Altered States: Creative Arts, Virtual Reality, and the Human Condition

Virtual reality (VR) is a medium that is cutting-edge and novel, creating fully immersive experiences for diverse audiences. Able to fabricate endless opportunities of hyper-realistic scenes, virtual reality provides a specific kind of space for self-reflection and empathy that no other medium can match. VR can take the viewer to the night of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, or next to families trying to survive the genocide in the Nuba mountains of Sudan, or even alongside a NASA scientists atop a sheet of ice in Greenland measuring the rising sea levels. This thesis explores the discourse and critical commentary surrounding various artists and investigative journalists working with virtual reality. The works grapple with our notion of the human condition from life and death, to violence and suffering; whether critiquing international and political conflicts, human rights, gender and sexuality, or humanity’s impact on the environment. The considered artists and groups engage the participant to see and question their own relationship to these issues surrounding the self, the other, and a range of challenges facing the world today. Virtual reality is as much immersive as it is interactive, allowing for your consciousness to not just interpret the medium, but to be the medium

Bildung als Chance. Menschenrechtsbildung mit Kindern in prekären Lebenslagen

In diesem Beitrag wird vor dem Hintergrund des Rechts auf Bildung als ein Recht auf Menschenrechtsbildung eine Bildungsinitiative zum Thema Kinderrechte mit palästinensischen Flüchtlingskindern im Südlibanon vorgestellt. (DIPF/Orig.)This article introduces - referring to the context of human rights education - the concept and implementation of a Children Right\u27s Workshop with children of refugees in the South Lebanon. (DIPF/Orig.

Altered States: Creative Arts, Virtual Reality, and the Human Condition

Virtual reality (VR) is a medium that is cutting-edge and novel, creating fully immersive experiences for diverse audiences. Able to fabricate endless opportunities of hyper-realistic scenes, virtual reality provides a specific kind of space for self-reflection and empathy that no other medium can match. VR can take the viewer to the night of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, or next to families trying to survive the genocide in the Nuba mountains of Sudan, or even alongside a NASA scientists atop a sheet of ice in Greenland measuring the rising sea levels. This thesis explores the discourse and critical commentary surrounding various artists and investigative journalists working with virtual reality. The works grapple with our notion of the human condition from life and death, to violence and suffering; whether critiquing international and political conflicts, human rights, gender and sexuality, or humanity’s impact on the environment. The considered artists and groups engage the participant to see and question their own relationship to these issues surrounding the self, the other, and a range of challenges facing the world today. Virtual reality is as much immersive as it is interactive, allowing for your consciousness to not just interpret the medium, but to be the medium

Configurable data center switch architectures

In this thesis, we explore alternative architectures for implementing con_gurable Data Center Switches along with the advantages that can be provided by such switches. Our first contribution centers around determining switch architectures that can be implemented on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to provide configurable switching protocols. In the process, we identify a gap in the availability of frameworks to realistically evaluate the performance of switch architectures in data centers and contribute a simulation framework that relies on realistic data center traffic patterns. Our framework is then used to evaluate the performance of currently existing as well as newly proposed FPGA-amenable switch designs. Through collaborative work with Meng and Papaphilippou, we establish that only small-medium range switches can be implemented on today's FPGAs. Our second contribution is a novel switch architecture that integrates a custom in-network hardware accelerator with a generic switch to accelerate Deep Neural Network training applications in data centers. Our proposed accelerator architecture is prototyped on an FPGA, and a scalability study is conducted to demonstrate the trade-offs of an FPGA implementation when compared to an ASIC implementation. In addition to the hardware prototype, we contribute a light weight load-balancing and congestion control protocol that leverages the unique communication patterns of ML data-parallel jobs to enable fair sharing of network resources across different jobs. Our large-scale simulations demonstrate the ability of our novel switch architecture and light weight congestion control protocol to both accelerate the training time of machine learning jobs by up to 1.34x and benefit other latency-sensitive applications by reducing their 99%-tile completion time by up to 4.5x. As for our final contribution, we identify the main requirements of in-network applications and propose a Network-on-Chip (NoC)-based architecture for supporting a heterogeneous set of applications. Observing the lack of tools to support such research, we provide a tool that can be used to evaluate NoC-based switch architectures.Open Acces

Dialogues of fisherwomen in Amazonian coastal communities - outcomes of a financial literacy education programme

The richness of resources in the Amazonian coastal region, combined with the need to break free from the constant financial vulnerability, stand at the heart of our fieldwork, conducted as part of the Fish Forever Program for Rare Brazil, an NGO that catalyses behavioural change to achieve enduring conservation results. Our research proposes an analysis of the intended and unintended outcomes of the financial literacy education programme offered during 2020 to the fisherwomen of eight communities in the State of Pará, Brazil. We aimed to understand the enablers and implications of individual and group change arising from that education programme. Drawing from theory of change and emancipatory education theories, we analyse evidence derived from ethnographic journals, interviews, and document analysis. Our initial findings show that the structure of the meetings for the financial literacy education programme enabled the emergence of new social-relational links amongst the women. This, in turn, allowed each woman to discover a new side of their identity, both on an individual and a communal level. Overall, we identify five themes of unintended outcomes: structured dialogue, foundations of dialogue, oracy, transformative emancipation, and self and group identity. We offer an analysis of their causes and implications. Using dialogic approaches to co-develop strategies of financial literacy allowed the women in eight Amazonian coastal communities to manage their fisheries' resources collectively and sustainably as well as see their cultural identity in a new light. We reflect on how this shift in the perception of self and group identities challenges elements of structural and cultural violence in the context of Amazonian fisherwomen. We conclude by proposing the inclusion of a feminist research perspective into the operationalisation of evaluation tools for education programmes aimed at fisherwomen in coastal communities

Transit Reconfigurable Exerciser - Intern Exit Abstract

The Transit Resistive Exerciser (TREX) was developed during a 16 week period in which a clutch device filled with smart material was built and began the testing phase. The clutch serves as a passive method of creating resistance. When paired with a series of springs, the device creates a rowing machine also capable of resistive exercise configurations. The device has loading profiles similar to the exercise devices used on the International Space Station today. The prototype created was designed in a modular fashion to support parallel development on various aspects of the project. Hardware and software are currently in development and make use of commercially available parts. Similar technologies have been used in the automotive industry but have never been explored in the context of countermeasure systems for space flight. If the work done leads to successful testing and further development, this technology has the potential to cut the size and weight of exercise devices by an order of magnitude or more

Doxycycline increases neurogenesis and reduces microglia in the adult hippocampus.

Adult hippocampal neurogenesis results in the continuous formation of new neurons and is a process of brain plasticity involved in learning and memory. Although inducible-reversible transgenic mouse models are increasingly being used to investigate adult neurogenesis, transgene control requires the administration of an activator, doxycycline (Dox), with unknown effects on adult neurogenesis. Here, we tested the effect of Dox administration on adult neurogenesis in vivo. We found that 4 weeks of Dox treatment at doses commonly used for gene expression control, resulted in increased neurogenesis. Furthermore, the dendrites of new neurons displayed increased spine density. Concomitantly, Iba1-expressing microglia was reduced by Dox treatment. These results indicate that Dox treatment may interfere with parameters of relevance for the use of inducible transgenic mice in studies of adult neurogenesis or brain inflammation