Difference and Diversity. (Review Article)

Review of Piper, H and Stronach I (eds) 2004 Educational Research: Difference and Diversity (Cardiff Papers in Qualitative Research) Aldershot: Ashgate Publishers. £45.00. IBSN 0754633551 This collection of papers on educational methodology are drawn from two conferences, ‘Realism, Relativism or Post-Modernism’ (1997) and ‘Feminism and Educational Research Methodologies’ (1999), suitably updated and with additional material. The overview and introduction are given in the final chapter, with separate text from each editor side by side in two columns. This overview is critical, even ‘rude’ (Piper’s word) so as not to seem to be 'sycophantic'..

Crime applications and social machines: crowdsourcing sensitive data

The authors explore some issues with the United Kingdom (U.K.) crime reporting and recording systems which currently produce Open Crime Data. The availability of Open Crime Data seems to create a potential data ecosystem which would encourage crowdsourcing, or the creation of social machines, in order to counter some of these issues. While such solutions are enticing, we suggest that in fact the theoretical solution brings to light fairly compelling problems, which highlight some limitations of crowdsourcing as a means of addressing Berners-Lee’s “social constraint.” The authors present a thought experiment – a Gendankenexperiment - in order to explore the implications, both good and bad, of a social machine in such a sensitive space and suggest a Web Science perspective to pick apart the ramifications of this thought experiment as a theoretical approach to the characterisation of social machine

Forest People or Village People: Whose voice will be heard?'

With reference to the current situation of the Mbendjele Yaka in northern Congo (Brazzaville) this paper summarises some of the problems facing them as outside interest in their forest increases. Issues relating to traditional and modern land ownership, international forest exploitation by both commercial loggers and wildlife protectionists, and representation are raised in the Mbendjele context. Mbendjele conceptualisations of themselves as ‘forest people’, as opposed to ‘village people’, are considered from the point of view of the contemporary indigenous peoples and minority rights movements. This offers an interesting analysis that highlights some of the challenges to be overcome in coming years. In effect, ‘forest people’ are currently marginalized from these processes by the ‘village people’ character of international procedural forms and structures within which they are expected to represent themselves

Brazil, the bomb and the poet: Cecilia Meireles and the Gandhian Seminar (1953)

In 1953, a group of nine delegates (from non-communist countries) met in New Delhi to discuss Gandhi’s “outlooks and techniques” as a creative means to resolve Cold War nuclear tensions. This article mainly focuses on the politics and lyrical impressions as observed by the Brazilian poet Cecília Meireles in the Seminar proceedings and the Diário de Notícias. As the only Latin American delegate to attend the Seminar, she sheds new light on the ways emerging countries such as India and Brazil cope with racism, war, hunger, and violence. One pressing Gandhian issue Meireles and other delegates address is the ethical role of “machines” in modern society. Problems faced by postcolonial cultures, such as industrialization, poverty, and racial strife, seem to take a different (and more dangerous) perspective when thought of in terms of machines and progress. To elucidate this “machine-like” rhetoric, the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari have been applied throughout. Other participant comments such as those by Ralph Bunche and John Boyd Orr allow for additional insight into topics still relevant today

Multimodal Polynomial Fusion for Detecting Driver Distraction

Distracted driving is deadly, claiming 3,477 lives in the U.S. in 2015 alone. Although there has been a considerable amount of research on modeling the distracted behavior of drivers under various conditions, accurate automatic detection using multiple modalities and especially the contribution of using the speech modality to improve accuracy has received little attention. This paper introduces a new multimodal dataset for distracted driving behavior and discusses automatic distraction detection using features from three modalities: facial expression, speech and car signals. Detailed multimodal feature analysis shows that adding more modalities monotonically increases the predictive accuracy of the model. Finally, a simple and effective multimodal fusion technique using a polynomial fusion layer shows superior distraction detection results compared to the baseline SVM and neural network models.Comment: INTERSPEECH 201

Do Chatbots Dream of Androids? Prospects for the Technological Development of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

The article discusses the main trends in the development of artificial intelligence systems and robotics (AI&R). The main question that is considered in this context is whether artificial systems are going to become more and more anthropomorphic, both intellectually and physically. In the current article, the author analyzes the current state and prospects of technological development of artificial intelligence and robotics, and also determines the main aspects of the impact of these technologies on society and economy, indicating the geopolitical strategic nature of this influence. The author considers various approaches to the definition of artificial intelligence and robotics, focusing on the subject-oriented and functional ones. It also compares AI&R abilities and human abilities in areas such as categorization, pattern recognition, planning and decision making, etc. Based on this comparison, we investigate in which areas AI&R’s performance is inferior to a human, and in which cases it is superior to one. The modern achievements in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence create the necessary basis for further discussion of the applicability of goal setting in engineering, in the form of a Turing test. It is shown that development of AI&R is associated with certain contradictions that impede the application of Turing’s methodology in its usual format. The basic contradictions in the development of AI&R technologies imply that there is to be a transition to a post-Turing methodology for assessing engineering implementations of artificial intelligence and robotics. In such implementations, on the one hand, the ‘Turing wall’ is removed, and on the other hand, artificial intelligence gets its physical implementation

Enkinaesthetic polyphony: the underpinning for first-order languaging

We contest two claims: (1) that language, understood as the processing of abstract symbolic forms, is an instrument of cognition and rational thought, and (2) that conventional notions of turn-taking, exchange structure, and move analysis, are satisfactory as a basis for theorizing communication between living, feeling agents. We offer an enkinaesthetic theory describing the reciprocal affective neuro-muscular dynamical flows and tensions of co- agential dialogical sense-making relations. This “enkinaesthetic dialogue” is characterised by a preconceptual experientially recursive temporal dynamics forming the deep extended melodies of relationships in time. An understanding of how those relationships work, when we understand and are ourselves understood, when communication falters and conflict arises, will depend on a grasp of our enkinaesthetic intersubjectivity