scholarly journals “I Say, Can You Hear Me?”

Author(s):  
Ava McLean

Harold Pinter’s 1959 radio play A Slight Ache serves to illuminate how the constraints of radio drama provided Pinter with the opportunity to examine themes such as passive aggression and competition within outwardly bland social interactions, in an entirely new form. Pinter’s approach to radio drama goes against the principles of clarity and unambiguousness that the BBC attempted to push its writers towards at the time, instead favouring the unease and uncertainty that a total lack of visual information allows him to visit upon his audience. In particular, Pinter’s decision to render the character of the Matchseller entirely mute allows his presence to constantly challenge the listening audience, forcing them to constantly revaluate the validity of everything they hear. Through Flora and Edward’s contradictory assessments of the Matchseller, their respective goals, desires and insecurities are exposed, shining increasing light on their divergent views of the world around them. The combination of the Matchseller’s silence and the total lack of visual information given about him allow The Matchseller to become an increasingly obscure, changeable presence in the play. A Slight Ache emerges as a play so well suited to the constraints of radio that later stage and television productions only serve to expose how added visuals actually render the play far less effective, closing off the opportunity for multiple interpretations of the Matchseller to coexist, as they do in the original radio format.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yue-Cune Chang

BACKGROUND The Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) is the new form of an acute infectious respiratory disease and has quickly spread over most continents in the world. Recently, it has been shown that Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) might protect against COVID-19. This study aims to investigate the possible correlation between BCG vaccination and morbidity/mortality/recovery rate associated with COVID-19 infection. OBJECTIVE Our findings confirm that the BCG vaccination might protect against COVID-19 virus infection. METHODS Data of COVID-19 confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, and population were obtained from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (Accessed on 12 June, 2020). To have meaningful comparisons among countries’ mortality and recovery rates, we only choose those countries with COVID-19 infected cases at least 200. The Poisson regression and logistic regression were used to explore the relationship between BCG vaccination and morbidity, mortality and recovery rates. RESULTS Among those 158 countries with at least 200 COVID-19 infected cases, there were 141 countries with BCG vaccination information available. The adjusted rates ratio of COVID-19 confirmed cases for Current BCG vaccination vs. non-Current BCG vaccination was 0.339 (with 95% CI= (0.338,0.340)). Moreover, the adjusted odds ratio (OR) of death and recovery after coronavirus infected for Current BCG vaccination vs. non-Current BCG vaccination were 0.258 (with 95% CI= (0.254,0.261)) and 2.151 (with 95% CI= (2.140,2.163)), respectively. CONCLUSIONS That data in this study show the BCG might provide the protection against COVID-19, with consequent less COVID-19 infection and deaths and more rapid recovery. BCG vaccine might bridge the gap before the disease-specific vaccine is developed, but this hypothesis needs to be further tested in rigorous randomized clinical trials. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT RR2-https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.14.20131268


2021 ◽  
pp. 002205742110319
Author(s):  
Sandra Levey

This review presents the Universal Design Learning (UDL) approach to education. Classrooms have become increasingly diverse, with second language learners, students with disabilities, and students with differences in their perception and understanding information. Some students learn best through listening, while others learn best when presented with visual information. Given the increased number of new language learners across the world, the UDL approach allows successful learning for all students. UDL has allowed students to acquire information more effectively. UDL provides guidance to educators that is especially valuable for the diversity of classrooms and the diversity in modalities in learning,


Author(s):  
Xiaoli Tian ◽  
Qian Li

With more social interactions shifting to online venues, the different attributes of major social media sites in China influence how interpersonal interactions are carried out. Despite the lack of physical co-presence online, face culture is extended to online spaces. On social media, Chinese users tend to protect their own face, give face to others, and avoid discrediting the face of others, especially when their online and offline networks overlap. This chapter also discusses the different methods used to study facework online and offline and how facework is studied in different parts of the world. It concludes with a brief discussion of how sociological research has contributed to the study of social media in China and directions for future research.


Author(s):  
Huang-Ming Chang ◽  
Leonid Ivonin ◽  
Marta Diaz ◽  
Andreu Catala ◽  
Wei Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Little ◽  
Alison Winch

Our case study looks at the events surrounding the sacking ofGoogle engineer James Damore who was fired for authoring a memo which stated that women are biologically less suited to high-stress, high-status technical employment than men. Damore, asserting that his document ‘was absolutely consistent with what he’d seen online’, instantly became an ambivalent hero of the alt-right. Like the men who own and run the companies of Silicon Valley, the software engineer subscribes to the idea that the world can be understood and altered through the rigorous application of the scientific method. And as he draws on bodies of knowledge from evolutionary psychology and mathematical biology, we see how the core belief structures of Silicon Valley, when transferred from the technical to the cultural and social domain, can reproduce the sort of misogynistic ‘rationalism’ that fuels the alt-right. We argue that Damore’s memo is in line with Google’s ideology of ‘dataism’: that is the belief that the world can be reduced to decontextualised information and subject to quantifiable logics.Through its use of dataism, the memo reveals much about the similarities and continuities between Damore, the ideas laid out n his memo, and Google itself. Rather than being in opposition, these two entities are jostling for a place in the patriarchal structures of a new form of capitalism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-112
Author(s):  
Anrieta A. Karapetyan ◽  

