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Queer and Trans life: anthropological futures
No full textBook synopsis: Against a background marked by endless ordinary crises, widespread precarity, and disrupting critical events, Queer and Trans Life charts queer investments for the future. It examines the challenges and pleasures in marginal everyday experiences of gender and sexual dissidence and the labours of care and endurance which sustain a sense of sociality and community, often against all odds. It presents queer and trans anthropological research from emerging European contexts. Though occasionally posited as non-belonging, the volume demonstrates that queer anthropology in Europe continues to thrive by providing textured ethnographic analysis and timely interventions in anthropological theory
Communicated priors tune the perception of control
Get PDFAction allows us to shape the world around us. But to act effectively we need to accurately sense what we can and cannot control. Classic theories across cognitive science suppose that this ‘sense of agency’ is constructed from the sensorimotor signals we experience as we interact with our surroundings. But these sensorimotor signals are inherently ambiguous, and can provide us with a distorted picture of what we can and cannot influence. Here we investigate one way that agents like us might overcome the inherent ambiguity of these signals: by combining noisy sensorimotor evidence with prior beliefs about control acquired through explicit communication with others. Using novel tools to measure and model control decisions, we find that explicit beliefs about the controllability of the environment alter both the sensitivity and bias of agentic choices; meaning that we are both better at detecting and more biased to feel control when we are told to expect it. These seemingly paradoxical effects on agentic choices can be captured by a computational model where expecting to be in control exaggerates the sensitivity or ‘gain’ of the mechanisms we use to detect our influence over our surroundings – making us increasingly sensitised to both true and illusory signs of agency. In combination, these results reveal a cognitive and computational mechanism that allows public communication about what we can and cannot influence to reshape our private sense of control
Testing 1, 2, 3 (on software testing and why it's interesting even to non-developers/non-coders)
No full textMy current coding focus, though, is writing so-called “unit tests” for our next generation of software (the aforementioned Profiles system). In many ways, these are tedious but necessary. It’s repetitive work and it doesn’t produce anything exciting to show end-users. However, I guess I do think that software unit testing is really interesting even for non-coders to understand: because it’s quite a simple way that you can learn how modern coding practices try to ensure software correctness, which affects absolutely everyone who uses a computer
Collective Funding Models for Open Access Books
No full textIf anything is destined to dissuade scholars of the value of open access for books, it is, most likely, to be the imposition of an unrealistic Book Processing Charge. Yet, this is hardly the only way in which we can fund the publishing labour of open, digital scholarship. In this talk, Professor Martin Paul Eve will cover the histories of collective funding models for open access and set out a the challenges and opportunities that they present
Recognition, craft and the elusiveness of 'Good Work'
Get PDFThis article seeks to challenge existing understandings of good work. It does so through a critical exploration of recognitive and craft conceptions of work, which are among the richest and most philosophically nuanced of extant accounts. The recognitive view emphasises work’s recognitive value through the social esteem derived from making a valuable social contribution. But by making recognition foundational, it is unable to appreciate the irreducible ethical significance of the objective quality of one’s work activity. The ‘craft ideal’, by contrast, promises to provide a powerful basis for understanding the importance of rich, rewarding, and morally educative activities, but is undermined by a laudable but misdirected egalitarian impulse which prevents it from being able to properly distinguish good from bad work. One underlying aim of our discussion is to provoke deeper reflection from business ethicists regarding what we might want from an account of good work
A natural experiment in education reform: the case of upper-secondary curriculum compression
No full textWe use a change in Iceland’s education system as a natural experiment to measure the effect of years spent in upper-secondary school on subsequent first-year outcomes at university. The duration of Iceland’s upper-secondary education was shortened by one year through compression of the curriculum. We find that shorter upper-secondary education, three years instead of the previous four, leads to first-year university students completing fewer credits, getting a lower average grade in completed courses, and being more likely to drop out. We find that this negative effect of the reform disproportionately affected the academic performance of male students and those who previously demonstrated weaker academic abilities, thus increasing academic disparities
How long is long‑term? Comparing decadal and centennial‑scale insect diversity dynamics
