The summer games

As part of a nationally funded project, we have developed and used \u27games\u27 as student centred teaching resources to enrich the capacity for design in beginning students in architecture, landscape architecture and urban design. Students are encouraged to learn inter-actively in a milieu characterised by self-directed play in a low-risk computer modelling environment. Recently thirteen upper year design students, six from Adelaide University (Adelaide, South Australia, Australia), five from Deakin University (Geelong, Victoria, Australia), and two from Victoria University, (Wellington, New Zealand) were commissioned over a ten-week period of the 2000-2001 Australian summer to construct a new series of games. This paper discusses the process behind constructing these games.This paper discusses six topical areas:&ndash; what is a game;&ndash; specific goals of the summer games;&ndash; the structure of a game;&ndash; the game-making process;&ndash; key findings from the production unit; and&ndash; future directions.<br /

XAI & I: Self-explanatory AI facilitating mutual understanding between AI and human experts

Traditionally, explainable artificial intelligence seeks to provide explanation and interpretability of high-performing black-box models such as deep neural networks. Interpretation of such models remains difficult, because of their high complexity. An alternative method is to instead force a deep-neural network to use human-intelligible features as the basis for its decisions. We tested this approach using the natural category domain of rock types. We compared the performance of a black-box implementation of transfer-learning using Resnet50 to that of a network first trained to predict expert-identified features and then forced to use these features to categorise rock images. The performance of this feature-constrained network was virtually identical to that of the unconstrained network. Further, a partially constrained network forced to condense down to a small number of features that was not trained with expert features did not result in these abstracted features being intelligible; nevertheless, an affine transformation of these features could be found that aligned well with expert-intelligible features. These findings show that making an AI intrinsically intelligible need not be at the cost of performance

Educação, empoderamento e lutas pelo reconhecimento: a questão dos direitos de cidadania

A revisão em baixa de certos direitos de cidadania, como os sociais e os laborais, em contextos de ajustamento estrutural e de crise econômica, está a reacender as lutas pelo reconhecimento, já não propriamente em termos de reconhecimento cultural ou identitário, como de fato se verificou, com intensidade, nas duas últimas décadas, mas em termos de reconhecimento jurídico, ou seja, de respeito por expectativas que podem ser satisfeitas porque estão legalmente protegidas. A educação, sendo fiel à sua vocação de defesa da integridade da pessoa humana, pelo menos desde a afirmação iluminista desse valor, não se pode alhear dessas brigas pelo reconhecimento jurídico. Tem seguramente um papel a desempenhar nessas contendas, mas qual, e de que modo? Esta é a questão de investigação que leva a demandar três objetivos: o primeiro consiste em associar a educação às brigas pelo reconhecimento, convocando, para o efeito, a “gramática moral dos conflitos sociais” de Honneth; o segundo, vinculando educação e empoderamento, procura mostrar que este último, não obstante dissensos interpretativos, pode ser interessante para definir o envolvimento da educação nas lutas pelo reconhecimento jurídico; o terceiro, por fim, consiste em delimitar as principais articulações desse papel em termos de empoderamento. A investigação, conjugando o quadro analítico honnethiano com a revisão de literatura sobre diagnósticos da “recessão jurídica” que hoje se vive em diversos contextos, nomeadamente nos países europeus mais fortemente atingidos pelas políticas de austeridade como modelo ou paradigma de resposta à crise do euro, das dívidas públicas e do Estado de bem-estar social, leva a concluir que a “era dos direitos” está sob ameaça e que a educação, mediante práticas de empoderamento bem delineadas, pode ser estratégica na potenciação de reações individuais e sociais ao ressurgimento desse tipo de ameaça.(undefined

This Artwork is Having a Rest

Both soul and art are terms with which “Western” thought makes a poetics of “energy” familiar, contrasting this to the prose of nouns. Where questions of personhood are not limited simply to oppositions between subject and object, the animate and inanimate, such a poetics engages with examples that can be discovered through their dialogue: work by Takis at Tate Modern and the Facts of Dickens’ Mr Gradgrind; or the metaphysics of clockwork in Baudelaire and the quantifications of energy by Helmholtz. In re-imagining Tylor’s fundamental notion of “animism” as itself a conceptual survival of the pre-industrial past, this article suggests that this very idea of animism already offers a vision of and for a post-industrial future

BU Canis Minoris -- the Most Compact Known Flat Doubly Eclipsing Quadruple System

