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Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI).
The journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. DOAJ is a reputable list of peer reviewed open access journals.
The journal is indexed in an established and reputable database such as Scopus or Ulrich's, or is included in a reputable database or index in one's field.
SHERPA/RoMEO: This website lists the open access policies of journals and publishers.
ThinkCheckSubmit : This tool was produced with the support of a coalition across the scholarly community in response to discussions about deceptive publishing and takes you through the process of choosing and evaluating journals.
The journal's scope, affiliation with a university or professional organization, editorial board credentials, or acceptance rates.
These resources are valuable for proving the quality of journals you have published in for tenure, promotion and performance reviews.
An unfortunate side effect of the open access movement is the proliferation of open access journals and publishers that exist for profit and not scholarly purposes. These journals/publishers have little or no subject expertise and are of questionable repute.
These same lists and caveats are useful for assessing the legitimacy of academic conferences. Be wary of conferences that are affiliated with the journals and publishers on Beall's lists as well as those that accept your papers very quickly and do not appear to offer much in the way of peer review. | http://libguides.adelphi.edu/c.php?g=604332&p=4188407 |
What does it mean to present a paper at a conference?
What does it mean to present a paper at a conference?
A conference paper is often both a written document and an oral presentation. You may be asked to submit a copy of your paper to a commentator before you present at the conference. Thus, your paper should follow the conventions for academic papers and oral presentations.
Can you present a published paper at a conference?
When an article is presented at a conference, it is generally not complete. It is also acceptable to present your published work at a conference. However, in this case, it is generally considered good practice to cite your published article and provide a link at the end of the presentation if it is avilable online.
Do Conference Proceedings count as publications?
Most of the researchers publish their research articles in conference because its a faster way of making the results available. At many places, papers published as conference proceedings are not considered during promotion, on the other hand, at few places it is counted as publications but with less credits.
What is the difference between conference proceedings and conference paper?
A conference proceedings article is published in the proceedings of a conference and the proceedings can be found online or in physical format. A conference paper is presented at the conference but there is no published proceedings.
Do conference proceedings have impact factor?
Conference proceedings that have been published as part of an indexed journal are citable items – they appear in the denominator. However, conference proceedings that have been published as a stand-alone item do not receive an Impact Factor.
What is difference between conference and journal?
A journal is a periodical publication that focuses on a certain discipline. It contains a number of peer-reviewed papers that are generally considered credible and are very good sources to cite from. Conference papers are usually short and concise with a limit on the number of pages allowed.
What is good impact factor?
In most fields, the impact factor of 10 or greater is considered an excellent score while 3 is flagged as good and the average score is less than 1. This is a rule of thumb. However, the wild card to pay attention to is that impact factor and comparing journals are most effective in the same discipline.
Is an impact factor of 4 good?
The higher the impact factor, the more highly ranked the journal. The top 5% of journals have impact factors approximately equal to or greater than 6 (610 journals or 4.9% of the journals tracked by JCR). Approximately two-thirds of the journals tracked by JCR have a 2017 impact factor equal to or greater than 1.
What is a high impact journal?
“High-impact journals” – those considered to be highly influential in their fields. A journal’s impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which an average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year.
How do you write a high impact journal?
How to get published in a high-impact journalYour research needs to be robust and solve a big and relevant problem. You need to tell a story. You NEED clear figures Presenting the right amount of data. You need to write in a short, clear and concise way. Your abstract needs to tell a story too. You need to follow the journal guidelines meticulously.
Do all journals have impact factor?
Not all journals have impact factors, and the importance of impact factors will vary between disciplines. They nevertheless provide a useful pointer to the more important journals in your subject.
How do you know if a journal is good?
Check to see whether the journal is still in publication and/or whether the title has it ceased publication. If it is the latter, consider whether the subject/expertise is no longer ‘in vogue’ or current and/or whether the field has been superseded by something that is more current.
How do I know if a journal is open access?
3 Answers. You can tell whether a journal is open access from their website. “Supports open access” doesn’t immediately say if the journal is completely open access, but it does mean that you will be able to publish open access in it.
Are open access journals reputable?
OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS GENERALLY CONSIDERED REPUTABLE The economics of open access publishing are evolving; note that article processing charges are not unique to open access publishing – reputable biomedical titles in particular have long used them for subscription journals.
Is plos one a respected journal?
Plosone Journal is Good, The Articles published are in high quality. this journal has Fast, efficient, and economical, publishing peer-reviewed research in all areas of science and medicine.
Is scientific reports a bad Journal?
Closed last month. The Journal “Scientific Reports”, published by the Nature publishing group, is gaining popularity with time (impact factor now around 5.2). Many researchers know that some well-regarded specialist journals might have relatively low impact factor, but their reputation is still top-ranked.
How much does it cost to publish in PLOS ONE?
These include its high-volume, multidisciplinary PLOS ONE , which charges an APC of up to $1695. Institutions can instead pay a single annual fee to publish papers by their authors, regardless of whether they are listed as the corresponding or contributing ones, broadening the pool of papers covered by the deals. | https://diaridelsestudiants.com/what-does-it-mean-to-present-a-paper-at-a-conference/ |
Finding journals in databases or articles inside journals using this system is not possible. Please perform such searches inside databases and journals in their websites.
Data of subscribed databases may be copied (transferred to computer, printed, etc.) only in small quantities (One article from one journal or up to 20% of electronic book during one session). It shall be strictly prohibited to copy information completely. Transfer of such data to third parties, placement into web sites or use for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited. These legal relations are regulated by Law on Copyright and related rights of the Republic of Lithuania.
Academic Complete collection contains over 200 000 multidisciplinary ebooks.
Multi-disciplinary database of scholarly journals.
The collection contains ARAN, the open access repository of the National University of Ireland, Galway. The repository includes peer-reviewed articles, working papers, and conference papers produced at the National University of Ireland.
The repository contains scientific works created at the university, including Master's theses, Doctoral theses, articles and other Open Access works such as research reports, working papers and conference proceedings. Subject areas cover a range of academic interests, including Humanities, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology and Medicine and Dentistry.
BIBSYS Brage contains open access material from more than 50 higher education and research institutions in Norway. Brage consists of research-papers, masters theses and reports from the main universities and colleges in Norway. The documents are Open Access and freely available to the public.
Britannica Academic provides up-to-date and easy access to high-quality, comprehensive information.
Scholarly business database of bibliographic and full text content.
Multidisciplinary and multilingual database of scholarly journals published in central and eastern European countries.
This collection contains DigitalCommons@McMaster, the institutional repository of the research and scholarly output at McMaster University. Subject areas cover the full range of academic interest. Nearly all of the repository is open access; some few records may be restricted for delivery.
This collection contains the research publications and student theses found on the DiVA portal, hosted at the Uppsala University Library. DiVA is the centralized archive of a group of 30 Scandinavian universities. Materials include theses, dissertations, and other academic publications.
This collection contains the theses and dissertations produced at the Free University of Berlin.
The collection offers access to 2,500+ titles on various topics.
EBSCO eBook Academic Collection contains over 60 000 ebooks.
Lietuvos akademinės elektroninės bibliotekos EBSCOhost el. knygų katalogas
Scientific journals in all fields of economics.
Emerald Journals Archive.
Multi-disciplinary database of historical ebooks.
The eWiC Series gives free access to the proceedings of workshops and conferences on the broadest possible range of computing topics. Each volume is based on the proceedings of a specialist workshop and is designed to provide information that represents a snapshot of current knowledge, debate or research.
The HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the vast collections of major research institutions and libraries. This collection includes records for material in the public domain. However, access to small number of materials might be temporarily restricted due to copyright validation. Only customers located outside of the United States should activate this collection.
This collection includes a selection of open access articles from hybrid titles.
This collection covers international, peer-reviewed journals in the fields of Law; Engineering and Technology; Management and Business Administration; Energy; Environment and Sustainable Development.
INFORMS journals are scholarly, peer-reviewed publications on Operations Research and Management Sciences.
International bibliographic database on higher education
Full text multi-disciplinary archive of scholarly journals.
Subscribed collections: Arts & Sciences I; Arts & Sciences II; Arts & Sciences III; Arts & Sciences IV, Arts & Sciences V.
Lithuanian science and study electronic documents
The Lituanistika database of the humanities and social sciences in Lithuania
Maney is an independent publishing company specialising in peer-reviewed print and electronic format academic journals. Subjects include materials science and engineering, the humanities and social sciences, and health science.
MasterFILE Premier contains full text for general reference magazines and publications that cover a wide-range of subject areas including business, health, education, general science and multicultural issues.
Articles from USA and other countries newspapers.
NORA aggregates scholarly content from over 50 Norwegian archives. It is a collaboration between the university libraries at the University of Bergen, NTNU, University of Troms? with funding from the Norwegian Digital Library.
OECD iLibrary is the online library of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) featuring its books, papers and statistics and is the gateway to OECD’s analysis and data.
Scientific journals covering all fields of science published by Oxford University Press.
Access from the first issue of 1996 to the latest issues.
International business and trade database covering demographic, economic and social indexes of 210 countries.
Purdue University Press, founded in 1960, is the publishing arm of Purdue University. Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, the Press provides quality resources in several key subject areas including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine and other limited disciplines in the humanities and sciences.
RMIT Research Repository provides free, searchable access to RMIT University research publications. Subject matter focuses on Science, Engineering, Health, Design and Business
Scientific journals in all fields of science.
Additional subscription:
Scientific journal of original scientific research, global news, and commentary Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
ScienceDirect e-Books purchased in 2012 Catalogue.
Chandos Publishing Information and Library management combined 2012-2013 collections Title list.
Subscribed collections 2022:
The collection contains full-text research journals in fields of biomedicine, medicine, life sciences, physics, mathematics, engineering, computing, humanities, social sciences, etc.
SwePub provides the publications of 30 Swedish universities -- including articles, conference papers, dissertations, and more -- for search. Topics range the gamut of research fields.
Full text journals in fields of humanities, social sciences, medicine, public health, etc.
Tímarit.is a digital library of the newspapers and periodicals from the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Iceland.
Citation database in all fields of science, constituent parts of which are: Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Science Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Conference Proceeding Citation Index - Science Edition & Social Science & Humanities Edition.
Scientific journals in all fields of science. Accessible content from the latest issues of the current year till 1997.
The database of electronic books in all fields of science. | https://biblioteka.vu.lt/e.istekliai/?browse=sub34&filter=res3_lanen&y=50&l=en |
Why Information Literacy?
Information literacy is essential for academic success, effective functioning in the workplace, and participation in society as knowledgeable citizens. It is a combination of research skills, critical thinking skills, computer technology skills, and communication skills.
Why are these skills important?
Information sources have become more challenging for students to comprehend as information becomes more abundant, more complex, and available in more formats.
Students are unfamiliar with different source types and have difficulty distinguishing between them.
Many first-year students have never encountered a journal or a journal article before, nor do they understand that a journal article is found within a journal. If you’ve never seen a print journal issue before – as most students haven’t – it’s hard to visualize the connection between journals and journal articles. Students frequently get frustrated by trying to find journals when they need articles.
Other types of sources such as conference papers, dissertations, theses, etc. are also unfamiliar to students.
When you don’t know what a source is, you won’t be able to recognize it, understand its purpose, or assess whether it’s appropriate for your information need. This inability to match the right source to an information need leads to an over-reliance on using websites for solving all information needs.
In the online environment, students struggle to distinguish one type of source from another.
Many students are unaware that many sources exist in print as well as online, and they are unable to recognize different types of sources when they encounter them on the web.
It’s not uncommon for students to consider any source they find on the web to be a ‘website,’ even though the source may be a journal article, newspaper article, magazine article, etc.
The inability to distinguish source types in their online form leads directly to problems with citing; if you can’t tell what a source is when you encounter it on the web in its digital form, then you won’t be able to cite it properly.
Students are confused by the array of terms we used to describe sources.
Students are variously told to use sources that are credible, scholarly, academic, peer-reviewed, refereed, primary, secondary, etc. Not only are some of these terms synonyms, frequently they are defined differently by different instructors or used differently depending on the discipline. We also use words like articles, papers, and literature to mean the same thing in some contexts, but not in other contexts. To reduce student confusion, be explicit about your preferred terms and how you are defining them.
The increase in source types and formats has made assessing credibility more difficult to master
Those of us who have had a lot of exposure to print copies of books, magazines, newspapers, and journals learned that they have characteristics that make them easily distinguishable from each other, such as paper quality, size, format, thickness, issue frequency, use of color, amount of advertising, etc.
Those physical qualities also provided important information about the function, use, and credibility of the source. But, most of that information is lost in the electronic formats that students encounter today, making sources difficult for students to identify or distinguish from one another – thus it’s a lot harder for them to pick up on cues that indicate credibility, or the lack thereof.
There’s no foolproof way to judge credibility. More experienced researchers use nuanced heuristics to make the best guess we can, and this is very difficult to teach. Consider the most common heuristic that experienced researchers use to judge credibility: they determine whether a source is scholarly or peer-reviewed. But how do they make that determination? Most often they rely on previously stored knowledge — for example, they recognize the publisher of the source as being a reputable scholarly publisher. Or in the case of journals, they recognize the title and know it is reputable. The same is true when judging the credibility of other types of sources. Experienced researchers are able to rely almost entirely on their stored knowledge of:
- reputable newspapers
- reputable magazines
- websites coming from reputable organizations, agencies, institutes, or educational institutions
Students don’t yet have the names of reputable information suppliers stored in their head. Often, students don’t even know what ‘peer-reviewed’ means. Instead, they have to learn to rely on alternative methods of assessing credibility – for example, they must:
- check whether the author has expertise or authority
- check if the content offers compelling explanations and evidence, and cites other reputable sources
- consider the source’s intended audience and what that implies about credibility
- assess whether the author is likely to be concerned about their reputation as an accurate and reliable writer
These alternative methods of assessing credibility are difficult skills for students to master and time-consuming – if not unrealistic – for them to apply to each source they are using. | https://nau.edu/library/why-information-literacy/ |
How Many Publications Are Required To Become a Tenured Professor?
There is no doubt that an aspiring academic or scientist must successfully publish sound research to obtain a position as a full tenured professor at a reputable research institution. Exactly how many publications might be required for a particular position varies widely among disciplines, countries, universities and departments, however, so it is impossible to provide specific numbers that will apply generally to all researchers who are working to achieve professorship. The key to success is to learn all you can about the publication expectations for promotion to full professor within your field of study and especially at the universities or other research institutions where you hope to be considered as a candidate. You can then use this information to tailor a constructive publishing strategy that will produce the number and kind of publications necessary to make your CV stand out in a highly competitive job market.
One aspect of the research-based publications required to become a professor that is virtually universal in its relevance is that quality can and should matter as much as quantity. This is to say that the quality of the papers and other documents you write, the quality of the research behind them and the quality of the journals and presses that publish them will almost certainly be of prime importance to the committee considering your application or promotion. A few or even one significant article reporting and discussing groundbreaking research in clear and relevant ways in a top-tier journal that upholds scholarly editorial and peer review practices will prove much more impressive than several or many articles of a low quality published by unscholarly or predatory journals that do not conduct effective peer reviews. The nature of your contribution to each publication is also vital, with a paper for which you are the sole or first author packing a much larger intellectual punch than one for which your name appears in the middle of a long list of authors. Scholarly collaboration will be particularly important to some committees and institutions, of course, but if you are hoping to become a full professor, being the primary author of a quality multi-authored publication will demonstrate research authority, responsibility and leadership.
Another primary consideration for hiring committees will be the number of citations your publications have earned in the publications of your peers. Although there has been considerable debate about the value of citation counts, they remain a primary means by which many research institutions compare candidates and make decisions about promotions and new hires, so a few highly cited articles will give a more positive impression than many articles that have rarely been cited or even read by other researchers. If those articles appear in high-impact journals, all the better, and dissemination in a high-impact journal will naturally increase your chances of being cited frequently, so obtaining a little of that coveted space in prestigious journals tends to be well worth the effort required to aim so high. Some committees use measures of quality and productivity such as h-indices that are based on both publications and citations. By such measures the successful production of one or two well-cited papers per year is far more valuable than piling up ten or twenty papers that draw little or no attention.
The point of all such measures is to determine and predict the influence of an academic’s or scientist’s work, and there are ways beyond formal publication to achieve and demonstrate such intellectual influence. The proven ability of a candidate for professor to obtain funding for research projects, for instance, or to establish and manage research groups successfully are extremely valuable in most cases, and at some institutions teaching and supervisory activities as well as innovations in educational material and experience with administrative duties will be particularly appealing. The best policy is therefore to be familiar with exactly what is expected of a candidate for the full professor position that interests you, make the most of your relevant skills and accomplishments when you apply, and have a clear and sophisticated plan in mind for continuing your research and teaching activities, ideally in your new position as full professor.
Why Our Editing and Proofreading Services?
At Proof-Reading-Service.com we offer the highest quality journal article editing, phd thesis editing and proofreading services via our large and extremely dedicated team of academic and scientific professionals. All of our proofreaders and editors are native speakers of English who have earned their own postgraduate degrees, and their areas of specialisation cover such a wide range of disciplines that we are able to help our international clientele with research editing to improve and perfect all kinds of academic manuscripts for successful publication. Many of the carefully trained members of our expert editing and proofreading team work predominantly on articles intended for publication in scholarly journals, applying painstaking journal editing standards to ensure that the references and formatting used in each paper are in conformity with the journal’s instructions for authors and to correct any grammar, spelling, punctuation or simple typing errors. In this way, we enable our clients to report their research in the clear and accurate ways required to impress acquisitions editors and achieve publication.
Our scientific editing services for the authors of a wide variety of scientific journal papers are especially popular, but we also offer manuscript editing services and have the experience and expertise to proofread and edit manuscripts in all scholarly disciplines, as well as beyond them. We have team members who specialise in medical editing services, and some of our experts dedicate their time exclusively to PhD proofreading and master’s proofreading, offering research students the opportunity to improve their use of formatting and language through the most exacting PhD thesis editing and dissertation proofreading practices. Whether you are preparing a conference paper for presentation, polishing a progress report to share with colleagues, or facing the daunting task of editing and perfecting any kind of scholarly document for publication, a qualified member of our professional team can provide invaluable assistance and give you greater confidence in your written work.
If you are in the process of preparing an article for an academic or scientific journal, or planning one for the near future, you may well be interested in a new book, Guide to Journal Publication, which is available on our Tips and Advice on Publishing Research in Journals website. | https://www.proof-reading-service.com/en/blog/how-many-publications-are-required-to-become-a-tenured-professor/ |
*PLEASE READ ALL INSTRUCTIONS THOROUGHLY*
The Integrated Research Paper is due Monday, October 22.
