Non-human Characters Research Articles

Female Mate-Guarding in Lawrence’s “Wintry Peacock”: An Evolutionary Perspective

D. H. Lawrence’s 1921 story “Wintry Peacock” presents a vivid example of female mate-guarding behavior, along with the male counter-strategies it provokes. Employing an elaborate yet subtle allusion to a tale from classical mythology, Lawrence underlines the archetypal—and, indirectly, the Adaptationist—significance of the male-female conflict he depicts. The allusion explains the otherwise puzzling presence of the title peacock, moreover, a non-human character who serves as a magnet for the fierce emotions of the battling husband and wife. Conflict between the sexes is inevitable, the story indicates: men and women are caught up in a contest neither sex can win definitively. Evolutionary theory helps to identify the causes of this conflict, which is rooted in innate biological differences. Deeply ingrained in evolved adaptations, male and female behavioral tactics are bound to collide, creating mutual frustration. Instead of demanding sympathy for either the male or female point of view, Lawrence’s story encourages readers to view the vicissitudes of intersexual competition with detachment.

IN SEARCH OF CHANGED CLIMATES

In postcolonial studies, national and indigenous communities are often partly framed in relation to the relatively stable, enduring space of the land. As we move into more amphibious or aerial realms, however, questions about these frameworks emerge. Is there a space indicated by water and climate? Do the spaces of water and climate designate particular socialities (such as the nation), as the land often has? If any concept and practice of community requires some kind of permanence and stability, how are possible communities imaginatively linked to the disruptive but also cyclical temporalities of water and weather? In discussing these questions in this essay, I trace the shifting shapes and pathways of water and weather conditions in recent literature from Hawai‘i. I find that Gary Pak, in his short story ‘Language of the Geckos’, theorizes a history of trans-Pacific US economic and military expansion and marginalization of indigenous Hawaiian water regimes, as well as the emergence of a new kind of sociality among human and non-human characters, through tracing the movements and shifting shapes of water. I argue that it is through confronting the methodological problems that water presents for knowledge (specifically, issues of time and space) that Pak is able to build modes of propelling knowledge towards changed future possibilities of existence.

Direct Control of Simulated Nonhuman Characters

A proposed system lets users directly control simulated self-propelled characters. Users drag a mouse to guide the character, while a physics simulation determines the motion. On the basis of the user input, the system computes an actuator command that causes the character to follow the user's intention as closely as possible while respecting the underlying physics. This direct control can be more intuitive than methods such as controlling character joints to track a given joint trajectory or using keyframes, especially when physically plausible dynamic motions are desired. With the system, users have created realistic motions of various kinds of characters, including rigid characters, characters with deformable bodies and rigid skeletons, and self-locomoting characters whose bodies form closed loops. The Web extras are screen-captured demos of algorithms for creating dynamic motions on various kinds of characters, and the resulting character animations. You can also view the videos on YouTube here: Part 1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD891Qub8kU; Part 2, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tqUDijvzZc.

Direct Control of Simulated Nonhuman Characters

A proposed system lets users directly control simulated self-propelled characters. Users drag a mouse to guide the character, while a physics simulation determines the motion. On the basis of the u...

Direct Control of Simulated Nonhuman Characters

A proposed system lets users directly control simulated self-propelled characters. Users drag a mouse to guide the character, while a physics simulation determines the motion. On the basis of the user input, the system computes an actuator command that causes the character to follow the user's intention as closely as possible while respecting the underlying physics. This direct control can be more intuitive than methods such as controlling character joints to track a given joint trajectory or using keyframes, especially when physically plausible dynamic motions are desired. With the system, users have created realistic motions of various kinds of characters, including rigid characters, characters with deformable bodies and rigid skeletons, and self-locomoting characters whose bodies form closed loops. The Web extras are screen-captured demos of algorithms for creating dynamic motions on various kinds of characters, and the resulting character animations. You can also view the videos on YouTube here: Part 1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD891Qub8kU; Part 2, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tqUDijvzZc.

Reading Disability in Children's Literature: Hans Christian Andersen's Tales

The article examines the diversity issues that are embedded in fairy tales and explores socio-political implications for the construction of so-called able-bodiedness. Critical disability theory is discussed, as are studies that provide alternative approaches to reading children's texts that explore disability. In order to expose the discourses of power, four of Hans Christian Andersen's tales that feature non-human characters with disabilities are analyzed. The conclusion is that, though seemingly innocent and thus supposedly pertinent for children's reading, fairy tales are loaded with ableist ideology.

