Military Members: Body, Identity, and The Transformations of Military Service

Military service and reintegration into civilian populations often entails an abrupt disorienting shift in environment for members of the United States military. Navigating variable differences in military and civilian culture directly impacts the ways service members navigate and understand health and wellness. By examining the lived experience of military members, this research aims to recognize how military service is a transformative process of the mind and body and how identity is shaped and reshaped by the institutions they work for. Using ethnographic research, I argue that service members adopt the behaviors and values associated with the military environment which directly impacts their health and identity in and out of the military. This study suggests that the military institution’s involvement in fostering certain behaviors has a direct consequence on how military members navigate and conceptualize their own physical and mental health

The postmonolingual turn : rethinking embodiment with New Confucianism in bodily education and research

The study of the body remains dominated by Western scholars examining Western bodies and using Western conceptualisations of the body. Though mainstream sociology of the body research is founded within dualisms, often privileging one side of a binary opposition at the expense of another, a thread within Chinese philosophies cut across such dualistic categories. This paper aims to reinvigorate this thread by the ‘turn to’ a postmonolingual approach, using New Confucianism to consider the challenges and implications for bodily education and research in three ways. First, this paper draws on a postmonolingual lens to extend current debates and limitations of embodiment literatures. Specifically, it provides examples of how thinking with New Confucianism in educating the body could help shift the academic landscape. Second, it offers an account of navigating through the ‘turns’ in order to reach for the ground of New Confucianism thinking in bodily education. Thinking through a postmonolingual lens with a focus on New Confucianism indicates a departure from Western approaches that have informed a Euro-American centric tradition of research. Such a shift reorientates thinking around postpositivist research that continues to perpetuate dualism and fails to capture the complexity, ambivalence and entangled relations of our embodied lives. Last, it highlights the revelations in how Chinese philosophical concepts can bring to challenge dominant Western notions of performance culture predicated upon binary oppositions and more broadly the privilege of the body over mind and emotions. Thinking about bodily education with New Confucianism this paper points to the potential to decenter normative assumptions and reshape the usual contours of the binary bodily praxis. It concludes by considering the potential and future directions when drawing on New Confucianism as a theoretical framework to rethink bodily education and research in the West

Extended Cognition, The New Mechanists’ Mutual Manipulability Criterion, and The Challenge of Trivial Extendedness

Many authors have turned their attention to the notion of constitution to determine whether the hypothesis of extended cognition (EC) is true. One common strategy is to make sense of constitution in terms of the new mechanists’ mutual manipulability account (MM). In this paper I will show that MM is insufficient. The Challenge of Trivial Extendedness arises due to the fact that mechanisms for cognitive behaviors are extended in a way that should not count as verifying EC. This challenge can be met by adding a necessary condition: cognitive constituents satisfy MM and they are what I call behavior unspecific

Zen Your College Experience

When college students transition from life at home to life at school, they may be faced with a variety of stressors such as navigating a more rigorous academic environment or an overload of new commitments and responsibilities. Struggling with the change in environment is one of the major problems faced among college students and often leads to more stress and anxiety, lack of sleep hygiene, and poor eating habits. Fortunately, mindful meditation has been proven to help with these issues. Mindful meditation is the practice of focusing or clearing the mind by using certain mental and physical techniques. It has a role in helping students transition into college and improve their learning which in turn, decreases stress and anxiety. Meditation also promotes relaxation and prepares the body for sleep, allowing a more restful night with fewer sleep disturbances. Lastly, meditation can promote healthy eating and physical activity. Implementing meditation into a college student’s daily life is a quick and easy way to improve overall health and well-being

Model for Human, Artificial & Collective Consciousness (Part I)

