94 research outputs found
Op soek na\u27n Mediabestel vir Suid·Afrika: \u27n Voorlopige antwoord aan Keyan Tomaselli
No full textCOMMUNICARE encourages the scientific debate. Our last contribu tion is published in response to the article of Tomaselli & Louw In 9(1), who questioned some of the predie tions regarding post-apartheid media In an earlier article by the author pub lished In 8(1). These are his repiles... Prof Keyan Tomaselli, Director of the Cultural Studies Unit at the University of Natal (Durban), is without doubt one of most prolific writers in the field of South African media and communication studies. This is not a matter of c tention; what is at stake in this review article Is the way in which Tomaselll deals with statements and facts in his pub lications. It is argued that Tomaselli Is prone to state a debatable point as a "scientific fact" and then proceeds to build a whole theoretical argument on this and similar "facts". It is fur ther argued that his article: \u27Vrye Weekblad\u27 and post-apartheld mania; what to do with the press? is a case In point
A portable massage devicedesigned for sedentary people
No full textLAUREA MAGISTRALEA scuola, passiamo la maggior parte del tempo seduti dietro i nostri banchi per la maggior parte della giornata. Al lavoro, facciamo lo stesso fissando lo schermo del computer. Molti di noi passano il tempo seduti anche durante gli spostamenti, in auto o con altri mezzi di trasporto. Poi, dopo una lunga giornata, torniamo a casa e riprendiamo la nostra abitudine alla sedentarietà davanti al computer o sul divano mentre guardiamo la televisione. È un ciclo difficile da spezzare, perché la scuola e la maggior parte dei lavori ci impongono di stare seduti per lunghi periodi di tempo. È un dato di fatto che lavoriamo in media circa 10 ore al giorno, il che significa che passiamo più tempo seduti che a dormire. Il corpo umano è stato progettato e si è evoluto per essere in attività, non per stare seduto. Il nostro stile di vita è in contrasto con le nostre esigenze biologiche e può essere disastroso per il nostro benessere generale. Potremmo non essere in grado di trascorrere molto tempo nella nostra vita facendo esercizio fisico, ed è per questo che abbiamo bisogno di un dispositivo di massaggio che possa fornire un sollievo tempestivo quando ci sentiamo a disagio. Il design di questo massaggiatore per sedentari è stato completamente studiato per soddisfare le esigenze delle persone sedentarie.In school, we spend most of our time sitting behind desks for most of the day. At work, we do the same, staring at the computer screen instead. Many of us also spend our time sitting while we commute, whether we use a car or other means of transportation. Then, after a long day, we go home and continue our sedentary habit again in front of our computer or on the couch while watching television. It is a tough cycle to break because school and most jobs essentially require us to sit for long periods. We work, on average, around 10 hours per day, meaning we spend more time sitting than sleeping. The human body has been designed and evolved to be in action, not stay seated. Our lifestyle is contrary to our biological needs and can harm our overall well-being.
