Examining Patterns within Challenged or Banned Primary Elementary Books

Public schools and public libraries often receive challenges—suppression or removal requests—to particular books, which can lead the book being banned. Research has examined challenges to books with multicultural themes and individuals, noted that authors of color are disproportionally targeted, and recognized the remarkable number of challenges to books deemed to be classic. This qualitative content analysis research utilized both with inductive and deductive elements—open coding and axial coding—to examine challenged books intended for primary elementary students. The theoretical framework blended critical multiculturalism, gay and lesbian identity, and radical politics in children’s literature. Findings included patterns based on era, frequency and location of challenge, demography of challenger, and oft-challenged themes, specifically sexuality (sexual reproduction and diverse sexualities), inappropriate humor, danger, death, racial and religious diversity, mysticism and wizardry, racially or culturally insensitive elements, concerning interpersonal dynamics, and evolution. Meaning is extracted for teachers, librarians, administrators, and researchers

L'expérience esthétique de l'environnement : une tension sociopolitique entre l'ordinaire et l'extraordinaire ?

Concernant la dimension esthétique des relations des hommes à leur environnement, deux lectures dominent la littérature scientifique : d'un côté, une esthétique qui serait l'apanage d'un regard distancié, associée à l'idée d' « extraordinaire » ; de l'autre côté, une esthétique qui, à force de puiser dans l'ordinaire, finirait par s'y dissoudre au profit d'autres valeurs dominantes utilitaires. À partir d'une analyse d'expériences de villégiature dans des contextes très différents, nous exposons que la dimension esthétique des relations des hommes à leur environnement peut être appréhendée comme une manifestation de la mise en tension entre ordinaire et extraordinaire. Une telle position permet de prendre toute la mesure de la dimension politique de l'esthétique, que l'expérience esthétique se fonde sur l'exclusion « d'autres » ou qu'elle se nourrisse « d'autres » et des liens sociaux qui les unissent. / When we consider aesthetics in human relationships with the physical environment as addressed in scientific literature, two leading approaches emerge. On the one hand aesthetics would appear to be the prerogative of a distanciated look and linked to the notion of extraordinary. On the other, aesthetics would be so immersed in "ordinary life" that if finally dissolves in it and vanishes behind other leading values, such as utilitarian ones. That is particularly obvious in studies of local people's aesthetical experiences. In this paper, we argue that there could be a third way between these two approaches to understanding the aesthetical dimension of human relationships with the environment. We analysed semi-directive interviews with people in two contrasted situations: mountain hikers in the Pyrénées and holiday-makers in the Sensée marshes of northern France. We point out that aesthetics in people's relationships with their physical environment may be seen as manifesting the tension between ordinary and extraordinary. This enables us to perceive the importance of the political dimension of aesthetics, whether visible (experience of a place explicitly incorporates the social relationships that take place in it), or concealed behind an aesthetical experience that appears to be very direct, material and autonomous

Approche des relations des visiteurs à l’espace : une expérience du paysage

Cet article présente le cadre théorique et méthodologique de notre recherche doctorale sur l’expérience de l’espace de marcheurs en montagne. Cette recherche repose sur un double postulat qui pose le paysage et l’expérience touristique comme deux entrées privilégiées pour comprendre les relations de l’être humain à l’espace. De notre exploration bibliographique sur l’expérience touristique, nous retenons deux concepts qui nous semblent particulièrement éclairants pour traiter la question de la relation des touristes à l’espace : la conscience géographique et la spirale. En mobilisant et en définissant ces deux concepts, ainsi que celui de paysage, d’une part, nous interrogeons les particularités de l’expérience paysagère des marcheurs. D’autre part, nous proposons une méthode de recherche qualitative et phénoménologique pour recueillir des récits d’expériences touristiques et comprendre quelles sont, au travers de ces expériences, les significations attribuées au(x) paysage(s).Our doctoral research, which focuses on space experience of mountain hikers, rests on the premise that both landscape and tourism experience are privileged entrances to understanding human relationship with space. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical and methodological framework of this doctoral research. Our theoretical framework is built on three main concepts: geographical consciousness, spiral and landscape as a social construction. Once defined these three concepts, we can identify key features of hikers’ landscape experience. Then, we propose a qualitative and phenomenological method that allows us to collect hikers’ testimony and to understand the meanings they attribute to visited landscapes

Pierre Perrin, chasseur des mots-sillons

Présentation Si Pierre Perrin éprouve le besoin d’écrire dès son adolescence, au fond d’un séminaire, c’est pour mieux comprendre ses sentiments obscurs et complexes. C’est à l’âge de 19 ans qu’il se trouve véritablement face à la réalité de la mort : « Père est mort, en mon absence… C’était à trembler. J’ai peut-être, pour la première fois, mesuré l’inconnu et l’incommensurable de la souffrance, quand elle traverse un être ». La mort du père, in Le temps, c’est aujourd’hui. L’écriture devien..

