Intelligent Character Research Articles

Revisiting the 1925 Johns Report on African-American Nurses

In 1925 the Rockefeller Foundation surveyed conditions of training and employment for African-American nurses in the United States. The foundation was interested in supporting nurse training for African-American women: the survey, according to official Rockefeller records, would provide information on which to base future decisions.1 Ethel Johns, a Canadian nurse recently hired by the foundation for work in Europe, was assigned the project and given 4 months to complete survey. Johns submitted report, A Study of the Present Status of the Negro Woman in Nursing, to the Rockefeller Foundation in December 1925.2 For the next 50 years, an aura of secrecy surrounded its contents.3 Leaders in nursing and the African-American community were certainly aware of the report's existence, but it was never published or circulated outside the Rockefeller offices.4 It was left to historian Darlene Clark Hine to provide the first historical analysis in 1982.5 Johns, said Hine, had done her work too well.6 The report provided stark evidence of the plight of African-American nurses, and Rockefeller officials, overcome by the evidence facing them and the complex U.S. racial situation, chose inaction. An added reason for Rockefeller inertia, according to Hine, was the prevailing attitudes of the white nursing establishment: African-American nurses were merely tolerated in the profession as second-class citizens. Hine amplified arguments using detailed illustrations from the report that highlighted the conditions of training in segregated hospitals, the racist view of African-American intelligence and moral character, and the limited career opportunities for African-American graduate nurses. The low status of nursing and poor conditions of training were reasons, Hine explained, why educated African-American women frequently shunned the profession and opted for social work or teaching. Those wishing to elevate themselves above the level of domestic servant did not favor nursing with its origins in domestic service.7 In analysis, Hine made few comments about Johns and did not discuss the influence of Johns's personal beliefs on the report. Using Hine's article as a stepping stone, I reexamine the Johns Report focusing on the author's imprint as investigator and writer. Johns was a member of the elite white nursing leadership in North America: image of the professional nurse and commitment to reform of nursing education influenced investigation and interpretation of survey data. She was a skilled writer who used language to capture and dramatize a situation, a fact that must be taken into consideration when reading the report. Given Johns's imprint, can we merely accept the report at face value? Though it is a significant document in the history of African-American nursing, my interpretation will highlight its relevance, as well, to the general history of nursing. By 1925, when she carried out the survey, Johns strongly supported college education for nurses as a means of improving training and advancing the quest for professional recognition. Her frustration with the existing system of hospital training colored assessment of the African-American nursing schools she visited. She deplored the general state of nursing education and the inability of the nursing leadership to legally impose standards. She could say about African-American nursing schools what she could not so bluntly say about white schools.8 As a leader in the profession, she held middle-class values, even though politically she was sympathetic to the cause of labor. Hine noted that Johns, while an enlightened person, was prone to certain racist observations.9 Johns included information from both sides of the racial divide in the report. As a humanitarian, she deplored the strict segregation of the south where she was unable to invite an African-American colleague to dine with her. But despite sympathies, she ultimately saw African-American nurses as inferior to white nurses and doubted their capacity for leadership. …

신경망을 이용한 지능형 게임 캐릭터의 구현

본 논문에서는 신경망 기반의 지능형 게임 캐릭터를 구현하는 방법을 제안한다. 지능 캐릭터를 구현하는 신경망은 상대방 캐릭터의 행동과 상대방 캐릭터와의 거리를 입력받아 지능 캐릭터의 행동을 결정하여 출력한다 신경망은 두 캐릭터들의 행동으로 인한 점수를 강화 값으로 사용하여 강화 학습된다. 제안한 방법의 효용성을 보이기 위해서 간단한 대전 액션 게임을 구현하고 그 환경에서 여러 가지 실험을 수행하였다. 실험 견과 제안한 지능형 캐릭터가 게임의 규칙을 잘 학습할 수 있음을 보였다. 제안된 방법은 대전 게임뿐만 아니라 대규모 온라인 게임상의 캐릭터 구현에도 적용될 수 있다. In this paper, we propose a scheme to implement intelligent game characters based on neural networks. Neural networks that implement in-telligent game character receive the action of an opponent character and the distance between them, decide intelligent character's action, and output the decision. The neural networks are trained by reinforcement learning using the scores acquired by the actions of two characters as reinforcement values. To show the usefulness of the proposed scheme, a simple fighting action game is implemented and various experiments are performed. Experimental results show that proposed intelligent characters can learn the rule of the game. The proposed scheme can be ap-plied to massively multiple online games as well as fighting action games.

