Pornography and accommodation

ABSTRACT In ‘Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game’, Rae Langton and Caroline West borrow ideas from David Lewis to attempt to explain how pornography might subordinate and silence women. Pornography is supposed to express certain misogynistic claims implicitly, through presupposition, and to convey them indirectly, through accommodation. I argue that the appeal to accommodation cannot do the sort of work Langton and West want it to do: Their case rests upon an overly simplified model of that phenomenon. I argue further that, once we are clear about why Langton and West's account fails, a different and more plausible account of pornography's influence emerges

Automatic detection of accommodation steps as an indicator of knowledge maturing

Jointly working on shared digital artifacts – such as wikis – is a well-tried method of developing knowledge collectively within a group or organization. Our assumption is that such knowledge maturing is an accommodation process that can be measured by taking the writing process itself into account. This paper describes the development of a tool that detects accommodation automatically with the help of machine learning algorithms. We applied a software framework for task detection to the automatic identification of accommodation processes within a wiki. To set up the learning algorithms and test its performance, we conducted an empirical study, in which participants had to contribute to a wiki and, at the same time, identify their own tasks. Two domain experts evaluated the participants’ micro-tasks with regard to accommodation. We then applied an ontology-based task detection approach that identified accommodation with a rate of 79.12%. The potential use of our tool for measuring knowledge maturing online is discussed

Location as a determinant of accommodation prices: managerial approach

In the presentation authors discuss the location-based factors’ impact on accommodation prices. The aim of the presentation is to compare the results of qualitative and quantitative research on location-based determinants of accommodation prices in Lodz Metropolitan Area (Poland). The authors employ methodological triangulation (Yeung 2000), both to explore statistical significance of location-based determinants of accommodation prices, and to present managerial opinions about the influence of location on accommodation prices.The research was financially supported by Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (Subsidy for young scientists No 545/392 and 545/915). The authors are grateful to the students of tourism and recreation program at University of Lodz, supporting data collection procedure and conducting in-depth interviews

New methodology to measure the dynamics of ocular wave front aberrations during small amplitude changes of accommodation

We present a methodology to measure the systematic changes of aberrations induced by small changes in amplitude of accommodation. We use a method similar the one used in electrophysiology, where a periodic stimulus is presented to the eye and many periods (epochs) of the stimulus are averaged. Using this technique we have measured changes in higher order aberrations from 0.006μm to 0.02μm and correlated them with amplitude changes of accommodation as small as 0.14D. These small changes would have been undetectable without epoch averaging. The correlation coefficients of Zernike terms with defocus were calculated, demonstrating higher values of correlation for epoch averaging. The accurate monitoring of defocus at the start of the accommodation response has shown some interesting trends that may be related with the mechanisms behind accommodation

Mark My Words! Linguistic Style Accommodation in Social Media

The psycholinguistic theory of communication accommodation accounts for the general observation that participants in conversations tend to converge to one another's communicative behavior: they coordinate in a variety of dimensions including choice of words, syntax, utterance length, pitch and gestures. In its almost forty years of existence, this theory has been empirically supported exclusively through small-scale or controlled laboratory studies. Here we address this phenomenon in the context of Twitter conversations. Undoubtedly, this setting is unlike any other in which accommodation was observed and, thus, challenging to the theory. Its novelty comes not only from its size, but also from the non real-time nature of conversations, from the 140 character length restriction, from the wide variety of social relation types, and from a design that was initially not geared towards conversation at all. Given such constraints, it is not clear a priori whether accommodation is robust enough to occur given the constraints of this new environment. To investigate this, we develop a probabilistic framework that can model accommodation and measure its effects. We apply it to a large Twitter conversational dataset specifically developed for this task. This is the first time the hypothesis of linguistic style accommodation has been examined (and verified) in a large scale, real world setting. Furthermore, when investigating concepts such as stylistic influence and symmetry of accommodation, we discover a complexity of the phenomenon which was never observed before. We also explore the potential relation between stylistic influence and network features commonly associated with social status.Comment: Talk slides available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~cristian/www201

Effects of customer trust and online experiences in building hospitality brands

Customer trust embodies customer beliefs of actually receiving a promised service and manifestations of consumer’s confidences in an exchange parties reliability and integrity. The study is based on the fact as to how trusts criteria affect online purchase especially in regard to booking and buying the accommodations and also that accommodation providers assume that are very essential for consumers to make the online purchase. In total 150 consumers and 80 hotels owners/operators in India were examined. There are enormous discrepancies between consumers and accommodation providers were searched. Like formal guarantee of providers, security concern, refund of price paid delivery time and information about confirmation and they will switch from one brand to other due to promise breakage, less service quality, high price charged. However, these trust criteria were viewed inconsequential by the accommodation providers. It concluded with vast number of suggestions and recommendations for the accommodation providers need to include in their websites and build reputation and strong brands in the hospitality market

Equality in the Age of the Internet: Websites under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act

Under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, no individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability in the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation. Currently, courts are split on whether websites are places of public accommodation under Title III. There are two predominant methods to determining whether a website is a place of public accommodation: (1) the nexus test, under which websites are places of public accommodation only if a sufficient nexus exists between the website and a physical place; (2) websites are places of public accommodation regardless of a nexus to a physical place. The circuit split highlights the need for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to pass the Title III regulations for websites to provide direct guidance for businesses and courts. The DOJ was expected to release Title III regulations for websites in 2016, but have pushed back the expected release to 2018. Regardless of when, or if, the DOJ releases Title III regulations for websites, companies would benefit from using the many resources available to make their websites accessible as soon as possibl