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The Radical Writing Podcast Episode 3 - The Page as Landscape: Harriet Tarlo’s Ground Aslant with Dr Amil Mohanan and Associate Professor Kate Grandjouan
No full textHow do you write a landscape? Associate Professor of Art History Kate Grandjouan and cultural geographer and data scientist Dr Amil Mohanan join me to discuss place, poetry, and inconclusive endings. The Ground Aslant, an anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry is edited by Harriet Tarlo and was published by Shearsman in 2011. It features poetry by some of the U.K.’s most prominent landscape poets such as Peter Riley, Zoe Skoulding and Frances Presley, as well as Tarlo herself. This is the only text in the Radical Writing Podcast series to have ‘radical’ in the name, and Tarlo explains that the genre reaches for a broad but definite aim of radicality in terms of form, language and subject. Play, in both how the poem appears on the page and in what it explores, is key to approaching the work, and the genre is purposely difficult to pin down. The poetry moves beyond the rose-tinted pastoral, but recognises its enduring presence in the fields and lanes of Britain, and touches on the politics of ecopoetry, without being subsumed into it. As Tarlo writes, the territory of these poems lie ‘betwixt and between’, both in terms of their engagement with, and positioning between, the pastoral and ecopoetic genres, and in the innovative linguistic games they play with sound, sense, and form, and, ultimately, language’s slippery relationship with place
Virtual Influencers in Social Media versus the Metaverse: Mind Perception, Blame Judgements and Brand Trust
No full textThe rise of virtual influencers (VIs) in digital marketing channels, such as social media platforms and the metaverse, raises critical, under-researched questions about blame attribution to these digital entities and its subsequent impact on brand trust. Our research addresses this gap by applying the theoretical lens of mind perception to two studies using an experimental causal chain design approach. Study 1 revealed that consumers attribute higher mind perception to a human VI and consequently place more blame on them in negative scenarios compared to AI-powered VI. Additionally, we found that perceived mind perception was unaffected by the digital channel (social media versus metaverse). Study 2 demonstrated that brand trust diminishes more significantly when an AI-powered VI is blamed compared to a human VI. These insights contribute to understanding the psychological mechanism of blame judgement towards VIs, and highlight the importance for brands to consider the repercussions of using AI-powered VI
Can sign-naïve adults learn about the phonological regularities of an unfamiliar sign language from minimal exposure?
Get PDFAdults can extract phonological regularities from just several minutes’ exposure to naturalistic input of an unknown spoken language (Gullberg et al., 2010). We examined whether such implicit statistical learning mechanisms also operate in the sign language modality. The input materials consisted of a continuous sign stream in the form of a weather forecast in Svenskt Teckenspråk (STS). L1-speakers of English with no prior knowledge of a sign language were assigned to two experimental groups who watched the forecast once (N=43) or twice (N=38), and a control group who did not watch it (N=40). Participants completed a ‘surprise’ lexical decision task designed to tap into their awareness of the phonological properties of the core STS lexicon. They viewed individual signs and indicated whether or not these could be real STS signs. The signs comprised four sets: STS signs that (1) were presented, and (2) were not presented, in the forecast; and signs that are not STS signs and (3) contain handshapes outside the STS handshape inventory, and (4) contain sets of phonological features that are dispreferred across sign languages. We found no evidence of any learning of STS phonological regularities. Considered in conjunction with two companion studies which did demonstrate some learning of sign forms and their meanings from these same input materials, our findings suggest limits to what can be learnt after just a few minutes of implicit and naturalistic exposure to language in an unfamiliar modality: information about specific lexical items is learnable, but information that requires generalisation across items may require greater amounts, or a different quality, of input
Creativity, Agency, and AI
No full textAbstract: We can formulate an argument against AI creativity from agency. By some accounts, creativity requires agency, and agency is, many think, not possible for AI. This is due to the typical conception of agency as a capacity for intentional action. Intentional action is thought to require mental states, a severe challenge for machine intelligence. On the face of things, the agency argument seems to provide a straightforward route to argue for the impossibility of AI creativity. However, this path, I argue, is not so clear. In this paper, I outline the agency argument against AI creativity, before calling into question the apparent simplicity of this argument. I argue, ultimately, that the reasoning behind the inclusion of agency in accounts of creativity does not necessitate the use of intentional action, but can instead be satisfied by a minimal teleological account of agency
Rethinking Experts’ Perceptions in Money Laundering Risk Assessment
Get PDFThis paper examines the factors that infuence experts’ risk assessments of money laundering in the context of anti-money laundering (AML) measures. Employing a mixedmethods approach, a survey was frst administered to 1497 AML risk assessment experts,
followed by semi-structured interviews with nine selected AML experts. The study’s fndings suggest that AML experts often heavily rely on their organization’s established risk
response frameworks, sometimes at the expense of not exercising independent judgment.