대전 액션 게임을 위한 신경망 지능 캐릭터의 구현

본 논문에서는 신경망을 이용하여 대전 액션 게임의 캐릭터들을 지능화하는 방법을 제안한다. 일반적인 대전 액션 게임에서 어떤 행동은 여러 개의 시간 단위에 걸쳐 이루어진다. 그러므로 캐릭터의 어떤 행동에 대한 결과는 곧바로 나타나지 않고 몇 개의 시간 단위가 지난 후에 나타난다. 이러한 캐릭터들에 적합한 신경망을 설계하기 위해서는 신경망을 학습시키는 시점을 결정하는 것과 더불어 학습 시에 사용되는 입력과 출력 값을 선정하는 것이 매우 중요하다. 본 논문에서는 캐릭터의 행동의 적합도를 게임 점수의 변화로 평가한다. 그러므로 게임 점수의 변화가 생길 때마다 신경망은 학습된다. 학습을 위해서는 우선 그 변화를 야기한 이전의 결정을 파악하고, 그 당시의 입력값, 출력값, 그리고 현재의 점수의 변화를 이용하여 신경망을 학습시킨다. 제안된 알고리즘의 성능을 평가하기 위하여 여러 실험을 간단한 (하지만 실제 게임과 매우 유사한) 게임 환경에서 수행하였다. 실험 결과 학습 초기에는 무작위의 캐릭터에 대해 점수를 획득하지 못하던 지능 캐릭터가 제안된 알고리즘으로 학습하면 최대 3.6 배의 점수를 획득하는 성능을 보였다. 그러므로 제안된 지능 캐릭터가 게임의 규칙과 기술을 학습하는 능력이 있는 것으로 결론지을 수 있다. 제안된 알고리즘은 온라인 게임과 같이 캐릭터들이 서로 대결하는 게임들에 적용할 수 있다. This paper proposes a method to provide intelligence for characters in fighting action games by using a neural network. Each action takes several time units in general fighting action games. Thus the results of a character's action are not exposed immediately but some time units later. To design a suitable neural network for such characters, it is very important to decide when the neural network is taught and which values are used to teach the neural network. The fitness of a character's action is determined according to the scores. For learning, the decision causing the score is identified, and then the neural network is taught by using the score change, the previous input and output values which were applied when the decision was fixed. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, many experiments are executed on a simple action game (but very similar to the actual fighting action games) environment. The results show that the intelligent character trained by the proposed algorithm outperforms random characters by 3.6 times at most. Thus we can conclude that the intelligent character properly reacts against the action of the opponent. The proposed method can be applied to various games in which characters confront each other, e.g. massively multiple online games.

An intelligent character recognizer for Telugu scripts using multiresolution analysis and associative memory

The present work is an attempt to develop a robust character recognizer for Telugu texts. We aim at designing a recognizer, which exploits the inherent characteristics of the Telugu Script. Our proposed method uses wavelet multi-resolution analysis for the purpose extracting features and associative memory model to accomplish the recognition tasks. Our system learns the style and font from the document itself and then it recognizes the remaining characters in the document. The major contribution of the present study can be outlined as follows. It is a robust OCR system for Telugu printed text. It avoids feature extraction process and it exploits the inherent characteristics of the Telugu character by a clever selection of Wavelet Basis function, which extracts the invariant features of the characters. It has a Hopfield-based Dynamic Neural Network for the purpose of learning and recognition. This is important because it overcomes the inherent difficulties of memory limitation and spurious states in the Hopfield Network. The DNN has been demonstrated to be efficient for associative memory recall. However, though it is normally not suitable for image processing application, the multi-resolution analysis reduces the sizes of the images to make the DNN applicable to the present domain. Our experimental results show extremely promising results.