No full textAnthropogenic changes to the environment are leading to a decrease in global biodiversity, with the aquatic insect fauna being particularly affected. Information on insect loss trends is mainly based on decadal-scale monitoring data, which does not allow natural baselines to be established, or for the impacts of multiple anthropogenic drivers to be separated. Here, we present decadal- and centennial scale datasets of chironomid diversity change and quantitatively compare changes in chironomid diversity resulting from climate change and anthropogenic impacts. Our decadal-scale data show changes in community composition for a set of lakes near Bergen (Norway) between 1996 and 2019, but trends in diversity change were not unidirectional across the twenty study sites. We additionally analysed temporal trends in chironomid communities in sediment records obtained from two of the study sites in order to provide a centennial-scale perspective to the observed recent changes. The sediment records date back to ca. 800 CE, and on these longer timescales the effects of climate on insect diversity are clearly identifiable and quantifiable. By using a palaeoecological approach, we show that the decadal-scale data did not capture the full extent of human-induced insect dynamics in this region. We conclude that palaeoecological records contribute unique insights on baseline conditions, effects of individual drivers and long-term diversity trends. Such information is key for effective ecosystem restoration and insect conservation
Integrating behavioral semantic analysis in usage-based equivalent tests generation for mobile applications
No full textGraphical user interface (GUI) testing is crucial to ensure the expected behaviors of mobile applications (apps). The burgeoning automated usage-based testing seeks to generate simulated human interactions tailored to functional features of apps. However, the difficulties in understanding UI semantics, along with the multiple implementation alternatives, significantly restrict the ability to exercise a specified usage. In this paper, we propose GUEST (Generating Usage-based Equivalent TeSTs), which automates the generation of multiple equivalent tests for GUI usage to help developers more thoroughly test mobile apps' features. GUEST integrates textual information from state pages with the UI structure to express operational GUI widgets with semantic information. It leverages the semantic coverage of edge links within the state transition graph of state-machine encoding for the usage to match canonical screens for the current state page. To exploit behavioral semantics, GUEST treats the state transition graph as a social network and performs centrality analysis to identify key canonical screens in the state transition graph. By utilizing the intimacy between key screens and candidate widgets' reachable screens, GUEST grants higher priority to frequently used and more accessible actions. We evaluate GUEST on desired usages across 22 popular apps and the results reveal that GUEST can successfully exercise the desired usage in 88% of the tests and outperform the state-of-the-art baseline method in both screen and widget classification performance
Pentecostal migrant entrepreneurs doing identity work: complying and contesting faith and gendered neoliberal subjectivities in Britain
No full textThis chapter critically examines how migrant entrepreneurs who are of the Pentecostal faith shape their identities while navigating their entrepreneurial journeys in the context of neoliberal Britain. Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing Christian denomination in the UK and is especially popular among migrant communities. Research on migrant entrepreneurship has generally overlooked the role of religion in explaining the motivations, strategies, and outcomes of entrepreneurship, particularly for migrant entrepreneurs. Moreover, studies looking at the intersection of gender and religion in this context have been insufficient. Drawing on fieldwork vignettes featuring two of our research participants, we illustrate how women entrepreneurs, while adhering to traditional family structures where collective strategies align with the husband's/patriarch's goals, emphasise education and self-improvement, enabling them to adapt and succeed in their entrepreneurial endeavours. For male business owners, entrepreneurship allows them to reconcile their Christian faith with new forms of hybrid masculinities within the household. Both male and female entrepreneurs rely on their religious identity and values to become successful in the context of neoliberalism.
Keywords
Religion, migrant entrepreneurship, gender, Pentecostalism, neoliberalism, UK
Aristotle's parts of animals: a critical guide
No full textOn the Parts of Animals (PA) is our main source for Aristotle’s explanations of animal character. This he locates in the qualities of an animal’s blood (or it’s analogue), whether it is hot, cold, thick, then, turbid or pure (PA II.2, 651a16). This chapter sets out the main debate about character in Aristotle’s biological writings, whether it is formal or material, and argues that it is part of an animals’ material nature. While the materials existing in the blood vessels are not put there for the purpose of underlying character, they are often utilised for this end, displaying a complex coordination of material and formal natures. The chapter ends with a detailed analysis of which fluid elements in the body are responsible for underlying character and at which point they emerge in the digestive process. This further clarifies the relationship between animal bodies, nutritive processes, and the character potentials animals possess
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