The captivating premise of the Toy Story movies is that toys have secret lives of which people are completely unaware. People can learn a lot from toys, as it turns out, including what it means to be free. Each of the first three movies explores a different way of thinking about freedom, and together they help people learn that, paradoxically, freedom is choosing the good of another over one's own good. One way of defining freedom is in terms of (...) stability and control. To be free means to have control over one's life and environment. In Toy Story 2 people make a fresh discovery about freedom: its connection with their sense of their own identity. Toy Story 3 embraces a further dimension of freedom: freedom from loss and pain. In so many ways, the human narrative is a story of people desperately trying to escape suffering. (shrink)

This essay examines the contemporary masculinity of straight, white men in the business classes of the United States as a category of identity. I argue that this form of masculine identity is currently in crisis, and, through a reading of the 1995 film Toy Story, develop an argument about the value of ‘downsizing’ masculinity in an era of diminished work expectations.

Sex toys promote a new consumptive ethos whose significance may be adequately outlined by attending to the institutional implications of this product category’s consumption. By drawing on Foucault’s theory of sexuality and the technologies of the self that materialize with the aid of discursive formations about sexuality, as well as on relevant sociological and ethnographic insights, I undertake a qualitative content analysis on a corpus of 100 sex toys’ product reviews from popular magazines and web sites in order to identify (...) how the discourse about sex toys is articulated in terms of three dominant categories of sexual scripts (Simon and Gagnon 2007, Sexual scripts. In Richard Parker & Peter Aggleton (eds.), Culture, society, and sexuality: A reader, 29–38. London: Routledge), namely, cultural scenarios, interpersonal and intrapsychic scripts. By opening up the discussion to a broader cultural terrain, I outline how the consumption experience of sex toys, as articulated in the reviews’ discursive formations, facilitates the emergence of new consumer trends, particularly with reference to orgasm-on-the-go and no-touch-orgasm, while redefining existing ones. (shrink)

Policymakers need to start considering the impact smart connected toys (SCTs) have on children. Equipped with sensors, data processing capacities, and connectivity, SCTs targeting children increasingly penetrate pervasively personal environments. The network of SCTs forms the Internet of Toys (IoToys) and often increases children's engagement and playtime experience. Unfortunately, this young part of the population and, most of the time, their parents are often unaware of SCTs’ far-reaching capacities and limitations. The capabilities and constraints of SCTs create severe side effects (...) at the technical, individual, and societal level. These side effects are often unforeseeable and unexpected. They arise from the technology's use and the interconnected nature of the IoToys, without necessarily involving malevolence from their creators. Although existing regulations and new ethical guidelines for artificial intelligence provide remedies to address some of the side effects, policymakers did not develop these redress mechanisms having children and SCTs in mind. This article provides an analysis of the arising side effects of SCTs and contrasts them with current regulatory redress mechanisms. We thereby highlight misfits and needs for further policymaking efforts. (shrink)

Policymakers need to start considering the impact smart connected toys (SCTs) have on children. Equipped with sensors, data processing capacities, and connectivity, SCTs targeting children increasingly penetrate pervasively personal environments. The network of SCTs forms the Internet of Toys (IoToys) and often increases children's engagement and playtime experience. Unfortunately, this young part of the population and, most of the time, their parents are often unaware of SCTs’ far-reaching capacities and limitations. The capabilities and constraints of SCTs create severe side effects (...) at the technical, individual, and societal level. These side effects are often unforeseeable and unexpected. They arise from the technology's use and the interconnected nature of the IoToys, without necessarily involving malevolence from their creators. Although existing regulations and new ethical guidelines for artificial intelligence provide remedies to address some of the side effects, policymakers did not develop these redress mechanisms having children and SCTs in mind. This article provides an analysis of the arising side effects of SCTs and contrasts them with current regulatory redress mechanisms. We thereby highlight misfits and needs for further policymaking efforts. (shrink)

The rise, in the 1980s, of what is now labelled appropriation-photography can be understood as the full absorption of the logic of the ready-made into photographic art. Like its Duchampian predecessor, the deployment of the ready-made was used to question the nature of institutionalized art-photography: was art inherent to the photo's medium; was it an auratic attribute of the author; conferred by the institution; or ratified by its consumption? It also enabled a critique of the politics of representation at stake (...) in photographic practice outside of the immediate institutions of art. However, the correlation of appropriation-photography and a politics of representation relies upon the reduced logic of the subversive effect of a re-presented image. David Levinthal's photographs of mass-produced toys extends the reduced logic of the ready-made cultural artefact through their playful configuration, as well as through the more complex forms of photographic technique this allows. This enables a distinctive critical re-presentation of cultural myth. However, Levinthal also introduces a number of photographic techniques, which would seem to renege on the avant-garde claims of appropriation-photography, such as the reintroduction of pictorial composition and the use of large-scale Polaroids that emphatically reassert the unique and the expertly crafted image. This article examines this ambiguity in Levinthal's work, particularly with respect to its presentation of myth, and diagnoses it as symptomatic of the conditions of recent art-photography. (shrink)

Representations of nonhuman wild animals in children's stories and toys underwent dramatic transformation over the years 1830-1915. During the earlier part of that period, wild animals were presented to children as being savage and dangerous, and that it was necessary for them to be killed or brutally constrained. In the 1890s, an animalcentric discourse emerged in Nature writing, along with an animal-human symbiosis in scientific child study that highlighted childhood innocence, resulting in a valuing of wild animals based upon their (...) similarity to humans. This article will describe the aesthetic devices of children's stories and play materials in relation to the dominant, emerging, and residual ideas about the wild communicated by adults to children through these means. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Out of an Old Toy ChestMarina Warner (bio)The Soul of the ToyIn Baudelaire’s essay “La Morale du joujou,” written in l853, he remembers how the toyshop owner Madame Pancoucke, all wrapped in velvet and furs, beckoned the young Charles to choose something from her “treasure store for children.” Looking back down the years, the poet still sees in his mind’s eye the magic room overflowing with toys from floor (...) to ceiling that this “Fée du joujou” (Toy Fairy) opened to him. Without a second thought, he picked out “the most beautiful, the most expensive, the most garish, the freshest and the most bizarre of the playthings.” But his horrified mother insisted he choose another, less extravagant present, and the little Baudelaire had to resign himself and relinquish his toy.The word joujou (not jouet, the usual word for toy) is almost a pet name with a nursery ring like a “teddy” or a “dolly”; its repetition hints at baby talk and hence at playing, as when a child exchanges endearments and questions with a toy in imaginary conversations and elaborate scenarios. The toy in so many children’s games becomes part of an ongoing story and in this way initiates the first invented narratives in the child’s life.That scene of seduction, pleasure, and frustration with Mme. Pancoucke and his own mother catches Baudelaire’s lasting affection and reasoned admiration for toys. He called them “cette statuaire singulière” (this singular statuary); he was first a poet and then an art critic rather than a novelist, and as a flâneur of the boulevards and the galleries, he adopted a language of aesthetics, treating toys as an unusual form of sculpture. He recalls in pleasurable detail the miniature worlds conjured by Victorian nursery games and child’s play—from tiny “diligences” or mail coaches to detailed model furniture. But above all he muses in wonder at children’s ability to play without props or models, creating narratives, dialogue, and dramas [End Page 3] through fantasy alone: “All children talk to their toys; toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced by the camera obscura of their small brains. Children bear witness through their games to their great faculty of abstraction and their high imaginative power. They play without playthings.”1Significantly, Baudelaire goes on to make the connection to creativity in general: “[The child’s] facility to satisfy the imagination shows the spirituality of childhood in its artistic conceptions. The plaything is the first initiation of a child to art.” Nothing will ever attain again, he says, the same degree of liveliness, or, crucially, the same intensity of presence or belief. For Baudelaire, the realization of childish make-believe cannot be regained: “Isn’t all of life found there in miniature, and much more vivid in colour, cleaner and shinier than real life?”2Yet Baudelaire’s essay lingers on the frustration that dims these vivid, shiny colors, for children, he says, also want to see the soul of a toy. He describes how they will turn about their playthings and shake them, hurl them to the ground, and often break them in their bafflement and even rage at their stubborn refusal to awaken into life. His meditation hints that at the point when make-believe fails, the vitality of toys vanishes and produces a primal encounter with mortality: “But where is the soul? It’s here that bewilderment and sadness begin.”3 The beginning of imagining stories brings with it frustration that the story is not powerful enough—it is not the real thing. In a connected prose poem entitled “Le Joujou du pauvre,” published nine years later, Baudelaire pursues this thought, as he observes an exchange between a beautiful, pampered child inside the exclusive railed park of a chateau. He has “a splendid toy, as fresh as its master, varnished, gilded, clothed in a purple dress and covered with plumes and glitter.”4 But the rich child is not interested in his doll, for on the other side of the railings a ragged street urchin shows him, in a little cage which he shakes about, a living rat—”drawn... (shrink)