We have found that the 2+2 quadruple star system BU CMi is currently the most compact quadruple system known, with an extremely short outer period of only 121 days. The previous record holder was TIC 219006972 (Kostov et al. 2023), with a period of 168 days. The quadruple nature of BU CMi was established by Volkov et al. (2021), but they misidentified the outer period as 6.6 years. BU CMi contains two eclipsing binaries (EBs), each with a period near 3 days, and a substantial eccentricity of about 0.22. All four stars are within about 0.1 solar mass of 2.4 solar masses. Both binaries exhibit dynamically driven apsidal motion with fairly short apsidal periods of about 30 years, thanks to the short outer orbital period. The outer period of 121 days is found both from the dynamical perturbations, with this period imprinted on the eclipse timing variations (ETV) curve of each EB by the other binary, and by modeling the complex line profiles in a collection of spectra. We find that the three orbital planes are all mutually aligned to within 1 degree, but the overall system has an inclination angle near 83.5 degrees. We utilize a complex spectro-photodynamical analysis to compute and tabulate all the interesting stellar and orbital parameters of the system. Finally, we also find an unexpected dynamical perturbation on a timescale of several years whose origin we explore. This latter effect was misinterpreted by Volkov et al. (2021) and led them to conclude that the outer period was 6.6 years rather than the 121 days that we establish here.Comment: 19 pages, 8 pages, accepted to MNRA

Musical events and perceptual ecologies

This paper, followed by two responses, discusses the application of ecological theory to an understanding of a number of issues in the aesthetics of music. It argues for an understanding of music as based in event perception, with an expanded conception of the sources that are specified by those events. Building on the theory of affordances, it considers the limitations of an information theoretic conception of musical complexity, discusses the importance of perceptual learning (understood as shaping by a structured environment) in understanding the affordances of music for different listeners, and raises the challenging problem of the terms in which musical materials might be appropriately described. The apparent tension between ecological and aesthetic positions—in which adaptation and accommodation seem to be at odds with a modernist aesthetic perspective which prioritizes the unsettling and defamiliarizing function of art—is confronted, before the paper concludes with some observations about different disciplinary perspectives on aesthetics, and matters of specificity and generality

Assessing the efficacy and tolerability of PET-guided BrECADD versus eBEACOPP in advanced-stage, classical Hodgkin lymphoma (HD21): a randomised, multicentre, parallel, open-label, phase 3 trial

Background Intensified systemic chemotherapy has the highest primary cure rate for advanced-stage, classical Hodgkin lymphoma but this comes with a cost of severe and potentially life long, persisting toxicities. With the new regimen of brentuximab vedotin, etoposide, cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, dacarbazine, and dexamethasone (BrECADD), we aimed to improve the risk-to-benefit ratio of treatment of advanced-stage, classical Hodgkin lymphoma guided by PET after two cycles. Methods This randomised, multicentre, parallel, open-label, phase 3 trial was done in 233 trial sites across nine countries. Eligible patients were adults (aged ≤60 years) with newly diagnosed, advanced-stage, classical Hodgkin lymphoma (ie, Ann Arbor stage III/IV, stage II with B symptoms, and either one or both risk factors of large mediastinal mass and extranodal lesions). Patients were randomly assigned (1:1) to four or six cycles (21-day intervals) of escalated doses of etoposide (200 mg/m2 intravenously on days 1–3), doxorubicin (35 mg/m2 intravenously on day 1), and cyclophosphamide (1250 mg/m2 intravenously on day 1), and standard doses of bleomycin (10 mg/m2 intravenously on day 8), vincristine (1·4 mg/m2 intravenously on day 8), procarbazine (100 mg/m2 orally on days 1–7), and prednisone (40 mg/m2 orally on days 1–14; eBEACOPP) or BrECADD, guided by PET after two cycles. Patients and investigators were not masked to treatment assignment. Hierarchical coprimary objectives were to show (1) improved tolerability defined by treatment-related morbidity and (2) non-inferior efficacy defined by progression-free survival with an absolute non-inferiority margin of 6 percentage points of BrECADD compared with eBEACOPP. An additional test of superiority of progression-free survival was to be done if non-inferiority had been established. Analyses were done by intention to treat; the treatment-related morbidity assessment required documentation of at least one chemotherapy cycle. This trial was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02661503). Findings Between July 22, 2016, and Aug 27, 2020, 1500 patients were enrolled, of whom 749 were randomly assigned to BrECADD and 751 to eBEACOPP. 1482 patients were included in the intention-to-treat analysis. The median age of patients was 31 years (IQR 24–42). 838 (56%) of 1482 patients were male and 644 (44%) were female. Most patients were White (1352 [91%] of 1482). Treatment-related morbidity was significantly lower with BrECADD (312 [42%] of 738 patients) than with eBEACOPP (430 [59%] of 732 patients; relative risk 0·72 [95% CI 0·65–0·80]; p<0·0001). At a median follow-up of 48 months, BrECADD improved progression-free survival with a hazard ratio of 0·66 (0·45–0·97; p=0·035); 4-year progression-free survival estimates were 94·3% (95% CI 92·6–96·1) for BrECADD and 90·9% (88·7–93·1) for eBEACOPP. 4-year overall survival rates were 98·6% (97·7–99·5) and 98·2% (97·2–99·3), respectively. Interpretation BrECADD guided by PET after two cycles is better tolerated and more effective than eBEACOPP in first-line treatment of adult patients with advanced-stage, classical Hodgkin lymphoma