Products as Affective Modifiers of Identities

© The Author(s) 2015. Are salesclerks seen as better, more powerful, or more active when they drive Mustangs? What about entrepreneurs? What about driving a mid-sized car? Intuitively, we have ideas about these, but much of the research on the affective nature of products is on purchasing, desires, and self-fulfillment. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, we argue that people's association with products has some basis in the impression management of their identity. For this to occur, there must be some cultural consensus about the way that products modify identities. Drawing on affect control theory's (ACT) methodology and equations, we measure the goodness, powerfulness, and activeness of several products, identities, and the associated product-modified identities to explore how products function as affective modifiers of identities. We find consistent effects across several types of technology products, whereby products pull the modified identity in the direction of the products' affective qualities. Support is established for the ACT equations that predict how traits modify identities as also having utility for predicting how products modify identities. This suggests that the opening questions can be answered empirically by measuring cultural-specific sentiments of the identity and the product and by developing equations to predict the identity modification process

Snapshot navigation in the wavelet domain

Many animals rely on robust visual navigation which can be explained by snapshot models, where an agent is assumed to store egocentric panoramic images and subsequently use them to recover a heading by comparing current views to the stored snapshots. Long-range route navigation can also be explained by such models, by storing multiple snapshots along a training route and comparing the current image to these. For such models, memory capacity and comparison time increase dramatically with route length, rendering them unfeasible for small-brained insects and low-power robots where computation and storage are limited. One way to reduce the requirements is to use a compressed image representation. Inspired by the filter bank-like arrangement of the visual system, we here investigate how a frequency-based image representation influences the performance of a typical snapshot model. By decomposing views into wavelet coefficients at different levels and orientations, we achieve a compressed visual representation that remains robust when used for navigation. Our results indicate that route following based on wavelet coefficients is not only possible but gives increased performance over a range of other models

On a New Type of Fern-Stele, and Its Probable Phylogenetic Relations

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The segregation and isolation of children and young people in the Victorian Juvenile Justice System: rethinking a flawed system: submission to the Inquiry into Youth Justice Centres in Victoria

YJ Submission 59Bronwyn Naylor, Elizabeth Grant & Rohan Lulha

Using neural networks to understand the information that guides behavior: a case study in visual navigation

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Introduction to Design+Crime

This special issue of Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal comprises select papers presented at the First International Design+Crime Conference and Exhibition held at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia in December 2012. Design+Crime provided a transdisciplinary forum for discussion on how the disciplines of design and criminology are becoming interlinked in crime prevention practice and academia. Academics and practitioners from design, urban planning, architecture, as well as criminology, law enforcement, social geography and policy development shared in this unique discussion and showcased a growing collection of innovative approaches to crime prevention