Framework for Studying Spatially Ordered Treemaps

We propose a comprehensive research framework to empirically investigate complex visual inference tasks, support mechanisms (animated transition using morphing or vector overlay), and how spatial ability affects people’s learning and knowledge construction process from Spatially Ordered Treemaps (SOTs) as compared to conventional choropleth maps. This effort is inspired by the call of the new International Cartographic Association commission on Cognitive Visualization (CogVis), which proposes “developing a sound theoretical framework based upon cognition and perception discipline” (Fabrikant, 2011). The framework aims to explore SOTs in the context of both ‘in-vitro’ and ‘in-vivo’ settings. This study is grounded in cartography but also conforms to experimental design standards in per-ception and cognitive sciences

The coupling of action and perception in musical meaning formation

The embodied perspective on music cognition has stressed the central role of the body and body move- ments in musical meaning formation processes. In the present study, we investigate by means of a behavioral experiment how free body movements in response to music (i.e., action) can be linked to specific linguistic, metaphorical descriptions people use to describe the expressive qualities they perceive in the music (i.e., per- ception). We introduce a dimensional model based on the Effort/Shape theory of Laban in order to target musical expressivity from an embodied perspective. Also, we investigate whether a coupling between action and perception is dependent on the musical background of the participants (i.e., trained versus untrained). The results show that the physical appearance of the free body movements that participants perform in response to music are reliably linked to the linguistic descriptions of musical expressiveness in terms of the underlying quality. Moreover, this result is found to be independent of the participants’ musical background

The sexual and theological ethics of gay marriage in France: a dialectic between autonomy and universalism

The debate on gay marriage has gathered pace globally and particularly in France. Here, the secularization of marriage as an ‘acte laïque’ has furthered progress towards a political and juridic recognition of gay marriage. The Catholic church (Vatican) has opposed this development in its re-enforcement of Catholic sexual ethics and the distinction it draws between secular and religious definitions of marriage. Complicating this distinction is the per-ception of a trend towards post-secularism in France where religion is making a return to democratic debates on citizenship and gender, and raising concerns over the status of the civility of the marriage act. The focus of this article is to look at gay marriage from the perspective of con-temporary ethical and theological thinking. Specifically, I aim to examine alternative discourses that open up new ways of configuring gay marriage through an examination of concepts of integrity, responsibility and asceti-cism, and critically the ethical relationship between autonomy and norms

Voice Conversion Based on Cross-Domain Features Using Variational Auto Encoders

An effective approach to non-parallel voice conversion (VC) is to utilize deep neural networks (DNNs), specifically variational auto encoders (VAEs), to model the latent structure of speech in an unsupervised manner. A previous study has confirmed the ef- fectiveness of VAE using the STRAIGHT spectra for VC. How- ever, VAE using other types of spectral features such as mel- cepstral coefficients (MCCs), which are related to human per- ception and have been widely used in VC, have not been prop- erly investigated. Instead of using one specific type of spectral feature, it is expected that VAE may benefit from using multi- ple types of spectral features simultaneously, thereby improving the capability of VAE for VC. To this end, we propose a novel VAE framework (called cross-domain VAE, CDVAE) for VC. Specifically, the proposed framework utilizes both STRAIGHT spectra and MCCs by explicitly regularizing multiple objectives in order to constrain the behavior of the learned encoder and de- coder. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CD- VAE framework outperforms the conventional VAE framework in terms of subjective tests.Comment: Accepted to ISCSLP 201

Intrepretative Phenomenological Analysis: Perception of Health Risk of Smoking and Smoking Cessation Among Pharmacy Students

Smokers can experience addiction that impedes their efforts to quit smoking. Smokers’ per-ception and view of quitting smoking are worthy input for health practitioners to promote smoking cessation programs. The purpose of this study was to explore the perception of health risks of smoking and smoking cessation. The method was based on the phenomenological per-spective using interpretative phenomenological analysis involving pharmacy students. The study was conducted over two years using snowball-purposive sampling. Participants were smokers who started smoking when they were 18 years old and had previously tried to quit smoking. Results showed that participants started smoking because of curiosity and influences from environments. All participants understood the risks of smoking, and had tried to quit smoking because smoking affected their health and economical status. Therefore, health pro-grams need to focus on smokers’ behavior and barriers to quitting smoking since those who have good knowledge on the risks of smoking can experience difficulty in quitting smoking

Hallucination as Mental Imagery

Hallucination is a big deal in contemporary philosophy of perception. The main reason for this is that the way hallucination is treated marks an important stance in one of the most hotly contested debates in this subdiscipline: the debate between 'relationalists' and 'representationalists'. I argue that if we take hallucinations to be a form of mental imagery, then we have a very straightforward way of arguing against disjunctivism: if hallucination is a form of mental imagery and if mental imagery and perception have some substantive common denominator, then a fortiori, perception and hallucination will also have a substantive common denominator

When do Words Matter? Understanding the Impact of Lexical Choice on Audience Perception using Individual Treatment Effect Estimation

Studies across many disciplines have shown that lexical choice can affect audience perception. For example, how users describe themselves in a social media profile can affect their perceived socio-economic status. However, we lack general methods for estimating the causal effect of lexical choice on the perception of a specific sentence. While randomized controlled trials may provide good estimates, they do not scale to the potentially millions of comparisons necessary to consider all lexical choices. Instead, in this paper, we first offer two classes of methods to estimate the effect on perception of changing one word to another in a given sentence. The first class of algorithms builds upon quasi-experimental designs to estimate individual treatment effects from observational data. The second class treats treatment effect estimation as a classification problem. We conduct experiments with three data sources (Yelp, Twitter, and Airbnb), finding that the algorithmic estimates align well with those produced by randomized-control trials. Additionally, we find that it is possible to transfer treatment effect classifiers across domains and still maintain high accuracy.Comment: AAAI_201

Models of preconception care implementation in selected countries.

Globally, maternal and child health faces diverse challenges depending on the status of the development of the country. Some countries have introduced or explored preconception care for various reasons. Falling birth rates and increasing knowledge about risk factors for adverse pregnancy outcomes led to the introduction of preconception care in Hong Kong in 1998, and South Korea in 2004. In Hong Kong, comprehensive preconception care including laboratory tests are provided to over 4000 women each year at a cost of $75 per person. In Korea, about 60$12) for preconception health care services. These case studies illustrate programmatic feasibility of preconception care services to address maternal and child health and other public health challenges in developed and emerging economies

Philosophy of perception – The new wave

Overview of recent work in philosophy of perceptio

Variation in the perception of an L2 contrast : a combined phonetic and phonological account

The present study argues that variation across listeners in the perception of a non-native contrast is due to two factors: the listener-specic weighting of auditory dimensions and the listener-specic construction of new segmental representations. The interaction of both factors is shown to take place in the perception grammar, which can be modelled within an OT framework. These points are illustrated with the acquisition of the Dutch three-member labiodental contrast [V v f] by German learners of Dutch, focussing on four types of learners from the perception study by Hamann and Sennema (2005a)