Perceiving fingerspelling via point-light displays: The stimulus and the perceiver both matter

Signed language users communicate in a wide array of sub-optimal environments, such as in dim lighting or from a distance. While fingerspelling is a common and essential part of signed languages, the perception of fingerspelling in varying visual environments is not well understood. Signed languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) rely on visuospatial information that combines hand and bodily movements, facial expressions, and fingerspelling. Linguistic information in ASL is conveyed with movement and spatial patterning, which lends itself well to using dynamic Point Light Display (PLD) stimuli to represent sign language movements. We created PLD videos of fingerspelled location names. The location names were either Real (e.g., KUWAIT) or Pseudo-names (e.g., CLARTAND), and the PLDs showed either a High or a Low number of markers. In an online study, Deaf and Hearing ASL users (total N = 283) watched 27 PLD stimulus videos that varied by Realness and Number of Markers. We calculated accuracy and confidence scores in response to each video. We predicted that when signers see ASL fingerspelled letter strings in a suboptimal visual environment, language experience in ASL will be positively correlated with accuracy and self-rated confidence scores. We also predicted that Real location names would be understood better than Pseudo names. Our findings show that participants were more accurate and confident in response to Real place names than Pseudo names and for stimuli with High rather than Low markers. We also discovered a significant interaction between Age and Realness, which shows that as people age, they can better use outside world knowledge to inform their fingerspelling success. Finally, we examined the accuracy and confidence in fingerspelling perception in sub-groups of people who had learned ASL before the age of four. Studying the relationship between language experience with PLD fingerspelling perception allows us to explore how hearing status, ASL fluency levels, and age of language acquisition affect the core abilities of understanding fingerspelling.

STEREOTYPING OF INTELLECTUAL SPACE

This article takes aim at the degeneration of modern society and its causes originating from the crisis of individualism. For this, the transformation of art from its roots, to its application in the modern world, has been examined. Art has been used as an indicator to explore how capitalism utilizes esthetic pleasure in order to influence the masses. The immobilization of intellectual space has been analyzed through mold-city installation and concretized by delving into the relationship between human perception and contemporary artistic expressions. On the same line, how others are using this relationship for their economic benefit ensues and the function of the artist, the consequences of his practices upon modern society are explored. Today, art has lost her meaning and became an absorber. This is because of the quantity which controls the values but not the quality. The individualization started getting the same meaning as materialization, destructs creativity and intuition. In other words, the buyer and the purchased material changed places. Human, being alienated from himself, lost his identity in the mass then marginalized to the rest. The separation between those individuals doesn’t mean “difference” and they are stereotyped by materialization. The art shows itself as a symptom of this societal crisis. In the modern world, the essence and the shape show themselves as a quality and quantity. The control lines imposed in order to legitimating that degeneration, replace old values with new ones, not only by stereotyping but also archetyping these. In this way, the real place that the mass exploitation is applying is not the showcase but the collective subconscious life. So the art, because of its qualities, is able to affect directly that area, became like an ideal instrument. Keywords: individu, space, ıdea, mold, art

Dialogue History Matters! Personalized Response Selection in Multi-Turn Retrieval-Based Chatbots

Existing multi-turn context-response matching methods mainly concentrate on obtaining multi-level and multi-dimension representations and better interactions between context utterances and response. However, in real-place conversation scenarios, whether a response candidate is suitable not only counts on the given dialogue context but also other backgrounds, e.g., wording habits, user-specific dialogue history content. To fill the gap between these up-to-date methods and the real-world applications, we incorporate user-specific dialogue history into the response selection and propose a personalized hybrid matching network (PHMN). Our contributions are two-fold: (1) our model extracts personalized wording behaviors from user-specific dialogue history as extra matching information; (2) we perform hybrid representation learning on context-response utterances and explicitly incorporate a customized attention mechanism to extract vital information from context-response interactions so as to improve the accuracy of matching. We evaluate our model on two large datasets with user identification, i.e., personalized Ubuntu dialogue Corpus (P-Ubuntu) and personalized Weibo dataset (P-Weibo). Experimental results confirm that our method significantly outperforms several strong models by combining personalized attention, wording behaviors, and hybrid representation learning.

Diaspora-Homeland Connection in Bharati Gautam’s Vigata ra Baduli [Past and Hiccups]

This article aims to explore the way Bharati Gautam’s memoir Vigata ra Baduli [Past and Hiccups] (2020) connects the writer with her homeland. Home and homeland are out of some major loci of diasporic life and the discourse. Diasporic writings deal with homeland both as a real place to return and an imaginary reality for those transnational migrants who have no chance of physical return to the place left back. To study the writer’s homeland connection as expressed in the book, this study uses qualitative methodology with its interpretative approach for analysis. The theoretical input is the diasporic discourse related to home and homeland. For the diasporans, homeland is the root of their life, culture, language and in total the life they live in the hostland. The time a diaspora loses its physical, imaginary or emotional connection with the homeland, it stops being a diaspora. Thus, every diasporic writing has some kind of homeland connection. The study finds that Gautam’s memoirs deal with her love and respect for the root. These feelings are expressed through her nostalgia, symbols and culture she follows in the USA. Similarly, her own and her children’s critical thoughts on Nepal and Nepali socio-cultural praxis also highlight their connection with the homeland. It is hoped that this study is useful to find how Nepali Diaspora connects itself with Nepal. It may encourage the researchers to work in this field.

Labor III

The Cerynean Hind serves to cast Heracles as a problematic hero. It is delicate and beautiful, and defeating it constitutes no great act of force or valor (though it does require fleetness of foot). Moreover, it is sacred to Artemis, and its capture therefore constitutes a serious religious transgression. This chapter examines the exploitation of this problematic quality in literature (such as Pindar) and art, and also discusses the localizations of the story, both in Hyperborea—the northern margin of Heracles’ travels—and the heartland of the Peloponnese. However, unlike the Stymphalian Birds, the Hind has no real place in the myth-historical identity of any Greek community.

The Castro District in San Francisco as a Contemporary Utopia: “Somewhere over the rainbow”

In search of a utopia in a real place, in which groups marginalized by society recreate a space, this article offers an analysis of the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco. This neighborhood inhabited by sexual minorities is an example not only of a utopian counter-space, but also of a resident identity based on an urban space, of an international LGBTQ+ community. First, a micro-history of Castro and the imaginary construction of the neighborhood through images, narratives, words, everything visual and discursive will show, the infrapolitics, the invisible structure of this resistance. In a second phase, the promises and conditions of the neighborhood will be examined in order to discuss the accessibility and credibility of this utopia. Based on Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, the principle of "a system of opening and closing" of this utopian space will be questioned through testimonies of the current inhabitants during the San Francisco Pride of 2019. This analysis of the history, structure and semiology of the neighborhood and its relationship to the outside world will allow us to question the possibility of a utopia that is feasible or achieved in today’s world.

Re-Mediation : Architecture and the Interface of Place

In the digital age, a cultural shift has arisen that privileges individual agency, leading to architectural repercussions in place-making. By contrast, a dissociation develops toward physical places that present as prescriptive, homogeneous, or superficial to its users. The architecture of place should progress from images of consumerism and containers of behaviour to become active producers of individual agency, mediated through the architectural interface. This thesis examines the design interfaces of institutional places, studying the relationships between agency and spatial structure. It introduces a contemporary reconstruction of place-making methods that involves the layering of ambient cues, shifting narratives, network connectivity, and dispositional identity in the architectural interface. Applying this method, the design project focuses on mediating the user’s journey and opportunistic settlement in realtime and real-place. The result is an architectural interface that communicates a greater sense of agency, contributing to the heuristic formation of individual landscapes of place.

Re-Mediation : Architecture and the Interface of Place

In the digital age, a cultural shift has arisen that privileges individual agency, leading to architectural repercussions in place-making. By contrast, a dissociation develops toward physical places that present as prescriptive, homogeneous, or superficial to its users. The architecture of place should progress from images of consumerism and containers of behaviour to become active producers of individual agency, mediated through the architectural interface. This thesis examines the design interfaces of institutional places, studying the relationships between agency and spatial structure. It introduces a contemporary reconstruction of place-making methods that involves the layering of ambient cues, shifting narratives, network connectivity, and dispositional identity in the architectural interface. Applying this method, the design project focuses on mediating the user’s journey and opportunistic settlement in realtime and real-place. The result is an architectural interface that communicates a greater sense of agency, contributing to the heuristic formation of individual landscapes of place.

English and uzbek toponymic phraseological units: Linguocultural and historical aspects

The present paper is devoted to investigation of English and Uzbek phraseological units which contain place names in their structure. An attempt is made to find out the sources of origin as well as to analyze them from linguocultural point of view. Toponymic phraseological units in both languages are classified into five main groups according to the emergence sources and particular attention is given to the historically associated phraseological units. Here the phraseological units that are based on the exact historical events and facts are discovered and explained. The author proposes two major groups of phraseological units concerning the existence of real place names in their structure. There are also revealed properties of real toponyms that stimulated the connection in the meaning of a proper name and a phraseological unit. Additional connotation of toponyms which influenced on the meaning of phraseological units are also discovered. The examples are taken from several English and Uzbek phraseological and paremiological dictionaries. The examples are analyzed by descriptive and comparative methods. Similarities and differences are found out due to national-cultural specifics of both languages.