Moradia e meio ambiente: extensão universitária e compromisso social

This book’s guideline is a description of the activities developed during the University Extension project entitled "Housing and Environment: building dialogue over the urbanization of the settlement Ilha", located in the Metropolitan Region of Curitiba. This project was coordinated by professors from the Federal University of Technology - Paraná (UTFPR). The initial objectives of the extension project were to investigate ways of intervention on the scenario of poor conditions of housing and urbanization of the settlement Ilha, for their land regularization. The book tells the story of the extension project, showing how the initial goals have changed with time. In addition, this book describes the frustrations and the learning process along the way, from the view of professors and students of UTFPR who actively participated in this project. This book also intends to report the feelings that the villagers attributed to their place of residence; the joys, stumbling and learning by using a participatory methodology from what Paulo Freire says about popular education. Moreover, the book brings the confrontation between the technical and popular vision on the regularization of the area.

Automated Discovery of Social Networks in Online Learning Communities

As a way to gain greater insights into the operation of online communities, this dissertation applies automated text mining techniques to text-based communication to identify, describe and evaluate underlying social networks among online community members. The main thrust of the study is to automate the discovery of social ties that form between community members, using only the digital footprints left behind in their online forum postings. Currently, one of the most common but time consuming methods for discovering social ties between people is to ask questions about their perceived social ties. However, such a survey is difficult to collect due to the high investment in time associated with data collection and the sensitive nature of the types of questions that may be asked. To overcome these limitations, the dissertation presents a new, content-based method for automated discovery of social networks from threaded discussions, referred to as ‘name network’. As a case study, the proposed automated method is evaluated in the context of online learning communities. The results suggest that the proposed ‘name network’ method for collecting social network data is a viable alternative to costly and time-consuming collection of users’ data using surveys. The study also demonstrates how social networks produced by the ‘name network’ method can be used to study online classes and to look for evidence of collaborative learning in online learning communities. For example, educators can use name networks as a real time diagnostic tool to identify students who might need additional help or students who may provide such help to others. Future research will evaluate the usefulness of the ‘name network’ method in other types of online communities.

Developmental Neural Correlates of Social Interaction

Children develop in a sea of reciprocal social interaction, but their brain development is predominately studied in non-interactive contexts (e.g., viewing photographs of faces). This dissertation investigated how the developing brain supports social interaction. Specifically, novel paradigms were used to target two facets of social experience—social communication and social motivation—across three studies in children and adults. In Study 1, adults listened to short vignettes—which contained no social information—that they believed to be either prerecorded or presented over an audio-feed by a live social partner. Simply believing that speech was from a live social partner increased activation in the brain’s mentalizing network—a network involved in thinking about others’ thoughts. Study 2 extended this paradigm to middle childhood, a time of increasing social competence and social network complexity, as well as structural and functional social brain development. Results showed that, as in adults, regions of the mentalizing network were engaged by live speech. Taken together, these findings indicate that the mentalizing network may support the processing of interactive communicative cues across development. Given this established importance of social-interactive context, Study 3 examined children’s social motivation when they believed they were engaged in a computer-based chat with a peer. Children initiated interaction via sharing information about their likes and hobbies and received responses from the peer. Compared to a non-social control, in which children chatted with a computer, peer interaction increased activation in mentalizing regions and reward circuitry. Further, within mentalizing regions, responsivity to the peer increased with age. Thus, across all three studies, social cognitive regions associated with mentalizing supported real-time social interaction. In contrast, the specific social context appeared to influence both reward circuitry involvement and age-related changes in neural activity. Future studies should continue to examine how the brain supports interaction across varied real-world social contexts. In addition to illuminating typical development, understanding the neural bases of interaction will offer insight into social disabilities such as autism, where social difficulties are often most acute in interactive situations. Ultimately, to best capture human experience, social neuroscience ought to be embedded in the social world.

Personalised TV ads are the future – but is it time to panic?

TV Advertising is evolving quickly. This article examines how the popularity of viewing content on mobile platforms is changing the way we advertise. VOD and OTT media services have meant that advertisers can now automate and personalise their TV advertising. It's having a significant impact on the UK TV business model.

Responsabilidade social das empresas: caso de estudo

Trabalho Final de Mestrado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Mecânica

Consumerism in urban Russia in the 1880s and 90s: Exploring conceptions of time, space, and modernity through bicycle and watch advertisements

This paper discusses the urban consumer culture in Moscow and Petersburg during the 1880s and 1890s and uses the consumption of bicycles and watches as a lens through which to explore changing perceptions of time and space within the experience of modernity at the end of the nineteenth century. Specifically, I argue that the way in which consumers and merchants constructed a dialogue of meaning around particular objects; the way in which objects are consumed by a culture gives insight into the values, morals, and tenure of that culture. The paper preferences newspaper ads and photographs as the mouthpieces of merchants and consumers respectively as they constructed a dialogue in the language of consumerism, and explores the ways in which both parties sought to assign meaning to objects during the experience of modernity. I am particularly interested in the way consumers perform elements of cultural modernity in photographs and how these instances of performance relate to their negotiation of modernity. The paper takes as its focus large section of the urban Russian population, much of whom can traditionally be called “middle class” but whose diversity has led me to the adoption of the term “consumer community,” and whose makeup is described in detail. The paper contributes to the continuing scholarly discourse on the makeup of the middle class in Russia and the social boundaries of late tsarist society. It speaks to the the developing sensibilities and values of a generation struggling to define itself in a rapidly changing world, to the ways in which conceptualizations of public and private space, as well as feminine and masculine space were redefined, and to the developing visual culture of the Russian consumer society, largely predicated on the display of objects to signify socially desirable traits. Whereas other explorations of consumer culture and advertisements have portrayed the relationship between merchants and consumers as a one-sided monologue in which merchants convince consumers that certain objects have cultural value, I emphasis the dialogue between merchants and consumers, and their mutual negotiation of cultural meaning through objects.