Technologies, Narratives, and Practical Wisdom

Recent digital and computational developments dramatically changed overnight the pace in which new technologies are integrated into the lives of billions of people and have changed how people use their time and relate to each other and their physical environment. This paper explores how some concepts of Ricœur’s practical philosophy can offer significant contributions to the ethical discussion of new technologies. I suggest that a narrative approach to the ethical debates on technologies helps to put them in context and to analyze them in a dialectical manner concerning the natural and human processes that will be impacted by them. I then explore how the narrative approach leads to an ethical proposal based on Ricœur’s critical phronesis (practical wisdom). While narratives work as a propaedeutic to ethics, a narrative approach to critical phronesis unveils and highlights some of its conceptual attributes that make it uniquely suited to tackle ethical issues related to technologies.Les développements récents du numérique et de l’informatique ont considérablement changé du jour au lendemain le rythme d’intégration des nouvelles technologies dans les vies de milliards de personnes, de même qu’elles ont changé la manière dont les gens usent de leur temps, entrent en relation avec les autres et avec leur environnement physique. Cet article explore la façon dont certains concepts de la philosophie pratique de Ricœur peuvent offrir des contributions significatives à la discussion éthique concernant les nouvelles technologies. Je suggère l’idée selon laquelle une approche narrative des débats éthiques sur les technologies aide à les contextualiser et à les analyser de manière dialectique en ce qui concerne les processus naturels et humains qui seront impactés par elles. J’explore ensuite la façon dont l’approche narrative conduit à une proposition éthique fondée sur la phronésis critique de Ricœur (sagesse pratique). Tandis que les récits fonctionnent comme une propédeutique à l’éthique, une approche narrative de la phronésis critique dévoile et éclaire certaines propriétés conceptuelles qui la rendent seule à même de s’attaquer à des questions éthiques concernant les technologies

Introduction

Introduction to ERRS 2019 10 2 “Practical Wisdom”Introduction à ERRS 2019 10 2 “La sagesse pratique

Prototypicality effects in global semantic description of objects

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for semantic description of object features based on the prototypicality effects of the Prototype Theory. Our prototype-based description model encodes and stores the semantic meaning of an object, while describing its features using the semantic prototype computed by CNN-classifications models. Our method uses semantic prototypes to create discriminative descriptor signatures that describe an object highlighting its most distinctive features within the category. Our experiments show that: i) our descriptor preserves the semantic information used by the CNN-models in classification tasks; ii) our distance metric can be used as the object's typicality score; iii) our descriptor signatures are semantically interpretable and enables the simulation of the prototypical organization of objects within a category.Comment: Paper accepted in IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision 2019 (WACV2019). Content: 10 pages (8 + 2 reference) with 7 figure

Exchange rate exposure of firms and the demand for foreign exchange derivatives in Brazil: did hedge or speculatiom matter?

This paper examines empirically how the demand of foreign exchange derivatives by Brazilian corporations is related to their exchange rate exposure. With the help of an original database of 74,567 contracts written from 1999 to 2002 between corporations and financial institutions, we were able to identify the corporations that speculated and the ones that hedged with foreign exchange derivatives during this period. Our results show that the exchange rate exposure is positively related to the foreign operational exposures for firms that speculated and negatively related for firms that hedged in 2002. For the other years of the sample period, speculation or hedge did not affect the relationship between the exchange rate exposure and the foreign operational exposure of firms.Este artigo analisa empiricamente como a demanda de derivativos de câmbio por firmas brasileiras está relacionada as suas exposições cambiais. Coma ajuda de umbanco de dados original de 74.567 contratos entre firmas e instituições financeiras de 1999 a 2002, somos capazes de identificar que empresas especularam e que empresas fizeram hedge durante o período. Nossos resultados mostram que a exposição operacional cambial das firmas está positivamente relacionada com a exposição cambial das firmas que especularam e negativamente relacionada com as firmas que fizeram hedge em 2002. Para os outros anos do período amostral, a especulação ou hedge não afetaram a relação entre a exposição operacional cambial e a exposição operacional das firmas brasileiras