Name does matter. During exploration of knowledge, name provides dignity of existence. Isolating a quid from a whole, name gives that quid a status (i.e., helps it to gain a space, time, and fact). Biohistory had its own name in August 1992, when finally my mind isolated the historical quantum as the promotor of life. Shape follows name; Biohistory began to take shape in 1993, when it ran into Edgar Morin's ideas. For about a year, Biohistory had been a game (...) I toyed with, using it to show my pupils the explosion of events in spaces. I even gave it a poetic dress, in the form of nursery-rhymes (Spazioliberina; Colamonico, 1993). In 1993 I also read Morin's Introduction to Complex Thought (1993), in which it is assumed that a new science and a new doctrine would manage to read the one-whole. It was then that I understood that this theory would have been the body-mind-eye of my joyful child. So I adopted Morin as the father of my Biohistory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 197-214 [Access article in PDF] The Origin of Stories:Horton Hears a Who Brian Boyd Works of art die without attention, and we should expect that any critical theory that cannot explain why we attend to art ought itself to be moribund. Yet the currently dominant approach to criticism, which I will dub Cultural Critique, 1 explains art in terms of the limited and suspect (...) perspectives of the culture (society, group, era) that produced it, or as the site of contestation or locus of imbrication of the ideological discourses of its time. Why anyone would want to attend to art, defined thus, becomes a mystery, unless audiences always do indeed crave ideological nourishment or indigestion. Surely we can do better.I would like to offer the outline of an alternative: an evolutionary explanation first for art, then for narrative, then for fiction. Then, since ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, or at least sometimes helps us retrieve it, and since we have no printouts of Pleistocene potboilers, I will color in the outline by way of Dr. Seuss's children's classic, Horton Hears a Who, contrasting a sample evolutionary analysis of a single work of fiction with the kind of response typical of Cultural Critique.In art we do or make things simply in order to engage our attention, for the sake of attention, and we are not the only species to do so. Intelligence began to evolve because the world is full of potential information that can suggest advantageous courses of behavior. Curiosity evolved on top of intelligence--especially in the species that Konrad Lorenz liked to call "specialists in non-specialization," such as rats among rodents, corvids among songbirds, and humans among primates 2 --because it extends the range of information creatures can attend to and act on. As a result rats can prefer cognitive stimulation to food and sex. 3 As the most intelligent and versatile of species, we humans particularly like directing our attention to what repays our curiosity. [End Page 197]And like other particularly intelligent species, we like to do things that provide cognitive stimulation, whether they have any immediate survival value or not. Corvids (together with psittacines, the most intelligent of birds) enjoy a kind of aerial acrobatics that Lorenz unashamedly labels art. 4 Dolphins in a Hawaiian marine park have developed, without any human prompting, what has been called "air art," a kind of rhythmic gymnastics in which they deploy air bubbles from their blowholes like gymnasts' ribbons or hoops, or, to stress the affinity to art, a kind of aquatic analogue of light sculpture. 5 Chimpanzees appear to engage both in solitary imaginative play, like Kakama with the stick he famously and repeatedly handled as if it were a toy baby, 6 and in group activity, like rhythmic dances, 7 for the sheer pleasure they produce. In art as in so much else we had thought uniquely human, like tool-using or tool-making, like counting or culture, we are finding there are precursors elsewhere in nature. 8Because we are such a highly social species, we crave the attention of others. Human infants are distressed at adults who do not respond to them; 9 infants and children across cultures punish others by withdrawing attention. 10 At any age we like to command attention in ways we choose, for the ability to compete successfully for attention is closely correlated with status, 11 which raises rates of survival and reproduction. 12 And we can recognize something artistic in such forms of competitive animal attention-getting as the dances of lekking birds, the songs of songbirds or whales, or the extravagant architecture of bowerbirds. Not only do we like to command attention, we also enjoy simply sharing it with others, because this cements our place in a social group whose support we need. 13 Again, there are precursors in other species: the elaborate song of duetting songbirds, 14 or the communal dances of chimpanzees.Curiosity directed at what we can do that gives us cognitive pleasure, whether by engaging our own attention or... (shrink)

