Books on the topic 'Human-building interactions'

This article presents a brief overview of the background of trust research and its relevance. It then introduces a framework for trust in mediated interactions that draws on existing models and findings, and applies this to human trust in other humans, organizations (e.g., e-commerce vendors), and technology (e.g., websites). Beyond incorporating variables related to the trusting and the trusted actor, the framework accommodates key contextual factors. Rather than treating trustworthiness as a relatively stable attribute of the trusted actor, the framework considers how trustworthiness is influenced by these contextual factors. This framework will help researchers in aligning disparate research findings and it may be a step towards building a theory of trust in human–computer interactions. For designers, the benefit lies in helping them to fully explore the available design space of systems fostering trust in mediated interactions.

This chapter reviews the evolution of development thought from the Second World War to date, tracing the dynamics and interactions between the circumstances that countries faced, economic thought, and policies. It shows that on gaining independence, countries first aimed to promote economic growth, and while this was quite successful, problems emerged and the human dimension was neglected. A succession of alternatives, including the basic needs approach, was displaced by the debt crisis and stabilization in the 1980s, with very harsh consequences for poverty. The human development approach arose then, with the 1990 Human Development Report, building on basic needs and Sen’s capabilities approach. The chapter traces subsequent developments, including global agreements such as the Millennium Development Goals, and subsequently the Sustainable Development Goals, which can be seen as embodiments of the human development approach.

Molecular biology is the story of the molecules of life, their relationships, and how these interactions are controlled. Its applications are wide and growing; the power of molecular biology can now be harnessed to treat diseases, solve crimes, map human history, and produce genetically modified organisms and crops. Starting with the building blocks established by Darwin, Wallace, and Mendel, and the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, Molecular Biology: A Very Short Introduction considers the wide range of applications for molecular biology today, including the development of new drugs and DNA fingerprinting, and looks forward to two key areas of evolving research: personalized medicine and synthetic biology.

Theories of embodied interaction and environmental coupling are now successfully struggling with the slippery notions of mind, matter, and sociality, but more empirical work is required, especially in relation to children. At the heart of the development of sociality is how the handling of objects in parent-child interaction may stand out as having expressive (gestural) qualities over and above their instrumental aspects. What sort of expressive qualities may be found in such actions, and what provides for them? In short, how do they come to mean? Using longitudinal recordings of five Swedish children between 18 and 30 months, the empirical part of this paper identifies microecologies of expression that have their basis in how human bodies handle objects. This accompanies an approach to intersubjectivity—building on the work of Schutz, Mead and Merlau-Ponty—that views it as emergent from embodied interaction.

The completion of the first draft of the human genome has led to an explosion of interest in genetics and molecular biology. The view of the genome as a network of interacting computational components is well-established, but researchers are now trying to reverse the analogy, by using living organisms to construct logic circuits. The potential applications for such technologies is huge, ranging from bio-sensors, through industrial applications to drug delivery and diagnostics. This book would be the first to deal with the implementation of this technology, describing several working experimental demonstrations using cells as components of logic circuits, building toward computers incorporating biological components in their functioning.

This volume makes a unique contribution to music theory by building on recent research in cognitive science and theoretical perspectives adopted from cognitive linguistics to present an account of the foundations of musical grammar. Musical grammar is conceived of as a species of construction grammar, in which grammatical elements are form-function pairs. In the case of music, basic constructions are sonic analogs for dynamic processes that are central to human cultures. This volume focuses on three such processes: those related to emotions, to gestures, and to dance. The first chapter introduces the volume and explains how this approach connects with previous work in music theory. The second chapter reviews research on analogy and shows how it provides a basis for analogical reference, which is fundamental to musical grammar. The third chapter describes the connection between music and the emotions facilitated by analogical reference. The fourth chapter explores connections between human gesture and musical utterances, and shows how both rely on the infrastructure for human communication that is also exploited by language. The fifth chapter demonstrates how music provides sonic analogs for the steps of social dances, and how music combined with dance has been used to structure social interactions. The sixth chapter focuses on the combination of language and music that occurs in songs, making clear how the different grammatical resources offered by music and language shape how meaning is constructed in songs. Detailed musical analyses are offered in each chapter, as well as summaries of the basic elements of musical grammar.