Personal biases, including preconceived notions about risk and fear of facing repercussions
for independent judgment, signifcantly infuence risk assessments. Based on these results
and guidance from the literature, we propose a new decision framework aimed at shedding
light on the mediating strategies employed by AML experts during risk assessment. The
proposed framework ofers valuable insights into the role of expert judgment in assessing money laundering risk for AML-regulated entities, with a particular focus on fnancial
institutions aiming to enhance their risk assessment frameworks
Maps to Arkham Great Writing 2024 Presentation
No full textThe horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is an enduring figure in contemporary genre writing and his legacy continues to shape the field of weird fiction. But he is a controversial character and, on a line by line level, a poor writer, and responding to his work prompts multiple challenges for the contemporary creative writer. My collection, Maps to Arkham, seeks to understand and disrupt this legendary figure through a series of visual poems which respond to Lovecraft’s attitudes towards language, walking and the landscape. This presentation examines the artistic process of détournement, as theorized by the avant-garde Situationist group, and other visual poets’ approach to the concept, and contextualizes my own digital appropriation of Lovecraft’s fiction. Maps to Arkham provides a framework by which experimental poetry can write through a historical figure, both confronting and parodying them, and poses questions for the role of design software in visual poetry
Mobilkit: A Python Toolkit for Urban Resilience and Disaster Risk Management Analytics using High Frequency Human Mobility Data
Get PDFIncreasingly available high-frequency location datasets derived from smartphones provide unprecedented insight into trajectories of human mobility. These datasets can play a significant and growing role in informing preparedness and response to natural disasters. However, limited tools exist to enable rapid analytics using mobility data, and tend not to be tailored specifically for disaster risk management. We present an open-source, Python-based toolkit designed to conduct replicable and scalable post-disaster analytics using GPS location data. Privacy, system capabilities, and potential expansions of \textitMobilkit are discussed
Defining Functional Illiteracy to Empower Inclusive Technology Design
Get PDFLimited literacy presents a significant challenge in HCI research, yet the field lacks consistent definitions and measurement
criteria. Researchers often interchange terms such as 'functional illiterates,' 'low literates,' and 'semi-literates,' further
complicating the field. This paper conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) of 33 HCI studies, revealing concerns about
the absence of a definition in 41% of the studies and the lack of measurement technique in 74%. Based on the results from
our SLR and relevant research beyond HCI, we propose the following work-in-progress definition. 'Functional illiterates are
motivated adults with some familiarity with text but insufficient to fully comprehend meanings and low skills in the
measured digital skill, with enough language proficiency in the study language if they are literate in their native language.
This understanding, coupled with addressing the identified issues, will empower the HCI4D community to design more
inclusive technology solutions for functionally illiterate users in developing countries
Moorgate, Enfield, Edmonton and Hampstead: The Cross-City Migrations of John Keats
Get PDFThis chapter presents new interpretations of John Keats’s poems in the context of his relationship to London. Born in Moorfield, Keats spent his school years between semi-rural Enfield and Edmonton, then moved to Southwark to pursue his medical studies, before settling in what was then suburban Hampstead. The chapter argues that Keats’s migrations between the city centre and its surroundings shaped his representation of nature in his poems. It also addresses London's geographical expansion in the early nineteenth century, which was reshaping the relationship between the urban and the rural, and reads Keats's poetry as a vehicle for transporting some of the nature which had been lost back into the city. The chapter argues for the continuing resonance of these ideas for Londoners today, and in the context of the edited collection, it makes the case for both migrations from the surrounding countryside and cross-city migrations as significant parts of the history of London and migration
Ethical dilemma arises from optimising interventions for epidemics in heterogeneous populations
Get PDFInterventions to mitigate the spread of infectious diseases, while succeeding in their goal,
have economic and social costs associated with them. These limit the duration and intensity
of the interventions. We study a class of interventions which reduce the reproduction number
and find the optimal strength of the intervention which minimises the final epidemic size for an
immunity inducing infection. The intervention works by eliminating the overshoot part of an
epidemic, and avoids a second-wave of infections. We extend the framework by considering a
heterogeneous population and find that the optimal intervention can pose an ethical dilemma
for decision and policy makers. This ethical dilemma is shown to be analogous to the trolley
problem. We apply this optimisation strategy to real world contact data and case fatality rates
from three pandemics to underline the importance of this ethical dilemma in real world scenarios.