In contemporary artificial intelligence, the challenge is making intricate connectionist systems—comprising millions of parameters—more comprehensible, defensible, and rationally grounded. Two prevailing methodologies address this complexity. The inaugural approach amalgamates symbolic methodologies with connectionist paradigms, culminating in a hybrid system. This strategy systematizes extensive parameters within a limited framework of formal, symbolic rules. Conversely, the latter strategy remains staunchly connectionist, eschewing hybridity. Instead of internal transparency, it fabricates an external, transparent proxy system. This ancillary system’s mandate is elucidating the principal system’s (...) decisions, essentially approximating its outcomes. Leveraging natural language processing as our analytical lens, this paper elucidates both methodologies: the hybrid method is underscored by the compositional vector semantics, whereas the purely connectionist method evolves as a derivative of neural semantic parsers. This discourse extols the merits of the purely connectionist approach for its inherent flexibility and for a pivotal delineation: segregating the explanatory apparatus from the operational core, thereby rendering artificial intelligence systems reminiscent of human cognition. (shrink)

This paper aims to study the role of the social robot Probo in providing assistance to a therapist for robot assisted therapy (RAT) with autistic children. Children with autism have difficulties with social interaction and several studies indicate that they show preference toward interaction with objects, such as computers and robots, rather than with humans. In 1991, Carol Gray developed Social Stories, an intervention tool aimed to increase children's social skills. Social stories are short scenarios written or tailored for autistic (...) individuals to help them understand and behave appropriately in social situations. This study shows that, in specific situations, the social performance of autistic children improves when using the robot Probo, as a medium for social story telling, than when a human reader tells the stories. The robot tells Social Stories to teach ASD children how to react in situations like saying “hello“, saying “thank you“ and “sharing toys“. The robot has the capability of expressing emotions and attention via its facial expressions and its gaze. The paper discusses the use of Probo as an added-value therapeutic tool for social story telling and presents the first experimental results. Keywords: social robot; ASD children; social story; robot assisted therapy. (shrink)

This paper aims to study the role of the social robot Probo in providing assistance to a therapist for robot assisted therapy with autistic children. Children with autism have difficulties with social interaction and several studies indicate that they show preference toward interaction with objects, such as computers and robots, rather than with humans. In 1991, Carol Gray developed Social Stories, an intervention tool aimed to increase children’s social skills. Social stories are short scenarios written or tailored for autistic individuals (...) to help them understand and behave appropriately in social situations. This study shows that, in specific situations, the social performance of autistic children improves when using the robot Probo, as a medium for social story telling, than when a human reader tells the stories. The robot tells Social Stories to teach ASD children how to react in situations like saying “hello”, saying “thank you” and “sharing toys”. The robot has the capability of expressing emotions and attention via its facial expressions and its gaze. The paper discusses the use of Probo as an added-value therapeutic tool for social story telling and presents the first experimental results. Keywords: social robot; ASD children; social story; robot assisted therapy. (shrink)

Toys to overcome time, distance, and gravity -- To fly like a bird, not float like a cloud -- Finding a place in the world -- A new continent -- A new age-old problem to solve -- The physics of miniature worlds -- Models of wings and models of the world -- A world made of facts.

