E-Merging Realities

E-Merging Realities is a project undertaken to utilize technology to display art and raise social awareness. An artistic design was built within the game Second Life that shows images designed to increase the users awareness of issues such as third world hunger. A special wheelchair controller was designed and a prototype built that is used to navigate through the piece. Ultimately we ended with a complete piece that uses interactive technology to address real human issues

Framework for creating augmented reality (AR) experiences

Mestrado em Engenharia Informática na Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão do Instituto Politécnico de Viana do CasteloThis work proposes the architecture of a system whose main goal focuses on implementing a complete framework for creating augmented reality (AR) experiences, allowing creators to digitize reality to create their storylines. Moreover, it is an internal process with the objective of merging/grouping multimedia content, enabling clear and intuitive navigation within infinite augmented realities (based on the captured real world). This way, the user can create points of interest within their parallel realities, allowing them to navigate and traverse their new augmented worlds through an AR experience.Neste trabalho propõe-se a arquitetura de um sistema em que o seu objetivo central se foca na criação de uma framework completa para criação de experiências de Realidade Aumentada (RA), permitindo a digitalização da realidade para que criadores consigam criar as suas histórias ou enredos. Posteriormente existirá um processo interno com o propósito de fundir/agrupar conteúdo multimédia, possibilitando assim uma navegação clara e intuitiva dentro de infinitas realidades aumentadas (baseadas no mundo real capturado). Desta forma, o utilizador consegue criar pontos de interesse dentro das suas realidades paralelas, podendo navegar e percorrer os seus novos mundos aumentados através de uma experiência RA

Form, science, and narrative in the anthropocene

A significant strand of contemporary fiction engages with scientific models that highlight a constitutive interdependency between humanity and material realities such as the climate or the geological history of our planet. This article looks at the ways in which narrative may capture this human-nonhuman interrelation, which occupies the foreground of debates on the so-called Anthropocene. I argue that the formal dimension of scientific knowledge-as manifested by diagrams or metaphors used by scientists-is central to this narrative remediation. I explore two analogical strategies through which narrative may pursue a formal dialogue with science: clusters of metaphorical language and the global structuring of the plot. Rivka Galchen's novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), for instance, builds on a visual representation of meteorological patterns in a storm (lifted from an actual scientific paper) to stage the narrator's mental illness. Two other contemporary works (Orfeo by Richard Powers and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki) integrate scientific models through the overall design of the plot. By offering close readings of these novels, I seek to expand work in the area of New Formalism and show how formal choices are crucial to bringing together the human-scale world and more-than-human phenomena

Assessing the Inequalities of Wealth in Regions: the Italian Case

This paper discusses region wealth size distributions, through their member cities aggregated tax income. As an illustration, the official data of the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance has been considered, for all Italian municipalities, over the period 2007-2011. Yearly data of the aggregated tax income is transformed into a few indicators: the Gini, Theil, and Herfindahl-Hirschman indices. On one hand, the relative interest of each index is discussed. On the other hand, numerical results confirm that Italy is divided into very different regional realities, a few which are specifically outlined. This shows the interest of transforming data in an adequate manner and of comparing such indices.Comment: to be published in Quality and Quantity; 23 pages; 1 figure; 23 tables; 19 reference

Active citizenship and late-life learning in the community

In an age where the official, adult-education component of lifelong learning is dominated by the discourse of employability and performativity, reclaiming the radical agenda of critical, adult, active citizenship is not only urgent but indispensable for morally sound and democratically viable societies. The crisis in capitalism is showing us, adult educators, that unless adult education is employed to interrogate, challenge and resist the accesses of a system that privileges profit at all cost, rampant individualism and privatisation of social goods, it will reproduce asymmetrical and predatory, social economic relations. This paper problematises dominant notions of active citizenship in later life and provides a framework for an alternative view of active citizenship. It also illustrates how adult educators can facilitate learning processes where late-life learners, reflect on the impact of the neoliberal value system and on the consequences of its hegemonic practices on personal and community life, before engaging in transformative action.peer-reviewe

Airspace sovereignty in the Chicago Regime: a reality check

Air service agreements (ASAs) under the ‘Chicago Regime’ of exchanged traffic rights are coupled with the overarching principle of State sovereignty recognized in Article 1 of the Chicago Convention. The Chicago Convention was written in an era when States were the principal actors in air transport. Faced with economic realities, however, States have allowed airlines to privatize and in turn, cross-border alliances between airlines have prompted States to liberalize their ASAs. This article explores the ways in which the exercise of State sovereignty in airspace has evolved, and examines the Chicago Convention’s viability 75 years on

Afterword

Today many books appear regarding Vatican II. Yet, only very few of them manage to locate this crucial event in the life of the twentieth century Roman Catholic Church against the broad horizon of both its prehistory and its aftermath. This book does just that. In seven chapters, this volume offers a survey of the evolution of Post-Enlightenment Catholicism, in the period spanning from ca. 1830 to the present, tying together the renewals proposed by the first and the Second Vatican Councils. Each phase in this evolution is discussed from a double angle: on the hand from the viewpoint of theological developments and milieu’s, and on the other hand from an institutional and Church historical perspective, thus binding together these two perspectives and tracing the evolutions within Catholicism in all their pluriformity