On the Pragmatics and Problematics of Defining Beauty and Character: The Greek Poet Lucian (120-200) Engages Exacting Portraitures and Difficult Subjects

Although best known as a satirist of the classical Roman era, Lucian's (c120-200CE) Essays in Portraiture and Essays in Portraiture Defended provide considerable insight into the problematics of people knowing and defining objects (along with the consequential and related matter of people sharing their definitions of reality with others). Engaging notions of admiration, beauty, and character in these two statements, Lucian not only faces the task of establishing viable frames of reference for linguistically defining the essence of a woman deemed to be particularly beautiful and gracious but also assumes the challenge of defending one’s preferred definitions of particular subject matters from others who do not share these views. Whereas Lucian uses the works of prominent sculptors, painters, poets, and philosophers as reference points in articulating beauty and grace, this paper also acknowledges the perils of people who sincerely express their viewpoints on others even when these descriptions of others are cast in clearly positive terms. Lucian may be a lesser-known classical Greek (Syrian) author, but he is an astute observer of human endeavor. Lucian’s work on portraiture also has a striking cross-cultural and transhistorical relevance for a more enduring pragmatist emphasis on human knowing and acting. Not only is Lucian (a) explicitly attentive to the necessity of people establishing frames of reference for describing objects to others in meaningful terms, but he also overtly recognizes (b) the multiple viewpoints that people may invoke with respect to describing particular objects, (c) the resistances that people may encounter from others, and (d) the importance of speakers articulating the foundations for their claims amidst contested notions of reality. Approached from an interactionist perspective (Mead 1934; Blumer 1969; Strauss 1993; Prus 1996, 1997, 1999), wherein attention is given to the more general matters of people acquiring perspectives, defining objects, and sustaining particular notions of reality, this paper uses Lucian’s materials on portraiture as a cross-cultural and transhistorical resource both for assessing (and qualifying) existing interactionist conceptualizations of human group life and for suggesting some more particular areas of inquiry to which contemporary scholars may attend.

“It’s Going to be Different for Everyone”: Negotiating Quality of Life and Care Priorities Within Care Convoys

Objective: The overall goal of this analysis was to learn about residents’ quality of life and quality of care in assisted living over time and from multiple viewpoints within support networks. Method: This grounded theory analysis examined qualitative data collected from 50 residents and 169 of their care network members followed over two consecutive 2-year periods in 8 diverse settings. Results: Quality involved a dynamic process of “negotiating priorities,” which refers to working out what is most important for residents’ quality of life and care. Resident and care partner priorities were not always consistent or shared, in part because quality is personal, subjective, dynamic, and situational. Discussion: Communication and collaboration among formal and informal care partners are vital to residents’ ability to age in place with a high quality of life and quality care.

Engaging students in redesigning a local urban space to improve ecosystem services

Ecosystem services are an important, but often invisible component of the urban landscape. Humans have altered the environment in cities, leading to degraded or missing ecosystem services in many cases. To enhance or replace these services, many urban municipalities are integrating green spaces and infrastructure into urban planning. We have designed an activity to help undergraduate students: 1) recognize the importance of urban ecosystem services, 2) identify when they are degraded or missing, and 3) integrate “green” ideas from multiple sources to propose improvements to them. To help students achieve these goals, we asked them to evaluate an underutilized space on their own campus, and propose a redesign of that space to support ecosystem services. While many students struggled initially to link urban ecosystem services with specific proposed improvements, we found that having students work together in groups for a second redesign often improved understanding and also resulted in more creative and interdisciplinary designs. The exercise also helped students to better identify ecosystem services and allowed them to practice integrating multiple viewpoints while proposing solutions to local environmental problems.

Pragmatism and Dialectics in a Mixed Methods Study with Visual Netnography, Interviews, Participant-generated Data and Survey

<p><i>A dialectic pragmatist stance provides ways of meaningful engagement with differences encountered in the context of study, in terms of cultural, ethnic, linguistic and other forms of diversity. The issues and challenges in the delivery of a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional curriculum as well possible solutions and enablers were also reviewed. The consolidated findings from the study reveal that teachers often use a hybrid pedagogical approach, blending both local and international practices and values in the delivery of the enacted curriculum. The potential and possibilities of culturally responsive, place-conscious pedagogical practices, rethinking the roles of teacher and learner, as well as the need for collaborative partnerships and relationships within communities of practice so as to enable the delivery of a future-oriented curriculum that address issues of equity, sustainability and social justice is reviewed and affirmed. </i><i>The pragmatist research paradigm engages everyday realities and allow practical methods to elucidate issues from multiple viewpoints and contexts. A dialectical stance comprising of a constructive- interpretivist worldview facilitated the analysis of findings across the data sets.</i></p>

Pragmatism and Dialectics in a Mixed Methods Study with Visual Netnography, Interviews, Participant-generated Data and Survey

<p><i>A dialectic pragmatist stance provides ways of meaningful engagement with differences encountered in the context of study, in terms of cultural, ethnic, linguistic and other forms of diversity. The issues and challenges in the delivery of a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional curriculum as well possible solutions and enablers were also reviewed. The consolidated findings from the study reveal that teachers often use a hybrid pedagogical approach, blending both local and international practices and values in the delivery of the enacted curriculum. The potential and possibilities of culturally responsive, place-conscious pedagogical practices, rethinking the roles of teacher and learner, as well as the need for collaborative partnerships and relationships within communities of practice so as to enable the delivery of a future-oriented curriculum that address issues of equity, sustainability and social justice is reviewed and affirmed. </i><i>The pragmatist research paradigm engages everyday realities and allow practical methods to elucidate issues from multiple viewpoints and contexts. A dialectical stance comprising of a constructive- interpretivist worldview facilitated the analysis of findings across the data sets.</i></p>

FreeFeed: Combating Unethical and Manipulative AI With Inferences From Human Interactions On Social Media

Current algorithms that are utilized on socialmedia feeds follow a basic profit-based model,which suggests posts based on previous userinteractions. However, when users areconstantly exposed to the same content, they areforced into believing the only perspective thatthey see, which makes these algorithms highlymanipulative. This can have negativeimplications on individuals suffering fromeating disorders, depressive symptoms, anddrug addiction, as they are continuouslyexposed to negative posts (ex. body-shaming,self-harm content, etc.). This study proposes arevised machine learning algorithm (FreeFeed)that will vary the feed so that it can introducemultilateral perspectives, thus allowing users tofreely formulate their own opinions afteranalyzing multiple viewpoints. At first, theTwitter API was filtered off of 4 stress-relatedrisk factors in adolescents: drugs, relationships,academics, and body image/physicalappearance. After 120,000 tweets were collected and preprocessed, the tweets wereused to train/test a generalized logisticregression model and a multi-layer perceptronneural network. The models were compared onvalues such as the F1 score (max 0.963), AUC(0.997), and accuracy (max 93.7%). Thealgorithm was then implemented into a site andtested on a set of 100 social media users in FairLawn, New Jersey, to identify FreeFeed’simpact on self-esteem. Over the course of aweek, participants completed a survey beforeand after use, in which responses were scoredon the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale. The testsubjects were split into 3 cohorts: a control thatused pre-existing feed algorithms, a group thatutilized FreeFeed for 15 minutes per day, and agroup that used FreeFeed 30 minutes per day.After a full week of usage, individuals that usedthe FreeFeed algorithm for 30 minutes/day hada 20.46% increase in self-esteem. Overall,FreeFeed has the ability to protect billions ofindividuals from the side-effects of highlymanipulative algorithms.

Two people, one graph: the effect of rotated viewpoints on accessibility of data visualizations

In co-located, multi-user settings such as multi-touch tables, user interfaces need to be accessible from multiple viewpoints. In this project, we investigated how this goal can be achieved for depictions of data in bar graphs. We designed a laboratory task in which participants answered simple questions based on information depicted in bar graphs presented from differently rotated points of view. As the dependent variable, we measured differences in response onsets relative to the standard viewpoint (i.e., upright graphs). In Experiment 1, we manipulated graph and label orientation independently of each other. We observed that rotations of the labels rather than rotations of the graph itself pose a challenge for accessing depicted information from rotated viewpoints. In Experiment 2, we studied whether replacing word labels with pictographs could overcome the detrimental effects of rotated labels. Rotated pictographs were less detrimental than rotated word labels, but performance was still worse than in the unrotated baseline condition. In Experiment 3, we studied whether color coding could overcome the detrimental effects of rotated labels. Indeed, for multicolored labels, the detrimental effect of label rotation was in the negligible range. We discuss the implications of our findings for the underlying psychological theory as well as for the design of depicted statistical information in multi-user settings.

Quality of Tourism in World Heritage Sites: A Way towards Sustainability

Quality issues around tourism are indicators for tourism demand, destination development, the visitor’s experience; environmental quality; and community participation. However, the search for quality issues in the tourism industry has been developed further through a one-dimensional approach concentrating specific questions on certain areas of tourism. This study intends to envisage the paradigm of tourism quality as a tool for overall destination development. This research has adopted an interpretive approach to explore multiple viewpoints about the quality of tourism. The findings explore the visitor’s experience, the residents’ perceptions, local issues, and destination management issues associated with the group of monuments in Mahabalipuram. This study enhances tourism literature by offering a framework of quality of tourism, which can be used as a gap analysis tool to identify the core areas of required development. The study also provided implications for management.

An efficient method for reflective surface scanning using Kinect v2

ToF cameras, also identified as range imaging cameras, are a recent generation of sensors. As they are desirable for measuring distances to objects at a high frame rate, such sensors are increasingly used for 3D acquisitions, and more generally for applications in robotics or reverse engineering. In this study, the authors presented an efficient method for reflective surface scanning using Kinect v2. The approach is based on the principles of the ICP (Iterative Closest Point) algorithm. During the Kinect v2 scanning, the obtained point cloud is incomplete and includes flying pixels. The authors solve the flying pixel problem by capturing point clouds as multiple viewpoints. Each point cloud belongs to each coordinate. Then, all of the point clouds must be aligned and combined using the ICP algorithm. The experimental results show that the quality of the method is significantly improved.