Meeting and Minding: early interactions and learning who we are

The works included here represent the last 10 years of a lifelong enquiry into the role of playfulness in communication, intersubjectivity and the co-construction of identity. From a focus on the attentive playfulness of very early interactions I have gone on to explore how relaxed, social communication facilitates the meeting of minds and how minding, the continuing sharing, negotiation and recalibration of attitudes and meanings, allows us to negotiate the dynamic tensions inherent in our similarities and differences. My work offers a perspective on belonging and performance that can inform our efforts to support infants’ participation in the social process of minding. I have shown how infants’ sensitivity to being ‘liked’ fuels a ‘virtuous spiral’ of communication, as the pleasure of playful interaction builds familiarity which then allows nuances of attitudes to be read from differences in how routine behaviours are performed. I have extended this understanding of ‘liking’ to explore how communication between adults can also be enriched and deepened when we have opportunities to meet in ways that allow us to get to know each other beyond the superficial exchanging of words and ideas. My work is informed by two very different epistemological frames: developmental psychology (specifically the growing interest in work that adopts a ‘second person perspective’) and cultural historical theory (specifically Vygotsky’s late writing on perezhivanie, the social situation of development, sense and meaning). Engaging with these different ways of seeing how infants are helped to fit in and to stand out has informed my understanding that the development of identity is not the ‘walling off’ of a private self so much as the internalisation of shared patterns of discourse. Increasing familiarity with the richly varied regularities of interactions enables us to feel ‘at home’ in a widening range of social situations. When we are able to recognise the significance of the nuances of individual performances, we are able to meet with other minds and also to notice our own attitudes. Our understanding of early interactions is framed by cultural assumptions about a dialectical opposition between childhood and adulthood, between the disruptive, unconstrained creativity of difference and the reassuring regularity of familiar ways of thinking and behaving. A focus on the flow of minding allows us to see this tension not as a problem but as a potential source of energy. Minding depends both on sameness, or familiarity with what people can be expected to do, and on the constant refraction and recalibration of this common understanding (Vygotsky’s znachenie or ‘meaning’) through the unique associations and filters of individual interpretations (smysl or ‘sense’) and performances. These works represent a series of stages in the development of my contribution to the flow of minding about how we help very young children to join in; to become like us but also to change what we are like. The next stage will be an exploration of how Vygotsky’s late works and González Rey’s model of subjective sense and subjective configurations can inform our understanding of performance and (inter)subjectivity

Towards Generalist Robots through Visual World Modeling

Moving from narrow robots specializing in specific tasks to generalist robots excelling in multiple tasks in various environmental conditions is the future of next-generation robotics. The key to generalist robots is the ability to learn world models that are reusable, generalizable, and adaptable. Having a general understanding of how the physical world works will enable robots to acquire transferable knowledge across different tasks, predict possible outcomes of future actions before execution, and constantly update their knowledge through continual interactions. While the majority of robot learning frameworks tend to mix task-related and task-agnostic components altogether throughout the learning process, these two components are often not intertwined when one of them is changed. For example, a task-agnostic component such as the computational model of the robot body remains the same even under different task settings, while a task-related component such as the dynamics of a moving object remains the same for different embodiments. This thesis studies the key steps towards building generalist robots by decomposing the world modeling problem into task-agnostic and task-related elements: (1) robot self-modeling; (2) robot modeling other agents; and (3) robot modeling the physical environment. This framework has produced powerful and efficient learning-based robotic systems for a variety of tasks and physical embodiments, such as computational models of physical robots that can be reused and adapted to numerous task objectives and changing environments, behavior modeling frameworks for complex multi-robot applications, and dynamical system understanding algorithms to distill compact physics knowledge from high-dimensional and multi-modal sensory data. The approach in this thesis could help catalyze the understanding, prediction, and control of increasingly complex systems

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE : WILL MODERATE THE EFFECT ACCOUNTING CONSEVATISMTOWARD EQUITY VALUATION

This study aimed to examine the effect of conservatism on equity valuation with corporate governance variable as moderating variable.The study was conducted on 365 manufacturing companies that meet the criteria of observations in 2011 to 2015. The variables used in this research is accounting consevatism as independent variables, corporate governance as moderating variable and equity valuastion as dependen variable. The board of directors and manajerial ownership in this article as a proxy of corporate governance. Studies show conservatism affect the equity valuation. The higher the companies does not affect the management to apply accounting conservatism. governanc

EBook proceedings of the ESERA 2011 conference : science learning and citizenship

This ebook contains fourteen parts according to the strands of the ESERA 2011 conference. Each part is co-edited by one or two persons, most of them were strand chairs. All papers in this ebook correspond to accepted communications during the ESERA conference that were reviewed by two referees. Moreover the co-editors carried out a global reviewing of the papers.ESERA - European Science Education Research Associatio