1,589 research outputs found
Piecing Together Performance: Collaborative, Participatory Research-Through-Design for Better Diversity in Games
Digital games are a multi-billion-dollar industry whose production and consumption extend globally. Representation in games is an increasingly important topic. As those who create and consume the medium grow ever more diverse, it is essential that player or user-experience research, usability, and any consideration of how people interface with their technology is exercised through inclusive and intersectional lenses. Previous research has identified how character configuration interfaces preface white-male defaults [39, 40, 67]. This study relies on 1-on-1 play-interviews where diverse participants attempt to create “themselves” in a series of games and on group design activities to explore how participants may envision more inclusive character configuration interface design. Our interview findings describe specific points of tension in the process of creating characters in existing interfaces and the sketches participant-collaborators produced challenge the homogeneity of current interface designs. This project amplifies the perspective of diverse participant-collaborators to provide constructive implications and a series of principles for designing more inclusive character configuration interfaces, which support more diverse stories and gameworlds by reconfiguring the constraints that shape those stories and gameworlds
Conceive and Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives of American Privacy and Reproductive Politics
Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights yet formed perhaps the most crucial legal issue of the second half of the twentieth century. But with the Court’s continuous “refinement” and clarification of the right to privacy, the Court has demonstrated how privacy is a Lyotardian differend which, in dividing the inside from the outside, dismantles the logic of both through deconstruction of the margin. Law-determining rulings protecting this right demonstrate a logical impossibility: the Court has made privacy a “right” in such a way that the conditions for exercising it are subject to state surveillance. To be a subject of the law is to relinquish privacy, and privacy requires that the individual subject him/herself to the law by placing the right to privacy within the public domain. Rules-governed practices are entangled in ways both inextricable and unresolvable with notions of privacy. Legal narratives of the right to privacy, therefore, provide a genealogy of failed supplementation, consistent with an array of cultural narratives reflected in contemporaneous literature, film, drama, and political discourse. The Supreme Court’s continual “refinements” of privacy expose the tenuousness of the authority upon which it is based, with the female body positioned as the site of contradiction upon which narratives of domesticity, sexuality, and subjectivity are made legible
The association between pre-operative pain experience and post-operative pain in patients undergoing elective gastrointestinal surgery: a descriptive-comparative study
Aims: The purpose of the rapid review was to summarize and aggregate information for researchers and clinicians about predisposing factors for post-operative pain in laparoscopic patients and the prevalent management approaches post-operatively. The purpose of the descriptive-comparative study was to explore the associations between previous pain experiences and medication on the intensity of pain post-operatively in patients undergoing elective gastrointestinal surgery, using data collected by the Smart Pain Assessment Tool Based on Internet of Things.
Methods: For the rapid review, the databases of PubMed, Web of Science and Embase were searched. ROBINS-I tool was used to evaluate the quality of non-randomized studies while ROB 2 tool was used for randomized controlled trials. For the descriptive-comparative study, 50 patients after gastrointestinal operations at Turku University hospital were included. The data collection of the study was done by a researcher belonging to Turku University staff at Turku University hospital. The data analysis was done by using descriptive and comparative methods of analysis. Descriptive statistics were used for the presentation and analysis of participants outcomes, diagnoses, procedures, and groupings based on variables related to the experience of pain (e.g., graphical measurement maximal pain levels using the numeric rating scale). Comparative statistics were used for associations and correlations regarding previous pain levels, medications, fear, and expectation of pain on maximal pain levels after gastrointestinal operations at Turku University Hospital.
Results: The result of the rapid review suggest many predisposing factors for post-operative pain are influenced by the psychological profile of the patient. Among these factors are anxiety, fear, depression, expectation of pain, and other factors related to gastrointestinal surgery. Nevertheless, the results of this review also describe acute pre-operative pain, surgical factors, genetics, age, gender, obesity, and previous experiences of pain as relevant predisposing factors to pain following gastrointestinal surgery. Pain care strategies following gastrointestinal surgery include the use of pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions. The literature suggests, non-pharmacological interventions are under-utilized and should be encouraged as an adjunct to pharmacological pain control strategies following elective gastrointestinal surgery.