Digital Ricœur

As Ricœur scholars know, the literature by and on Ricœur is vast. Material written by Ricœur that is not collected in published volumes is often difficult to locate, and even in the published volumes it is frequently a challenge to locate where Ricœur discusses a particular topic. Given the amount of his work it can be a challenge too to determine changes in his analyses over the life of his corpus. And locating secondary literature on Ricœur can be equally problematic. In response, we have been working to establish a model for how Ricœur’s corpus might be digitized so that the issues of access, keyword location, and pattern might all be addressed. To develop the model, we are starting with Ricœur’s primary texts in English and plan to expand over time to other languages and to the secondary literature on Ricœur. In the present article we discuss our model and its five steps: digital access; copyright; text preparation for digital searches and analysis; examples of digital searches and analyses; and an archive portal interface that allows users to query based on an extensible set of search variables without needing to know or access the underlying search logic. We also invite interested researchers to help assist the development of this digitization project.Comme le savent les spécialistes de Ricœur, l’œuvre de Ricœur comme la littérature secondaire qui lui est consacrée sont vastes. Les écrits de Ricœur qui ne sont pas réunis dans des volumes publiés sont souvent difficiles à localiser, et même dans les volumes publiés, c’est fréquemment un défi que de localiser dans quels écrits il aborde tel ou tel thème. Étant donné l’ampleur de son œuvre, determiner quels ont été les changement de ses analyses tout au long de son corpus peut aussi constituer un défi. De même, localiser la littérature secondaire sur Ricœur peut s’avérer problématique. En réponse à cela, nous avons travaillé à établir un modèle de numérisation du corpus de Ricœur, de façon à ce que les questions d’accès à l’œuvre, de localisation par mots-clés et de modélisation puissent être toutes solutionnées. Pour developper ce modèle, nous commençons avec les écrits de Ricœur en anglais et nous prévoyons avec le temps d’étendre cette demarche aux écrits du philosophe dans d’autres langues ainsi qu’à la littérature secondaire le concernant. Dans cet article, nous présentons notre modèle dans ses cinq étapes: accès numérique; droits d’auteurs; préparation de textes pour des recherches et des analyses numériques; exemples de recherches et d’analyses numériques; interface de portail destiné aux archives et basée sur un ensemble extensible de variables permettant aux utilisateurs de faire leur recherche sans avoir besoin de connaître ou d’avoir accès à la logique de recherche sous-jacente. Nous invitons également les chercheurs intéressés à contribuer à ce projet de numérisation

Time Synchronization in Limited Resources Wireless Devices

This article deals with implementation of a time distribution protocol among limited resources wireless sensor devices. This type of protocol aims to distribute the same time reference among two or more devices within a network. Timestamps on measures help to relate them on causality studies. The PTP protocol defined at IEEE 1588-2008 is used, with little adaptations, to synchronize and tune software clocks inside the target boards of the Texas Instruments  ez430-RF2480ZigBee kit. Initially only synchronization was done, but it was verified the need to implement clock tuning. The devices clocks can be synchronized and tuned, even in heavily limited resources devices

Development of a fuzzy qualitative risk assessment model applied to construction industry

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia IndustrialThe construction industry is plagued by occupational risky situations and poor working conditions. Risk Assessment for Occupational Safety (RAOS) is the first and key step to achieve adequate safety levels, particularly to support decision-making in safety programs. Most construction safety efforts are applied informally under the premise that simply allocating more resources to safety management will improve safety on site. Moreover, there are many traditional methods to address RAOS, but few have been adapted and validated for use in the construction industry, thus producing poor results. The contribution of this dissertation is a qualitative fuzzy RAOS model, tailored for the construction industry, named QRAM (Qualitative Risk Assessment Model). QRAM is based on four dimensions: Safety Climate Adequacy, (work accidents) Severity Factors, (work accidents) Possibility Factors and Safety Barriers Effectiveness. The risk assessment is based on real data collected by observation of reality, interviews with workers, foreman and engineers and consultation of site documents (working procedures, reports of work accident investigation, etc.), avoiding the use of data obtained by statistical tecnhiques. To rating each parameter it was defined qualitative evaluators - linguistic variables - which allow to perform a user-friendly knowledge elicitation. QRAM was, firstly evaluated by “peer” review, with 12 safety experts from Brazil (2), Bulgaria (1), Greece (3), Turkey (3) and Portugal (3), and then, evaluated by comparing QRAM with other RAOS tecnhiques and methods. The safety experts , concluded that: a) QRAM is a versatile tool for occupational safety risk assessment on construction sites; b) the specific checklists for knowledge elicitation are a good decision aid and, c) the use of linguistic variables is a better way to make the risk assessments process more objective and reliable.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - PhD Scholarship SFRH/BD/39610/200

Fast-Forward Video Based on Semantic Extraction

Thanks to the low operational cost and large storage capacity of smartphones and wearable devices, people are recording many hours of daily activities, sport actions and home videos. These videos, also known as egocentric videos, are generally long-running streams with unedited content, which make them boring and visually unpalatable, bringing up the challenge to make egocentric videos more appealing. In this work we propose a novel methodology to compose the new fast-forward video by selecting frames based on semantic information extracted from images. The experiments show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art as far as semantic information is concerned and that it is also able to produce videos that are more pleasant to be watched.Comment: Accepted for publication and presented in 2016 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP