scholarly journals Investigating drivers’ geospatial abilities in unfamiliar environments

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Dafni Karkasina ◽  
Margarita Kokla ◽  
Eleni Tomai

Abstract. The prominence of landmarks in aiding pedestrian navigation has been highlighted in various studies; people rely strongly on visual landmarks, especially when navigating in unfamiliar environments. The paper describes the design and implementation of a study for assessing drivers’ spatial abilities, when navigating in an unfamiliar environment. Two types of route directions based on references to either landmarks or street names were given to two groups of participants. Three geospatial learning tasks are used to evaluate these abilities: map sketching, distance, and direction estimation. The findings showed that landmark-based route instructions help drivers develop a better cognitive map of the route. On the other hand, instructions either based on landmarks or on street information do not have an effect on distance or direction estimates. Nonetheless, qualitative analysis of directions and distances estimations gave interesting results. Findings associated with self-assessment of environmental spatial abilities using the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Scale (SBSOD) seem to support prediction of at least one of the drivers’ abilities among those assessed in this study.

Author(s):  
Milen Dimov

The present study traces the dynamics of personal characteristics in youth and the manifested neurotic symptoms in the training process. These facts are the reason for the low levels of school results in the context of the existing theoretical statements of the problem and the empirical research conducted among the trained teenagers. We suggest that the indicators of neurotic symptomatology in youth – aggression, anxiety, and neuroticism, are the most demonstrated, compared to the other studied indicators of neurotic symptomatology. Studies have proved that there is a difference in the act of neurotic symptoms when tested in different situations, both in terms of expression and content. At the beginning of the school year, neurotic symptoms, more demonstrated in some aspects of aggressiveness, while at the end of school year, psychotism is more demonstrated. The presented summarized results indicate that at the beginning of the school year, neurotic symptoms are strongly associated with aggression. There is a tendency towards a lower level of social responsiveness, both in the self-assessment of real behavior and in the ideal “I”-image of students in the last year of their studies. The neurotic symptomatology, more demonstrated due to specific conditions in the life of young people and in relation to the characteristics of age.


2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (7) ◽  
pp. 1607-1625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel E Alarcón ◽  
Charlotte Bonardi ◽  
Andrew R Delamater

Four experiments compared the effect of forward and backward conditioning procedures on the ability of conditioned stimuli (CS) to elevate instrumental responding in a Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) task. Two responses were each trained with one distinct outcome (R1->O1, R2->O2), either concurrently (Experiment 1) or separately (Experiments 2, 3 and 4). Then, in Experiments 1 and 2, four CSs were either followed or preceded by one outcome (A->O1, B->O2, O1->C, O2->D). In Experiment 3, each CS was preceded and followed by an outcome: for one group of participants, both outcomes were identical (e.g., O1->A->O1, O2->B->O2), but for the other, they were different (e.g., O1->A->O2, O2->B->O1). In Experiment 4, two CSs were preceded and followed by identical outcomes, and two CSs by different outcomes. In the PIT tests, participants performed R1 and R2 in the presence and absence of the CSs. In Experiments 1 and 2, only the CSs followed by outcomes in Pavlovian training elevated responding. In Experiments 3 and 4, all the CSs elevated responding but based on the outcome that followed them in training. These results support the stimulus-outcome-response (S-O-R) mechanism of specific PIT, according to which CSs elevate responding via activation of its associated outcome representation.


Author(s):  
Shriya A. Hande ◽  
Nitin R. Chopde

<p>In today’s world, in almost all sectors, most of the work is done by robots or robotic arm having different number of degree of freedoms (DOF’s) as per the requirement. This project deals with the Design and Implementation of a “Wireless Gesture Controlled Robotic Arm with Vision”. The system design is divided into 3 parts namely: Accelerometer Part, Robotic Arm and Platform. It is fundamentally an Accelerometer based framework which controls a Robotic Arm remotely utilizing a, little and minimal effort, 3-pivot (DOF's) accelerometer by means of RF signals. The Robotic Arm is mounted over a versatile stage which is likewise controlled remotely by another accelerometer. One accelerometer is mounted/joined on the human hand, catching its conduct (motions and stances) and hence the mechanical arm moves in like manner and the other accelerometer is mounted on any of the leg of the client/administrator, catching its motions and stances and in this way the stage moves as needs be. In a nutshell, the robotic arm and platform is synchronised with the gestures and postures of the hand and leg of the user / operator, respectively. The different motions performed by robotic arm are: PICK and PLACE / DROP, RAISING and LOWERING the objects. Also, the motions performed by the platform are: FORWARD, BACKWARD, RIGHT and LEFT.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2S11) ◽  
pp. 2858-2863

The main goal of this article is to implement an effective Non-Blocking Benes switching Network. Benes Switching Network is designed with the uncomplicated switch modules & it’s have so many advantages, small latency, less traffic and it’s required number of switch modules. Clos and Benes networks are play a key role in the class of multistage interconnection network because of their extensibility and mortality. Benes network provides a low latency when compare with the other networks. 8x8 Benes non blocking switching network is designed and synthesized with the using of Xilinx tool 12.1.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-150
Author(s):  
AMY LYNN WLODARSKI

AbstractGeorge Rochberg often attributed his postmodern shift to the death of his son in 1964. Accordingly, the literature has described his practice of ars combinatoria (“art of combination”) as an “abrupt about-face”—a sudden rejection of modernist aesthetics. But the composer's unpublished essays, diaries, correspondence, and musical sketchbooks suggest that the road to ars combinatoria had well-laid roots in two of his least considered biographical periods: his service during World War II and his serial period. During these two decades, Rochberg actively sought positive models for humanistic composition, historical figures who rose to the level of musical heroes in that they served humanity through their art. But as the war had taught him, heroes are necessarily defined by their struggle against nemeses in ethical conflicts. Correspondingly, he constructed the other side of the artistic world as a realm of vain egoists who sought self-promotion and seemed unconcerned with humanistic modes of expression. As his ideas matured, Rochberg assigned different figures to these archetypes, but the guiding ethical criteria remained fairly consistent throughout. I therefore argue that ars combinatoria was less a sudden aesthetic reversal than it was the result of a longer cumulative process of self-assessment and compositional maturation.


Author(s):  
Amir Mashhadi ◽  
Saeed Khazaie

This chapter endeavored to devise a motivating way to engage learners in L2 English learning tasks presented through the mobile game (m-game). It started on the issue of whether types of a displayed picture on m-games had any significant relationship with learners' performance in the blended mode of L2 learning. To that end, a cellphone-based form of the nonEnglish game of 'Xane Bazi', modified as didactic 'Xane Bazi' for English vocabulary learning, was grafted onto the face-to-face mode of content representation in the blended language learning module. 100 Iranian boys and girls within the age range of 10-13 were divided into two groups to learn English vocabulary items during 12 sessions of an academic semester: One group played a version of 'Xane Bazi' with learner-made paintings and the other group played a version of the game filled with photos. The results hinted at the desired effect of utilizing m-games as applying learner-made painting condition to didactic 'Xane Bazi' was proved to significantly ratchet up the participants' L2 learning.


Within this field of serial fiction, American product leads, French ranks second, and British third. This triangular force field explains Neighbours’s anomalous position in the French market. American serial fiction is, in the form of Dallas especially, very well known in France. Such American imports are treated with a culturally characteristic ambivalence: admiration for the narrative drive and polish of American product counterposed by distaste for its spectacularization and superficiality. As seen with reference to the American market, a serial fiction market dominated by Dallas and Santa Barbara offers a less than congenial soil for a Neighbours to take root. French serial fiction production offers few more televisual referents to make Neighbours accessible/familiar/popular on French screens. Crucial here is a long history of French distaste for continuous television serial fiction: “you might say that French serial fiction quickly runs out of steam” (Bianchi 1990: 92). One French forte in this field is the series, the sequence of narratively discrete stories engaging the same characters (more or less) across (usually) weekly transmissions for some months. The best known examples are Les cinq dernières minutes, dating from 1958, Commissaire Moulin, and Maigret. Besides the series, the other forte of French television serial production is the mini-series. And the reasons underpinning the dominance of these two modes, especially the mini-series, will explain both the limited field of the French soapscape and the difficulties for a Neighbours. First, a cultural snobbery attaches to the mini-series, indicated by one critic’s sneering at the genre as representing “a serial of interminable insipidity, the television equivalent of the photo-novel or romance, destined above all to housewives [sic]” (Oppenheim 1990: 43; the sexism of this account may further point to certain assumptions about soaps among French television executives). High(er) cultural literature, in other words, commonly supplies the mini-series’ source material and cultural cachet. Second, then, French television scriptwriters have long traditions of the skills of literary compression and visualization of the psychological, skills which would be seen as wasted on scripting soaps. A further occupational/industrial factor working against the imminent success of soaps focuses on the reluctance of directors of mini-series and longer series to cede the dominant creative role to scriptwriters, the major creative force in continuous serials. And finally, actors in a country with vibrant film and theater industries are loath to commit themselves to the lengths of term required by soaps (Bianchi 1990: 96). These factors militate against the continuous fictional serial which involves a large number of characters engaged by multiple, interweaving plot strands of indeterminate duration and with limited resolution at the end of any given episode (usually 30 minutes long, and often stripped across three–five days weekly). Thus there were, at the time of Neighbours’s launch on French television, only four home-grown French soaps, of which the longest-running, Voisin, voisine, launched by La Cinq in September 1988, ran to only 360 episodes; contrast the British Coronation Street which started in 1960 and is still going! French soaps, then, “were far from proven successes” (A.W. 1989: 7). “The French have been uneasy about soaps” (Pélégrin

2002 ◽  
pp. 126-126

the context of evidence from other spheres. This evidence of manipulation may correspond to increasing concern with the production of corporate descent groups, lineages or other communities or sub-groups as suggested by Robb (1994a: 49ff) for southern Italy and by others dealing with the Neolithic elsewhere (e.g. Chapman 1981 ; Thomas & Whittle 1986). This suggests different spatialities to those described for the earlier Epipalaeolithic burials, as does the evidence in much of Neolithic southern Italy for separation of activities such as not only the procurement but also the consumption of wild animals. Remains of these are extremely rare at most settlement sites, but evidenced at other locations whether associated with 'cults' e.g. the later Neoltihic (Serra d'Alto) hypogeum at Santa Barbara, (PUG: Geniola 1987; Whitehouse 1985; 1992; 1996; Geniola 1987), or at apparently more utilitarian hunting sites e.g. Riparo della Sperlinga di S. Basilio (SIC: Biduttu 1971; Cavalier 1971). One interpretation may wish to link these to newly or differently gendered zones or landscapes (see below). ART, GENDER AND TEMPORALITIES In southern Italy there is a rich corpus of earlier prehistoric cave art, parietal and mobiliary, ranging from LUP incised representations on cave walls and engraved designs on stones and bones; probable Mesolithic incised lines and painted pebbles; and Neolithic wall paintings in caves (Pluciennik 1996). Here I shall concentrate on two caves in northwest Sicilia; a place where there is both LUP (i.e. from c. 18000-9000 cal. BC) and later prehistoric art, including paintings in caves from the Neolithic, perhaps at around 6000 or 7000 years ago. These are the Grotta Addaura II, a relatively open location near Palermo, and the more hidden inner chamber of the Grotta del Genovese on the island of Levanzo off north west Sicilia. These are isolated, though not unique examples, but we cannot talk about an integrated corpus of work, or easily compare and contrast within a widespread genre, even if we could assign rough contemporaneity. Grotta dell'Addaura II Despite poor dating evidence for the representations at this cave, material from the excavations perhaps suggests they are 10-12000 years old (Bovio Marconi 1953a). Many parts of the surface show evidence of repeated incision, perhaps also erasure as well as erosion, producing a palimpsest of humans and animals and other lines, without apparent syntax. Most of the interpretations of this cave art have centred on a unique 'scene' (fig. 3) in which various masked or beaked vertical figures surround two horizontal ones, one (H5) above the other (H6), with beak-like penes or penis-sheaths, and cords or straps between their buttocks and backs. These central figures could be flying or floating, and have been described as 'acrobats'. Bovio Marconi (1953a: 12) first suggested that the central figures were engaged in an act of homosexual copulation, but later preferred to emphasise her suggestion of acrobatic feats, though still connected with a virility ritual (1953b). The act of hanging also leads to penile erection and ejaculation; and in the 1950s Chiapella (1954) and Blanc (1954; 1955) linked this with human sacrifice, death and fertility rites. All of these interpretations of this scene are generally ethnographically plausible. Rituals of masturbation (sometimes of berdaches, men who lived as women) are recorded from North America, where the consequent dispersal of semen on ground symbolised natural fertility (Fulton & Anderson 1992: 609, note 19). In modern Papua New Guinea ritual fellatio was used in initiation ceremonies as a way of giving male-associated sexual power to boys becoming men (Herdt 1984) and this ethnographic analogy has been used by Tim Yates (1993) in his interpretation of rock art in Scandinavia, which has figures with penes, and figures without: he argues in a very unFreudian manner that to be penis-less is not necessarily a female prerogative.

2016 ◽  
pp. 76-86

Author(s):  
Yi-Ching Jean Chiu ◽  
John Cowan

This chapter presents and contrasts descriptions of two cases of online affective support provided to support students engaged in higher level learning tasks. The cases are set in different cultures, centre upon different intended learning outcomes, and follow different tutorial styles. One (Eastern) tutor acted as a “shepherd leader” in response to needs arising in the Confucian Heritage Culture as the teacher promoted critical thinking, according to the Western model. The other (Western) tutor provided Rogerian facilitation of reflective learning journals, kept by students seeking to develop personal and professional capabilities. In both styles, affective support features strongly. The cultural and pedagogical comparisons between the cases have proved useful to the writers. These distinctions together with the similarities between the two online styles emerge in the comparisons.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-373
Author(s):  
Lauren Strachan ◽  
Sara Kennedy ◽  
Pavel Trofimovich

Abstract This study investigated whether second language (L2) speakers are aware of and can manipulate aspects of their speech contributing to comprehensibility. Forty Mandarin speakers of L2 English performed two versions of the same oral task. Before the second task, half of the speakers were asked to make their speech as easy for the interlocutor to understand as possible, while the other half received no additional prompt. Speakers self-assessed comprehensibility after each task and were interviewed about how they improved their comprehensibility. Native-speaking listeners evaluated speaker performances for five dimensions, rating speech similarly across groups and tasks. Overall, participants did not become more comprehensible from task 1 to task 2, whether prompted or not, nor did speakers’ self-assessments become more in line with raters’, indicating speakers may not be aware of their own comprehensibility. However, speakers who did demonstrate greater improvement in comprehensibility received higher ratings of flow, and speakers’ self-ratings of comprehensibility were aligned with listeners’ assessments only in the second task. When discussing comprehensibility, speakers commented more on task content than linguistic dimensions. Results highlight the roles of task repetition and self-assessment in speakers’ awareness of comprehensibility.


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