The results of the descriptive-comparative study somewhat contradict the results of the rapid review. Previous pain experiences or the recollection of preceding painful events were not associated with the administration of supplemental pain medication post-operatively (p = 0.741). Fear related to the upcoming pain following surgery was not associated with the level of invasiveness of the surgery (p = 0.662). In addition, the relationship between expectation of pain (p = 0.698), fear of pain related to the upcoming surgical procedure (p = 0.637) and medication post-operatively (p = .481) on the intensity of maximal post-operative pain was found to be negligible. The results of this study suggest patient expectation as a possible domain of intervention for better pain outcomes post-operatively. The administration of pain medication in the recovery room and the amount of pain medication in the recovery room were significant predictors of maximal post-operative pain (p = .001).
Discussion: The results of the rapid review suggest a high to critical risk of bias in the studies included. The predisposing factors for post-operative pain differed widely across studies, but mainly included psychological factors as factors for post-operative pain. Pain management strategies should include an individualized approach and be implemented before, during and after the operation. For the descriptive-comparative study, there are substantial difficulties in discerning the effect of pain history or experience on post-operative pain using physiological or subjective reporting for conscious individuals due to risk of bias and using a unidimensional approach.
Conclusion: Predisposing factors for post-operative pain should be screened in the pre-operative phase if possible, focusing on addressable factors whereas management of pain care strategies should include careful screening of participants biopsychosocial profile for elective surgery. The descriptive-comparative study suggests a possible, yet minimal benefit for managing patients’ expectation of pain related to the upcoming gastrointestinal surgery. The amount of pain medication in the recovery room is a significant predictor of maximal post-operative pain. Future research should include a larger sample, more variables related to pain and continue with a follow-up.
Keywords: gastrointestinal, post-operative, pain, analgesia, anesthesiaTavoitteet: Katsauksen tarkoituksena oli tiivistää ja koota yhteen tutkijoille ja kliinikoille tietoa laparoskooppisten potilaiden postoperatiiviselle kivulle altistavista tekijöistä ja vallitsevista postoperatiivisista hoitokeinoista. Kuvailevan-vertailevan tutkimuksen tarkoituksena oli tutkia aiempien kipukokemusten ja lääkityksen välisiä yhteyksiä postoperatiivisen kivun voimakkuuteen potilailla, joille tehdään elektiivinen ruoansulatuskanavan leikkaus, käyttäen tietoja, jotka on kerätty esineiden internetiin perustuvalla älykkäällä kivunarviointityökalulla.
Menetelmät: Katsausta varten tehtiin hakuja PubMed-, Web of Science- ja Embase-tietokannoista. ROBINS-I-työkalua käytettiin satunnaistamattomien tutkimusten laadun arviointiin, kun taas satunnaistettujen kontrolloitujen tutkimusten osalta käytettiin ROB 2-työkalua. Kuvailevaan-vertailevaan tutkimukseen otettiin mukaan 50 potilasta Turun yliopistollisessa sairaalassa tehtyjen ruoansulatuskanavan leikkausten jälkeen. Tutkimuksen aineistonkeruun suoritti Turun yliopiston henkilökuntaan kuuluva tutkija Turun yliopistollisessa sairaalassa. Aineiston analysoinnissa käytettiin kuvailevia ja vertailevia analyysimenetelmiä. Kuvailevia tilastoja käytettiin osallistujien tulosten, diagnoosien, toimenpiteiden ja kivun kokemiseen liittyvien muuttujien perusteella tehtyjen ryhmittelyjen esittämiseen ja analysointiin (esim. maksimaalisen kiputason graafinen mittaaminen numeerisella arviointiasteikolla). Vertailevia tilastoja käytettiin yhdistelmiin ja korrelaatioihin, jotka koskivat aiempia kiputiloja, lääkkeitä, pelkoa ja kivun odotusta maksimaalisen kiputason suhteen ruoansulatuskanavan leikkausten jälkeen Turun yliopistollisessa sairaalassa.
