The Student Movement Volume 105 Issue 10: One Dose Down, One to Go!: President Luxton Vaccinated

NEWS Andrews University Holds Employee Awards Virtual Celebration, Jenae Rogers New Life Hosts Black Like Me: Growing Up Black, Caralynn Chan Texas Winter Storm Impacts Families of Students at Andrews, Taylor Uphus The Red Cross Blood Drive Reveals Growing Shortage in Donor Participation, Amanda Cho PULSE Favorite Meals: Café Edition, Interviewed by Alec Bofetiado The Wellness Column: Decluttering your Room and Mind, HeeYun Oh The Wellness Column: Decluttering Your Room and Mind, Jessica Rim HUMANS AUSA Candidate Interviews, Interviewed by Abigail Lee Freshman Spotlight: Rekha Isaac, Interviewed by Celeste Richardson Trusting the Science, Interviewed by Pearl Parker ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Creative Spotlight: Karla Torres, Interviewed by Megan Napod Current Favorites: March, Megan Napod Signal Boost: Canvas, Hannah Cruse IDEAS A Woman and Her God, Evin N. Musgrove COVID-19 Updates: The Variants, the Vaccines, and Other News, Sung Been Han Parler, QAnon, and the Freedom of Speech: What Should be Done?, Abigail Lee THE LAST WORD Taking Stock, Masy Domecillohttps://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/sm-105/1013/thumbnail.jp

Connections between social stress, immune dysregulation and psychosis:a virtual reality study

Connections between social stress, immune dysregulation and psychosis.A virtual reality study.Childhood trauma, ethnic minority position or growing up in an urban environment increase the risk for psychosis. The social environment, combined with genetic susceptibility, is important in the development of psychosis. We examined if an altered reaction to social stress is involved. We used a virtual reality (VR) environment, a VR café. The VR café was quiet or crowded. Virtual humans had similar or different skin colour as participants and reacted in a friendly or hostile way. Participants felt more stressed and paranoid and their physiological stress levels increased in reaction to VR stressors. This reaction was similar for persons with and without a psychosis. However, as psychosis patients were more stressed to begin with, their stress levels ended up higher. In contrast, participants with a history of childhood trauma reacted stronger to social stress.We also examined a possible role for immune dysregulation. Previous studies found altered immune markers in psychosis patients and after childhood trauma. We did not find altered immune markers in our study. Immune dysregulation may occur mainly in combination with obesity. Obesity is more common in psychosis patients. However, the psychosis patients in our sample had an healthy weight on average. Our results highlight that childhood trauma and life style warrant attention in psychosis patients

The perception of emotion in artificial agents

Given recent technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it is perhaps unsurprising that the arrival of emotionally expressive and reactive artificial agents is imminent. However, if such agents are to become integrated into our social milieu, it is imperative to establish an understanding of whether and how humans perceive emotion in artificial agents. In this review, we incorporate recent findings from social robotics, virtual reality, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how people recognize and respond to emotions displayed by artificial agents. First, we review how people perceive emotions expressed by an artificial agent, such as facial and bodily expressions and vocal tone. Second, we evaluate the similarities and differences in the consequences of perceived emotions in artificial compared to human agents. Besides accurately recognizing the emotional state of an artificial agent, it is critical to understand how humans respond to those emotions. Does interacting with an angry robot induce the same responses in people as interacting with an angry person? Similarly, does watching a robot rejoice when it wins a game elicit similar feelings of elation in the human observer? Here we provide an overview of the current state of emotion expression and perception in social robotics, as well as a clear articulation of the challenges and guiding principles to be addressed as we move ever closer to truly emotional artificial agents

Unlocking the “Virtual Cage” of Wildlife Surveillance

The electronic surveillance of wildlife has grown more extensive than ever. For instance, thousands of wolves wear collars transmitting signals to wildlife biologists. Some collars inject wolves with tranquilizers that allow for their immediate capture if they stray outside of the boundaries set by anthropocentric management policies. Hunters have intercepted the signals from surveillance collars and have used this information to track and slaughter the animals. While the ostensible reason for the surveillance programs is to facilitate the peaceful coexistence of humanity and wildlife, the reality is less benign—an outdoor version of Bentham’s Panopticon. This Article reconceptualizes the enterprise of wildlife surveillance. Without suggesting that animals have standing to assert constitutional rights, the Article posits a public interest in protecting the privacy of wildlife. The very notion of wildness implies privacy. The law already protects the bodily integrity of animals to some degree, and a protected zone of privacy is penumbral to this core protection, much the same way that human privacy emanates from narrower guarantees against government intrusion. Policy implications follow that are akin to the rules under the Fourth Amendment limiting the government’s encroachment on human privacy. Just as the police cannot install a wiretap without demonstrating a particularized investigative need for which all less intrusive methods would be insufficient, so too should surveillance of wildlife necessitate a specific showing of urgency. A detached, neutral authority should review all applications for electronic monitoring of wildlife. Violati ons of the rules should result in substantial sanctions. The Article concludes by considering—and refuting—foreseeable objections to heightened requirements for the surveillance of wildlife

