Past Interactions Research Articles

Art as a Channel and Embodiment of Symbolic Interaction Between Migrants and Non‐Migrants

Many non‐migrant politicians, journalists, and scholars in migrant‐ destination societies often represent migrants with self‐interested objectives and in specific instrumental ways based on stereotypes. Yet research on symbolic interaction reveals migrants are not passive victims. They actively and strategically shape their interactions with non‐migrants. The artwork produced by Chinese migrant artists becomes a non‐verbal channel through which the migrant can convey such challenges to non‐migrants who can more empathetically appreciate these challenges. By analyzing the artwork and narratives of first‐generation migrant artists, I show how art highlights various challenges that migrants confront in their process of immigration, like enduring physical pain, conforming to the institutions of the host society, navigating language barriers, confronting regular cultural clashes, accepting social estrangement, and coping with double consciousness. This paper shows how migrant art can serve as a semiotic object that reveals important features of past symbolic interactions between migrants and non‐migrants and offers a channel through which non‐migrants can potentially empathize more with migrants' experiences.

A micro‐geoarchaeological investigation of a cultivation pit (maite) on Teti'aroa atoll, Central‐East Polynesia

ABSTRACTCultivation pits represented the principal form of horticultural features developed by past atoll communities in Central‐East Polynesia (CEP), and they are still utilised on some atolls in Oceania. The majority of information about the use of cultivation pits in CEP derives from ethnographic and preliminary archaeological investigations. The lack of excavations with rigorous stratigraphic sampling and analyses has constrained the recovery of environmental information associated with these agro‐technical features. Using a combination of geoarchaeological techniques, including field observations, physico‐chemical analyses and soil micromorphology, this study focuses on sedimentary deposits from a cultivation pit (MAITE‐01) on Teti'aroa atoll, in the Society Islands. We demonstrate how micro‐geoarchaeological investigations can advance research and offer new interpretations to study past human interactions within environments long considered “lost causes” to detailed archaeostratigraphic interpretation. High‐resolution geoarchaeological techniques reveal details about pit construction and provide indirect evidence of the integration of human‐animal interaction into the horticultural system.

Artificial Intelligence and Informatics: Redefining Educational Methodologies

The incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) into educational settings is the primary force behind the revolutionary change occurring in the educational scene of the twenty-first century. This new way of thinking, called AI Education, has the potential to reshape the conventional wisdom that has long defined educational systems around the globe. The capacity of AI to automate administrative processes, give profound insights into student learning behaviours and needs, and create tailored learning experiences is fundamental to this revolution. In order to fully take advantage of AI technologies, educators, legislators, and engineers must successfully negotiate the many opportunities and threats that these technologies present. The article delves into the effects of AI on the field of education, drawing attention to the change from a cookie-cutter approach to instruction to one that is more personalized and flexible. New educational tools and platforms powered by AI are changing the game when it comes to information delivery and consumption. AIcan analyse a student's past interactions and performance using adaptive learning technology to personalize educational content to their unique learning style and pace. Not only does this method increase involvement, but it also improves understanding and memory retention. In addition, with the help of AI-driven analytics, teachers can see their students' strengths and weaknesses like never before, which allows them to help those students when needed it the most.

SocialJGCF: Social Recommendation with Jacobi Polynomial-Based Graph Collaborative Filtering

With the flourishing of social media platforms, data in social networks, especially user-generated content, are growing rapidly, which makes it hard for users to select relevant content from the overloaded data. Recommender systems are thus developed to filter user-relevant content for better user experiences and also the commercial needs of social platform providers. Graph neural networks have been widely applied in recommender systems for better recommendation based on past interactions between users and corresponding items due to the graph structure of social data. Users might also be influenced by their social connections, which is the focus of social recommendation. Most works on recommendation systems try to obtain better representations of user embeddings and item embeddings. Compared with recommendation systems only focusing on interaction graphs, social recommendation has an additional task of combining user embedding from the social graph and interaction graph. This paper proposes a new method called SocialJGCF to address these problems, which applies Jacobi-Polynomial-Based Graph Collaborative Filtering (JGCF) to the propagation of the interaction graph and social graph, and a graph fusion is used to combine the user embeddings from the interaction graph and social graph. Experiments are conducted on two real-world datasets, epinions and LastFM. The result shows that SocialJGCF has great potential in social recommendation, especially for cold-start problems.

