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The Toy Brick as a Communicative Device for Amplifying Children’s Voices in Research

Активное внедрение в повседневную жизнь человека технических инноваций (роботы, системы smart hous, НБИК-технологии, игровые самообучающиеся ИИ-системы) способствовало организации и проведению социологического исследования, целью которого стало выявление отношения молодежи и людей старшего возраста к использованию роботизированной техники в быту. Для достижения цели был организован гибридный опрос: онлайн-анкетирование (100 человек) и глубинное интервью (6 человек). Выявлено амбивалентное отношение у обоих поколений (молодёжь и люди старшего возраста) к использованию роботизированной техники в повседневной жизни. Установлено, что люди старшего возраста показывают положительное отношение к робототехнике в быту; наделяют технику антропоморфными качествами и готовы впустить роботов в свой дом. При этом, удалось установить, что старшее поколение не готово и не желает разбираться во всех функциях робототехнических устройств. Результаты исследования показывают, что молодёжь положительно относится к внедрению роботов в повседневную жизнь, объясняя это упрощением жизни посредством передачи роботам бытовых обязанностей. Одновременно, молодое поколение не готово возлагать на роботов функции обеспечения безопасности жизни. На основе анализа результатов исследования, авторы приходят к выводу, что отношение молодежи и старшего поколения к внедрению робототехники в повседневную жизнь носит положительный, оптимистичный характер. Однако у молодежи и старшего поколения явно прослеживаются различия в восприятии роботов, разные причины переживаний и страхов применения роботов в быту, что обусловливает роль возрастных установок в процессе внедрения робототехники в повседневную жизнь. Active introduction of technical innovations into human daily life (robots, smart house systems, NBIC technologies, game self-learning AI systems) contributed to the organization and conduct of a sociological study, the purpose of which was to identify the attitude of young people and older people to the use of robotic technology in everyday life. To achieve the goal, a hybrid survey was organized: an online questionnaire (100 people) and an in-depth interview (6 people). The ambivalent attitude of both generations (youth and older people) to the use of robotic technology in everyday life was revealed. It has been established that older people show a positive attitude to robotics in everyday life; endow technology with anthropomorphic qualities and are ready to let robots into their home. At the same time, it was possible to establish that the older generation is not ready and does not want to understand all the functions of robotic devices. The results of the study show that young people have a positive attitude to the introduction of robots into everyday life, explaining this by simplifying life by transferring household duties to robots. At the same time, the younger generation is not ready to assign the functions of ensuring the safety of life to robots. Based on the analysis of the results of the study, the authors conclude that the attitude of young people and the older generation to the introduction of robotics in everyday life is positive, optimistic. However, young people and the older generation clearly have differences in the perception of robots, different reasons for experiences and fears of using robots in everyday life, which determines the role of age-related attitudes in the process of introducing robotics into everyday life.

In ‘Darkly Dreaming (in) Authenticity: The Self/Persona Opposition in Dexter,’ Glenn D'Cruz uses Dexter Morgan, the novelised serial killer and Showtime TV anti-hero to examine the connections between self and persona and the discourse of authenticity. D’Cruz foresees a series of challenges for persona studies and considers key concerns ahead, in terms of the critical vocabulary and scholarly agenda and addresses the need for critical genealogy of the term ‘persona’.

The key technologies of the modern information society are telecommunications and the Internet. To prepare the younger generation for life in this society, we need an education system that will be based on a cloud infrastructure and the use of its electronic educational resources. Every year more and more Ukrainian children use the Internet in everyday life. Any manufactured electronics today and planned for release tomorrow (desktops, laptops and netbooks, tablets and smartphones) certainly have a key function required for work in the World Wide Web - a browser. The use of cloud technologies, aimed at supporting open education, creates the conditions for organizing remote and mobile access not only to teaching materials, but also to learning tools placed on the Internet.

