Human Action Research Articles

Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Sharing and Emerging Postdigital Meaning-Making Practices in the Astronomy Community

AbstractFor decades, science communities have had digital technology embedded in their everyday work. However, new research infrastructures are amplifying the presence and use of digital technologies for scientists. In that respect, radio astronomy is undergoing a major transformation causing the community to enter a phase of postdigital work, due to the construction of the most sensitive telescope, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO), which scales the presence of digital technology and the amount of data generated. As new digital research infrastructure is set up, sociotechnical imaginaries—symbols and visions of a shared future—emerge, while others become obsolete thus impacting structures and practices of meaning-making. In this paper, we explore the disruptive potential of sociotechnical imaginaries and how astronomers using SKA pathfinder and precursor telescope data respond to these imaginaries and incorporate them into their meaning-making. The analysis shows that postdigital imaginaries related to data circulation, storage, archiving, and reuse have been amplified as SKA facilities and services are set up. Two changes are highlighted regarding a new postdigital condition within the astronomy community. Firstly, as astronomers engage in new postdigital forms of collaboration, they need to reach a consensus on what types of analyses to use by agreeing which methods are appropriate. This affects how scientific questions and research proposals are negotiated collectively, impacting the agency of astronomers. Secondly, as digital tools are increasingly part of astronomers’ daily work, they have to rely on new data analysis methods, which determine what evidence is uninteresting. Overall, these changes pose new questions regarding how meaning-making processes are altered and the way science is undertaken because of these new entanglements of human and non-human actors.

Elephants, Ecological Grief, and Art Therapy

Climate change is a well-documented challenge for human societies where human actions have spurred global warming leading to climate breakdown. Ecological disasters are already affecting the mental health of many people, and this is escalating. By painting elephants, I address ambiguous loss and demonstrate the power of art therapy to inform grief work and ecological grief as humanity’s shared trauma. Seen through the lens of elephants, one realizes the many connections between elephant and human societies, including ancestral memories, experience of attachment and trauma, and capacities to heal. Maintaining a consistent art practice helps one make sense of the senseless and deal with grief as an act of resilience, self-and-planetary care, and ethics, thereby having implications for art therapists.

Human Action Recognition for Outdoor Monitoring System

Human Action Recognition for Outdoor Monitoring System

Human iPSC-derived neurons with reliable synapses and large presynaptic action potentials

Understanding the function of the human brain requires determining basic properties of synaptic transmission in human neurons. One of the most fundamental parameters controlling neurotransmitter release is the presynaptic action potential, but its amplitude and duration remain controversial. Presynaptic action potentials have so far been measured with high temporal resolution only in a limited number of vertebrate but not in human neurons. To uncover properties of human presynaptic action potentials, we exploited recently developed tools to generate human glutamatergic neurons by transient expression of Neurogenin 2 (Ngn2) in pluripotent stem cells. During maturation for 3 to 9 weeks of culturing in different established media, the proportion of cells with multiple axon initial segments decreased, while the amount of axonal tau protein and neuronal excitability increased. Super-resolution microscopy revealed the alignment of the pre- and postsynaptic proteins, Bassoon and Homer. Synaptic transmission was surprisingly reliable at frequencies of 20, 50, and 100 Hz. The synchronicity of synaptic transmission during high-frequency transmission increased during 9 weeks of neuronal maturation. To analyze the mechanisms of synchronous high-frequency glutamate release, we developed direct presynaptic patch-clamp recordings from human neurons. The presynaptic action potentials had large overshoots to ∼25 mV and short durations of ∼0.5 ms. Our findings show that Ngn2-induced neurons represent an elegant model system allowing for functional, structural, and molecular analyses of glutamatergic synaptic transmission with high spatio-temporal resolution in human neurons. Furthermore, our data predict that glutamatergic transmission is mediated by large and rapid presynaptic action potentials in the human brain.Significance statementPresynaptic physiology remains poorly understood despite its relevance to neurological and psychiatric diseases. Studying presynaptic functions in human iPSC-derived neurons offers the important advantage of characterizing molecular mechanisms of neurotransmitter release in neurons derived from diseased patients. As a first step towards this goal, we established direct presynaptic whole-cell patch-clamp recordings from human glutamatergic neurons induced by transient Neurogenin 2 overexpression. We furthermore analyzed the structure of the synapses with super-resolution light microscopy and the synaptic short-term plasticity during high-frequency transmission. Our findings show that synchronous high-frequency transmission is mediated by rapid and large presynaptic action potentials in human neurons, similar to small conventional nerve terminals of rodent neurons.