The IACOB project. XIII. Helium enrichment in O-type stars as a tracer of past binary interaction

The IACOB project. XIII. Helium enrichment in O-type stars as a tracer of past binary interaction

Transboundary nature of a closed border: Memory dynamics in Karelia’s border areas

The consequences of geopolitical turbulence are vividly manifested at state borders, influencing the functional mode of the border itself and the everyday life of borderland communities. The ongoing socio-cultural transformations and the border residents’ reflections on new life conditions can be explored through narratives of memory, which are being shaped by global challenges. The article focuses on the dynamics of historical memory in the borderlands of Russia and Finland, particularly in the context of the closure of the state border and the crisis in interstate relations. Using existing concepts in border studies and historical memory research, the author attempts to analyze narratives about the past cross-border interactions in the Karelian regions bordering Finland, specifically examining the Sortavala municipal district and the Kostomuksha urban district. The study argues that shifts in historical memory can be traced through an examination of narrative density and the clarity of categories of “others”, constructed based on interactions with narrative agents and the remoteness of these categories in the past. It further analyzes the role of reflective and restorative nostalgia in shaping perceptions of the memory culture among residents of neighboring countries. The author also differentiates levels of cross-border relations at both grassroots and interstate levels, describing different catalysts and motives for interaction. The paper also examines changing significance of the border itself and its borderland status, which determines strategies for social adaptation to new conditions in these areas. The first part of the article examines historical events in the Sortavala and Kostomuksha district that form the basis for memory narratives. The second part consists of three chapters and analyzes the narratives identified through interviews which were collected by the author in 2023–2024.

Young adults, mental health, and help-seeking: what difficulties do they face? A Singapore-based study

ABSTRACT Young adults in Singapore are a population at high risk of mental health distress but with a low rate of help-seeking and mental health service usage, further increasing their vulnerability. This study aimed to investigate the factors that either encourage or hinder mental health help-seeking among young adults in Singapore. An online self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data on help-seeking intentions and attitudes from 110 Chinese young adults aged 21 to 30 years old residing in Singapore. The findings show that good attitudes towards services and positive past interactions with services increased intention to seek help, while stigma, high self-reliance, and lack of time reduced intention to seek help. Three improvements to mental health services were suggested: providing convenient and accessible assistance, advocating for greater understanding of services, and managing the dual effect of self-reliance in young adults.

False killer whales and fisheries in Hawaiian waters: evidence from mouthline and dorsal fin injuries reveal ongoing and repeated interactions

Monitoring bycatch in fisheries is essential for effective conservation and fisheries sustainability. False killer whales Pseudorca crassidens in Hawaiian waters are known to interact with both commercial and recreational fisheries, but limited observer coverage across Hawaiian fisheries obscures the ability to assess bycatch. We build upon previous work and assess occurrence of fisheries interactions through photographic evidence of dorsal fin and mouthline injuries for 3 false killer whale populations in Hawai‘i. Photographs of injuries on dorsal fins and mouthlines collected between 1999-2021 were scored for consistency with fishery interactions (‘not consistent’, ‘possibly consistent’, ‘consistent’). For individuals with both dorsal fin and mouthline photos available, the endangered main Hawaiian Islands (MHI) population had the highest rates of injuries consistent with fisheries interactions (28.7% of individuals), followed by the pelagic stock (11.7%), while no individuals from the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands population with both types of photos had fisheries-related injuries. Some individuals from the MHI population were documented with multiple fisheries-related injuries acquired on different occasions, indicating repeated interactions with fisheries. Individuals first began acquiring injuries consistent with fishery interactions at an estimated age of 2 yr. Females were more likely to have fisheries-related dorsal fin injuries than males, but rates of fisheries-related mouthline injuries were similar between the sexes. Injuries consistent with fisheries interactions were acquired throughout the study period, indicating that this is an ongoing issue, not a legacy of past fishery interactions. Our results suggest that efforts to reduce bycatch and begin monitoring of fisheries that overlap the range of the endangered MHI population are needed.

