Populist Human-Computer Interface

With advances in HCI and AI, and increasing prevalence of commercial social robots and chatbots, humans are communicating with computer interfaces for various applications in a wide range of settings. Kissenger is designed to bring HCI to the populist masses. In order to investigate the role of robotic kissing using the Kissenger device in HCI, the authors conducted a modified version of the imitation game described by Alan Turing by including the use of the kissing machine. Results show that robotic kissing has no effect on the winning rates of the male and female players during human-human communication, but it increases the winning rate of the female player when a chatbot is involved in the game.

NEGATIVE POLITENESS STRATEGIES USED BY MAIN CHARACTER IN “THE IMITATION GAME”

This research aims to find out types of negative politeness strategies expressed by the main character in the movie titled The Imitation Game. This research is categorised as descriptive qualitative research. The data of the research were taken from utterances identified as negative politeness strategies by the main character “Alan Turing” and analysed with theory proposed by (Brown & Levinson, 1988). Data were collected using the observation and non-participatory method. Additionally, to analyse the data, pragmatic identity method were used. The result discovered in this research are; 5 be conveniently indirect, 16 question and hedge, 1 be pessimistic, 6 give deference, 4 impersonalise interlocutors, and 4 state the FTA as the general rule, totalling to 36 indication of negative politeness strategies. Question and hedge became the most frequently used strategy the main character tends to assume unwillingness to comply to the other characters in The Imitation Game movie.

The Modified Imitation Game: A Method for Measuring Interactional Expertise

The study of the sociology of scientific knowledge distinguishes between contributory and interactional experts. Contributory experts have practical expertise—they can “walk the walk.” Interactional experts have internalized the tacit components of expertise—they can “talk the talk” but are not able to reliably “walk the walk.” Interactional expertise permits effective communication between contributory experts and others (e.g., laypeople), which in turn facilitates working jointly toward shared goals. Interactional expertise is attained through long-term immersion into the expert community in question. To assess interactional expertise, researchers developed the imitation game—a variant of the Turing test—to test whether a person, or a particular group, possesses interactional expertise of another. The imitation game, which has been used mainly in sociology to study the social nature of knowledge, may also be a useful tool for researchers who focus on cognitive aspects of expertise. In this paper, we introduce a modified version of the imitation game and apply it to examine interactional expertise in the context of blindness. Specifically, we examined blind and sighted individuals’ ability to imitate each other in a street-crossing scenario. In Phase I, blind and sighted individuals provided verbal reports of their thought processes associated with crossing a street—once while imitating the other group (i.e., as a pretender) and once responding genuinely (i.e., as a non-pretender). In Phase II, transcriptions of the reports were judged as either genuine or imitated responses by a different set of blind and sighted participants, who also provided the reasoning for their decisions. The judges comprised blind individuals, sighted orientation-and-mobility specialists, and sighted individuals with infrequent socialization with blind individuals. Decision data were analyzed using probit mixed models for signal-detection-theory indices. Reasoning data were analyzed using natural-language-processing (NLP) techniques. The results revealed evidence that interactional expertise (i.e., relevant tacit knowledge) can be acquired by immersion in the group that possesses and produces the expert knowledge. The modified imitation game can be a useful research tool for measuring interactional expertise within a community of practice and evaluating practitioners’ understanding of true experts.

Cage’s Imitation Game: Cheap Imitation and Song Books through the sketches

The theme of John Cage’s Song Books (1970), according to Cage, is contained in the statement “We connect Satie with Thoreau” (".fn_cite($cage_1970).", 1). Previous studies of Cage’s Song Books have not asked what I feel to be obvious questions: how, precisely, does Cage connect Satie with Thoreau? To what end? And how does Cage connect to Satie and Thoreau (and to the other sources from which he borrows)? I make use of Cage’s sketch materials to seek answers. I examine three of the Solos for Voice from Song Books that make use of the cheap-imitation procedure that Cage had devised for his work of that name in 1969. Because Song Books is a work for vocalists while Cheap Imitation is a work for solo piano, Cage needed to apply analogous processes of textual “imitation” and mixture to the words of Thoreau to accompany the cheap imitations of the music of Satie. This article explores the persistence of compositional choice in Song Books as revealed by the sketches, in so doing exploring themes of duality in Cage’s pursuit of “poetry as I need it” in the music of Erik Satie, the words of Henry David Thoreau, and in the imitation game that he devises to connect them with one another.

The straw man effect: Partisan misrepresentation in natural language

Political discourse often seems divided not just by different preferences, but by entirely different representations of the debate. Are partisans able to accurately describe their opponents’ position, or do they instead generate unrepresentative “straw man” arguments? In this research we examined an (incentivized) political imitation game by asking partisans on both sides of the U.S. health care debate to describe the most common arguments for and against ObamaCare. We used natural language-processing algorithms to benchmark the biases and blind spots of our participants. Overall, partisans showed a limited ability to simulate their opponents’ perspective, or to distinguish genuine from imitation arguments. In general, imitations were less extreme than their genuine counterparts. Individual difference analyses suggest that political sophistication only improves the representations of one’s own side but not of an opponent’s side, exacerbating the straw man effect. Our findings suggest that false beliefs about partisan opponents may be pervasive.

Harnessing the Demographic Dividend in Africa Through Lessons From East Asia's Experience

Notably, East Asian Economies successfully capitalized on shifts in their age structures to gain a boost in economic productivity, a phenomenon known as the demographic dividend. Nowadays, despite the hitherto sluggish pace of Africa’s transition, experts remain optimistic that similar transformation in Africa may lead to faster development in coming decades. The paper attempts to answer the following three questions: (i) Can natural resource development help African economies harness its demographic dividend? (ii) as China forty years long, demographic dividend draws to an end, China is actively trying to capture fresh economic opportunities in higher-value-added productive activity. Can Africa seize this opportunity provided by its own emerging demographic dividend era? (iii) Can imitation game help African economies harness its demographic dividend? Arguably, for African economies to imitate the East Asian miracle and harness a maximum demographic dividend, they should adhere to these three mechanisms: labor supply, savings, and human capital.

Ectopic Prostate Tissue Presenting as Urinary Bladder Tumor: The Imitation Game!

Ectopic prostate tissue is a rare phenomenon. Histologically and immunohistochemically it is indistinguishable from normal prostatic tissue but it is difficult to recognize and may be confused with malignancy when presenting as ectopic lesion in the urinary system. Therefore, awareness of this entity is essential for both urologists and pathologists to prevent misdiagnosis.