Borrowing the functional modeling approach common in systems and software engineering, an implementable model of the functions of human consciousness proposed to have the capacity for general problem solving ability transferable to any domain, or true self-aware intelligence, is presented. Being a functional model that is independent of implementation, this model is proposed to also be applicable to artificial consciousness, and to platforms that organize individuals into what is defined here as a first order collective consciousness, or at higher orders into what is defined here as Nth order collective consciousness. Part I of this two-part article includes: Summary; Introduction; Set of Postulates One; Set of Postulates Two; Overview of the Model; Model of Homeostasis; Model of the Functional Units; Model of the Body System; Model of the Other Basic Life Processes; Model of the Other Functional Systems; Model of Perceptions in the Perceptual Fields; Model of Body Processes as Paths in the Perceptual Field; & Model of Conscious Awarenes

A list of websites and reading materials on strategy & complexity

The list has been developed based on a broad interpretation of the subject of ‘strategy & complexity’. Resources will therefore more, or less directly relate to ‘being strategic in the face of complexity’. Many of the articles and reports referred to in the attached bibliography can be accessed and downloaded from the internet. Most books can be found at amazon.com where you will often find a number of book reviews and summaries as well. Sometimes, reading the reviews will suffice and will give you the essence of the contents of the book after which you do not need to buy it. If the book looks interesting enough, buying options are easy

Design Principals of Social Navigation

8th Delos Workshop on "User Interfaces for Digital Libraries" (on 21 October it will be held in conjuction with the 4th ERCIM Workshop on "User Interfaces for All"), SICS, Kista, Sweden, 21-23 October 1998PERSON

Perspectives on Deepening Teachers’ Mathematics Content Knowledge: The Case of the Oregon Mathematics Leadership Institute

The Oregon Mathematics Leadership Institute (OMLI) project served 180 Oregon teachers, and 90 administrators, across the K-12 grades from ten partner districts. OMLI offered a residential, three-week summer institute. Over the course of three consecutive summers, teachers were immersed in a total of six mathematics content classes– Algebra, Data & Chance, Discrete Mathematics, Geometry, Measurement & Change, and Number & Operations—along with an annual collegial leadership course. Each content class was designed and taught by a team of expert faculty from universities, community colleges, and K-12 districts. Each team chose a few “big ideas” on which to focus the course. For example, the Algebra team focused on algebraic structure and properties of the concept of a group, while the Data & Chance team centered their activities on the exploration of ideas of central tendency and variation using statistics and data analysis software packages. The content in all of the courses was addressed through deep investigation of the mathematics of tasks that had been selected and adapted from resources for K-12 mathematics classrooms. In addition to mathematics content, the courses were designed with specific attention to socio-mathematical norms, issues of status differences among learners, and the selection and implementation of group-worthy tasks for group work. The faculty attended sessions grounded in the work of Elizabeth Cohen on strategies for working with heterogeneous groups of learners (Cohen, 1994; Cohen et al, 1999) which was central to the OMLI design and implementation. Institute faculty modeled these strategies in the Institute classrooms and made their moves as transparent as possible, so that the teachers would be able to grapple with these strategies during the Institute and plan for implementation in their own classrooms. The Data & Chance course also modeled uses of technology in instruction using Tinkerplots. Generalization and justification were emphasized as mathematical ways of learning and knowing, and institute faculty conducted classroom discussions that intentionally modeled pushing for generalization and justification

Pictures in Your Mind: Using Interactive Gesture-Controlled Reliefs to Explore Art

Tactile reliefs offer many benefits over the more classic raised line drawings or tactile diagrams, as depth, 3D shape, and surface textures are directly perceivable. Although often created for blind and visually impaired (BVI) people, a wider range of people may benefit from such multimodal material. However, some reliefs are still difficult to understand without proper guidance or accompanying verbal descriptions, hindering autonomous exploration. In this work, we present a gesture-controlled interactive audio guide (IAG) based on recent low-cost depth cameras that can be operated directly with the hands on relief surfaces during tactile exploration. The interactively explorable, location-dependent verbal and captioned descriptions promise rapid tactile accessibility to 2.5D spatial information in a home or education setting, to online resources, or as a kiosk installation at public places. We present a working prototype, discuss design decisions, and present the results of two evaluation studies: the first with 13 BVI test users and the second follow-up study with 14 test users across a wide range of people with differences and difficulties associated with perception, memory, cognition, and communication. The participant-led research method of this latter study prompted new, significant and innovative developments