The Relationship between Conflict and Social Change in the Perspective of Expert Theory: A Literature Review

Conflict and social change are a couple that influences each other. Conflict inevitably drives social change. Social changes also inevitably lead to conflict. These conditions can manifest in large or small sizes. Every society that exists on this earth in their life will certainly experience what is called changes. The existence of these changes will be known if we compare by examining society at a particular time which we then compare with the state of society in the past. Changes that occur in society are a continuous process. This situation means that every society will, in fact, experience changes. This study aims to collect argumentative views on the relationship between conflict and social change. The conclusions of this study have a significant impact in providing illustrations and projections of what social situations occur before and after conflicts or social changes occur. This research is a discourse relation analysis research. This type of research analyzes the relationship between two or more variables and then describes each contextual factor. This study concludes that the argumentative view of implying and exposing the relationship of conflict to social change is vital and sensitive.

When and How to Regulate: Everyday Emotion-Regulation Strategy Use and Stressor Intensity

Contextual factors shape emotion regulation (ER). The intensity of emotional stimuli may be such a contextual factor that influences the selection and moderates the effectiveness of ER strategies in reducing negative affect (NA). Prior research has shown that, on average, when emotional stimuli were more intense, distraction was selected over reappraisal (and vice versa). This pattern was previously shown to be adaptive as the preferred strategies were more efficient in the respective contexts. Here, we investigated whether stressor intensity predicted strategy use and effectiveness in similar ways in daily life. We examined five ER strategies (reappraisal, reflection, acceptance, distraction, and rumination) in relation to the intensity of everyday stressors, using two waves of experience-sampling data (N = 156). In accordance with our hypotheses, reappraisal, reflection, and acceptance were used less, and rumination was used more, when stressors were more intense. Moreover, results suggested that distraction was more effective, and rumination more detrimental the higher the stressor intensity. Against our hypotheses, distraction did not covary with stressor intensity, and there was no evidence that reappraisal, reflection, and acceptance were more effective at lower levels of stressor intensity. Instead, when examined individually, reflection and reappraisal (like distraction) were more effective at higher levels of stressor intensity. In sum, stressor intensity predicted ER selection and moderated strategy effectiveness, but the results also point to a more complex ER strategy use in daily life than in the laboratory.

Hunter S. Thompson, Transmetropolitan, and the Evolution from Author to Character

<p>This thesis examines American author Hunter S. Thompson, in the context of his own works – primarily Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rum Diary– as well as the representation of him as a character in the graphic text Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis. The evolution of Thompson from author to character and the development of that character in his own works is examined, as well as how this development allowed for his character to be fully realised in a completely fictional world. In turn, the fully developed use of Thompson’s character is the starting point for my analysis of Transmetropolitan could potentially be read as a work of New Journalism, albeit a fictional one. The first chapter examines how Thompson began writing himself as a character in his early fictional work The Rum Diary. Though largely overlooked by critics because of its long delayed publication and the focus on the more flashy and better known Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Rum Diary is critical to Thompson’s development of himself as a character in his works in particular, and to his development as an author in general. Though The Rum Diary is ostensibly a purely fictional novel, this chapter examines how the character Paul Kemp is actually largely autobiographical, and how Kemp is an early version of the same character Thompson uses in his later nonfiction. I then analyse the development of that nonfiction version, Raoul Duke, in Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As The Rum Diary is not actually purely fictional, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is not actually completely nonfictional. Thompson, as this chapter shows, did not believe in the divide between fact and fiction, and he uses the character he develops in Raoul Duke to write about himself while creatively embellishing the truth. I then look at how Thompson wrote himself so strongly into his character that he became inextricably viewed as actually being Raoul Duke, and how that character was in turn viewed and written about. The second chapter examines the legacy of Thompson’s fully formed self-characterisation, as it is picked up by another author and written in the fully fictional context of the graphic novel series Transmetropolitan. I consider how Transmetropolitan’s main character Spider Jerusalem continues Thompson’s self-as-character through his characterisation, behaviour, and language. Furthermore I analyse how, within the world of the series, Spider as a journalist continues Thompson’s legacy as a writer. The third and final chapter examines how Spider’s characterisation as a continuation of Thompson is an important contextual factor for considering Transmetropolitan as a work of New Journalism. I consider the connection to Thompson, the content of Spider’s articles, and the format in which the articles are depicted in the graphic novel</p>

Language as contextual factor of an education system: Reading development as a necessity

Language is a contextual factor of an education system as it determines the Language of Learning and Teaching (LOLT). In order to provide for diversity in South Africa, the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, makes provision for 11 official languages and the Language in Education Policy (LiEP) promotes respect for not only these official languages, but languages in general as well as the preservation of cultural diversity by means of multilingualism. Having measures like these in place creates the assumption that different languages are used as LOLT. However, mother tongue education is not fully realised in South Africa. A large percentage of learners’ LOLT is not their home language. This lack of mother tongue education may cause poor reading ability. South Africa’s government and Department of Education (DoE) has certain strategies available to promote reading, however, the feasibility of these strategies is questionable when the poor reading performance of South African learners is taken into account. To find a solution for the above-stated problem, due to the fact that reading plays an important role within an education system, and the integral part it forms in nation-building, we conducted a literature study to identify current national and international reading strategies. In this article we present a synthesis of these strategies, which we refer to as a reading motivation framework, outlining the responsibilities of various social role players.

