Disconnect36: A Social Experiment to Teach Students to Shut Down, Turn off, and Understand Connectivity

Author(s):  
Monica Flippin-Wynn ◽  
Natalie T.J. Tindall
Keyword(s):  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-149
Author(s):  
Shirish M. Chitanvis

AbstractBackground Social distancing has led to a “flattening of the curve” in many states across the U.S. This is part of a novel, massive, global social experiment which has served to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic in the absence of a vaccine or effective anti-viral drugs. Hence it is important to be able to forecast hospitalizations reasonably accurately.Methods We propose on phenomenological grounds a random walk/generalized diffusion equation which incorporates the effect of social distancing to describe the temporal evolution of the probability of having a given number of hospitalizations. The probability density function is log-normal in the number of hospitalizations, which is useful in describing pandemics where the number of hospitalizations is very high.Findings We used this insight and data to make forecasts for states using Monte Carlo methods. Back testing validates our approach, which yields good results about a week into the future. States are beginning to reopen at the time of submission of this paper and our forecasts indicate possible precursors of increased hospitalizations. However, the trends we forecast for hospitalizations as well as infections thus far show moderate growth.Additionally we studied the reproducibility Ro in New York (Italian strain) and California (Wuhan strain). We find that even if there is a difference in the transmission of the two strains, social distancing has been able to control the progression of COVID 19.


2021 ◽  
pp. 214-235
Author(s):  
Alexey E. Kozlov ◽  

The article examines the phenomenon of spatial imagination in the plot and composition of the allegorical story by the critic and writer, member of the Petrashevsky Circle Nikolai Dmitrievich Akhsharumov. Turning to the most generalized Siberian topos and ignoring the numerous ethnographic information accumulated both in periodicals and in special studies, the writer constructs a dystopian plot, drawing on the novels by N.G. Chernyshevsky and F.M. Dostoevsky. Special attention should be paid to the polemic of Akhsharumov with the novel Crime and Punishment, which began in a critical article and continued beyond its borders, in a literary text. Akhsharumov begins his work from the point and coordinates where Crime and Punishment actually ends. When in a Siberian settlement, a gold digger and hunter, a former convict Lazar implements an educational project: he gives animals a language (according to the method of Robertson and Wundt) and law, teaches them the social principles of community and creates a kind of phalanstery. The social experiment gets out of control and ends in failure: “citizens of the forest” begin to worship the personified symbol of animal primal fear – the Great Fly totem. An uprising flares up to defeat a forcibly cultivated democracy, which yields to authoritarianism and totemism. By choosing the totem of the Great Fly, the forest dwellers finally lose their civic consciousness, appearing in their natural form and at the same time showing that there is no place for people, whoever they are, in their world (neither for life, nor, especially, for resurrection ). Like most dystopias, Citizens of the Forest demonstrates several phases of a social project: the formation of a civil society, its heyday and fall. Akhsharumov shows how the harmony of the animal world flings itself on mercy of one person and the word given to him; how the mass instinct (instincts of survival, reproduction, etc.) prevails over the needs of each individual (cattle or creature, as follows from the text). Citizens of the Forest creates an alternative value architectonics, due to which the life path of the protagonist, largely corresponding to the Old Testament, personifies the non-possibility of the resurrection miracle. The article attempts to describe not only intertextual links to political literature, utopias of Fourier, Cabet and Owen, dystopias in the spirit of Hobbes’ Leviathan, but also biographical lines associated with portraits of the writer’s brother, Fourierist Dmitry Akhsharumov, and M.V. Butashevich- Petrashevsky. Akhsharumov created space from scratch. Turning to the most primitive model of the Siberian text, and starting from strong texts (most likely, Voinarovsky and Crime and Punishment), Akhsharumov intuitively determined its two limits: a short novel, which begins as a story of the New World, ends with a descent into the kingdom of the dead. Siberia, which became a part of an ideological project and showed opportunities for a utopian perception, turned out to be reversible and easily transposed into a dystopia. Thus, despite the low aesthetic quality and numerous formal flaws, Citizens of the Forest remains one of the most significant evidences of spatial imagination, allowing to see in the choice of topos both ideological (from Icaria to Phalanstery) and conditionally biographical equestrianism (from family legends to political jokes). Siberia, as a space of imagination becomes the topos of an experiment continued by the writer in his fantastic story “Wanzamia”, directly replicating Cabet’s “Icaria”.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-179
Author(s):  
Syafruddin Syafruddin ◽  
Aziz Thaba ◽  
Abdul Rahman Rahim ◽  
Munirah Munirah ◽  
Syahruddin Syahruddin

This research investigates the semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic aspects of the culture of Indonesian sarcasm, especially East Indonesia, namely South Sulawesi with an ethnolinguistic framework. Researchers collect sarcasm utterances and study the semantic aspects. Furthermore, the speech is used in a social experiment to obtain pragmatic data. Social experiments are carried out in two situations, namely the situation of friendship (close) and the situation free (situations not knowing each other). The utterance of sarcasm for Indonesians is a culture for expressing thoughts and feelings towards a particular problem, event, situation, or object (generally human). Indonesians use sarcasm in various emotional situations such as anger, disappointment, regret, even in joking situations. Semantically, Indonesian sarcasm has bad, insulting, or immoral meanings that can intimidate even hurt the feelings of others. So, pragmatically the use of sarcasm can lead to antipathy and even conflict. Self control is required to respond to sarcasm.


2021 ◽  
Vol 35.5 ◽  
pp. 83-89
Author(s):  
Daniil T. Baboshin

Today it’s not possible to deny the approach of the new epoch – the epoch of the information society. The high technologies have infiltrated the total scope of the everyday life of modern people. In 2020 our civilization confronted the new, but for a long time anticipated, challenge, - mass introduction of distant education in schools and universities. We still will have to comprehend the results of this social experiment in the nearest future. Still one fact arises no doubts: information nowadays is the product that is widely and easily (perhaps, too easily) accessible, but real knowledge remains the lot of the few, and even tend to marginalize. Forty years ago the stated problems became the issue of the studies of the Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont. His conclusions turn out to be more and more relevant with the acceleration of the process of culture, communications and education digitalization. His article “Information Isn’t Knowledge” has been published in Russian for the first time. The article deals with the issues of information technologies integration into the human cognitive activity, its influence on the thinking process and cultural, ethic and spiritual values formation. Denis de Rougemont step by step reveals the definition of information technologies, their application in various areas of human existence, their ability to compete with personality and the consequences of their integration in everyday life. These speculations become especially valuable in the era of the triumph for information society and global computerization.


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