The Need for a Paradigm Shift in Approaching Ageing-Related Design Research and Practice

Despite a rapidly ageing world population, ageism – particularly in its implicit form – is widespread in society. In this article, we propose that a paradigm shift is needed in how we approach ageing-related design research and practice in areas such as assistive technologies. We also put forward the idea of using the Healthy Ageing (HA) framework of the WHO as the basis for new lines actions that can be taken by design researchers and practitioners to address implicit ageism in society through their work.

“Fake” Phenomenon in the System of Types of Linguistic Manipulation

The article is devoted to the definition of the linguistic status of the “fake” phenomenon, the study of the sources of its destructiveness as one of the types of linguistic manipulation. The work examines speech models of argumentation, persuasion, communicative pressure and fake in order to establish a number of their differential and integral features, to distinguish fake from related linguistic phenomena. The material for the study is represented by the web pages of print and online media of various levels and formats, blogs operating within the framework of public discourse. The basis for the analysis is an approach taken to distinguish between linguistic and rhetorical norms, according to which the argumentation should be considered as a correct non-rhetorical type of persuasion. In turn, as rhetorical types of persuasion, one should consider conviction, which is realized as a correct rhetorical influence, communicative pressure and fake, which are incorrect (destructive) rhetorical types of linguistic manipulation. Analysis of the components of the speech model of these linguistic phenomena and the establishment of the sources of their destructiveness makes it possible to more clearly determine fake as a separate type of linguistic manipulation. It is concluded that fake differs from argumentation by the presence of pathos in the structure of the speech model of persuasion; from argumentation and persuasion - by the implicit nature of the intention and destructive communicative orientation. Fake should also be distinguished from communicative pressure, based on the following principles: fake is unreliable false information, as well as an implicit form of intention; communicative pressure is an excess of the permissible norms of morality and ethics of a measure of influence, as well as an explicit form of intention.

Initial Dataset Dimension Reduction Using Principal Component Analysis

Any data in an implicit form contain information of interest to the researcher. The purpose of data analysis is to extract this information. The original data may contain redundant elements and noise, distorting these data to one degree or another. Therefore, it seems necessary to subject the data to preliminary processing. Reducing the dimension of the initial data makes it possible to remove interfering factors and present the data in a form suitable for further analysis. The paper considers an approach to reducing the dimensionality of the original data based on principal component analysis.

PARADOXES OF “THE COFFIN-MAKER”: EXPLICIT AND HIDDEN ELEMENTS

One of obscure places in “The Coffin-maker” is the inscription on the sign advertising his services, since it contains elements that contradict common sense. The article provides a brief critical review of the existing interpretations of this inscription. It is shown that this absurd inscription has a narrative potential, predicting subsequent events that “occurred” in the character’s dream. In this aspect, it is an example of the so-called inverse metaphor. It also has an iconic character, as it advertises non-existent services to send to the world of nonexistence. The article reveals a number of other narrative aspects of the story that are present in an implicit form, which is an example of a hidden plot.As a result of the reconstruction of the omitted plot links, a number of circumstances of the undertaker’s personal history, related to his family and the history of moving, are restored, which allows us to understand the nature of his experiences, with the description of which the story begins. The logic of the plot leads to the assumption: soon after the coffin-maker joyfully realizes that the nightmarish events were a dream, the news of the real death of Tryukhina should follow.

The Catholic Charismatic Movement in Global Pentecostalism

This article deals with Catholic Charismatics in Italy. The brief description of the case study gives a chance to make some more general comments on what is happening under the sacred canopy of Global Catholicism where the Spirit blows, and furthermore in relation with so-called Global Pentecostalism. In other words, my working hypothesis includes the following statements: (a) Catholic Pentecostalism constitutes a variant of a more global phenomenon, which seems to challenge the organizational model of historic Christian churches. (b) The study of the Italian case is interesting because its story shows the extent to which Pentecostalism questions the Roman form of Catholicism. Elsewhere in the world, the development of the phenomenon has not encountered the same difficulties as it did in Italy. Indeed, in some cases (Brazil and the Philippines), it has been supported and accepted as a sign of new religious vitality. From this point of view, Rome is relatively far away. The Roman–Tridentine model governed by the clergy resists in Italy, while it appears weaker where the Spirit blows wherever it wants. The Charismatic movement was gradually brought back to the bed of ecclesial orthodoxy after a long persuasive work carried out by bishops and theologians towards the leaders of the movement itself. However, despite this ecclesification/clericalization process, the charismatic tension remains, and the expectation for a pneumatic church constitutes an implicit form of criticism of the Roman form of Catholicism.

An Implicit Form of Krasulina's k-PCA Update without the Orthonormality Constraint

We shed new insights on the two commonly used updates for the online k-PCA problem, namely, Krasulina's and Oja's updates. We show that Krasulina's update corresponds to a projected gradient descent step on the Stiefel manifold of orthonormal k-frames, while Oja's update amounts to a gradient descent step using the unprojected gradient. Following these observations, we derive a more implicit form of Krasulina's k-PCA update, i.e. a version that uses the information of the future gradient as much as possible. Most interestingly, our implicit Krasulina update avoids the costly QR-decomposition step by bypassing the orthonormality constraint. A related update, called the Sanger's rule, can be seen as an explicit approximation of our implicit update. We show that the new update in fact corresponds to an online EM step applied to a probabilistic k-PCA model. The probabilistic view of the update allows us to combine multiple models in a distributed setting. We show experimentally that the implicit Krasulina update yields superior convergence while being significantly faster. We also give strong evidence that the new update can benefit from parallelism and is more stable w.r.t. tuning of the learning rate.

PROSODIC ORGANISATION OF REFUSAL UTTERANCES: THEIR CORRECT CODING, DECODING AND ACTUALISATION IN ENGLISH DIALOGUE SPEECH

The article focuses on the specificity of correct coding and decoding of refusal utterances in English dialogue speech and their intonation patterns taking full account of the importance of a communicative context in which the utterances occur. The author states that the communicative context to be considered while perceiving the refusal intonation patterns includes the following complex of factors: the communicative situation (formal, informal), the relation of speaker’s social status to the recipient’s status (higher, equal, and lower), the explicit or implicit form of the refusal, the speaker’s socio-cultural level (high. mid, low), emotional-and-pragmatic potential of the utterance (high, mid, low) as well as the class of reasons for the refusal utterances generation “I do not want to”, “I cannot”, “I can but I do not want to”, “I want but I cannot”). In this paper the author studies the suprasegmental level means contributing to correct coding and decoding of the utterance information and the speaker’s emotional state and his/her pragmatic intention. 70 students of Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute aged 18-21 took part in the experiment. The author reports the results of the study of difficulties experienced by learners while mastering intonation patterns of English refusal utterances. The results of the research prove that intonation plays the leading role in correct encoding and decoding of refusal utterances’ meaning.

Translingualism / Transculturality and Ethno-Cultural Identity: Complementarity or Conflictness?

The article deals with a few aspects of translingualism and their influence on ethno-cultural and ethno-lingual consciousness. The authors postulate that a statement of the harmonic coexistence between the ‘native’ and the ‘acquired’, with all its attractiveness and ‘magnetism’, isfar from being always proven in practice. In addition, the ‘smoothness’ of transition from one linguistic culture to another and the ‘cross-flow’ of languages and cultures into each other can be perceived as a threat to the preservation of the ‘native’ linguocultural identity and an implicit form of the ‘linguistic imperialism’. In this regard, it seems appropriate to objectively analyze the phenomena of translingualism and transculturalism and to consider the associated positive and negative consequences in more details.

Public-private partnership as remedy for crumbling infrastructure: Is this hope looking for reason?

It has become commonplace to describe publicly provided infrastructure as being in a sorry state and to advance public-private partnership as a possible remedy. This essay adopts a skeptical but not a cynical posture toward those claims. The paper starts by reviewing the comparative properties of markets and politics within a theory of budgeting where the options are construction and maintenance. This analytical point of departure explains how incongruities between political and market action can favor construction over maintenance. In short, political entities can engage in an implicit form of public debt by reducing maintenance spending to support other budgetary items. This implicit form of public debt does not manifest in higher interest rates but rather manifests in crumbling bridges and other infrastructure due to the transfer of maintenance into other budgetary activities.