Distant Context Research Articles

DBSA-Net: Dual Branch Self-Attention Network for Underwater Acoustic Signal Denoising

Underwater acoustic signal denoising is a challenging task due to the complexity of the underwater environment. Most of the existing methods cannot effectively cope with the problem of underwater acoustic signal (UWAS) denoising at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). According to the characteristics of UWAS, a novel idea is proposed to simultaneously model latent features from both the time and frequency dimensions of complex-valued spectrum in a dual-branch self-attention network, namely DBSA-Net. In this model, both magnitude and phase information in the complex spectrum are enhanced from different dimensions by two branches. Specifically, DBSA-Net is an encoder-decoder based network with several global-local-self-attention (GL-SA) blocks distributed on dual branches between encoder and decoder. Each GL-SA block incorporates global self-attention and local self-attention to capture distant context and fine-grained local dependencies along the temporal and frequency dimensions. Moreover, we also design an information interaction module between two branches to exchange complementary information. This interaction module together with a merge block fuse features extracted from different dimensions, thus enhancing the capability of our model to learn the target signal features. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate our model on a publicly available dataset. Results of the ablation experiments show that the different modules of DBSA-Net play their respective roles in improving denoising performance and are empirically valid. In both the seen ships and unseen ships scenarios, the proposed DBSA-Net outperforms existing approaches by a large margin on various evaluation metrics.

Life cycle assessment teaching innovation: experiences from a Brazilian higher education institution

PurposeThe inclusion of sustainability in higher education courses has been debated in recent decades and has gained particular emphasis throughout the COVID-19. This paper aims to show how the context of the pandemic, which demanded the transition from in-person classes to virtual classes, was used to illustrate better the concepts of life cycle assessment (LCA) for Production Engineering students in a Brazilian University.Design/methodology/approachThe research strategy used was action research. Throughout the discipline offering, the environmental impacts resulting from in-person and remote classes were comparatively assessed through a practical activity using LCA. Students’ behaviour and perception of the activities were recorded by the professor and discussed with the other researchers on the team. At the end of the course, students answered a questionnaire to assess their satisfaction with different aspects of the discipline, and these data were analysed via Fuzzy Delphi.FindingsThe results focus on discussing the pedagogical aspects of this experience and not the environmental impacts resulting from each class modality. It was possible to notice a greater engagement of students when using a project that directly involved their daily activities (food, transportation, use of electronics, etc.) compared to the traditional approach of teaching LCA concepts. In this traditional approach, the examples focussed on the industrial sector, a more distant context from the reality of most students. Student feedback demonstrated great acceptance by them regarding the approach adopted.Originality/valueThis study contributes to expanding debates about sustainability insertion in higher education and the training of professionals more aligned with the sustainable development agenda.

Temporal context effects and energy drink consumption: the moderating role of behavioral status

Objective This study investigated the factors that impact the effectiveness of energy drink-related health messages. Specifically, this study examined how behavioral status moderates the effects of the temporal contexts described in messages related to energy drink consumption. Participants A total of 823 college students enrolled in a northeastern university participated in this study. Methods A 2 (temporal context: proximate vs. distant) × 3 (behavioral status: non-initiator vs. former consumer vs. current consumer) experiment was conducted. Results Proximate context messages were more effective for non-initiators and current consumers in influencing descriptive norms and attitudes respectively, whereas distant context messages were marginally more effective for former consumers in influencing descriptive norms. Conclusion The findings contribute to health promotion research by advancing scholarly understanding of the various behavioral status-dependent psychological effects of temporal context. Moreover, the results have implications for designing effective health campaign messages targeted to college students.