Dynamic capabilities for digital transformation in an enterprise business

PurposeDigital transformation is a process in which organizations use technology as an essential resource to improve performance and increase market reach and results.Design/methodology/approachThis research aims to verify how dynamic capabilities are configured for the development of strategies and processes necessary for digital transformation. To this end, qualitative research of an exploratory nature was carried out, operationalized through in-depth individual interviews with a semi-structured approach with managers who occupy leadership positions, in addition to a documentary survey of the internal records of the analyzed organization. In data analysis, the content analysis technique was used.FindingsThe main results of the research showed that the dynamic capabilities configured in sensing, seizing and reconfiguring contribute to leveraging digital transformation in the business studied through the reformulation of strategies to integrate and coordinate the implementation of new routines, investments in technological and human resources and actions to change culture with a focus on digital transformation considering the company’s stakeholders.Originality/valueThis transformation affects business models, products, services and processes, as well as the review of strategies, organizational structures and management concepts.

Diseñando la coexistencia urbana

This paper critically examines the prevailing paradigms of environmental and spatial justice, emphasising the existing disparities in policies that predominantly favour human interests while overlooking the fundamental rights and well-being of non-human species. Despite the growing acknowledgement of the importance of establishing a deeper connection between human and non-human actors for overall well-being, a pervasive speciesism mindset persists, distancing humans from the broader natural world. This separation from nature profoundly influences the formulation of policies and justice, establishing a bias that focuses primarily on human concerns and environmental conditions tailored to human well-being. Architects and planners, despite possessing the potential to enrich habitats for various species, frequently adopt human-centric approaches that marginalise other-than-human entities, restricting their access to the immediate surroundings of human territories and impeding opportunities for immersive nature experiences. This article advocates for a comprehensive paradigm shift in architectural practices, urging a more inclusive and equitable approach that extends spatial and environmental justice to encompass the diverse needs and rights of both human and non-human species within the urban landscape. The conclusions underscore the urgent need for architects and planners to re-evaluate their approaches, fostering an environment that supports coexistence and acknowledges the interconnectedness of all species. In the face of global biodiversity concerns and international frameworks such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the research contributes to the discourse on sustainable and ethical design practices, advocating for a future where spatial and environmental justice extends its reach beyond the confines of human experience to create a respectful and just coexistence with the entire ecological community.

Early Eye Disengagement Is Regulated by Task Complexity and Task Repetition in Visual Tracking Task

Understanding human actions often requires in-depth detection and interpretation of bio-signals. Early eye disengagement from the target (EEDT) represents a significant eye behavior that involves the proactive disengagement of the gazes from the target to gather information on the anticipated pathway, thereby enabling rapid reactions to the environment. It remains unknown how task difficulty and task repetition affect EEDT. We aim to provide direct evidence of how these factors influence EEDT. We developed a visual tracking task in which participants viewed arrow movement videos while their eye movements were tracked. The task complexity was increased by increasing movement steps. Every movement pattern was performed twice to assess the effect of repetition on eye movement. Participants were required to recall the movement patterns for recall accuracy evaluation and complete cognitive load assessment. EEDT was quantified by the fixation duration and frequency within the areas of eye before arrow. When task difficulty increased, we found the recall accuracy score decreased, the cognitive load increased, and EEDT decreased significantly. The EEDT was higher in the second trial, but significance only existed in tasks with lower complexity. EEDT was positively correlated with recall accuracy and negatively correlated with cognitive load. Performing EEDT was reduced by task complexity and increased by task repetition. EEDT may be a promising sensory measure for assessing task performance and cognitive load and can be used for the future development of eye-tracking-based sensors.

Exploring the use of projected videos to test action matching from different perspectives in dogs.

Dogs trained with the Do as I Do method can imitate human actions upon request, but their ability to match actions observed from different perspectives remains unknown. The use of 2D video stimuli may enable researchers to systematically manipulate the perspective from which demonstrations are observed, thereby widening the range of methods available to study cognitive skills related to imitation. In this study, we explore the possibility of using 2D stimuli to test action matching in dogs, including when demonstrations are seen from different perspectives. We examined two dogs' imitative performance using videos projected on a screen; while, the owner interacted with the dog remotely through an online meeting software. The dogs were first trained to match human actions seen on a screen frontally, and then were tested when the projected demonstrations were seen frontally, from the side, and from above. Results revealed that both dogs matched the demonstrated actions from frontal and, notably, also from side perspectives, at least to some extent, consistent with familiarity of their daily interactions with humans. However, action matching from an above perspective presented challenges, indicating the potential influence of observational experience and highlighting the importance of perspective manipulation when investigating imitation abilities. These findings show that it is possible to use 2D videos to test imitation in dogs, thereby expanding the potential methodologies to study imitation and other related cognitive skills.