Making a Pig of the Humanities: Re-centering the Historical Narrative

Purpose of the study is to find out the interdependence of the event as a factor of transformations in the established areas of human life and everyday routine as a way of existence of social being, which cover various types of human activity. Theoretical basis of the research is based on understanding of everyday routine as a form of social reality, a complex and multidimensional object that is constantly evolving, includes new forms of reality, and is influenced by various social changes. The main function of everyday routine is the survival of individual and society, therefore the stable foundations of human existence play a dominant role in every life. In turn the event serves as a way of being existence, has a singular character, an individual expression, identifies elements that do not fit into the usual framework of everyday life. Originality of the obtained results lies in understanding event as the opposition of the phenomena world to the out of experience world of being, unexpected innovation that leads to the emergence of behaviours and structures that are new and unusual for everyday life. Event is not identical to empirical facticity, does not correspond to the usual understanding of phenomena and processes, and leads to a break from the everyday life, as it causes significant changes in human life on the individual and social levels. Unexpected change in everyday life caused by event is a traumatic collision with another dimension of being for an individual, as a result of it new meanings may open. Conclusions. On the background of everyday life, which is able to be in different states, function in a variety of relationships, to be manifested in numerous structures, junctions and connections, the event assumes the prospect of a new reality, contrary to previous representations. From existential point of view, event is always an interruption of everyday life, as for example, love or religious conversion. A large-scale event causes shocks that affect most or all individuals and communities that use multiple ways to react to an event – interpretation, selection, glorification, silence, valuations adjustment, phenomena, facts, celebration of holidays, rituals that are periodically repeated.

In his early lecture courses, Martin Heidegger exhibited an abiding interest in human life. He believed that human life has philosophical import while it is actually being lived; language has philosophical import while it is being spoken. In this book, Scott Campbell traces the development of Heidegger's ideas about factical life through his interest in Greek thought and its concern with Being. He contends that Heidegger's existential concerns about human life and his ontological concerns about the meaning of Being crystallize in the notion of Dasein as the Being of factical human life. Emphasizing the positive aspects of everydayness, Campbell explores the contexts of meaning embedded within life; the intensity of average, everyday life; the temporal immediacy of life in early Christianity; the hermeneutic pursuit of life's self-alienation; factical spatiality; the temporalizing of history within life; the richness of the world; and the facticity of speaking in Plato and Aristotle. He shows how Heidegger presents a way of grasping human life as riddled with deception but also charged with meaning and open to revelation and insight.