Joyce among the Brothers

Noting James Joyce's famous remark that You allude to me as a Catholic; you ought to allude to me as a (2), Kevin Sullivan writes in Joyce Among the Jesuits that Joyce received the whole of his formal education from the Jesuits. Only once during these fourteen years [between the ages of seven and twenty] was his study with them interrupted, and during this period--from the beginning of the year 1892 to April, 1893--he seems not to have attended any school (7). It is an abundantly documented commonplace of Joyce criticism that the Society of Jesus played a major role in his life and works. On the other hand, it has long been assumed, from one reference in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that the Brothers figured little in Joyce's life and that, in fact, his admiration for his Jesuit teachers was complemented by a contempt for the Brothers who educated many of his contemporaries. An examination of references to the Brothers in Joyce's texts, however, leads to the conclusion that he respected them, whatever he may have thought of them as educators. The Brothers appear at least briefly in each of Joyce's major fictional works, and the only negative remark is that of Simon Dedalus in the second chapter of Portrait: Christian be damned! [...] Is it with Paddy Stink and Mud? No, let him stick to the jesuits in God's name since he began with them. They'll be of service to him in after years. Those are the fellows that can get you a position (72). Dedalus draws a very clear line between the Brothers and the Jesuits. Because Joyce himself suppressed the detail that he spent some months in 1893 as a student of the Brothers at their school in North Richmond Street in Dublin, Sullivan logically assumed that Joyce's schooling was entirely with the Jesuits, but Richard Ellmann finally revealed the truth: [When the Joyces moved into] Fitzgibbon Street off Mountjoy Square, the last of their good addresses[,] the children were not sent to school at once, but eventually John Joyce, with the greatest reluctance, sent them to the Brothers' school on North Richmond Street. James Joyce chose never to remember this interlude with the Brothers in his writings, preferring to have his hero spend the period in two years of reverie, and he did not mention it to [his first biographer] Herbert Gorman. It was Joyce's one break with Jesuit education, and he shared his father's view that the Jesuits were the gentlemen of Catholic education, and the Brothers (Paddy Stink and Micky [sic] Mud;' as his father denominated them) its drones. (35) Ellmann is quoting not Joyce's father but Stephen's father in Portrait. When Simon Dedalus returns home one day to report that he has managed to place Stephen with the Jesuits at Belvedere College, Mrs. Dedalus says, I never liked the idea of sending him to the christian brothers (an interestingly ambiguous remark that could reflect Joyce's own brief experience with the Brothers), and Simon responds with the words already quoted. Although James Joyce and his father John may have agreed with Simon Dedalus's characterization, the names have stuck ever since as a handy description of Joyce's view of the Brothers. So famous did the phrase become that Joyce seems to be parodying himself in a section of Finnegans Wake characterized as students' class notes. One parenthetical passage begins: Sure you could wright anny pippap passage, Eye bet, as foyne as that moultylousy Erewhig, yerself, mick! Nock the nickers! The second sentence is footnoted, Excuse theyre christianbrothers irish? (301). Here Mickey Mud of Portrait becomes muddy nickers. The phrase itself, however, was not uttered by Joyce or by his father but by a fictional father who is not a very attractive or intelligent character. Ellmann ignores the distinction, and Barry Coldrey, an Australian Brother, blurs the fact/fiction distinction even further when he writes that Joyce himself recoils from the prospect of being educated 'with Paddy Stink and Mud' at a Brothers' School (69). …

Girls rule!: gender, feminism, and nickelodeon

Nickelodeon is a powerful commercial cable network of television, internet activities, toy manufacturing, and video production. The network has been recognized by both industry professionals and media scholars for its representation of girls as strong, intelligent lead characters. Focusing on entertainment programs Clarissa Explains It All and As Told by Ginger, as well as on Nickelodeon's non‐fiction children's news program, Nick News, I argue that the media context of girl power, combined with the increasing recognition of adolescent girls as both powerful citizens and consumers, offers what at times looks like a radical gesture in terms of disrupting dominant gender relations. However, we can also read the mainstream embrace of girl power as a restabilization of particular categories of gender, so that this “radical” challenge moves toward the entrenchment of conventional gender relations.