Sketching-out virtual humans: From 2d storyboarding to immediate 3d character animation

Virtual beings are playing a remarkable role in today’s public entertainment, while ordinary users are still treated as audiences due to the lack of appropriate expertise, equipment, and computer skills. In this paper, we present a fast and intuitive storyboarding interface, which enables users to sketch-out 3D virtual humans, 2D/3D animations, and character intercommunication. We devised an intuitive “stick figurefleshing-outskin mapping” graphical animation pipeline, which realises the whole process of key framing, 3D pose reconstruction, virtual human modelling, motion path/timing control, and the final animation synthesis by almost pure 2D sketching. A “creative model-based method” is developed, which emulates a human perception process, to generate the 3D human bodies of variational sizes, shapes, and fat distributions. Meanwhile, our current system also supports the sketch-based crowd animation and the storyboarding of the 3D multiple character intercommunication. This system has been formally tested by various users on Tablet PC. After minimal training, even a beginner can create vivid virtual humans and animate them within minutes

Maintaining the Human Touch in Educational Leadership

It is a pleasure to be invited to contribute to this special edition of the TCPEA School Leadership Review. TCPEA has been a valuable organization for me as the relationships that have been fostered through it have enabled me to grow personally and professionally. This has led me to consider some of the issues that educational leaders are facing today and will continue to face in the years to come which are focused on the notion of how to effectively maintain human relationships. While few leaders agree on everything, there is no doubt that we all agree this is a complex time for our schools. My focus of this article is to consider three of the challenges before us to maintain the human touch in our profession: Identifying appropriate responses to the dilemmas that are occurring due to technology advances which include movement to hybrid/blended and fully on-line teaching venues, Establishing covenant communities in our diverse classrooms and beyond, and Nurturing our professional relationships as educational leaders. While these three topics might seem unrelated, I believe they all are connected to our shared humanity and all have the potential to develop or diminish the human touch

Time, terror and the technological imagination : Frankenstein's fictional legacy in the scientific age : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

There is a long-standing belief that there is an opposing discourse between science and the humanities in relation to the future of humankind. Attitudes towards the environment have changed radically in the last 200 years from a natural view to one where we dominate and re-order our environment to suit ourselves and to further the material self-interests of human beings, regardless of cultural and ecological consequences. In order for human beings to properly understand what is happening and why, we must begin to restore the balance between our relationship with Nature and our new technological worldview. The Introduction firstly addresses issues relating to the changing relationship between human beings and their environment over the last two centuries, and how literature and film have accurately predicted our collective future. It is my objective to illustrate how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has remained one of the most potent pieces of literature foreshadowing the future of humankind, and the timeless quality of the theme of the controller out of control. The main text focuses on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and how the novel embodied humankind's growing anxieties and fears about our technological ambivalence, and I give an overview of how Frankenstein has paved the way for further literary and cinematic predictions of our future in artificial and synthesised environments dominated by the new frontier of genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and beyond, and how these technologies will impact on our cultural worldview and the future evolution of humankind

Continuous Interaction with a Virtual Human

Attentive Speaking and Active Listening require that a Virtual Human be capable of simultaneous perception/interpretation and production of communicative behavior. A Virtual Human should be able to signal its attitude and attention while it is listening to its interaction partner, and be able to attend to its interaction partner while it is speaking – and modify its communicative behavior on-the-fly based on what it perceives from its partner. This report presents the results of a four week summer project that was part of eNTERFACE’10. The project resulted in progress on several aspects of continuous interaction such as scheduling and interrupting multimodal behavior, automatic classification of listener responses, generation of response eliciting behavior, and models for appropriate reactions to listener responses. A pilot user study was conducted with ten participants. In addition, the project yielded a number of deliverables that are released for public access