Body Activity Research Articles

Perception of Threatening Intention Modulates Brain Processes to Body Actions: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials.

Efficiently perceiving a threatening intention conveyed by others’ bodily actions has great survival value. The current study examined if the human brain is sensitive to differences in intentions that are conveyed via bodily actions. For this purpose, a new intention categorization task was developed in which participants sat in front of a computer screen on which the pictures of highly threatening (HT), moderately threatening (MT), and non-threatening (NT) body actions were presented randomly. Participants were asked to press the corresponding buttons using threatening intention judgment, while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. According to a cluster permutation test, we analyzed N190, N2, EPP (early posterior positivity), and P3. The results showed there was a positive correlation between the amplitude of the EPP induced by three kinds of body actions and the reaction time of the task. The results also revealed that when the deflection of EPP was less positive, the reaction time was shorter. We suggest that EPP might be useful as an index of body intention processing of the brain. The current study revealed that intention perception of body actions modulates brain processing.

On Dissipation: Goodbye, Dragon Inn and the “Death of Cinema”

This paper explores the cinematic meta-theme of the “death of cinema” through the lens of Taiwanese director, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film, Goodbye, Dragon Inn. In the film, the final screening of the wuxia pian classic, Dragon Inn, directed by King Hu, provides a focal point for the exploration of the diminished experience of institutional cinema in the post-cinematic age. Using the concept of “dissipation” in conjunction with a reappraisal of the turn to affect theory, this paper explores the kinds of subjective experiences that cinema can offer, and the affective experience of cinema-going itself, as portrayed in Goodbye, Dragon Inn. More specifically, in theorizing the role of dissipation in cinema-going, this paper explores the deployment of time and space in Goodbye, Dragon Inn and how it directs attention to the bodily action of cinema-going itself. The result is a critique of the possibilities of post-cinematic affects, rooted in an understanding of the way that late-capitalism continues to dominate and shape the range of experiences in the contemporary moment.

Sexuality as a promotion of Power: How the Chief Wife becomes a Means of Persuasion in the Vedic Rhetoric on Kingship

In the ancient South Asian texts about ritual known as Saṃhitā s and Brāhmaṇa s, the wives of the king play an interesting role in terms of bodily actions and ritual rhetoric. Especially the so-called “chief wife” ( mahi ṣ ī ) is described as a central and liminal player who serves as a sexual counterpart of the king at the main solemn rituals, i.e. Aśvamedha and Rājasūya, involving the travel of a horse in unconquered lands and the royal consecration, respectively. In this essay I suggest that the construction of female sexuality is a crucial point to fix the boundaries around the notion of authority, not only that of the king, but also that of his practitioner, i.e. the brāhmaṇa or purohita . From this starting point I suggest also that the chief wife of the king may be reconsidered as one of the most strategic actor on a ritual and political stage. I will try to show that the mahiṣī ’s sexual function in the ritual exegesis had gained value, in connection with the attempt to deify the human primus inter pares of the political organisation, i.e. the king. More specifically, I will deal with the ritual language and codification concerning the mahiṣī ’s sexuality in order to illustrate the formulation of her body in the rituals prescribed in the Brāhmaṇas about solemn rites. I will discuss how the persuasive force of description and prescription about her bodily actions served as a means of persuasion in displaying the king’s power. Finally, I suggest rethinking the role of gender in royal rituals from the perspective of literary criticism.

El estatuto jurídico del trabajador migrante internacional en el sistema interamericano de derechos humanos

La investigación parte de la falta de relevancia cuantitativa que el tema del estatuto jurídico del inmigrante internacional por razones laborales tiene todavía en el conjunto de la acción de los órganos regionales interamericanos de protección de derechos humanos. La preocupación por los derechos de los trabajadores migrantes y de sus familias está adquiriendo importancia en la medida en que aumentan los flujos hacia países que hasta el momento habían sido emisores y no receptores. La Comisión y la Corte se han referido a diversas situaciones en las que su condición de no nacionales les coloca en una situación de vulnerabilidad que repercute directamente en la violación de sus derechos, siendo las medidas y prácticas estatales en materia de control migratorio aquellas situaciones que dan origen al mayor número de casos. Aunque la jurisprudencia está tomando muy en cuenta el principio de igualdad y no discriminación en razón del estatus migratorio y la protección de los derechos laborales, la investigación concluye que todavía queda mucho trabajo que hacer en cuanto al establecimiento de las garantías de la libertad de circulación y residencia, la adquisición de la nacionalidad y los derechos de los inmigrantes internacionales en situación administrativa irregular.

The Body as Evidence for the Nature of Language.

