Understanding Of Human Action Research Articles

Composition of virtual-real worlds and intelligence integration ofhuman-computer in mixed reality

Recent rapid developments in mixed reality and virtual reality have attracted worldwide attention. This technology has prospective uses in education, medicine, video games and other fields. Mixed reality is the composite of a virtual world and the real world, typically with virtual objects incorporated into a view-dependent visual scene. A wearable head-mounted display provides a basic tool for immersion in mixed reality scenes, and a computer provides virtual scenes that coordinate with the real world. The composition of virtual and real scenes is essentially the inter-embedding of different temporal and spatial scenes, and depends on interactions with spatial geometry and illumination of the environment, namely geometrical consistency and illumination consistency. In the sociological sense, the composition must also follow the law of human sociology and psychology, that is, behavioral consistency. Mixed reality provides a natural and intuitive interface between users and real and virtual worlds. Mixed reality, through the understanding of human action and behavior, intuitively connects the virtual and real world. Humans can understand the world through the observation of the composition of the virtual and real scenes, and immediately influence the virtual world through natural interaction, receiving intelligent feedback from the computer. Thus, immersive interaction and deep interaction between humans and computers can be realized. Technological improvements from non-wearable to wearable devices have allowed mixed reality to gain immersion; in advancing from static scenes to dynamic scenes, mixed reality gained social attributes; and progressing from specific virtual scenes to semantic analysis and visualization of big data, mixed reality becomes a platform for the integration of human and computer intelligence.

Thought, thoughts, and deflationism

Deflationists about truth embrace the positive thesis that the notion of truth is useful as a logical device, for such purposes as blanket endorsement, and the negative thesis that the notion doesn’t have any legitimate applications beyond its logical uses, so it cannot play a significant theoretical role in scientific inquiry or causal explanation. Focusing on Christopher Hill as exemplary deflationist, the present paper takes issue with the negative thesis, arguing that, without making use of the notion of truth conditions, we have little hope for a scientific understanding of human speech, thought, and action. For the reference relation, the situation is different. Inscrutability arguments give reason to think that a more-than-deflationary theory of reference is unattainable. With respect to reference, deflationism is the only game in town.

Justice as the Practice of Non-Coercive Action: A Study of John Dewey and Classical Daoism

ABSTRACTIn this essay, I will argue for an understanding of justice that is grounded in our imperfect world by drawing upon the works of John Dewey and the Classical Daoist philosophers. It will require a reconstructed understanding of persons as a field/continuum of interrelations and an updated understanding of human action and agency. This understanding of justice takes the form of non-coercive action, interaction that respects the particularity of each lived situation. The practice culminates in an ability to respond to the environment considered to be ziran (自然) or ‘self-so’ by the Daoist Philosophers. As described in the Dao De Jing, it is the cultivation of the ‘Three Jewels of the Dao’, the most central of them being compassion making, this practice of justice as non-coercive action also understandable as the practice of compassion as described by the Classical Daoist philosophers.

La (auto)responsabilidad y la idea de renovación del hombre y la cultura en la ética personalista de Husserl. Una aproximación desde el parricidio Karamázov

In this paper we examine Husserl's ethics contribution to the understanding of human action determined by self-responsibility. We admit that self-responsibility is that 'capacity' of any subject to take a reflective stance on himself and his life. In this sense, the subject only experiences fully being responsible when guides his reason in the multidimensionality of his actions, aiming at a personal and cultural renewal. To show this, we firstly analyze the project of renewal of man and culture in the personalist ethics proposed by Husserl, viewed from the history of parricide Karamazov. Secondly, we inquire about one of the two dimensions of human personality, self-awareness and presence of oneself, to approach the complex intentional act in which this self-consciousness takes place. Thirdly, we analyze how the ability of self-determination, the other key dimension of the person, makes possible the self-appraisal by which the new man values his actions, motives, means and ends. We conclude that the self guides his life in full participation and emotional manifestation out of experiences that strengthen the 'self' and the 'us'.

Weaner production with low antimicrobial usage: a descriptive study.