Core components of male-specific person-centred HIV care: a qualitative analysis from client and healthcare worker perspectives in Malawi

IntroductionPerson-centred care (PCC) improves clinical outcomes for people living with HIV. Heterosexual men in sub-Saharan Africa are under-represented in HIV care, yet PCC interventions for men are lacking. We identified...

Learning from past society-environment interactions is discursive rather than substantive

Abstract Environmental changes pose unprecedented risks to human societies worldwide. Over the past few decades, burgeoning academic literature argues or assumes that past societies’ responses to environmental impacts can provide valuable lessons to guide adaptation to contemporary environmental changes. The ancient Maya civilization, whose decline is often linked with historically unprecedented droughts, constitutes a major case study for extracting such lessons. To analyze these lessons, we conduct a meta-analysis of the discourse of learning from past Maya-environment interactions. We demonstrate that although studies often refer to learning from the Maya explicitly, the learning is primarily declarative and discursive rather than substantive, and lessons are often vague, misguided, or inapplicable. Only a few articles employ research designs conducive to learning from the past, and only a few reflect on the process of, or the problems associated with, learning from the past. On the other hand, many articles are content with reaching ‘inspirational’ lessons, calling, for example, for increasing resilience, while only a fifth of the papers drew more specific lessons that offer somewhat concrete recommendations and courses of action. Many studies also claimed that their findings are applicable to present-day societies far outside the core regions of Maya habitation, ignoring pertinent social and geographical differences. Although the paper does not preclude the theoretical possibility of learning from the past, it argues that such learning must undergo significant changes to achieve robustness and relevance for the present. This would also require a more open discussion between scholars of the past and adaptation practitioners.

The Role of Memory in LLMs: Persistent Context for Smarter Conversations

Memory in LLMs has given way to more logical and sensible interactions between the system and the user. This is different from other models that are session bound, such that the responses to any one query are not related to past and future interactions with the same user, but memory-enabled LLMs retain information across sessions and continually update interactions with the person they are communicating with. The role of permanent memory in LLMs is considered in this work, provided through the analysis of the role of memory mechanisms in maintaining conversation flows, improving user interaction, and supporting practical applications in various industries, including customer service, healthcare, and education. Discussing how the idea and architectures of memory correspond to storage and retrieval procedures and the management of memory in LLMs this paper outlines the opportunities and challenges for AI systems that want to include contextual intelligence but also remain ethical. The synthesis of important concepts underlines the promising prospects of memory-augmented models in improving the communication with users and points to the imperatively important aspect of controlling the memory process at the design stage of LLMs. We also offer recommendations for privacy and ethical concerns that should be avoided in the case of future AI memory advancements in an effort to pursue sustainable technological progress while also incorporating user-oriented values into the process.

I have seen this before: imprinting experiences and Bank CEO risk-taking in times of crisis

Abstract Understanding the causes and consequences of corporate risk-taking has remained a crucial topic for organizational scholars. Using the case of U.S. banks and one dimension of their risk-taking behavior around the 2008 financial crisis, we offer a theory of how the diverse experiences of corporate leaders can shape their risk-taking behavior. Building on the imprinting literature, we theorize how different types of experiences that bank CEOs had in the past interact to shape current risk-taking behavior, resulting in risk moderation under crisis conditions. We focus on two imprinting experiences with particular relevance for bank CEOs’ risk-taking behavior—MBA education and past crisis experience. We argue that the latter played a pronounced role during the crisis because of greater imprint-environment fit. Our analysis using data from 170 large banks between 2001 and 2019 shows that bank CEOs’ firsthand experience of a prior banking crisis not only directly tempered bank risk-taking but also did so indirectly by limiting the risk-taking tendencies of CEOs with an MBA, particularly during the crisis period. Our study contributes to the sociological literature about organizational risk-taking by emphasizing the crucial role of organizational leaders’ biographies and exploring how earlier institutional conditions shape their risk-taking behavior later.

Limited trust in social network games.