Fast and learnable behavioral and cognitive modeling for virtual character animation

AbstractBehavioral and cognitive modeling for virtual characters is a promising field. It significantly reduces the workload on the animator, allowing characters to act autonomously in a believable fashion. It also makes interactivity between humans and virtual characters more practical than ever before. In this paper we present a novel technique where an artificial neural network is used to approximate a cognitive model. This allows us to execute the model much more quickly, making cognitively empowered characters more practical for interactive applications. Through this approach, we can animate several thousand intelligent characters in real time on a PC. We also present a novel technique for how a virtual character, instead of using an explicit model supplied by the user, can automatically learn an unknown behavioral/cognitive model by itself through reinforcement learning. The ability to learn without an explicit model appears promising for helping behavioral and cognitive modeling become more broadly accepted and used in the computer graphics community, as it can further reduce the workload on the animator. Further, it provides solutions for problems that cannot easily be modeled explicitly. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

James Merrill’s Manners and Elizabeth Bishop’s Dismay

Alison Lurie's impression of James Merrill on first meeting him was that he seemed both coolly detached and awkwardly self-conscious.... He appeared to have read everything and, worse, to be surprised at our ignorance (6). As Merrill matured, she writes, he became kinder, generous, and sympathetic. He never quite became an ordinary person, but his instinctive scorn of fools, once only half-concealed by good manners, relaxed and gave way to detached, affectionate amusement, such as highly civilized visitor from another planet might feel. (7) Since the politeness of bemused alien among human fools would satisfy no one's criteria for that are not merely polite, Lurie's portrait of Merrill's maturity is hardly flattering. It raises the question of the relationship between Merrill's detachment, his affection, and his amusement. Do his transform his scorn, or do they simply relax it? Does Merrill mature, or was he simply well brought up? Since, according to Merrill, It's hard to imagine work of literature that doesn't depend on manners (Recitative 33), the question of bears also on style, which Stephen Yenser rightly calls the allotrope of (58). For Merrill, Wallace Stevens's work exemplifies the poem of manners because of his inclination to present the through, say, character's intelligence or lack of (Recitative 32). Such first-person enactments of behavior are more hospitable to irony, self-expression, self-contradiction, than many philosophical or sociological system or the descriptions of social behavior that according to Merrill inform Eliot's work (33). qualities of tone or that Merrill values are evident in Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time: The real triumph of in Proust is the extreme courtesy toward the reader.... Proust says to us in effect, 'I will not patronize you by treating these delicate matters with less than total, patient, sparkling seriousness' (33). Marcel's voice restores to the social graces of the Proustian salon, so easily pressed into the service of flattery and aggression, the moral function of demonstrating respect. To align and morals as Merrill does is to challenge the familiar claim that are essentially practices of exclusion and inclusion, social strategies of power and distinction. This is an important issue in reading Merrill because of the perception that his work, as Donald Sheehan puts it in 1967 interview with him, seems to reflect a or less unified social world constituted by taste, intelligence, and rather than class or family (qtd. in Merrill, Recitative 32). Merrill's imagination of the social is notoriously hierarchical in appearance, and in Changing Light at Sandover becomes unabashed in its appeal to the spiritually elite constituted by the poem's circles of the brilliant and creative (383). And the kind of friendship Merrill's style inclines toward is indeed based on small partialist communities of friends rather than on democratic and impartialist notion of respect. (1) In this essay, then, I will examine Merrill's concern with in order to discover if manners, and therefore style, are ultimately aligned with certain moral substance, or if they are essentially strategies of social distinction that serve to mark group membership. At stake in this question is the extent to which an ethical claim is asserted by Merrill's association of with style: just as politeness without moral substance would be merely aesthetically pleasing, so might pleasing literary style be merely ornamental (Recitative 32) or elegant, charge frequently aimed at Merrill, to which he replies with polite shrug (33). One story in Merrill's memoir A Different Person narrates the birth in his teens and twenties of his opera-going self (112), whose and style were representative of generation of economically privileged gay men who were educated in the private schools and colleges of the American Northeast. …

Towards a narrative theory of virtual reality

Virtual Reality (VR), by its nature and characteristics, is of specific interest to the AI community, particularly in the domains of Storytelling and Intelligent Characters. We argue that VR must be considered a particular narrative medium alongside Theatre, Literature or Cinema. This paper reviews relevant work in narrative theory from Plato onwards, including the work and theories of literary critics [1], cinema critics [2–4] and theatrical dramaturges [5], and analyses the specific characteristics of VR relevant to this theory. Less studied media such as Live Role Playing Games, improvisational drama and participatory drama are also considered. Finally, this document argues for a participatoryprocess-oriented narrative, with particular attention to the specificities and particularities of stories and their possible representation, adapted to the narrative medium Virtual Reality.

