1,180 research outputs found

    Technology and Contemporary Classical Music: Methodologies in Practice-Based Research

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    This position paper provides a distillation of the NCRM Innovation Forum, ‘Technology and Contemporary Classical Music: Methodologies in Creative Practice Research’, hosted by Cyborg Soloists in June 2023. It features contributions from a variety of creative practitioner-researchers to debate the current state and future of technologically focused, practice-based research in contemporary classical music. The position paper is purposefully polyphonic and pluralistic. By collating a range of perspectives, experiences and expertise, the paper seeks to provoke and delineate a space for further questioning, inquiry, and response. The paper will be of interest to those working within creative practice research, particularly in relation to music, music technologists and those interested in research methodologies more broadly

    I like therefore I can, and I can therefore I like: the role of self-efficacy and affect in active inference of allostasis

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    Active inference (AIF) is a theory of the behavior of information-processing open dynamic systems. It describes them as generative models (GM) generating inferences on the causes of sensory input they receive from their environment. Based on these inferences, GMs generate predictions about sensory input. The discrepancy between a prediction and the actual input results in prediction error. GMs then execute action policies predicted to minimize the prediction error. The free-energy principle provides a rationale for AIF by stipulating that information-processing open systems must constantly minimize their free energy (through suppressing the cumulative prediction error) to avoid decay. The theory of homeostasis and allostasis has a similar logic. Homeostatic set points are expectations of living organisms. Discrepancies between set points and actual states generate stress. For optimal functioning, organisms avoid stress by preserving homeostasis. Theories of AIF and homeostasis have recently converged, with AIF providing a formal account for homeo- and allostasis. In this paper, we present bacterial chemotaxis as molecular AIF, where mutual constraints by extero- and interoception play an essential role in controlling bacterial behavior supporting homeostasis. Extending this insight to the brain, we propose a conceptual model of the brain homeostatic GM, in which we suggest partition of the brain GM into cognitive and physiological homeostatic GMs. We outline their mutual regulation as well as their integration based on the free-energy principle. From this analysis, affect and self-efficacy emerge as the main regulators of the cognitive homeostatic GM. We suggest fatigue and depression as target neurocognitive phenomena for studying the neural mechanisms of such regulation

    Energy Research Governance in the European Union

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    A major share of Europe’s knowledge about its incumbent energy cultures is pre-defined in closed spaces of negotiations. One such space are the negotiations surrounding the European Union´s research and innovation Framework Programmes, which are the focus of this thesis. With these programmes, the European Union not only funds energy research across Europe, but likewise produces guiding energy research narratives that act beyond their scope into the research agendas of its Member States. Energy research governance, considered as the wider scope surrounding the Framework Programmes negotiations in the European Union, takes place in hybrid spaces, were science and politics meet and are influencing each other, inheriting limiting, and enabling effects on both sides. This study aims to determine how these spaces are organised, who is participating under which conditions, and how decisions on energy research agendas and research funding conditions are taken. Therefore, this thesis enfolds the emergence history of energy policy, research policy and the governance of its overlap, namely energy research. It then examines in depth the negotiations that took place during the reform process of the Frame-work Programmes between its seventh and eighth repetition. The perspective of scientific, political and hybrid social worlds is taken to draw an encompassing picture of the situation of energy research governance of the European Union. The methodological background of this study is a situational analysis, which was conducted based on narrative expert interviews, participant observations and documents, drawing on sensitizing concepts from the fields of Science and Technology Studies, sociology, and political sciences. The investigated hybrid spaces revealed the importance of historical rooted (energy) re-search narratives, that are combined with a set of standards and standardized governance practices making the Framework Programmes a robust governance tool, despite changing political climates. Moreover, the role of so far largely overlooked boundary social worlds became apparent. Whereas strategies of narrative governance were found to be a structuring element across all social worlds and hybrid spaces. The newly developed continuum of implicatedness disclosed movements of visibility and agency among the participating negotiators of energy research governance. These results have in common that they bear diverse forms of ambivalences a collective, an individual or a group of collectives is confronted with. The author concludes that these the ambivalences must be met with strategies of disclosure and debate, rather than with vain attempts to resolve irresolvable contradictions

    Dialogues concerning Natural Politics: A Modern Philosophical Dialogue about Policymaker Ignorance

