Urban Africa; key words

The state of the art of contemporary urban Africa is the focus of this poster. Africa is no longer a continent of villages and towns, and it is only now that both the size and importance of urban Africa are becoming widely apparent. A global reflection of the rapid urban growth happening in the African continent is necessary, especially in architectural and urban studies. Africa covers a huge area, with great differences within its borders; therefore the risk of generalising is high. To analyse the urban spaces, the socio-economic context has to be considered. Nevertheless, some recurring features occur when discussing urbanisation in Africa. This bibliographical research concentrates on the combination and the repetition of concepts in scientific books and articles dealing with urban Africa. This led to the identification of the key words, as shown above. The diagram simplifies the real complexity of the continent, but nevertheless it provides a framework of the essential issues involved. The use of the map of Africa together with key words and images is a deliberate choice. It refers to a common approach when presenting issues related to emerging countries, where the visual message is often more important than the content itself. Putting together the positive and pessimistic points of view generates a fragmented and uneven perception, that is probably closer to the real stratified and intricate situation. The bigger the key words are in the diagram, the more relevant or repetitive the concept appears in urban African bibliography. Some words are coloured; and the colour itself creates a link to the reference pictures. This is a fundamental step towards research into the African context, especially from a foreign point of view. Within this context, one of the most interesting topics is the understanding of the limit between formal and informal spaces, as a means of interpreting contemporary African cities

Modeling the perceptual component of conceptual learning—A coordination perspective

Although a picture may be worth a thousand words, modeling diagrams as propositions and modeling visual processing as search through a database of verbal descriptions obscures what is problematic for the learner. Cognitive modeling of language learning and geometry has obscured the learner's problem of knowing where to look—what spaces, markings, and orientations constitute the objects of interest? Today we are launching into widespread use of multimedia instructional technology, without an adequate theory to relate perceptual processes to conceptual learning. Does this matter? In this article, I review the symbolic approach to modeling perceptual processing and show its limitations for explaining difficulties children encounter in interpreting a graphic display. I present an alternative analysis by which perceptual categorization is coupled to behavior sequences, where gesturing and emotional changes are essential for resolving impasses and breaking out of loops. I conclude by asking what kind of cognitive theory we need to exploit communication technology. Have we been correct to assume that pedagogy must be grounded in an accurate psychological model of knowledge, memory, and learning

History of writing and record keeping

The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of human knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of the environment enables human needs to be met in a more efficient manner. The human environment includes the human being itself and the human ability to communicate by means of language and to make symbolic representations of the sounds produced by language, allowed the development of writing. Writing developed over time in a necessary and inevitable manner from logographic, to syllabic, to alphabetical systems. This development from simpler word based writing to more complex syllable based systems and then even more complex sound based writing systems was a logical progression from, simple less useful systems, to more complex, but more useful systems. This is an example of how the simplest knowledge is acquired first and more complex knowledge is acquired later. The order of discovery determines the course of human social and cultural history as knowledge of new and more efficient means of meeting human needs, results in new technology, which results in the development of new social and ideological systems. This means human social and cultural history, has to follow a particular course, a course that is determined by the structure of the human environment

First grade reading materials of high interest level for children from the ages of seven through twelve.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

A Foundation for Emotional Expressivity

To express emotions to others in mobile text messaging in our view require designs that can both capture some of the ambiguity and subtleness that characterizes emotional interaction and keep the media specific qualities. Through the use of a body movement analysis and a dimensional model of emotion experiences, we arrived at a design for a mobile messaging service, eMoto. The service makes use of the sub-symbolic expressions; colors, shapes and animations, for expressing emotions in an open-ended way. Here we present the design process and a user study of those expressions, where the results show that the use of these sub-symbolic expressions can work as a foundation to use as a creative tool, but still allowing for the communication to be situated. The inspiration taken from body movements proved to be very useful as a design input. It was also reflected in the way our subjects described the expressions

Improving customer churn prediction by data augmentation using pictorial stimulus-choice data

The purpose of this paper is to determine the added value of pictorial stimulus-choice data in customer churn prediction. Using Random Forests and 5 times 2 fold cross-validation, this study analyzes how much pictorial stimulus choice data and survey data increase the AUC of a churn model over and above administrative, operational and complaints data. The finding is that pictorial-stimulus choice data significantly increases AUC of models with administrative and operational data. The practical implication of this finding is that companies should start considering mining pictorial data from social media sites (e.g. Pinterest), in order to augment their internal customer database. This study is original in that it is the first that assesses the added value of pictorial stimulus-choice data in predictive models. This is important because more and more social media websites are focusing on pictures

'Interrupted interviews': listening to young people with autism in transition to college

This article examines the methodological approaches used in a research project that investigated the lived experiences of young people with autism as they made the transition from special schools to mainstream colleges of Further Education. A combination of visual methods using iPad applications and walking interviews were explored in an attempt to develop ways of engaging young people with autism in research and to privilege their voice in their own transition. The strengths and challenges of these methods are examined here and illustrated through the experience and responses of one young person in the study and his engagement with the research