Resonating Experiences of Self and Others enabled by a Tangible Somaesthetic Design

Digitalization is penetrating every aspect of everyday life including a human's heart beating, which can easily be sensed by wearable sensors and displayed for others to see, feel, and potentially "bodily resonate" with. Previous work in studying human interactions and interaction designs with physiological data, such as a heart's pulse rate, have argued that feeding it back to the users may, for example support users' mindfulness and self-awareness during various everyday activities and ultimately support their wellbeing. Inspired by Somaesthetics as a discipline, which focuses on an appreciation of the living body's role in all our experiences, we designed and explored mobile tangible heart beat displays, which enable rich forms of bodily experiencing oneself and others in social proximity. In this paper, we first report on the design process of tangible heart displays and then present results of a field study with 30 pairs of participants. Participants were asked to use the tangible heart displays during watching movies together and report their experience in three different heart display conditions (i.e., displaying their own heart beat, their partner's heart beat, and watching a movie without a heart display). We found, for example that participants reported significant effects in experiencing sensory immersion when they felt their own heart beats compared to the condition without any heart beat display, and that feeling their partner's heart beats resulted in significant effects on social experience. We refer to resonance theory to discuss the results, highlighting the potential of how ubiquitous technology could utilize physiological data to provide resonance in a modern society facing social acceleration.Comment: 18 page

Fast dynamic difficulty adjustment for intelligent tutoring systems with small datasets

This paper studies the problem of automatically adjusting the difficulty level of educational exercises to facilitate learning. Previous work on this topic either relies on large datasets or requires multiple interactions before it adjusts properly. Although this is sufficient for large-scale online courses, there are also scenarios where students are expected to only work through a few trials. In these cases, the adjustment needs to respond to only a few data points. To accommodate this, we propose a novel difficulty adjustment method that requires less data and adapts faster. Our proposed method refits an existing item response theory model to work on smaller datasets by generalizing based on attributes of the exercises. To adapt faster, we additionally introduce a discount value that weakens the influence of past interactions. We evaluate our proposed method on simulations and a user study using an example graph theory lecture. Our results show that our approach indeed succeeds in adjusting to learners quickly

Macroanatomical and histological study of the structure of intercornual gland in Abaza (Capra Aegagrus) and Gurcu (Capra Falconeri) goats breeds

Background: The anatomical localisation of the odour glands, which increase activity during the reproduction period and help goat species to find each other, varies. Materials and methods: In our study, the anatomical and histological structures of the glands around the horn were examined in the Gurcu and Abaza goats, which are native breeds. In this study a total of 12 Abaza and Gurcu goat heads were used. Results: The area between the two horns and area at the back of the horns were shaved to remove all hair. The distance between the horns of both goat breeds was measured using an electronic calliper. The mean distance between the horns of the Abaza goats was determined as 36.80 ± 8.62 mm while this distance was 39.63 ± 4.10 mm for the Gurcu goats. Gland tissue that could not be seen anatomically under the skin was examined histologically. For the histological examination, skin samples were taken from the anterior, middle, right posterior and left posterior of the area between the two horns of both breeds. Crossman triple staining and haematoxylin and eosin staining were applied to the samples. Conclusions: Glandula intercornualis was found to be slightly caudal between the horns in both breeds and normal sebaceous glands were almost absent in the areas where these glands were found. Lobes and branched alveolar glands were located around the hair follicles

Kişilik ile Ayrışma Bireyleşme Arasında Akran İlişkilerinin Aracılığı

Bu çalışmanın amacı lise 11. ve 12. Sınıfa giden ergenlerin kişilik özellikleri ile ayrışma bireyleşme arasındaki ilişkide akran ilişkilerinin aracı etkisini belirlemektir. Çalışma grubunu Batman il merkezinde lise 11.ve 12 sınıfa giden 557 öğrenci oluşturmaktadır. Çalışmanın verileri LİSREL ve SPSS 22 programlarıyla analiz edilmiştir. İlk olarak çalışmada kullanılan ölçeklerin doğrulayıcı faktör analizleri ve uyum iyiliği değerlerine bakıldı. Analiz sonucuna göre bütün ölçeklerin doğrulayıcı faktör değerlerinin (p<.01) düzeyinde anlamlı olduğu ortaya çıkmıştır. Ölçeklerin uyum iyiliği değerleri ise çalışma için yeterli uyum değerlerine sahip olduğu saptanmıştır. Analizler sonucunda lise öğrencilerinin kişilik özellikleri ile ayrışma bireyleşme arasındaki ilişkide akran ilişkilerinin negatif yönde aracılık ettiği ortaya çıkmıştır. Elde edilen sonuçlara göre, lise öğrencilerinin ayrışma bireyleşme düzeyleri yükseldikçe, akran ilişkilerinin düşüş gösterdiği saptanmıştır

Coal Consumption and Economic Growth in Turkey

This aim of this paper is to use asymmetric causality tests to examine the coal consumption and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) relationship in Turkey based on data from 1980 to 2006. To investigate this relationship, a multivariate system is employed by including fixed capital formation and labor force variables into the model. The empirical results obtained from asymmetric causality tests show no causality for coal consumption and GDP relationship in Turkey. The results indicate that coal consumption does not affect growth; hence, energy conservation policies may be pursued without adversely affecting growth in Turkey. Thus, neutrality hypothesis is confirmed for Turkey. This means that a decrease in coal consumption does not affect economic growth and vice versa. In this case, policymakers should explore the feasibility of either decreasing the coal consumption or increasing the efficiency of coal consumption. Keywords: Economic growth; coal consumption; asymmetric causality; Turkey JEL Classifications: O; Q4

An overview & analysis of sequence-to-sequence emotional voice conversion

Emotional voice conversion (EVC) focuses on converting a speech utterance from a source to a target emotion; it can thus be a key enabling technology for human-computer interaction applications and beyond. However, EVC remains an unsolved research problem with several challenges. In particular, as speech rate and rhythm are two key factors of emotional conversion, models have to generate output sequences of differing length. Sequence-to-sequence modelling is recently emerging as a competitive paradigm for models that can overcome those challenges. In an attempt to stimulate further research in this promising new direction, recent sequence-to-sequence EVC papers were systematically investigated and reviewed from six perspectives: their motivation, training strategies, model architectures, datasets, model inputs, and evaluation methods. This information is organised to provide the research community with an easily digestible overview of the current state-of-the-art. Finally, we discuss existing challenges of sequence-to-sequence EVC

Planimetry investigation of the corpus callosum in temporal lobe epilepsy patients

Objective: To evaluate the effects of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) on corpus callosum (CC) morphometry in patients with TLE. Methods: This retrospective study was conducted at the Faculty of Medicine, Tekirdag Namik Kemal University, Tekirdag, Turkey between November 2010 and December 2013. The epileptic syndrome diagnosis was based on International League Against Epilepsy criteria, and this study was conducted on the MRIs of 25 epilepsy patients and 25 control subjects. We classified the patients according to their duration of epilepsy: = 10 years. The projection area length (PAL) of the CC was also estimated. Total brain volumes (TBV) were measured on CT images. Results: The mean values of TBV for patients with TLE and the control group were not statistically different, but the CC PAL values were statistically different. The mean CC PAL values of under and over 25 years of age in patients with TLE were statistically different. The mean values of TBV of under and over 10 years duration of TLE were small statistically, but the CC PAL values were statistically different. Conclusion: The results indicate a clear influence of TLE on the structure of the CC rather than TBV