Aesthetic Relevance Research Articles

Learning space preferences of higher education students

This paper aims to address higher education students’ learning space preferences. The study is based on a survey that involved 697 business management students of a Dutch University of Applied Sciences. The research focuses on preferred learning spaces for individual study activities, which require concentration, and preferred learning spaces for collaborative study activities with peers, which require communication. The results show that students consider their physical learning environment to be relevant and assume that learning spaces contribute to the outcome of their study activities. In contrast to the literature, the findings reveal that learning space preferences of students cannot substantially be attributed to behavioral aspects, such as their individual preference for privacy, interaction, and autonomy, nor to aspects of the physical environment related to the perceived relevance of comfort, aesthetics, ICT facilities, and layout. Student characteristics, such as gender, age, study year, or living situation, have a significant, but limited influence on the learning space preferences of students. Students mainly prefer learning spaces related to their learning activities. Students prefer learning space at home for individual activities. For collaborative study activities with peers, they prefer learning space at the university. Public spaces are not popular for study activities. Overall, students particularly prefer quiet learning spaces with the possibility to retreat as an individual or as a small group. Apparently, learning space preferences are more related to perceived effectiveness rather than to experience value.

Towards a new infrastructure: aesthetic thinking, synthetic sensibilities

What is the relevance of aesthetics and sensibility for infrastructure? Drawing on the ideas of Jacques Rancière, Susan Sontag, and Gregory Bateson, the historical example of Frederick Law Olmsted, and a number of contemporary case studies, this essay argues that the value of aesthetics and sensibility lies in their ability to conceive of and produce infrastructural projects that are an integrated, multifunctional part of the landscape, rather than something isolated from it.It is argued that such an understanding of infrastructure is increasingly important, as the interdependent social, environmental, economic, and political problems it is asked to tackle–for example, the issues associated with rising sea levels–cannot be solved using its traditional techniques of isolation and optimization. Rather, they demand the synthetic techniques and products produced by aesthetic practices such as landscape, architectural, and urban design.

The Sabar Ways of Knowing Through the Arts

Abstract We engage with the significance of aesthetic experience as it is created and conferred in the everyday lives of everyday peoples, in this case, the indigenous Sabar tribes of Jharkhand, India. Through several months of fieldwork, we found that arts and aesthetic practices are integral to Sabar "ways of knowing, being, and doing." We examine definitions and identify limitations before introducing the social actors of the study. We illustrate how the arts empower "voice" by enabling multimodal expressions and access to data that other methods may not elicit. This paper offers discussions on how aesthetic experiences and activities are essential means of being; furthermore, it highlights the relevance of everyday aesthetics for the development of sustainable educational systems and future citizenship.

Incontinentia Pigmenti in a newborn: Case report and review of the literature

Incontinentia Pigmenti (IP) is a rare X-linked dominant genodermatosis resulting from mutations in IKBKG gene, affecting primary females. Most cases present with early dermatologic changes, but clinical features can be found in hair, teeth, nails, eyes, and central nervous system (CNS). A typical 4 stages skin chronologic evolution occurs from the first weeks of life and may persist into adulthood: vesicobullous, verrucous/inflammatory, hyperpigmentar and atrophic (some stages may overlap). A distribution pattern along Blaschko's Lines (BL) is typical. We describe a newborn report focusing on the aesthetic relevance and we enhance an early and correct diagnosis based on reviewed literature. A 6-day-old female neonate presented with a progressive vesicobullous eruption in the trunk, limbs and scalp, as well as infected skin lesions. No systemic involvement was found and she underwent intravenous antibiotherapy. Inflammatory markers, blood culture and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) studies to herpes simplex virus (HSV) and varicella-zoster virus (VZV) were negative. Skin biopsy was compatible with IP and IKBKG mutation was confirmed. There was spontaneous regression of most skin lesions. She had no extra-cutaneous complications and growth and psychomotor development were satisfactory until 18-months-old. This report alerts to a rare disease with potential morbidity and great aesthetic relevance, often misdiagnosed and mistaken for more common neonatal skin infections.

