Inclusive development in search of political will

Inclusive development builds upon the three pillars of increased human wellbeing for all, social and environmental sustainability, and empowerment. Political will at multiple levels of governance needs to be mobilized to curb the global inequality trend

The importance of visual control and biomechanics in the regulation of gesture-speech synchrony for an individual deprived of proprioceptive feedback of body position.

Do communicative actions such as gestures fundamentally differ in their control mechanisms from other actions? Evidence for such fundamental differences comes from a classic gesture-speech coordination experiment performed with a person (IW) with deafferentation (McNeill, 2005). Although IW has lost both his primary source of information about body position (i.e., proprioception) and discriminative touch from the neck down, his gesture-speech coordination has been reported to be largely unaffected, even if his vision is blocked. This is surprising because, without vision, his object-directed actions almost completely break down. We examine the hypothesis that IW’s gesture-speech coordination is supported by the biomechanical effects of gesturing on head posture and speech. We find that when vision is blocked, there are micro-scale increases in gesture-speech timing variability, consistent with IW’s reported experience that gesturing is difficult without vision. Supporting the hypothesis that IW exploits biomechanical consequences of the act of gesturing, we find that: (1) gestures with larger physical impulses co-occur with greater head movement, (2) gesture-speech synchrony relates to larger gesture-concurrent head movements (i.e. for bimanual gestures), (3) when vision is blocked, gestures generate more physical impulse, and (4) moments of acoustic prominence couple more with peaks of physical impulse when vision is blocked. It can be concluded that IW’s gesturing ability is not based on a specialized language-based feedforward control as originally concluded from previous research, but is still dependent on a varied means of recurrent feedback from the body

Masked-Piper: Masking personal identities in visual recordings while preserving multimodal information

In this increasingly data-rich world, visual recordings of human behavior are often unable to be shared due to concerns about privacy. Consequently, data sharing in fields such as behavioral science, multimodal communication, and human movement research is often limited. In addition, in legal and other non-scientific contexts, privacy-related concerns may preclude the sharing of video recordings and thus remove the rich multimodal context that humans recruit to communicate. Minimizing the risk of identity exposure while preserving critical behavioral information would maximize utility of public resources (e.g., research grants) and time invested in audio–visual​ research. Here we present an open-source computer vision tool that masks the identities of humans while maintaining rich information about communicative body movements. Furthermore, this masking tool can be easily applied to many videos, leveraging computational tools to augment the reproducibility and accessibility of behavioral research. The tool is designed for researchers and practitioners engaged in kinematic and affective research. Application areas include teaching/education, communication and human movement research, CCTV, and legal contexts

Energy flows in gesture-speech physics: The respiratory-vocal system and its coupling with hand gestures

Expressive moments in communicative hand gestures often align with emphatic stress in speech. It has recently been found that acoustic markers of emphatic stress arise naturally during steady-state phonation when upper-limb movements impart physical impulses on the body, most likely affecting acoustics via respiratory activity. In this confirmatory study, participants (N = 29) repeatedly uttered consonant-vowel (/pa/) mono-syllables while moving in particular phase relations with speech, or not moving the upper limbs. This study shows that respiration-related activity is affected by (especially high-impulse) gesturing when vocalizations occur near peaks in physical impulse. This study further shows that gesture-induced moments of bodily impulses increase the amplitude envelope of speech, while not similarly affecting the Fundamental Frequency (F0). Finally, tight relations between respiration-related activity and vocalization were observed, even in the absence of movement, but even more so when upper-limb movement is present. The current findings expand a developing line of research showing that speech is modulated by functional biomechanical linkages between hand gestures and the respiratory system. This identification of gesture-speech biomechanics promises to provide an alternative phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and mechanistic explanatory route of why communicative upper limb movements co-occur with speech in humans. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Towards an economics of well-being

There is growing concern that presently dominant frameworks in economics no longer provide a way of adequately addressing and analysing the problems of today’s globalising and rapidly changing world. This article makes a number of fundamental proposals about how we might reframe economics to move it towards a clearer focus on human well-being. It develops arguments for a change in the basic ontological proposition and for the need to see ‘the economy’ as an instituted process of resource allocation. From this viewpoint, economics is then the study of resource allocation decisions and processes and the forces that guide these: from a human perspective it is about understanding who gets what, under what conditions and why? The paper argues that a pluralist approach to understanding the economy is necessary for political, analytical and technical reasons. Drawing on a range of contributions to heterodox economics, the paper argues that if we are to understand current crises and challenges, then our understanding of resource allocation in society must have a broader scope than is present in mainstream economics; it proposes a rethinking of economic agency and provides a critique of rational behaviour that is founded in shifting the emphasis from a narrow conception of welfare to well-being. Acknowledging human well-being as a multidimensional concept, the relationship between the well-being of the person and the collective is reconsidered and the methodological implications for the issue of aggregation are discussed. The article seeks to serve as a point of departure for formulating new research questions, exploring the relationships between human well-being and economic development and analysing economic behaviour and interactions in such a way as to bring us closer to peoples’ realities on the ground

LE CHANGEMENT ET LES INSTITUTIONS CULTURELLES ET MUSÉOLOGIQUES : L’ICOM ET LE CHANGEMENT

Je remercie Raul Mendez Lugo, le Président de MINOM et Alfredo Tinoco, le Président de MINOM-Portugal… Mesdames et messieurs, amis et collègues, c’est un honneur de représenter le Conseil international des musées aujourd’hui ici à Lisbonne pour l’ouverture d’un atelier qui promet d’être fructueux et instructif de tous les points de vue, notamment en nous esquissant les grandes lignes d’actions à mener en plus étroite collaboration. Parmi les musées que les participants à cet atelier pourraient visiter dimanche, nous prenons note du “Museu nacional do azulejo” et de l’écomusée “Ecomuseu do Seixal”. D’une part, un musée national présente à un public international une forme d’artisanat traditionnel et mondialement connu par des moyens muséologiques contemporains et d’autre part une communauté qui a fondé et qui gère l’écomusée s’attache à son patrimoine au sein de son territoire

From correlation to causation: the cruciality of a collectivity in the context of collective action

This paper discusses a longitudinal field study on collective action which aims to move beyond student samples and enhance mundane realism. First we provide a historical overview of the literature on the what (i.e., antecedents of collective action) and the how (i.e., the methods employed) of the social psychology of protest. This historical overview is substantiated with meta-analytical evidence on how these antecedents and methods changed over time. After the historical overview, we provide an empirical illustration of a longitudinal field study in a natural setting―a newly-built Dutch neighbourhood. We assessed changes in informal embeddedness, efficacy, identification, emotions, and grievances over time. Between t0 and t1 the residents protested against the plan to allow a mosque to carrying out their services in a community building in the neighbourhood. We examined the antecedents of protest before [t0] and after [t1] the protests, and whether residents participated or not. We show how a larger social network functions as a catalyst in steering protest participation. Our longitudinal field study replicates basic findings from experimental and survey research. However, it also shows that one antecedent in particular, which is hard to manipulate in the lab (i.e., the size of someone’s social network), proved to be of great importance. We suggest that in overcoming our most pertinent challenge―causality―we should not only remain in our laboratories but also go out and examine real-life situations with people situated in real-life social networks