Being There and Not Being There: Historiography and the Digital Arts

Histories of the digital arts have their own distinctive concerns. These interests also deserve to be compared to more general historiographical discussions of history writing where there have been fierce debates about empirical analysis and theoretical developments allied to postmodern linguistic theory. Through this comparison, the ways in which history can be a creative process will be examined

Virtual Ethnography: The Post Possibilities of Not Being There

The purpose of this paper is methodological. It serves as a defense of virtual ethnography as a method, not only well suited to postpositivist research, but as a tool to further interrogate the tenuous truth that all research produces. To accomplish this, virtual ethnography is situated within the history of qualitative inquiry and then examined in terms of data collection, analysis, and the types of productive challenges virtuality presents. The paper concludes by considering the use of virtual ethnography in education, particularly in the field of educational technology

The best defence is not being there : avoidance of larger carnivores is not driven by risk intensity

ACKNLOWDGEMENTS We would like to thank the Cairngorms Connect, Forestry and Land Scotland, Wildland.Ltd, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and NatureScot for providing access to the study sites, and their staff who supported our work. We would like to thank Thomas MacDonell and Wildland.Ltd in particular for their in-kind contributions and continued support. Comments by two anonymous reviewers and the journal’s associate editor contributed to improve this article. The study was funded by Forestry and Land Scotland, the School of Biological Sciences (University of Aberdeen) and Wildland.Ltd.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Narrowed Domain of Disagreement for Well-Being Policy

in recent years, policy makers have shown increasing interest in implementing policies aimed at promoting individual well-being. But how should policy makers choose their well-being policies? a seemingly reasonable first step is to settle on an agreed-upon definition of well-being. yet there currently is significant disagreement on how well-being ought to be characterized, and agreement on the correct view of well-being does not appear to be forthcoming. Nevertheless, i argue in this paper that there are several reasons to think that the domain of well-being in the public policy context is narrower than that of well-being in general, which makes agreement on how to understand well-being in the public policy context more likely

Testing the Gender Role-Perception Theory: A Proposed Explanation for the Lack of Maternity Leave Policy in the United States

The United States is the only industrialized country in the world to not have a federally mandated paid maternity leave. While there is an obvious lack of maternity leave policy in the United States, there is not adequate explanation of this lack. There are some current theories used to explain this problem, such as Hofstede’s theory of individualism, and historical influence, but they are not able to fully explain why there is not maternity policy in the United States. A new proposed theory, the Gender Role-Perception Theory combines gender roles in the United States and attitudes/perceptions towards working mothers to explain how society’s negative views of working mothers who abandon their traditional gender roles leads to the unavailability of maternity policy. Results indicated that while the Gender Role-Perception Theory did not predict attitudes towards a federally mandated maternity leave in general, it did predict attitudes towards paid federally mandated maternity leave. Additional findings included males being more supportive of maternity leave than females, and a liberal political affiliation being significantly correlated with attitudes towards a federally mandated maternity leave

Being there yet not there : why don't embodied responses to literary texts jar with one another?

Language can stimulate simulations of perception. But it is not yet clear how sequences of such perceptions are experienced as integrated, for example in response to sustained discourse, such as literary texts. Why is it that a succession of embodied representations which would be impossible online is not experienced as incoherent? One possibility is that embodied responses to language are fleeting and detached from a fuller embodied context; these need not be integrated because they do not depend or relate to one another as they would in perception. Yet it is precisely the potential for embodied representations to linger and connect with one another which underlies at least some embodied theories of mental imagery, narrative and metaphor. So they must be integrated at some level. One possibility is that readers anchor their embodied representations in a notional human body, one endowed with superhuman powers, such as omniscience. But this account, I suggest, relies on implausible post hoc explanations. A second possibility is that the integration of perceptual simulations offline need be no more problematic than the integration of gappy and incomplete perceptual cues online. But online cues can be integrated through grounding in specific points in time and space; this is not the case with representations stimulated by language. Drawing on sensorimotor theories of perception, I propose that perceptual simulations can be integrated through patterns generated by the sustained experience of language itself, as though language were an additional modalit

Existence versus Exploitation: The Opacity of Backbones and Backdoors Under a Weak Assumption

Backdoors and backbones of Boolean formulas are hidden structural properties. A natural goal, already in part realized, is that solver algorithms seek to obtain substantially better performance by exploiting these structures. However, the present paper is not intended to improve the performance of SAT solvers, but rather is a cautionary paper. In particular, the theme of this paper is that there is a potential chasm between the existence of such structures in the Boolean formula and being able to effectively exploit them. This does not mean that these structures are not useful to solvers. It does mean that one must be very careful not to assume that it is computationally easy to go from the existence of a structure to being able to get one's hands on it and/or being able to exploit the structure. For example, in this paper we show that, under the assumption that P $\neq$ NP, there are easily recognizable families of Boolean formulas with strong backdoors that are easy to find, yet for which it is hard (in fact, NP-complete) to determine whether the formulas are satisfiable. We also show that, also under the assumption P $\neq$ NP, there are easily recognizable sets of Boolean formulas for which it is hard (in fact, NP-complete) to determine whether they have a large backbone

Program Verification in the presence of complex numbers, functions with branch cuts etc

In considering the reliability of numerical programs, it is normal to "limit our study to the semantics dealing with numerical precision" (Martel, 2005). On the other hand, there is a great deal of work on the reliability of programs that essentially ignores the numerics. The thesis of this paper is that there is a class of problems that fall between these two, which could be described as "does the low-level arithmetic implement the high-level mathematics". Many of these problems arise because mathematics, particularly the mathematics of the complex numbers, is more difficult than expected: for example the complex function log is not continuous, writing down a program to compute an inverse function is more complicated than just solving an equation, and many algebraic simplification rules are not universally valid. The good news is that these problems are theoretically capable of being solved, and are practically close to being solved, but not yet solved, in several real-world examples. However, there is still a long way to go before implementations match the theoretical possibilities

Child Well-being in the Pacific Rim

This study extends previous efforts to compare the well-being of children using multi-dimensional indicators derived from sample survey and administrative series to thirteen countries in the Pacific Rim. The framework for the analysis of child well-being is to organise 46 indicators into 21 components and organise the components into 6 domains: material situation, health, education, subjective well-being, living environment, as well as risk and safety. Overall, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan have the highest child well-being and Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines the lowest. However, there are substantial variations between the domains. Japan and Korea perform best on the material well-being of children and also do well on health and education but they have the lowest subjective well-being among their children by some margin. There is a relationship between child well-being and GDP per capita but children in China have higher well-being than you would expect given their GDP and children in Australia have lower well-being. The analysis is constrained by missing data particularly that the Health Behaviour of School-Aged Children Survey is not undertaken in any of these countries