3차원 가상환경에서 동작하는 지능형 에이전트의 구조와 경로 찾기 행위

In this paper, we Introduce the Unreal Tournament (UT) game and the Gamebots system. The former it a well-known 3D first-person action game and the latter is an intelligent agent research testbed based on UT And then we explain the design and implementation of KGBot, which is an intelligent non-player character deploying effectively within the 3D virtual environment provided by UT and the Gamebots system. KGBot is a bot client within the Gamebots System. KGBot accomplishes its own task to find out and dominate several domination points pro-located on the complex surface map of 3D virtual environment KGBot adopts UM-PRS as its control engine, which is a general BDI agent architecture. KGBot contains a hierarchical knowledge base representing its complex behaviors in multiple layers. In this paper, we explain details of KGBot`s Intelligent behaviors, tuck af locating the hidden domination points by exploring the unknown world effectively. constructing a path map by collecting the waypoints and paths distributed over the world, and finding an optimal path to certain destination based on this path graph. Finally we analyze the performance of KGBot exploring strategy and control engine through some experiments on different 3D maps.

Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It .

University of California, San Francisco, California. EgerE@anesthesia.ucsf.eduEther Day: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It . By Julie M. Fenster. New York, HarperCollins, 2001. Pages: 278. Price: $63.00.Some stories are so good that the telling seems secondary, and when the telling is good, the stories are wonderful. The discovery of anesthesia is such a story, and the scholarly telling by Fenster augments the pleasure. Anesthesia is arguably the greatest discovery in medicine. The circumstances and characters surrounding the events leading up to and following ether day lend themselves to great drama. The agony before anesthesia affected surgeon and audience as well as patient. Fenster uses a letter to the Scottish surgeon James Simpson to describe the patient's view:“Suffering so great as I underwent cannot be expressed in words … the blank whirlwind of emotion, the horror of great darkness, and the sense of desertion by God and man, bordering close upon despair, which swept through my mind and overwhelmed my heart, I can never forget. …” Then, the demonstration on October 16, 1846 swept that away. Gone were the pain, the fear, and the despair.What a cast it was of unlikely, sometimes foolish, scandalous, generous, greedy, grand, intelligent characters: the dreamer Wells, who some believe to be the true discoverer of anesthesia; the obsequious, brilliant, self-serving Jackson, who did not focus enough to make use of his brilliance; the con man and scoundrel Morton, acknowledged by most to be the discoverer of anesthesia, a thief and liar whose bravado facilitated the demonstration of the anesthetic powers of ether; the erudite hero Warren; the gentleman (in the truest sense) Long; the honest, clever, and generous showman Colton. They all come together in this play that is so magnificent it seems improbable. Did it really happen? Yes, it did.Then, Fenster guides us through the years that follow the discovery. None of the three principle claimants gain happiness or wealth from the discovery. Wells commits suicide. Jackson dies bitter and unrecognized. Morton fails to convince Congress to reward him for the gift he gave us, dying a pauper. We are indebted to them all.I talk with residents about the great thing we do every day, something that we take for granted, the gift of anesthesia. Few know of the origins of the gift or of the men who participated in the discovery. Fenster offers us a grand view of this wonder.

The effect of occupational exposure and smoking on mortality——a prospective cohort study on 165 660 workers in Guangzhou,China

