January 21, 1977

The Breeze is the student newspaper of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia

Impoliteness strategies used by the main character in the Hancock movie

This research aims to analyze the impoliteness found in the utterances of the main character of the Hancock movie named John Hancock, a man who deserves to be called a superhero because of his efforts to reduce crimes but tends to be disliked by the public because of his impolite words and cause much damage while performing his heroic actions. The researcher is interested in investigating the impoliteness strategies used by John Hancock because, as far as the researcher knows, it is very little that researches on impoliteness strategies make use of action films the main study. Moreover, no study focuses on examining the utterances of one main character in the movie. There are two problems to be solved in this research, namely: (1) What are the types of impoliteness strategies used by the main character in the Hancock action movie and (2) How do interlocutors respond toward the main character’s impoliteness in the Hancock action movie. This study used a qualitative approach because it gathered non-numerical data. Specifically, this research employed descriptive research in textual analysis to analyze the utterance of the main character through the Hancock movie transcript. The data were collected by first transcribing the Hancock movie. The analysis began with highlighting the utterances that include impolite words and the responses toward the impoliteness, giving the certain code of each type of impoliteness strategies and strategies to counter the face attacks, and classifying them into a data card. The analysis was continued by identifying the impoliteness strategies used by the main character in the Hancock movie and identifying strategies to counter the face attacks used by the interlocutors. Finally, the researcher provides the explanations of why particular strategies were used by looking at the background and conversation situation of the main character with the interlocutors.This research reveals that the impoliteness strategy most used by the main character in the Hancock movie is a positive impoliteness strategy. Most of the choices of impoliteness strategies in the main character are influenced by his personality. The power factor, such as superman who can fly, strong, and bulletproof body that is not possessed by others, affects the main character in the use of impoliteness strategies. In addition, this research also reveals that the strategy to counter the face attacks that are most often found in the Hancock movie is the offensive escalation strategy. Most of the choices of strategy to counter the face attacks that applied by the interlocutors emerged because their disagreement that makes them strike back the main character’s statement. It can be concluded that the power factor is one of the factors that can influence the choice of impoliteness strategies, and strategies to counter the face attacks can emerge when a positive self-image has been attacked by the speaker

Agent Based Modeling in Land-Use and Land-Cover Change Studies

Agent based models (ABM) for land use and cover change (LUCC) holds the promise to provide new insight into the processes and patterns of the human and biophysical interactions in ways that have never been explored. Advances in computer technology make it possible to run almost infinite numbers of simulations with multiple heterogeneously shaped actors that reciprocally interact via vertical and horizontal power lines on various levels. Based upon an extensive literature review the basic components for such exercises are explored and discussed. This resulted in a systematic representation of these components consisting of: (1) Spatial static input data, (2) Actor and Actor-group static input data, (3) Spatial dynamic input, (4) Actor and Actor-group dynamic input data, (5) the model with the rules describing the rules, (6) Spatial static output, (7) Actor and Actor-group static output, (8) Dynamic output of Actor behaviour changes, (9) Dynamic output of actor-group behavioural changes, (10) Dynamic output of spatial patterns, (11) Dynamic output of temporal patterns. This representation proves to be epistemologically useful in the analysis of the relationships between the ABM LUCC components. In this paper, this representation is also used to enumerate the strengths and limitations of agent based modelling in LUCC

Chatbots for Modelling, Modelling of Chatbots

Tesis Doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Escuela Politécnica Superior, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática. Fecha de Lectura: 28-03-202

Actor based behavioural simulation as an aid for organisational decision making

Decision-making is a critical activity for most of the modern organizations to stay competitive in rapidly changing business environment. Effective organisational decision-making requires deep understanding of various organisational aspects such as its goals, structure, business-as-usual operational processes, environment where it operates, and inherent characteristics of the change drivers that may impact the organisation. The size of a modern organisation, its socio-technical characteristics, inherent uncertainty, volatile operating environment, and prohibitively high cost of the incorrect decisions make decision-making a challenging endeavor. While the enterprise modelling and simulation technologies have evolved into a mature discipline for understanding a range of engineering, defense and control systems, their application in organisational decision-making is considerably low. Current organisational decision-making approaches that are prevalent in practice are largely qualitative. Moreover, they mostly rely on human experts who are often aided with the primitive technologies such as spreadsheets and visual diagrams. This thesis argues that the existing modelling and simulation technologies are neither suitable to represent organisation and decision artifacts in a comprehensive and machine-interpretable form nor do they comprehensively address the analysis needs. An approach that advances the modelling abstraction and analysis machinery for organisational decision-making is proposed. In particular, this thesis proposes a domain specific language to represent relevant aspects of an organisation for decision-making, establishes the relevance of a bottom-up simulation technique as a means for analysis, and introduces a method to utilise the proposed modelling abstraction, analysis technique, and analysis machinery in an effective and convenient manner

Personalizing Human-Robot Dialogue Interactions using Face and Name Recognition

Task-oriented dialogue systems are computer systems that aim to provide an interaction indistinguishable from ordinary human conversation with the goal of completing user- defined tasks. They are achieving this by analyzing the intents of users and choosing respective responses. Recent studies show that by personalizing the conversations with this systems one can positevely affect their perception and long-term acceptance. Personalised social robots have been widely applied in different fields to provide assistance. In this thesis we are working on development of a scientific conference assistant. The goal of this assistant is to provide the conference participants with conference information and inform about the activities for their spare time during conference. Moreover, to increase the engagement with the robot our team has worked on personalizing the human-robot interaction by means of face and name recognition. To achieve this personalisation, first the name recognition ability of available physical robot was improved, next by the concent of the participants their pictures were taken and used for memorization of returning users. As acquiring the consent for personal data storage is not an optimal solution, an alternative method for participants recognition using QR Codes on their badges was developed and compared to pre-trained model in terms of speed. Lastly, the personal details of each participant, as unviversity, country of origin, was acquired prior to conference or during the conversation and used in dialogues. The developed robot, called DAGFINN was displayed at two conferences happened this year in Stavanger, where the first time installment did not involve personalization feature. Hence, we conclude this thesis by discussing the influence of personalisation on dialogues with the robot and participants satisfaction with developed social robot

Bootstrapping a Smalltalk

International audienceSmalltalk is a reflective system. It means that it is defined in itself in a causally connected way. Traditionally, Smalltalk systems evolved by modifying and cloning what is called an image (a chunk of memory containing all the objects at a given point in time). During the evolution of the system, objects representing it are modified. However, such an image modification and cloning poses several problems: (1) There is no operational machine-executable algorithm that allows one to build a system from scratch. A system object may be modified but it may be difficult to reproduce its exact state before the changes. Therefore it is difficult to get a reproducible process. (2) As a consequence, certain classes may not have been initialized since years. (3) Finally, since the system acts as a living system, it is not simple to evolve the kernel for introducing new abstractions without performing some kind of brain surgery on oneself. There is a need to have a step by step process to build Smalltalk kernels from scratch. In this paper, after an analysis of past and current practices to mutate or generate kernels, we describe a kernel bootstrap process step-by-step. First the illusion of the existence of a kernel is created via stubs objects. Second the classes and meta-classes hierarchy are generated. Code is compiled and finally information needed by the virtual machine and execution are generated and installed

Project-Team RMoD 2013 Activity Report

Activity Report 2013 Project-Team RMOD Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolutio

Squeak by Example

Squeak by Example, intended for both students and developers, will guide you gently through the Squeak language and environment by means of a series of examples and exercises. This book is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license