No other media has become so popular in such a short period of time as online, which mainly serves for the purpose of communication. Online communications have the potential to fundamentally change the character of our social lives on all levels of social interactions. This article represents an attempt of discussing pros and cons of the online communication compared to the offline ones, and including functional as well as cultural components such as habits, usefulness, as well as specific cases affecting the gradual and immediate shift from the offline to the online communication (like COVID19 pandemic). Online communication spaces provide ample opportunities for selfrepresentation, convenience and compliance, easy connectivity from every place in the world, it is time-consuming and costly. It is widely used in all areas of everyday life. At the same time participants of online communication need nonverbal communication and those all-important social signals, which make communication more efficient. Despite the number of advantages, online communication still cannot completely replace the offline ones.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Umay Sen ◽  
Gustaf Gredebäck

In this review article, we describe the mobile paradigm, a method used for more than 50 years to assess how infants learn and remember sensorimotor contingencies. The literature on the mobile paradigm demonstrates that infants below 6 months of age can remember the learning environment weeks after when reminded periodically and integrate temporally distributed information across modalities. The latter ability is only possible if events occur within a temporal window of a few days, and the width of this required window changes as a function of age. A major critique of these conclusions is that the majority of this literature has neglected the embodied experience, such that motor behavior was considered an equivalent developmental substitute for verbal behavior. Over recent years, simulation and empirical work have highlighted the sensorimotor aspect and opened up a discussion for possible learning mechanisms and variability in motor preferences of young infants. In line with this recent direction, we present a new embodied account on the mobile paradigm which argues that learning sensorimotor contingencies is a core feature of development forming the basis for active exploration of the world and body. In addition to better explaining recent findings, this new framework aims to replace the dis-embodied approach to the mobile paradigm with a new understanding that focuses on variance and representations grounded in sensorimotor experience. Finally, we discuss a potential role for the dorsal stream which might be responsible for guiding action according to visual information, while infants learn sensorimotor contingencies in the mobile paradigm.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Anne-Laure Mention ◽  
Marko Torkkeli ◽  
JJ Pinto Ferreira

A few months ago, we claimed that COVID-19 had the potential to be a catalyst for change and innovation (Mention et al., 2020). Undeniably, this has indeed eventuated, but to a scale that was unforeseeable and unpredictable to many. Over the last few months, the world has literally changed. Around the world, people and communities have seen their lives put on a standstill, experiencing and experimenting with variable levels of restrictions preventing social interactions. We have learned what physical – rather than social, at least initially – distancing meant and have uncovered new ways of doing things. And that applied to almost for every single aspect of life. (...)


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Giersch ◽  
Thomas Huard ◽  
Sohee Park ◽  
Cherise Rosen

The experience of oneself in the world is based on sensory afferences, enabling us to reach a first-perspective perception of our environment and to differentiate oneself from the world. Visual hallucinations may arise from a difficulty in differentiating one's own mental imagery from externally-induced perceptions. To specify the relationship between hallucinations and the disorders of the self, we need to understand the mechanisms of hallucinations. However, visual hallucinations are often under reported in individuals with psychosis, who sometimes appear to experience difficulties describing them. We developed the “Strasbourg Visual Scale (SVS),” a novel computerized tool that allows us to explore and capture the subjective experience of visual hallucinations by circumventing the difficulties associated with verbal descriptions. This scale reconstructs the hallucinated image of the participants by presenting distinct physical properties of visual information, step-by-step to help them communicate their internal experience. The strategy that underlies the SVS is to present a sequence of images to the participants whose choice at each step provides a feedback toward re-creating the internal image held by them. The SVS displays simple images on a computer screen that provide choices for the participants. Each step focuses on one physical property of an image, and the successive choices made by the participants help them to progressively build an image close to his/her hallucination, similar to the tools commonly used to generate facial composites. The SVS was constructed based on our knowledge of the visual pathways leading to an integrated perception of our environment. We discuss the rationale for the successive steps of the scale, and to which extent it could complement existing scales.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Casadei

It is beautiful to be able to have the opportunity to allow oneself a doubt on the unquestionability of one's mental habits; it is beautiful to be able to renew one's energy to relate to the world in a way not bent by the banality of convenience and calculation. It is beautiful to realise that one feels the need for beauty as an inspirational motive for one's thinking, feeling and acting, and as a resource towards a new education. The serious pandemic crisis has probably accelerated a necessary but demanding process that takes time to accomplish: that of becoming aware of a reality based on the principle of interconnection and interdependence – of the person with all his/her dimensions, with each other, with the Cosmos. I believe that this new perception of reality – as the result of an experience – can mark a new step for the discourse and pedagogical practice so as to devote itself to a new form of beauty in the search for a ἀλήθεια (aletheia) truth to be configured as a desire for unveiling and deep understanding of the sense of reality, to be nourished in a revitalised interdisciplinarity, with a sense of wonder and amazement for every aspect of life. Care, responsibility and commitment, if animated by joy and love, can only aspire to excellence, giving the person the opportunity to fully realise his or her dignity and humanity.


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