Student Migration in Terms of Social and Philosophical Reflection

Introduction. Student migration exists over the whole period of society development and by the second half of the 20th century it is becoming a mass social phenomenon. A constant society complication under influence of information technologies gives student migration other forms. Considering the fact that student migration is a component part of unified educational process, its separate stages make actual differentiation of migrant students mobile behaviour, including localization of living environment, educational institution, educational activities and the interactive nature of training. The objective of the article is to attempt to explicate the phenomenon of student migration in the field of social philosophy, to consider its accompanying positive and negative aspects in the prism of distant context. Materials and Methods. The methodological basis of the study is interdisciplinary approach which allows to distinguish and describe the relationship of the phenomenon under study. Solution of research problems was provided by critical analysis intercomplementary methods and by interpretation of social reality phenomena based on the dialectic idea of removing the one-dimensionality of cognition of the globalizing educational space. The Results. The peculiarity of student migration was revealed consisting in 1) in the restriction of free movement in space; 2) in the forced relocation to the virtual reality of the digital format, which caused the imaginary territorial mobility; 3) in the weakening of direct contact with the host educational environment, leading to dissonance with the existing state of things; 4) in strengthening the cross-border nature of education, which allows to expand international cooperation with different countries. Discussion and Conclusions. Expected effect of student migration distant forms realization consists in a new interpretation of the subject of the universal, changing the attitude to migration. The media resonance that occurs everywhere contributes to the formation of prerequisites for a positive perception of the image of a migrant. Academic mobility caused by today’s modification of reality, was determined by the digitalization megatrend of educational institutions, which affected all aspects of life. Remote technologies have mitigated the problem of migrants’ adaptation to another cultural environment, neutralized the consequences of socio-cultural stress, which is usually experienced by the subject of both external and internal migration. Practical experience of remote forms realization of work with the subject of educational migration has shown the indisputability of universal involvement in the movement to a new type of knowledge production, the most important role in which is played by pragmatic situativeness and the powerful presence of digital environment tools.

The Effects of Network Outages on User Experience in Augmented Reality Based Remote Collaboration - An Empirical Study

Augmented Reality (AR) applications can enable geographically distant users to collaborate using shared video feeds or interactive 3D holograms, and may be particularly useful in the socially distant context of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, a good user experience is key for their success and could be negatively impacted by network impairments, which are an inevitable occurrence in today's best-effort Internet. In this paper, we present the findings of an empirical user study, aimed at understanding the effects of network outages, on user experience and behavior, in a collaborative AR task. We highlight how network outages affected users in different ways depending on their role in the collaborative task, and how giving users explicit information about poor network conditions helped them deal with some of these negative effects. Furthermore, we report the strategies that users themselves adopted, to deal with outages, such as batching instructions, or shifting to a different spatial referencing style when communicating with their partners. Lastly, based on our findings, we present some design implications for future remote-collaborative AR applications.

Distant context aware text generation from abstract meaning representation

Distant context aware text generation from abstract meaning representation

Question framing effects and the processing of the moral–conventional distinction

ABSTRACT Prominent theories in moral psychology maintain that a core aspect of moral competence is the ability to distinguish moral norms, which derive from universal principles of justice and fairness, from conventional norms, which are contingent on a specific group consensus. The present study investigated the psychological bases of the moral-conventional distinction by manipulating the framing of the test question, the authority’s license, and the historical context. Participants evaluated moral and conventional transgressions by answering an ‘okay for you’ test question (i.e., judging according to their opinion) or an ‘okay in context’ test question (i.e., judging by imagining being a contemporary of the story protagonist). In evaluating moral transgressions that happened in a distant context or with the authority’s license, most of the participants condemned the violations when responding to the ‘okay for you’ test question, but did not do so when responding to the ‘okay in context’ test question. A similar effect of the question framing was found also on scenarios presenting conventional violations suggesting that subtle changes in the framing of the test question can influence people’s evaluations of both moral and conventional prototypical transgressions. We propose that these effects indicate the presence of moral and conventional construals of social actions that are highly flexible and context-sensitive.

Feasting Our Eyes on the Candidates: Visual Cues in Televised Debates Prime Personality Traits of Lesser Known Candidates and Promote Learning

This article examines how different modes of exposure to debates between presidential candidates affect both the criteria by which they are assessed and levels of learning about politics in an unobtrusive, distant context. In this study, 167 Portuguese undergraduate students were randomly assigned to either watch or listen to one of two 1986 dyadic presidential debates, rate the candidates on a series of items, and answer questions about the contents of the debate. We found that the mode of exposure only affected the assessment criteria of the lesser known presidential candidate. In fact, his personality appraisals carried more weight for viewers than for listeners, while the substantive performance was more important for those who listened to the debate. Although a more confrontational debating style lowered the ratings of the lesser known candidate, this was not conditional to mode of exposure. Moreover, video exposure to the debate resulted in higher levels of learning. In summary, this study supports the assumption that the visual cues in audiovisual formats are major factors of learning and prime personality traits as criteria for the appraisal of (relatively) unknown candidates.