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    How should we conceive of policymakers for the purposes of political analysis? In particular, if we wish to explain and predict political decisions and their consequences, if we wish to ensure that political action is as effective as it can be, how should we think of policymakers? Should we think of them as they are commonly conceived in traditional political analysis, i.e., as uniquely knowledgeable and as either altruistic (i.e., as motivated to realize goals associated with their constituents’ interests) or knavish (i.e., as motivated to realize goals associated with their own personal interests), or should we treat them as possibly ignorant with respect to their political tasks? It is always an open question whether policymakers possess the knowledge required to realize some policy objective. It should never be assumed a priori that policymaker knowledge is adequate to the policy tasks with which policymakers are charged. Politicians need knowledge concerning the causes of social phenomena adequate to control events sufficiently well to ensure the success of their policies. No argument has ever been offered for the standard, if only implicit, assumption that policymakers, somehow automatically, possess this knowledge. In many contexts, there is no reason to believe that policymakers possess or can acquire this knowledge. Indeed, a bit of reflection reveals how unlikely it is that and how rare the circumstances must be in which policymakers meet this condition, which political philosophers, theorists, economists, and other political thinkers have traditionally assumed as a matter of course. The main purpose of the book is to encourage a conversation among scholars and students of political inquiry (in philosophy and political theory, political science, economics and political economy) concerning the best way to conceive of policymakers for the purposes of such inquiry. The book defends an alternative, more realistic, method of political analysis. The book argues against the false assumption that policymakers are epistemically privileged. The book presents and defends the alternative assumption that, with respect to the knowledge required to discharge their political tasks effectively, policymakers are at least as ignorant as constituents. The book further argues that whether policymakers are altruistic or knavish is, in the first instance, a function of the nature and extent of their ignorance with regard to constituent-minded policy goals. Policymakers who possess the knowledge required to be effectively altruistic are more likely to be altruistic, other things the same, than policymakers who are ignorant of the knowledge that successful altruism requires. This being said, my goal is more to leave readers thinking about and inclined to debate these profound issues than to prescribe a particular methodological conclusion (even less to advocate a particular political conclusion). The book is a heuristic for spurring further conversation. It makes of readers fellow interlocutors partnered with the characters (and the author!) of the dialogue. The vehicle for this analysis is a conversation between four friends, philosophy graduate students, with different interests, different levels and kinds of experience, and different political preferences. The four friends consider how politicians should be conceived for the purposes of analyzing political decision-making and its consequences. In his famous Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, David Hume concluded that the assumption of an all-knowing and all-powerful God was neither necessary nor sufficient to explain natural phenomena. Dialogues concerning Natural Politics does for social science what Hume did for natural science. Both books undermine the assumption that some epistemically privileged being – God in the case of natural phenomena and God-like politicians in the case of social phenomena – must be invoked to explain relevant phenomena

    Computer Vision and Architectural History at Eye Level:Mixed Methods for Linking Research in the Humanities and in Information Technology

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    Information on the history of architecture is embedded in our daily surroundings, in vernacular and heritage buildings and in physical objects, photographs and plans. Historians study these tangible and intangible artefacts and the communities that built and used them. Thus valuableinsights are gained into the past and the present as they also provide a foundation for designing the future. Given that our understanding of the past is limited by the inadequate availability of data, the article demonstrates that advanced computer tools can help gain more and well-linked data from the past. Computer vision can make a decisive contribution to the identification of image content in historical photographs. This application is particularly interesting for architectural history, where visual sources play an essential role in understanding the built environment of the past, yet lack of reliable metadata often hinders the use of materials. The automated recognition contributes to making a variety of image sources usable forresearch.<br/

    Family Talk: Deontic Rights and Initiating Interaction in Domestic Space

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    This thesis investigates the initiation of talk-in-interaction within domestic space. Using the research methods of Conversation Analysis (CA), I examine the practices family members use to initiate social interaction and explore the claims to, and displays of, entitlement and authority within these sequences of action. Using naturally occurring data recorded over a span of 100 days for the 2008 fly-on-the-wall documentary television series, The Family, I examine the production of summonses, greetings, and the deployment of interrogatives to implement suggestions and complaints, and their responses. This analysis focusses on both the sequential and social implications of initiating sequences of talk-in-interaction, specifically examining actions produced in and around doorway thresholds within the home, for instance, a summons deployed at a closed bedroom door, or a greeting produced after coming home or coming into a room. Through the use of linguistic and bodily resources, parties construct their turns-at-talk as more or less deontically entitled: firstly, through directing their own or another’s current and future actions; and secondly, in the determination of what is or is not appropriate regarding current or previous (in)actions. Furthermore, through the initiating actions they implement and the deontic entitlements they claim, parties negotiate and display their orientations to theirs and their co-participant’s claimed identity and social roles, as well as manage their relationships with one another. All together, this study shows how deontic claims to authority and entitlement are displayed and managed by interlocutors in initiating sequences, and how the interplay of the physical space with verbal and embodied resources shapes their subsequent trajectory

    Participation for health equity: a comparison of citizens’ juries and health impact assessment