Taking its cue from sign languages, this paper proposes that the recruitment and composition of body actions provide evidence for key properties of language and its emergence. Adopting the view that compositionality is the fundamental organizing property of language, we show first that actions of the hands, face, head, and torso in sign languages directly reflect linguistic components, and illuminate certain aspects of compositional organization among them that are relevant for all languages, signed and spoken. Studies of emerging sign languages strengthen the approach by showing that the gradual recruitment of bodily articulators for linguistic functions directly maps the way in which a new language increases in complexity and efficiency over time. While compositional communication is almost exclusively restricted to humans, it is not restricted to language. In the spontaneous, intense emotional displays of athletes, different emotional states are correlated with actions of particular face and body features and feature groupings. These findings indicate a much more ancient communicative compositional capacity, and support a paradigm that includes visible body actions in the quest for core linguistic properties and their origins.

The eye of sport, robot, and martial arts — visual cognition activities and body action

The eye of sport, robot, and martial arts — visual cognition activities and body action

Mitigation of Cyber Risks in the Field of Electronic Payments: Organizational and Legal Measures

The issues of ensuring the electronic payments’ security are currently in the limelight of participants in the monetary system and the scientific expert community. The goal of this paper is to develop organizational and legal measures aimed at improving the security of electronic payments in the Russian Federation.
 Research methods include the analysis of retrospective data describing the development of the payment system and electronic payments using bank cards, as well as the method of statistical observations and analysis of secondary data from surveys of Russian and foreign companies covering the information security.
 Through solving the research problems, the author managed to draw a number of conclusions:
 
 Dynamic development of the electronic payment system causes the growth of cybercrime and cyber risks in payment systems;
 Despite quite active actions of state bodies and the Bank of Russia, the legal framework and infrastructure for electronic payments are still in the development stage;
 Cyber attacks cause significant damage not only to financial institutions, but also to companies from a non-financial sector, as well as to ordinary citizens using electronic payment systems.
 
 In the opinion of the author, the key organizational and legal measures aimed at mitigating cyber risks in electronic payments may be measures to form the centralized payment infrastructure of the Bank of Russia, introduce the corporate cyber threat management systems, improve policies and procedures for the protection of personal data at the corporate level, as well as train the employees in the field of information security of electronic settlements.

Exploring the Effects of Imitating Hand Gestures and Head Nods on L1 and L2 Mandarin Tone Production.

This study investigated the impact of metaphoric actions-head nods and hand gestures-in producing Mandarin tones for first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers. In 2 experiments, participants imitated videos of Mandarin tones produced under 3 conditions: (a) speech alone, (b) speech + head nods, and (c) speech + hand gestures. Fundamental frequency was recorded for both L1 (Experiment 1) and L2 (Experiment 2a) speakers, and the output of the L2 speakers was rated for tonal accuracy by 7 native Mandarin judges (Experiment 2b). Experiment 1 showed that 12 L1 speakers' fundamental frequency spectral data did not differ among the 3 conditions. In Experiment 2a, the conditions did not affect the production of 24 English speakers for the most part, but there was some evidence that hand gestures helped Tone 4. In Experiment 2b, native Mandarin judges found limited conditional differences in L2 productions, with Tone 3 showing a slight head nods benefit in a subset of "correct" L2 tokens. Results suggest that metaphoric bodily actions do not influence the lowest levels of L1 speech production in a tonal language and may play a very modest role during preliminary L2 learning.

FEATURES OF FOREIGN INVESTORS’ PROTECTION IN ADMINISTRATIVE LEGAL PROCEEDINGS OF UKRAINE

In a difficult economic situation in Ukraine, the attracting of foreign investment is the priority direction of economic development. In practice, there are often cases of violation of the foreign investors’ rights by officials. Therefore, an important issue of the present is the study of the foreign investors’ rights protection mechanism since they are important economic entities. Ukraine has an outflow of foreign investment. This is due to the imperfection of the current legislation, economic instability, corruption, unfairness of counterparties, unlawful actions of state bodies, and the absence of an effective mechanism to protect the rights of foreign investors. Therefore, the objective of the article is to study the peculiarities of administrative legal proceedings of foreign investors protecting, to analyse the current state of protection of foreign investors in Ukraine by administrative courts, and to analyse the problems that arise in practice. It should be noted that the researchers did not investigate the peculiarities of administrative legal proceedings of foreign investors’ protection. A considerable attention is paid to protecting foreign investors in the context of economic legal proceedings. Therefore, the issue deserves special attention. Methodology. The authors substantiated the necessity to improve the current legislation concerning the protection of foreign investors in the administrative legal proceedings. Based on the analysis of the current legislation norms, one can conclude that most norms are only declarative. Therefore, the authors provide appropriate proposals for improving domestic legislation using positive foreign experience. Results. The article reveals the peculiarities of the appeal of decisions, actions and inactivity of the subjects of authority by foreign investors, the relevant judicial practice is analysed there, the European experience is investigated in order to implement it in domestic legislation. The authors discuss the current state of protection of foreign investors in Ukraine by administrative courts and the problems that arise in practice. Particular attention is paid to the lack of proper legal protection of foreign investors. In this regard, the appropriate proposals are provided by the authors that will contribute to improving the investment climate in Ukraine. Practical implications. Foreign investment has a positive effect on the economic situation of any state. In order to achieve investment attractiveness, Ukraine needs to provide it with adequate judicial protection. Value/originality. The urgent question of the present is the protection of foreign investors in the form of administrative legal proceedings. The necessary step is the implementation of positive international experience on this issue in domestic legislation.

