Three-Dimensional Printing Fashion Product Design with Emotional Durability Based on Korean Aesthetics

Given the potentially significant environmental impacts of fashion design, various design approaches are required to extend product lifespan. Digital design methods may play an essential role in reducing the environmental impact of products and production processes. In addition, a design approach inspired by nature, where humans have long lived, is valid for sustainable design innovation. The purpose of this study is to examine the aesthetics of Koreans, who prefer nature, and to find a sustainable fashion design approach by using it as a knowledge database. In this study, a parametric design methodology that can reflect knowledge-based data in the process of producing 3D printing sustainable fashion products, considering the emotional durability of consumers, was used. The study results are as follows. From the aesthetic point of view of Korea, sustainable design characteristics represent unique Korean folk art, resilience to nature, and simplicity that resembles nature. The properties of the form represented to “forms resembling nature”, “changeable forms”, “organic forms”, and “minimal forms”. Materials were “nature inspired textures”, “rustic natural materials”, and “regional materials”. Colors were “the colors of nature” and “indigenous colors”. The parametric controls variables used for 3D printing the fashion products were size, assembly style, and sustainable material. These control parameters were used to create designs according to the individual taste of users. In the 3D printing fashion product design process, pieces were printed in different shapes and sizes by controlling the parameters to create designs according to users’ tastes and Korean aesthetics. It was determined that this process could extend the lifespan of products, and that it is possible to modify sustainable fashion products according to personal taste by adjusting numerical values and extracting visual images based on knowledge of art and culture.

Evolved Features of Artistic Motivation: Analyzing a Brazilian Database Spanning Three Decades

Darwin explored the evolutionary processes underlying artistic propensities in humans. He stressed the universality of the human mind by pointing to the shared pleasure which all populations take in dancing, engaging in music, acting, painting, tattooing, and self-decorating. Artistic motivation drives/reinforces individuals to engage in aesthetically oriented activities. As curiosity/play, artistic behavior is hypothesized as a functionally autonomous activity motivated intrinsically through an evolved, specific, and stable aesthetic motivational system. The author tested whether artistic motivation is rather intrinsically sourced, domain-specific, and temporally stable using a large decades-long real-life public Brazilian database of university applications. In Study I, the author analyzed reasons for career-choice responded to by 403,832 late-adolescent applicants (48.84% women), between 1987 and 1998. In Study II, the author analyzed another career-choice reason question responded to by 1,703,916 late-adolescent applicants (51.02% women), between 1987 and 2020. Music, Dance, Scenic Arts, Visual Arts, and Literary Studies, in combination, presented a higher percentage of individuals reporting intrinsic factors (e.g., personal taste/aptitude/fulfillment) and the lower proportion reporting extrinsic motives (e.g., the influence of media/teacher/family, salary, social contribution/prestige) than other career groups. If artistic motivation were a recent by-product of general curiosity or status-seeking, artistic and non-artistic careers would not differ. Overall, intrinsic motives were 2.60–6.35 times higher than extrinsic factors; among artistic applicants’ were 10.81–28.38 times higher, suggesting domain-specificity. Intrinsic motivation did not differ among artistic careers and remained stable throughout the periods. Converging results corroborated a specific, stable, and intrinsically sourced artistic motivation consistent with its possible evolutionary origins.

Indexical Relativism?

The particular behavior exhibited by sentences featuring predicates of personal taste such as “tasty” may drive us to claim that their truth depends on the context of assessment, as MacFarlane does. MacFarlane considers two ways in which the truth of a sentence can depend on the context of assessment. On the one hand, we can say that the sentence expresses a proposition whose truth-value depends on the context of assessment. This is MacFarlane’s position, which he calls “truth relativism” and, following Weatherson, I rebrand as “nonindexical relativism”. On the other hand, we can say that what proposition a sentence expresses depends on the context of assessment. MacFarlane calls this position “content relativism” and rejects it on the grounds that it leads to implausible readings of certain sentences and is unable to account for the speaker’s authority over the content of her assertions. In this paper, I too argue against content relativism, which, again following Weatherson, I rebrand as “indexical relativism”. However, my arguments against the theory are different from MacFarlane’s, which I prove unsound. In particular, I show that any version of indexical relativism will be unable to account for at least one of the phenomena that have been standardly used to motivate nonindexical relativism—faultless disagreement and retraction—in most of the ways in which it has been proposed to understand them.