Tulokset: Katsauksen tulokset viittaavat siihen, että potilaan psykologinen profiili vaikuttaa moniin leikkauksen jälkeiselle kivulle altistaviin tekijöihin. Näihin tekijöihin kuuluvat ahdistus, pelko, masennus, kivun odotus ja muut ruoansulatuskanavan leikkaukseen liittyvät tekijät. Tämän katsauksen tuloksissa kuvataan kuitenkin myös akuutti preoperatiivinen kipu, kirurgiset tekijät, genetiikka, ikä, sukupuoli, lihavuus ja aiemmat kokemukset kivusta merkityksellisinä altistavina tekijöinä ruoansulatuskanavan leikkauksen jälkeiselle kivulle. Ruoansulatuskanavan leikkauksen jälkeisiin kivunhoitostrategioihin kuuluu farmakologisten ja ei-farmakologisten toimenpiteiden käyttö. Kirjallisuuden mukaan ei-farmakologisia toimenpiteitä käytetään liian vähän, ja niitä olisi edistettävä farmakologisten kivunhoitostrategioiden lisänä elektiivisen ruoansulatuskanavan leikkauksen jälkeen.
Kuvailevan ja vertailevan tutkimuksen tulokset ovat jossain määrin ristiriidassa nopean katsauksen tulosten kanssa. Aiemmat kipukokemukset tai aiempien kivuliaiden tapahtumien muistaminen eivät olleet yhteydessä ylimääräisen kipulääkityksen antamiseen leikkauksen jälkeen (p = 0,741). Leikkauksen jälkeiseen tulevaan kipuun liittyvä pelko ei ollut yhteydessä leikkauksen invasiivisuuteen (p = 0,662). Lisäksi kivun odotuksen (p = 0,698), tulevaan kirurgiseen toimenpiteeseen liittyvän kivun pelon (p = 0,637) ja leikkauksen jälkeisen lääkityksen (p = 0,481) välinen yhteys maksimaalisen leikkauksen jälkeisen kivun voimakkuuteen todettiin merkityksettömäksi. Tämän tutkimuksen tulokset viittaavat siihen, että potilaan odotukset ovat mahdollinen interventioalue, jolla voidaan parantaa leikkauksen jälkeistä kiputilannetta. Kipulääkityksen antaminen heräämössä ja kipulääkityksen määrä heräämössä olivat merkittäviä postoperatiivisen maksimaalisen kivun ennustajia (p = .001).
Pohdinta: Katsauksen tulokset viittaavat siihen, että mukana olleissa tutkimuksissa on suuri tai kriittinen harhan riski. Postoperatiiviselle kivulle altistavat tekijät vaihtelivat suuresti eri tutkimuksissa, mutta niihin sisältyi pääasiassa psykologisia tekijöitä postoperatiivisen kivun tekijöinä. Kivunhoitostrategioihin olisi sisällyttävä yksilöllinen lähestymistapa, ja niitä olisi sovellettava ennen leikkausta, sen aikana ja sen jälkeen. Kuvailevassa ja vertailevassa tutkimuksessa on huomattavia vaikeuksia havaita kipuhistorian tai -kokemuksen vaikutusta leikkauksen jälkeiseen kipuun fysiologisen tai subjektiivisen raportoinnin avulla tietoisten yksilöiden osalta, koska on olemassa harhan riski ja koska käytetään yksiulotteista lähestymistapaa.
