Tracking the affective state of unseen persons.

Emotion recognition is an essential human ability critical for social functioning. It is widely assumed that identifying facial expression is the key to this, and models of emotion recognition have mainly focused on facial and bodily features in static, unnatural conditions. We developed a method called affective tracking to reveal and quantify the enormous contribution of visual context to affect (valence and arousal) perception. When characters' faces and bodies were masked in silent videos, viewers inferred the affect of the invisible characters successfully and in high agreement based solely on visual context. We further show that the context is not only sufficient but also necessary to accurately perceive human affect over time, as it provides a substantial and unique contribution beyond the information available from face and body. Our method (which we have made publicly available) reveals that emotion recognition is, at its heart, an issue of context as much as it is about faces

On Inhuman Conditions and Its Overcoming

Modern technologies have brought about alienation, disorientation, ill-beings and malaise in human lives by gradually transforming human beings into “inhuman beings”. Bernard Stiegler’s reflections on the relationship between human beings and technologies illustrate why and how the development of modern technologies induced such “inhuman conditions”. It begins with the descriptions of alienation by machines and the loss of knowledge of work. Subsequently, it describes culture industry and the loss of knowledge of life leading to an one-dimensional society and human spiritual disorientation. Then it illustrates how the ubiquitous programmed automaton (UPA) and the tyranny “24/7 capitalism” have contributed to the reign of stupefaction and stupidity and the loss of theoretical knowledge. It shows that the inhuman conditions are frustrating consequences of “the loss of all knowledge” as well as the “devaluation of spirit”. Overcoming of inhuman conditions requires human beings to reinvent knowledge as “knowledge of work” instead of “alienated labor or pure employment”, to reinvest the time liberated by technology in the re-sublimation of the human spirit and to re-enchant the world with an improvement in spiritual ecology. 

New existence and multiplicity of homoclinic solutions for second order non-autonomous systems

In this paper, we study the second order non-autonomous system \begin{eqnarray*} \ddot{u}(t)+A\dot{u}(t)-L(t)u(t)+\nabla W(t,u(t))=0, \ \ \forall t\in\mathbb{R}, \end{eqnarray*} where $A$ is an antisymmetric $N\times N$ constant matrix, $L\in C(\mathbb{R},\mathbb{R}^{N\times N})$ may not be uniformly positive definite for all $t\in\mathbb{R}$, and $W(t,u)$ is allowed to be sign-changing and local superquadratic. Under some simple assumptions on $A$, $L$ and $W$, we establish some existence criteria to guarantee that the above system has at least one homoclinic solution or infinitely many homoclinic solutions by using mountain pass theorem or fountain theorem, respectively. Recent results in the literature are generalized and significantly improved

Bringing Theoretical and Comparative Studies Together

The debate whether power is a kind of resource or an application of resources shows the complexities of the concept of power. By combining both perspectives, the authors argue that it is possible to develop a new categorization of power: soft power, soft hard-power, hard soft-power and hard power. Compared with the US and the European Union, the authors argue that if the American power strategy could be seen as “omnidirectional American primacy” and EU “omnidirectional post-sovereignty”, China’s power strategy at the moment could be mainly described as an “attraction-defence” one. With relatively limited tangible and intangible power resources, China relies more on attraction than coercion, and focuses more on defence rather than shaping. Finally, the authors propose to improve China’s power strategy by prioritizing its soft economic hard-power, upgrading soft power, extending soft military hard-power, moderately developing hard power and hard soft-power, and expanding its shaping function while maintaining the central defensive role

Should primates have legal rights?

A primate having legal rights is a controversial topic these days. Many other countries around the world support the idea of great apes having legal rights, because we for one are one of the five great primates. Others do not support this trending topic as much as others. These types of people believe that great apes such as chimpanzees are superb testing animals for medical purposes, because of the fact that they are closely related to mankind. Organizations such as Great Ape Protection, work towards protecting the rights of these great apes since they cannot speak for themselves. In many other countries, the legal rights of great apes are already official, although here in the United States people are still debating on this sensitive topic. Here we are presenting both arguments toward great apes able to have legal rights