Instructions (per the course syllabus):
A 6-8 page research paper is due Week 8, Day 3 of the course. The purpose of the paper is to integrate various disciplines of the humanities in the study of in comparing two different eras and/or cultures covered in the course.
Please compare Mesopotamia and Egypt while integrating/comparing the following disciplines below:
The paper must integrate and compare at least THREE of the following humanities disciplines: philosophy, history, art, architecture, music, dance, drama, religion, literature and social structure/government.
***The paper must begin with a thesis statement and then present facts and concepts to support the thesis, referencing materials from research sources; at least five (5) scholarly sources are required.
Acceptable sources include: articles published in reputable journals, books published by academic/reputable publishers, and government publications. Only two articles from newspapers, magazines or the Web (unless they are electronic versions of peer-reviewed journals or government publications) count toward the five required sources. Fiero’s text does not count toward one of the five required sources, though it may be consulted in the paper. Do not reference Wikipedia, and other general or non-specialized encyclopedias do not count toward the five sources. If you are in doubt about the suitability of a source, check with the instructor. The CBU Library Web site has extensive links to online publications and databases.
The final paper must be typed, double-spaced, with 1″ margins all around, and must be 6-8 pages in length. Include a bibliography, which is not part of the 6-page minimum. Examples of an artist’s work also do not count toward the page total.
Citation style and format must follow the guidelines of the MLA or APA. Papers will be judged on the basis of both content and the quality of writing. Every student is welcome to discuss with the instructor any ideas for the paper, especially if a student is uncertain about the topic’s suitability or has difficulty choosing a topic.
This is the Critical Assignment for this course and must be passed at an acceptable rate in order to pass the course.
PLEASE reference AND follow the rubric that is attached to pass the paper at an acceptable rate.
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That’s why we have developed 5 beneficial guarantees that will make your experience with our service enjoyable, easy, and safe. | https://getcustomessay.com/2021/02/08/6-8-page-research-paper-on-humanities-absolutely-no-plagiarism/ |
Browsing Databases, content full text
Finding journals in databases or articles inside journals using this system is not possible. Please perform such searches inside databases and journals in their websites.
Data of subscribed databases may be copied (transferred to computer, printed, etc.) only in small quantities (One article from one journal or up to 20% of electronic book during one session). It shall be strictly prohibited to copy information completely. Transfer of such data to third parties, placement into web sites or use for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited. These legal relations are regulated by Law on Copyright and related rights of the Republic of Lithuania.
5 Minute Consult is an invaluable tool that provides quick answers and targeted, evidence-based medical content from reliable, trusted resources.
The database of electronic books in all fields of science.
Multi-disciplinary database of scholarly journals.
Online research database AccessMedicine includes Textbooks, Guidelines, Diagnostic Tests, Quick Medical Diagnosis and Treatment, Differential Diagnosis, Drug Database, Self-Assessment questions, Case files, Multimedia, Interactive Learning Module, Custom Curriculum.
It is the most comprehensive collection of full-text articles and bibligraphic records in the fields of computing and information technology.
Scientific journals in all fields of chemistry represented by ACS (American Chemical Society).
AgEcon Search is an open access repository of scholarly literature in agricultural and applied economics. It includes working papers, conference papers, and journal articles, and other materials.
This collection contains the articles of the journals of the American Economic Association. The AEA encourages all areas of economic research and freedom of economic discussion, without partisan approach.
Scientific journals in all fields of physics published by American Institute of Physics (AIP).
Scientific journals in field of mathematical research published by American Mathematical Society (AMS).
Title list:
Scientific journals in all fields of physics published by American Physical Society (APS).
Multi-disciplinary database of scholarly journals.
The collection contains ARAN, the open access repository of the National University of Ireland, Galway. The repository includes peer-reviewed articles, working papers, and conference papers produced at the National University of Ireland.
The database in field of law. Beck-Online provides access to statutory codes, judicial opinions, and secondary materials (including statutory commentaries, journals, and practice-oriented materials).
Medical journals published by British Medicine Journals (BMJ) Group.
Humanities, International Law & Biology database of eBooks.
The rich combination of the venerable Encyclopædia Britannica plus Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, magazines and periodicals, and many other research tools.
The Digitised Manuscripts site contains many different kinds of manuscripts, archives and documents.
Scholarly business database of bibliographic and full text content
Multidisciplinary and multilingual database of scholarly journals published in central and eastern European countries
This collection contains The Cranfield Collection of E-Research – CERES, a digital repository of the research conducted at Cranfield University. Materials include journal articles, theses and dissertations, book chapters, working papers, and technical reports. Subjects covered include Engineering, Library Science, Management, Health, the Applied Sciences, and more.
ClinicalKey offers access to Elsevier's current medical and surgical content.
ClinicalKey Medical Education is the next-generation medical learning platform
Users are required to create a personal profile to access any content on the site.
A free mobile app is available through iOS and Android app stores, search “Study Tools for ClinicalKey MedEd"
It is a collection of databases in the field of medicine:
This comprehensive database of indexed and full-text content offers a vast knowledgebase pertaining to traditional computing and applied sciences challenges and resources. | https://biblioteka.vu.lt/e.istekliai/index.php?browse=db&%3Bl=en&%3Bfilter=acc2&l=en&y=25&filter=dat1 |
While faculty know the major journals in their disciplines, some help may be needed to evaluate lesser known publications or publications in another discipline. Below are a few of the tools available:
In addition to the tools above, the following may help:
If you use EndNote Online to manage references for your research papers and projects, it includes a tool called "Manuscript Matcher" that will use the title and abstract of your paper to match it to journals that are a best match for publication. It provides a list of 2 to 10 best journals in which to publish content like yours. Select the MATCH tab in EndNote Online. See "Manuscript Matcher" for more information.
Reputable journals will describe their review processes on their websites, typically in their “submission guidelines” area. All journal acceptance rates and review procedures are self-reported by the journals, so no journal should be selected for publication without evaluating its articles for scholarly value, etc. | https://library.dsu.edu/c.php?g=22491&p=133158 |
Browsing philosophy (subject), content full text and access Free access
Finding journals in databases or articles inside journals using this system is not possible. Please perform such searches inside databases and journals in their websites.
Data of subscribed databases may be copied (transferred to computer, printed, etc.) only in small quantities (One article from one journal or up to 20% of electronic book during one session). It shall be strictly prohibited to copy information completely. Transfer of such data to third parties, placement into web sites or use for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited. These legal relations are regulated by Law on Copyright and related rights of the Republic of Lithuania.
Manuscriptorium aggregates manuscripts, incunabula, early printed books, maps, charters and other types of documents from many institutions across Europe and beyond. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Czech Republic.
NORA aggregates scholarly content from over 50 Norwegian archives. It is a collaboration between the university libraries at the University of Bergen, NTNU, University of Troms? with funding from the Norwegian Digital Library.
OAPEN is an online library and publication platform that collects open-access books in the humanities and social sciences from throughout Europe.
OECD iLibrary is the online library of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) featuring its books, papers and statistics and is the gateway to OECD’s analysis and data.
This website gives access to over 40,000 electronic books covering a wide variety of topics.
An authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.
This collection includes Open Access articles from academic and research journals provided by Oxford, all available free of charge.
Journal of philosophy and sociology, published by Lithuanian Academy of Sciences
Research papers of philosophy, published by Vilnius University
One of the biggest collections of free downloadable ebooks, created since 1971. At the moment it is possible to download over 32,000 free ebooks. No fee or registration is required.
This website gives access to over 5,,000 electronic books covering a wide variety of topics.
Registry of Open Access Repositories
Research papers of religion and culture, published by Vilnius University
Empirical data and other relevant information from various research areas
Research papers of language culture, published by Vilnius University and Jan Kochanovski University of Humanities and Natural Sciences in Kielce
This digitized collection of free scholarly scientific journals is available as part of the Swiss Electronic Academic Library Service. Titles are in German and in French. Coverage dates back to the early 1800's.
Open access scholarly articles in Art and Humanities.
This collection includes Open Access articles provided by Springer, all available free of charge. Articles published under the Bohn Stafleu van Loghum are not included.
SwePub provides the publications of 30 Swedish universities -- including articles, conference papers, dissertations, and more -- for search. Topics range the gamut of research fields.
Free online books mostly about mathematics, science, and computers.
Catalog of more than 40,000 free online books, including textbooks. Hosted by the University of Pennsylvania library.
Tímarit.is a digital library of the newspapers and periodicals from the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Iceland.
Journal of philosophy of literature, published by European Humanities University
Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) ebooks collection in field of humanities, social and natural science.
Wikibooks is a collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit and which can be used in a traditional classroom, an accredited or respected institution, a home-school environment, as part of a Wikiversity course or for self-learning.
This collection contains the open access records of ZORA (Zurich Open Repository and Archive), the repository containing the scholarly output of the University of Zurich.
Scientific journal published by Lithuanian Educological University. The journal consist of 4 parts: Didactic Linguistics; Literary criticism; Foreign Languages; Philosophy. | https://biblioteka.vu.lt/e.istekliai/index.php?browse=sub13&%3Bl=en&%3Bfilter=acc4_res2&l=en&filter=dat1_acc1&y=50&p=2 |
Fuad Abdul Hamied (Editor)
Professor, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia.
Fuad Abdul Hamied was former President of TEFLIN (Association of English Language Teaching in Indonesia) (2008-2014), former President of the Association of Indonesian Language Teaching for Foreign Speakers (1999-2002), and is currently President of Asia-TEFL (The Asian Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language Asia TEFL). He is now Editor-in-Chief of the Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, a reputable international journal, and also a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of Asia TEFL, also indexed by Scopus, as well as an editor and reviewer for several other international journals such as TEFLIN Journal, Indonesia; MELTA Journal, Malaysia; and The New English Teacher, Thailand. His research reports and articles on language education and policies are published in various reputable international journals, as well as in books published by international reputable publishers. | https://novapublishers.com/writer/fuad-abdul-hamied/ |
These databases are excellent resources, especially when you are beginning your research.
Ovid- MEDLINE & PsycINFO
Bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care
PubMed
References and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics
Academic Search Complete
Academic Search Complete is a comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 5,300 full-text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format.
Databases
Academic Search Complete
This database indexes and provides full text to many well-respected economics journals which are not necessarily covered in Medline/PubMed.
Annual Reviews
A quick search of health economics yields articles covering economics of prevention in mental health programs; the intersection of economics, health and environment; international comparisons of health economics; risk assessments, and more.
more...
less...
Log in using Open Athens from Texas Medical Center Library
Bureau of Economic Analysis
Business Source Complete
Scholarly business database, providing both bibliographic and full text content; includes indexing and abstracts for the most important scholarly business journals back to 1886. In addition to the searchable cited references provided for more than 1,200 journals, Business Source Complete contains detailed author profiles for the 20,000 most-cited authors in the database. Provides full text journals in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. Additional full text, non-journal content includes financial data, books, monographs, major reference works, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, market research reports, country reports, company profiles, SWOT analyses and more.
Cochrane Library
The Cochrane Library includes the NHS Economic Evaluation Database.
Economic Indicators
Government Accountability Office (GAO) Reports & Testimonies
The Government Accountability Office is a non-partisan independent agency that prepares reports for Congress.
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Papers
OECD Health Data
PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) (National & International)
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics
Social Expenditures Statistics (OECD)
Thomas
Search Congressional bills, hearings, reports, and other documents for legislation that focuses on aspects of health economics.
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Working papers are preliminary works, released to share ideas or invite discussion and feedback, often prior to the submission of a paper to a peer-reviewed journal or conference. Economists have traditionally relied on working papers as a method for the timely and informal communication of recent research findings.
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IDEAS (Hosted by RePEc)"IDEAS is the largest bibliographic database dedicated to Economics and available freely on the Internet. Based on RePEc, it indexes over 3,000,000 items of research, including over 2,700,000 that can be downloaded in full text."
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NBER Working PapersNBER researchers initially report their findings in these scientific papers aimed at other professional economists. Nearly 700 NBER Working Papers are published each year, and many subsequently appear in scholarly journals.
Top Databases for Articles in Economics
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EconLit with Full TextAbstracts, indexing, and full-text articles in all fields of economics, including capital markets, country studies, econometrics, economic forecasting, environmental economics, government regulations, labor economics, monetary theory, and urban economics.
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Business Source CompleteBusiness Source Complete provides full text for scholarly business journals and other sources, including full text for more than 1,800 peer-reviewed business publications. Coverage includes virtually all subject areas related to business. This database provides full text (PDF) for top scholarly journals, including the Harvard Business Review. It also includes industry and country reports from Euromonitor and company and industry reports from Datamonitor.
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ABI/InformABI/Inform, an extensive international business and management database, contains bibliographic citations, abstracts, and full text of articles appearing in professional publications, academic journals, and trade magazines published worldwide. ABI/Inform covers the areas of accounting, banking, computers, economics, engineering management, communications, finance, health care, human resources, insurance, international trends, law, management, marketing, public administration, real estate, taxation, transportation.
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PAIS InternationalContains citations to public policy literature of economics, government, law, international business, political science, public administration, and other social sciences. It includes references to journal articles, books, government documents, reports and pamphlets in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.
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CEIC Data ManagerCEIC Data contains economic, industrial and financial time-series data. Our Global Database offers unprecedented coverage of 221 countries in Asia, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East, Africa and the Americas. EIC also offers 18 macro-economic concepts, and 1,400,000 time series. Data comes from analysts on the ground and the prime national and regional statistical agencies and major industrial data issuing organizations of each country covered. The CEIC Data Manager provides access to the entire CEIC database from within the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application. Times-series can be directly retrieved from the database and imported into Excel for quick analysis.
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Web of ScienceChoosing "All Databases" allows you to search an index of journal articles, conference proceedings, data sets, and other resources in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
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JSTORJSTOR is a fully-searchable database containing the back issues of several hundred scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics, music, ecology and botany, business, and other fields. It includes the following collections: Arts & sciences I, II and III, General science, Ecology and botany, Business, Language and literature.
Tips for Finding Articles
- The easiest way to find articles is to use the Articles & Full Text option on the library homepage.
- A more precise way to search for articles is to select and browse Databases on the library homepage, especially those recommended in this and other library guides.
- In the databases, choose the advanced or guided searches (usually 3 lines) to help you correctly format your search.
- Use OR between your search terms to broaden the search to include any of the terms.
- Use AND between your search terms to narrow the search to include all the terms.
- Find full text within the databases in html or pdf format.
- Use the GetIt!Cornell to link to full text found outside of the database.
- Ask a Librarian if you need further help!
Evaluating Your Sources
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Evaluating Web Sites (Cornell University Library)Tips for evaluating the sources you find on the web.
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Critical Thinking CommunityProvides articles and papers on critical thinking. Promotes the development of critical thinking for students and others. | https://guides.library.cornell.edu/economics/articles |
Recognizing that NIH‐funded investigators have inadvertently published results in “predatory” journals, the NIH recently issued Notice NOT-OD-18-011 “encouraging” authors to publish in “reputable” journals.
While there are existing detailed guidelines for selecting good journals, here are two easy tips for instantly identifying a predatory journal:
- Look for the indexing statement and logos or icons. Accept only PubMed or MEDLINE, EMBASE, Scopus, Web of Science and other known research indices or databases. Ask an HSLS librarian if unsure. Also, avoid journals touting inclusion in Google Scholar! Predatory journals are retrieved by Google Scholar, making it a poor indexing benchmark.
- Look for the Journal Impact Factor, the h‐index, and other metrics such as CiteScore and SNIP in Elsevier products and the Relative Citation Ratio from NIH. These are validated research metrics backed by published research. Be alert for Google Scholar metrics disguised as Journal Impact Factors. Avoid Index Copernicus and other imposter impact factors. Visit the HSLS guide to Research Impact for more resources on impact metrics.
Test yourself: Is the following statement from a reputable journal?
“The journal has been indexed in Google Scholar, SCOPEMED, Tubitak Dergipark, Index Copernicus, Index Scholar, Index Journal, ISI Index, CiteFactor.”
Refer to the examples below:
Reputable Indices or Databases
|PubMed|
|Embase|
|Web of Science|
|Scopus|
|Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)|
Beware these Indices or Databases
|Google Scholar
|
Warning! Predatory journals tout Google Scholar indexing!
|CiteFactor|
|ICI World of Journals|
|Scribd|
|ResearchGate|
Impact Metrics used by Predatory Journals
|Google Scholar Metrics|
|Index Copernicus|
|Real-time Impact Factor|
|JIFactor|
|Research Journal Impact Factor (RJIF)|
As a final backup, Stop Predatory Journals is a useful new website maintained by a group of anonymous academics who resurrected Beall’s lists of predatory (or possibly predatory) journals and publishers. Journals and publishers are listed separately, and new sections have been added covering “Misleading and Fake Metrics” as well as “Hijacked Journals,” making it easy to track legitimate journals whose titles or URLs may have been co-opted by alternative or illegitimate management. This and more resources for assessing publishing quality can be found on the HSLS Scholarly Communication/Publishing Guide.
If you have any questions, or for more information, please e-mail Andrea Ketchum at [email protected] or call 412-648-9757. | https://info.hsls.pitt.edu/updatereport/issue/2018/july-2018/ |
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LUND UNIVERSITY
LUND UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
LUB
LibGuides
Economics and Management
Economic History Subject Guide
Working papers and other research
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Economic History Subject Guide
For more general resources, choose Other Guides: All Resources
Home
Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Books
Scholarly articles and citation indexes
News and magazine articles
Working papers and other research
Working papers and other research publications
Statistics, data and country information
Finance
Archives
Student theses
Working papers and other research publications
Asian Development Bank
A multilateral finance institution that promotes economic and social progress in the Asia-Pacific region
CEPR Discussion Papers
Centre for Economic Policy Research.
Access to scientific work at the discussion paper stage.
Since journals typically insist on reducing the length of papers, published articles are often highly condensed versions of the full results of a research effort.
EBSLG working papers
European Working Papers in Business and Economics
Run by the Stockholm School of Economics on the behalf of EBSLG, the European Business Schools Librarians' Group
Free resource
Economics Working Papers in Oxford, Oxford University
Includes Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers
Free resource
EconPapers
Provides access to RePEc, the world's largest collection of on-line Economics working papers, journal articles and software
Free resource
Eldis
Institute of Development Studies, Sussex
Guides with access to key documents, organisations, research themes, discussions and other key resources on development.