BackgroundHealth, productivity and antimicrobial use in the production of pigs are expected to be interrelated to some extent. Previous studies on register-based data have investigated these correlations with a subsequent large variation residing at the farm level. In order to study such farm factors in more detail we designed an elaborate interview-guide. By in-depth interviews of farmers with well-managed 7–30 kg (weaner) productions we sought to describe a set of common key-factors characterizing their management practices. Identification of such common practices could be used in follow-up projects, investigating whether identified factors really are characteristic for good-practicing famers.ResultsEleven farms were selected for a farm visit and in-depth interview. Participating farms used less antimicrobials than the national median (8.2 animal daily doses/100 weaners/day), had a mortality below the national average (2.9%) and an average daily weight gain above the national average (443 g/day). Similarities were observed among participating farms, including the sectioning of farms, use of all-in-all-out procedures with subsequent cleaning, purchasing 7 kg weaners from only one source, as well as active participation in management by a committed farm owner. Most farmers had a specific point of focus in their management, and were convinced that this was the reason for their success. This included; feeding, treatment strategy, refurbishment of facilities and presence in the shed.ConclusionAccording to register data, participating farms were alike; in the good league regarding use of antimicrobials, mortality and daily growth. However, on-farm interviews elucidated more heterogeneity among farmers than expected. Most of the farmers had a specific point of focus, which they considered to be crucial for their good results. These results indicate the importance of non-registerable factors, highlighting the value of qualitative study techniques in the understanding of human actions. Further studies on the effect of various farmer types are recommended.

Emotion Analysis and Classification: Understanding the Performers' Emotions Using the LMA Entities

AbstractThe increasing availability of large motion databases, in addition to advancements in motion synthesis, has made motion indexing and classification essential for better motion composition. However, in order to achieve good connectivity in motion graphs, it is important to understand human behaviour; human movement though is complex and difficult to completely describe. In this paper, we investigate the similarities between various emotional states with regards to the arousal and valence of the Russell's circumplex model. We use a variety of features that encode, in addition to the raw geometry, stylistic characteristics of motion based on Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). Motion capture data from acted dance performances were used for training and classification purposes. The experimental results show that the proposed features can partially extract the LMA components, providing a representative space for indexing and classification of dance movements with regards to the emotion. This work contributes to the understanding of human behaviour and actions, providing insights on how people express emotional states using their body, while the proposed features can be used as complement to the standard motion similarity, synthesis and classification methods.

As contribuições do gênero textual anúncio publicitário para o ensino- aprendizagem do francês: a capacidade de argumentar e a variedade linguística e cultural através da linguagem verbal e visual

Este artigo objetiva mostrar como a produção de anúncios publicitários pode contribuir para: i) a exposição dos alunos à pluralidade tanto linguística quanto cultural que raramente encontramos em livros didáticos; ii) o desenvolvimento da capacidade de argumentação dos alunos, por meio dos recursos verbais e visuais que caracterizam esse gênero textual. Para tanto, mostraremos o estudo do ensino-aprendizagem de língua estrangeira através de uma sequência didática e da produção de textos pertencentes ao gênero textual anúncio publicitário por alunos de Francês como Língua Estrangeira (FLE). Daremos especial atenção à linguagem verbal e visual articuladas para o ensino do francês e às contribuições do gênero anúncio publicitário para a compreensão dos aspectos culturais e linguísticos veiculados nos textos. Para isso, apoiamo-nos no quadro teórico-metodológico do interacionismo sociodiscursivo (BRONCKART, 1999, 2003, 2006, 2008), no que se refere à compreensão do agir humano através da atividade de linguagem e na união das categorias da Gramática do Design Visual (KRESS e VAN LEEUWEN, 2006), para nos auxiliar na análise de textos visuais. Palavras-chaves: Gênero textual anúncio publicitário. Interacionismo sociodiscursivo. Gramática do Design Visual. Ensino-aprendizagem. FLE. Capacidade de argumentação.

Embodiment in Children’s Choice

In the traditional framework of cognitive psychology, the brain—viewed as a device for manipulating arbitrary symbols—remains the organ of decision making. However, the dimension of embodiment should not be ignored in investigations of decision-making processes in tasks involving a motor response. Experimental research in developmental psychology has shown that perceptual-motor constraints affect the explicit choices infants and toddlers make in some tasks. In these situations, the ability to make action choices that were previously thought to be highly abstract now appears to be attributable to an embodied-cognition approach. These developments concerning embodiment in children’s choice, and their implication for our understanding of human voluntary action, form the subject of this article.

Interevent time distributions of human multi-level activity in a virtual world

Studying human behavior in virtual environments provides extraordinary opportunities for a quantitative analysis of social phenomena with levels of accuracy that approach those of the natural sciences. In this paper we use records of player activities in the massive multiplayer online game Pardus over 1238 consecutive days, and analyze dynamical features of sequences of actions of players. We build on previous work where temporal structures of human actions of the same type were quantified, and provide an empirical understanding of human actions of different types. This study of multi-level human activity can be seen as a dynamic counterpart of static multiplex network analysis. We show that the interevent time distributions of actions in the Pardus universe follow highly non-trivial distribution functions, from which we extract action-type specific characteristic “decay constants”. We discuss characteristic features of interevent time distributions, including periodic patterns on different time scales, bursty dynamics, and various functional forms on different time scales. We comment on gender differences of players in emotional actions, and find that while males and females act similarly when performing some positive actions, females are slightly faster for negative actions. We also observe effects on the age of players: more experienced players are generally faster in making decisions about engaging in and terminating enmity and friendship, respectively.