Chin Microgenia: A Clinical Comparative Study

The aesthetic relevance of the chin and its relatively simple correction through different approaches make genioplasty one of the most performed aesthetic procedures of the face. Sliding genioplasty is extremely rewarding, particularly when performed as an adjunction to rhinoplasty, rhytidectomy, or jaw surgery. In the scientific literature, many different surgical techniques are described, but the biological implications and the economical impact can shape the surgeon's decision on which can be the best treatment: surgical correction with osteotomy, chin implants, or with fillers. The authors propose a decision making protocol for correcting chin microgenia based on a revision of 345 treated cases. A retrospective review of 345 cases of chin microgenia was undertaken to understand the proper preoperative assessment and therapeutic planning. A total of 135 patients were treated with surgical sliding genioplasty (group A): 60 patients (group B) have been grafted with alloplastic implants and the remaining 150 patients (group C) with hyaluronic acid. We recorded clinical indications, complications, and long-term aesthetic results at 3-year follow-up. The analysis of the results based on the entity of the chin's sagittal defect, the chin soft-tissue thickness, the patient's age, and self-judgment allows for simplified treatment planning for sagittal chin deformities showing a greater predictability and a more stable long-term aesthetic result regarding sliding genioplasty compared to alloplastic implant placement and fillers. Our proposal for a simple and versatile protocol of chin microgenia aims to simplify the therapeutic indications for a predictable and a stable long-term aesthetic result. This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266 .

Analysis of Steel Structure Aesthetic Performance in Architecture and Landscape

Both of architecture and landscape are complexes of technology and art. Steel structure’s excellent mechanics performance and aesthetic characteristics make its application in modern architecture and landscape design increasingly. This paper analyses the intrinsic relevance of aesthetics and structure, and expound the application of steel structure on the aesthetic characteristics of architecture and landscape, also analyses related cases. The research results will provide reference for steel structure aesthetic characteristics analysis.

Music feels like moods feel.

While it is widely accepted that music evokes moods, there is disagreement over whether music-induced moods are relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of music as such. The arguments against the aesthetic relevance of music-induced moods are: (1) moods cannot be intentionally directed at the music and (2) music-induced moods are highly subjective experiences and are therefore a kind of mind-wandering. This paper presents a novel account of musical moods that avoids these objections. It is correct to say that a listener’s entire mood is not relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of music. However, the experience of mood consists of having different feelings. Music induces feelings that are intentionally directed at the music and clusters of these feelings can be recognized as typical of a specific mood. Therefore, mood-feelings are relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of music.

Atmospheric video blogs on infertility

This paper explores how the presence of bodies, objects and spaces in a video blog on YouTube about infertility attunes the viewer. The paper questions mediated experiences as matters of reflexivity and image value and points to how the aesthetic dimension of mediated experiences with infertility is of experiential value. I begin by discussing the relevance of aesthetics and the concept of atmosphere in relation to mediated experiences in new media. I then illuminate how the atmospheric body, technology and time, space and particular modalities of everyday life and their constellation are significant for the viewer’s involvement in the mediated fertility project.

How can i find a doggy book?: Children's cognitive processes of physical characteristics of books

How can i find a doggy book?: Children's cognitive processes of physical characteristics of books

A Model for Haptic Aesthetic Processing and Its Implications for Design

Research in aesthetics typically focuses on static stimuli or stimulus properties from the visual domain leaving unanswered a great many questions on haptic aesthetics. This paper aims to give a short impression of the relevance of aesthetics for design and everyday-life decisions, then focuses on phenomena concerning haptic aesthetics in particular, for instance, top-down processes and mere exposure effects. Based on empirical findings and theoretical considerations with regard to haptic research, the paper develops a functional model of haptic aesthetics, which is explained step by step. This model assumes a continuous increase of elaborative processing through three subsequent processing stages beginning with low-level perceptual analyses that encompass an initial, unspecific exploration of the haptic material. After a subsequent, more elaborate, and specific perceptual assessment of global haptic aspects, the described process enters into deeper cognitive and emotional evaluations involving individual knowledge on the now specified haptic material. The paper closes with an applied view on design issues to explicate the importance of integrating haptic aesthetics into corresponding approaches.

