Rethinking the Politics of Creativity: Posthumanism, Indigeneity, and Creativity Beyond the Western Anthropocene

With the emergence of Western posthuman understandings, new materialism, artificial intelligence (AI), and the growing acknowledgment of Indigenous epistemologies, an ongoing rethinking of existing assumptions and meanings about creativity is needed. The intersection of new technologies and philosophical stances that upend human-centered views of reality suggests that creativity is not an exclusively “human” activity. This opens new possibilities and assemblages for conceiving of creativity, but not without tensions. In this article, we connect multiple threads, to reimagine creativity in light of posthuman understandings and the possibilities for creative emergence beyond the Anthropocene. Creativity is implicated as emerging beyond non-human spaces, such as through digitality and AI or sources in the natural world. This unseats many understandings of creativity as positioned in Euro-Western literature. We offer four areas of concern for interrogating tensions in this area, aiming to open new possibilities for practice, research, and (re)conceptualization beyond Western understandings.

Intricate Identities: Cochlear Implant Users Negotiating Lives Between d/Deaf and Hearing Worlds

<p>The cochlear implant (CI), a device that “provides hearing sensations for severely and profoundly deaf individuals” (NZ Audiological Society), initially emerged for public use in the 1980s, but was met with strong opposition from Deaf communities in many countries (Lane et al 1996, Edwards 2005). However, since the beginning of the 21st century, hostility towards implants has lessened and they are increasingly accepted as an option in a range of possibilities for deaf children and adults. Despite increasing numbers of the Deaf community considering implants themselves, however, the continuing task of the Deaf community is to counter the conception of implants as ‘miracle cures’ for deafness (Lane et al 1996, Edwards 2005). Furthermore, the Deaf community needs to communicate to parents of deaf children that those with implants may still be perceived as d/Deaf, by both the community and themselves (Christiansen and Leigh 2002). This thesis explores the identities of a small group of cochlear implant users in New Zealand, and examines their involvement in both d/Deaf and hearing worlds. The narratives of my participants demonstrate some of the everyday difficulties that d/Deaf individuals, and their families, encounter in medical and health‐care settings, along with educational and workplace settings. I draw on participants’ narratives that explain their relationship with both medicalised and cultural models of deafness, and with Deaf culture, decisions about implants, and perceptions of the effects and limits of cochlear implants. I argue that the identities of CI users in modern New Zealand society are influenced by a multiplicity of factors, including medicalised understandings of deafness, familial pressures, the embodied experiences of CI technology, and personal identity trajectories. Given that these individuals are navigating these multiple threads in the formation of their identities, I argue that, at this stage in their lives, the CI users in this study occupy a liminal position in regards to d/Deaf and hearing worlds. Furthermore, I posit that the medical model of deafness needs to be tempered with social and cultural views of both deafness and CIs, and that the voices of CI users themselves should be prominent in such debates.</p>

Intricate Identities: Cochlear Implant Users Negotiating Lives Between d/Deaf and Hearing Worlds

<p>The cochlear implant (CI), a device that “provides hearing sensations for severely and profoundly deaf individuals” (NZ Audiological Society), initially emerged for public use in the 1980s, but was met with strong opposition from Deaf communities in many countries (Lane et al 1996, Edwards 2005). However, since the beginning of the 21st century, hostility towards implants has lessened and they are increasingly accepted as an option in a range of possibilities for deaf children and adults. Despite increasing numbers of the Deaf community considering implants themselves, however, the continuing task of the Deaf community is to counter the conception of implants as ‘miracle cures’ for deafness (Lane et al 1996, Edwards 2005). Furthermore, the Deaf community needs to communicate to parents of deaf children that those with implants may still be perceived as d/Deaf, by both the community and themselves (Christiansen and Leigh 2002). This thesis explores the identities of a small group of cochlear implant users in New Zealand, and examines their involvement in both d/Deaf and hearing worlds. The narratives of my participants demonstrate some of the everyday difficulties that d/Deaf individuals, and their families, encounter in medical and health‐care settings, along with educational and workplace settings. I draw on participants’ narratives that explain their relationship with both medicalised and cultural models of deafness, and with Deaf culture, decisions about implants, and perceptions of the effects and limits of cochlear implants. I argue that the identities of CI users in modern New Zealand society are influenced by a multiplicity of factors, including medicalised understandings of deafness, familial pressures, the embodied experiences of CI technology, and personal identity trajectories. Given that these individuals are navigating these multiple threads in the formation of their identities, I argue that, at this stage in their lives, the CI users in this study occupy a liminal position in regards to d/Deaf and hearing worlds. Furthermore, I posit that the medical model of deafness needs to be tempered with social and cultural views of both deafness and CIs, and that the voices of CI users themselves should be prominent in such debates.</p>