AB033. Testosterone and nocturia

Nocturia is a major problem in the elderly and can be caused by a range of urologic and nonurologic conditions. Age-associated physiologic, structural, hormonal, and histologic changes play an important role in the increasing incidence of nocturia in elderly patients. Benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) has been suggested as the main factor triggering nocturia, and therefore, efforts have focused on alleviating BPH through medical or surgical treatment. Although male lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) have traditionally been attributed to BPH, many evidences has shown that LUTS in some male patients might be derived from the bladder or systemic conditions. Recent investigations have reported that factors such as aging, late onset hypogonadism (LOH), and sleep disturbances are associated with nocturia. An increased prevalence of nocturia in elderly men is also caused by many factors other than BPH. Impaired kidney responsiveness to arginine vasopressin (AVP) and disrupted circadian nocturnal AVP secretion has been reported as a possible mechanism of nocturnal polyuria in older patients. Lack of sleep because of nocturia affects normal physiological actions in the human body, especially testosterone secretion. It is mostly secreted in the early morning and decreases to its minimum level after sleep. Therefore, sleep disturbances are believed to affect the pulsatile secretion of testosterone, and when sleep disturbances improve, testosterone secretion is expected to improve as well. Currently, it has not yet been revealed which of the following occurs first: nocturia-induced stress decreases testosterone levels or age induces decreased testosterone levels, which causes nocturia. Although the mechanism of action is still unknown, we suggest that desmopressin could correct disturbances of the circadian regulation of testosterone secretion. Because many factors are involved in testosterone and nocturia, further studies are needed to confirm our findings.

Bi-View Semi-Supervised Learning Based Semantic Human Activity Recognition Using Accelerometers

Semantic human activity (SHA) refers to users' activities performed in their daily lives (e.g., having dinner, shopping, etc.). SHA recognition is a promising issue in wearable and mobile computing. Most existing methods represent a SHA based on a single view, e.g., representing a SHA as a combination of human body actions, representing a SHA as a distribution of latent semantics. Since SHAs are complicated in nature, single views lack the ability of comprehensively profiling SHAs. In this paper, we propose a bi-view semi-supervised learning based method for recognizing SHAs using accelerometers. First, we represent a SHA based on two different views. One view represents a SHA as a distribution of latent activities in an unsupervised manner, and the other view represents a SHA as a set of human crafted features extracted in a hierarchical way. Second, we use a semi-supervised learning framework, which exploits the complementary information provided by the two views, to improve the classification accuracy based on both labeled and unlabeled data. Extensive experiments show that representing SHAs based on bi-views is more effective than representing SHAs based on single views, and our method is able to yield a competitive SHA recognition performance.

Simulation data integration-based approach for motion synthesis in virtual maintenance

Immersive and non-immersive simulations have been widely adopted to improve product maintainability design based on virtual maintenance technique. On the one hand, immersive simulation shows that our body actions, especially those of the hand, are suitable for detailed operation simulation. Meanwhile, the problem associated with immersive simulation is hardware capacity as constrained by the environment. On the other hand, non-immersive simulation shows superiority in large-scale movement; however, problems, such as cumbersome operation, time-consuming labor, and inadequate precision, arise in terms of complicated and repeated operations. Considering the preceding advantages and limitations mentioned, this study presents a virtual simulation method by purposefully integrating human motion data from immersive and non-immersive simulations. We first decompose maintenance process based on common operations to determine typical types of maintenance motions. We then analyze the classified motion characters to identify a suitable simulation approach for each type of motion. Subsequently, motion data from immersive and non-immersive simulation are processed by spatial and temporary alignment. These data are further integrated by synchronous or asynchronous cooperative control for their respective simulation requirement. Lastly, we adopt interpolation to further process position and posture angle data and achieve smooth transition between adjacent simulation slices. Three cases are introduced to separately verify the feasibility of synchronous and asynchronous control and smooth transition in the method.

Is perceiving bodily action?