We consider agents in a social network competing to be selected as partners in collaborative, mutually beneficial activities. We study this through a model in which an agent i can initiate a limited number k_{i}>0 of games and selects partners from its one-hop neighborhood. Each agent can accept as many games offered by its neighbors. Each game signifies a productive joint activity, and the players attempt to maximize their individual utilities. Unsurprisingly, more trustworthy agents, as measured by the game-theoretic concept of limited-trust, are more desirable as partners. Agents learn about their neighbors' trustworthiness through interactions and their behaviors evolve in response. Empirical trials conducted on realistic social networks show that when given the option, many agents become highly trustworthy; most or all become highly trustworthy when knowledge of their neighbors' trustworthiness is based on past interactions rather than known a priori. This trustworthiness is not the result of altruism; instead, agents are intrinsically motivated to become trustworthy partners by competition. Two insights are presented: First, trustworthy behavior drives an increase in the utility of all agents, where maintaining a relatively minor level of trustworthiness may easily improve net utility by as much as 14.5%. If only one agent exhibits a small degree of trustworthiness among self-centered ones, then it can increase its personal utility by up to 25% in certain cases. Second, and counterintuitively, when partnership opportunities are abundant, agents become less trustworthy.

Fishing or farming? Isotopic evidence of human subsistence strategies at the Dashuitian site during the middle Neolithic in the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, China

The Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, with its deep canyons, abundant freshwater resources, and unique geographic location at the crossroads in the spread of rice-millet agriculture in the Middle Neolithic, is of great significance for understanding the interaction between fishing-hunting-gathering and farming in inland freshwater environments. However, few direct evidence for human subsistence strategies had been published in this region. This study presents results of carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analyses on human bones, animal and millet remains from the Dashuitian site (c. 6000–5500 BP) in the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, China, to investigate the diet and subsistence and intrapopulation dietary variations in this region. The results indicate that the humans at the site consumed mostly freshwater fish foods and supplemented by terrestrial animals, with no discernable input from millets. They had consistently relied on a fishing, hunting, and gathering economy during the occupation of the site in the Middle Neolithic (c. 6000–5500 BP), differing from humans in other areas especially along the rivers and coasts of the lower Yangtze River valley for the roughly same period, further showing the extensive utilization of and adaptation to the available environmental resources. In addition, intrapopulation dietary variations based on burial style and sex provide evidence that differentiation and inequality, at least regarding to food consumption, existed at the Three Gorges region during the Middle Neolithic. Here, our findings provide isotopic evidence about the Middle Neolithic human subsistence strategies in the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, providing a glimpse into the complexity related to inequality in food access among fisher-hunter-gatherers in inland areas, and new insights into understanding past human-environment interactions.

DHKFN

Knowledge tracing is effective in modeling learners' knowledge levels to predict future answering situations based on their past learning history and interaction processes. However, current methods often overlook the impact of knowledge point correlations on answer prediction. This paper design a model based on deep hierarchical knowledge fusion networks (DHKFN). It utilizes statistical approaches to construct correlation matrices to capture the correlations between knowledge points. Subsequently, it constructs a topology graph structure of questions and knowledge points and utilizes a multi-head attention network to learn student interaction information from multiple perspectives, effectively constructing adjacency matrices. Finally, it uses GCN to learn the interaction information representation between deep-level knowledge points from dynamically constructed a topology graph structures. Experimental results on three large public datasets show that DHKFN effectively considers the influence of correlations between different knowledge points, thus showing promising effectiveness.

Spacetime symmetry breaking on nongeodesic leaves and a new form of matter

We examine the permanent damage caused by the historical breakdown of full diffeomorphism invariance induced by a foliation. We focus on the case where the foliation is allowed to be nongeodesic after the interactions with the foliation switch off. Gravity and other forms of matter recover full diffeomorphism invariance only at the expense of introducing a new matterlike component, carrying the nonvanishing Hamiltonian (and momentum, as it turns out) left over from the violating past interactions. This matter form must be stress-free in the preferred frame; this is the only way a matter action can mimic the evolution of the leftover Hamiltonian (and momentum) driven by the Dirac hypersurface deformation algebra. Hence, if the preferred frame is nongeodesic, the equivalent matter component must have energy and a momentum current in this frame, but still no spatial stresses: an unusual form of “matter.” It is equivalent to a fluid with anisotropic stress in some regimes, reducing to dust in others, or even displaying completely new features in extreme situations. Its stress energy tensor is conserved. We provide two examples based on accelerated frames: Rindler space-time and the canonical Schwarzchild frame. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