Cross-modal compensation between name and visual aspect in socially active avatars

Avatars serve for humans immersed in virtual settings as the interface between real and virtual worlds. The avatar-creation process involves numerous choices, including choice of visual representation, and choices to imbue the character with personality. Here, we hypothesised that these choices are not independent, and that a cross-modal talk may occur between the different components of the avatar identity. Specifically, we investigated whether name properties may be affected by the visual aspect (human vs. non-human) of the avatar. We analyzed names structure of players characters from the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft, which display both human and non-human avatars. We selected 1261 names of characters actively engaged in the in-game and out-game social networks. Analysis of the names revealed that female names presented more variability than male names, and contained systematically more vowels than male names. However, the strategy used to enrich the vowel composition of female names differed between human-like and non-human characters, suggesting that a lesser proximity with human regular appearance was compensated by an increase of “feminization” of the name. Altogether, our results suggest that a cross-modal compensation occurs between name and visual aspect in the creation of socially active avatars.

Gesture controllers

We introduce gesture controllers , a method for animating the body language of avatars engaged in live spoken conversation. A gesture controller is an optimal-policy controller that schedules gesture animations in real time based on acoustic features in the user's speech. The controller consists of an inference layer, which infers a distribution over a set of hidden states from the speech signal, and a control layer, which selects the optimal motion based on the inferred state distribution. The inference layer, consisting of a specialized conditional random field, learns the hidden structure in body language style and associates it with acoustic features in speech. The control layer uses reinforcement learning to construct an optimal policy for selecting motion clips from a distribution over the learned hidden states. The modularity of the proposed method allows customization of a character's gesture repertoire, animation of non-human characters, and the use of additional inputs such as speech recognition or direct user control.

Anthropomorphism in Sign Languages: A Look at Poetry and Storytelling with a Focus on British Sign Language

The work presented here considers some linguistic methods used in sign anthropomorphism. We find a cline of signed anthropomorphism that depends on a number of factors, including the skills and intention of the signer, the animacy of the entities represented, the form of their bodies, and the form of vocabulary signs referring to those entities. We consider four main factors that allow signers to anthropomorphize the whole range of entities (from animate to inanimate): the linguistic base that allows such play, the ability of the nonmanuals to anthropomorphize even when the manual articulators are signing in an ordinary way, the range of possibilities for both manual and nonmanual articulators when the signer engages in (almost) complete embodiment of the nonhuman character, and how nonhumans are portrayed as communicating via sign language.

From Animal to Animality Studies

When Jack London's human characters interact with dogs and wolves in texts such as the call of the wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), erotic fireworks often light up the wild. The love between the dog Buck and his human partner, John Thornton, in The Call of the Wild is characterized as “[l]ove, genuine passionate love. … love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness” (59–60). In White Fang, the half wolf of the title experiences a love for Weedon Scott that “manifested itself to [White Fang] as a void in his being—a hungry, aching, yearning void that clamored to be filled. It was a pain and an unrest; and it received easement only by the touch of the new god's presence” (244). Instead of reading these passionate nonhuman characters as “real” animals, literary and cultural critics often read them as “men in furs,” in Mark Seltzer's memorable phrase, leading to interesting and important discussions of, for example, homoerotic interactions between men.

Dimensions of Mind Perception

Participants compared the mental capacities of various human and nonhuman characters via online surveys. Factor analysis revealed two dimensions of mind perception, Experience (for example, capacity for hunger) and Agency (for example, capacity for self-control). The dimensions predicted different moral judgments but were both related to valuing of mind.

Expression modeling—a boundary element approach

Popular techniques for modeling facial expression usually rely on the shape blending of a series of pre-defined facial models, the use of feature parameters, or the use of an anatomy based facial model. This requires extensive user interaction to construct the pre-defined facial model, the deformation functions, or the anatomy based facial model. Besides, existing anatomy based facial modeling techniques are targeted for human facial model and may not be used directly for non-human like character models. This paper presents an intuitive technique for the design of facial expressions using a physics based deformation approach. The technique does not require specifying the deformation function associated with facial feature parameters, and does not require a detail anatomical model of the head. By adjusting the contraction or relaxation of a set of facial muscles, different facial expressions can be obtained. Facial muscles and skin are assumed to be linearly elastic. The boundary element method (BEM) is adopted for evaluating deformation of the facial skin. This avoids the use of volumetric elements as in the case of finite element method (FEM) or the setting up of complex mass-spring models. Given a polygon mesh of a facial model, a closed volume of the facial mesh is obtained by offsetting the polygon mesh according to a user defined depth map. Each facial muscle is approximated with a series of muscle polygons on the mesh surface. Deformation of the facial mesh is attained by stretching or compressing the muscle polygons. By pre-computing the inverse of the stiffness matrix, interactive editing of facial expression can be achieved.