Knowledge-enhanced temporal word embedding for diachronic semantic change estimation

Historical, social and linguistic factors cause semantic changes that can narrow, broaden or completely alter the meanings of words. Frequency, syntactic and semantic variations are to be studied to examine such changes. Syntactic changes cannot be observed in many cases, if words have no POS variation. Context and connotation contribute more to semantic alteration. In addition, words have similar or related meanings in certain contexts, and the context is considered with diverse features such as co-occurrence and word association. The semantic change is generally related to the variation in n-gram context with a maximum of 5 g. However, distant context terms also play a prominent role in semantic change. There is also a link between the type of change and the use of lexical relations. This paper builds a knowledge-enhanced temporal word embedding model that utilizes ‘word-centric dependency relations’ for capturing context words irrespective of their n-gram position and ‘syntactic patterns for lexical relations’ for determining the type of semantic change. The joint learning of contexts with both dependency and lexical relations from diachronic corpora is performed to obtain temporal word embedding vectors. The proposed model outperforms other n-gram-based approaches when evaluated with standard diachronic corpora.

KAUM REMNANT, SIAPAKAH MEREKA? SUATU KAJIAN BIBLIKA TERHADAP TEKS YESAYA 10:20-23

This research seeks to find a definite identity regarding the Remnants recorded in Isaiah 10: 20-23. Various theories have been conveyed by Old Testament scholars about who the Remnants were. Some scholars conclude that the Remnants are only limited to the remnants of Assyria. Some consider that the Remnant refers to those who have returned from the Babylonian exile. In fact, some scholars consider that this also refers to future eschatological times. Through biblical studies that have been carried out with the right methodology, this research has produced a conclusion. These Prophecies of the Rest in Isaiah 10: 20-23 have multiple fulfillments. Fulfillment in its immediate context, the remnant refers to the remnants of Israel who escaped the savagery of Assyria and they later joined the Southern Kingdom. While the fulfillment in the distant context, these remnants point to a later eschatological period where God will truly gather Israel again as a nation. The distinctive feature possessed by the rest of Israel is the absolute loyalty to God (New Testament concept: Jesus Christ) and in the future there will be a fair government from God himself. From this conclusion there are also theologies and practical implications regarding the church today

Humouring the conflict: Israel and Palestine in twenty-first century British and German travel writing

ABSTRACTThis article examines the use of humour in accounts of Israel and Palestine by travellers from the UK and Germany, where humour functions to bring a distant geopolitical context close to European audiences while maintaining the necessary distance to enable critical engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The essay’s focus on Mark Thomas’s Extreme Rambling: Walking Israel’s Separation Barrier. For Fun (2011) and Theresa Bäuerlein’s Das war der gute Teil des Tages (That Was the Good Part of the Day) (2008) considers the extent to which humour provides German and British audiences with a way of looking critically at Israel and Palestine within a genre, travel writing, typically thought of as encouraging conservative politics. Moreover, it traces how humourous depictions of Israel and Palestine work to engage with concerns at home, including the memory of the British Mandate and the role of the Holocaust in twenty-first century German identity formation.

Epifaniusza z Salaminy krytyka doktryny herodian

Epifaniusz z Salaminy, przedstawiając sektę herodian, wskazuje na to, iż uznają oni króla Heroda za Chrystusa, namaszczonego lwa z pokolenia Judy, który jest dla nich nadzieją i wyczekiwanym wybawcą. Swoją wiarę opierają na tekście z Księgi Rodzaju. Jednakże Epifaniusz kontrargumentuje, iż żaden z narodów nie pokładał ufności w Herodzie oraz nikt nie widział, aby ten był w stanie ocalić ludzi poprzez ofiarę z samego siebie. Dlatego też Epifaniusz przestrzega przed pójściem za poglądami herodian. Biskup Salaminy wskazuje ponadto, iż grupa herodian o wiele za daleko posunęła się w interpretowaniu tekstu Pisma Świętego. Nie dosyć, że nie brali oni pod uwagę całego kontekstu, zarówno bliższego, jak i dalszego, wybranych przez siebie fragmentów, to jeszcze próbowali je tak wyjaśniać, aby przypodobać się panującemu władcy – Herodowi. To pokazuje, iż ich egzegeza była w pełni podporządkowana politycznym celom i nie miała nic wspólnego z poszukiwaniem prawdy i Boskich zasad. W obecnych opracowaniach dotyczących stronnictw żydowskich z czasów Jezusa Chrystusa nie pojawia się w odniesieniu do herodian wzmianka dotycząca ich wiary, jakoby Herod był wyczekiwanym Chrystusem. Widać więc, że ich działalność polityczna była o wiele bardziej rozwinięta niż ich wiara w zbawczą rolę dynastii herodiańskiej. Jako stronnictwo byli oni wierni dynastii reprezentowanej przez Heroda Wielkiego, dzięki któremu awansowali w hierarchii społecznej. W poglądach religijnych byli zbliżeni do faryzeuszy, przez co wspólnymi siłami próbowali zwalczyć groźnego w ich przekonaniu przeciwnika, jakim był Jezus Chrystus.