Development of functional architectures for cyber‐physical systems using interconnectable models

AbstractCyber‐physical Systems (CPSs) are characterized by entities in both the physical and the virtual space, thus enabling an immersion of the physical world into the cyberspace. Connectivity via the cyberspace allows CPS cooperation for new services in product service systems (PSS). In consequence, cooperating CPSs act as actors with interest in the CPS in focus. Considering the needs of human actors and cooperating CPSs is a challenging task in CPS development because of many actors, interdepending CPS functions, and multiple CPS interfaces. For systems, the known Functional Architectures for Systems (FAS) method offers a solution approach for deriving functional system architectures from system use cases originating from human actors. For CPS development, this publication presents an expansion of the FAS method for developing functional architectures based on use cases originating from human actors as well as from cooperating CPSs and offers a model‐based approach based on the method description. In the authors’ opinion, interconnectable CPSs and models of cooperating CPSs can be integrated and interconnected with each other into a unifying aggregated model to represent the joint behavior of CPSs in an aggregated system. The paper explains this novel approach through a CPS functional architecture development example related to the prediction of remaining boarding time in an aircraft. The result is an approach that allows the consideration of initial CPS functions and new aggregated system functions, that pays special attention to the interconnectivity of CPSs and the required interfaces, and enables the systematic analysis of functions for the identification of redundancies.

Mitigation of Soil Erosion and Enhancement of Slope Stability through the Utilization of Lignin Biopolymer.

Human activities have had a profound impact on the environment, particularly in relation to surface erosion and landslides. These processes, which are natural phenomena, have been exacerbated by human actions, leading to detrimental consequences for ecosystems, communities, and the overall health of the planet. The use of lignin (LIG) as a biopolymer soil additive material is regarded as an eco-friendly solution against soil erosion and slope failure which holds immense promise. However, significant research gaps currently hinder a comprehensive understanding of its mechanisms and effectiveness. Experimental studies offer a robust platform to address these gaps by providing controlled conditions for assessing soil stability, exploring mechanisms, and evaluating adaptability. Bridging these research gaps will contribute to the development of innovative and sustainable strategies for mitigating soil erosion and preventing slope failure, thereby promoting environmental resilience and resource conservation. This study aimed to investigate the effect of the LIG biopolymer on mitigation of soil erosion, slope failure and the enhancement of soil strength by conducting laboratory tests (UU triaxial, unconfined compressive strength (UCS), and soaking) as well as flume experiments under uniform rainfall events. The alterations in the engineering characteristics and erosion resistance of silty soil mixed with a LIG additive at concentrations of 1% and 3.0% by weight have been examined. The results show that the LIG-treated samples demonstrated an enhanced resistance to surface erosion and an enhanced prevention of slope failure, as well as improved shear stress, cohesion, stiffness, and resistance to water infiltration.

Empowering Individuals for a Sustainable Tomorrow: Role of Life Skills Development

Prioritizing a sustainable future is paramount in global energy planning and development. Sustainable development, per the Brundtland Report, involves meeting current needs while safeguarding the ability of future generations to meet their own. Life skills, as defined by WHO, encompass positive abilities that empower individuals to tackle life’s challenges effectively. This paper delves into the role of life skills in shaping a sustainable future, informed by a systematic review of pertinent studies. It underscores the importance of integrating economic, environmental, and social factors into decisionmaking for enduring economic and environmental stability. Given that human actions profoundly impact all systems, including the economy, environment, and society, the focus on life skills becomes pivotal in achieving sustainability. Life skills bridge the gap between capabilities and essential functioning, enhancing individuals’ capacity to meet contemporary societal expectations and address social, economic, and environmental issues. Ultimately, sustainable development hinges on human actions guided by life skills, highlighting their pivotal role in securing a sustainable future.