Johtopäätökset: Kivunhoitostrategioihin olisi kuuluttava osallistujien biopsykososiaalisen profiilin huolellinen seulonta valintaleikkausta varten. Kuvaileva-vertaileva tutkimus viittaa siihen, että potilaiden tulevaan ruoansulatuskanavan leikkaukseen liittyvien kipuodotusten hallinnasta on mahdollista, joskin vähäistä hyötyä. Kipulääkkeiden määrä heräämössä on merkittävä leikkauksen jälkeisen maksimaalisen kivun ennustaja. Tulevaan tutkimukseen olisi sisällytettävä suurempi otos, enemmän kipuun liittyviä muuttujia ja jatkettava seurantaa
The language of racism and the criminal justice system
The question of racial bias in the criminal justice system has long been a controversial one in South African legal, sociological and political discussion. This thesis is an intervention in the discussion, in favour of the argument that the criminal justice system is a site of racial and other forms of bias. Whereas the conventional emphasis has been on the structures of bias, the focus here is upon the language of bias in the criminal justice system, that is, upon the way in which white judicial officers speak to or about working-class people of colour. Traditionally, the analysis of biased language has been concerned with the patent racist utterance or opinion, identified according to the positivist techniques of content analysis. However, of late an important shift has taken place in the language of racism, to a discourse formally free of blatant racist insults. The analysis of the language of this "new racism" in the criminal justice system is the central focus of this thesis
Second-Person Surveillance: Politics of User Implication in Digital Documentaries
This dissertation analyzes digital documentaries that utilize second-person address and roleplay to make users feel implicated in contemporary refugee crises, mass incarceration in the U.S., and state and corporate surveillances. Digital documentaries are seemingly more interactive and participatory than linear film and video documentary as they are comprised of a variety of auditory, visual, and written media, utilize networked technologies, and turn the documentary audience into a documentary user. I draw on scholarship from documentary, game, new media, and surveillance studies to analyze how second-person address in digital documentaries is configured through user positioning and direct address within the works themselves, in how organizations and creators frame their productions, and in how users and players respond in reviews, discussion forums, and Let’s Plays. I build on Michael Rothberg’s theorization of the implicated subject to explore how these digital documentaries bring the user into complicated relationality with national and international crises. Visually and experientially implying that users bear responsibility to the subjects and subject matter, these works can, on the one hand, replicate modes of liberal empathy for suffering, distant “others” and, on the other, simulate one’s own surveillant modes of observation or behavior to mirror it back to users and open up one’s offline thoughts and actions as a site of critique.
This dissertation charts how second-person address shapes and limits the political potentialities of documentary projects and connects them to a lineage of direct address from educational and propaganda films, museum exhibits, and serious games. By centralizing the user’s individual experience, the interventions that second-person digital documentaries can make into social discourse change from public, institution-based education to more privatized forms of sentimental education geared toward personal edification and self-realization. Unless tied to larger initiatives or movements, I argue that digital documentaries reaffirm a neoliberal politics of individual self-regulation and governance instead of public education or collective, social intervention.
Chapter one focuses on 360-degree virtual reality (VR) documentaries that utilize the feeling of presence to position users as if among refugees and as witnesses to refugee experiences in camps outside of Europe and various dwellings in European cities. My analysis of Clouds Over Sidra (Gabo Arora and Chris Milk 2015) and The Displaced (Imraan Ismail and Ben C. Solomon 2015) shows how these VR documentaries utilize observational realism to make believable and immersive their representations of already empathetic refugees. The empathetic refugee is often young, vulnerable, depoliticized and dehistoricized and is a well-known trope in other forms of humanitarian media that continues into VR documentaries. Forced to Flee (Zahra Rasool 2017), I am Rohingya (Zahra Rasool 2017), So Leben Flüchtlinge in Berlin (Berliner Morgenpost 2017), and Limbo: A Virtual Experience of Waiting for Asylum (Shehani Fernando 2017) disrupt easy immersions into realistic-looking VR experiences of stereotyped representations and user identifications and, instead, can reflect back the user’s political inaction and surveillant modes of looking.