Previously uncharacterized rectangular bacteria in the dolphin mouth

Much remains to be explored regarding the diversity of host-associated microbes. Here, we report the discovery of microbial structures in the mouths of bottlenose dolphins that we refer to as rectangular cell-like units (RCUs). DNA staining revealed multiple paired bands that suggested cells in the act of dividing along the longitudinal axis. Deep sequencing of samples enriched in RCUs through micromanipulation indicated that the RCUs are bacterial and distinct from Simonsiella, a genus with somewhat similar morphology and division patterning found in oral cavities of animals. Cryogenic transmission electron microscopy and tomography showed that RCUs are composed of parallel membrane-bound segments, likely individual cells, encapsulated by an S-layer-like periodic surface covering. RCUs displayed pilus-like appendages protruding as bundles of multiple threads that extend parallel to each other, and splay out at the tips and/or intertwine, in stark contrast to all known types of bacterial pili that consist of single, hair-like structures. These observations highlight the diversity of novel microbial forms and lifestyles that await discovery and characterization using tools complementary to genomics such as microscopy.

Locality-Based Cache Management and Warp Scheduling for Reducing Cache Contention in GPU

GPGPUs has gradually become a mainstream acceleration component in high-performance computing. The long latency of memory operations is the bottleneck of GPU performance. In the GPU, multiple threads are divided into one warp for scheduling and execution. The L1 data caches have little capacity, while multiple warps share one small cache. That makes the cache suffer a large amount of cache contention and pipeline stall. We propose Locality-Based Cache Management (LCM), combined with the Locality-Based Warp Scheduling (LWS), to reduce cache contention and improve GPU performance. Each load instruction can be divided into three types according to locality: only used once as streaming data locality, accessed multiple times in the same warp as intra-warp locality, and accessed in different warps as inter-warp data locality. According to the locality of the load instruction, LWS applies cache bypass to the streaming locality request to improve the cache utilization rate, extend inter-warp memory request coalescing to make full use of the inter-warp locality, and combine with the LWS to alleviate cache contention. LCM and LWS can effectively improve cache performance, thereby improving overall GPU performance. Through experimental evaluation, our LCM and LWS can obtain an average performance improvement of 26% over baseline GPU.

A Breath of Fresh Air for the European Green Deal: Energy Efficiency and Climate Neutrality Factors

The topics covered and the research framework as such provide multiple level takeaways regarding energy efficiency and climate neutrality. The research, therefore, elaborates on concepts central to the academic debate at the time of the writing and undercuts patterns and proposals relevant for multiple actors within the local and global energy market. In fact, the research develops broader discussion regarding any strategic energy-efficiency related goal and the complexity and multiple threads that meeting such a goal would entail. The research also explicitly elaborates on the role of energy efficiency in both climate transition and energy system transformation. In addition, it uncovers the scope of various policies implemented on a local level and discusses their role in meeting the climate targets in medium and long-term. Furthermore, the research also elaborates on the role of bioeconomy and climate neutrality.

The Ethics of Uncertainty

Disorders of consciousness (DoCs) raise difficult and complex questions about the value of life for persons with impaired consciousness, the rights of persons unable to make medical decisions, and our social, medical, and ethical obligations to patients whose personhood has frequently been challenged and neglected. Recent neuroscientific discoveries have led to enhanced understanding of the heterogeneity of these disorders and patients, and focused renewed attention on the disturbingly high rate of misdiagnosis. This book examines the entanglement of epistemic and ethical uncertainty in DoCs and other medical contexts, and how they interact to create both epistemic and ethical risks. Philosopher and bioethicist L. Syd M Johnson pulls together multiple threads—the ontological mysteries of consciousness, medical uncertainty about unconsciousness, ableist bias, withdrawal of treatment in neurointensive care, and the rarely questioned view that consciousness is essential to personhood and moral status. Johnson challenges longstanding bioethical dogmas about DoC patients, and argues for an ethics of uncertainty for contexts where there is a need for decisive action in the presence of unavoidable uncertainty. The ethics of uncertainty refocuses ethical inquiry concerning persons with DoCs, placing less emphasis on their contested personhood, and more on inductive risk and uncertainty, on respect for autonomy, and especially on epistemic justice, and the duties of privileged epistemic agents. It is an approach with applications beyond brain injury, encouraging an expansive and humane approach that enables surrogate decision makers facing fraught, complex, risky choices to fulfill their obligations as moral and epistemic agents.

Dancing K-Pop with Chinese and “English in Class Please”: Policy Negotiations as Relational-Languaging Episodes

Pointing out that language policy negotiations in classroom discourse are an understudied kind of “language-related episode”, and proposing that Tim Ingold’s notion of “meshwork” dissolves a boundary that typically encloses their analysis, this paper examines how a rich and indicative example of student group interaction on a British university campus in China becomes interwoven with multiple threads, including: different languages, Korean pop dance moves, coffee from the campus Starbucks, and the teacher’s repeated attempts at English-Medium Instruction policy enforcement. Our example was discovered in corpus recordings of group activities during classes in English for Academic Purposes, then transcribed for embodied activity (primarily speech and gesture) and further explored in relation to the multiple threads which visibly and audibly became involved. Analysis of the episode shows how students’ relational-languaging behaviours must negotiate, respond, and adapt to the policy enforcement, illustrating some of the tensions immanent to the transnational higher education experience.

Computation analysis of regularization methods and parameter selection for acoustics radiation modes source reconstruction of vibrating plates

Source localization and power estimation is a topic of great interest in acoustics and vibration. Acoustic source radiation modes reconstruction is a method of particular interest. Solutions leads to determinate sound/vibration power and surface velocity distribution from sparse acoustics samples. It has been shown that the quality of the results depends on Tikhonov regularization parameter. This inverse method is based on the radiation resistance matrix and we show that a single instruction multiple threads computing approach for graphics processing unit device exhibit better speed performance than common approaches to achieve the solution. We compare four regularization and three estimating methods for regularization parameters. We use a similarity measure to the simulated cases in three frequencies. Tikhonov regularization exhibits best reconstruction results. However, truncated singular vector decomposition also shows good performance with the advantage of not using a regularization parameter. Graphics processing unit implementation reduce reconstruction's computing time at least in a half.

EXPERIENCES FROM STARTING AND RUNNING A SOFTWARE COMPANY WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF DESIGN RESEARCH

This paper deals with the story and experiences of setting up a new start-up company with the ambition to scale using a software-based product. The paper is written by researchers for researchers interested in doing the same thing. The paper concludes that it can be very beneficial for research as the startup-can be seen as a data collection machine, but to set up a start-up company, comes with unforeseen problems along the way. A few of them involves: Do not rely on rational arguments (only), when marketing your product. Expect long lead-times. Work with multiple threads and secure funding early to ensure that you can finance your startup. Finally, you need to be committed, and you have to have a strategy to manage both your research and your commercial activities.