We may not be able to spend much time working out and exercising ourselves, so we need a massage device to provide timely relief when we feel uncomfortable. The design of this massager for sedentary people has been thoroughly researched to meet the needs of sedentary people
Abrupt shift to hotter and drier climate over inner East Asia beyond the tipping point
No full textUnprecedented heatwave-drought concurrences in the past two decades have been reported over inner East Asia. Tree-ring–based reconstructions of heatwaves and soil moisture for the past 260 years reveal an abrupt shift to hotter and drier climate over this region. Enhanced land-atmosphere coupling, associated with persistent soil moisture deficit, appears to intensify surface warming and anticyclonic circulation anomalies, fueling heatwaves that exacerbate soil drying. Our analysis demonstrates that the magnitude of the warm and dry anomalies compounding in the recent two decades is unprecedented over the quarter of a millennium, and this trend clearly exceeds the natural variability range. The “hockey stick”–like change warns that the warming and drying concurrence is potentially irreversible beyond a tipping point in the East Asian climate system
Ethical Procedures? A Critical Intervention: The sacred, the profane, and the planet
No full textIssues relating to ethical clearance, how these procedures relate to very different ontologies, ways of making sense,conditions of existence, and the ideological implications thereof are critically discussed. Written as an invited intervention, the author takes readers through a variety of paradigms: indigenous approaches involving the sacred and the profane, instrumentalization of research; multispeciesism and research as a lived practice. Comments are offered on the nature of science and some questions are posed on the contradictions of ethical practices that readers encounter. The method is eclectic, read through a Peirceian pragmatism, and the outcome proposes relationality rather than the inevitability of discrete findings. Some conclusions are offered on the geographical distribution of populations sampled.</jats:p
A self-reflexive analysis of Communicare: Inter-paradigmatic repositioning
No full textThis partly autoethnographical account of my experiences as an author, editor and researcheroffers an experiential framework with which to make sense of publishing in the contemporaryera, governed as it is by neoliberal managerialist principles that tend to reduce activities tomeasureable units so as to render academic disciplines comparable. This is the context withinwhich Communicare is repositioning itself in communication and media studies, situated as it isbetween positivist communication science and interpretivist critical theory. Historical elements ofthe journal are examined via the author’s long-term association with it. The article ends with anexamination of the problems that scholarly work faces when universities measure finite productsat the expense of processes
CNN vs. SIFT for Image Retrieval: Alternative or Complementary?
No full textIn the past decade, SIFT is widely used in most vision tasks such as image retrieval. While in recent several years, deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) features achieve the state-of-the-art performance in several tasks such as image classification and object detection. Thus a natural question arises: for the image retrieval task, can CNN features substitute for SIFT? In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate that the two kinds of features are highly complementary. Following this fact, we propose an image representation model, complementary CNN and SIFT (CCS), to fuse CNN and SIFT in a multi-level and complementary way. In particular, it can be used to simultaneously describe scene level, object-level and point-level contents in images. Extensive experiments are conducted on four image retrieval benchmarks, and the experimental results show that our CCS achieves state-of-the-art retrieval results.CPCI-S(ISTP)[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
Encoding/Decoding, the transmission model and a court of law
No full textAbstract: Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model is discussed in terms of CS Peirce’s theory of the interpreter and interpretant. This historical semiotic window frames an example to which the Hall model was applied in South Africa to oppose a military dirty tricks campaign that involved a Supreme Court case brought against the Minister of Defence by the End Conscription Campaign (ECC) requiring him to cease his disinformation against the ECC. The Minister’s own expert had proposed a transmission model of communication that was defeated by the Peirce-Hall combination. The author argues that the model can be massively strengthened when combined with Peirceian semiotics
‘Twelve Years Later: Second ASSAf report on Research Publishing in and from South Africa (2018)’: Some issues arising
No full textAbstract:Responding to the extraordinary challenges facing publication in the digital age is the holistic view taken by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) on threats and opportunities that characterise this conjuncture. Twelve Years Later, researched by Wieland Gevers, Robin Crewe and Susan Veldsman on national publishing strategies, provides the ‘nuts ’n bolts’ that every researcher should know in order to navigate the changing environment.1 The Report examines both past and present. The first chapter reviews ASSAf’s 2006 report.2 Chapter 2 revisits the 2009 report on books. Chapter 3 details ASSAf’s Scholarly Publishing Programme between 2007 and 2018. How to enhance access of South African authors to global commercial publishers is discussed in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 deals with journal and book publishing, and Chapter 6 examines pitfalls and threats to good publishing practices. Outstanding problems are highlighted in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 offers recommendations. Appendices (45 pp) tabulate the hard data on which the study draws. These data showcase close correlations between the ASSAf qualitative evaluations and Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) decisions. Significantly, ASSAf ratings and reviews of publishers closely align with the international Socio-economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment (SENSE) and the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers ratings. The 2018 Report offers a detailed history useful for individual university policy planning, and implementation of monitoring mechanisms, and explains accreditation decisions. A basic cost–benefit analysis of the publication incentive system administered by DHET identifies residual problems. Notwithstanding these (see below), the statistics tabulated in Appendices by the Centre for Research, Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University reveals that DHET has been very effective in encouraging publication. It has also acted as an inhibiting factor in author choice of predatory journals, although many thousands of articles still slipped through...
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