This volume presents theoretical discussions, methodological outlines, and case-studies describing the discursive overlap of the theoretical and methodological framework of historical ecology, and the emerging sub-discipline of applied archaeology. Historical ecology is based on the recognition that humans are not only capable of modifying their environments, but that all environments on earth have already been directly or indirectly modified. This includes anthropogenic climate change, widespread deforestations, and species extinctions, but also very local alterations, the effects of which may last a few years, or may have legacies lasting centuries or more. The volume presents a range of case-studies that highlight how modern environments and landscapes have been shaped by humans, and includes outlines of the methods we can use to better understand these changes. Authors include anthropologists, archaeologists, human geographers, and historians, all of whom are focussed not just on defining human impacts in the past, but on the ways that understanding these changes can help inform contemporary practices and development policies. Some present examples of how ancient or current societies have modified their environments in sustainable ways, while others highlight practices that had unintended long-term consequences. The possibility of learning from these practices are discussed, as is the potential of using the long history of human resource exploitation as a method for building or testing models of future change. Rather than merely acting as advocates for historical data, the chapters collected here also warn of the limitations of drawing simple lessons from the history of interactions between humans and their environments, and note that doing so is potentially just as damaging as ignoring these rich sources of data.

Australia's unique biodiversity is under threat from a rapidly changing climate. The effects of climate change are already discernible at all levels of biodiversity – genes, species, communities and ecosystems. Many of Australia's most valued and iconic natural areas – the Great Barrier Reef, south-western Australia, the Kakadu wetlands and the Australian Alps – are among the most vulnerable. But much more is at stake than saving iconic species or ecosystems. Australia's biodiversity is fundamental to the country's national identity, economy and quality of life. In the face of uncertainty about specific climate scenarios, ecological and management principles provide a sound basis for maximising opportunities for species to adapt, communities to reorganise and ecosystems to transform while maintaining basic functions critical to human society. This innovative approach to biodiversity conservation under a changing climate leads to new challenges for management, policy development and institutional design. This book explores these challenges, building on a detailed analysis of the interactions between a changing climate and Australia's rich but threatened biodiversity. Australia's Biodiversity and Climate Change is an important reference for policy makers, researchers, educators, students, journalists, environmental and conservation NGOs, NRM managers, and private landholders with an interest in biodiversity conservation in a rapidly changing world.

This book focuses on the law and politics of rights protection in democracies, and in human rights regimes in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. After introducing the basic features of modern constitutions, with their emphasis on rights and judicial review, the authors present a theory of proportionality that explains why constitutional judges embraced it. Proportionality analysis is a highly intrusive mode of judicial supervision: it permits state officials to limit rights, but only when necessary to achieve a sufficiently important public interest. Since the 1950s, virtually every powerful domestic and international court has adopted proportionality as the central method for protecting rights. In doing so, judges positioned themselves to review all important legislative and administrative decisions, and to invalidate them as unconstitutional when they fail the proportionality test. The result has been a massive—and global—transformation of law and politics. The book explicates the concepts of “trusteeship,” the “system of constitutional justice,” the “effectiveness” of rights adjudication, and the “zone of proportionality.” A wide range of case studies analyze: how proportionality has spread, and variation in how it is deployed; the extent to which the U.S. Supreme Court has evolved and resisted similar doctrines; the role of proportionality in building ongoing “constitutional dialogues” with the other branches of government; and the importance of the principle to the courts of regional human rights regimes. While there is variance in the intensity of proportionality-based dialogues, such interactions are today at the heart of governance in the modern constitutional state and beyond.

In the new edition of the Oxford Textbook of Neurorehabilitation all chapters have been updated to reflect advances in knowledge in the field of neurorehabilitation. It will be supplemented by additional chapters that reflect novel developments in the field of neurorehabilitation. During recent years there has been a strong evolution in the field of vocational rehabilitation with the aim of helping people after an injury of the nervous system to overcome the barriers and return to employment. A new chapter on self-management strategies deals with building confidence in individuals to manage the medical and emotional aspects of their condition. Furthermore, today the scientific basis for music supported therapy is a much broader to introduce it in this edition. New guidelines and consensus statements became established concerning preclinical research, biomarkers, and outcome measures, in both animal models and human beings. There are new data on attempts (e.g. using stem cells or Nogo antibodies) to restore function after spinal cord injury and stroke. Not all of these therapies and clinical trials have had positive outcomes. One particular area of rapid expansion reflects the use of technology in neurorehabilitation and several chapters remain devoted to this topic in various forms. Still a better understanding of the interactions of technology led therapies and conventional approaches in patients with neurodisability is required. There is still work to be done in defining key components of all neurorehabilitation interventions in order to understand how they might best be delivered for maximum benefit.

What is musical time? Where is it manifested? How does it show up in our experience, and how do we capture it in our analyses? Enacting Musical Time offers several answers to these questions by considering musical time as the form of the listener’s interaction with music. Building on evidence from music theory, phenomenology, cognitive science, and social anthropology, the book develops a philosophical and critical argument that musical time is created by the moving bodies of participants engaged in musical activities. The central thesis is that musical time describes the form of a specific kind of interaction between musical sounds and a situated, embodied listener. This musical time emerges when the listener enacts his or her implicit kinesthetic knowledge about “how music goes”—knowledge expressed in the entire spectrum of behavior, from deliberate inactivity, through the simple action of tapping one’s foot in synchrony with the beat, to dancing in a way that engages the whole body. This idea is explored in the context of recent Western classical art music, where composers create temporal experiences that might feel unfamiliar or idiosyncratic, that blur the line between spectatorship and participation, and even challenge conventional notions of musical form. Basing the discussion on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and on the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson, the volume examines different aspects of musical structure through the lens of embodied cognition and what phenomenologists call “lived time,” or time as it shows up in human lives.

