scholarly journals Tactical Acts from Lockdown Homes

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 312-326
Author(s):  
Karthikeya Acharya ◽  
Madalina Pop
Keyword(s):  
Professional Work ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Working From Home ◽  
The World

The COVID 19 lockdown brought work home. As design researchers our interest has been in the socio-material changes which the pandemic lockdown, as a top down strategy has brought to the domestic realm. Using an online response gathering tool we undertook an inquiry with 31 different households from around the world. Analyzing this data, we present 7 inter-connected activity categories performed by people as they merged and separated their professional work and domestic living within their homes. From within these categories we note particular activities let people overcome the pressures of merging professional work and domestic living. We see these activities to be tactically emerging from specific characteristics of the domestic realm. Targeting innovation specialists, product designers, architects and service designers we seek the potential for amplifying such tactical characteristics when designing for working from home futures.

scholarly journals Actually existing smart citizens: expertise and (non)participation in the making of the smart city

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Shelton ◽  
Thomas Lodato
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The World ◽  
Number Of Individuals

In response to the mounting criticism of emerging ‘smart cities’ strategies around the world, a number of individuals and institutions have attempted to pivot from discussions of smart cities towards a focus on ‘smart citizens’. While the smart citizen is most often seen as a kind of foil for those more stereotypically top-down, neoliberal, and repressive visions of the smart city that have been widely critiqued within the literature, this paper argues for an attention to the ‘actually existing smart citizen’, which plays a much messier and more ambivalent role in practice. This paper proposes the dual figures of ‘the general citizen’ and ‘the absent citizen’ as a heuristic for thinking about how the lines of inclusion and exclusion are drawn for citizens, both discursively and materially, in the actual making of the smart city. These figures are meant to highlight how the universal and unspecified figure of ‘the citizen’ is discursively deployed to justify smart city policies, while at the same time, actual citizens remain largely excluded from such decision and policy-making processes. Using a case study of Atlanta, Georgia and its ongoing smart cities initiatives, we argue that while the participation of citizens is crucial to any truly democratic mode of urban governance, the emerging discourse around the promise of smart citizenship fails to capture the realities of how citizens are actually discussed and enrolled in the making of these policies.

scholarly journals Attentional mechanisms drive systematic exploration in young children

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel J. Blanco ◽  
Vladimir Sloutsky
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Attention Allocation ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Distributed Attention ◽  
Systematic Exploration ◽  
The World ◽  
Attentional Mechanisms

Exploration is critical for discovering how the world works. Exploration should be particularlyvaluable for young children, who have little knowledge about the world. Theories of decision- making describe systematic exploration as being primarily driven by top-down cognitive control, which is immature in young children. Recent research suggests that a type of systematic exploration predominates in young children’s choices, despite immature control, suggesting that it may be driven by different mechanisms. We hypothesize that young children’s tendency to distribute attention widely promotes elevated exploration, and that interrupting distributed attention allocation through bottom-up attentional capture would also disrupt systematic exploration. We test this hypothesis by manipulating saliency of the options in a simple choice task. Saliency disrupted systematic exploration, thus indicating that attentional mechanisms may drive children’s systematic exploratory behavior. We suggest that both may be part of a larger tendency toward broad information gathering in young children.

State Actor Dynamics in Brunei’s Healthcare Policies

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Syazana Fauzi
Keyword(s):  
Medical Ethics ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
World Health Organisation ◽  
The State ◽  
World Health ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The World ◽  
Prevention And Treatment ◽  
State Actor ◽  
State Actors

This study seeks to ascertain the state actor dynamics in Brunei’s healthcare policies from the perspectives of an Islamic system of governance, by first identifying the state actors, or institutions, involved in influencing, formulating and implementing Brunei’s healthcare policies. The ‘IGC Matrix’ is employed to establish the Islamic health ‘sets of expectations’ (SoEs), particularly in terms of prevention and treatment, and medical ethics, primarily derived from the Qur’ān and Prophet Muhammadﷺ’s Sunnah, in order to construct for this study a framework of reference. The SoEs are then compared against Brunei’s healthcare policies and activities to determine how much of the Islamic health SoEs are met. This study reveals that Brunei’s healthcare policies are largely motivated by non-Islamic inspirations, specifically by the World Health Organisation (WHO), but with numerous overlaps with Islamic demands. In other words, Brunei’s healthcare policies may be stemmed from a non-Islamic influence, but it does not necessarily mean that they are un-Islamic. And most, if not all, of Brunei’s healthcare policies demonstrate a top-down approach, where the state actors play a crucial role in shaping Brunei’s dynamical SoEs.