Free resource
Fed-in-Print
Provided by the Economic Research Division, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, USA
Ideas
IMF eLibrary
Working Papers, Doctoral Disserations and other Research Publications
Lund Papers in Economic History
Working papers published by the Department of Economic History
NBER Working Papers
National Bureau of Economic Research
A private, non-profit organizations that conducts economic research for academics, public policy makers and business professionals.
OECD working papers series: By theme
Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology
Emerald
S-WoPEc
Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics
Free resource
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
Abstracts on scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers
SwePub
SwePub makes it possible to search among articles, conference papers, dissertations etc. published at Swedish universities.
World Bank: Research and Publications
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The ZBW is Germany's central subject library and research infrastructure for economics in Germany. Its mandate is to acquire, to index, and to archive theoretical and empirical literature and subject-specific information from economics and business studies, and to provide access to these materials to the general public on a national basis. The ZBW also acquires all publications from closely related and auxiliary disciplines focussing on economics, in order to accommodate the increasing tendency towards interdisciplinary work in economic research.
The ZBW is part of the system of national literature provision within the German Research Foundation (DFG).
The ZBW holds almost 4.4 million items. The ZBW subscribes to more than 27,100 journals and enables access to 2.3 million electronic documents. The search portal EconBiz gives free access to 10 million datasets. More than 134,000 full-texts (working papers, articles from journals, conference proceedings) from German research institutes and universities are available online and free of charge on the repository EconStor.
The ZBW creates content-descriptive metadata not only for books, but also for articles in journals and working papers, i.e. they are indexed with keywords (descriptors) from the Standard Thesaurus for Economics.
The ZBW maintains the search portal EconBiz containing more than 10 million datasets of bibliographic references for economics and business studies. The ZBW also offers an online reference service, Research Guide EconDesk, which provides guidance for literature and data searches in economics and business studies.
The ZBW is an active player in the Open Access movement which aims for free access to scholarly research output. It is the chief negotiator for national licences in economics in Germany.
The repository EconStor serves as a platform for the free publication of research output in economics. Authors and publishing institutions can publish without charges on EconStor.
More than 400 institutions use EconStor for the digital dissemination of their publications in Open Access. It is an input service for RePEc and one of its most frequently used archives. All titles in EconStor are indexed by search engines such as Google, Google Scholar and BASE, and distributed to databases such as WoldCat, OpenAire and EconBiz.
The ZBW Journal Data Archive is a service for the editors of scholarly journals in economics. Editors can deposit datasets and other material relating to empirical articles and provide access to them in order to enable reproducibility of published research findings.
The ZBW publishes two journals of economic policy, Wirtschaftsdienst and Intereconomics.
The ZBW also provides support for researchers dealing with the different aspects of the digitisation of the science system, such as publishing in Open Access or research data management.
The ZBW participates in national and international projects to develop new services for its users.
In order to meet the challenges resulting from the technological changes in information provision, the ZBW relies on a global network. It has signed cooperation agreements with national and international research institutions, for instance in the context of the Leibniz Research Alliance Science 2.0, the EU project MOVING, and in numerous DFG-funded projects.
The ZBW is also actively engaged in the community of information infrastructure providers, for instance in the working groups of the Leibniz Association, the Common Library Network, LIBER, nestor and the Priority Initiative "Digital Information".
The ZBW carries out application-oriented research in computer and information science. Three professors work with an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers on the subject of Open Science / Science 2.0.
Open Science / Science 2.0 describes the changes that the World Wide Web and its numerous Web 2.0 applications engender in the research and publication processes of the science system, which are the subject of research at the ZBW. In 2013, the ZBW initiated the Leibniz Research Alliance Science 2.0. This Europe-wide cooperation of infrastructure providers and research institutes wants to establish the topic of Open Science in the scholarly community. | https://www.knowpia.com/knowpedia/German_National_Library_of_Economics |
Elizade University is a private University situated in Ilara-Mokiri, Ondo State, Nigeria. The University aims to be an institution with the best traditions in the production of self-reliant, ethics-conscious, globally competitive graduates imbued with requisite skills, competencies and ability to be key players in the nation’s quest for socio-economic and technological development.
Departments: Mechanical Engineering, Law, Mass Communication, Applied Geophysics, Biochemistry, Environmental Management and Toxicology, Biotechnology, Performing and Film Art, Information & Communication Technology (lCT), Electrical & Electronics Engineering, Computer Engineering, Automotive Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Automotive Engineering.
Candidate should be holders of PhD from recognized Universities with at least three (3) years post doctoral teaching, research and administrative experience in tertiary institutions, with evidence of at least four (4) journal articles in reputable learned journals, plus registration with relevant professional bodies (where applicable).
Candidates with Master’s Degree with at least six (6) years post qualification teaching and administrative experience in tertiary institution, six (6) journal articles, evidence of PhD registration or Master’s CGPA of not less than 4.0/5.0 may also apply.
Candidates must possess NYSC Discharge Certificate or Certificate of Exception where applicable.
Candidates should be holders of Ph.D degree from recognized Universities with at least six (6) years teaching, research and administrative experience in a tertiary institution.
Candidates must have evidence of at least twelve (12) scholarly publications in both local and international reputable learned journals, plus registration with relevant professional bodies (where applicable).
Candidates should be holders of Ph.D degree from recognized Universities with at least eight (8) years teaching, research and administrative experience in a tertiary institution.
Candidates must have evidence of scholarly publications in both local and international reputable learned journals, plus registration with relevant professional bodies (where applicable).
Candidates should possess a good Honours Degree preferably in Law, humanities or Social Sciences from recognized Universities, plus seven (7) years cognate experience in a tertiary institution.
Candidates must possess a good University Degree preferably in the Humanities, Law, Social Sciences or Management Sciences with ten (10) years cognate experience, (5) of which must have been spent in a tertiary institution.
Candidates should possess a degree in Computer Science, Electrical/Electronics Engineering, Information Technology, Software Engineering, Management Information System with 12 years’ experience, five (5) of which should be in a tertiary institution, and be registered with the relevant professional bodies.
Experience in any of SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and Database, Scripting languages, MySQl Certifications, MCDBA, CCNA and CCNP would be required.
Candidates should possess a degree in Computer Science, Electrical/Electronics Engineering, Information Technology, Software Engineering, Management Information System with ten (10) years’ experience, five(5) of which should be in a tertiary institution. and be registered with the relevant professional bodies.
Candidates must demonstrate hands-on experience in area of specialization.
The Candidates must possess Higher National Diploma (HND) in Secretarial Studies passed at minimum of Lower Credit level, with seven (7) years’ experience plus demonstrable ability for 60 words speed per minute in typing plus computer literacy.
Also the candidates must have WASC/SSCE/GCE with at least 5 credits including English Language.
In addition, the candidates should not only have a credit in English Language, but be proficient in oral and written English Language.
Salary, allowances and other conditions of service is the same as approved for Federal Universities in Nigeria.
Full details of teaching, research experience and service to the nation and Immediate community (where applicable).
Names, addresses, GSM numbers and e-mail addresses of three referees who shall include: his/her current Boss or Head of Department.
Applicants are advised to request their referees to send their reports under confidential cover.
Application Closes on 14th February, 2018. | https://www.ngyab.com/2018/01/massive-2018-recruitment-elizade-university-ilara-mokiri-ondo-state-academic-non-academic-staff/ |
This is a tough question. Not all sources are created equal. Just because a journal article has been peer-reviewed doesn't mean it's accurate or true. Reviewers don't replicate the work they're reviewing and they don't recheck all the data. Plenty of papers pass peer review in top journals, only to be disproved or even retracted later on, for any number of reasons. And it's well documented that the scientific literature is filled with, well, junk science. Peer review is far from perfect, but it does convey some added level of authority to what is published. On the other hand, it also tends to constrain "out of the box" thinking that may be truly innovative and ultimately revolutionary.
Ultimately it's up to the reader - that's you - to separate the good research from the bad. Experienced scientists use their accumulated judgment and knowledge, as well as an outlook of informed skepticism, to decide quickly if a particular paper is worthwhile or not. But what are students to do? Here are some questions you can ask yourself.
Like articles, not all journals are created equal. Major journals in every field are recognized for their overall quality and authority (even though bad articles can appear in them too). In analytical chemistry, these are some of the best known journals:
They come from reputable publishers such as the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, AOAC, the Electrochemical Society, and the like.
"Reputable publishers" implies that there are also disreputable publishers. That's true. But there is a difference between "obscure" (that is, not widely known or read) and "disreputable" (known to publish fake or junk papers, or vanity presses that publish anything for a fee). This distinction may not matter much to your audience or instructor. When in doubt about a journal, it's OK to ask your librarian or professor for advice.
You can easily determine this by looking up the article in Web of Science or Google Scholar. Articles with lots of citations from later works are probably more reliable than those with few or no citations. But recently published papers may not have accumulated many citations yet, and sometimes citations are negative - a controversial or disproved paper might have many citations that refute its claims. It's even possible that the highly cited paper has since been retracted!
Some articles just seem "off" from the start. Perhaps the data don't make sense. Perhaps the conclusions don't seem to be supported by the data or evidence. Important data may be unclearly presented or missing altogether. The methods be not be clearly described. There isn't really any formal rubric for evaluating physical science articles in this way, but you can see some guidance here: A Rough Guide to Spotting Bad Science.
Bad science vs fraud - Although scientific dishonesty gets a lot of media attention these days, outright fraud is actually rare in the literature. Bad articles are more often the result of sloppy experimental design, imprecise writing, or lack of adequate peer review or editorial oversight. Nevertheless, fraudulent research (which can include outright plagiarism, self-plagiarism, fabrication, etc) can be present even in the most prestigious journals, although it's more likely to be found in journals of lesser reputation, where it's easier to get accepted.
Bad writing - Poor grammar and language usage is often a giveaway to a paper that hasn't been properly vetted or edited. Really poor language use is a clue that translation software might have been used, which should disqualify it altogether. If you run across an article like this, it's a good idea to move on to another article.
Learn more about retractions, fraud, and other shenanigans at Retraction Watch.
There are no hard and fast rules, but in general, these types of information aren't appropriate for scholarly citations:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License. | https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/chemistry/literaturetutorial/authority |
These Include:
E-Books
E-Journals
E-Resources A-Z
American Chemical Society
The American Chemical Society is the leading publisher of peer-reviewed research journals in the chemical and related sciences, serving scientific communities worldwide through an unparalleled commitment to quality, reliability, and innovation. Access is to over 35 high quality, high impact journals.
Acoustical Society of America
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA)
AGORA
The AGORA program, set up by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain access to an outstanding digital library collection in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. AGORA provides a collection of more than 3500 key journals and 3300 books to 2500 institutions in 116 countries. AGORA is designed to enhance the scholarship of the many thousands of students, faculty and researchers in agriculture and life sciences in the developing world.
Alberta Law Review
Amsterdam Law reform
American Institute of Physics
AIP publishes 12 journals, 2 magazines, and a conference proceedings series. AIP's Scitation platform hosts over 2 million articles from more than 200 scholarly publications for 28 earned society publishers.
American Institute of Physics
Access to the Physical Review Online Archive (PROLA) and journals produced by the American Physical Society.
American Society of Civil Engineers
ASCE Journals Online provides unprecedented access to 33 Peer-reviewed journals with more than 60,000 full-text papers and a 31-Year archive from 1983 to the present.
Annual Reviews
Annual Reviews publications operates in prioritising and synthesising the primary research literature in disciplines for the Biomedical, Life, Physical and Social Sciences
ARDI
The Access to Research for Development and Innovation (ARDI) program is coordinated by WIPO together with its partners in the publishing industry with the aim to increase the availability of scientific and technical information in developing countries.
By improving access to scholarly literature from diverse fields of science and technology, ARDI seeks to:
• reinforce the capacity of developing countries to participate in the global knowledge economy; and
• support researchers in developing countries in creating and developing new solutions to technical challenges faced on a local and global level.
Currently, 17 publishers provide access to around 20,000 journals, books, and reference works for 117 developing countries and territories through ARDI.
BiolineInternational
Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries. It provides open access to peer reviewed bioscience journals published in developing countries. The journals contain timely research on public health, international development, tropical medicine, food and nutritional security, and biodiversity
British Institute of Radiology
Access to British Journal of Radiology (BJR) and Dent maxillofacial Radiology (DMFR)
Global Health is a bibliographical abstract and indexing database specialising in public health, human nutrition, parasitic, communicable and tropical diseases and medicinal plants. It provides access to abstracts of the world's research literature from 1973 to present with coverage of English and foreign language journals, books, research reports, patents and standards, dissertations, conference proceedings, annual reports, developing country information and other difficult to obtain literature.
Cambridge University Press
Full text of over 323 Cambridge University Press Online Journals.
Canadian Science Publishing (publisher of the NRC Research Press journals)
Full text of 17 online peer-reviewed journals in a broad range of scientific disciplines with back files dating back to 1996 in most cases.
Cochrane Library
The Cochrane Library is a collection of online searchable databases containing high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision-making. Cochrane Reviews represent the highest level of evidence on which to base clinical treatment decisions. In addition to Cochrane Reviews, The Cochrane Library provides other sources of reliable information, from other systematic reviews abstracts, technology assessments, economic evaluations and individual clinical trials all the current evidence in one single environment.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a discovery service for peer reviewed books published under an open access license. DOAB provides a searchable index to the information about these books, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher's website or repository.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and languages.
Earth Planets and Space
EBSCO
Access to 8 major databases: Academic Search Premier; Business Source Premier; ERIC; Masterfile Premier; Newspaper Source; Health Source : Nursing & Academic; Health Source : Consumer Edition; Medline.
Edinburgh University Press
Edinburgh University Press publishes over 35 journals across a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.
Emerald Publishing Group Limited
EmeraldCUULfull-text access features Emerald HR, Learning & Organization Studies (25 journals)andEmerald Accounting, Finance & Economics (39 journals) all of which are peer-reviewed and fully searchable full text journals.
Free Medical Journals:
Highwire PressHighWire Press is a division of the Stanford University Libraries that produces the online versions of peer-reviewed journals and other scholarly content. Resources include a vast database of full-text scholarly, high-impact materials.
HST - Libraries in a Digital Age
Specially prepared, online, animated, audio-visual lectures by world leading authorities on library developments in a digital environment for researchers and university faculty members.
Henry Stewart Talks The Marketing & Management Collection (TMMC)
TMMC is specially prepared, online, animated, audio-visual lectures by world leading authorities on topics in marketing and management for researchers and university faculty members.
Subject strengths: Marketing and Management
HINARI
HINARI Programme set up by WHO together with major publishers, enables low- and middle- income countries to gain access to one of the world's largest collections of biomedical and health literature. Up to 13,000 journals (in 30 different languages), up to 29,000 e-books, up to 70 other information resources are now available to health institutions in more than 100 countries, areas and territories benefiting many thousands of health workers and researchers, and in turn, contributing to improve world health.
Goettingen Journal of International Law
Over 20 Research journals and letters in electrical and electronic engineering
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The IMF is viewed as one of the world’s most authoritative sources for economic information, analysis and harmonized statistics. IMF eLibrary provides comprehensive data and original analysis, with coverage of almost every economy in the world and a special focus on developing and emerging economies.
IOP Publishing
IOP publishes over 60 of the world's most prestigious journals in physics and related sciences, all available online through IOP publishing.
Journal of Law and Commerce
JSTOR
JSTOR is a growing digital library of more than 2,000 academic journals, 20,000 books, and 2 million primary source objects.
JSTOR helps students, scholars, and other individuals discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content through a powerful research and teaching platform.
Mary Ann Liebert
Founded in 1980, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. is universally acknowledged for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in the most promising areas of biotechnology, biomedical research/life sciences, clinical medicine and surgery, and law. Liebert Online delivers electronic access to peer-reviewed journals published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Nature Publishing Group
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a publisher of high impact scientific and medical information in print and online. NPG publishes journals, online databases and services across the life, physical, chemical and applied sciences and clinical medicine.
Oxford University Press
Oxford Journals publishes journals from science, technical, professional, medical, humanities, arts and social science disciplines.
Organisations that qualify for the free Developing Countries Oxford Online Collection offer will obtain access to over 200 titles.
OARE
Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) is led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in partnership with major publishers. The programme enables developing countries to gain access to one of the world’s largest collections of environmental science research.
OARE enhances environmental research by connecting academics, researchers and policy makers in low and middle income countries with online research and scholarly information. Up to 5710 peer reviewed journals and 1119 online books, and other information resources are available to environmental institutions in more than 100 countries benefitting many thousands of environment researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators, and students.
OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Contain digital collections that preserve and provide access of intellectual output of an institution, and content varies i.e. could be open or closed, though open is encouraged today.EachOpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded there. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.
As well as providing a simple repository list, OpenDOAR lets you search for repositories or search repository contents
Palgrave Macmillan Journals
Palgrave Macmillan offers a combined portfolio of over 70 peer-reviewed e-journals.
Project MUSE
Project MUSE provides online access to 500 full-text journals from 200 non-profit publishers in the humanities and social sciences.
Royal College of Physicians
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World Bank
The World Bank e-Library is an electronic portal to the World Bank's full-text collection of books, reports/working papers, journals and other documents on social and economic development. It is the most comprehensive collections in the area and it brings together, in PDF format, a fully indexed and cross-searchable database of 6,000+ titles, as well as every new title as it becomes available in print. In addition, subscribers have access to information not available in print. eLibrary is fully searchable by subject, region, keyword, title, author, abstract, or year of publication. | http://www.nkumbauniversity.ac.ug/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=299&Itemid=665&lang=en |
A few weeks ago, I announced my choice of topic for my BCM325 Digital Artefact, which is Virtual Reality (VR) and related ethical issues. However, further research has proven that VR-in-general is too large a topic; combined with my passion for writing and storytelling, this means I have narrowed the scope down, focusing on the application of VR in storytelling to create compelling narratives.
In my upcoming presentation, I will share with the class some key points which I will further explain these below, with resources from my secondary research thus far.
VR is one of the keys to immersive storytelling, yet there are currently some obstacles.
Created in 2016 and even nominated for an Academy Award (Chalk 2017), Pearl is not only a theatrical short film but a fully immersive 360° video and an interactive VR experience. Following the dream-chasing journey of a father-daughter duo, viewers, with head-mounted devices, could step into the story and immerse themselves in the experience.
VR, with its power of allowing viewers to be active agents (Dooley 2017, p. 161), is reshaping storytelling in unprecedented ways—the agency means the audience can go at their own pace in non-linear paths, even (Jones 2017 p. 178); the consequent myriad of possible endings urges storytellers to think in non-linearly (Koski 2015, p. 11).
