scholarly journals Educational Uses of the Digital World for Human Development

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colette Daiute

This article discusses several enduring features of the digital world in relation to the dramatically changing global context and visibility of the human condition. Based on the author’s experience as an educator and researcher, she explains that interactivity, multi-modality, and information storage are ripe for advancing students’ creative and critical interactions with diverse others and themselves. With the digital world as a focal point, although by no means the only communication medium, educators are in unique positions to guide contemporary human development, which is increasingly an interdependent individual-societal process, thereby requiring knowledge of realities beyond one’s own.

Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.


Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Alexander Pschera

"Neben der Industrie hat die Digitalisierung auch die Natur ergriffen. Die Tatsache, dass Tausende von Tieren mit GPS-Sendern aus- gerüstet und überwacht werden, erlaubt, analog zur Industrie 4.0 auch von einer Natur 4.0 zu sprechen. Dieses Internet der Tiere verändert den Begriff, den der Mensch von der Natur hat. Er transformiert die Wahrnehmung vor allem der Natur als etwas fundamental An- deren. Neben den vielen kulturellen Problematisierungen, die das Internet der Tiere mit sich bringt, lassen sich aber auch die Umrisse einer neuen, ganz und gar nicht esoterischen planetarisch-post-digitalen Kultur aufzeigen, die die conditio humana verändert. In addition to industry, digitalization has also taken hold of nature. The fact that thousands of animals are provided and monitored with GPS transmitters allows to speak of nature 4.0 by way of analogy to industry 4.0. This internet of animals changes our idea of nature. Most of all, it transforms the perception of nature as something fundamentally other. Beside the many cultural problems that the internet of animals implies, it can also outline a new, not at all esoteric planetary post-digital culture that is about to change the human condition. "


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Ashish C Patel ◽  
C G Joshi

Current data storage technologies cannot keep pace longer with exponentially growing amounts of data through the extensive use of social networking photos and media, etc. The "digital world” with 4.4 zettabytes in 2013 has predicted it to reach 44 zettabytes by 2020. From the past 30 years, scientists and researchers have been trying to develop a robust way of storing data on a medium which is dense and ever-lasting and found DNA as the most promising storage medium. Unlike existing storage devices, DNA requires no maintenance, except the need to store at a cool and dark place. DNA has a small size with high density; just 1 gram of dry DNA can store about 455 exabytes of data. DNA stores the informations using four bases, viz., A, T, G, and C, while CDs, hard disks and other devices stores the information using 0’s and 1’s on the spiral tracks. In the DNA based storage, after binarization of digital file into the binary codes, encoding and decoding are important steps in DNA based storage system. Once the digital file is encoded, the next step is to synthesize arbitrary single-strand DNA sequences and that can be stored in the deep freeze until use.When there is a need for information to be recovered, it can be done using DNA sequencing. New generation sequencing (NGS) capable of producing sequences with very high throughput at a much lower cost about less than 0.1 USD for one MB of data than the first sequencing technologies. Post-sequencing processing includes alignment of all reads using multiple sequence alignment (MSA) algorithms to obtain different consensus sequences. The consensus sequence is decoded as the reversal of the encoding process. Most prior DNA data storage efforts sequenced and decoded the entire amount of stored digital information with no random access, but nowadays it has become possible to extract selective files (e.g., retrieving only required image from a collection) from a DNA pool using PCR-based random access. Various scientists successfully stored up to 110 zettabytes data in one gram of DNA. In the future, with an efficient encoding, error corrections, cheaper DNA synthesis,and sequencing, DNA based storage will become a practical solution for storage of exponentially growing digital data.


Author(s):  
Leticia Flores Farfán

Assuming with Georges Bataille that men is a being who is not in the world “like water within the water”, that is to say, in an immanent and lack of distinction state, but that its destiny is shaped in the permanent significant joint or logos to which its unfinished nature jeopardizes him, we analyze the form in which the mythical story, characterized like a sacred word with symbolic and ontological quality within the perspective of Mircea Eliade, gives account of the wound or the original tear that constitutes the human condition.


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