Real-Time EtherCAT-Based Control Architecture for Electro-Hydraulic Humanoid

Electro-hydraulic actuators have witnessed significant development over recent years due to their remarkable abilities to perform complex and dynamic movements. Integrating such an actuator in humanoids is highly beneficial, leading to a humanoid capable of performing complex tasks requiring high force. This highlights the importance of safety, especially since high power output and safe interaction seem to be contradictory; the greater the robot’s ability to generate high dynamic movements, the more difficult it is to achieve safety, as this requires managing a large amount of motor energy before, during, and after the collision. No matter what technology or algorithm is used to achieve safety, none can be implemented without a stable control system. Hence, one of the main parameters remains the quality and reliability of the robot’s control architecture through handling a huge amount of data without system failure. This paper addresses the development of a stable control architecture that ensures, in later stages, that the safety algorithm is implemented correctly. The optimum control architecture to utilize and ensure the maximum benefit of electro-hydraulic actuators in humanoid robots is one of the important subjects in this field. For a stable and safe functioning of the humanoid, the development of the control architecture and the communication between the different components should adhere to some requirements such as stability, robustness, speed, and reduced complexity, ensuring the easy addition of numerous components. This paper presents the developed control architecture for an underdeveloped electro-hydraulic actuated humanoid. The proposed solution has the advantage of being a distributed, real-time, open-source, modular, and adaptable control architecture, enabling simple integration of numerous sensors and actuators to emulate human actions and safely interact with them. The contribution of this paper is an enhancement of the updated rate compared to other humanoids by 20% and by 40 % in the latency of the master. The results demonstrate the potential of using EtherCAT fieldbus and open-source software to develop a stable robot control architecture capable of integrating safety and security algorithms in later stages.

A capabilitarian behavioral economics: what behavioral economics can learn from the capability approach

AbstractBehavioral economics (BE) accounts for how people actually behave has proven to be very influential in multiple domains. Its insights have dislodged settled assumptions and put forward an improved understanding of human beings and their agency. Although it challenges the conventional approach, advanced by rational choice theory (RCT), because it also formally builds on it, BE shares some of RCT’s advantages as well as its shortcomings. One the one hand, it shares an important focus on freedom. On the other, it is limited to self-interest as the main motivation for human action. The latter is a limitation since human experience is much richer than that. To complement BE’s limitation, this paper suggests Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach (CA). This framework places humans and their quality of life at the locus of attention for the assessment of social states. To do so, it challenges RCT in a more fundamental way and it provides a richer account of human agency, which includes both self-regarding as well as other-regarding motivations. This combination enriches BE’s realism as well as practicality.

Is it personal or is it social? The interaction of knowledge domain and statistical evidence in U.S. and Chinese preschoolers' social generalizations.

Children make inferences about the social world by observing human actions. However, human actions can be ambiguous: They can be sources of information about personal, idiosyncratic characteristics of individuals or socially shared knowledge. In two cross-cultural studies (N = 420; Mage = 4.05 years, SD = 0.77, 47% female), we ask if U.S. and Chinese children's inferences about whether an action is personal or social vary by domain, statistical evidence, and culture. We did this with a generalization method: Preschoolers learn about one agent's actions and then are asked what they think a new agent will do. Low rates of generalization suggest children inferred something unique to an individual, while high rates suggest that children inferred that the action represented socially shared knowledge. In a mixed between- and within-participant design, children observed agents demonstrate sequences of statistically random (or nonrandom, between participants) actions that were verbally framed as relevant to a particular domain (agent's personal preferences, labels, object functions, or game rules). We found that children's social generalizations about actions were on a continuum: with linguistic conventions (e.g., labels) being the most social, preferences being the most personal, and nonlinguistic conventions (i.e., object functions, game rules) falling somewhere in between. Furthermore, the influence of statistical evidence and cultural variation varied for each domain. These findings highlight how children combine knowledge and evidence to infer social meaning from actions and have implications for rational constructivist accounts of cultural learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Further preclinical characterization of molnupiravir against SARS-CoV-2 : Antiviral activity determinants and viral genome alteration patterns.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted the need for broad-spectrum antiviral drugs to respond promptly to viral emergence. We conducted a preclinical study of molnupiravir (MOV) against SARS-CoV-2 to fully characterize its antiviral properties and mode of action. The antiviral activity of different concentrations of MOV was evaluated ex vivo on human airway epithelium (HAE) and in vivo in a hamster model at three escalating doses (150, 300 and 400 mg/kg/day) according to three different regimens (preventive, pre-emptive and curative). We assessed viral loads and infectious titres at the apical pole of HAE and in hamster lungs, and MOV trough concentration in plasma and lungs. To explore the mode of action of the MOV, the entire genomes of the collected viruses were deep-sequenced. MOV effectively reduced viral titres in HAE and in the lungs of treated animals. Early treatment after infection was a key factor in efficacy, probably associated with high lung concentrations of MOV, suggesting good accumulation in the lung. MOV induced genomic alteration in viral genomes with an increase in the number of minority variants, and predominant G to A transitions. The observed reduction in viral replication and its mechanism of action leading to lethal mutagenesis, supported by clinical trials showing antiviral action in humans, provide a convincing basis for further research as an additional means in the fight against COVID-19 and other RNA viruses.