How do overweight people dropout of a weight loss diet? A qualitative study

Background The growing trend of overweight and obesity in many developed and developing countries in recent years has made obesity one of the most significant health problems in the world. The treatment of overweight and obese people is challenging, as patients have difficulty adhering to a weight-loss diet. Thus, the present study aimed to identify the reasons for the dropout of weight-loss diets. Methods This qualitative study using content analysis was conducted in a comprehensive health center in Shiraz, southern Iran, between April and October 2020. The study was performed on 27 participants with a history of obesity and diet dropout selected via purposive and theoretical sampling. The data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and were thematically analyzed. Results The participants included 25 females (92.6%) and two males (7.4%) with a mean age of 33.4 ± 8.4 years. Data analysis resulted in the emergence of three themes and 14 sub-themes. The first theme was personal reasons for diet dropout, which included six sub-themes; i.e., misunderstanding of diet, not having enough motivation, stress and hormonal disorder, having the feel of “being harmful to health”, lack of mental and psychological preparation, and personal taste. The second theme was familial and social reasons for diet dropout, including two sub-themes, i.e., social and familial problems. Finally, the third theme was the reasons related to diet characteristics, including six sub-themes: ineffectiveness of diet, expensiveness of diet food and dietary supplements, family problems, unavailability of food, unscientific and unconventional diets feeling bad about the diet, and unpalatable diet food. All the concepts were related to each other and resulted in a pattern revealing the experiences of overweight people and who had dropped out of weight-loss diets. Conclusion The reasons for diet dropout were divided into three levels: personal reasons, familial and social reasons, and diet characteristics. Overall, clinicians should pay attention to the complexity of diets to increase the success rate of weight management. Based on the current study findings, a guideline is recommended to guide patients who dropout of weight-loss diets.

In search of the narrator

The chapter proposes a semantic analysis of narrators in fiction, addressing three main issues: (a) in fiction, we cannot rely on reality to determine the identity of the narrator, (b) there are linguistic items beyond pronouns to introduce a narrator, and (c) narrators can be unreliable. It shows how narrators in fiction can be modeled by discourse referents (drefs) in dynamic semantics. At the core of the analysis is the assumption that hearers derive subjective meanings by taking into account all contexts c that could be the context they are in. Combined with dynamic semantics, this captures the intuition that a narrator can be both unique and indefinite. Different types of narrator introduction are surveyed: apart from first-person pronouns, speaker-oriented items like exclamatives, questions, and evidentials trigger the accommodation of a narrator dref. Other items, like predicates of personal taste, can but need not refer to the narrator dref. The analysis is extended to unreliable narrators and narrations about humanless worlds.

How to theorize about subjective language: a lesson from ‘de re’

Subjective language has attracted substantial attention in the recent literature in formal semantics and philosophy of language (see overviews in MacFarlane in Assessment sensitivity: relative truth and its applications, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014; van Wijnbergen-Huitink, in Meier, and van Wijnbergen-Huitink (eds) Subjective meaning: alternatives to relativism, De Gruyter, Berlin, pp 1–19, 2016; Lasersohn in Subjectivity and perspective in truth-theoretic semantics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017; Vardomskaya in Sources of subjectivity, Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, IL, 2018; Zakkou in Faultless disagreement: a defense of contextualism in the realm of personal taste, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt a. M., 2019b). Most current theories argue that Subjective Predicates (SPs), which express matters of opinion, semantically differ from ordinary predicates, which express matters of fact. We will call this view “SP exceptionalism”. This paper addresses SP exceptionalism by scrutinizing the behavior of SPs in attitude reports, which, as we will argue, significantly constrains the space of analytical options and rules out some of the existing theories. As first noticed by Stephenson (Linguist Philos 30(4):487–525, 2007a; Towards a theory of subjective meaning, Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2007b), the most prominent reading of embedded SPs is one where they talk about the attitude holder’s subjective judgment. As is remarked sometimes (Sæbø in Linguist Philos 32(4):327–352, 2009; Pearson in J Semant 30(1):103–154, 2013a), this reading is not the only one: embedded SPs may also talk about someone else’s, non-local, judgment. We concentrate specifically on such cases and show that non-local judgment is possible if and only if SPs are used within a DP that is outside main predicate position and that entire DP is read de re. We demonstrate that the behavior of SPs in attitude reports does not differ from that of ordinary predicates: it follows from general constraints on intersective modification and intensional quantification (Farkas in Szabolcsi (ed) Ways of scope taking, Springer, Dordrecht, pp 183–215, 1997; Musan in On the temporal interpretation of noun phrases, Garland, New York, 1997; Percus in Nat Lang Semant 8(3):173–229, 2000; Keshet in Good intensions: paving two roads to a theory of the de re/de dicto distinction, Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2008). We argue that this unexceptional behavior of SPs in fact has unexpected consequences for SP exceptionalism. Precisely because SPs have been argued to be semantically different from ordinary predicates, not all theories correctly predict these less-studied data: some overgenerate (e.g. Stephenson 2007a, b; Stojanovic in Linguist Philos 30(6):691–706, 2007; Sæbø 2009) and some undergenerate (e.g. McCready in McNally, and Puig-Waldmüller (ed) Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, vol 11, pp 433–447, 2007; Pearson 2013a). Out of the currently available theories, only relativist accounts (Lasersohn in Linguist Philos 28(6):643–686, 2005; MacFarlane 2014; Bylinina in J Semant 34(2), 291–331, 2017; Coppock in Linguist Philos 41(2):125–164, 2018) predict the right interpretation, and only that interpretation. We thus present a novel empirical argument for relativism, and, more generally, formulate a constraint that has to be taken into consideration by any view that advocates SP exceptionalism.