Objective To study the effects of exposure to occupational hazards and smoking on mortality. Methods Based on the Guangzhou Occupational Health Surveillance Record System established in 1989～1992,165 660 factory workers and drivers(aged≥30)were included.Baseline information was retrieved from individual health records onto computer by Intelligent Character Recognition technology.Vital status and causes of death were followed up until 31 December 1998. RR (95% CI ) were calculated and survival curves for occupational exposure and smoking were developed with Cox proportional hazards models by SPSS 10.0. Results There were 165 660 subjects(129 155 men,36 505 women) in the study with mean age of (42.0±6.3)years,and 87% of them were 30～49.Of them,37.3% had been exposed to occupational hazards.In men,70.8% of factory workers and 54.8% of drivers were smokers,but only less than 2.0% of the women had ever smoked in.The mean follow up time was (7.6±1.1)years with 1 252 168 person years in total 2 437 subjects died during the time,51(2.1%) of whom had unknown cause of death.Crude death rates were 194.6 per 100 000 person year for all subjects with factory workers 241.5 per 100 000 person year,drivers 143.1 per 100 000 person year,all men 225.0 per 100 000 person year and all women 92.6 per 100 000 person year.For occupational exposure,significant adjusted RR (95% CI ) of deaths from total causes,stroke,and other causes were 1.11(1.02～1.20),1.30(1.01～1.68) and 1.27(1.06～1.51);and for smoking, RR (95% CI ) of deaths from total causes,malignant neoplasms and lung cancer were 1.23(1.11～1.35),1.34(1.16～1.54) and 2.51(1.81～3.48),respectively.Higher risks were observed in smokers with occupational exposure,showing RR (95% CI ) of 1.32(1.16～1.68) for all causes and 1.35 (1.12 ～1.62) for malignant neoplasms.Furthermore,the RR of all causes,malignant neoplasms,lung cancer and stomach cancer increased with the increasing of pack years of smoking( P 0.01). Conclusion Mortality in workers is associated with both occupational exposure and smoking,and the risk is higher for smokers.The highest risk is observed when both factors are present simultaneously.

Human-Level AI's Killer Application: Interactive Computer Games

Although one of the fundamental goals of AI is to understand and develop intelligent systems that have all the capabilities of humans, there is little active research directly pursuing this goal. We propose that AI for interactive computer games is an emerging application area in which this goal of human-level AI can successfully be pursued. Interactive computer games have increasingly complex and realistic worlds and increasingly complex and intelligent computer-controlled characters. In this article, we further motivate our proposal of using interactive computer games for AI research, review previous research on AI and games, and present the different game genres and the roles that human-level AI could play within these genres. We then describe the research issues and AI techniques that are relevant to each of these roles. Our conclusion is that interactive computer games provide a rich environment for incremental research on human-level AI.

Pre-Service Teacher Attitudes Toward Differing Dialects

In order to evaluate pre-service teachers' attitudes toward differing dialects, 111 students at a small Alabama university were asked to provide demographic data (including gender, race, age, and socioeconomic status) and to respond to five readers representing a variety of dialects common to the region. Respondents were asked to rate readers on the qualities of intelligence, friendliness, consideration, education, trustworthiness, ambition, honesty, and social status. The results indicate that listeners do evaluate speakers' personal characteristics on the basis of dialect and that race is a factor in the perception of language, since white respondents were most favorable to white speakers and least favorable to black speakers and black respondents were most favorable to black speakers and least to white speakers. Directions for further study are noted.

Embodiment and Community

To understand how bodily practices such as folk dance encourage or create community, we must examine the processes that underlie the formation of community feeling and participation. The process of learning movements or positions and the process of learning associated feelings both necessarily take place within a and cultural context, that is, a community. They also depend on specific bodily techniques that are utilized by worship or dance practices-these in turn rely on certain qualities of the Further, like worship, dance makes use of what John Blacking refers to as somatic states (1977b:10). Folk dance can also be understood as a shared text. Dance does not need to be programmatic, like hula dance or indigenous dances that reenact myth, to be experienced as shared text, nor does it need to communicate definable ideas. Rather, the body's knowledge is valuable in itself and pertinent to relations with others. It is not necessary for the intellect, the rational mind, to this knowledge for it to be considered a text. The first issue in writing about bodily practice is to see that we need to start our investigation at the most fundamental level. If we are going to examine the relationship between individual bodies and community, then we must examine what we mean by body. In contemporary American culture, the is understood to be a material, medicalized organism-a biochemical mechanism. Even consciousness is regarded as merely neural firings and does not exist separately from those processes. Bodies are considered to be independent and to be under the direction of the intentions and willpower of some kind of self-this is itself a contradiction to the medical view. Bodies are also generally considered to be local, bounded entities. Other definitions and meanings of include the Christian idea of the mystical of Christ, and concepts of a subtle body, an astral body, and so on. Recent experiments with healing prayer have lead to the idea of nonlocalized wisdom of the body.2 Medical anthropology suggests concepts of social and political as well as the personal (Scheper-Hughes and Lock, 1987), and current anthropological conversation questions the bounded quality of bodily experience. To begin to speak of the need for a new definition of the body, even a holistic one that acknowledges the necessary condition of our experience of ourselves in the world as embodied, is still to be steeped in a dichotomous culture. Our need to define the as having its own qualities of intelligence and agency is predicated on the fact that we cannot help but think in terms of body and mind if not body and soul, the being merely of a lower or animal nature. Our culture marginalizes the The Buddhist concept of body-mind (we cannot even transmit it without having to use these two terms) is perhaps closer to the working definition we need in order to understand how bodily practice both engenders and is informed by feeling and cultural ideals. In this essay, I am interested particularly in how learning and participating in traditional group dance activities leads to an increased sense of community or experience of spiritual participation. Specific qualities of somatic experience are critical for my discussion, the primary one being the intelligence of the and emotions. The body's intelligence is not based on reason but on direct knowledge of the world. Its immediacy can be seen in the speed with which athletes react to situations or the astounding feats of acrobats. We can observe it in ourselves as well, in quickly hitting the brake in a car-much too fast to be a reasoned response-or riding a bike after many years without one. The latter experience is so ubiquitous that it has become a maxim for memory of this type: you never forget how. Body knowledge differs from the intellectual kind in several ways. …