Trust, but verify.. Power relations and control practices in a smart working environment

2021 ◽  
pp. 24-50
Author(s):  
Silvia Doria
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Top Down ◽  
New Ways Of Working ◽  
The World ◽  
Relevant Role ◽  
Smart Working ◽  
Banking Institution ◽  
And Control

The world of working is changing and the technological transformations are playing a relevant role in this change. In particular, new technologies are making the physical boundaries of traditional offices increasingly permeable, allowing the diffusion of New Ways of Working (Demerouti et al., 2014; Koops and Helms, 2014), such as smart working. This paper, based on a qualitative research and discursive interviews, intends to reflect on the introduction and top-down management of smart working within a banking institution. At the same time, it aims to grasp the role attributed to and played by technology in its implementation. Starting from the two reconstructed stories, I shall show if and how the innovations introduced whereby technologies enable us to work remotely, are changing existing power relations and what control dynamics emerge from the field.

Shapes of Threats in the Global South

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-165
Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew
Keyword(s):  
Public Awareness ◽  
National Level ◽  
Global South ◽  
Potential Response ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Social Image ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Images ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Image Representations

What do “threats” look like in the Global South in tagged social imagery, and what can these respective imagesets suggest about (1) formal outreaches to the broader publics by strategic messengers, (2) public awareness of such threats and their potential response role, and (3) the apparent (root) causes of these threats and possible risk mitigations? Are there visual differences in the senses of threat to the Global South as compared to the world? Finally, global and national-level frameworks about global threats were captured from international and national entities and used to recode the selected social images in a top-down way and to understand if there are gaps in social image representations about threats in the Global South and what these gaps may mean in public awareness of threats and preparedness.

Ralph Lansky in Conversation

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 160-183
Author(s):  
Igor I. Kavass ◽  
Arno Liivak
Keyword(s):  
International Association ◽  
Professional Work ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Different Parts

Perhaps the greatest reward for many of us who have participated in the activities of the International Association of Law Libraries over the past decades has been the opportunity to meet colleagues in our profession who work in so many different parts of the world. Unfortunately, there are so many of our members who have not been able to attend our meetings for one reason or another and have not had the opportunity to exchange thoughts on our often surprisingly shared common concerns in our professional work or to develop the friendships which transcend the distances which separate our daily lives.

scholarly journals The world city network: Evaluating top-down versus bottom-up approaches

Cities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 287-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Lüthi ◽  
Alain Thierstein ◽  
Michael Hoyler
Keyword(s):  
World City ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
World City Network ◽  
The World ◽  
City Network

scholarly journals The rhythmic nature of visual perception

2018 ◽  
Vol 119 (4) ◽  
pp. 1251-1253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randolph F. Helfrich
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Visual Perception ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Oculomotor System ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Discrete Sampling ◽  
The Neural Network ◽  
The World ◽  
Oscillatory Brain Activity

Our continuous perception of the world could be the result of discrete sampling, where individual snapshots are seamlessly fused into a coherent stream. It has been argued that endogenous oscillatory brain activity could provide the functional substrate of cortical rhythmic sampling. A new study demonstrates that cortical rhythmic sampling is tightly linked to the oculomotor system, thus providing a novel perspective on the neural network underlying top-down guided visual perception.

Ideas and Practices of Prostitution Around the World

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magaly Rodriguez Garcia
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Labor Theory ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Socioeconomic Changes ◽  
Military Modernization ◽  
The World

This essay provides a global overview of prostitution from the early modern period to the present. Although the distinction between “premodern” and “modern” prostitution is not necessarily sharp, the profound political, military, and socioeconomic changes from roughly 1600 onward had an important impact on the sale of sex. Worldwide, the practice of prostitution and societal reactions to it were influenced by processes of colonization, industrialization, urbanization, the rise of nation-states, military modernization, nationalism, and war, as well as revolutions in politics, agriculture, transport, and communication. A long historical and broad geographical perspective reveals the continuities and discontinuities in the way commercial sex was practiced, perceived, and policed. This essay paper approaches prostitution from a double (top-down and bottom-up) perspective that integrates criminology and labor theory, presenting the views of authorities, anti-vice campaigners, and society at large while situating prostitution as an integral part of labor history.

Differentiating ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ in sign languages

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Sze ◽  
Silva Isma ◽  
Adhika Irlang Suwiryo ◽  
Laura Lesmana Wijaya ◽  
Adhi Kusumo Bharato ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
The Past ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
The World ◽  
Language Promotion

The distinction between languages and dialects has remained a controversial issue in literature. When such a distinction is made, it often has far-reaching implications in top-down language promotion and preservation policies that tend to favor only those varieties that are labelled as ‘languages’. This issue is of critical importance for the survival of most sign language varieties in the world from a socio-political point of view. Against this background, this paper discusses how the notions of ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ have been applied in classifying sign languages in the past few decades. In particular, the paper reports on two recent studies which provide linguistic evidence that the signing varieties used by Deaf signers in Jakarta and Yogyakarta in Indonesia should be regarded as distinct sign languages rather than mutually intelligible dialects of Indonesian Sign Language. The evidence comes from significant differences in the lexicon, preferred word order for encoding transitive events, and use of mouth actions. Our result suggests that signing varieties within a country can be significantly different from each other, thus calling for more concerted efforts in documenting and recognizing these differences if the linguistic needs of the signing communities are to be met.

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