Reviewed by: Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games by Jaroslav Švelch Elisabeth van Meer (bio) Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. By Jaroslav Švelch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Pp. 400. Hardcover $45. The first monograph to appear in MIT's Game Histories series, Gaming the Iron Curtain offers an engaging, well-researched, and clearly organized social history of DIY gaming culture in 1980s Communist Czechoslovakia. It places the amateurs and teenagers who imported, "cracked," played, and circulated Czechoslovakia's gaming technologies deservedly front and center. Their inventions did not achieve the commercial success of Soviet-invented Tetris, and their pioneering political games did not end the Communist regime in 1989. Instead, Czechoslovak youths turned games into their medium of expression, carving out their own digital spaces despite the restrictions that life behind the Iron Curtain entailed. By analyzing games as continuous bricolage, Švelch greatly adds to our understanding of technological development, youthful agency, and "everyday life" during the final decade of state socialism. Gaming the Iron Curtain underscores that Communist power was not "monolith[ic]" but operated through "numerous rules" that gamers creatively "circumvented or subverted" (p. xxxiv). The book's first three chapters detail the tactics involved in assembling hardware in a "shortage economy." For although Czechoslovakia's authorities endorsed computing for productivity and education purposes, their production plan focused on mainframes and minis. The Federal Ministry of Electrotechnical Industry tried to game the lack of micros themselves by calling for "bottom-up" initiatives (p. 22). This resulted, by the mid-1980s, in the PMD 85, the IQ 151, and the Ondra (all using COMECON components), while agricultural cooperative Didaktik even managed to develop a home computer for retail with imported British ULA chips. Combined [End Page 702] domestic output, however, remained small. The Iron Curtain was only successfully gamed by committed enthusiasts who "hunted" down their hardware through individual Western imports (p. 38), preferring the British Sinclair ZX Spectrum—not the Atari—for its affordability and compatibility with local electronics. Hobbyists also gamed their own accessories (with DIY mice, joysticks, and keyboards) and repurposed furniture in cramped family apartments. All these individual acts of bricolage, Švelch stresses, were ultimately anchored in hundreds of computer clubs, embedded in state-sponsored youth and paramilitary organizations, across Czechoslovakia. By accepting official patronage, youths gamed access to local buildings where they could use computers, share technical know-how, exchange games, and communicate with peers, all largely uncensored. Czechoslovakia's gaming culture, including its national discourse on gaming, its informal distribution networks, its hobbyist and homebrew productions, and their expressive significance, is analyzed in the final four chapters. Drawing on interviews, club publications, and an impressive range of gaming technologies, Švelch finds that for many Czechoslovaks, "playing with the game was [as] rewarding as playing the game" itself (p. 118). This pro-hacking attitude was encouraged by hobbyists in charge of computer clubs but also necessitated by the scarcity of games. Czechoslovak authorities, moreover, did not consider games part of culture or politics (unlike Western music or dissident literature). They saw little reason (and lacked the knowledge) to stop youths from "poking," "cracking," "cloning," or "converting" Western originals. While engaged in such distribution bricolage, Švelch argues, youths learned to code and, by the mid-1980s, produced over two hundred originals for their peers. Text adventures (textovkas) became the hallmark of Czechoslovak gaming; amateurs employed the medium to comment on unofficial popular culture, on their local surroundings (e.g., turning one's mundane socialist dwelling into a text adventure); even political protests were incorporated into games just days from their occurrence. ("Text adventures" are a subset of games, dating back to the 1976 U.S. text-based game Adventure, in which the player controls the protagonist by typing in "verb+object" style commands [p. 175]. The Czech term textovka refers to text-based games in a broader sense, including "text-based management and strategy titles" and "hacking games" [p. 178].) In sum, Gaming the Iron Curtain offers a fascinating read for students and scholars of STS, history, and media studies alike...

BackgroundThe use of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) as an endpoint in cancer clinical trials is growing rapidly. Hence, research into the statistical approaches used to analyze HRQoL data is of major importance, and could lead to a better understanding of the impact of treatments on the everyday life and care of patients. Amongst the models that are used for the longitudinal analysis of HRQoL, we focused on the mixed models from item response theory, to directly analyze raw data from questionnaires.MethodsWe reviewed the different item response models for ordinal responses, using a recent classification of generalized linear models for categorical data. Based on methodological and practical arguments, we then proposed a conceptual selection of these models for the longitudinal analysis of HRQoL in cancer clinical trials.ResultsTo complete comparison studies already present in the literature, we performed a simulation study based on random part of the mixed models, so to compare the linear mixed model classically used to the selected item response models. As expected, the sensitivity of the item response models to detect random effects with lower variance is better than that of the linear mixed model. We then used a cumulative item response model to perform a longitudinal analysis of HRQoL data from a cancer clinical trial.ConclusionsAdjacent and cumulative item response models seem particularly suitable for HRQoL analysis. In the specific context of cancer clinical trials and the comparison between two groups of HRQoL data over time, the cumulative model seems to be the most suitable, given that it is able to generate a more complete set of results and gives an intuitive illustration of the data.