The Handbook of Constructive Therapies

The Handbook of Constructive Therapies Michael F. Hoyt, ed. 480 pp., $49.95. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc. Website: www.JosseyBass.com The Handbook of Constructive Therapies is a stimulating and informative book, containing clinical insights and wisdom for the practicing psychotherapist. It is a well organized and edited book which, despite its diverse voices, has a coherent and intelligent character. The central conceptual themes pivot around constructivism and social constructionist approaches to therapy. The overarching framework threading its way through each chapter can best be identified as postmodern. Constructivism is identified as a meaning-making epistemological view in which human agency is the generative motor that shapes our environment and social lives. The social constructionist paradigm emphasizes interpersonal relatedness and the dialogical process through which we construct our visions and versions of reality within a social matrix. The self is, itself, construed as social and communal. Embracing the postmodern motif leads to an emphasis on local knowledge, giving voice to otherwise marginalized groups, celebrating diversity, deconstructing sacred assumptions, and the formation of egalitarian, nonhierarchical therapeutic relationships. The key focus with clients is on their strengths and resources, with a deemphasis on diagnosis and pathologizing. The book has definite political and ideological implications by striking a blow against society' s silencing of marginalized groups and adopting an advocacy stance on behalf of oppressed minorities. The therapist's role as presented here is divested of power, but not potency, and a multiperspectival view of persons and cultures is encouraged. Of course, not every chapter in the book gives equal emphasis to all of the themes cited above, but the overall range of the book definitely encompasses them. I found the Handbook to be reader friendly and would anticipate that it will be of value to both beginning and experienced therapists, which is one of the intentions of the editor, Michael Hoyt. The background and experience brought by the reader to each chapter will influence the meaning he or she makes out of what is encountered, just as a great play can be seen several times over a lifetime and generate new meanings each time depending upon the developmental stage of the viewer. The Handbook is actually a culmination of two previously edited books by Michael Hoyt (1994,1996) and is intended to enlarge upon the depth and range of the earlier works. The contributors to the current book were invited by the editor to present the theory undergirding their constructivist approach and to convey to the reader how that approach would unfold upon being put into practice. In effect, each contributor was encouraged to evoke curiosity in the reader, to stimulate interest, to engender grounds for discussion, to elaborate upon skillful interventions that go beyond fundamentals to impart novel ideas and methods; in brief, to be creative. In my opinion, the authors admirably rose to the occasion. The Handbook is divided into three sections: Theoretical Perspectives, Conversations and Songs, and Specific Clinical Applications. Given the size of this book, which contains 22 chapters, it will not be feasible to cover each one in this review. Therefore, I shall choose selections from each section. Anderson and Levin provide a fascinating and useful discourse on "Generative Conversations" in therapy from a postmodern perspective. Therapeutic conversations in their view are transformative. They raise what I would consider the central question of all verbal psychotherapies: "How can therapists create the kinds of conversations with their clients that allow both parties to access their creativities and develop possibilities where none seemed to exist before?" Their chapter is an attempt to answer this question. Albert Ellis attempts to develop the argument that his rational emotive behavior therapy is decisively a constructivist model of therapy. …

Evolutionary Design Method of Morphology and Intelligence in Autonomous Mechanical System. 2nd Report, Generality and Inner-Structural Characteristics of Morphology/Intelligence.