This paper aims to study the role of the social robot Probo in providing assistance to a therapist for robot assisted therapy with autistic children. Children with autism have difficulties with social interaction and several studies indicate that they show preference toward interaction with objects, such as computers and robots, rather than with humans. In 1991, Carol Gray developed Social Stories, an intervention tool aimed to increase children’s social skills. Social stories are short scenarios written or tailored for autistic individuals (...) to help them understand and behave appropriately in social situations. This study shows that, in specific situations, the social performance of autistic children improves when using the robot Probo, as a medium for social story telling, than when a human reader tells the stories. The robot tells Social Stories to teach ASD children how to react in situations like saying “hello”, saying “thank you” and “sharing toys”. The robot has the capability of expressing emotions and attention via its facial expressions and its gaze. The paper discusses the use of Probo as an added-value therapeutic tool for social story telling and presents the first experimental results. Keywords: social robot; ASD children; social story; robot assisted therapy. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg needs to be reassessed and extricated from the many misunderstandings that surround it. First, I suggest that we consider her cyborg as an ethical concept. I propose that her cyborg can be productively placed within the ethical framework developed by Luce Irigaray, especially in relationship to her concept of the “interval between.” Second, I consider how Haraway's “cyborg writing” can be understood as embodied ethical writing, that is, as (...) a contemporary écriture feminine. I believe that this cyborgian “writing the body” offers us a way of both creating and understanding texts that think through ethics, bodies, aesthetics, and politics together as part of a vital and relevant contemporary feminist ethics of embodiment. I employ the term “poethics” as a useful way to describe such a practice. (shrink)

This paper explores contract cheating from the perspectives of researchers at three post-secondary institutions in Alberta, Canada, describing their efforts to develop and advance awareness of, interventions against, and responses to contract cheating at their respective institutions. Contract cheating is when a third party produces or completes academic work for a student, and the student then presents the work as their own. The student might have personal connections to the third party, or the student might pay a fee and outsource (...) the academic work to the third party. All three institutions are experiencing an increase in the incidence of contract cheating, which is consistent with trends at colleges and universities across Canada and the world. Contract cheating is not a new phenomenon, but it is a growing one, due in part to students having access to thousands of online companies offering to help them with their academic work. This paper examines personal narratives from four researchers and identifies five key themes: types of contract cheating, students, awareness, evidence and policy implications, and educational development. (shrink)

Many philosophers take for granted the distinction between the first-person and third-person perspectives. They employ this distinction in a variety of philosophical debates including those concerning self-consciousness, phenomenal properties, subjectivity of phenomenal consciousness, and conceivability issues. This paper aims to explore the developmental root of the distinction in question. Through several analyses, the paper attempts to show that infants in the early childhood are exposed to cognitive, behavioral and experiential processes that are constitutive of the first-person perspective. The striking conclusion (...) that can be derived from the analyses is that the first-person perspective is not possessed inborn. Rather, it gradually develops through certain experiential processes and interaction with other human infants in the early childhood. This potentially implies that if conditions had been properly designed, infants would have possessed an “inter-subjective self” that lacks the first-person perspective as we traditionally know. The paper additionally hints that serious philosophical consequences occur if the above conclusion is true. (shrink)

Anlambilimsel bileşimsellik ilkesi, herhangi bir ifadenin anlamının o ifadenin parçalarının anlamlarının bir fonksiyonu olduğunu bildirmektedir. İlke Gottlob Frege’nin dilsel anlamı fonksiyon argüman uygulaması olarak ele alan çalışmalarına dayanmaktadır. Bileşimselliğin, Richard Montague ile birlikte biçimsel anlambilim içerisinde merkezi bir rol aldığı görülmektedir. Bileşimsellik ilkesi, dilsel yapı ve anlamsal yapı arasında homomorfik bir ilişki bulunduğunu bildirmektedir. İlkenin savunucuları bileşimselliğin dilin sistematik ve üretken yapısına önemli katkılar sağladığını iddia etmektedirler. Wlodek Zadrozny, bu görüşe karşı olarak, bileşimselliğin dilin sistematik yapısına herhangi bir katkı sağlamadığını (...) iddia etmektedir. Zadrozny, iddiasını temellendirmek için, herhangi bir anlambilimsel yapının bileşimsel olarak kodlanabileceğini gösteren bir ispat ortaya atmıştır. Zadrozny herhangi bir anlambilimsel yapı için böyle bir anlam fonksiyonunun var olduğunu ise Peter Aczel’in iyi-yapılanmamış kümeler kuramına dayandırmaktadır. Çözüm Lemması bize böyle bir anlam fonksiyonunun var olduğunu bildirmektedir. Zadrozny’nin iddiasına karşı önemli bir itiraz bulunmaktadır. Elde edilen anlamsal yapının asıl anlamsal yapıyı kodlamak için yeterli olmadığı iddia edilmektedir. Bu iddianın temelinde eş anlamlılık olgusu bulunmaktadır. Eş anlamlı ifadelerin yer değiştirme ilkesine uymadığı, bileşimsel olmayan anlambilimsel yapıların elde edilen bileşimsel yapılar tarafından temsil edilemeyeceği iddia edilmektedir. Bu çalışmada, Zadrozny’nin ispatı incelenerek, eş anlamlılık üzerinden yapılan itiraz cevaplandırılmaktadır. İtirazın konusu olan eş anlamlılığın, anlambilimsel olarak korunması gereken bir özellik olmadığı iddia edilmektedir. (shrink)

The topic of population is treated only lightly in the major modern biographies of John Maynard Keynes, yet Keynes himself had strong - if varying - views on the subject. For many years he maintained a neo-Malthusian view of population, based on a postulated link between population growth and deteriorating terms of trade. This led him to take up a militant stance towards 'overpopulated' countries, notably India, China, and Egypt. Keynes on Population publishes two of John Maynard Keynes's manuscripts not (...) published in the Collected Writings: his Cambridge lectures on population and 1914 Oxford lecture on 'Population'. It provides a detailed commentary on the text of 'Population' and discusses the extent of Keynes's engagement with the Social Darwinist doctrine of the 'rapid multiplication of the unfit' and with eugenics. It then traces the subsequent vicissitudes of his views on population and his interventions in the contemporary politics of population. These include his part in the 1920s campaign for birth control, the reversal of his neo-Malthusianism, and his eventual support for family allowances. (shrink)

This article presents results from a self-report survey of misconduct behaviours and the stress students (n = 916) experienced at one Canadian community college. Results showed that students engaged in a variety of contract cheating behaviours, and experienced a myriad of stressors both in and outside the college context, including traumatic life events. Those who engaged in commercial contract cheating and inappropriate sharing behaviours experienced significantly higher levels of stress. This result differed by type of stress suggesting that not all (...) stress may lead to violation behaviour. Results also suggest that some students are exposed to more stress than others, which could put them at higher risk for engaging in contract cheating. Understanding contract cheating using the stress process framework draws our attention to how a student’s location in the social institutions of work, family, and school, how their positions of advantage or disadvantage, and their involvement in social relationships may produce stress which we have found to be associated with contract cheating. Seeing stress in this way allows post-secondary institutions to address the structural conditions which lead to stress through the development of policy, procedure, and supports for students as they navigate academic integrity throughout their programs. (shrink)

The standard approach to model how human beings understand natural languages is the symbolic, compositional approach according to which the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its constituents. In other words, meaning plays a fundamental role in the model. In this work, because of the polysemous, flexible, dynamic, and contextual structure of natural languages, this approach is rejected. Instead, a connectionist model which eliminates the concept of meaning is proposed.

This article explores the relationship between Churchill’s view of Britain as the home of freedom and his broader conception of Western/European civilization. It considers: first, his attitude to Classical learning and culture; second, his experiences of European travel; and third, his attitude to the Bolsheviks (as much as the Nazis) as the barbaric antithesis of civilization. It is argued that his vision of the European future was linked both to his own experiences of free and civilized travel in the Nineteenth (...) Century and a growing scepticism about the speedier and more globalized locomotion of the Twentieth. Moreover, Churchill’s late-life commitment to the virtues of Classical learning, about which he had previously been sceptical, was connected to his post-WWII enthusiasm for European unity. He believed that a united Europe could act as a vehicle for spiritual and cultural values passed down from the ancient world which themselves had become a part of the continent’s Christian heritage. Although it has rightly been pointed out that Churchill was not a conventional religious believer, he still conceived ‘Christendom’ as a significant geopolitical space (with flexible boundaries) and he saw it as the spiritual inheritor of Greece and Rome. (shrink)