Abstract One of the dominant modes of storytelling in the twenty-first century, fantasy can mirror contemporary experiences and convey our anxieties and longings better than any representation of the merely real. It is the lie that speaks truth. This book addresses two central questions about fantastic storytelling: first, how can it be meaningful if it doesn’t claim to represent things as they are, and second, what kind of change can it make in the world? How can a form of storytelling that alters physical laws and denies facts about the past be at the same time a source of insight into human nature and the workings of the world? What kind of social, political, cultural, intellectual work does fantasy perform in the world—the world of the reader, that is, not that of the characters? Focusing on various aspects of fantastic world-building and story creation in classic and contemporary fantasy, from the use of symbolic structures to the way new stories incorporate bits of significance from earlier texts, the book as a whole shows how fantasy allows writers to test new modes of understanding and interaction and thus to rethink political institutions, social practices, and models of reality.

A photographic survey of the robotic face of Tokyo buildings and an argument that robot aesthetics plays a central role in architectural history. In Tokyoids, architect François Blanciak surveys the robotic faces omnipresent in Tokyo buildings, offering an architectural taxonomy based not on the usual variables—size, material, historical style—but on the observable expressions of buildings. Are the eyes (windows) twinkling, the mouth (door) laughing? Is that balcony a howl of distress? Investigating robot aesthetics through his photographs of fifty buildings, Blanciak argues that the robot face originated in architecture—before the birth of robotics—and has played a central role in architectural history. Blanciak first puts the robot face into historical perspective, examining the importance of the face in architectural theory and demonstrating that the construction of architecture's emblematic portraits triggered the emergence of a robot aesthetics. He then explores the emotions conveyed by the photographed buildings' robot faces, in chapters titled “Awe,” “Wrath,” “Mirth,” “Pain,” “Angst,” and “Hunger.” As he does so he considers, among other things, the architectural relevance of Tokyo's ordinary buildings; the repression of the figural in contemporary architecture; an aesthetic of dismemberment, linked to the structure of the Japanese language and local building design; and the influence of automation technology upon human interaction. Part photographic survey, part theoretical inquiry, Tokyoids upends the usual approach to robotics in architecture by considering not the automation of architectural output but the aesthetic properties of the robot.

Online social networks have made sharing personal experiences with others mostly in form of photos and comments a common activity. The convergenceof social, mobile, cloud and wearable computing expanded the scope of usergeneratedand shared content on the net from personal media to individual preferencesto physiological details (e.g., in the form of daily workouts) to informationabout real-world possessions (e.g., apartments, cars). Once everydaythings become increasingly networked (i.e., the Internet of Things), future onlineservices and connected devices will only expand the set of things to share. Given that a new generation of sharing services is about to emerge, it is of crucialimportance to provide service designers with the right insights to adequatelysupport novel sharing practices. This work explores these practices within twoemergent sharing domains: (1) personal activity tracking and (2) sharing economyservices. The goal of this dissertation is to understand current practices ofsharing personal digital and physical possessions, and to uncover correspondingend-user needs and concerns across novel sharing practices, in order to map thedesign space to support emergent and future sharing needs. We address this goalby adopting two research strategies, one using a bottom-up approach, the otherfollowing a top-down approach.In the bottom-up approach, we examine in-depth novel sharing practices within two emergent sharing domains through a set of empirical qualitative studies.We offer a rich and descriptive account of peoples sharing routines and characterizethe specific role of interactive technologies that support or inhibit sharingin those domains. We then design, develop, and deploy several technology prototypesthat afford digital and physical sharing with the view to informing the design of future sharing services and tools within two domains, personal activitytracking and sharing economy services.In the top-down approach, drawing on scholarship in human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design, we systematically examine prior workon current technology-mediated sharing practices and identify a set of commonalitiesand differences among sharing digital and physical artifacts. Based uponthese findings, we further argue that many challenges and issues that are presentin digital online sharing are also highly relevant for the physical sharing in thecontext of the sharing economy, especially when the shared physical objects havedigital representations and are mediated by an online platform. To account forthese particularities, we develop and field-test an action-driven toolkit for designpractitioners to both support the creation of future sharing economy platformsand services, as well as to improve the user experience of existing services.This dissertation should be of particular interest to HCI and interaction designresearchers who are critically exploring technology-mediated sharing practicesthrough fieldwork studies, as well to design practitioners who are building and evaluating sharing economy services.