Encounter, story and dance: Human-machine communication and the design of human-technology interactions

John McCarthy and Peter Wright argue that people “don't just use technology;” they “live with it,” which drives their decision “to suggest an approach to viewing technology as experience,” rather than theorizing people's “experience with technology” [8]. This paper takes a step back, to reconsider the potential of analyzing what people do with technology, because some technologies, in particular robots, are increasingly experienced as machine others, with which people are encouraged to collaborate, as opposed just to use. Recognizing the work of McCarthy and Wright, the paper takes the threads of experience they identify-sensual, emotional, compositional and spatio-temporal-and examines these alongside a broad communication-theoretical approach that identifies three interlocking elements in human-robot interactions: encounter, story and dance [11]. This framework is identified as one approach being developed within a new area of communication studies, Human-Machine Communication (HMC). The paper argues that attending to the detail of how humans and robots communicate in relation to encounters, stories and dances, supports recognition of the complexities of experience within human-robot interactions that support flexible modes of human-robot collaboration. In particular, this framework is open to the potential of machine-like robots in human-robot interactions for which a process of “tempered anthropomorphism” supports meaningful communication with a robot that is nonetheless clearly recognized by people as a machine other [11]

Mistakes Made: Will the Council of the Federation Be Effective?

Constitutional issues have always been an integral and controversial part of Canadian politics and federalism since Confederation in 1867. It became even more so after the Second World War as the jurisdictional line became blurred when different levels of government began to introduce programs together. However in this present day with the written Constitution of 1982 patriated without the consent of Quebec, there is an even greater controversy over jurisdictional powers. Particularly with the growing complexity involved with the development of programs and services and the inability for the provincial governments to effectively influence nation-wide policy due to the political nature of the Canadian Senate. The needs of each province/region differs from one another but because of the provinces’/territories’ disagreements on how things should be done, the federal government has frequently taken unilateral action by imposing what it believes is good for Canada and Canadians overall rather than taking in enough consideration for the diversity of this country. (author's abstract

The Promise and Limits of Cooperative Federalism as a Constitutional Principle

In this article, I shall address the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent jurisprudence on cooperative federalism and its promise for the future, from the perspective of federalism as an underlying constitutional principle. In its jurisprudence, particularly over the past decade, the Court moved from an ostensibly neutral view on what form federalism, as a normative concept, should take, to one of not just tolerating but actively encouraging flexible and cooperative federalism. There are limits to the ambit of cooperative federalism as an organizing principle, and it must be balanced with other principles, including parliamentary sovereignty and the separation of powers, and occasionally, with the fact that sections 91 and 92 of the Constitution Act, 1867 grant powers that are, in principle, exclusive and not concurrent (even though they may apply concurrently to certain matters through the double-aspect doctrine). On the separation of powers, there are also limits to what courts can do as adjudicative bodies in encouraging cooperation, and it falls principally to federal and provincial political actors to determine the dynamics and degree of cooperation, given the diversity of views and perspectives inherent in a federal system. Given its origins in the political dynamics of federal-provincial relations and its implementation largely through political agreements and more or less informal institutional or administrative arrangements and concertation, cooperative federalism might be better understood and applied in the legal context as a modality of the federal principle, rather than as a full-blown constitutional principle in its own right

Canada’s multiple voices diplomacy in climate change negotiations: a focus on Québec

Abstract: This article sheds light on the complexity of international climate change negotiations in a federal country, like Canada, where there is no clear attribution of full power over international negotiation concerning this issue. Climate change is a multi-level and multi-stakeholder issue, one that can only be tackled successfully if all actors, at all levels of government, are involved in the process. In recent years, Canadian provinces, especially Québec, have become intensely involved in climate change paradiplomacy. That situation has led to a Canadian paradox where the Government of Québec worked to respect the Kyoto Protocol and act accordingly, while Canada opted out of the Protocol in 2011

Old School Catalog 1908-09, The Department of Law

https://scholar.valpo.edu/oldschoolcatalogs/1023/thumbnail.jp