Spatial updating of objects after rotational and translational body movements in virtual environments

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Spatial reasoning in architectural design can be better understood by considering the factors that affect the spatial updating process of the individual in an environment. This study focuses on the issue of spatial updating of viewed and imagined objects after rotational and translational body movements in a virtual environment (VE). Rotational and translational movements based on an egocentric frame of reference where there is no control of the user are compared in a desktop VE. Moreover, preference in architectural drawing medium and gender are analyzed as the factors that affect the spatial updating of objects in each body movement type. The results indicated that translational movement was more efficient than the rotational movement in judgment of relative directions in viewed objects. Furthermore, the viewed objects were more correctly spatially updated than the imagined ones both in translational and rotational body movements. In comparison of hand, computer and both as the drawing media, findings indicated that preference in computer medium in architectural design drawings was an effective one in spatial updating process in a VE. Contrary to the previous studies, it is found that there was no significant difference between gender and movement types. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Traveling Yellow Peril: Race, Gender, and Empire in Japan's English Teaching Industry

Contemporary U.S. white migrants working in Japan long-term as English teachers find themselves in an increasingly precarious labor market. When reacting to industry flexibilization, the U.S. men I interviewed during two years of fieldwork in Nagoya regularly invoked Filipina competition as an impending threat to their livelihoods. Anxieties coalesced around the question of whether racialized postcolonial subjects can fully inhabit the category of "native English teacher." This essay combines Asian American, postcolonial, and transnational American Studies perspectives to situate these "nativist" logics within an historical trajectory of anti-Asian labor backlash in the United States and "benevolent assimilation" policies in the Philippines. These histories reappear within Japan's neoliberal labor regimes to position Filipina migrants as a feminized "yellow peril" menace to hegemonic white masculinities abroad. Extending Homi Bhabha's theories, the essay demonstrates how Filipina "colonial mimicry" undermines the embodied, linguistic authority of white "native" English teachers and becomes a discursive conduit for the transplantation into Japan of the "white male victim" figure commonly seen in domestic U.S. culture wars

DIY networking as a facilitator for interdisciplinary research on the hybrid city

DIY networking is a technology with special characteristics compared to the public Internet, which holds a unique potential for empowering citizens to shape their hybrid urban space toward conviviality and collective awareness. It can also play the role of a “boundary object” for facilitating interdisciplinary interactions and participatory processes between different actors: researchers, engineers, practitioners, artists, designers, local authorities, and activists. This position paper presents a social learning framework, the DIY networking paradigm, that we aim to put in the centre of the hybrid space design process. We first introduce our individual views on the role of design as discussed in the fields of engineering, urban planning, urban interaction design, design research, and community informatics. We then introduce a simple methodology for combining these diverse perspectives into a meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration, through a series of related events with different structure and framing. We conclude with a short summary of a selection of these events, which serves also as an introduction to the CONTACT workshop on facilitating information sharing between strangers, in the context of the Hybrid City III conference

The Effects of Visual Discriminability and Rotation Angle on 30-Month-Olds' Search Performance in Spatial Rotation Tasks

Tracking objects that are hidden and then moved is a crucial ability related to object permanence, which develops across several stages in early childhood. In spatial rotation tasks, children observe a target object that is hidden in one of two or more containers before the containers are rotated around a fixed axis. Usually, 30-month-olds fail to find the hidden object after it was rotated by 180°. We examined whether visual discriminability of the containers improves 30-month-olds’ success in this task and whether children perform better after 90° than after 180° rotations. Two potential hiding containers with same or different colors were placed on a board that was rotated by 90° or 180° in a within-subjects design. Children (N = 29) performed above chance level in all four conditions. Their overall success in finding the object did not improve by differently colored containers. However, different colors prevented children from showing an inhibition bias in 90° rotations, that is, choosing the empty container more often when it was located close to them than when it was farther away: This bias emerged in the same colors condition but not in the different colors condition. Results are discussed in view of particular challenges that might facilitate or deteriorate spatial rotation tasks for young children

Translation's Histories and Digital Futures

Drawing on Latour’s actor-network-theory and De Landa’s robot historian, this essay asks in what ways translation’s past is a prehistory of the present and to what extent nonhuman agents have shaped and are shaping translation. In particular, it examines the impact of computational media on translation and finds that the difference made by the computer as a convergence medium is that, for the first time in history, one medium has become capable of presenting in its entirety the media history of translation. To grasp the changes that translation is undergoing in the 21st century therefore requires a comparative understanding of its relations to the mediascapes of the past, present, and future

Are the deficits in navigational abilities present in the Williams syndrome related to deficits in the backward inhibition?

Williams syndrome (WS) is associated with a distinct profile of relatively proficient skills within the verbal domain compared to the severe impairment of visuo-spatial processing. Abnormalities in executive functions and deficits in planning ability and spatial working memory have been described. However, to date little is known about the influence of executive function deficits on navigational abilities in WS. This study aimed at analyzing in WS individuals a specific executive function, the backward inhibition (BI) that allows individuals to flexibly adapt to continuously changing environments. A group of WS individuals and a mental age- and gender-matched group of typically developing children were subjected to three task-switching experiments requiring visuospatial or verbal material to be processed. Results showed that WS individuals exhibited clear BI deficits during visuospatial task-switching paradigms and normal BI effect during verbal task-switching paradigm. Overall, the present results suggest that the BI involvement in updating environment representations during navigation may influence WS navigational abilitie