Chapter two analyzes web- and social media messenger-based documentaries that position users as outsiders to U.S. mass incarceration. Users are noir-style co-investigators into the crime of the prison-industrial complex in Fremont County, Colorado in Prison Valley: The Prison Industry (David Dufresne and Philippe Brault 2009) and co-riders on a bus transporting prison inmates’ loved ones for visitations to correctional facilities in Upstate New York in A Temporary Contact (Nirit Peled and Sara Kolster 2017). Both projects construct an experience of carceral constraint for users to reinscribe seeming “outside” places, people, and experiences as within the continuation of the racialized and classed politics of state control through mass incarceration. These projects utilize interfaces that create a tension between replicating an exploitative hierarchy between non-incarcerated users and those subject to mass incarceration while also de-immersing users in these experiences to mirror back the user’s supposed distance from this mode of state regulation.
Chapter three investigates a type of digital game I term dataveillance simulation games, which position users as surveillance agents in ambiguously dystopian nation-states and force users to use their own critical thinking and judgment to construct the criminality of state-sanctioned surveillance targets. Project Perfect Citizen (Bad Cop Studios 2016), Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You (Osmotic Studios 2016), and Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) all create a dual empathy: players empathize with bureaucratic surveillance agents while empathizing with surveillance targets whose emails, text messages, documents, and social media profiles reveal them to be “normal” people. I argue that while these games show criminality to be a construct, they also utilize a racialized fear of the loss of one’s individual privacy to make players feel like they too could be surveillance targets.
Chapter four examines personalized digital documentaries that turn users and their data into the subject matter. Do Not Track (Brett Gaylor 2015), A Week with Wanda (Joe Derry Hall 2019), Stealing Ur Feelings (Noah Levenson 2019), Alfred Premium (Joël Ronez, Pierre Corbinais, and Émilie F. Grenier 2019), How They Watch You (Nick Briz 2021), and Fairly Intelligent™ (A.M. Darke 2021) track, monitor, and confront users with their own online behavior to reflect back a corporate surveillance that collects, analyzes, and exploits user data for profit. These digital documentaries utilize emotional fear- and humor-based appeals to persuade users that these technologies are controlling them, shaping their desires and needs, and dehumanizing them through algorithmic surveillance
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An investigation into the cultural and legal factors influencing the differential prosecution rate for female genital mutilation in England and France
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is a problem that both England and France face. Both countries agree that FGM is a criminal offence and that it constitutes child abuse. Accordingly, each nation has taken its own distinct measures in law and policy against the practice. These approaches have produced significantly divergent outcomes, particularly in the prosecution rates of offenders, with France leading in that regard.
This thesis seeks to understand why criminal justice outcomes differ so significantly between the two nations, despite many parallels between the historical and contemporary contexts of these two Western European neighbours. In order to do this, it seeks to explore the overarching, systemic forces at play within both paradigms, what the author has termed “the Medium”. Furthermore, given that FGM within both France and England is a product of migrant communities having transported cultural practices into their new context, particular attention is paid to approaches to multiculturalism as a key aspect of the Medium for the purposes of this study. However, alongside this examination of the Medium, the study also explores the role of individual activism, and the agency of particular campaigners, termed “the Human Catalyst”. It addresses the complex interplay between the Medium and the Human Catalyst, as a means of understanding their combined influence on the divergent pictures in respect of prosecuting FGM
Soundscape in Urban Forests
This Special Issue of Forests explores the role of soundscapes in urban forested areas. It is comprised of 11 papers involving soundscape studies conducted in urban forests from Asia and Africa. This collection contains six research fields: (1) the ecological patterns and processes of forest soundscapes; (2) the boundary effects and perceptual topology; (3) natural soundscapes and human health; (4) the experience of multi-sensory interactions; (5) environmental behavior and cognitive disposition; and (6) soundscape resource management in forests