The Merited Response Argument and Artistic Categories

The merited response argument is an argument in favor of artistic ethicism. According to this view, the interaction between art and morality is such that a moral defect in a work of art negatively influences the work's artistic value (and a moral merit, when relevant, is always an artistic merit). I contend that the argument relies on a criterion of aesthetic and artistic relevance that, when properly understood, fails to constitute a premise that either the artistic contextualist or the autonomist would accept. I then offer a version of the merited response argument that supports artistic contextualism and argue that, given certain controversial assumptions, immoral art in the Western tradition is more common than typically acknowledged in the recent literature on the topic.

Art, Ethics, and Critical Pluralism

AbstractThose who have views about the relation between aesthetic and ethical value often also have views about the nature of art criticism. Yet no one has paid much attention to the compatibility of views in one debate with views in the other. This is worrying in light of a tension between two popular kinds of view: namely, between critical pluralism and any view in the art and ethics debate that presupposes an invariant relation between aesthetic value and ethical value. Specifically, the tension with invariance arises insofar as critical pluralism accommodates the aesthetic value of interpretive richness, including the aesthetic value of ethically conflicted interpretive richness. Given this tension, a shift of focus is needed in the art and ethics debate; from specifying the criteria for the aesthetic relevance of a work's ethical qualities to defending the fundamental nature of the aesthetic‐ethical value relation.

The New Modernist Studies: What's Left of Political Formalism?

This article evaluates the methods and ideological positions that define the critical movement known as the New Modernist Studies (NMS). It treats the NMS as characteristic of recent attempts to politicize aesthetics within the corporate university. The piece argues that the NMS has consolidated its brand by strategically making anachronistic and shopworn claims for the relevance of modernist aesthetics for postmodern politics. The methodological hallmarks of the movement include the liberalization of previously radical political thought, the reduction of past theoretical interventions into portable dualisms and reified fixed principles, and the substitution of homological equivalences between aesthetics and politics in the place of mediating, dialectical, and/or constellating thought. While the NMS's self-branding impulse has generated popular, ready-to-apply models for new scholars in the humanities, it has also ironically brought many of its arguments closer in form to the positions of the neoliberal and neoconservative orthodoxies it positions itself against. In particular, its tendency to reduce politics to clashes between oppressive state powers and individuals seeking personal freedom limits its ability to push beyond the commonsense framework of the status quo.

Two Ships Crossing: Hybrid Poetics in The Dream of the Rood

Although the theological and aesthetic relevance of the term holmwudu (“sea-wood”) in line 91 of The Dream of the Rood has been demonstrated, many editions and pedagogical texts still insert the emendation holtwudu (“forest-wood”). I argue against the emendation because holmwudu belongs to an ongoing characterization of the Holy Cross as a sea vessel that occurs throughout the body of the poem, not just after line 91. Moreover, I claim that The Dream of the Rood uses a modified version of the Sea Voyage type-scene in the talking cross's tale of the crucifixion. My reading of The Dream of the Rood shows the productive interplay of two poetic strategies: the literate and the oral traditional. The poem combines the Christian metaphor of navis crucis, drawn from patristic theology, and an oral-related type-scene, both of which portray the rood as the vehicle by which one may reach heaven.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Authors, Intentions and Literary Meaning

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Authors, Intentions and Literary Meaning

Introduction

ABSTRACT The editors of this volume, by way of introducing the collective concerns of its constituent essays, engage with possible reasons for, and implications of, the continuing affective powers of literary, cinematic, dramatic, musical, and plastic art “texts” from and about South Africa for global audiences. In Part I, Patrick Denman Flanery offers a personal reflection on his earliest encounters with “South African” “cultural texts” (or their adaptations) in an American context, suggesting the nature of such texts’ emotional and aesthetic relevance to white liberal audiences in particular. In Part II, Andrew van der Vlies offers broader theoretical analyses of the idea of global mediascapes, relating this to his own ongoing encounters with South African cultural and literary material. In Part III, the editors discuss the relevance of the essays which follow to the issue's themes and concerns.