Concept Alignment for Sustainability: Relevance of the Mauri Model in Asmat, Southern Papua

Asmat is located in the delta area of Southern Papua, the easternmost part of Indonesia. The culture of the indigenous people of this area, the Asmat, is focused on sustaining balance in the universe: Asmat believe in a connection between humans, their environment and the spirit of the environment. This article aims to determine the feasibility of transferring a decision-making framework created specifically for the Aotearoa New Zealand context to the geographically, politically and culturally distant context of Asmat. The Māori concept of mauri is similar to the Asmat concept of ja asamanam apcamar (keep in balance). The Mauri Model Decision Making Framework is a unique sustainability decision-making model that was developed in New Zealand. The framework has been applied to engineering case studies to assess problem solving in complex systems. A comparison between Māori and Asmat tribes reveals similarities that support the use of the Mauri Model in the Asmat context to assess the equitable distribution of infrastructure development in Asmat.

Topic Avoidance and Negative Health Perceptions in the Distant Family Caregiving Context

This study examines topic avoidance motivations and frequency from a multiple goals perspective in relation to self-reported negative health perceptions in the distant family caregiving context. A sample of 130 self-identified distant family caregivers completed an online survey about their communication with their care recipient. Overall topic avoidance and the self-protection and partner unresponsiveness motivations were significant, positive predictors of distant family caregivers' self-reported negative health perceptions. The remaining topic avoidance motivations were not significant predictors. This study is one of the first known to examine communication in the distant family caregiving context, and it offers possibilities for future research on communication barriers and health issues that impact this growing population.

An intergroup communication approach to understanding the function of compliance, outgroup typicality, and honest explanations in distant caregiving relationships: Validation of a health-care communication scale

This study examines distant caregiving relationships to achieve a better understanding of the function of compliance, outgroup typicality, and honest explanations from an intergroup communication perspective. With more families living at a distance due to our increasingly mobile society, long-distance caregiving (LDC) is a unique and growing caregiving situation that caregivers must face. LDC differs for caregivers and patients in close geographic proximity due to lack of availability, lack of intimate understanding of the caregiving needs at hand, and unknown financial burdens. As family residential distance increases, additional and unknown stressors are placed on individuals who provide distant care to an aging adult; however, little is known about different accommodation types used in situations of close-proximity as compared with distance caregiving situations. A sample of 130 self-identified distant family caregivers completed an online survey about their communication with their care recipient. This study is one of the first known to examine communication in the distant family caregiving context, and it offers possibilities for future research on communication barriers and health issues that impact this growing population.

Autistic traits predict individual differences in speech categorization.

Investigating individual differences in speech perception using measures of “autistic” traits in neurotypicals can gauge natural variability in speech processing [M. Stewart and M. Ota, Cognition 109, 157–162 (2008)]. Using the autism-spectrum quotient (AQ) [Baron-Cohen et al., J. Autism & Dev. Disord. 31, 5–25 (2001)], which measures autistic traits in neurotypicals, we investigated individual differences in context-dependent speech processing. Twenty-eight neurotypicals categorized a nine-step da/ga series in the context of non-speech tone precursors [following L. Holt, Psychol. Sci. 16, 305–312 (2005)] and completed the AQ. Context included three tone groups, including relatively high (shift toward ga), medium, and low (shift toward da) tones. Overall, the temporally adjacent tone grouping shifted perception more than distant context (p<0.001). Effects correlated with AQ (r=0.53). Lower AQ (fewer autistic traits) is associated with near-zero context dependence for endpoint categorization and large context-dependence for ambiguous speech-target categorization. Higher AQ is associated with intermediate influence of context across the series. Individual differences in context-dependent phonetic processing can be predicted from a personality trait scale, suggesting that phonetic processing is not immune from the influence of higher-order cognitive processes associated with these traits or that lower-level perceptual processing varies with these traits. [Work supported by NIH.]

