Absences and Silences: The Representation of the Tea Picker in Colonial and Fair Trade Advertising

Ethical consumption as a form of consumerism suggests that there can be a benign form of globalization where consumers can effect positive change by exercising the ‘choice’ of opting for fair trade. In marketing this choice, fair trade advertising of tea, cocoa and coffee in particular has adopted the image of the smiling and happy worker from the global South, often in their working environment and testifying by their presence and their smile to the ethical and moral nature of the product. They therefore condone our consumption as moral pleasure. This essay explores the history of this image in colonial advertising and considers how the smile works in contemporary advertising to silence these workers who are unable to ‘speak the truth about themselves’ (Michel Foucault interviewed by Gerard Raulet)

South Asian mobilisation in two northern cities: a comparison of Manchester and Bradford Asian youth movements

Anti-racist movements develop and maintain their energy through the establishment of local, grass root networks. To date, research on the anti-racist movement in Britain has focussed on the creation of national narratives that highlight the power and influence of the movement. This article compares two of the Asian Youth movements that operated in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explore the importance of investigating localised settings when researching the history and impact of the antiracist movement as a whole. Oral histories and documents produced by the Asian Youth Movements are used to reflect and understand how the organisations operated and developed differently, highlighting the influence of specific urban environments which affected local migratory experiences and therefore the makeup and operations of the movements themselves

Design and Fabrication of cross corrugated recuperator fins for a micro gas turbine

The National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore is involved in the development of a 10kW micro gas turbine (MGT). A recuperator is mandatory for an MGT to boost the thermal efficiency of the unit. This paper describes in detail the fabrication process of efficient corrugated fins for deploying in the recuperator of an MGT. The use of corrugated fins in the recuperator of the MGT gives higher effectiveness compared to conventional flat fins. The paper, in detail, describes the various materials used and the heat treatment process used for manufacturing the forming and shearing die sets. All manufacturing accuracy requirements were achieved to get the required fin geometry. The formed corrugated fins were qualified through a series of tests and large number fins were formed for use in the annular recuperator of the Micro Gas Turbine

Motivations, Values and Emotions: 3 sides of the same coin

This position paper speaks to the interrelationships between the three concepts of motivations, values, and emotion. Motivations prime actions, values serve to choose between motivations, emotions provide a common currency for values, and emotions implement motivations. While conceptually distinct, the three are so pragmatically intertwined as to differ primarily from our taking different points of view. To make these points more transparent, we briefly describe the three in the context a cognitive architecture, the LIDA model, for software agents and robots that models human cognition, including a developmental period. We also compare the LIDA model with other models of cognition, some involving learning and emotions. Finally, we conclude that artificial emotions will prove most valuable as implementers of motivations in situations requiring learning and development

Using Echo State Networks for Cryptography

Echo state networks are simple recurrent neural networks that are easy to implement and train. Despite their simplicity, they show a form of memory and can predict or regenerate sequences of data. We make use of this property to realize a novel neural cryptography scheme. The key idea is to assume that Alice and Bob share a copy of an echo state network. If Alice trains her copy to memorize a message, she can communicate the trained part of the network to Bob who plugs it into his copy to regenerate the message. Considering a byte-level representation of in- and output, the technique applies to arbitrary types of data (texts, images, audio files, etc.) and practical experiments reveal it to satisfy the fundamental cryptographic properties of diffusion and confusion.Comment: 8 pages, ICANN 201

The Role of Consciousness in Memory

Conscious events interact with memory systems in learning, rehearsal and retrieval (Ebbinghaus 1885/1964; Tulving 1985). Here we present hypotheses that arise from the IDA computional model (Franklin, Kelemen and McCauley 1998; Franklin 2001b) of global workspace theory (Baars 1988, 2002). Our primary tool for this exploration is a flexible cognitive cycle employed by the IDA computational model and hypothesized to be a basic element of human cognitive processing. Since cognitive cycles are hypothesized to occur five to ten times a second and include interaction between conscious contents and several of the memory systems, they provide the means for an exceptionally fine-grained analysis of various cognitive tasks. We apply this tool to the small effect size of subliminal learning compared to supraliminal learning, to process dissociation, to implicit learning, to recognition vs. recall, and to the availability heuristic in recall. The IDA model elucidates the role of consciousness in the updating of perceptual memory, transient episodic memory, and procedural memory. In most cases, memory is hypothesized to interact with conscious events for its normal functioning. The methodology of the paper is unusual in that the hypotheses and explanations presented are derived from an empirically based, but broad and qualitative computational model of human cognition