3D printed electret as self-powered wearable sensor and futuristic implementation for on-spot bone injury

The importance of wearable pressure sensors extends to the progress of modern society and personal healthcare. The utility of currently available self-powered sensors is restricted in complex areas due to their limited geometrical configurations. In this study, an electret composed of polylactic acid (PLA) has been developed by 3D printing technology, where the pressure sensors with the desired complicated structure are possible to design. We demonstrate that the 3D-printed electret-based pressure sensor (3D-EPS) exhibits outstanding sensitivity (~178 mV/kPa) with ultrafast response time (6 ms). It enables the capture of the biomechanical signals from different parts of bone-joint motions, which could be utterly suitable for monitoring injury recovery. We show that if the electret structure is printed as a shoe sole shape, then it generates 65 V of open circuit voltage and 12 μA of short circuit current during the human running action, indicating to use as an effective wearable energy harvester. It is also capable of detecting different motion and foot pressure distributions, which makes it a potential candidate as a wearable biomedical sensor. To demonstrate its futuristic potential applications in patient-specific bone damage recovery monitoring, the feasibilities of electrets with commonly desired structures have been shown to print.

A re-conceptualisation of the Batwa's right to recognition as a minority and indigenous people in Rwanda: A human rights-based approach

There have been divergent views by various human rights scholars and actors on how to address the question of vulnerability among indigenous and minority groups in Rwanda. Even though factors influencing vulnerability among these groups have received increasing scholarly attention, findings from these studies fall short of reflecting on the role of identity and discrimination. Whereas the government in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide sought to enhance unity and reconciliation by outlawing all ethnic identities, and instead conflating all vulnerable groups into a nomenclature namely, a Historically Marginalised People (HMP), a divergent group of scholars, human rights activists, the United Nations and African Union's instruments of human rights describe this approach as antithetical to the promotion and protection of the rights of indigenous and minority groups. Using the human rights-based approach, this paper critically interrogates the issue of identity and how it has affected the enjoyment of the rights among the minority and indigenous Batwa people in Rwanda.The study employed a qualitative research design with data collected through Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) as well as in-depth interviews (IDIs). Respondents included members of the Batwa community, officials of selected public institutions, leaders in Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), and cooperative societies working towards the promotion of rights of the HMP. Data analysis involved the process of transcription and coding of data and the eventual reflexive thematic analysis.The findings show that the rights of the Batwa community to recognition and self-identity have varied meanings and implications to different members of the community as well as officials from public institutions and other relevant actors. To the existing research, the study affirms that the inconsistencies surrounding the Batwa's identity have accentuated their vulnerability.In terms of policy, the study suggests that in the short run, the Batwa community may require enhanced special temporary social protection measures in order to ameliorate their conundrum arising from identity ambiguity without compromising Rwanda's national unity. Further studies, should consider the role of land, forest and culture in further marginalising the Batwa, as well as quantitative methodology for inferential analysis.

VT-Grapher: Video Tube Graph Network With Self-Distillation for Human Action Recognition

VT-Grapher: Video Tube Graph Network With Self-Distillation for Human Action Recognition

Image-based security techniques for water critical infrastructure surveillance

Security-related image analysis of critical infrastructures involves using advanced technologies to analyze visual data to identify potential threats, vulnerabilities, or abnormal activities. This type of analysis can be crucial for safeguarding critical infrastructure such as water management systems, power plants, transportation systems, communication networks, and more. In this paper, we propose two-factor-based authentication and pose-based monitoring tasks for water critical infrastructures. In the first phase, we detect and recognize the faces of authorized persons and check their liveness for anti-spoofing by eye-clicking checking and multimodal ensemble methods. In the second phase, we create our dataset, WCI-Pose, and we use four pose-based approaches -OpenPose, AlphaPose, Kapao, and YOLOv8- for human action recognition. Experimental results show that OpenPose algorithm provides more favorable results compared to the other algorithms with an accuracy of 92.4% and SVM with multimodal data has the best performance score with an accuracy of 92%.

The Deep Learning-based Human Action Recognition System for Competitive Sports

The Deep Learning-based Human Action Recognition System for Competitive Sports