Nobody Wants to Eat Them Alive:” Ethical Dilemmas and Dual Media Narratives on Domestic Rabbits as Pets and Commodity

Using semiotic analysis, this study explores changes occurring in the societal perception of rabbits as farm animals as juxtaposed to their increasing popularity as domestic companions. This study is based on a preliminary hypothesis that rabbits are increasingly perceived and portrayed in media as domestic companion animals similar to cats and guinea pigs, which challenges a parallel narrative that views rabbits as commodities for their meat and fur. Operating within a theoretical framework that considers news media as both socially constructed reality and recorded history, the study examines the dynamics of change in numbers of coded news narratives drawn as a 1000-piece convenience sample from a database of news stories published worldwide between 1990 and 2011

'The Work of Teacher Education' : Final Research Report

Partnership teacher education – in which schools work with universities and colleges to train teachers – works and there is abundant existing evidence in support of this fact. But our small-scale study across England and Scotland shows that it is the higher education tutor who seems to make it work, often at the cost of research-informed teaching and research. The most time-intensive activity for the higher education tutors in our sample was maintaining relationships with schools and between schools and individual trainee teachers. The need to maintain relationships to such a degree is caused in part by the creation of a marketplace of ‘providers’ of teacher education who compete for funding on the basis of inspection and quality assurance data and also by the very early school placements that characterise the English model of initial teacher education in comparison to other European models such as that of Finland

Posthum/an/ous: Identity, Imagination, and the Internet

The Furry, Otherkin, and Otakukin are Internet fan subcultures whose members personally identify with non-human beings, such as animals, creatures of fantasy, or cartoon characters. I analyze several different forms of expression that the fandoms utilize to define themselves against the human world. These are generally narrative in execution, and the conglomeration of these texts provides the communities with a concrete ontology. Through the implementation of fiction and narrative, the fandoms are able to create and sustain complex fictional personas in complex fictional worlds, and thereby create a “real” subculture in physical reality, based entirely off of fiction. Through the use of the mutability of Internet performance and presentation of self-hood, the groups are able to present themselves as possessing the traits of previous, non-human lives; on the Internet, the members are post-human. The members no longer need to suffer through the society of humans around them: they can reclaim their past lives and live out a posthum/an/ous existence

Spartan Daily October 30, 2012

Volume 139, Issue 33https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1349/thumbnail.jp

Plush Love: Animal Anthropomorphism in Contemporary Art

Abstract Plush Love: Animal Anthropomorphism in Contemporary Art Isa Tousignant In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben writes: “the relation between man and animal marks the boundary of an essential domain, in which historical inquiry must necessarily confront that fringe of ultrahistory which cannot be reached without making recourse to first philosophy.” (1) With this thesis I suggest an investigation of the historical and philosophical contexts of the human/nonhuman animal relationship through the lens of fursuiting and a body of contemporary visual art production that finds inspiration within that subject. Fursuiting is a practice undertaken by members of a subculture called the “furry fandom,” which centres on the appreciation of anthropomorphized animal characters that find their origins in the traditions of comics and animation. In addition to engaging in their own visual culture production featuring hybrid “humanimal” creatures, members of the furry fandom who don fursuits choose to dress up in full-body artificial fur costumes and perform in characters they feel express alternate identities. This thesis aims at uncovering that phenomenon, but focuses mainly on the identification and analysis of a secondary body of visual production that has resulted from the existence of fursuiting: the work produced by contemporary Canadian and American visual artists that uses fursuiting as a theme. This body of work has never been examined as a whole. (1) Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 21

Stirrings: Interactive tableware

The goal of this thesis project was to create an object or set of objects that would serve as an interaction point to foster reciprocal learning and perceptual exchange between children and adults. The underlying investigation dealt with the notion that the child\u27s point of view can be quite insightful, but it is often forgotten or overlooked and replaced by a more `reasonable\u27 and rational perspective as we age. The project\u27s final form serves not only as a whimsical, functional set of dishes, but also as a language of anthropomorphic forms

A Cruel nature

Discusses the artist\u27s animated film

Neural Mechanisms for Information Compression by Multiple Alignment, Unification and Search

This article describes how an abstract framework for perception and cognition may be realised in terms of neural mechanisms and neural processing. This framework — called information compression by multiple alignment, unification and search (ICMAUS) — has been developed in previous research as a generalized model of any system for processing information, either natural or artificial. It has a range of applications including the analysis and production of natural language, unsupervised inductive learning, recognition of objects and patterns, probabilistic reasoning, and others. The proposals in this article may be seen as an extension and development of Hebb’s (1949) concept of a ‘cell assembly’. The article describes how the concept of ‘pattern’ in the ICMAUS framework may be mapped onto a version of the cell assembly concept and the way in which neural mechanisms may achieve the effect of ‘multiple alignment’ in the ICMAUS framework. By contrast with the Hebbian concept of a cell assembly, it is proposed here that any one neuron can belong in one assembly and only one assembly. A key feature of present proposals, which is not part of the Hebbian concept, is that any cell assembly may contain ‘references’ or ‘codes’ that serve to identify one or more other cell assemblies. This mechanism allows information to be stored in a compressed form, it provides a robust mechanism by which assemblies may be connected to form hierarchies and other kinds of structure, it means that assemblies can express abstract concepts, and it provides solutions to some of the other problems associated with cell assemblies. Drawing on insights derived from the ICMAUS framework, the article also describes how learning may be achieved with neural mechanisms. This concept of learning is significantly different from the Hebbian concept and appears to provide a better account of what we know about human learning