Can a Robot Hear Music? Can a Robot Dance? Can a Robot Tell What it Knows or Intendes to Do? Can it Feel Pride or Shame in Company? -- Questions of the Nature of Human Vitality

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Theories of the development of human communication

This article considers evidence for innate motives for sharing rituals and symbols from animal semiotics, developmental neurobiology, physiology of prospective motor control, affective neuroscience and infant communication. Mastery of speech and language depends on polyrhythmic movements in narrative activities of many forms. Infants display intentional activity with feeling and sensitivity for the contingent reactions of other persons. Talk shares many of its generative powers with music and the other ‘imitative arts’. Its special adaptations concern the capacity to produce and learn an endless range of sounds to label discrete learned understandings, topics and projects of intended movement

The importance of utilising electronic identification for total farm management in Australia

This paper aims to explore how Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) can be utilised on dairy farms to enhance total farm management. There is a growing worldwide trend for countries to implement whole-of-life traceability systems for livestock, and RFID is clearly the dominant technology being chosen to achieve this aim. In line with this global trend, and to meet the requirements of key trading partners (such as the EU), Australia has implemented the National Livestock Identification System (NLlS) to provide whole-of-life traceability for Iivestock - a system based on the use of RFID devices. As such, it is proposed that dairy farmers utilise RFID so as to not only comply with NLIS requirements, but to extend the use of RFID onto their farms so as to provide additional benefits for themselves through subsequent enhancements in farm management practices

Stakeholder perceived barriers to the use of solar energy in Thailand's buildings : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Environmental Management at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Energy efficiency and use of renewable energy is currently a key topic given rising fuel prices and concerns regarding future energy security. Governments around the world are looking for ways to reduce the demand for energy from unsustainable sources either through improving energy efficiency or through generating energy using renewable sources. The building industry is one industry where it is considered that energy demand can be reduced. Studies have shown that green building practices, such as the use of solar energy, can substantially reduce the energy demand of residential and commercial buildings. However for green building practices such as solar energy to be incorporated into a building design, industry stakeholders must understand the benefits. Despite Thailand having a tropical climate there is little adoption of either passive solar design strategies or solar energy technologies. In this study 30 interviews were conducted with stakeholders in the Thai building industry and analysed using grounded theory methodology to determine what stakeholders perceive as the barriers to using solar energy in buildings in Thailand. As well as analysis of the interview transcripts, research participants also completed a 20 question Likert scale survey designed to gauge opinions towards known barriers to the use of solar energy in buildings. The research identifies 25 barriers that stakeholders in the building industry perceive to be barriers to the use of solar energy in buildings in Thailand. The core concept of the research is that stakeholders perceive a difference between the concepts of awareness and knowledge and a lack of awareness and a lack of knowledge is the primary reason solar energy is not used more often. Increasing both awareness and knowledge of solar energy is the primary way to encourage consideration of solar energy in Thailand’s building projects

Development of consciousness

Recent research that uses refined methods of tracing infant’s movements to determine how they are coordinated and integrated proves they are directed in selective ways to take in and adjust to information from the senses about the present environment. It shows that the circumstances and objects of the infant’s actions are evaluated by the infant as ‘good’ (attractive and rewarding or pleasurable), or ‘bad’ (frightening and avoided, or resisted). The manifestations of purposeful, expectant and evaluated consciousness are identified as proof of Self-awareness, or ‘subjectivity’. Studies of the imitative and provocative actions of newborn infants in response to the behaviours of other persons who give close attention to them prove also that there is an innate Other-awareness, or ‘inter-subjectivity’, that attends to and sympathises with expressive movements of a person (Trevarthen, 2001; Kugiumutzakis and Trevarthen, 2015)

The infant's creative vitality, in projects of self-discovery and shared meaning : how they anticipate school, and make it fruitful

This paper presents the child as a creature born with the spirit of an inquisitive and creative human being, seeking understanding of what to do with body and mind in a world of invented possibilities. He or she is intuitively sociable, seeking affectionate relations with companions who are willing to share the pleasure and adventure of doing and knowing with 'human sense'. Recent research traces signs of the child's impulses and feelings from before birth, and follows their efforts to master experience through stages of self-creating in enjoyable and hopeful companionship. Sensitive timing of rhythms in action and playful invention show age-related advances of creative vitality as the body and brain grow. Much of shared meaning is understood and played with before a child can benefit from school instruction in a prescribed curriculum of the proper ways to use elaborate symbolic conventions. We begin with the theory of James Mark Baldwin, who observed that infants and young children are instinctive experimenters, repeating experience by imitating their own as well as other's actions, accommodating to the resources of the shared world and assimilating new experiences as learned ideas for action. We develop a theory of the child's contribution to cultural learning that may be used to guide practice in early education and care of children in their families and communities and in artificially planned and technically structured modern worlds of bewildering diversity

Intersubjectivity in the imagination and feelings of the infant : implications for education in the early years

This chapter presents the child as a creature born with the spirit of an inquisitive and creative human being, seeking understanding of what to do with body and mind in a world of invented possibilities. He or she is intuitively sociable, seeking affectionate relations with companions who are willing to share the pleasure and adventure of doing and knowing with 'human sense'. Recent research traces signs of the child's impulses and feelings from before birth, and follows their efforts to master experience through stages of self-creating in enjoyable and hopeful companionship. Sensitive timing of rhythms in action and playful invention show age-related advances of creative vitality as the body and brain grow. Much of shared meaning is understood and played with before a child can benefit from school instruction in a prescribed curriculum of the proper ways to use elaborate symbolic conventions. We begin with the theory of James Mark Baldwin, who observed that infants and young children are instinctive experimenters, repeating experience by imitating their own as well as other's actions, accommodating to the resources of the shared world and assimilating new experiences as learned ideas for action. We argue that the child's contribution to cultural learning is a good guide for practice in early education and care of children in their families and communities and in artificially planned and technically structured modern worlds of bewildering diversity