Foreign Military Presence and the Changing Practice of Sovereignty: A Pragmatist Explanation of Norm Change

Recent years have seen an increasing interest among international relations scholars in applications of pragmatist thought. Few works, however, have gone beyond discussing the epistemological and methodological implications of pragmatism. This article draws on a pragmatist understanding of human action to develop a novel explanation of norm change in contexts not amenable to more common analytical approaches. Specifically, concepts derived from pragmatism help explain how the creative recombination of practices by actors in response to changes in the material and social context of action can transform largely tacit notions of appropriate behavior. The article demonstrates the value of the approach by explaining the origin of a common contemporary security practice unknown prior to the Second World War and incompatible with the then-prevailing norms of sovereignty: the long-term, peacetime presence of one state's military on the territory of another equally sovereign state.

Genesis und Geltung zusammen denken. Hans Joas, interviewt von Malte Dreyer und Walter Zitterbarth

Abstract The following interview takes up and discusses central questions of Hans Joas’ theory of human rights. Joas explains how the genealogy of human rights relates to their validity and distinguishes his approach from others by stressing the emotive quality of values. He addresses the critique leveled at him of rooting human rights in religion and elaborates on what he terms the “sacredness of the person”. In doing so, he demonstrates that his version of universalism is rooted in the pragmatist understanding of human action which stresses the importance of experience, argument and narrative for the emergencies of values.

Simultaneous people tracking and motion pattern learning

The field of Human Robot Interaction (HRI) encompasses many difficult challenges as robots need a better understanding of human actions. Human detection and tracking play a major role in such scenarios. One of the main challenges is to track them with long term occlusions due to agile nature of human navigation. However, in general humans do not make random movements. They tend to follow common motion patterns depending on their intentions and environmental/physical constraints. Therefore, knowledge of such common motion patterns could allow a robotic device to robustly track people even with long term occlusions. On the other hand, once a robust tracking is achieved, they can be used to enhance common motion pattern models allowing robots to adapt to new motion patterns that could appear in the environment. Therefore, this paper proposes to learn human motion patterns based on Sampled Hidden Markov Model (SHMM) and simultaneously track people using a particle filter tracker. The proposed simultaneous people tracking and human motion pattern learning has not only improved the tracking robustness compared to more conservative approaches, it has also proven robustness to prolonged occlusions and maintaining identity. Furthermore, the integration of people tracking and on-line SHMM learning have led to improved learning performance. These claims are supported by real world experiments carried out on a robot with suite of sensors including a laser range finder.

Prolactin actions

Molecular genetics and other contemporary approaches have contributed to a better understanding of prolactin (PRL) actions at the cellular and organismal levels. In this review, several advances in knowledge of PRL actions are highlighted. Special emphasis is paid to areas of progress with consequences for understanding of human PRL actions. The impacts of these advances on future research priorities are analyzed.

History, Secularity, and the Problem of Catholic Seeing

But now we have found that the soul is immortal; and so her only refuge and salvation from evil is to become as perfect and wise as possible. For she takes nothing with her to the other world but her education and culture; and these, it is said, are of the greatest service or the greatest injury to the dead man, at the very beginning of his journey thither. PLATO, Phaedo The universe, created in and by the eternal Word, the image of the invisible God, is destined for and addressed to man, himself created in the image of God and called to a personal relationship with God. CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH WHAT MIGHT HISTORY LOOK LIKE if it were practiced and taught from a Catholic worldview? Is this even a legitimate question? Certainly there is at least some justification for raising it; after all, Catholicism makes claims about the why, how, and what of the world and the people who inhabit it (i.e., ontological claims), and it has much to say about the value of all these things and people (i.e., axiological claims). What strangely superfluous claims these would be, if they made no difference in how one understands the world of human action. Conversely, might not one's account suffer if, for one reason or another, one felt pressured or obliged to bracket ontological and axiological claims that have the potential to illuminate one's understanding of human action? And so, it would seem that there are reasonable grounds for the endeavor. All the same, the question is frustratingly elusive, threatening to evaporate the moment one touches it. To bring a religious point of view to bear upon the study of history cuts across the grain of received academic wisdom. It is simply a matter of common sense that the pursuit of truth must be unencumbered by personal commitments, value judgments, religious bias, and so on. So deeply engrained is this methodological common sense in the discipline of history--a common sense that history shares with the social and natural sciences in general--that any attempt to approach an academic discipline from a Catholic worldview is likely to sound a bit silly and Bible-schoolish, perhaps even heretical, not only to secular academics, but to many Catholic academics as well. One cannot simply ignore this and swim against the current. Without first understanding the in which this common sense operates, practicing an intellectual discipline with full and open Catholic intentionality is likely to run aground rather quickly or perhaps never even make it out of port. Therefore, the goal of this article will be relatively circumscribed and propaedeutic in nature. (1) My central argument is that the common sense that seems to preclude, or at least marginalize religious insight in the practice and teaching of history and other academic disciplines is itself the manifestation of a worldview, a way of seeing, characterized especially by naturalism. It is all too common to adopt what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the Enlightenment prejudice against prejudice, and mistake this naturalistic worldview as if it were the view of a neutral observer, or some democratically chosen common denominator among all views. (2) Such is the blindness to which the world of education has long been prone. As will become clear in the course of this article, I think this pervasive masking of a naturalistic worldview as either a scientific or democratic method is a source of the deep and widespread confusion in the world of Catholic education. (3) Therefore, what follows is the beginning of a critical project, the goal of which is to clear and prepare a space for Catholic seeing in the practice and teaching of academic disciplines such as history. This project hinges upon coming to a critical awareness of worldview as a hermeneutic problem. How the Problem Manifests Itself: Everywhere I go, I see you ONE EVENING AT DINNER ... Some time ago, at a conference in which the question of religion and history seemed to knock persistently on the door, I witnessed a dinner conversation as fascinating as it was puzzling. …