Aso-ebi Custom among the Yoruba People of Southwest Nigeria: An Assessment of Trend, Challenges and Prospects

The study investigated the trend, challenges and prospects of Aso-Ebi practice among the Yoruba people of Southwest Nigeria. The major objective of the study was to compare the benefits of the phenomenon with the challenges associated with it. This is to reach a cogent premise for upholding or discouraging the practice. The methodology followed a survey research design that involved generating data from individuals who patronize Aso-Ebi in Osun and Oyo States. Primary data sources came from a well-designed questionnaire which was administered to 270 respondents. The result findings revealed that: (i) Distress arising from the financial burden emanating from incessant purchase of Aso-Ebi fabrics (ii) Distress caused by unhealthy flamboyant competition among Aso-Ebi patrons, and (iii) Distress caused by compromising personal taste and choice for chosen Aso-Ebi fabrics are all significant challenges allied with the phenomenon. On the other hand, (i) Distress caused by the suspension of the use of personal clothes (ii) Distress caused by stocking loads of Aso- Ebi fabrics in personal wardrobes are found not to be significant. The study also found that the benefits associated with the practice outweigh the challenges therein. Consequently, it was recommended in the study that: (i) the practice of Aso-Ebi should be upheld and encouraged (ii) individuals, organizations and the Nigerian government at all levels should leverage on its potentials as a panacea for capacity building and economic growth (iii) it should be harnessed as an instrument for fostering social cohesion in Nigeria.

A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance

This article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the context of a fiction: (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl. This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction. To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.

Differences in Eating Behavior Among Followers of Popular Diets Across Categories of Perceived Adherence

Objectives To understand how eating behaviors, susceptibility to the food environment, and perceived dietary habit strength differ across self-reported categories of adherence. Methods We used data in a sample (n = 2829) from Adhering to Dietary Approaches for Personal Taste (ADAPT), an online study conducted in self-identified popular diet followers. Adherence was categorized into 3 groups: >95% of the time (high adherers = HA), between 75–95% (moderate adherers = MA); <75% time (lower adherers = LA). The Power of Food Scale (POF) assessed susceptibility to the food environment (availability, presentation, taste), with higher scores indicating food has a higher power over dietary decisions. The Three-Factor Eating Questionnaire captured cognitive restraint (CR), uncontrolled eating (UE), and emotional eating (EE), with higher scores indicating greater response to the specific eating behavior. The Self-Report Habit Index (SRHI) measured perceived habit strength with respect to eating, with a lower score indicating stronger habits. We used ANCOVA adjusting for age, sex, time on diet, and diet group to compare POF, CR, UE, EE, and SRHI outcomes across adherence groups. Results Sixty six percent were HA (n = 1881), 28% MA (n = 787), and 6% LA (n = 161). LA were significantly more susceptible to food availability (mean [95% CI] = 14.9 [13.8–16.1]), presentation (12.1 [11.2–13.1]), and taste (13.4 [12.6–14.2], compared to HA (11 [10.7–11.3], 8 [7.8–8.3],11.6 [11.4–11.9]), respectively. LA indicated significantly greater UE (21 [20.2–21.9]) than HA (17 [16.7–17.4]) and EE (LA = 8 [7.5–8.4] vs. HA = 6.1 [6–6.3]). No significant differences were observed with respect to CR. LA reported weaker SRHI habits (3.4 [3.2–3.6]) compared to HA (1.7 [1.7–1.8]). Differences seen between the LA and MA were similar to those described for HA. Conclusions Our findings show that higher self-reported adherence to dietary patterns is associated with lower susceptibility to negative influences in the food environment, lower uncontrolled and emotional eating, and greater habit strength. Future research should investigate the directionality of the relationship between eating behavior and adherence. Funding Sources USDA Cooperative Agreements 58-8050-9-004 & 58-8050-4-003, General Mills Bell Institute of Health & Nutrition