A non-anthropocentric humanism is almost a contradiction in terms. But I still propose just that. Humanism explicitly places human beings at the centre, as their dignity and well-being are the goal of this thinking. In the humanism of antiquity and the Renaissance, it was felt necessary to define man as opposed to gods, animals and things. Later, in Marxism, for example, the term delineates a contrast with social and technological developments that seem to have become so independent of human beings that they are harmful to them. It stands for an ideal humanity that is promoted by education or Bildung and the norms and practices of civility. Bildung is indeed the context in which it was coined.1 So far, this is a familiar narrative. In direct opposition to this ideal and the ideas behind it, many and prominent voices such as Latour, Haraway, Descola and Chakrabarty 2 call for a decentralisation of humanity, a new world view in which non-human beings and entities are not grouped around human beings in the centre and in which the division between nature and culture is obsolete. That culture and nature were ever seen as different at all is seen as a mistake, and the thinking around it as in need of correction. And indeed, even if one considers only human life and the atrocities that have been inflicted upon it, the idea seems to have failed horribly. Looking more broadly at the world as a whole, the multiple pressing ecological crises are leading many to question the centrality of humans in the world. The label Anthropocene for the age we are in further supports this questioning: a world in which human power is the strongest force and nothing can be clearly attributed to non-human influence can even be seen as a logical consequence of humanism. The idea of decentring human beings seems to be a necessary and overdue step. The efforts for human welfare that flow from humanism, which are central to education and the many ways in which humans care for each other and the non-human world, are an important part of human agency, but they are only a part of what human agency is capable of.

Making an Impact: Cultural Studies, Media and Contemporary Work

The article is devoted to the analysis of the history of everyday life as a component of the school history course. The author infers that mastering knowledge about the everyday life of people of another historical era allows us to avoid a simplistic and schematic attitude to the past. At the same time, a specific feature of school history in the first decades of the twenty-first century is the direct connection of historical local history with the events of everyday life in the past. The study of the history of everyday life makes it possible to illuminate the life of both a social group, a stratum, an individual family, and the entire state and civilization. The main subject of studying the history of everyday life is ordinary people’s everyday life, changes in their lives and changes in themselves that occur in time and space. The history of everyday life is the core of social history, as it considers human life as a subject of the historical process. Its study creates opportunities to better understand social processes and changes in society around the world.

Engineering is a discipline that not only covers numerous aspects of our everyday lives, but it also act as an integral part that govern our everyday life. This mean, without engineering, human life will be in distress. Engineers work to give practical solutions to everyday problems. An engineer not only need to apply theories, methods and tools where these are appropriate, but also to use them selectively and constantly trying to discover solutions to problem although there are no applicable theories and methods to support them. Engineers also realize that organizational and financial constraint is inevitable, thus the engineer has to look for solutions within these constraints. This paper presents the design of a smart handheld budget and tracker. The project involves three major phases which are hardware construction, software programming, and communication setup. Hardware construction requires wiring up the microcontroller as the 'brains' of the device to external input/output devices such as liquid crystal display (LCD), keypad and a radio frequency identification (RFID) reader. Software programming involves the programming of the microcontroller to interact with the earlier mentioned devices that is connected to the microcontroller to give the user choices for inputs as well as displaying it through the LCD screen. Lastly, communication setup will enable the smart handheld budget tracker interact with an external device such as personal computer and mobile phone.

Research has documented the ways in which students of Mexican origin are not succeeding academically in the same proportion as the rest of the US population. This process of educational failure occurs in the context of overt and more subtle forms of racism experienced throughout their schooling and everyday lives. Undocumented Mexican students face even harsher educational challenges as they experience life in a post‐September 11th environment of heightened xenophobic US nativism. The purpose of this three‐year study was to acknowledge the counter‐stories and learn from the counter‐life‐histories of undocumented college graduates of Mexican origin as they navigate across and between historical, socioeconomic, political and cultural boundaries, barriers and contexts. The research is grounded in the experiences, voices and perspectives of six individuals who graduated from a community college in Arizona. The study utilizes critical race theory (CRT) as an interpretive approach to both situate and challenge ahistorical, decontextualized, and one‐dimensional explanations of Mexican‐American underachievement and adopts a life history methodology to engage comprehensively with the perceptions of the interviewees.