Motion Segment Decomposition of RGB-D Sequences for Human Behavior Understanding

International audienceIn this paper, we propose a framework for analyzing and understanding human behavior from depth videos. The proposed solution first employs shape analysis of the human pose across time to decompose the full motion into short temporal segments representing elementary motions. Then, each segment is characterized by human motion and depth appearance around hand joints to describe the change in pose of the body and the interaction with objects. Finally , the sequence of temporal segments is modeled through a Dynamic Naive Bayes classifier, which captures the dynamics of elementary motions characterizing human behavior. Experiments on four challenging datasets evaluate the potential of the proposed approach in different contexts, including gesture or activity recognition and online activity detection. Competitive results in comparison with state of the art methods are reported

Construire l’image d’une destination touristique dans un paysage en changement : défi d’articulation autour de l’éolien en Gaspésie (Canada)

L’article s’intéresse au processus de construction de l’image d’une destination touristique dans un contexte de changements paysagers importants. Ce processus est abordé à partir du concept de circuit des représentations, bâti sur l’interaction entre l’image promotionnelle, les représentations des touristes et les paysages visibles. Selon notre hypothèse, l’image d’une destination serait d’autant plus forte que ces trois dimensions sont cohérentes. Avec l’implantation de plusieurs grands parcs éoliens, entraînant de notables changements paysagers ces dernières années, le cas de la région de la Gaspésie, au Canada, apparaît pertinent pour éclairer un tel processus. En examinant à la fois le travail sur l’image promotionnelle de la région et les pratiques de visiteurs que l’on y observe, nous montrons que, malgré promotion qui ne prend pas en compte la présence des éoliennes et les changements paysagers, le circuit des représentations de la Gaspésie touristique n’est pas brisé : les touristes amortissent certains décalages entre l’image promotionnelle véhiculée sans éolienne et la réalité des paysages de la destination qu’ils rencontrent, avec éoliennes. Par ce travail sur le processus de construction de l’image d’une destination, notre recherche vise, plus largement, à éclairer les impacts et les enjeux relatifs à l’introduction de la filière énergétique de l’éolien dans une région dont l’économie actuelle s’appuie en partie sur l’industrie touristique.The article is about the process of building a tourism destination image in a context of major landscape changes. This process is addressed from the concept of the circuit of representations built on the interaction between the promotional image, the tourist images and the visible landscapes. According to our hypothesis, the destination image would be all the more stronger as these three dimensions are consistent. With the implementation of several large wind farms causing significant landscape changes these last few years, the case of the Gaspesia region (Canada) seems relevant to clarify such a process. By examining at once the work on the promotional image of the region and the visitors’ practices observed in the region, we show that, despite a promotional image that does not take into account the presence of wind turbines and the landscape changes, the circuit of representations of Gaspesia is not broken: tourists reduce certain gaps between the promotional image promoted without wind turbines and the reality of the landscapes of the destination they visit, with wind turbines. Through this work on the process of building a destination image, our research aims at throwing light on the impacts and the stakes relative to the introduction of the wind energy sector in a region where the current economy partly relies on the tourist industry

3-D Human Action Recognition by Shape Analysis of Motion Trajectories on Riemannian Manifold

International audienceRecognizing human actions in 3D video sequences is an important open problem that is currently at the heart of many research domains including surveillance, natural interfaces and rehabilitation. However, the design and development of models for action recognition that are both accurate and efficient is a challenging task due to the variability of the human pose, clothing and appearance. In this paper, we propose a new framework to extract a compact representation of a human action captured through a depth sensor, and enable accurate action recognition. The proposed solution develops on fitting a human skeleton model to acquired data so as to represent the 3D coordinates of the joints and their change over time as a trajectory in a suitable action space. Thanks to such a 3D joint-based framework, the proposed solution is capable to capture both the shape and the dynamics of the human body simultaneously. The action recognition problem is then formulated as the problem of computing the similarity between the shape of trajectories in a Riemannian manifold. Classification using kNN is finally performed on this manifold taking advantage of Riemannian geometry in the open curve shape space. Experiments are carried out on four representative benchmarks to demonstrate the potential of the proposed solution in terms of accuracy/latency for a low-latency action recognition. Comparative results with state-of-the-art methods are reported

ShapeDBA: Generating Effective Time Series Prototypes using ShapeDTW Barycenter Averaging

Time series data can be found in almost every domain, ranging from the medical field to manufacturing and wireless communication. Generating realistic and useful exemplars and prototypes is a fundamental data analysis task. In this paper, we investigate a novel approach to generating realistic and useful exemplars and prototypes for time series data. Our approach uses a new form of time series average, the ShapeDTW Barycentric Average. We therefore turn our attention to accurately generating time series prototypes with a novel approach. The existing time series prototyping approaches rely on the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) similarity measure such as DTW Barycentering Average (DBA) and SoftDBA. These last approaches suffer from a common problem of generating out-of-distribution artifacts in their prototypes. This is mostly caused by the DTW variant used and its incapability of detecting neighborhood similarities, instead it detects absolute similarities. Our proposed method, ShapeDBA, uses the ShapeDTW variant of DTW, that overcomes this issue. We chose time series clustering, a popular form of time series analysis to evaluate the outcome of ShapeDBA compared to the other prototyping approaches. Coupled with the k-means clustering algorithm, and evaluated on a total of 123 datasets from the UCR archive, our proposed averaging approach is able to achieve new state-of-the-art results in terms of Adjusted Rand Index.Comment: Published in AALTD workshop at ECML/PKDD 202