Tracing an Approach to Art Teaching: A Historical Study of an Art Education Documentary Film

In 1960-61 the Film Division of the Australian Commonwealth Department of the Interior produced an 18-minute documentary, recorded on 35-millimeter color film and entitled Approach to Art Teaching. The film purports to describe a method of teaching art to children in schools administered by the Department of Education of the government of the Australian state of New South Wales. Historical documents associated with the production of this documentary reveal the parameters of a divisive and controversial debate in art educational theory and practice, which bear resonance even in today's seemingly distant context. This debate relates to the nature of creativity, and the functions of the art teacher as an educator, guide, observer, or participant in a student's progress in learning about art. The question of the degree to which an art teacher should encroach upon what has long been considered the private mental space of a developing child, proved in the mid 1960s to be a lightning rod, provoking a moment of outrage and dissidence in art education. The article reports archival evidence of the film and indicates its significance as an artifact of a specific historical debate.1 The film depicts the activities of three age-groups, commencing with kindergarten children engaged in finger-painting, followed by more detailed scenes of children in two different elementary schools learning to draw and paint action figures. One of these scenes was shot in a rural village school, where the local police constable is asked to pose for the class in the act of taking off his hat. The longest sequence of the film features a secondary school girls' class from a metropolitan high school in Sydney, the capital of New South Wales. Here the art teacher is Lawson, whose lesson requires the girls to paint a picture from memory of a visit to the dentist. Mrs. Lawson's narration reveals that the resulting class discussion and painting exercise aims to engage the class in expression and to develop an artistic vocabulary they can draw upon, both for their appreciation of work by other artists and for their own work. They are guided toward aesthetic composition, but are to express their own ideas.2 The debate which the film aroused was generated in relation to conflicting perceptions of the meaning of free expression, and was particularly focused on whether the teaching methods represented by Lawson constituted an infringement on the creativity of her students. The argument presented here focuses on the evidence that different sections of the wider art education community understood the nature of art teaching in differing and sometimes contradictory ways. The article focuses on reporting the circumstances within which the documentary was initially made, so as to contextualize the evidence about the intentions of its producers. The evidence of the debate about the film shows that specific concepts relating to the meaning and function of art teaching reflected different assumptions about the creativity of art students. Historical Background Different sections of the art education community came together in an art education seminar sponsored by the Australian UNESCO committee, held in the Australian national capital city, Canberra in May 1963. The organization of this conference included a screening of Approach to Art Teaching, due to the involvement of senior Australian art educators in UNESCO's production of the film. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is an arm of the United Nations (UN) which provided financial sponsorship to member countries particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. UNESCO took a special interest in supporting projects designed to implement Western educational methods in the Third World as well as in post-war Europe. For instance, in 1948 UNESCO promoted an investigation into the use of mobile film projectors for all forms of fundamental education throughout the world, with a particular emphasis upon areas where literacy is low (UNESCO, 1948). …

Distant context effects in language production: A reply to Motley et al.

Motley, Baars, and Camden (1981), continuing earlier work, report on several experiments that are interpreted as evidence for output editing in language production, editing that is sensitive to lexical, phonological, semantic, and syntactic factors. Their results can be accounted for equally well if context affects the formation, rather than the output, of the subjects' responses. Similar distant context effects on utterance formation have also been observed in naturally occurring speech errors.

Effects of prior context upon lexical access during sentence comprehension

The effects of disambiguating prior contexts upon the processing of lexical ambiguities in sentences were investigated. Subjects listened to lexically ambiguous (or unambiguous control) sentences under one of three conditions: a neutral prior context, a disambiguating context occurring immediately prior to the ambiguity, or a disambiguating context occurring in a prior sentence. Subjects monitored for phonemes which occurred immediately after each ambiguous or control word. In the neutral context condition, reaction times were significantly longer following ambiguous words than following their controls. For both the immediate and distant context conditions, the ambiguity-control contrast was not significant The results were interpreted as support for a model of sentence processing in which a prior disambiguating context serves to restrict access to readings for an ambiguous word.

‘Imagery of the Elsewhere” Two Choral Odes of Euripides

In this paper I approach the relationship between one kind of choral ode and its play, through an analysis of two stasima and less detailed reference to their respective plays. The two odes, Hipp. 732–75 and Hel. 1451–1511, share the theme which has provoked comment on Euripides' use of ‘escapism’ to counteract the supposed reality of his tragedies. I prefer to see the escape-form as a reassertion of the themes and problems of the play in a different and distant context, and to suggest that even in the ‘elsewhere’ of lyric song the dark features of life that mark the drama are not to be escaped. The winged boat in the Hippolytus, for instance, is parallel in the ode to the winged bird, symbol and vehicle of escape, but it is also the ship whose journey initiates the disaster of the play.