One of the boldest claims one finds in the enactivist and embodied cognition literature is that perceiving is bodily action (PBA). Research on the role of eye movements in vision have been thought to support PBA, whereas research on paralysis has been thought to pose no challenge to PBA. The present paper, however, will argue just the opposite. Eye movement research does not support PBA, whereas paralysis research presents a strong challenge that seems not to have been fully appreciated.

Compositionality in the language of emotion.

Emotions are signaled by complex arrays of face and body actions. The main point of contention in contemporary treatments is whether these arrays are discrete, holistic constellations reflecting emotion categories, or whether they are compositional—comprised of smaller components, each of which contributes some aspect of emotion to the complex whole. We address this question by investigating spontaneous face and body displays of athletes and place it in the wider context of human communicative signals and, in particular, of language. A defining property of human language is compositionality—the ability to combine and recombine a relatively small number of elements to create a vast number of complex meaningful expressions, and to interpret them. We ask whether this property of language can be discerned in a more ancient communicative system: intense emotional displays. In an experiment, participants interpreted a range of emotions and their strengths in pictures of athletes who had just won or lost a competition. By matching participants’ judgements with minutely coded features of face and body, we find evidence for compositionality. The distribution of participants’ responses indicates that most of the athletes’ face and body features contribute to displays of dominance or submission. More particular emotional components related, for example, to positive valence (e.g. happy) or goal obstruction (e.g. frustrated), were also found to significantly correlate with certain face and body features. We propose that the combination of features linked to broader components (i.e, dominant or submissive) and to more particular emotions (e.g, happy or frustrated) reflects more complex emotional states. In sum, we find that the corporeal expression of intense, unfiltered emotion has compositional properties, potentially providing an ancient scaffolding upon which, millions of years later, the abstract and constrained compositional system of human language could build.

Fluorescent biosensor for the selective determination of dopamine by TGA-capped CdTe quantum dots in human plasma samples

As a vital catecholamine neurotransmitter released by the brain in human central nervous system, dopamine (DA) plays an important role in a wide range of physiological functions and the mechanism of actions in human body, and its accurate detection is required in medicine. The present study reports a novel, simple and cost-effective nano-biosensor based on a thioglycolic acid (TGA)-capped cadmium telluride (CdTe) quantum dots (QDs) for the sensitive detection of DA in alkaline media. The assembled QDs-based biosensor showed a linear working range of 0.5–10 μM and a detection limit of 0.35 μM. The highest recovery of 97% was obtained by using the prepared biosensor for the detection of DA in human blood plasma samples. Additionally, the biosensor exhibited high selectivity toward DA without the interfering effects of biomolecules including some amino acids and chlorides. The concept of TGA-capped CdTe QDs will open up a new insight into the determination of DA in biological fluids where DA is at low levels.

Comportamiento mimético y construcción de sentido. La ejecución aérea como externalización de la cognición

La hipótesis mimética de Arnie Cox sostiene que entendemos los sonidos musicales comparándolos con aquellos que hacemos nosotros, y que este proceso implica una imitación tácita de una experiencia de producción sonora anterior. Entre no músicos, una forma común de comportamiento mimético es la ejecución aérea: la recreación ‘en el aire’ de acciones corporales de la ejecución instrumental. Bajo la suposición de que la conducta revela aspectos de las imágenes asociadas a la experiencia musical, se planteó un experimento con 36 estudiantes de música, que involucró la ejecución aérea durante la audición de un fragmento musical, para observar características del comportamiento mimético de los participantes y analizar sus relaciones con otras modalidades de experiencia. Se aislaron tres modalidades de comportamiento mimético y se analizó en qué medida y cómo los rasgos de la experiencia comunicados por la mímesis se transfirieron a una transcripción y una versión cantada del fragmento.

К вопросу об ограничении полномочий единоличного исполнительного органа для целей контроля со стороны участников общества (корпоративный механизм)

This article is devoted to the possible application of legal mechanisms, through which it is possible to prevent the actions of the sole executive body that are undesirable for the participants of the company. The author presents the mechanisms of legal protection of interests of the founders (participants) of corporations.

Agency, perception, space and subjectivity

The goal of this paper is to illuminate the connections between agency, perception, subjectivity, space and the body. Such connections have been the subject matter of much philosophical work. For example, the importance of the body and bodily action on perception is a growth area in philosophy of mind. Nevertheless, there are some key relations that, as will become clear, have not been adequately explored. We start by examining the relation between embodiment and agency, especially the dependence of agency on perception and the dependence of perception on agency. We also consider the nature of subjectivity itself: In virtue of what do humans and animals but not rocks and pencils have genuine perceptual and agentive intentional contents? We sketch a hylomorphic account of subjects and subjectivity, which highlights connections between the conclusions argued for in the previous sections and some basic principles of teleosemantics.

Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress

Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress

Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress

Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress