Dis/place/ment: The Life and In/animacy of Rocks and Stories

In this illustrated article, I begin with a question: Do rocks talk? The life, movement and migration of stories – and rocks, as the oldest living beings, have witnessed these histories and transformations (Donald, 2009; Tinker, 2004). This article explores the changing landscapes and stories of our lives, and the places where we live and dwell. It unravels discourses seeped in colonial histories, while recognizing our responsibilities as newcomers and settlers to these places and Indigenous peoples. This métissage of stories speaks to the meaning of places within our lives – and what we can learn from these places, when and if, we are willing to listen. And rocks, as the oldest living beings, always remember.

Conceptualising Augmented Reality: From virtual divides to mediated dynamics

Although Augmented Reality (AR) scholarship is largely defined through technocentric boundary work that delineates the virtual from the real, it is nevertheless vital to consider experiential conceptualisations of AR as mediating the human–physical environment, as this makes visible for analysis specific properties that afford specific dynamics of augmented publics. We consider how AR mediates the environment in ways previous media could not, identifying four affordances of note. We name visual (dis)integrity, environmental activation, contextual pointalisation and four-dimensional place(ment), as well as reliance on digital infrastructures as sets of properties and dynamics that speak to what AR affords its users. The article first traces how the conceptualisation of AR in scholarship has yet to move past technocentric metaphors of description, adopted from the Virtuality Continuum (Milgram et al., 1995) that separates reality from mediating technologies. It then pushes media critique conceptualising AR in ways that more accurately account for lived experiences of perception. Doing so updates the metaphors used to understand AR and exposes first- and second-order affordances of AR media, which define but are not definitive of the constraints and potentials present in how the properties and dynamics of AR mediate perceptions of life. The article concludes by noting how future research can now consider definitions of AR media that centre on how perceptible spatial computation augments relations between objects, whether these are conjured from electrons, atoms or humans.

Psychological Characteristics of Aviation Personnel of Senior Age Groups

The article explores the changes in the psychological characteristics of the personality of senior age personnel, who play an important role in ensuring the professional performance of staff and passen-ger safety. The specifics of pilots’ activities, their psychological and personal qualities are noted and described, and changes that occur with the increase in age have been revealed. The study involved 466 people of two age groups, young and age. With the help of L.N. Sobchik’s “SMIL” method, a number of personal features of aviation personnel of older age groups have been revealed. The use of correlation analysis showed a number of differences in the two groups in such personal indicators as “overcontrol”, “pessimism”, “rigidity”, “introversion”. The results will allow to take into account the individual characteristics of young and age aviation personnel in psychological examination, place-ment of personnel.

Peers, Neighborhoods, and Immigrant Student Achievement: Evidence from a Placement Policy

We examine to what extent immigrant school performance is affected by the characteristics of the neighborhoods that they grow up in. We address this issue using a refugee place ment policy that provides exogenous variation in the initial place of residence in Sweden. The main result is that school performance is increasing in the number of highly educated adults sharing the subject's ethnicity. A standard deviation increase in the fraction of high-educated in the assigned neighborhood raises compulsory school GPA by 0.8 percentile ranks. Particularly for disadvantaged groups, there are also long-run effects on educational attainment. (JEL I21, J15, R23)