Improving Search Engine Efficiency through Contextual Factor Selection

Learning to rank (LTR) is an important artificial intelligence (AI) approach supporting the operation of many search engines. In large-scale search systems, the ranking results are continually improved with the introduction of more factors to be considered by LTR. However, the more factors being considered, the more computation resources required, which in turn, results in increased system response latency. Therefore, removing redundant factors can significantly improve search engine efficiency. In this paper, we report on our experience incorporating our Contextual Factor Selection (CFS) deep reinforcement learning approach into the Taobao e-commerce platform to optimize the selection of factors based on the context of each search query to simultaneously maintaining search result quality while significantly reducing latency. Online deployment on Taobao.com demonstrated that CFS is able to reduce average search latency under everyday use scenarios by more than 40% compared to the previous approach with comparable search result quality. Under peak usage during the Single’s Day Shopping Festival (November 11th) in 2017, CFS reduced the average search latency by 20% compared to the previous approach.

The Limits of Defaults: The Influence of Decision Time on Default Effects

The stability of default effects to contextual features is critical to their use in policy. In this paper, decision time was investigated as a contextual factor that may pose limits on the efficacy of defaults. Consistent with the hypothesis that time constraints may increase reliance on contextual cues, four experiments, including a preregistered one of a nationally representative sample, and a meta-analysis that included four additional pilot experiments, indicated that short decision times increased the advantage of action defaults (i.e., the default option automatically endorsed the desired behavior) and that the default advantage was trivial or nonexistent when decision times were longer. These effects replicated for naturalistic as well as externally induced decision times and were present even when participants were unaware that time was limited. This research has critical implications for psychological science and allied disciplines concerned with policy in the domains of public health, finance and economics, marketing, and environmental sciences.

Revealing the manifestations of neoliberalism in academia: Academic collective action in Turkey

Academic Collective Action (ACA) stands as a small-scale collective action for social change toward liberation, independence and equity in academia. Academic collectives in Turkey, as an example of ACA, prefigure building academia outside the university by emphasizing the extent to which neoliberal academia has already prepared the groundwork for more recent waves of oppression. In this research, we aim to reveal the manifestations of neoliberalism in ACA as captured with prominent social/political psychological concepts of collective action. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 dismissed academics to understand the social and political psychological processes in academic collectives. The narrations of ACA were accompanied by manifestations of neoliberalism as experienced by dismissed academics. We found that, as follows from the existing conceptual tools of collective action, neoliberalism serves as an embedded contextual factor in the process of ACA. This becomes mostly visible for grievances but also for collective identifications, politicization, motivations, finding/allocating resources and sustaining academic collectives. We provide a preliminary basis to understand the role of neoliberalism in organization, mobilization and empowerment dynamics of collective action.

Manipulating situational risk in human-automation research – Validation of a new experimental paradigm in virtual reality

Although situational risk has often been postulated as an important contextual factor in the literature of human-automation research, experimental evidence is scarce due to the difficulty operationalizing risk in an ethical way that is comparable to what real life operators can be exposed to. This study serves as a manipulation check of a newly developed experimental paradigm, in which a subjectively experienceable situational risk can be manipulated as part of a virtual reality environment. It is varied by the altitude participants must carry out the tasks in, including the possibility of virtually falling in case of a mistake. Results revealed medium to large effect sizes in subjective as well as objective metrics signifying a more pronounced perception of risk in the higher altitude condition. This is evidence for a successful manipulation of situational risk in a new paradigm that meets the same requirements of other multi-task environments used in human-automation research.

Community Violence and Internalizing Mental Health Symptoms in Adolescents: Systematic Review.

Purposes: Mental health diseases (MHD) are responsible for 16% of the global burden of disease in adolescents. This review focus on one contextual factor nominated community violence (CV) that can contribute to the development of MHD. Objective: to evaluate the impact of CV on internalizing mental health symptoms (IMHS) in adolescents, to investigate whether different proximity to CV (witness x victim) is associated with different risks and to identify whether gender, age, and race moderate this association. Methods: systematic review of observational studies. Population includes adolescents (10 - 24 years), exposition involves individuals exposed to CV and outcomes consists of IMHS. Selection, extraction and quality assessment were performed independently by two research. Results: 2987 works were identified, after selection and extraction it remained 42. Higher exposure to CV were associated positively with IMHS. Being a witnessing is less harmful for mental health than being a victim. Age and race did not appear in the results as modifiers, but masculine gender and family support appear as a protective factor in some studies. Conclusion: This review confirms the positive relationship between CV and IMHS in adolescents and brings relevant information that can direct public efforts to build policies in prevention of both problems.