiske havmiljø. Observation og interviews af deltagere sættes sammen med optagelse og kreative metoder for at kortlægge de (ufuldkomne) måder, hvorpå lyttere (herunder forfatteren) forsøger at forstå havskabningers lydverdener. I fokus er de lyttemetoder, der blev udviklet af dykkere, havforskere, akustikere og interesseorganisationer

Demographic-Aware Natural Language Processing

The underlying traits of our demographic group affect and shape our thoughts, and therefore surface in the way we express ourselves and employ language in our day-to-day life. Understanding and analyzing language use in people from different demographic backgrounds help uncover their demographic particularities. Conversely, leveraging these differences could lead to the development of better language representations, thus enabling further demographic-focused refinements in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this thesis, I employ methods rooted in computational linguistics to better understand various demographic groups through their language use. The thesis makes two main contributions. First, it provides empirical evidence that words are indeed used differently by different demographic groups in naturally occurring text. Through experiments conducted on large datasets which display usage scenarios for hundreds of frequent words, I show that automatic classification methods can be effective in distinguishing between word usages of different demographic groups. I compare the encoding ability of the utilized features by conducting feature analyses, and shed light on how various attributes contribute to highlighting the differences. Second, the thesis explores whether demographic differences in word usage by different groups can inform the development of more refined approaches to NLP tasks. Specifically, I start by investigating the task of word association prediction. The thesis shows that going beyond the traditional ``one-size-fits-all'' approach, demographic-aware models achieve better performances in predicting word associations for different demographic groups than generic ones. Next, I investigate the impact of demographic information on part-of-speech tagging and syntactic parsing, and the experiments reveal numerous part-of-speech tags and syntactic relations, whose predictions benefit from the prevalence of a specific group in the training data. Finally, I explore demographic-specific humor generation, and develop a humor generation framework to fill-in the blanks to generate funny stories, while taking into account people's demographic backgrounds.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155164/1/gaparna_1.pd

Consuming Transformed Islands: Representing Human Interactions with Mobility Infrastructures with GoPro Cameras in Tahiti Nui, Mā'ohi Nui/French Polynesia

M.A.M.A. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 201

Neural Scoring of Logical Inferences from Data using Feedback

Insights derived from wearable sensors in smartwatches or sleep trackers can help users in approaching their healthy lifestyle goals. These insights should indicate significant inferences from user behaviour and their generation should adapt automatically to the preferences and goals of the user. In this paper, we propose a neural network model that generates personalised lifestyle insights based on a model of their significance, and feedback from the user. Simulated analysis of our model shows its ability to assign high scores to a) insights with statistically significant behaviour patterns and b) topics related to simple or complex user preferences at any given time. We believe that the proposed neural networks model could be adapted for any application that needs user feedback to score logical inferences from data

Indigenous knowledge and practices for marine ecotourism development in Misool, Raja Ampat, Indonesia.

This doctoral study examines the complexities of integrating Indigenous knowledge and practices into sustainable marine ecotourism development, with a focus on the case study of Misool, Raja Ampat, in West Papua Province, Indonesia. The research addresses the knowledge gaps on integrating Indigenous knowledge into marine ecotourism initiatives. Indigenous knowledge is often neglected as a key source of information, undervalued from the perspective of Western scientific knowledge, even though utilising Indigenous knowledge helps to increase the sustainability of development efforts and contributes to the empowerment of local communities. Literature on marine ecotourism shows an almost total absence of studies that draw from Indigenous knowledge, yet, local community participation is underlined as one of the most important factors in sustainable marine ecotourism development. This thesis thus aims to contribute new insights on how Indigenous knowledge can be optimally integrated or applied in marine ecotourism development. Misool is one of the islands in Raja Ampat which attracts scuba divers and marine tourists from around the world, due to its abundance marine life. As tourism development in Misool is still in its early stages, it is an excellent location to explore processes of marine ecotourism development and the integration of Indigenous values. This study is qualitative, informed by an awareness of research approaches to Indigenous issues. The method applied was semi structured in-depth interviews, which complements Indigenous methodology approaches. The fieldwork was conducted in five tourism villages in Misool with forty-seven participants, consisting of: Indigenous people who worked in tourism and Misool’s Marine Protected Area, marine ecotourism operators, heads of villages, traditional leaders, government officials, and NGOs. Both field notes and transcriptions were analysed using narrative analysis with a thematic approach to explore participants’ viewpoints around the issues. This study has identified nine key themes of Indigenous knowledge and practices the local communities in Misool hold, which are: 1) marine sasi (traditional marine resource management), 2) petuanan adat (customary ownership right of land and/or sea area), 3) baca alam (reading the signs of nature), 4) finding and calling the animals, 5) pamali ikan (fish taboo), 6) respecting sacred sites, 7) weather shamanism, 8) traditional way of sailing, and 9) traditional ways of building. It was also found that the local Indigenous communities, marine ecotourism operators, NGOs, and some of the local government institutions in Misool have acknowledged and incorporated some aspects of Misoolese Indigenous knowledge and practices in existing marine ecotourism development. The local Indigenous communities and marine ecotourism operators have been incorporating Misoolese Indigenous knowledge and practices in scuba diving and other marine ecotourism activities, as well as into the establishment of supporting facilities. The research identified that NGOs and a local government institution have been using marine sasi and petuanan adat to support marine conservation and development programmes, which involve the local communities. Overall, the findings of this study contribute to and also make practical recommendations for understanding the integration of Indigenous knowledge and practices into marine ecotourism development