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    Despite research demonstrating that the social determinants of health are the primary cause of health inequities, policy efforts in high-income countries have largely failed to produce more equitable health outcomes. Recent initiatives have aimed to create ‘healthier’ policies by incorporating public perspectives into their design, and scholarship has focused on improving participatory technologies. Yet how participation can improve health equity through policymaking for the social determinants of health remains unclear. The thesis addresses this gap by examining how two examples of participatory technologies implemented in Australia and the UK -- citizens’ juries and health impact assessment -- affected health equity. I found that the intersection between context, positionality and process generated a range of direct and distal outcomes for health equity. I conducted a qualitative comparative analysis of four case studies of participatory processes, including interviews and document analysis. In doing so, I examine how processes were contextually designed and delivered, personally experienced, and how their adaptive and interpretive nature produced outcomes relevant to health equity. Though participatory technologies were often designed and promoted as uniform tools, the context in which they were employed profoundly affected their implementation. Processes were embedded within different participatory ecologies -- histories, spaces and practices – that shaped their aims, design and delivery. Similarly, individual characteristics of participants (especially their positionality) affected how they interpreted the process: what the process could achieve and how they should participate. In turn, participants’ experiences resulted from (in)congruence between their expectations and outcomes. The participatory experience led to various personal outcomes, including civic skills, social capital and empowerment, which can benefit health equity. ‘Having a say’ was often described as the vital ingredient for why participants experienced empowerment. Yet what mattered most for generating this outcome was whether or not participants ‘felt heard.’ This dialogic process between participants ‘voicing’ and decision-makers ‘listening’ was core to the experience of empowerment. The processes also led to governance outcomes. The level of impact on the intended decision ranged, with some processes creating direct effects, but more commonly, by being situated in participatory ecologies, the processes affected change through non-linear or diffuse channels. Though public participation is often structured to achieve a technocratic goal, the processes accomplished other participatory, epistemic and institutional aims. These non-technocratic outcomes, combined with decision-making changes, could improve governance for the social determinants of health. Power acted as a mechanism that underpinned other elements of the processes. Public health theories have begun to focus on the role of power as a fundamental determinant of health inequities, and this thesis contributes to this emerging body of evidence by examining how instrumental, structural and discursive forms of power were enacted and influenced how processes were implemented, experienced, and what outcomes they produced. By examining not just what outcomes occurred but how they arose, this research develops a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms that generate outcomes. This shifts evidence from ‘perfecting the form’ toward building an understanding of how to utilise participatory approaches within specific contexts to achieve health equity benefits. The thesis highlights the need for greater consideration of context, positionality and variability of experiences in public participation. If participatory processes seek to achieve specific outcomes (healthy public policy and empowerment) that improve health equity, then consideration must be given to the mechanisms that can produce these effects

    Twilight of the American State

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    The sudden emergence of the Trump nation surprised nearly everyone, including journalists, pundits, political consultants, and academics. When Trump won in 2016, his ascendancy was widely viewed as a fluke. Yet time showed it was instead the rise of a movement—angry, militant, revanchist, and unabashedly authoritarian. How did this happen? Twilight of the American State offers a sweeping exploration of how law and legal institutions helped prepare the grounds for this rebellious movement. The controversial argument is that, viewed as a legal matter, the American state is not just a liberal democracy, as most Americans believe. Rather, the American state is composed of an uneasy and unstable combination of different versions of the state—liberal democratic, administered, neoliberal, and dissociative. Each of these versions arose through its own law and legal institutions. Each emerged at different times historically. Each was prompted by deficits in the prior versions. Each has survived displacement by succeeding versions. All remain active in the contemporary moment—creating the political-legal dysfunction America confronts today. Pierre Schlag maps out a big picture view of the tribulations of the American state. The book abjures conventional academic frameworks, sets aside prescriptions for quick fixes, dispenses with lamentations about polarization, and bypasses historical celebrations of the American Spirit

    Agree, Disagree, Agree: Spatial Agency Bias in Online Survey Instrument Design

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    Self-administered, online survey and questionnaire instruments are ubiquitous in research. They are highly visual and involve spatial information processing in addition to the cognition involved in response formulation. Despite its wide use, the linguistic focus of survey research is still largely oriented to Eurocolonial and English-speaking contexts. There is evidence that the writing direction of a person's language produces an effect on the processing and execution of spatial tasks. This is referred to as spatial agency bias. For readers of right-to-left (RTL) languages, such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, this spatial agency bias means that we can expect to see an effect in directionally-dependent visuo-spatial or visuo-motor tasks. Online questionnaire and survey instruments are developed for and by left-to-right (LTR) language readers. Given an increasingly diverse, diasporatic global population, it is important to consider how research methods developed within one linguistic context affect data quality when used in more diverse populations. This dissertation takes an experimental approach to explore the relationships between unconscious bias and other effects produced by an interaction between writing system direction and response scale direction in self-administered, online questionnaire instruments. Three experiments attempt to identify any interaction between two independent variables: 1) writing system direction for questionnaire response language) and 2) response scale category order (direction) on three dependent variables: 1) score on scale items, 2) duration of time spent in instrument, and 3) trust in the questionnaire interface. Participants are Arabic or English speakers responding to an instrument presented in one of these two languages. The analysis found no interaction effect between the independent variables on either trust or time on response, but did find a significant interaction effect on mean scale score for horizontal response scale items. This study has implications for multilingual, international, and cross-cultural survey and questionnaire design. This work contributes to efforts to incorporate more diverse populations in research through better understanding how language context affects data collection.Doctor of Philosoph
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