An investigation of toddler risky play informed by the voices of parents and teachers of toddlers in one school setting

ABSTRACT This qualitative study explored the perceptions of teachers and parents within the context of toddlerhood risky play at a university laboratory school. Sociocultural and bioecological theories informed the study and the developmental niche framework guided the data analysis. Video-stimulated recall interviews were analyzed using the constant comparative method. Findings include: (1) parents’ and teachers’ perceptions of risky play are comprised of (a) their psychology as the caregiver, (b) knowing the child, and (c) cultural influences, (2) parent and teacher descriptions of risky play include that it happens outdoors, away from adults, and encompasses developmental benefits, and (3) the development of perceptions of risky play is situated and dynamic. This study contributes important knowledge to the field of early childhood education by offering a new perspective regarding the definition of risky play revealing how parents’ and teachers’ perceptions of risky play are situated in their own past experiences, knowledges, and interactions.

Macroscale Roughness Reveals the Complex History of Asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos

Morphological mapping is a fundamental step in studying the processes that shaped an asteroid surface. However, it is challenging and often requires multiple independent assessments by trained experts. Here we present fast methods to detect and characterize meaningful terrains from the topographic roughness: entropy of information, and local mean surface orientation. We apply our techniques to Didymos and Dimorphos, the target asteroids of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission—the first attempt to deflect an asteroid. Our methods reliably identify morphological units at multiple scales. The comparative study reveals various terrain types, signatures of processes that transformed Didymos and Dimorphos. Didymos shows the most heterogeneity and morphology that indicate recent resurfacing events. Dimorphos is comparatively rougher than Didymos, which may result from the formation process of the binary pair and past interaction between the two bodies. Our methods can be readily applied to other bodies and data sets.

Bronze Age cheese reveals human-Lactobacillus interactions over evolutionary history

Despite the long history of consumption of fermented dairy, little is known about how the fermented microbes were utilized and evolved over human history. Here, by retrieving ancient DNA of Bronze Age kefir cheese (∼3,500 years ago) from the Xiaohe cemetery, we explored past human-microbial interactions. Although it was previously suggested that kefir was spread from the Northern Caucasus to Europe and other regions, we found an additional spreading route of kefir from Xinjiang to inland East Asia. Over evolutionary history, the East Asian strains gained multiple gene clusters with defensive roles against environmental stressors, which can be a result of the adaptation of Lactobacillus strains to various environmental niches and humanselection. Overall, our results highlight the role of past human activities in shaping the evolution of human-related microbes, and such insights can, in turn, provide a better understanding of past human behaviors.

Egalitarian preferences in young children depend on the genders of the interacting partners

In decisions between equal and unequal resource distributions, women are often believed to be more prosocial than men. Previous research showed that fairness attitudes develop in childhood, but their—possibly gendered, developmental trajectory remains unclear. We hypothesised that gender-related fairness attitudes might depend not only on the gender of the Allocator, but also on that of the Recipient. To examine this, we tested 332 three to 8-year-old children in a paired resource allocation task, with both boys and girls acting as Allocators and Recipients. We indeed found gender-related effects: girls more than boys aimed to reduce advantageous inequity, and Allocators of both genders were more averse against male Recipients being better off. Notably, older girls exhibited an envy bias, i.e., they tolerated disadvantageous inequity more when the resource allocation was in favour of other girls than when it favoured boys. We also observed a gender-related spite gap in boys aged 7-8: unlike girls, boys treated other boys with spite, i.e., they valued unfair distributions in their own favour over equal outcomes, especially if rejecting advantageous inequity was costly. This pattern hints at contextualised gender-related fairness preferences that evolve with age that could depend on same- and cross-gender past interaction experiences.