Content and Ratings of Mature-Rated Video Games

To quantify the depiction of violence, blood, sexual themes, profanity, substances, and gambling in video games rated M (for "mature") and to measure agreement between the content observed and the rating information provided to consumers on the game box by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. We created a database of M-rated video game titles, selected a random sample, recorded at least 1 hour of game play, quantitatively assessed the content, performed statistical analyses to describe the content, and compared our observations with the Entertainment Software Rating Board content descriptors and results of our prior studies. Harvard University, Boston, Mass. Authors and 1 hired game player. M-rated video games. Percentages of game play depicting violence, blood, sexual themes, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs; use of profanity in dialogue, song lyrics, or gestures. Although the Entertainment Software Rating Board content descriptors for violence and blood provide a good indication of such content in the game, we identified 45 observations of content that could warrant a content descriptor in 29 games (81%) that lacked these content descriptors. M-rated video games are significantly more likely to contain blood, profanity, and substances; depict more severe injuries to human and nonhuman characters; and have a higher rate of human deaths than video games rated T (for "teen"). Parents and physicians should recognize that popular M-rated video games contain a wide range of unlabeled content and may expose children and adolescents to messages that may negatively influence their perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors.

Pasteur on lactic acid yeast: a partial semiotic analysis.

Pasteur on Lactic Acid Yeast: A Partial Semiotic Analysis Bruno Latour (bio) One of the interests of studying scientific practice from the vantage point of literature is that it adds another series of mediations to the many that historians, sociologists, and philosophers are unfolding when they analyze laboratories, instruments, controversies, disciplines or institutions. 1 Scientific texts, to be sure, have no privilege,but neither are they inferior to the many sources we have forunderstanding science. Indeed, when properly studied, they offer a convenient model to show how many mediations can be retrieved from the scientist’s own practice. A scientific text is not only a more or less transparent medium to convey information to the author’s scientific colleagues, nor is it only a document to help historians, psychologists, or sociologists retrieve the state of mind of its author or the context in which it has been written. As many decades of literary theory have helped us to see, texts are a little bit less and a good deal more than information and document. They build a world of their own that can be studied as such in relative and provisional isolation from the other aspects. They are localized events, with their own matter and their own practice. Although this point is taken for granted in many studies of fictional literature, 2 it has not been rendered as acceptable in the [End Page 129] study of scientific literature—in spite of Francoise Bastide’s work 3 and the many studies of scientific texts coming either from the humanities 4 or from the social sciences. 5 The same people who would not hesitate to say that laboratory practices, or citations, or instruments, or institutions, or controversies, or conversations, or rhetoric can be studied in relative and provisional isolation from the rest, would balk at allowing a full-blown study of a single text. They would insist that a text is not an island, and that it cannot be understood without its context of use, the reader’s response, and the wider social picture. I understand these worries. They stem largely from the fact that, as Thomas Pavel has so clearly shown, many literary theories are ontologically weak, which makes them of little use for texts that insist on being referential and not fictional. 6 But as I have shown elsewhere in the case of Einstein, even this question of the referent may be tackled by semiotic theory. 7 The main advantage of practicing some sort of semiotics on scientific texts lies in the very limitation of the theory. By bracketing out the question of the referent (there exist only internal referents generated by the text itself) and by bracketing out the question of the locutor (authors and readers are built into the texts and may not relate to any authors and readers in the flesh), we let the texts deploy their own categories. Their world-making activity is no longer squeezed in between a referent that it has to grasp and a locutor or a social context from which it emerges. It becomes an event, which has the same activity, the same materiality, the same complexity, the same historicity as any other event. This provisional independence, both from the referent and from the context, gives a valuable bonus to literary theory in the treatment of nonhumans. In the study of texts there is no a priori distinction to be made between an anthropomorphic actor and a [End Page 130] “physimorphic” or “zoomorphic” one: the same amount of work is required to attribute a role to a human or to a nonhuman character. In a fairy tale identical functions may be fulfilled by a prince, a dwarf, a magic rod, or a fox. This freedom in selecting actors and redistributing properties among them is crucial to understanding scientific practice, and, to my knowledge, no other discipline possesses that freedom. All the others have to start from a “natural” division between human and nonhuman properties. So, eventhough the ontology embedded in literary theory may be flawed, its ability to deal with nonhumans is without a par, and it allows us to go much further in the study of scientific work than do discourse...