Introduction: The tourist gaze 4.0: uncovering non-conscious meanings and motivations in the stories tourists tell of trip and destination experiences

This special issue includes unique contributions sharing advanced concepts and tools immediately applicable to building theory that describes and increases understanding of practices in tourist travel and destination experiences. Articles in this special issue focus emic-to-etic reporting on naturalistic drama-enactments that enable tourists as storytellers to experience powerful myths in actual destination settings (also recognising that mythical qualities imbue aspects of both travel and destination sites, e.g., ‘The Orient Express [train]’ and Machu Picchu, Peru, respectively). Tourists’ stories provide intimate tourist travel insights regarding destinations as well as the enactments they engender for tourists. Such insights offer the material for guidelines for productions of ‘authentic’ tourist-destination relationship engagements. This special issue contributes to developing a comprehensive understanding of non-conscious influence-paths that impact tourist-destination behaviours and experiences

How neurons in deep models relate with neurons in the brain

In dealing with the algorithmic aspects of intelligent systems, the analogy with the biological brain has always been attractive, and has often had a dual function. On the one hand, it has been an effective source of inspiration for their design, while, on the other hand, it has been used as the justification for their success, especially in the case of Deep Learning (DL) models. However, in recent years, inspiration from the brain has lost its grip on its first role, yet it continues to be proposed in its second role, although we believe it is also becoming less and less defensible. Outside the chorus, there are theoretical proposals that instead identify important demarcation lines between DL and human cognition, to the point of being even incommensurable. In this article we argue that, paradoxically, the partial indifference of the developers of deep neural models to the functioning of biological neurons is one of the reasons for their success, having promoted a pragmatically opportunistic attitude. We believe that it is even possible to glimpse a biological analogy of a different kind, in that the essentially heuristic way of proceeding in modern DL development bears intriguing similarities to natural evolution

Coupling Global Context and Local Contents for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Thanks to the advantages of the friendly annotations and the satisfactory performance, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) approaches have been extensively studied. Recently, the single-stage WSSS was awakened to alleviate problems of the expensive computational costs and the complicated training procedures in multi-stage WSSS. However, results of such an immature model suffer from problems of \emph{background incompleteness} and \emph{object incompleteness}. We empirically find that they are caused by the insufficiency of the global object context and the lack of the local regional contents, respectively. Under these observations, we propose a single-stage WSSS model with only the image-level class label supervisions, termed as \textbf{W}eakly-\textbf{S}upervised \textbf{F}eature \textbf{C}oupling \textbf{N}etwork (\textbf{WS-FCN}), which can capture the multi-scale context formed from the adjacent feature grids, and encode the fine-grained spatial information from the low-level features into the high-level ones. Specifically, a flexible context aggregation module is proposed to capture the global object context in different granular spaces. Besides, a semantically consistent feature fusion module is proposed in a bottom-up parameter-learnable fashion to aggregate the fine-grained local contents. Based on these two modules, \textbf{WS-FCN} lies in a self-supervised end-to-end training fashion. Extensive experimental results on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of \textbf{WS-FCN}, which can achieve state-of-the-art results by $65.02\%$ and $64.22\%$ mIoU on PASCAL VOC 2012 \emph{val} set and \emph{test} set, $34.12\%$ mIoU on MS COCO 2014 \emph{val} set, respectively. The code and weight have been released at:~\href{https://github.com/ChunyanWang1/ws-fcn}{WS-FCN}.Comment: accepted by TNNL

Relationship as teacher of sustainability: Post-individualist education

In the face of destructive human presence, sustainability has become a prominent and central theme of the contemporary environmental and wellbeing discourse. Our chapter takes the current environmental and sociopolitical challenges humanity faces as our species’ developmental issue precipitated by the bonding rupture between human beings and other beings. We propose that the sustainability discourse be taken in the direction of healing the wounds of bonding rupture and facilitating the evolution of human consciousness and development of a more mature identity. We posit that the latter is concomitant with overcoming materialistic individualism and moving towards the relational integration of self, community, and world. We make the case that these relational practices are intrinsic to evolving and developing sustainable humanity. In particular, this chapter shows, by way of narrative illustrations, how we may create teaching and learning environments in schools and other institutions that are conducive to experiencing and internalizing a relational sense of self

Directing personal sustainability science toward subjective experience: conceptual, methodological, and normative cornerstones for a first-person inquiry into inner worlds

Despite the rapid expansion of sustainability science in recent decades, sustainability crises have continued to grow. Sustainability researchers argue that this is partly the result of neglecting people’s inner worlds and call for a stronger consideration of inner states and processes in sustainability scholarship. We argue that the advancement of personal sustainability science, i.e., the systematic inquiry of inner worlds in relation to sustainability, is currently impeded by at least two unresolved issues. First, attitudes, emotions, values, and the like have frequently been the object of sustainability-related research. It thus remains unclear to what exactly researchers should more closely look at when inquiring into people’s inner worlds. Second, the epistemological and methodological foundations for conducting research on inner worlds remain underdeveloped. We illustrate that current research activities usually remain at a phenomenologically shallow level. In response to these issues, we provide conceptual, methodological, and normative cornerstones for a first-person inquiry within personal sustainability science, allowing for an in-depth understanding and potentially even a transformation of people’s inner worlds with regard to sustainability. Overall, we suggest redirecting personal sustainability science more strongly toward the inquiry into people’s subjective (i.e., first-person) experiences of inner states and processes unfolding in relation to sustainability

Directing personal sustainability science toward subjective experience: conceptual, methodological, and normative cornerstones for a first-person inquiry into inner worlds

Despite the rapid expansion of sustainability science in recent decades, sustainability crises have continued to grow. Sustainability researchers argue that this is partly the result of neglecting people’s inner worlds and call for a stronger consideration of inner states and processes in sustainability scholarship. We argue that the advancement of personal sustainability science, i.e., the systematic inquiry of inner worlds in relation to sustainability, is currently impeded by at least two unresolved issues. First, attitudes, emotions, values, and the like have frequently been the object of sustainability-related research. It thus remains unclear to what exactly researchers should more closely look at when inquiring into people’s inner worlds. Second, the epistemological and methodological foundations for conducting research on inner worlds remain underdeveloped. We illustrate that current research activities usually remain at a phenomenologically shallow level. In response to these issues, we provide conceptual, methodological, and normative cornerstones for a first-person inquiry within personal sustainability science, allowing for an in-depth understanding and potentially even a transformation of people’s inner worlds with regard to sustainability. Overall, we suggest redirecting personal sustainability science more strongly toward the inquiry into people’s subjective (i.e., first-person) experiences of inner states and processes unfolding in relation to sustainability

Teaching intersectionality: Pedagogical approaches for lasting impact

Recently there have been calls to study and apply critical theory and tools around social justice, and intersectional approaches of race, anti-racism, gender, sexuality, disability and accessibility, and class in Library and Information Studies (LIS). But applying lasting techniques in the LIS classroom require pedagogies that are intersectional, assessable, and apply lasting change for the student. This article argues for impactful approaches to intersectionality – the inclusion of multiple identities and subjectivities such as race, gender, sexuality, and class – to LIS in three parts: (1) Teaching critical theories alongside traditional LIS texts, (2) using systems of assessment for cultural competencies and analysis, and (3) classroom activities that implement metacognitive change. These approaches in the LIS classroom can demonstrably move LIS students into a deeper critical analysis of power in libraries that will be applied throughout their careers