The philosophical significance of binary categories in Habermas’s discourse ethics

The philosophical programme associated with the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas has been widely discussed in the literature. The fact that Habermas has devoted a considerable part of his work to the elaboration of this philosophical programme indicates that discourse ethics can be regarded as a cornerstone of his communication-theoretic approach to society. In essence, Habermas conceives of discourse ethics as a philosophical framework which derives the coordinative power of social normativity from the discursive power of communicative rationality. Although there is an extensive literature on Habermas’s communication-theoretic account of society, almost no attention has been paid to the fact that the theoretical framework which undergirds his discourse ethics is based on a number of binary conceptual divisions. It is the purpose of this paper to shed light on the philosophical significance of these binary categories in Habermas’s discourse ethics and thereby demonstrate that their complexity is indicative of the subject’s tension-laden immersion in social reality

Tweet Acts: A Speech Act Classifier for Twitter

Speech acts are a way to conceptualize speech as action. This holds true for communication on any platform, including social media platforms such as Twitter. In this paper, we explored speech act recognition on Twitter by treating it as a multi-class classification problem. We created a taxonomy of six speech acts for Twitter and proposed a set of semantic and syntactic features. We trained and tested a logistic regression classifier using a data set of manually labelled tweets. Our method achieved a state-of-the-art performance with an average F1 score of more than $0.70$. We also explored classifiers with three different granularities (Twitter-wide, type-specific and topic-specific) in order to find the right balance between generalization and overfitting for our task.Comment: ICWSM'16, May 17-20, Cologne, Germany. In Proceedings of the 10th AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2016). Cologne, German

Terrorist Incitement on the Internet

I organized this symposium to advance understanding of how terrorist communications drive and influence social, political, religious, civil, literary, and artistic conduct. Viewing terrorist speech through wide prisms of law, culture, and contemporary media can provide lawmakers, adjudicators, and administrators a better understanding of how to contain and prevent the exploitation of modern communication technologies to influence, recruit, and exploit others to perpetrate ideologically driven acts of violence. Undertaking such a multipronged study requires not only looking at the personal and sociological appeals that extreme ideology exerts but also considering how to create political, administrative, educational, and economic conditions to effect positive change at micro and macro levels. The deep analysis that a symposium provides can paint a more comprehensive picture to explain the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of various memes, videos, interactive websites, group chat rooms, and blogs that justify, glorify, or incite violence. Moreover, understanding the operation of terrorist groups on the internet can help to explain their organizational hierarchies

Talking the Talk: The Effect of Vocalics in an Interview

Our voices carry more than just content. People continuously make assumptions of one’s intelligence, credibility, personality, and other characteristics merely based on the way we talk. As the diversity of individuals in the workplace increases, so too do the differences in how those individuals talk. It is important that we understand how these different ways of speaking are being perceived in the workplace. More specifically, how are individuals being perceived prior to being hired via the interview process? This Honors Capstone project aims to understand the impact that vocal characteristics in an individual have on the interviewer’s perception of the interviewee, and how that impacts the hiring process. This project will offer professionals of all ages tangible advice on ways to increase one’s chances of receiving a job just by altering aspects of one’s voice

An evaluation of in-patient respite care at St. Vincent de Paul Residence

Aim: To identify the multi-dimensional characteristics and need for inter-disciplinary input associated with in-patient respite care. Methods: During the period January-December 2007, 91 in-patient respite users, aged ≥60 years, were assessed on admission for respite care at St. Vincent de Paule Residence. Assessment instruments used included the Barthel Index, the Mini-Mental State Examination, a Caregiver Strain Index, the Functional Oral Intake Scale and the Communicative Effectiveness Index. Findings: Of the study group (n=91), 65% of respite users were found to be suffering from moderate to severe dementia (Mini-Mental State Examination score 0-20). High dependency on the Barthel Index (0-7/20) was found in 52% of cases whilst 45% had low dependency (13-20/20). Carer strain was reported in 60% of care-givers (carers). Interdisciplinary input requirements in the group studied included nursing in 85%, dental (83%), speech language pathology (70%), physiotherapy (39%), occupational therapy (38%), medical (33%) and social worker assistance (24%). Conclusion: Elderly respite users are a mixed group with multiple and diverse needs. In their own homes, these care needs are principally met by informal helpers who are frequently under stress. The expansion of in-patient respite services will reinforce the informal community care network and will help avoid or postpone long-term institutionalisation.peer-reviewedpeer-reviewe