Understanding goal-directed human actions and physical causality: The role of mother–infant interaction

This study addresses the relation between early cognitive development and mother–infant interaction. Infants at the age of 6 and 10 months recruited from labs in three European countries – Germany, Great Britain, and France – were tested on two cognitive tasks: understanding of goal-directed human action and physical causality. Mother–infant interaction was assessed with the CARE-Index. In the goal-directed action task, the overall sample of the 6-month olds did not yet reliably discriminate between an object-change and a path-change trial while a subsample of infants of modestly controlling mothers did. All infants at 10 months of age showed discrimination. In the physical causality task, the overall sample of the 6-month olds did not yet reliably discriminate between an expected and an unexpected launching event. At 10 months of age, the overall sample showed discrimination, due to the major subsample of infants of highly sensitive mothers. Our findings support the view that exogenous factors influence cognitive development within a particular time window, in highly specific ways, depending on the age of the subjects, the cognitive domain, and the quality of mother–infant interaction.

Quaestio Disputata the Recovery of Aquinas's Action Theory: A Reply to William Murphy

The article addresses a recent claim regarding Aquinas's understanding of voluntary human action; namely, that moral species is determined by an object that functions as the proximate end of a chosen behavior. This reply examines the context of the argument, the text on which the argument is said to be based, and Aquinas's more specific texts in regard to formulating a moral intention to an end and choosing a way to accomplish that end.

Tradition in the Work of Shils and Polanyi

Tradition in the Work of Shils and Polanyi

HAVING KNOW‐HOW: INTELLECT, ACTION, AND RECENT WORK ON RYLE'S DISTINCTION BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE‐HOW AND KNOWLEDGE‐THAT

AbstractStanley and Williamson reject Ryle's knowing‐how/knowing‐that distinction charging that it obstructs our understanding of human action. Incorrectly interpreting the distinction to imply that knowledge‐how is non‐propositional, they object that Ryle's argument for it is unsound and linguistic theory contradicts it. I show that they (and their interlocutors) misconstrue the distinction and Ryle's argument. Consequently, their objections fail. On my reading, Ryle's distinction pertains to, not knowledge, but an explanatory gap between explicit and implicit content, and his argument for it is sound. I defend the distinction's necessity in explaining human action and show that it propels a fruitful explanatory program.

A teoria sociológica contemporânea: da superdeterminação pela teoria à historicidade

Ao se situar no campo da metateoria, o presente trabalho tem por objetivo discutir uma das principais premissas que está subjacente à sociologia contemporânea: a historicidade. Contrapondo-se à teoria sociológica desenvolvida entre as décadas de 1940 e 1970, as "novas sociologias" têm procurado ultrapassar um pressuposto epistemológico daquele período - a superdeterminação pela teoria. Nesse esforço, têm outorgado à ideia de historicidade uma posição central no entendimento da ação humana. Constituindo-se como aberturas para o futuro (seu componente de "liberdade"), a ação, longe de ser um processo "cego", sempre revela necessariamente tanto o seu enraizamento no mundo social e físico quanto a possibilidade de transcender essa situação.

Making ubiquitous computing available

Introduction The field of ubiquitous computing was inspired by Mark Weiser's vision of computing artifacts that disappear. "They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are ind...