In this issue

In this issue

Prevalence and severity of dental fluorosis among students from João Pessoa, PB, Brazil

The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence and severity of dental fluorosis among 12-15-year-old students from João Pessoa, PB, Brazil before starting a program of artificial fluoridation of drinking water. The use of fluoridated dentifrice was also surveyed. A sample of 1,402 students was randomly selected. However, 31 students refused to participate and 257 were not permanent residents in João Pessoa, thus leaving a final sample of 1,114 students. Clinical exams were carried out by two calibrated dentists (Kappa = 0.78) under natural indirect light. Upper and lower front teeth were cleaned with gauze and dried, and then examined using the TF index for fluorosis. A questionnaire on dentifrice ingestion and oral hygiene habits was applied to the students. The results revealed that fluorosis prevalence in this age group was higher than expected (29.2%). Most fluorosis cases were TF = 1 (66.8%), and the most severe cases were TF = 4 (2.2%). The majority of the students reported that they had been using fluoridated dentifrices since childhood; 95% of the participants preferred brands with a 1,500 ppm F concentration, and 40% remembered that they usually ingested or still ingest dentifrice during brushing. It was concluded that dental fluorosis prevalence among students in João Pessoa is higher than expected for an area with non-fluoridated water. However, although most students use fluoridated dentifrices, and almost half ingest slurry while brushing, the majority of cases had little aesthetic relevance from the professionals' point of view, thus suggesting that fluorosis is not a public health problem in the locality.

Assessing aesthetic relevance: Children's book selection in a digital library

AbstractRecreational reading among young people is reportedly on the decline in the United States. Some researchers have suggested that supporting children's strategies for book selection is crucial to encouraging children to engage with books, indicating that improving these strategies might increase the amount of reading they do. In response, this study explores how elementary‐school children select books for recreational reading using a digital library. The work extends traditional models of relevance assessment with reader‐response theory, employing the concept of “aesthetic relevance”: the potential of a document to provide a suitable reading experience. Individuals define aesthetic relevance in personal terms and apply it as they assess documents, much as they do in traditional relevance assessment. This study identified a total of 46 factors organized along seven dimensions that influence children's assessment of the aesthetic relevance of books during selection. The analysis yielded differences in the prevalence of the aesthetic‐relevance factors that children mention at various stages of book selection. In addition, the children exhibited differences by age and subtle differences by gender in the frequency of mention of various aesthetic‐relevance factors. Recommendations drawn from the findings are offered to improve systems design and literacy education in order to enhance children's access to books and to promote recreational reading.

Further application of the bilobed flap: the split bilobed flap for reconstruction of composite posterior auricular and mastoid defects

In this article a modified bilobed flap from mastoid and lateral neck skin for reconstruction of complex defects of the posteromedial surface of the auricle and mastoid skin, with the preservation of the retroauricular sulcus, is described. Reconstruction of the postero-medial auricular surface has almost never been a concern for reconstructive surgeons. It is in fact a shaded area with little aesthetic relevance and direct closure, skin grafting and even secondary healing are used for skin cancer defects repair. Also mastoid skin defects can be repaired with simple techniques such as skin grafts or transposition flaps from the remaining mastoid skin or from the neck. On the other hand, cancers involving the postero-medial auricular surface, the retroauricular sulcus and the mastoid skin require wide and deep resections that involve the posterior auricular muscles and reach the perichondral and periosteal surfaces. Direct closure with undermining, if feasible, will obliterate the retroauricular sulcus causing asymmetry with the contralateral ear and, if defects are cephalad will impair the possibility of wearing spectacles, thus leaving functional and aesthetic impairment. Transposition flaps from the remaining mastoid skin, due to the lack of skin laxity, are not feasible because the donor site cannot be closed. Two patients, both affected by basal cell carcinoma involving the posteromedial auricular surface and the mastoid skin have been treated with this flap. In both cases the use of the modified bilobed flap described in this article allowed preservation of the retroauricular sulcus and closure of the donor site. Scars were hidden along minimal tension lines and the possibility of wearing spectacles along with sensitivity all over the reconstructed area were maintained.