New Architecture of Pacific Asia in the 21st Century : Opportunities and Challenges for Mongolia and Pacific Russia

The article attempts to compare the geopolitical conditions of Mongolia and Pacific Russia contemporary development considering both of them as integral parts of a common space of Northeastern Eurasia. The author highlights several fundamental trends that crucially influence the situation in the region and which, among other factors, entail the strengthening of regional multipolarity by growing the independence of individual players, including Mongolia. According to the author, Pacific Russia and Mongolia can hardly find the worthy place in American or Japanese concepts of Free and Open Indo-Pacific, Chinese “belt and road” initiative or the Russian Greater Eurasia project. Being economically less developed parts of Eurasia, Mongolia and Pacific Russia are at the same time are the most politically stable segment and promising areas of the continent for the application of financial and human capital, intellectual resources and scientific and technological achievements, self-fulfillment of people and implementation of ideas. So they have to use their advantages to meet the challenges of their development.

Reclaiming the Right to Play in the Child-Friendly City to Achieve SDG 11: The Case of Depok City

The purpose of this research is to analyze the process of expanding commoning that happens when children produce playgrounds in the streets. The responsibility imposed by the award received by Depok with the title of the child-friendly city is questioned in this research. We use the theory of expanding commoning by Stavrides to analyze the continuity of production of children’s playgrounds in the street. The research method used is a qualitative method by conducting a discourse on the theory of common space and correlating the theory of expanding commoning with the theory of lived space. We conducted field observations in two different streets to make a comparison about which street’s characteristics produce continuous lived space. Our study shows that access for children to use other people’s resources, to control the programming of space, and to reach out to the social space easily are the factor that makes expanding commoning continue to happen. This research is expected to be able to broaden the knowledge about the concept of child-friendly settlements.

Cross-Modal Hybrid Feature Fusion for Image-Sentence Matching

Image-sentence matching is a challenging task in the field of language and vision, which aims at measuring the similarities between images and sentence descriptions. Most existing methods independently map the global features of images and sentences into a common space to calculate the image-sentence similarity. However, the image-sentence similarity obtained by these methods may be coarse as (1) an intermediate common space is introduced to implicitly match the heterogeneous features of images and sentences in a global level, and (2) only the inter-modality relations of images and sentences are captured while the intra-modality relations are ignored. To overcome the limitations, we propose a novel Cross-Modal Hybrid Feature Fusion (CMHF) framework for directly learning the image-sentence similarity by fusing multimodal features with inter- and intra-modality relations incorporated. It can robustly capture the high-level interactions between visual regions in images and words in sentences, where flexible attention mechanisms are utilized to generate effective attention flows within and across the modalities of images and sentences. A structured objective with ranking loss constraint is formed in CMHF to learn the image-sentence similarity based on the fused fine-grained features of different modalities bypassing the usage of intermediate common space. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analysis performed on two widely used datasets—Microsoft COCO and Flickr30K—show the effectiveness of the hybrid feature fusion framework in CMHF, in which the state-of-the-art matching performance is achieved by our proposed CMHF method.

SWOT Analysis of a Didactic Program in Dietetics: Results from Focus Group Research

This study utilized focus group research to understand the experiences of students in a Didactic Program in Dietetics (DPD) at a large, public university. Students participating in the focus group reflected on and discussed the strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats of the program. The participants stated that faculty support, hands-on learning, and opportunities to participate in clubs were strengths of the program. Students would like more opportunity to do research with faculty. They also indicated that there are program weaknesses such as access to common space, limits in course availability, roadblocks in curriculum, and limited access to necessary tools. Program opportunities, such as the upcoming accreditation visit, will express the student’s concerns and therefore focus administration’s attention on much needed financial support for the program. Although not a specific threat, changes in the credentialing for Registered Dietitian Nutritionists were also discussed by the students. Data were collected in preparation for an accreditation visit. However, the results can be used to advise department and university administrators about what items make students successful in their programs.

English language teaching to young learners in the socially distanced classroom

It is understood by the academic communities that they take responsibility for their online learning with the help of the necessary technical equipment during the lockdown times, and manage their schedules. They have no choice but to find a solution to their problems on their own when their classmates and their language teachers are around. As the detention is partially lifted in some places, young students are starting to attend their language classes. In a way, they are released from the sense of isolation they felt at home during this time of Lockdown that was coming to an end. But things have changed. Now they find the common space of the classroom again, but in the socially distant classroom and also referred by some as a virtual classroom. This is a challenging time for an English teacher too. The communicative classroom has changed. How it would be possible to regain the enthusiasm of students who work together and share broad and meaningful interaction? Group discussions and pairwork can be very difficult, and young students may need to find new ways to combine these activities.

The humane co house

<p>The Humane Co-house design-led research project presents a new typology for shared medium-density housing sited in a city-fringe Wellington suburb. The research argues communal living can be utilised to achieve smaller dwellings, a high medium-density grain, a humane living environment and a new form of social interaction that home buyers will find desirable. Buying a home is difficult throughout New Zealand and Wellington is no exception. Inner-city apartment blocks lack individuality, space for growing families and a sense of community and autonomy. While research shows houses in outer suburbs are perceived to provide these, they come at a high price and there are low amounts of available stock. There is potential for city-fringe suburbs adjacent to the inner city to accommodate more dwellings, creating available housing stock that is appealing to buyers who would otherwise be looking at expensive suburban houses. The research begins with the current attitudes and preferences within the New Zealand housing context, and suggests that the appeal of the traditional detached suburban house is intertwined with a desired balance of private space to common space. The research designs and develops a new typology that attempts to achieve this balance, but with smaller dwellings at a high medium-density. Through design-led research an architectural definition and manifestation of a humane dwelling is formed. This focuses on a balance of private space and common space. Qualities of common and private spaces within a dwelling are explored through literature and design tests. Evaluation of design case studies produced from research, tests and iterations draws conclusions about how communal living can be utilised by different demographics to achieve a new type of social interaction, and a basic level of affordability that will resonate in the current context. The final design case study was critically reflected upon in terms of a theoretical client that over time might transition through three demographic groups – a working young person or couple, a family and a retired person or couple. In this way the design case study produced was considered as a flexible and long-term dwelling, resulting in a humane and appealing home for occupants at different stages of life.</p>

The humane co house

<p>The Humane Co-house design-led research project presents a new typology for shared medium-density housing sited in a city-fringe Wellington suburb. The research argues communal living can be utilised to achieve smaller dwellings, a high medium-density grain, a humane living environment and a new form of social interaction that home buyers will find desirable. Buying a home is difficult throughout New Zealand and Wellington is no exception. Inner-city apartment blocks lack individuality, space for growing families and a sense of community and autonomy. While research shows houses in outer suburbs are perceived to provide these, they come at a high price and there are low amounts of available stock. There is potential for city-fringe suburbs adjacent to the inner city to accommodate more dwellings, creating available housing stock that is appealing to buyers who would otherwise be looking at expensive suburban houses. The research begins with the current attitudes and preferences within the New Zealand housing context, and suggests that the appeal of the traditional detached suburban house is intertwined with a desired balance of private space to common space. The research designs and develops a new typology that attempts to achieve this balance, but with smaller dwellings at a high medium-density. Through design-led research an architectural definition and manifestation of a humane dwelling is formed. This focuses on a balance of private space and common space. Qualities of common and private spaces within a dwelling are explored through literature and design tests. Evaluation of design case studies produced from research, tests and iterations draws conclusions about how communal living can be utilised by different demographics to achieve a new type of social interaction, and a basic level of affordability that will resonate in the current context. The final design case study was critically reflected upon in terms of a theoretical client that over time might transition through three demographic groups – a working young person or couple, a family and a retired person or couple. In this way the design case study produced was considered as a flexible and long-term dwelling, resulting in a humane and appealing home for occupants at different stages of life.</p>

What it is like to be a bit: an integrated information decomposition account of emergent mental phenomena

A central question in neuroscience concerns the relationship between consciousness and its physical substrate. Here, we argue that a richer characterization of consciousness can be obtained by viewing it as constituted of distinct information-theoretic elements. In other words, we propose a shift from quantification of consciousness—viewed as integrated information—to its decomposition. Through this approach, termed Integrated Information Decomposition (ΦID), we lay out a formal argument that whether the consciousness of a given system is an emergent phenomenon depends on its information-theoretic composition—providing a principled answer to the long-standing dispute on the relationship between consciousness and emergence. Furthermore, we show that two organisms may attain the same amount of integrated information, yet differ in their information-theoretic composition. Building on ΦID’s revised understanding of integrated information, termed ΦR, we also introduce the notion of ΦR-ing ratio to quantify how efficiently an entity uses information for conscious processing. A combination of ΦR and ΦR-ing ratio may provide an important way to compare the neural basis of different aspects of consciousness. Decomposition of consciousness enables us to identify qualitatively different ‘modes of consciousness’, establishing a common space for mapping the phenomenology of different conscious states. We outline both theoretical and empirical avenues to carry out such mapping between phenomenology and information-theoretic modes, starting from a central feature of everyday consciousness: selfhood. Overall, ΦID yields rich new ways to explore the relationship between information, consciousness, and its emergence from neural dynamics.

Accessibility in Online User Testing

The current COVID-19 crisis has revealed the crucial role of online communication technologies in providing unique opportunities to carry out qualitative research in online user-based testing. The ability to provide a shared common space for participants living in different parts of the world and to record discursive data in text format accurately, makes these tools crucial in gathering qualitative data for research studies (Turney & Pocknee, 2005). Although the accessibility of the online communication platforms is improving, they still present significant challenges for all users, especially when running synchronous meeting sessions with participants in remote settings (Dodds & Hess, 2020).

Identifikasi Karakteristik Ruang Bersama pada Permukiman Nelayan Untuk Optimalisasi Peremajaan Permukiman dengan Konsep Co-Living (Studi Kasus Kelurahan Kangkung, Kota Bandar Lampung)

Housing and settlements are basic needs of every human being as a place to grow and develop. In developing countries, rapid population growth results in scarcity of land and housing, especially for low-income people. Thus, slums grow on the top, edges, plains, hills and disaster-prone areas. Various initiatives to rejuvenate slums have been carried out, but have not completely succeeded in eliminating slums. Limited institutional and funding resources require an innovative approach in rejuvenating slum settlements to be more efficient, which has a significant impact on the community. The characteristics of slum settlements that are dense and have a limited residential area also require innovation to meet decent housing standards. In addition, the value of togetherness and the high level of social interaction between residents of urban villages is a potential that can be integrated in the rejuvenation of slums. In line with these challenges and potentials, co-living, the concept of living together, by sharing space for common use, is an approach that can be applied in efforts to rejuvenate settlements. As a maritime and archipelagic country, one of the characteristics of settlements that often develop in Indonesia is fishermen's settlements in coastal areas. In this study, a study was conducted on the common spaces in the fishermen's settlement of Kangkung Village, Bandar Lampung. This common room is usually used by the community to interact or carry out their activities either in the morning, afternoon, evening or night. The purpose of this study is to identify the characteristics of the common space in fishing settlements, as well as the characteristics of its users. The handling of this common space can be prioritized to improve the social and economic conditions of the community, while at the same time providing a significant impact not only for individuals, but also for wider community groups. The research method used in this study is a qualitative inductive approach, with data sourced from field observations and interviews with stakeholders in fishing settlements, both community and government representatives. The results of this study have identified at least five shared spaces in the fishing settlements of Kangkung Village, namely markets, ports and fish auction sites (TPI), waterfront areas, road corridors and public toilets.