This paper deals with function generality and inner-structural characteristics of morphology/intelligence in autonomous mechanical (robotic) system which is generated using evolutionary design method. In the realistic virtual world including physics such as gravity, collision and friction, the robotic systems generated are found to have various morphologic feature and intelligence. In performing a given task, they show a various morphologies together with the corresponding interesting strategy. At first, the effect of noise addition to the initial condition on the task performance is discussed, and then we analyze the complexity of the robotic morphology and "dimension consistency" in the intelligence described by the decision tree expressing the inner-structures of the robotic system. It has found that 1) a small noise addition has improved markedly the task-performance rate, and also the robustness of the robotic system, and 2) the physical-dimension-consistency can explain the inner-structural character of the robotic intelligence that realized the better task performance.

Gender Trouble and Lesbian Desire in Djuna Barnes's "Nightwood"

Djuna Barnes has always been a troublemaker. Or, to be more precise, her public persona and artistic output have proved troublesome on a number of levels. As a friend or acquaintance, Barnes could be hard to get along with; those who knew Barnes admired her wit, intelligence, and forceful character but occasionally winced at the harshness of her judgments. She was not afraid, it would seem, to say exactly what she thought on almost any topic. As a journalist, she conveyed her political and social viewpoints spectacularly: In 1914, she allowed herself to be force-fed for The New York World in simulation of the force-feedings which the English suffragists were then undergoing.' Her description of the physical experience and its acutest horror is damning-of the patriarchal institutions administering that treatment represented by the doctors in their white coats holding down Barnes's arms and legs, despite her supposed acquiescence, and, potentially, of herself as well. She put herself in the position of torture, submitting to the political and social structures she wished to critique. Barnes's staged yet real enactment of the dominant power structure becomes a problematic critique at best; at worst, it's an affirmation, even if unwitting, of patriarchal mastery. Recent scholarship on Djuna Barnes has concerned itself with precisely those aspects of her work and life that are most troubling, which is to say, without being entirely facetious, all of them. Most criticism before the 1980s focuses on placing Barnes within a modernist tradition, examining her complex, metaphorical language and working out some of the most obvious trouble spots for readers

To the glory of her sex: women's roles in the composition of medieval texts

The author's readings in the public and private correspondence of medieval women suggested to her that women were far more involved in affairs of the world and in the lives and work of prominent men than is normally acknowledged. Letters of dedication led her to works commissioned by women, or dedicated to them, which often reflect the interests and views of the women. Additionally, works written by women reveal a sense of the achievements of other women as well as of the problems they face in a male and usually misogynist world.To the Glory of Her Sex looks at the roles women played in medieval literature as patrons or collaborators and as authors. Men who wrote for women, whether religious texts written at their request, historical texts written as propaganda for them or their cause, or romances composed for their favor, offer women models from history and the bible, and from fiction of intelligent, forceful women. Though they were painfully aware of the prejudices against women in public life and the problems women faced in private life, they were more likely to take pride in the achievements of women than to present them as victims.The women who conveyed God's message to men, Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Schoenau, nuns who wrote for religions and secular audiences, Hrotsvit and Clemence of Barking, and women who wrote for worldly courts, the trobairitz, marie de France, later Christine de Pizan, admired the same qualities of intelligence and courage and independence in other women, and found support in the lives and affection of women for themselves and their audiences.

Race Logic and “Being like Mike”: Representations of Athletes in Advertising, 1985–1994

Although participation in sports by black athletes has increased, evidence remains that these athletes still face discriminatory practices. One arena in which black athletes are treated differently from their white counterparts is the advertising of products by athletic spokespersons. This paper examines the stereotypes used in portraying black athletes in advertising by scrutinizing advertisements in Sports Illustrated from 1985 to 1994. I hypothesize that advertisers will draw on stereotypes from both sport and more general society to depict athletes. Two hundred ten advertisements in the sample contain well-known athletes; content analysis reveals that black athletes are more likely to be portrayed as succeeding because of innate physical abilities, while white athletes are more often portrayed as succeeding because of hard work, intelligence or leadership qualities. In addition, black athletes are more Likely to be portrayed as angry, violent or hypersexual.