Neo-Nazi Postmodern: Right-Wing Terror Tactics, the Intellectual Neue Rechte, and the Destabilization of Memory in Germany since 1989
This dissertation argues that from 1989 onwards an increasingly terroristic neo-Nazi underground in Germany became gradually entangled with the reactionary Neue Rechte, whose crusade against the German culture of remembrance is also a crusade against European integration, increased migration, and the conceits of liberal democracy. This entanglement produced an ideologically coherent extreme-right political movement with a heavily armed and tactical paramilitary faction that has, contrary to what various governments of the Federal Republic have wanted to believe, been developing in Germany since the early 1990s. Moreover, tactics of information warfare initiated by so-called “postmodern” terrorists of the 1990s would, by the 2010s, take an epistemological turn, sewing global anxiety about the instability of knowledge and truth itself. Throughout the 1990s the Neue Rechte increasingly aimed its rhetorical ammunition at the stability of historical truth and the German culture of remembrance by engaging in historical revisionism. Epistemic chaos was further deepened by a trend of left-wing apostasy to the Neue Rechte, culminating in recent years in a lateral politics that uses the instability of truth to its advantage. In an intellectual turn referred to in this dissertation as “right-wing postmodernism,” the Neue Rechte of the 1990s and beyond has successfully weaponized anxiety concerning the knowability of facts, from its attack on the liberal media to its online disinformation campaigns in recent years. While other nations such as the US and Britain have experienced their own “post-truth” climates in which concepts such as “alternative facts” and “fake news” abound to discordian effect, in Germany, historical memory is the specific target of the Neue Rechte’s campaign in info-terror precisely because memory of the Holocaust is synonymous with a central and terrible truth about German history and identity. In weaponizing memory, the extreme right is able to call the very basis of the Bundesrepublik’s self-image into question; attacks on European integration, on asylum policies, and on the perceived liberal hegemony of the German media all begin and end with the claim that the Holocaust is used as a moral cudgel by liberal politicians and historians
The Possibilities of Leaky Bodies. A Feminist Materialist Ethnography of Menstruating Youth
Using feminist new materialist theory and based on ethnographic field work, the monograph examins the (im) possibilities of young menstruants bodily becomings, as they navigate everyday youth life in a predominantly white upper-middle class suburb to Copenhagen, Denmark. To explore menstruation as a socio-material phenomena, the study pays attention to the meanings of whiteness, class and gender in relation to menstruation and zooms in how affects, bodies, blood, slime, pads and tampons matters to young menstruants bodily becomings. The study finds that the ignorance of menstruation in everyday life infrastructures, school pedagogics and peer relations can be limiting to young menstruants possibilities for joyfull participation in everyday life activiites. It however also shows how menstruation can matter for subversions of power and catalyze change, and how the leaky body can act as critique against neoliberal logics of bodies
Towards More Realistic Membership Inference Attacks on Large Diffusion Models
Generative diffusion models, including Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, can
generate visually appealing, diverse, and high-resolution images for various
applications. These models are trained on billions of internet-sourced images,
raising significant concerns about the potential unauthorized use of
copyright-protected images. In this paper, we examine whether it is possible to
determine if a specific image was used in the training set, a problem known in
the cybersecurity community and referred to as a membership inference attack.
Our focus is on Stable Diffusion, and we address the challenge of designing a
fair evaluation framework to answer this membership question. We propose a
methodology to establish a fair evaluation setup and apply it to Stable
Diffusion, enabling potential extensions to other generative models. Utilizing
this evaluation setup, we execute membership attacks (both known and newly
introduced). Our research reveals that previously proposed evaluation setups do
not provide a full understanding of the effectiveness of membership inference
attacks. We conclude that the membership inference attack remains a significant
challenge for large diffusion models (often deployed as black-box systems),
indicating that related privacy and copyright issues will persist in the
foreseeable future
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