As a result, this application of VR is becoming more prevalent in educational institutions as a pedagogical approach to the delivery of highly visual content to young pupils. Project MuraVagando is an excellent example: it was developed for students in an Italian high school to learn about their local heritage (Carrozzino et al. 2016, pp. 304-306), as they freely moves through picturesque virtual scenery with the help of a birds’-eye-view map.
Taking it even further, researchers have discovered that VR technological intervention proves more efficient in assisting deaf and hard-of-hearing students in improving their storytelling ability more than traditional pictorial intervention (Eden 2014, p. 370). Wildcard, a wearable VR storytelling tool has been implemented at a facility for children with intellectual developmental disability and has been proven to “partially [boost]” the children’s long-term memory (Gelsomini et al. 2016, p. 5191).
However, in post-production, a major challenge is to assemble frames from multiple cameras into 360° worlds (Burns 2016, p. 38). Also, since they are time-consuming and costly to produce, VR projects can yet to be constantly churned out (Sullivan 2018).
In journalism, the application of VR in creating immersive news stories has been proven to enhance audience’s experience greatly.
With names like New York Times and Guardian ambitiously entering the market for immersive VR journalism, it is no surprise that huge steps have been taken to introduce news audiences to elaborately crafted pieces that “stand up to journalistic rigor” (Kane 2014, p. 32), e.g. Project Syria, a visceral take on Syrian children at war
A remarkable observation is how the audience of VR journalism “respond realistically” to situations which they fully know to be virtual, according to de la Pena, one of the creators of Project Syria (2010, p. 293). This is partially due to viewers’ complete deprivation of distractions (Jones 2017, p. 181; Shin & Biocca 2017, p. 16) and a sense of “being-there” (Sundar et al. 2017, p. 674).
A question arising from this, however, is whether immersive experience with VR evokes genuine feelings and empathy—this discussion involves many philosophical questions on whether we can feel for (what is deemed by many) fiction.
As pondered over by Radford and Weston (1975, pp. 67-69),
what we think to be genuine feelings for a character in a story (be it fiction or non-fiction) are likely mere make-believe, no matter how “moved” we are by an account. On the other hand, Currie (1995) argued that we can truly, genuinely, feel for what is virtual/unreal, via “secondary-imagining”, which is imagining not just what a character would do but what one would feel if he/she were the character.
Sánchez Laws (2017) and Shin (2018) seemingly think along the same line as Currie. Emotional engagement, a major part of immersive journalism, encourages viewers to empathise with the virtual people’s pain as if it were their own, countering emotional distancing in traditional journalism (Sánchez Laws 2017, p. 10); it is further enhanced by the state of flow brought by immersion (Shin 2018, p. 70).
As the application of VR in storytelling is studied heavily in relation to child development and early education, some other serious ethical implications should be considered during this type of research.
Motion sickness, information overload, intensification of experience, and re-entry into the real world are debatable aspects of a VR experience (Behr et al. 2005, pp. 670-671), and they require special strategies to alleviate (pp. 674-675). In child development, VR is found to potentially impact children’s prefrontal brain structures, and engrossment sometimes makes them lose track of the real world (Southgate et al. 2017, pp. 14-15).
For my final Digital Artefact (which will be up on my blog by 1 June), I will present my findings through a series of annotated 360° illustrations embedded in a blog post, which requires some usage of Photoshop and another sketching app for tablets, Leonardo. As of this recess week, I have subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud (with a student discount) for Photoshop, and—coincidentally—Leonardo has recently been upgraded with a brilliant function of exporting to .psd files, which would seemingly make my process of transferring drawings into Photoshop to create 360° illustrations more intuitive.
That’s it for now—stay tuned for more updates!
Mia (Minh-Anh)
References:
Behr, K, Nosper, A, Klimmt, C, & Hartmann, T 2005, ‘Some Practical Considerations of Ethical Issues in VR Research’, Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 668-676.
Burns, M 2016, ‘VR in post: building a world for immersive storytelling’, TVB Europe, pp. 38-39.
Carrozzino, M, Evangelista, C, & Galdieri, R 2016, ‘Building a 3D Interactive Walkthrough in a Digital Storytelling Classroom Experience’, Informatica (03505596), vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 303-309.
Chalk, L 2017, ‘Virtual Reality Is Reshaping Story-Telling For The Better’, Forbes, 12 June, viewed 14 April 2018, <https://www.forbes.com/sites/lionelchok/2017/06/12/virtual-reality-is-reshaping-story-telling-for-the-better/#5302762a5dd4>.
Currie, G 1995, ‘The moral psychology of fiction’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 73, no. 2, pp. 250-259.
Dooley, K 2017, ‘Storytelling with virtual reality in 360-degrees: a new screen grammar’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, vol. 11, no. 3, p. 161-171.
de la Pena, N, Weil, P, Llobera, J, Giannopoulos, E, Pomes, A, Spanlang, B, Friedman, D, Sanchez-Vives, M, & Slater, M 2010, ‘Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News’, Presence, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 291-301.
Eden, S 2014, ‘Virtual intervention to improve storytelling ability among deaf and hard-of-hearing children’, European Journal of Special Needs Education, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 370-386.
Gelsomini, M, Garzotto, F & Montesano, D 2016, ‘Wildcard: A wearable virtual reality storytelling tool for children with intellectual developmental disability’, in 38th Annual International Conference of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) 2016 Proceedings, Orlando, USA, 16 – 20 August, viewed 9 April 2018, <https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/document/7591896/?arnumber=7591896&SID=EBSCO:edseee>.
Jones, S 2017, ‘Disrupting the narrative: immersive journalism in virtual reality’, Journal of Media Practice, vol. 18, no. 2/3, pp. 171-185.
Kane, R 2014, The Future is Now. (cover story)’, Editor & Publisher, vol. 147, no. 12, p. 30.
Koski, O 2015, ‘Step into the Story’, Nieman Reports, vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 8-11.
Radford, C & Weston, M 1975, How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume, vol. 49, pp. 67-93.
Sánchez Laws, A 2017, ‘Can Immersive Journalism Enhance Empathy?’, Digital Journalism, p. 1-16.
Shin, D 2018, ‘Empathy and embodied experience in virtual environment: To what extent can virtual reality stimulate empathy and embodied experience?’, Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 78, pp. 64-73.
Shin, D, & Biocca, F 2017, ‘Exploring immersive experience in journalism’, New Media and Society. Available from: 10.1177/1461444817733133. [14 April 2018].
Southgate, E, Smith, SP & Scevak, J 2017, ‘Asking ethical questions in research using immersive virtual and augmented reality technologies with children and youth’, in IEEE Virtual Reality (VR) 2017 Proceedings, Los Angeles, USA, 18 – 22 March, viewed 10 April 2018, <https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/document/7892226/?arnumber=7892226&SID=EBSCO:edseee>.
Sullivan, T 2018, ‘VR gets real: Immersive storytelling in journalism’, PC Magazine, p. 103.
Sundar, SS, Kang, J, & Oprean, D ‘Being There in the Midst of the Story: How Immersive Journalism Affects Our Perceptions and Cognitions’, Cyberpsychology Behavior and Social Networking, vol. 20, no. 11, pp. 672-682. | https://thespecsofmia.com/2018/04/17/update-bcm325-digital-artefact-virtual-reality-storytelling/comment-page-1/ |
Tribeca Film Festival 2016 Delves Deep Into VR and Interactive Storytelling
Virtual reality (VR) and interactive storytelling take center stage at the 2016 edition of the Tribeca Film Festival (TFF). Twenty-three VR exhibits and interactive installations from leading creators and emerging artists will be presented, with 16 of them making their world debut, at the Tribeca Festival Hub.
Tribeca Film Festival has announced in a recent press release that the upcoming 15th edition of the festival will feature a whole variety of virtual reality productions and installations in order to showcase the state of play of interactive storytelling. Additionally, a section called 'Virtual Arcade' invites audiences to explore the world of VR, taking them to vastly different worlds crafted by some of the leading creators working in the medium. The Virtual Arcade, open April 18-20, demonstrates the breadth of work created by VR storytellers, including projects that are rooted in documentary, narrative, gaming, music and journalism.
“Tribeca has always celebrated the most exciting new forms of storytelling, from video games to virtual reality," said Jane Rosenthal, co-founder Tribeca Film Festival and Executive Chair of Tribeca Enterprises. “This year’s program, which you can touch and feel at our amazing Festival Hub at Spring Studios, features the most dynamic work to date at the intersection of story and technology. We're committed to giving the independent artists we support the best stage to share their mind-blowing work with audiences.”
Among the line-up are at least three projects that qualify as documentaries with an innovative approach of storytelling, interactivity and immersion.
VIRTUAL REALITY
The Ark (World Premiere)
Project Creators: Jongsma + O’Neill (Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill) | Key Collaborator: Springbok Entertainment
The northern white rhinoceros is the most endangered animal on the planet. Only three remain, and they are protected at all times by armed bodyguards. The Ark is a virtual reality documentary that puts viewers face-to-face with the last northern white rhinos, and tells the story of the global coalition scientists who are fighting to rescue the species from extinction.
Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness
Project Creators: Arnaud Colinart, Amaury La Burthe, Peter Middleton, and James Spinney
After losing his sight in 1983, John Hull began recording an audio-diary documenting his discovery of “a world beyond sight.” John’s original recordings form the basis of this interactive experience, which uses real time 3D, virtual reality, and binaural sound to explore the interior world of blindness.
VIRTUAL ARCADE
KANJU (World Premiere)
Project Creator: Stephanie Riggs / Azimyth Creation Studios | Key Collaborators: The Nantucket Project, Harbers Studios
Journey across Africa in search of Kanju, “creativity born of struggle.” Visit a floating school rising from the slums of Makoko. Witness President Obama's historic speech in Nairobi from the press pit. This uplifting, immersive documentary seamlessly layers traditional narrative techniques and 360o live action. Feel the power of storytelling merged with technology and rediscover Africa as the bright continent.
Please visit this link in order to see the full list of projects featured in the Virtual Arcade section. | http://edn.network/news/news-story/article/member-of-the-month-milton-tabbot-ifp/?tx_felogin_pi1%5Bforgot%5D=1&%3BcHash=97e2efb9156690f64b5b7912d9a10d1d&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=111 |
Andrew Cochrane's keynote on narrative in virtual reality reveals some key elements of an exciting medium in its infancy.
Virtual reality is very much a brave new world: still firmly in its infancy in terms of technology, application, and availability. The opportunities presented by VR are difficult to fully grasp, mostly because we’ve yet to fully uncover them. But they are many, and as Andrew Cochrane, Digital & New Media Director of Mirada Studios, said in a keynote at the annual FMX Conference yesterday, while VR isn’t The Matrix quite yet: “We are living through an unbelievable moment in history.”
Cochrane’s keynote, titled “Creating Narratives for Virtual Reality,” focused on the narrative opportunities for VR and, more specifically, how we must change our approach to stories for them to work inside of the headset.
Where We Are
Cochrane emphasizes that where we’re at with virtual reality right now is akin to the very early days of film, when a few-seconds-long clip of men boxing in 1891 was an impressive feat. We’re at the stage of nickelodeons and Muybridge and primitively constructed visual narratives, because creators and audiences are still trying to find the best ways to use the medium.
But Cochrane also points to the 1905 film The Black Imp from Georges Méliès. It was a huge leap in filmmaking, despite the fact that there was no earth-shattering advancement in technology. It was all application — figuring out how to use the tools available to tell a story that was evocative and a dramatic departure from what was basically an extended GIF in 1891.
That, Cochrane says, is where we’re at with VR. We have technology and it’s going to get a lot better, but we don’t have to wait for it to get better to make it meaningful. That’s where creating narratives in VR becomes important — it’s not frame rates and resolution that are going to make VR impactful, but the experiences that people are going to have inside of headsets that will forever change the way that we perceive stories.
What We Talk About
When we talk about VR, we have the awful habit of clumsily shoving a bunch of different things into one broad category. In reality, VR is a number of different things that don’t necessarily fit into neat boxes. Cochrane breaks it down into three categories: 360-degree video, immersive cinema, and “true VR. He explains that the last term is effectively meaningless because “true” VR doesn’t exist yet. But, for the purposes of this conversation, it comes down to what we might think of as interactive VR that gives the audience agency.
360-degree video is something we see a lot of in Google Cardboard apps — essentially a camera set up to capture an entire 360-degree environment like a stadium, the cockpit of a fighter jet, a museum, or a lookout at a national park. It often gives viewers what Cochrane calls an “impossible perspective.”
While immersive cinema also has the 360-degree component, the element that sets it apart is a first person intent.
“Immersive cinema is one in which there is an intentional first-person narrative being told, being created,” Cochrane says. “When you put on a headset, you are in a narrative world, you are in a story.”
And that’s where things get really interesting.
Immersive cinema is designed to give us the feeling that we’re in the story, even though we might not be able to move around or affect our environment. The cameras are at person-height, characters talk to us and we have a character, ourselves. Cochrane uses the example of a Mirada VR experience for the FX show The Strain. “You do exist,” he says. “You’re not being ignored. You’re actually being addressed and, later, attacked.”
How We Create and Think About Narrative in VR
“Storytelling is dead in VR,” Cochrane says. It’s a word that doesn’t have any meaning in virtual reality because the medium isn’t about “telling” the audience anything, it’s about creating experiences. And so he says that words like “narrative” and “story architecture” and story worlds” are more apt.
In most of the traditional art and storytelling forms we have now — film, music, books, television, theater — it’s up to writers and directors to determine what you’re seeing, what you’re paying attention to, what you notice. In VR, that’s not the case. Audiences will be able to look around and focus on different parts of the world. And that changes things.
Cochrane points out that whenever someone puts on a headset, they’re immediately filled with a bunch of questions: Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I? Can I move? Who is that? It’s up to the narrative creators to answer those questions quickly so that the audience is paying attention. He stresses that the audience is the key element and that no matter how flashy and impressive and complex your story is, if the audience isn’t at the center of it, it’s meaningless.
“[I]f the audience is not literally the most important thing in that story that you’ve created, all of that is for naught. It’s a waste.”
Once it’s established that the audience is the centerpiece, we start to think about directing attention, and Cochrane says that this where other mediums come into play. Just like cinema wasn’t photography or vaudeville — but a medium that stole from both — VR is going to steal from a number of places: haunted houses, game design, cinema, and amusement parks.
Cochrane points out that video games are excellent at directing attention, cinema gives us light and effect cues, and amusement parks are experts at what he calls “on boarding and off boarding what is bringing us into a story, giving us a character, and, once the ride is over, ushering us back into the real world.” He uses the example of Star Tours at Disney amusement parks.
There’s also room for narrative in “true” and social VR, though. It’s not just immersive cinema that gets in on the narrative action. “True” or interactive VR will rely on user choice and reactive environments, but the full-body interactivity and immersion is going to make for new and complex narrative developments. He uses the Aperture Robot Repair experience for Vive as an example of narrative in interactive VR.
However, Cochrane points out that it’s important to note that this kind of VR doesn’t yet have a real consumer base. While consumer headsets are shipping, it will likely be years before they’re a real part of the entertainment paradigm on a mainstream scale.
Where We’re Going
Though we’re a long way from Cochrane’s “matrix,” he makes it clear that we don’t have to wait for significant advancements in VR to make experiences meaningful. Working through these narratives and finding ways to bring experiences and stories into the headset is going to change narrative permanently, and that starts now, in 2016. What’s more, there’s exciting technology coming in the form of light fields and parallax rendering. While they’re wildly different (and somewhat complex) concepts, they boil down to making VR more interactive, more real, and more impactful.
It’s clear that while we’re still miles away from a VR headset in every house, VR is here to change everything, and perhaps the most important thing it’s here to change is the way we tell experience stories. | https://www.inverse.com/article/14971-how-virtual-reality-could-change-storytelling |
I have been selected as a New Talent Fellow as part of the Expanded Performance Fellowship produced by Bristol + Bath Creative R + D.
"Innovations in technology are changing every part of the performance landscape - from how shows are made and marketed to how they are captured and distributed. VR, AR, motion capture, 5G, spatialized audio and virtual worlds are just some of the technologies changing where a performance can take place, who the audience is, and how it is experienced."
My research will be exploring the question 'How can digital techniques such as motion and volumetric capture expand on embodied and participatory live dance experiences and are these experiences engaging the LGBTQ community?'
The first phase of my research is to go out and speak to the industry: technologists, developers, producers, directors, inclusion producers, dancers, choreographers and of course audiences. I have decided to present this research in a podcast series which can be found below.
INTRODUCTION
Release Date: 20th July 2020
I introduce the podcast series, outlining my research questions and give some insight into the hows, whys and whats of my process.
NICK FELLINGHAM
Release Date: 20th July 2020
Nick, CEO of Condense Reality talks to me about: new ways volumetric capture can be broadcast live; the future of volumetric capture; the multitude of different ways this technology can be used and how customer / audience facing volumetric experiences will shape the commercial and cultural landscape.
JOSHUA PAWLOWSKI
Release Date: 27th July 2020
Joshua, environmental advocate and creator talks about the use of volumetric capture in his environmental augmented reality project Sanctuary and the technical aspects of our collaboration on virtual reality dance documentary Gimme One
MARTA DI FRANCESCO
Release Date: 04th August 2020
Marta, XR artist and creator discusses volumetric capture as a sculptural medium and how she has specialised in this medium to create her own XR dance related experiences.
TESSA RATUSZYNSKA
Release Date: 25th August 2020
Tessa, XR creator and researcher talks Avatar culture and gender roles in social digital spaces. with references to sexual assault, gender violence and Black Lives Matter movement.
References:
Turkle, S (1995) Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Touchstone: New York
Maharaj, C (2017) Embodiment and the Boundaries Between Us in Virtual Reality
Corts, A (2016) (Un)limited: Virtual Performance Spaces and Digital Identity, Theatre Symposium, Volume 24, 2016, pp. 113-128 (Article)
ROB EAGLE
Release Date: 1st September 2020
Rob Eagle is a PhD researcher, employing virtual reality and immersive, interactive media to documentary stories of non-cisgender lives.
PRENTICE WHITLOW
Release Date: 20th Novemeber 2020
Prentice Whitlow is a dancer with an interest in using technology to respond to and to react to dance theory.
JACK NORRIS
Release Date: 25th Novemeber 2020
Jack Norris is the managing director of Zubr, a Bristol based XR studio. Coming from a visual effects background, Zubr started researching hologram capture and mixed reality in 2014. Now they develop groundbreaking XR content including room scale VR, custom-built mixed reality viewers and augmented product showcases.
LAUREN MOFFATT
Release Date: 02nd December 2020
Lauren Moffatt is an Australian artist working between video, performance and immersive technologies. Her works, often presented in multiple forms, explore the paradoxical subjectivity of connected bodies and the friction at the frontiers between virtual and physical worlds.
Release Date: 07th December 2020
Gayatri is co-founder of NowHere Media -- a storytelling studio that views contemporary issues through a critical lens. Gayatri likes to explore taboo topics with the help of new technologies such as virtual and augmented reality. She is most excited about using VR and AR as mediums to create realities for a desirable future.
Release Date: 08th December 2020
Anca Salagean, currently commencing on an ambitious PHD as part of the arts and humanities research councils creative industries clusters programme. Anca is a graduate of psychology as part of her undergrad dissertatiion investigated the induction of body ownership over a virtual hand using ultrahaptics simulation.
Release Date: 08th January 2021
Keiken Collective are a cross-dimensional collaborative practice (Hana Omori, Isabel Ramos and Tanya Cruz), whose practice merges the physical with the digital by building online worlds and augmented realities for you to experience, often through face filters hosted on Instagram.
VOYRE brings together traditional filmmakers, game designers and programmers to create beautiful experiences in this new medium.
Release Date: 08th January 2021
A VR designer at Facebook Reality Labs; at the frontline in helping design the look feel and function of Facebook virtual experience. Her work navigates the intersection of digital and material worlds focusing on user interfaces.
Release Date: 11th January 2021
A dance artist, musician and somatic educator. Jan creates and facilitates interactive experiences through dance focussing on empathy and communication in a world of social and cultural differences.
Release Date: 12th January 2021
Chagall is an electronic music producer, songwriter, singer, performer and early adopter of the MIMU Gloves. Her practice applies and reacts to visuals to create a hyper-reality where physical sound effects are represented visually.
Release Date: 13th January 2021
Lisa May Thomas is a contemporary dance artist who has worked extensively with body-technology relations in performance-making practices. We talk about inclusion and her new project Soma.
Release Date: 27th March 2021
Harsha, a PhD researcher exploring the social & cultural impact of Immersive Storytelling XR in Bristol talks about inclusion and open source methodologies that can expand from theatre to XR. | https://www.harrysilverlock.com/expanded-performance-podcast |
06 September 2016, 12:12 p.m.
While Donally loves all the possibilities that professional, ready-made VR content – like Google Expeditions, Engage or Nearpod offers – she is one of the teachers who don’t want to content themselves with consuming virtual reality in the classroom.
“The next step, of course, is our kids being the creators of those experiences”, she says. Now that school libraries are upgraded to Makerspaces, teachers want to show their students both sides: How to consume new media wisely – but also how to create content for it.
“Making something yourself, as in the whole Maker Movement, is very valuable. Especially for computer education, which is getting more and more important”, says Man Choi, who already lets his students build virtual reality content.
The South-Korean teacher is one of the educators who uses CoSpaces in class. The platform has a ow entry level and lets children build in virtual reality.
The content is created via drag and drop in a browser app, the creations can be viewed in virtual reality using the smartphone app. The whole process doesn’t need any special technical skills and only the most basic VR tool: a cardboard headset. Additionally, it is free.
That means a few computers, smartphones and cardboard headsets are enough to turn the classroom into a VR studio. But what kind of VR content would a class produce?
Experience shows that teachers and students are especially interested in telling stories with virtual reality. Left with no instructions, kids use the software to create everyday scenes with an odd twist or downright strange fantasy worlds. They use VR to tell stories that do not have to follow the ruleset of the everyday world they know.
A candy land, Tintin fan fiction and a world with gigantic mice and tiny green elephants – these were some of the VR stories created in a workshop for kids, conducted by the startup iMMERSiVELY.
“This was a very new experience for the kids – a totally different kind of storytelling”, says Alison Foo, one of the organisers of the workshop.
Teachers usually have more concrete plans when it comes to VR creation in the classroom. “I've already started using this with a year five to eight class, focusing on comprehension based around a story we read together”, says Angela Lee, technology integration specialist.
She lets students recreate plot lines in 3D to see if they have understood a given text.
This shows how it is not only interesting to invent but also retell stories in virtual reality. May it be a simple scene from a fairy tale or an elaborate stage design for Shakespeare’s “Richard III” – VR can make literature immersive in a whole new way.
Creating virtual reality content is great when it comes to fantasy. However, it is also interesting when it comes to facts.
Instead of standard presentations or posters, students can use a 3D environment to share information by, for example, creating a VR model or an immersive infographic. They could also even create a virtual exhibition with images and information panels.
This is not only an interesting challenge for the student who creates the VR presentation, but also makes it more immersive for the classmates who will explore it later.
VR exhibitions can be created to cover pretty much any subject. However, there is one especially exciting use case: Children are able to design museums with their own pieces of art.
After having digitalised the paintings and drawings, students can design individual exhibition spaces for their art and invite others to visit them.
Exploring ready-made VR content and creating your own experiences has very different benefits for students.
The immersive learning content that, for example, Google or Engage provide aim to give students a realistic experience: They can explore far-away places as if they were there or look at the naturalistic replication of an organ from all angles.
Like this, learning matter feels much more real and, thus, relevant. Unlike VR professionals, school kids can't build lifelike simulations.
They won’t bring a realistic replication of the South Pole or the digestive tract into being. However, that shouldn’t be the aim. With creating virtual reality yourself, the emphasis lies not so much on the outcome, but in the process of translating something into a whole new medium – and the possibility to step inside your own creations. | https://www.virtualreality-news.net/news/2016/sep/06/virtual-reality-and-classroom-how-its-working-education/ |
Documentary Filmmaking in the Age of Digital Interface (2022)
The third thematic seminar of DocNomads Academy was held at the conference hall of Premier Kultcafé in Budapest under the overarching topic “Documentary Filmmaking in the Age of Digital Interface – When Documentary and Technology Converge” with guest lecturers external to DocNomads staff.
Ana Brzezińska, a senior producer of immersive documentary and virtual reality projects, also curator of events and exhibitions, presented her masterclass “Introduction to Spatial Storytelling and Immersive Technology”.
Sara Božanić, a transmedia design and audiences’ engagement expert and consultant, based in Slovenia, presented the lecture “Brave New Narratives” to examine how documentary filmmakers can utilise new mass media formats, and narratives, to activate alterity and challenge/influence audiences’ interactions, which was complemented by a workshop for the participants.
4 FEBRUARY, FRIDAY
PREMIER KULTCAFE, CONFERENCE HALL
Moderator: DOROTTYA ZURBÓ (Teacher in the Budapest semester)
09:00 – 10:30
INTRODUCTION TO SPATIAL STORYTELLING AND IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGY
How digital media change our culture and everyday life?
How does immersive technology change the way we think about stories we tell and audiences we try to reach?
Why is spatial art making us re-evaluate everything we know about creating compelling narratives?
What does the future of visual culture look like and how filmmakers can join the metaverse/web3 party?
This 90-minute masterclass offers a rich and contextual introduction to extended reality (XR) and spatial art.
Lectured by ANA BRZEZIŃSKA
Ana is a Senior Producer & Curator, currently running an American-French immersive production studio Kaleidoscope. The company co-produces VR experiences (‘Spheres’, starring Jessica Chastain and Patti Smith and executive produced by Darren Aronofsky, ‘Battlescar’, starring Rosario Dawson, ‘Evolver’ executive produced by Terrence Malick), events and exhibitions in the virtual gallery of the Museum of Other Realities including the biggest VR exhibition at Cannes XR/March. du Film, a first virtual fashion show with RYOT/Verizon Media, and a first national collection of immersive art with Digital Catapult/UKRI.
Ana collaborates with public funds (Creative Europe MEDIA), nongovernmental organizations, universities and business. Former Discovery Group Producer and Director, and Lead Multimedia Specialist at the Grand Theatre–National Opera, she has over 15 years of experience in audiovisual content creation working across TV, film, digital media and theatre. She is also the author of awarded documentary and virtual reality projects.
For most of her career, Ana has been working across realities, mediums and genres helping creators, institutions and brands tell impactful stories, embrace innovation as a core part of their philosophy, use and develop technology to create positive change.
A diverse background, education in art history, philosophy and theatre, combined with a life-long passion for technology allowed her many times to prove her value as a successful project leader.
11:00 – 14:00 (lecture) 15:30 – 18:30 (interactive workshop)
BRAVE NEW NARRATIVES
The aim of the coaching session (lecture + workshop) is to examine how documentary filmmakers can utilise new mass media formats, and narratives, to activate alterity and challenge/ influence audiences’ interactions. The sessions will utilise the skills and experiences of the participants in immersive narrative construction, audience development and in new media usage. Participants will be drawn into the process of immersive scriptwriting, participatory creation, distribution, and financing of such works
Lectured by SARA BOŽANIĆ
Sara is a CEO of the Institute for Transmedia Design, based in Slovenia whose wide-ranging participatory projects center on education and engagement. Ideas inhabit varied media and platforms as a vehicle for engagement, using co-production as a form of collective action that encourages diverse audiences to think critically and act creatively. She is a ‘hybrid’ – a designer, strategist, educator and thinker.
She has been working for many years on the promotion of interaction and interactive design disciplines in Slovenia, organizing events, designing labs and lectures.
As a consultant she has worked on various international projects. In 2015 she has been chosen among 40 EU consultants who work on audience development via digital means to take part in policy debates under the project The Voice of Culture − a Structured Dialogue between the European Commission and the cultural sector.
Sara believes that digital opens new paths to the public and fosters an endless series of design possibilities. In 2011, she was given a Young Creative Entrepreneur Media Award by the British Council. | https://www.docnomads.eu/academy-seminars/documentary-filmmaking-in-the-age-of-digital-interface-2022 |
Sparked by recent developments in digital technology, companies and creators are exploring ways to extend storytelling beyond traditional screens. Sensory Stories invites visitors to encounter new immersive technologies and creative experiments that engage sight, hearing, touch, and smell. These virtual reality experiences, interactive films, participatory installations, and speculative interfaces offer insights into a possible future where stories engage more of our bodies than just our eyes and ears.
Conceived and organized by Future of StoryTelling
Presenting Sponsor: Phi Centre
Creative Direction: Sub Rosa
Note to Visitors:
Access to the virtual reality experiences (Herders, Clouds Over Sidra, Evolution of Verse, Way to Go) requires timed tickets on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Timed tickets are also required from 10:30 to 3:00 on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Please visit the admissions desk to obtain your tickets.
Birdly (2014/2015), a bird-flight simulator that allows the user to fly over Manhattan with a virtual reality rig, was part of the exhibition from April 30 through June 7. It was created by Max Rheiner and the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland, with Thomas Tobler and Fabian Troxler, and presented at Museum of the Moving Image by swissnex Boston. For more information about Birdly, please visit somniacs.co. | https://stage.movingimage.us/event/sensory-stories-an-exhibition-of-new-narrative-experiences/ |
Bringing Storytelling To Life To Build a Better World
The world we experience is not exactly the real world. Human experience is a mental construction, mediated though our physical senses. What this means is that every aspect of our daily lives is interpreted. First, we filter perceptions through our five senses; and, then we selectively filter each conscious experience through attitudes, beliefs, culture and environmental conditions.
Within this perceptual process, presence is the sense of “being there”, that is, our experience of the self in the world. In technology-mediated spaces (e.g. books, digital spaces, virtual reality etc.) a greater sense of presence means that you feel more engaged within that environment and less aware of the environment in which you are physically located. The presence that occurs in the real world is the standard by which we measure presence in imagined and created environments. Immersion is the ability of an environment to evoke the sensation of presence, or “being there” in the audience. The amount of immersiveness depends on various conditions such as fidelity, interactivity and believability – all which work to increase the sense of presence. A well-simulated world can transport us so we become lost within the story.
While presence, immersion and simulations are constructs often linked to things like gaming and virtual reality, the constructs are not new. Storytellers have been conjuring believable immersive experience since the beginning of humanity. A good story well told, invents an immersive environment in the imagination.
Used wisely, technology can boost the experience but it is just a tool. Technology alone does not create an immersive experience. At its essence, immersion is about feelings. Being immersed in an event means to be engaged - to feel involved, emotionally connected and present. A truly immersive experience engages us on a human level, giving us a narrative and a clear purpose. Immersive environments offer audiences a chance to feel like they belong within the work and are truly part of whatever world it creates.
Art has a substantial history of using multisensory stimuli and interactivity for creative expression as well as to increase public interest. Immersive installations enlist our senses to create context and a space of absorption where the sense of being there is enhanced. Immersive exhibitions have the capacity to engage visitors in curated worlds that mobilize sensation and imagination.
Immersive interactive technologies have mainly been developed for entertainment and training; but, there is a growing appetite for experiential and immersive art. Realizing the psychological power of immersion, spaces can be created that generate genuine emotional responses allowing an installation to become integrated with the visitors own history and self-narrative at an emotional as well as cognitive level. Such potential increases considerably when we shift the focus toward experiences that support human wellbeing and positive social change. The Holocaust Memorial Museum does this. As the architect of the space, James Ingo Freed described: “It communicates alienation, terror and the claustrophobia of the people herded into cattle cars, and the disorienting selection process at the gates of the camps after their interminable trip...it is not meant to be an architectural promenade or a walk through memory or an exposition of emotion, but all of this. It must be intestinal, visceral; it must take you in its grip.”
Visitors of immersive art installations experience a sense of being there with enough detachment to reflect upon the world. This promotes critical thinking and self-examination. Further, immersion in art settings can cause a strong visceral and cognitive acceptance of what is being experienced, thus enhancing the richness and memorability of the visitor experience. Being fully engaged means that a visitor accepts the point of view of the narrator and becomes active in the actual construction of the story. Multisensory opportunities create efficient social and emotional engagement where the mind, body, emotions and spirit are all involved in holistic transformative perceiving and learning.
Collaborative science and art installations with multisensory environments represent a compelling way for evidence-based narratives to be presented that are capable of producing transformative learning, empathy and social change. If we can imagine new scenarios and immersively manifest these visions so they can be seen and heard and interacted with, then we can also believe them and we have begun the process of creating a better world. | https://www.relational-space.org/post/bringing-storytelling-to-life-can-build-a-better-world |
Immersive and Interactive Production LOST ORIGIN Will Take Place at Hoxton Docks Next Month
Lost Origin opens to audiences on 21 November 2021 for an exclusive limited run until 4 December 2021.
Immersive pioneers Factory 42 have teamed up with Almeida Theatre and Sky to create Lost Origin: a new immersive and interactive world, using innovative digital technology.
Situated at Hoxton Docks (55 Laburnum St, E2 8BD), Lost Origin is a unique mixed-reality experience where audiences explore parallel worlds in small groups of six people, uncover vital evidence and discover intriguing secrets. Lost Origin opens to audiences on 21 November 2021 for an exclusive limited run until 4 December 2021, with press performances from 10 - 14 November.
This collaborative and multidisciplinary research partnership is majority funded by UK Research and Innovation's (UKRI) Audience of the Future programme as part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund's Audience of the Future initiative to explore new types of audience experiences. It brings together world-class storytellers, technology companies and academics, to explore and pioneer cutting-edge immersive experiences through ground-breaking storytelling.
The production team unites a broad range of disciplines - from theatre set designers to gaming coders and animators and special effects talent with credits spanning The Hobbit, The Matrix, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games.
The immersive experience turns participants into undercover investigators who need to crack a mystery, which is set in the illegal dark web marketplace. Guests weave their way through differently-themed rooms on their extraordinary mission to solve the enigma.
John Cassy, Founder of Factory 42 and Executive Producer, said: "For a very limited amount of time Lost Origin offers audiences a chance to step into the unknown, and enter an intimate and magical new type of immersive experience designed by a unique creative team. We're hugely grateful to UKRI and our other partners for having been given the opportunity to bring the worlds of art and technology together to explore innovative ways to tell stories and create a new type of audience experience".
Rupert Goold, Artistic Director of Almeida Theatre, said: "It's exciting to be joining forces with Factory 42 and Sky, two pioneers of their fields, on Lost Origin. At the Almeida, our ambition is to interrogate the present, dig up the past and imagine the future and this project ticks those boxes. Dani Parr, our Director of Participation here at the Almeida, was the perfect person to be the Creative Director of this experience and bring together the latest interactive technology to create a new form of storytelling."
UKRI challenge director for the Audience of the Future Programme, Andrew Chitty, said: "The integration of immersive technologies, AI, projection mapping, haptics and new forms of interactive technologies into visitor experiences, from museums to theme parks, is incredibly exciting both creatively and commercially. While the pandemic has kept us out of venues, Factory42 and its partners have been working incredibly hard to bring these technologies together in a dynamic, creative and at times astonishing live experience. Anyone who is interested in the future of museums, galleries, immersive theatre, storytelling and technology will get a glimpse of that future through Lost Origins."
Lost Origin's creative team is as follows: Dani Parr (Creative Director), Hannah Wood, Story Juice (Writer), Michelle Feuerlicht (Executive Producer), John Cassy (Project Lead and Executive Producer), Alice Helps & Julie Landau (Set Design), Nick Ryan (Sound Design and Composition), Peter Mauder, Phonotheque Ltd (Augmented Reality Experience Music Composition and Sound Design), Jo Mackie (Live Producer), Ross Phillips (Creative Consultant), Jess Bernberg (Lighting Designer), Kate Bunce (Costume), Will Burton (Casting Director), Hugo Sterk Ltd (Set Construction), The Production Family (Technical Direction and Production Management), Stephen Stewart (Software Development Director), Sucharita Ghosh Stephenson (XR Producer), Maciek Sznabel (Art Lead/Animation Director), Maria Robertson (Main 3D Animation), Stephen Nevin & Niccolò Temperanza (3D Art), David Addis (Lead Programmer), John Foster (Magic Leap Design Lead), Zeno Rawling (Magic Leap Programmer), Mike Golembewski (Interactive Design and Development), Vytautas Niedvaras, Andrew Sheldon, Callum Walsh (Digital Tech Support and QA).
Lost Origin is part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund's Audience of the Future programme, which is delivered by UKRI. Through this programme, the government is supporting the best UK storytellers to research, develop and create new forms of stories, performances and experiences. Lost Origin is a research and development project designed to push forward state-of-the-art immersive entertainment. As part of this remit, the experience uses Magic Leap (an American company specialising in innovative augmented reality headsets) to bring mixed reality into live theatre. Similarly, the experience is a rare use of Volumetric Capture technology in a theatrical setting. For more information on this programme please click here.
Lost Origin is the final deliverable from the partners who make up this project and have been exploring the future of visitor attractions and experiences. Previously, the partners plus the Natural History Museum and The Science Museum have delivered dinosaurs and robot themed mixed reality experiences in the Metro centre in Gateshead. They also worked together to create two augmented reality mobile fun learning apps for younger children. For more information on the Industrial Challenge Strategy Fund, click here. | https://www.broadwayworld.com/uk-regional/article/Immersive-and-Interactive-Production-LOST-ORIGIN-Will-Take-Place-at-Hoxton-Docks-Next-Month-20211020 |
May 11, 2021 – War Remains, an immersive experience from MWM Interactive (MWMi) will this month debut at its new home, the National WWI Museum and Memorial located in Kansas City, US. Presented by ‘Hardcore History’ podcaster Dan Carlin, War Remains is an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience that transports viewers to the Western Front of the First World War where they can witness history unfold from a soldier’s point-of-view.
War Remains is a location-based experience (LBE) that places attendees in a 25ft x 25ft space and equips them with a VR headset. The space effectively acts as a physical set, thereby allowing viewers to interact with what they are witnessing virtually in the physical world, adding to the immersion of the experience. Although a relatively small space, according to Brandon Padveen, Associate Producer at MWM Interactive, the experience actually feels enormous due to the techniques that were used to create the experience and trick users into thinking they are in the vast trench networks on the frontlines of WWI.
The VR experience was produced by MWMi, directed by Brandon Oldenburg, and developed by Flight School Studio, with audio designed by Skywalker Sound. Throughout the experience, Dan Carlin leads audiences into the trenches as an active battle scene rages on around them. Through a combination of visual effects, sound engineering, and the guidance of Carlin’s voice, audiences get the opportunity to experience a moment in history.
“Virtual Reality creates other dimensions. The medium allows the storyteller to engage the audience in a way that previous storytelling genres haven’t been able to tap into. The engagement level is so much higher because the audience is 100% involved. It’s an active not passive experience,” said Carlin.
As well as the digital animation and physical interaction aspects of the experience, another hugely important part is the sound. Ethan Stearns, Executive Vice President of Content at MWM Interactive, said that originally, the team wanted the experience to be “so loud and uncomfortable that people wouldn’t really want to be in a headset.” Obviously, this wouldn’t be something that viewers would reasonably want to experience, and understandably, MWMi couldn’t really push things to a level that the real soldiers of WWI went through. Instead, the team had to look at how it could emulate how loud the trenches would have been in a different way. This emulation was achieved through clever sound design methods including the integration of speakers into the walls of the physical set, thanks to the work that Skywalker Sound carried out.
MWMi has gifted the War Remains LBE to the National WWI Museum and Memorial. Stearns added: “We want War Remains to continue to be experienced, and there is no better permanent home than the National WWI Museum and Memorial.”
“We are extremely grateful to MWMi for the gift of War Remains. This experience is unlike anything that Kansas City has hosted before,” said Matthew Naylor, President and CEO of the National WWI Museum and Memorial. “War Remains will allow the viewer to immerse themselves in the trenches of WWI and experience it with all of their senses, reaching them on both an educational and emotional level.”
War Remains premiered to international acclaim at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 and later opened for a limited run in Austin, Texas. It went on to win the “Out-of-home VR Entertainment of the Year” award at the VR Awards. The experience will be hosted in the National WWI Museum and Memorial’s Memory Hall and will be open to the public on May 27, 2021. Due to the graphic nature of the content, viewers must be at least 14 years of age.
For more information on the War Remains experience, click here. | https://www.auganix.org/immersive-lbe-virtual-reality-experience-war-remains-comes-to-national-wwi-museum-and-memorial-this-month/ |
Underlining its commitment to virtual reality and augmented reality, Paramount Pictures has named veteran tech executive Ted Schilowitz its first-ever Futurist in Residence.
He will report jointly to Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jim Gianopulos and Chief Operating Officer Andrew Gumpert. He’s being assigned to work closely with the Paramount and Viacom technology teams to explore all forms of new and emerging technologies, with an emphasis on virtual reality and augmented reality.
Schilowitz will remain as chief creative officer at immersive cinema specialist Barco Escape.
“Ted has been an integral part of the film industry’s innovation into next generation visual storytelling,” said Gianopulos and Gumpert. “He has been a pioneer throughout the industry’s constant technological evolution and can identify what is and what will be relevant and important to moviegoers. He will be an incredible asset to the Paramount team.”
Schilowitz was a consulting futurist at 20th Century Fox, where he worked on the technology and vision of cinema. He was a founding member of the product development team at RED Digital Cinema and one of the creators of the G-Tech product line of advanced hard drive storage products. Prior to RED Digital Cinema and G-Tech, he was on the team that developed and launched the Macintosh products desktop video division of AJA Video Systems.
“From immersive cinema to augmented reality and beyond, I’m excited to work with the Paramount and Viacom teams to discover and implement the latest technological advancements and create strategies that will enhance the audience’s experiences across Paramount’s movie, television, and interactive content,” he said in a statement.
Thursday’s announcement is the latest in a series of initiatives by Gianopulos to revive Paramount since he was named to run the studio in late March. | https://variety.com/2017/film/news/paramount-pictures-ted-schilowitz-futurist-1202494903/ |
World Premiere: 06.06.2016 - In\Formation App Google Play for Android and YouTube360
In\Formation is a two part (25 min) immersive documentary investigating the medium of Virtual Reality and creative use of the technology to build empathy and new forms of storytelling.
Explored through 3D 360-degree video, the live-action virtual reality experience documents VR pioneers during the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival through a deep dive into their projects, motivations and speculations.
Part One features interviews with VR pioneers Nonny De La Peña, James George, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, Brian Chirls and Vincent Morisset along with Ingrid Kopp, Clint Beharry and Nick Fortugno. Part Two focuses on VR projects selected for Tribeca Storyscapes - The Enemy by Karim Ben Khelifa and The Machine To Be Another by BeAnotherLab.
Directed by Debra Anderson and produced by Hugh McGrory, In\Formation is a Datavized production. The experience will be released June 6, 2016 for Google Cardboard available for download and streaming via the In\Formation App on Google Play for Android, distributed by EEVO, and Datavized's YouTube360 Channel. A future release is being planned for Facebook 360 and Gear VR.
Directors Statement:
Pioneering storytellers are creating new forms of documentary to pull at our heartstrings, change our minds and visualize our actions, in real time. Experimental non-linear forms of immersive storytelling point to a future where qualitative data and quantitative data intertwine. Storytellers, driven by humanist motivations, aim to build and measure empathy through virtual worlds and create plausible social impact, their ambitions are aspirational, the projects are complex and research-driven, designed to frame a myriad of questions exploring the human condition: What are the implications of working in this new medium and to what capacity are these technologies truly transformative? How are emotions measured in such environments, can bias be removed, how are these investigations planning to address social issues in a broad sense, from conflict resolution, identity and mutual respect? How is empathy stimulated and exploited, in the most positive sense? How are storytellers crafting experiences, new realities for the viewer, to contextualize social issues, to better understand the human experience?
Through a focus on The Enemy and Machine to Be Another, two pioneering virtual reality prototype projects debuting immersive, interactive installations at the Tribeca Storyscapes exhibition at the crossroads of experimental research, journalism, neuroscience, and interactive performance installation, In\Formation captures these projects, the methodology and motives of the artists and makers, and explores insights about building empathy among individuals through social, cultural and ideological ways to audiences around the world. As an experiment and prototype of its own, it aims to connect as many people as possible to the most important art being made, art that reveals our individual connection to a most complex system, humanity. | http://www.informationdocumentary.com/ |
It was a tough call last night–go to see Jean Lave talk about the everyday or to listen to Henry Jenkins on transmedia? Since they were at overlapping times, I decided to go to the Jenkins talk. I have heard him speak before, but this was an intimate setting and I hoped that hearing his thoughts on transmedia might help me to rethink a chapter I am writing about transliteracies. And I think it ended up doing that. But in searching online for the official definition of the concept (he whipped through that slide too quickly for me to process), I found a pretty faithful summary of his talk here on his website. Nevertheless, I am posting my take on this for anyone interested.
He made two important points: 1) there is an important distinction between participatory culture and Web 2.0 (a business model that attempts to commodify that participation) and 2) transmedia is about how we tell stories and not the tools we use to do so. That is, he is interested particularly in the ways that narratives can be expanded and how fans/audiences engage with that process. That is my take away, at least, from the talk (and the part I am most interested in).
He spent the majority of his time describing how transmedia storytelling expands narratives (point #1). This story expansion can happen successfully when the author creates a world (e.g. the world of Harry Potter). That is, when storytellers create or map a fictional world (e.g. Baum’s creation of Oz), they create many opportunities for narratives to be developed in different media (novels, movies, plays, etc. that all tell different stories set in Oz). Sometimes this means that a story is adapted (Superman is told in comic form and in movie form, with a similar plot line but adapted/interpreted for different media) and other times the story is extended (Superman in his youth, in a different country, etc.). Hollywood has embraced the principle of additive storytelling, in which there is a “mother ship” or a self-contained, ‘authorized’ version from which other stories are spun off. This adds a deepening/layering element to the narrative, which also allows other narratives to be told (e.g., minor characters’ stories or some kind of backstory might be developed in a video game). But the Matrix, for example, had a different logic–an integrated vision whereby the story was told in pieces across different media (and made for an incoherent narrative if someone missed the backstory from the video game, for example).
In all of these ways, then, Jenkins makes clear he is talking about the different possible relations between media. He argues that for him, transmedia storytelling has to combine principles of radical intertextuality and multimodality that allow us to understand something more about a story. He describes radical intertextuality as a movement across texts or across textual structures within the same medium (like DC comic characters that traverse different comics over time). He talks about multimodality as the way different media involve different representations, with different affordances for interaction (e.g., the Green Lantern is a character that moves across comic, movie, and game but is recognizable across all three, though each has a different kind of affordance for our relationship to the story/medium). For him, then, transmedia storytelling has to traverse texts (intertextuality) and modes (multimodality) in order to extend a narrative in some way.
I am particularly interested in the second point (above), about how fans and audiences engage with transmedia storytelling. Jenkins argues that fans can have different kinds of relationships with transmedia stories, from hunting and gathering (e.g., finding parts of the Buffy story that you like) to fan participation (creating your own story in the Harry Potter fictional world). He says the question becomes–as audiences take up, broaden, and extend these narratives through their participatory practices (like the huge fan fiction following of Harry Potter fans), what is the relation of these texts to the authorized “canon”? Jenkins talked about this tension in relation to JK Rowling’s new online space that will extend the Harry Potter narrative but not take into account the complex worlds fans have already created (e.g., ‘sorting’ themselves in ways the new site will likely not recognize or take into account). He asks about the multiplicity of stories in this ‘fanon’ and its relations to the canonical texts of the corporate entity. All fascinating questions–and I am left wondering: what other kinds of relations might audiences take up with texts? What are the other roles people take up beside ‘fan’? What can we understand about the literacy practices of authors and audiences as they participate in multiple ways? What are the relationships between texts/authors/audiences across genres? With corporate/mainstream texts? What kinds of counternarratives might we find in an analysis of the stories fans create? In general, I think I wondered a lot about the stories that do and do not get told and the ways in which people are positioned by and position themselves in relation to these mainstream media (and of course they ways they actively coopt, resist, and otherwise transform those media/narratives).
In relation to these questions and Jenkins’ work, I found an interesting article on transmedia traversals by Jay Lemke that proposes a theoretical model for understanding these relationships. Lemke argues that the presence of social networks changes the nature of these relationships, in that we will filter and re-appropriate our diversity of experiences and resources across our social networks in ways that challenge the hegemony of mass media.
Amy, thanks for such a great summary. I took pretty good notes considering I was typing on my iPhone in Evernote, but didn’t get anything out on the web. This is very helpful.
Thanks Bobby and Sharon! One goal is to try to attend more of these talks and post about them–glad to know people found it useful!
Lemke indicates creators could distribute content on a social network, as well as fans.
I agree, that the identity market on Lemke’s model is the mass-media…which is the user’s first introduction to a film, tv, or comic franchise, and after that experience he or she will log-on to a social network and dive in deeper to a franchise.
I also agree that social networks or online sites that are connected to a film, tv, or comic franchise could potentiallty change the leadership because with the internet fans have access to an abundance of free tools. They also have the ability to discover likeminded fans, held debates, and create their own stories, most of the time, without the authorization of content creators/copyright owners.
So, the problem here is that the owners of mass-media prevents fans from pushing their ideas into the mass market, limiting the chance of a fans storyline or idea to reach a comic book store, television channel, or movie theatre. I understand because of legalities why they don’t want do this…but the solution to Transmedia storytelling, I think is for fans and creators to be connected.
Last thing, could you describe what you meant by social networks changing the nature of the relationship(hunting and gathering, fan participation) and did you meant in a good or bad way?
Because I see it as a good way because it enhances the experience, and most social networks provides the users with free tools to dig in deeper.
I hope my point of view makes much sense, and I love your piece!
Hi Tyre–thanks for writing! I appreciate your comments about connecting fans and creators and I concur. I did mean that social networks can change relationships in a good way in just the way you described. But I also think there is room for other kinds of relationships to take root, especially as more people create their own content (eg self-publishing books, movies, art) and interact with others around that content (promotion, commerce, civic engagement, etc.). I’m thinking of Etsy and other peer-peer engagement. Just some thoughts–I am still thinking all of this through! | https://amystorn.com/2011/11/04/jenkins-on-transmedia/ |
Nataliia Hryvniak is the founder of InFeatures Story Production, which creates multimedia content and promotes topics to international audiences related to Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Researches topics related to new media, various formats of storytelling, and misinformation for international organizations and institutions, including Congress and the US State Department.
She has over 16 years of experience in communications, business management, and journalism. She is an inspiration, author of digital projects. She works as a journalist and producer for top international media (BBC, Washington Post, OCCPR, PRI, and others), media and film projects producer. Mentor, lecturer, and communications consultant.
She has graduated from Kyiv Mohyla School of Journalism (MA), BA International Christian University; a participant in international media programs of professional development and internship (USA, Estonia, Greece, Norway).
She is a member of the international community of digital specialists, Digital Communication Network.
Why are we talking about the new reality of the media today? We live in a world full of information and with a fast pace of life. This affects how we consume content, hold attention, and notice this or that information in principle.
The media is experimenting with different formats of audience engagement and retention. Both with shorter formats, attracting attention and subsequent disclosure of history, and a constant return to history for a deeper immersion. To do this, new innovative forms and approaches are created, using technological and creative developments: virtual and augmented reality, games or gamification, interactive and immersive projects, podcasts, newsletters.
And this is where the synergy of technology and media content comes into play and opens up a huge springboard for opportunities for all areas.
In the world, and Ukraine in particular, there is a huge prospect of creating partnerships between technology companies and the media. Traditional media around the world are willing to invest in those opportunities, they see opportunities to develop media startups.
The pandemic has affected requests for quality of material that can be trusted. There is a request for information, data journalism, objective content. The population is ready to pay for this. The number of people around the world who are willing to pay for materials in the form of subscriptions, membership in the media community, and even in the form of donations has increased.
We live in a world of accelerated digitalization, most media are moving to online formats, especially during the pandemic. In Ukraine, especially after the pandemic, the audience grew by 25-65% in the digital sphere. This is a huge market for opportunities.
Among the most current trends – data visualization, engaging and retaining audiences in innovative ways, artificial intelligence for the media, gamification, audio storytelling, virtual and augmented reality, multimedia, and interactive content.
Want to stay updated on the most exciting IT events? | https://2021.iforum.ua/en/speaker/nataliia-hryvniak/ |
Co-Producer and Ballroom Artist
Josh is a determined, self motivated and hard working multimedia creator, with a passion for landscape and wildlife photography. He is currently studying Marine and Natural History Photography at Falmouth University, continuing a lifelong passion for the natural world. For for final project he has been working with 360 degree filmmaking techniques which he used to create a VR documentary film. He is a firm believer that the best work comes from the heart and he looks to bring that value to everything that he does.He thinks that now is the time to tell the stories that matter, the stories that connect us and the stories that make us think about the world in which we live. He is always open to learning new practices and techniques and feels that developments in virtual reality and particularly augmented reality might hold exciting new ways of connecting an audience to a subject.
Ballroom Artist
Gadget 007
Ballroom Artist
Diva Miyake-Mugler
Ballroom Artist
Kenzo Miyake-Mugler
Aysha 007
Ballroom Artist
360 Camera Operator
Harrison Willmott is an extended realities producer and creative director. He loves experimenting with all kinds of immersive technology and designing both fiction and non-fiction experiences within the blossoming new realm of extended reality. Over the past year he has been studying a Masters Degree in Virtual and Extended Reality with UWE at the Bristol VR Lab and has also been a part of the South west Creative Technology Networks Immersion Fellowship. Harrison comes from a short film and photography background that led to producing some 360 films and propelled him into the creative immersive industries.
Joe is an artist, musician & instrument builder, working across disciplines & with numerous collaborators. His sound work draws heavily on improvi- sation, often using acoustic manipulation and feedback. He hosts a regular radio show on Resonance Extra, co-runs the experimental music imprint First Terrace Records, and has performed across Europe as a solo musician & in collaboration with other performers.
I am a Freelance Audio Editor and aspiring Dubbing / Re-Recording Mixer based in Bristol. I have over 4 years of experience in studios working on a variety of different projects including recording, editing, mixing and mastering audio for podcasts, music and more.
Dom Okah
Artwork Deisgner
Dom is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary designer with a particular passion for illustration and art direction. Please feel free to contact him regarding any projects, requests or to simply just have a chat! www.domokah.com
Rosa Eaton
360 Sound Artist
Rosa Eaton is a freelance audio producer and artist. Winner of the Charles Parker Award for best student radio feature, her work has been on BBC Radio 4 and featured on Pick of the Week. She made an episode of the three times British Podcast Awards season of #QueerAF with National Student Pride and is currently producing Bristol Unpacked podcast for The Bristol Cable. Before doing an MA in Radio Documentary in 2019, she made analogue documentaries in the form of one-woman shows, investigating the unexplained in a suburb and inviting the city of Bristol to help make her life less dull via a poster campaign
Harrison Willmott
360 Camera Operator
Fi Nicholson
Post-production Manager
Fi is a 360 / VR Filmmaker, an enthusiast for narrative storytelling and artist-led experimentation in VR, MR, and games. Fi has worked with creators such as Surround Vision, Visualise, Parable VR, Sky VR, and Mammalian Diving Reflex on 360 film productions. Often Fi can be found collaborating with Limina Immersive on exhibitioning content to audiences in VR Theatres, or at festivals around the world.
Co-founder of THE OTHVRS, an open 360/ VR/ XR collaborative group based in Bristol. This group’s aim is to encourage a broader and inclusive spectrum of individuals within this emerging media by democratising access to materials, funding, and resources. Find more information at theothvrs.com.
Harry Silverlock
Producer
A Berlinale Talent and Locarno Industry Academy alumni. Trained as an impact producer at The Scottish Documentary Institute and now studying Virtual Reality MA at UWE. His interests are in queer identity storytelling experienced through new technologies. He is also the producer of The Palace International Film Festival, Bristol’s queer film festival.
Euella Jackson
Project Support
Presenter, film-maker and creative producer, working in Bristol. 2017 alumni of Rife Magazine, Euella works to help underrepresented young creatives take up space, leadership and strategic decision-making positions in the creative industry with Rising Arts Agency and worked with Limina Immersive to open the UK first Virtual Reality Theatre earlier this year.
Karteer Miyake-Mugler
Monty Fitzgerald
Director
Joshua Pawlowski
Volumetric Capture Artist
Joseph Summers
Score Composer
Becky Street
360 Sound Engineer
Sophie Le Roux
Photographer
Sophie le Roux’s photography is almost entirely preoccupied by texture, colour, and chance. She frequently uses expired film to produce unpredictable, aleatory pictures, and is fascinated by the accidents that occur at the beginning and end of the roll: a counterintuitive blaze of colour, an elegant chaos of shapes. The camera is encouraged to create something new out of what she’s pointed it at, so that the final result seems to merge the external world with an interior imagination: a photograph captured in the act of capturing itself. The unusual is discovered inside the usual. | https://www.gimmeonevr.com/team |
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ABSTRACT
In all forms of storytelling, from oral traditions to transmedia, the imaginary worlds created work to ground our human experiences as something shared. Detailed and expansive storyworlds are acknowledged as being a crucial element to transmedia storytelling and are evident in the early commercial examples of transmedia projects. Transmedia writing is heterogeneous and has a multiplicity of features, however it can be argued that all transmedia writing must involve a narrative universe or storyworld. Saldre and Torop (2013) state that discussions of transmedia storytelling are dominated by a cognitive spatial lexicon, evidenced by metaphors such as environment, landscape, and maps. Being able to create an environment that can encompass the variety of experiences and points of view that exist in the real world through different forms of media also creates the possibility for the general public to engage and interact with stories in new ways. As Ryan (2016) notes, ‘A storyworld is not just the spatial setting where a story takes place; it is a complex spatio-temporal totality that undergoes global changes’ (13). This chapter expands the concept of world-building and the current literature to examine nascent media technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality – extended reality and mixed reality – which have facilitated profoundly immersive and innovative story experiences. | https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9780429274008-4/making-worlds-donna-hancox |
New Delhi, April 5, 2022:Immersive Technologies are transforming how we consume, interact, and experience digital information and media. Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) are now being used in pilot mode across numerous and diverse industries, from games to entertainment; theatre and live events; museums and heritage; marketing, advertising, tourism, architecture, product development and design; through to simulation and healthcare.
A degree in Immersive Technologies from the University of Bristol will enable the students to translate their knowledge and skills to make engaging immersive content and interactive experiences for diverse audiences. This will equip the students with the technical knowledge and skills to succeed in this exciting and rapidly growing sector. Throughout the programme, students will be learning from world-leading academics and working with industry partners.
This master’s programme equips students with technological skills and knowledge to work with virtual reality and augmented reality. This will give the students the ability and knowledge to consider the processes of content creation, delivery and consumption; holistically, as a continuum to provide engaging immersive experiences for a range of audiences while meeting technological constraints and addressing commercial needs. The students will work collaboratively with students on the MA Immersive Arts (Virtual and Augmented Reality) to bring together skills in creative arts and computer science.
The programme has been co-designed with industrial partners to meet growing skills-gap demand. The University has excellent cutting-edge research and facilities in immersive technologies. This ensures the teaching is research-led and gives students insights into how the sector will evolve in the future, along with emphasizing an applied and practice-based education.
Speaking on the relevance of the course Suneet Singh Kochar, CEO, Fateh Education, says, “We are living in an era where digitilisation and new technologies are transforming the way we learn, work and live. Courses such as MSc Immersive Technologies are being curated by universities to meet the skill demand in the market and prepare students for the future of the job market. We at Fateh Education take great care and go into details to help students understand which are the new and upcoming fields, so that students can choose the right course for themselves and conquer their dreams.”
Programme delivery
Students will be introduced to the technologies underpinning immersive interactions, the diverse applications and experiences that can be achieved with these technologies, and the wide range of opportunities in the sector.
The degree will cover theories of immersivity, histories of immersive and interactive media, along with emerging technologies and approaches. Students will be made aware of the ethical considerations that should be taken into account when developing immersive experiences to instill a sense of responsible innovation. Students will be taught how to use professional 3D modelling software, game engines, plugins and hardware that are used readily in industry. Students will learn how to utilise interactive methods and hardware to further immerse their players/users in the action, giving them agency in how an immersive experience unfolds or giving designers an understanding of how the player/user is being affected by the experience.
Deadline:29 July 2022
Entry Requirements:
To be considered for admission to a master’s degree programme at the University of Bristol, the minimum requirement for entry is an undergraduate (bachelor’s) degree that is equivalent to a UK upper second-class degree (also known as a 2:1).
Application process and admission details:Students shallapproachFateh Education (www.fateheducation.com) for guidance on the admission process and submission of applications within the deadline.
Tuition:Tuition fees for international students will be £25,900 per annum.
Contact Details for admissions query: | https://blog.bangaloreeducation.com/the-university-of-bristol-invites-applications-msc-immersive-technologies-virtual-and-augmented-reality-through-fateh-education/ |
Nobody said it would be easy, and in fact, maintaining or increasing the motivation of workers is a huge challenge. There are many different ways to go about it. But we should reflect on certain aspects that, in one way or another, affect our workers.
Motivating is an art, not a science
Neither it is about human engineering, nor a question of mathematical calculations, probabilities or manipulations of any kind. It is simply the art of understanding what motivates a particular person and how that can act as the key to unlocking their productivity.
I call it an art because it is not a question of mathematics: the sum of everything that leaders do to motivate their people results in something completely different than the sum of its parts; sometimes the result is much greater, sometimes much smaller. And, to be frank, it is also tough to measure the degree of impact specific actions or motivational strategies have on their recipients.
There are no universal techniques or strategies
Because, as we were saying, human beings are not as straightforward as simple arithmetic, they are complex and individual entities. As the saying goes, every person is a world. And each “world” requires something unique, personal, and completely different from the others around them. A strategy that works for one person will not necessarily work for another. Motivational techniques must be reconsidered for each person. Personalisation is the key.
Proximity is key for motivation
And because each person is a world, leaders cannot be far away if they intend to understand and attract them, sense their needs, their aspirations and what motivates them. Remote leadership is a pipe dream that borders on being oxymoronic. Leaders need to be so close to the team that nobody doubts they are part of it. You have to be able to listen, observe and examine the smallest details (sometimes a simple and subtle gesture when a person is given a specific task is enough to tell us that something is wrong), you must be empathetic and put yourself in other people’s shoes. Without proximity (and sensitivity) there can be no understanding, and without understanding it is impossible to motivate.
Discouraging is much easier than motivating
For the most part, when people start something they do it with enthusiasm, motivation comes as standard. Whether they start a new job or embark on a project that has just begun, they are eager to prove themselves, to really show how much they can do, to try new things, to face challenges, to change, to discover, to learn. But that motivation fades, it becomes diluted over time if left unaddressed.
Work is no longer new and stimulating, projects are not exciting anymore and challenges become obstacles. And often this is caused by an omission, a lack of motivational incentives to revitalise them, to return them to their original state: the homo motivatus.
Sometimes workers are discouraged by action (not by omission): a word out of place, unpleasant working conditions, excessive rigidity, lack of empathy, a flood of work and tasks without established priorities… the list is endless. A good leader takes great care not to sabotage the motivation accrued up until a given moment. Mistakes, however small, can be costly.
Always avoid “Direct” payment
You don’t always have to “pay” for the effort made. You don’t always have to wait for the worker to take the first step, to do their part so that they can be rewarded. Few are aware of the enormous impact of implementing motivational strategies that are not linked to results and that are put into effect before the worker does anything. It is about reversing the steps and motivating to generate an increase in productivity, and not expecting an increase in productivity to be rewarded. Some possible examples include:
A) A more pleasant workplace that encourages the desire to work in every way: pleasant work environment, listening and taking different views into account, providing a pleasant space where you would want to work, etc.
B) Give “unexpected” compensation that no one can feel directly deserving of, this will enhance the feeling of being rewarded for overall effort and not for specific actions.
Reward the effort, not the success
If someone has given their all and exceeded all expectations, but their efforts haven’t ultimately translated into success, they deserve recognition so they can see that their efforts haven’t been completely in vain. Consider this, what kind of behaviour can we expect from someone who has made great efforts without being recognised for them, regardless of whether they were successful or not?
And, on the contrary, if someone has achieved success then they have done what they were asked to do, but what if we know that they could have done much more or that their management was poor? This person should only be acknowledged for their success with the task, in no case should they receive additional compensation that implies they should also be taking all the credit.
Conclusions
In short, since motivation is an art, the task is complex and diverse. But we cannot let the old ways, which have now been superseded, become embedded in our team leading techniques.
We must remember that, actually, employees and employers want the same thing, to work well and be proud of what we do. Anything we can do ourselves to facilitate this will have positive effects. | https://barcelona.tbs-education.com/news/motivation-techniques-essential-reminders/ |
Leadership is defined as a position or function of a person who leads the group. Effective leadership requires a set of personal qualities and skills, necessary for early diagnosis of the situation and knowledge necessary for choosing the most appropriate solutions. An effective leader can take the responsibility for not only his/her actions, but also the actions and outcomes of the subordinate group. Leadership plays the core role in the corporate culture and leaders can have a significant impact on effectiveness of a team and organization in general.
Advanced leadership skills are necessary for becoming a successful manager, able to hold the control over the situation, inspire and motivate the employees whenever it is necessary. The appointment as a manager does not necessarily bring trust and respect of the employees. Careful analysis and appropriate strategies aimed at establishing a personal rapport with every member of a group are needed to become a leader and an effective manager, as a result. Good managers find an individual approach and use their knowledge of psychology to create a healthy atmosphere in a group to improve the productivity of every employee and the team in general. The main task of a good leader is to connect the work of a team with the goals of the entire organization. Along with perfect understanding of the company’s targets and its vision, a good manager needs to balance the praise and punishment system with the talents of the subordinate employee to create a favorable atmosphere and maximize their outcomes.
Though certain inborn qualities can be useful, in most cases effective leadership is the result of ongoing hard work, self-education and training. Whereas there are informal leaders in all kids of social groups, ranging from primary school classes to international corporations, effective leadership for management can and should be taught. Thus, understanding the mechanisms of gaining trust and psychology of groups, the formal leaders would be able to enhance their effectiveness and reach the goals. Moreover, a leader should be aware of the different leadership styles and the specifics of the situations in which they would be most appropriate. Most leadership theorists agree that there is no such thing as a good or bad leadership style; there are only styles that are more or less appropriate for certain environments and specific groups. One of the major skills in a good leader is the ability to analyze a certain environment and choose the communication style and strategies that satisfy the needs of the group members.
Influencing the employees’ motivation, innovation processes and crisis management in a company, leaders play an important role in realization of the economic plans of the organization. There is a direct relationship between the organizational culture and economic effectiveness of a company. Leaders have the potential of shaping the way people behave and even think. Importantly, leadership can have long term effects on the effectiveness of the organization. Thus, first leaders shape corporate culture, and later on the corporate culture will shape leadership, influencing the appointment of certain individuals and creating certain expectations for them.
To be an effective leader, an individual needs profound knowledge of not only psychology of leadership and relations in a group, but also clear understanding of the company’s vision and long-term goals. By connecting the team’s motivation with the targets of the organization, leaders can have a significant impact on the company’s revenues. | https://youressayhelper.com/samples/essay-on-leadership.html |
What's a productivity method?
Productivity systems and methods are designed to help individuals and teams work more efficiently and effectively. There are many different approaches to productivity, and the best method for you will depend on your personal preferences, the specific needs of your work or project, and how your brain works.
Tips to help you find the best method for you
Finding the best productivity method for you can take some time and effort, as different methods may work better for different people and tasks. Only you know how you like to work!
A few tips to help you find the best method:
- Start by identifying the specific issues you're facing with your current productivity level. Are you having trouble staying focused? Are you having trouble prioritizing tasks? Are you feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work you have to do? Identifying these specific issues will help you choose a method that addresses them directly.
- Try lots of different methods. There are many different productivity methods available, so it's important to experiment with a few different ones to see which one works best for you. Start by trying one method for a week or two, and then move on to the next one if it's not working. You're not locked into any one method.
- Be flexible. Once you've found a method that works well for you, don't be afraid to make adjustments as needed. A productivity method that works great for a certain task or project may not work as well for others. Be open to trying new techniques and experimenting with different approaches.
- Keep track of your progress. Keeping a log or journal of your progress can help you to see what's working and what's not. This way, you can evaluate which methods are the most effective, and adjust your approach as needed.
- Seek advice and guidance. You can also seek advice from experts and people who have experience with different productivity methods, like coaches, trainers, or colleagues. They can provide you with guidance, tips and strategies to help you find the best method for you.
- Experiment with a combination of methods. It's also possible to use different methods at different times or for different tasks. For example, you can combine a time blocking method to schedule your day and the Eisenhower matrix to prioritize tasks, this allows you to have a full view of what you need to do, when and how.
Image credit: Janis Ozolins
What methods are there to try?
There are quite a few to consider! Some popular methods include:
The Pomodoro Technique
This method involves breaking work into short, focused intervals (typically 25 minutes) called 'pomodoros'. After each pomodoro, you take a short break (usually 5 minutes), and after every four pomodoros, you take a longer break (usually 15 minutes). This system helps to combat fatigue and maintain focus by giving your brain regular rest periods.
The Eisenhower Matrix
This method is a way to prioritize tasks based on their level of importance and urgency. The matrix is divided into four quadrants, with 'important and urgent' tasks in the top left, 'important but not urgent' tasks in the top right, 'not important but urgent' tasks in the bottom left, and 'not important and not urgent' tasks in the bottom right.
By sorting your tasks into these categories, you can focus on the most important and pressing tasks first, while still leaving time for the less critical but still important tasks.
The Getting Things Done method
This system is for organizing and managing tasks and projects. It involves five steps: capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting, and engaging.
The method is based on the idea that by breaking tasks into smaller steps and making sure that you have a system for capturing and organizing new tasks and ideas as they come up, you'll be better able to stay on top of your to-do list and make progress on your goals.
Timeboxing
Timeboxing is a technique that involves allocating a specific, fixed amount of time to complete a task or set of tasks. This can be a useful way to stay on track and make the most of your time. You can try timeboxing by using Llama Life to set a time limit for each task. By making sure you're not spending too much time on a single task at the expense of others, and you can also ensure that you're making steady progress throughout the day.
It also helps to reduce procrastination and indecision as you set a clear goal to finish the task in a certain amount of time.
This approach divides your day into blocks of time and assigns specific tasks to each block. By doing this, you're able to stay on top of your schedule and ensure that you're making the most of your time. With this method, you are also able to schedule specific tasks at the time of the day when you are the most productive.
The Kanban method
This method is based on the principles of just-in-time manufacturing and it’s widely used in software development and agile methodologies. It’s visual and flexible, it allows you to prioritize and organize tasks in columns, showing the progress of each one.
Make most of your time and energy
Ultimately, it's important to remember that productivity is not just about getting more done, but also about working smarter and making the most of your time and energy. So don't get too caught up in finding the perfect method, instead, focus on what works for you and what makes you feel productive. | https://llamalife.co/blog/finding-the-right-productivity-method-that-works-for-you-clcrap9aq581591pntx26btzqx |
In the modern era, increased productivity is on the mind of every employee and business leader. There are thousands of tips out there claiming to help us rattle through the most critical tasks. But do they work? Or are they creating more distractions?
Here, we explore two popular systems for productivity and explain why they are useful. Ultimately, the goal is to understand what helps you to get motivated and focused on your tasks.
It is important to note here that there are several tools dedicated to team productivity and project management. These guidelines focus on productivity for individuals, rather than teams.
The Eisenhower Matrix
Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had to make tough decisions every day about which of the many tasks he had to do was most critical. To make this process easier, he came up with an accessible system known as the Eisenhower Matrix.
This diagram explains how to set the matrix up. On one axis, you consider whether your tasks are important or not. On the second axis, you think about whether the tasks are urgent or not. This system helps you to place tasks on the grid and identify which you need to prioritize:
Rather than have a long list of items circling in your head, the matrix organizes tasks into categories to identify which are the most pressing. The tasks that need to be done first are those that are both important and urgent. Using this system can both reduce stress and increase focus.
The Pomodoro technique
This is a time management trick developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The idea is to tackle a piece of work you need to get done in 25-minute intervals, followed by a short break. Follow these steps to get started:
Repeat this as many times as it takes to get a particular piece of work done. At the end of each session, record what you achieved, and your next goal.
Why does it work? One reason is our reward systems. If we promise ourselves a reward at the end of completing a section of work, such as a break, we are more extrinsically motivated to complete the task. Extrinsic motivation can help us get started, particularly with tasks that are not interesting. Awareness of how you are spending your time also helps you to become more focused.
This article also includes an extensive list of helpful suggestions for boosting productivity.
Finding a system that works for you
Whether or not productivity hacks will work depends entirely on your personality. If you are easily distracted, tools that help you to remain focused will make all the difference. If you are naturally diligent and conscientious, you might be able to forgo them altogether. The most important thing is that you tailor systems. These tips might help you to form strategies that work for you:
1. Think about your personality
Your personality plays a huge role in your ability to be productive and how best to overcome slowed output.
There are certain traits in our personalities that remain fixed throughout life. The ‘Big Five’ personality traits are currently the most accurate measure we have of our characters. The five-factor model is organized into extraversion-introversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Research shows that where you sit on this scale remains relatively consistent throughout life, but you can take action to balance or accentuate certain traits when you need to.
Knowing where your personality sits can be hugely helpful and relevant to your ability to be productive. If you are introverted and work best in quiet environments, your focus will be dependent on being alone. Communicating with others often could be overwhelming, and you could quickly lose momentum.
2. Include reflection in the process
When testing out a new productivity hack, it is essential to build in time for reflection. If you don’t, you won’t know whether the system you’re using is working for you, or if you need to personalize it.
If you are using a time management technique like Pomodoro, be sure to include a minute or so for reflection at the end of each session. Record what you got done, and whether or not that met your target.
If your targets are consistently higher than what you can achieve, you might need to adjust your expectations for what you can get done in a given amount of time.
3. The ultimate goal is awareness
The American Psychological Association explains that growing your attention span is one of the most effective ways to boost productivity.
Many productivity hacks are designed to improve focus on a single task. When you are testing out a new tool, reflect on whether it helps you reach a state of deep concentration.
If you can be aware of what you are doing at any given time, rather than lost in thought, you will be more productive and happier. The brain is only capable of doing one task at a time, and you risk reaching cognitive overload if you attempt too much at once.
4. Communicate your priorities to your team
One of the biggest distractions at work is instant messaging, emails, and notifications. Sometimes, messages will be both important and urgent, but you can’t set up your entire day waiting for a task like this to come in.
Trust that, in most cases, if you switch your notifications off while you are focusing on a particular task that the world won’t fall apart! This attitude can be challenging if you are in a position of responsibility. Ultimately, if you can focus on urgent tasks when you need to, you will be a better leader and provide better support to your team.
For more insights, be sure to subscribe to the Go1 newsletter to stay on top of all the latest L&D trends. Or, you can book a demo today to find out how Go1 can help with your team’s learning needs.
Sophia is a freelance writer who specialises in thought leadership, opinion pieces and content creation for learning publications. Her work focuses on the latest research in learning theory and practice. She regularly contributes articles on workplace learning and personal development to the Go1 blog. You can connect with her on LinkedIn. | https://www.go1.com/blog/how-to-make-productivity-hacks-work-for-you |
The real challenge within a business is often internal stakeholder management. If you fail to identify your stakeholders and meet their needs, your project is doomed to fail.
This article gives you the tools to create a stakeholder management strategy and is a must-read for anyone that relies on others internally to get stuff done.
Download a strategic template here.
What is stakeholder management and how do you identify your stakeholders?
Stakeholder management is where you seek a good working relationship with those who have the biggest impact on your work.
The first step to creating a successful stakeholder management strategy is to define who your stakeholders are.
Ask yourself, whose:
- Workflow is being affected
- Approval you will need
- End product will change
To further help you with managing your stakeholders, use the Mendelow’s Matrix (1991).
Adding stakeholders to the matrix will help you avoid spending excessive time trying to influence powerless staff and will help you prioritise the needs of certain stakeholders.
Keep those with low influence and high interest informed regularly as long as it’s practical for you. Weekly emails should do it.
On the contrary, those with high influence but low interest need more direct strategies from you. These are your key stakeholders!
When you’ve identified your stakeholders, you need to spend some time thinking about how to engage them. To dig deeper into defining your key stakeholders, see this article.
How to engage your stakeholders - communications worksheet
What level of support do you need from each person on your list? And exactly what do you need from them? How will you persuade them to help you? Think about what they will gain from the project.
In your worksheet, craft a value proposition/key message to each of your most important stakeholders.
Typically there are three dimensions of value:
1. Financial
2. Functional (increasing productivity, being easy and convenient to do business with, providing choice and flexibility etc)
3. Emotional (providing security or a ‘feel-good-factor').
Your stakeholders will respond well to one of these dimensions if not all of them.
By identifying what your stakeholders value and what they prioritise, you can connect your concerns to theirs.
How is the problem you are highlighting impacting them? And how can you tailor your message to their preferred communications style?
Understand the different personality types to become a better communicator
When you are better at communicating with your stakeholders, you can save yourself from small mishaps and develop better relationships.
Ultimately, this will make you a better leader.
To understand how individuals communicate and how you communicate, you can use the DISC model.
The DISC model is based on the work of the psychologist William Moulton Marston in the 1920s and is used by organisations worldwide.
In a nutshell, DISC classifies people’s behaviours into four types (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness) by looking at their preferences on two scales:
• Task versus People
• Fast-Paced versus Moderate-Paced
Below is a quick overview of the different personality types. More often than not, people are a mix of two/three with one area of the quadrant more dominant than in the others.
Go to https://www.discprofile.com/ or do a Google search to take the test. Alternatively, download the full list of different DISC personalities here.
What's your persuasion style?
You can be more successful in influencing and persuading your stakeholders if you know what approach to use based on your skills and abilities.
With the persuasion model from Reynolds A. 2003, you can use your level of intuition and influencing approach to best find your negotiation style and ultimately be better at persuading your stakeholders.
The quadrants highlight four different negotiation approaches that may work best for you.
For example, if you have a low level of intuition but you’re good at influencing others, the best approach would be to use logic when negotiating.
Conclusion
Creating a successful stakeholder management strategy is ultimately about clarifying who you need to influence and how you can persuade those people to help you out. This is best done if you tailor your message to each person highlighting how you, and this project, will add value to them and give them a solution to a problem they might have.
It can also be helpful to think about what communications style your stakeholders prefer. Completing a personality profile as a team can help clarify this.
Last, knowing how to best communicate with different personalities, and how yours might clash with certain ones, is useful to avoid any hang-ups along the way.
Download the Internal Stakeholder Management Strategy Template
Sources
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2017/12/27/how-to-manage-and-influence-internal-stakeholders/?sh=6de457a871a7
https://hbr.org/2011/07/implementing-a-stakeholder-str
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/it-teams/tips-for-getting-stakeholder-buy-in
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/confluence/ultimate-guide-to-stakeholder-management
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_92.htm
https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/stakeholder-management-keeping-stakeholders-happy-6697#:~:text=Failure%20of%20stakeholder%20management%20can,project%20manager%20to%20be%20replaced. | https://blog.grainstonelee.com/insight/internal-stakeholder-management-strategy |
Most office workers spend an average of two hours a day doing unplanned tasks, according to Sheridan Institute’s Edward Sykes.
These work interruptions are associated with:
- Disrupted progress toward tasks completion,
- Reduced task focus,
- Longer task completion time,
- Increased errors.
Unplanned tasks decrease productivity and are characterized by:
- Intrusions – Unplanned interactions initiated by others: Synchronous communication including instant message, phone call, or a coworkers visiting to talk,
- Distractions – Unplanned focus change from a task to environmental conditions like other conversations,
- Breaks – Unscheduled task stoppage to rest, visit the restroom, have a meal,
- Discrepancy Detection – Unplanned task stoppage to correct errors or redirect work effort toward a revised objective.
Unplanned workplace interruptions are increasingly prevalent due to rising incidence of:
- Open and collaborative workspaces,
- Technological interruptions,
- Meetings.
Open space floor plans increase unplanned interruptions, perceived stress, and “cognitive fatigue,” due to greater noise levels and reduced privacy for employees.
These factors also reduce employees’ job satisfaction, found Carnegie Mellon’s Sheldon Cohen and E. M. De Croon and team of University of Amsterdam.
Synchronous communications are more disruptive than asynchronous communications, which allow response at a convenient time and mitigate the negative impact of task-shifting on cognitive load and stress level, noted University of Texas’s Julie Rennecker and Lindsey Godwin, now of Champlain College.
Strategies to mitigate the impact of work disruptions include time management and boundary setting, according to Tulane’s Greg Oldham, Carol Kulik of University of South Australia and Florida State University’s Lee Stepina.
They suggested that employees:
-“Batch” communication to check email and returning phone calls at specified intervals,
-Block technology pop-ups, alerts, sounds to avoid startling interruptions,
-Organize tasks around energy peaks, with tasks requiring the most effort and concentration earlier in the workday and after a break, also advocated by Purdue’s James Tyler and Kathleen Burns of University of Wisconsin,
-Take active breaks, such as walking outside to breathe outdoor air,
-Schedule interruption-free intervals, to increase perceived control over interruptions and reduce stress, also cited by Duke’s Andrew Carton and John Aiello of Rutgers,
-Create “work-arounds” for open space floor plans by:
.Installing higher cubicle dividers,
.Providing noise-cancelling headphones,
.Offering white noise machines to reduce ambient notice,
.Designating reservable private work rooms for audio privacy,
-Reduce meeting frequency to focus on issues that require group discussion, consensus, commitment.
A counterpoint argument is that task interruptions provide benefits, proposed by Rutgers’s Quintus Jett, and Jennifer George of Rice University.
The argued that unplanned and planned interruptions :
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Prevent widespread rework when employees alert colleagues to a work discrepancy or error,
- Increase productivity during repetitive or well-learned tasks that may lead to boredom, errors, or lost task focus.
-*How do you reduce the negative impact of workplace interruptions?
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- Arc of Attentional Focus: Has Someone Picked Your Pocket While You Experienced “Inattentional Blindness”? | https://kathrynwelds.com/2018/02/14/managing-workplace-interruptions/ |
The Pomodoro Technique is a productivity method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 80s. It’s designed to make you more productive by using intervals of work, followed by breaks. The idea is that you focus on one task for a set period of time (typically 25 minutes) before taking a five-minute break. You repeat this pattern until your first task is complete, then move onto something else. Sounds simple enough—but is it really? In this post, I’ll explain how the Pomodoro Technique works and why it might be useful for boosting your productivity at work or home.
What is the Pomodoro Technique?
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method that uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. As you go along you can add more frequent breaks or change the length of time for each pomodoro. The method is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility and even boost creativity. That’s why when I’m stuck on a task and feeling sluggish, I’ll start taking shorter pomodoros with mini-breaks between them. It works wonders!
How to use the Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique involves setting a timer for 25 minutes and then working on a task until it rings. After each pomodoro, take a short break (5 minutes is typical). Then repeat this process four times, taking a longer break after the fourth cycle.
Let’s say you’re writing an article about how to boost productivity: your first pomodoro might be spent researching the best strategies for increasing output; your second compiling resources and writing an outline; in the third drafting one of several possible beginnings; and during your fourth pomodoro creating several sample paragraphs that illustrate those ideas in action.
How to decide what to work on
After you have determined what is to be done, it’s time to decide exactly when and how you are going to get it done. You’ve already thought about the details of your task, so now it’s time for execution.
There are two important parts of deciding what work should be tackled next:
- What do I have to do?
- When will I do it?
How to choose your first task.
Once you’ve set your timer, it’s time to choose your first task. This can be a bit daunting at first because there are so many things that need doing! But here are some tips for choosing the perfect first step:
- Choose something that will take less than 5 minutes. Remember: this is just the warmup!
- Choose something that you don’t mind doing and enjoy doing. You’re not going to get into “flow” if the task feels like more of a chore than anything else. If you’re trying to finish up some paperwork or call people back who have been emailing you—feel free! But if these tasks feel more like an obligation than something fun, maybe consider other options instead (like reading a magazine).
- Make sure that whatever you choose fits into your overall goals for today (or even better, this week) so it’s relevant when deciding on what task goes first on Pomodoro day.
How long should you work for?
The Pomodoro Technique is built around a simple idea: working in 25-minute intervals, followed by a 5-minute break. You’ll repeat this cycle four times, at which point you can take a longer break or start another Pomodoro.
In theory, this should work even if you’re not good at estimating how long something will take to complete. But like all things in life, there are exceptions to the rule that could impact your productivity. If your attention span is short or you have a lot of work to do (or both), then those intervals might not be enough for you. If that’s the case for you and/or your colleagues who use Pomodoro timers, try adjusting the length of each session so that it works better for everyone involved–just remember that doing more than five per day might be too much!
Ketchup with Your Work: How to focus on one task at a time.
When you’re working on a project, you want to focus on one task at a time. That way, you can get things done faster; and if something comes up that requires your attention (like an email or a text message), you can deal with it quickly in between Pomodoros.
For example: don’t check your email every hour while working on something important; instead, set aside specific times during your day for checking email. The same goes for social media—don’t watch TV shows or movies while working either. And even though water is considered essential to human life and good health (I’m looking at you, Gatorade!), drinking regularly while trying to concentrate could cause unnecessary distractions and interruptions.
Because we often multitask without realizing it (like checking Facebook while reading a textbook), it’s easy for our brains to become overwhelmed by all the different stimuli coming at them at once—so it’s important not only that we block out all other potential distractions but also that we create space around us so there aren’t any within arm’s reach either!
How to deal with distractions.
The first step in using your timer effectively is setting it for a short period of time.
It’s important to use an actual tomato-shaped timer for this method, so that you can see the ticking of its internal clock as you work on your task. The reason for this is two-fold: It will help keep you focused on your work, and it will also make sure that when the timer goes off, it’s time to take a break. If there were no visual reminder of how much longer you have left before taking another break, there would be less incentive to stay focused on what needs doing!
As such, I recommend setting your Pomodoro Technique timer for 25 minutes (75 minutes if working on something particularly difficult). You’ll get through all of these intervals with enough time left over at the end of each interval to take a 5 minute break—which should be enough regeneration time for most people who are interested in improving their productivity levels by following this method!
Repeat, repeat, repeat!
Once you’ve completed your first pomodoro, take a break for about five minutes. During this time, you’ll want to stretch or meditate and make sure that the thoughts of the task at hand aren’t still lingering in your mind.
Then it’s back to work! Use another tomato-shaped timer to start another pomodoro session and repeat the process until you’ve completed the task at hand. If by the end of four pomodoros (about 25 minutes) you’re still not done with what needs doing, repeat again! You can use a timer like Google Calendar’s built-in timer or download one onto whatever device that works best for you.
That’s a Pomodoro! Take a break!
Take a break! It’s important to take breaks every 25 minutes. In fact, they’re such a big part of the Pomodoro Technique that they’ve earned their own name: “Pomodoros.”
The idea behind the Pomodoro Technique is that it can help you focus on your work in short bursts, then take a break so you don’t burn out or get distracted by other things. A lot of people find it really helpful, especially if you’re working on something that takes more than an hour at a time.
During your break time, do whatever you like—walk around outside, play video games, go for a run—but don’t check email or social media (we’ll talk about this more later). After five minutes of doing whatever it is that makes you happy and gives your brain some rest from thinking about work stuff, come back refreshed and ready to get back into making progress toward completing whatever task was at hand before taking your first break!.
After you’ve finished four Pomodoros…
After you’ve finished four Pomodoros, and the timer is done ringing, take a short break. This can be five to 15 minutes long depending on how long your previous task took. During this time, don’t think about work or anything related to it—and don’t even check your emails! You deserve a break from all that stress. Instead, use this time to do something completely unrelated to work: watch videos on YouTube (or any other video site), play games online with friends, read a book (but not about work), or listen to music.
Of course if you have an urgent email that needs answering quickly then by all means do so—but try not to get sucked into responding directly and immediately every single time someone sends you an email!
The Tomato Way to Get Things Done: Use the Pomodoro Technique to Boost Your Productivity
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method that helps you get more done in less time. The technique involves working for 25 minutes, then taking a 5 minute break. You repeat this pattern until you have completed 4 intervals, or “Pomodoros” as they are called.
This method can be applied to as many tasks as you want and is designed to help you focus on the task at hand without being distracted by other things. Most people find this process to be very helpful because it keeps them from getting distracted by email notifications or other things that tend to pull our attention away from what we need to get done steadily throughout the day
Turn Procrastination into Productivity with a Tomato Timer
The Pomodoro Technique is an effective method for increasing your productivity. It breaks down work into intervals and takes breaks at regular intervals. This helps you focus on one task at a time and avoid distractions during your work sessions. | https://ecomfortdiary.com/2023/01/25/the-pomodoro-technique-how-to-boost-your-productivity-with-a-tomato-shaped-timer/ |
Organizational changes are the changes of strategies, processes, technologies, operational methods, and culture and the effect of these changes on the organization (Understanding and leading change, 2018). Changes are sometimes required and most of the time are forced to do because of the changing strategies of rivals. These changes can be frequent and sometimes for a specific period of time. In this report, changes in Waitrose are explained with its effect and measures to cure the effect. Waitrose is a chain of British supermarkets having its headquarter in Bracknell, Berkshire, England. This company mainly deals in the food retail division which makes it the sixth-largest retailer of groceries in the UK. In this project, different ways by which organizations' strategies are affected and the influence of drivers of change in organizational behavior is discussed. Apart from that, different barriers to change influence leadership decision-making, and a range of leadership approaches to change initiative is also discussed.
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LO1: Compare ways in which change impacts an organization’s strategy and operations
Impact of changes on an organization's strategies and operations with the help of different organizational examples.
Changes are sometimes required by an organization to change their previous strategies to compete them with their rivals. On the other hand, sometimes these changes are must to put into organization since their business strategies are not meeting the requirement of its customers. The position and perception of company also affects the changes required. It has its negative and positive impact on the organization (Alavi, 2017). The position of company is all about its image in market which has a great impact on the changes required. Waitrose is a large company hence it has to change its strategy of business according to the large scale of customers. There can be two aspects here, the positive aspect shows that company can manage its changes according to different segments of customers but changes on a large scale which is not easy, shows a negative impact on the strategies of company. Here with the help of two organizations, difference is shown that how change impact on different organizational strategies, operations, process, technology and culture.
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Change
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Waitrose
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Marks & Spencer
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Organizational Structure
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The organizational structure used in Waitrose is hierarchical . In this structure, decision is taken by the person having position in hierarchy. This structure helps in making quick decision-making.
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The organizational structure followed by M&S is flat. The changes occurred using this type of structure helps the company in the involvement of its employees in decision making. This increases their job responsibility.
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Organizational Culture
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Waitrose follows a strong culture of innovation and involvement of employees into the organization (Anderson, 2016). This culture strengths the operations of the company and hence strategies can be made accordingly.
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M&S follows role culture, in which role of each individual is assigned and allowed to work for it accordingly. This culture helps in increasing the job responsibility of an employee towards the company. Therefore it also helps to manage the operations department and strategies.
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Pricing strategies
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Waitrose don't follows the strategies are followed by others. It provides values for its member customers rather than discounting and lowering of prices (Bascia, 2014). This helps in increasing the image of it in the minds of customers and thus it strengths the bonding between customer and company.
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M&S follows a dynamic pricing policy. In this policy, it changes the pricing strategies according to season. In festive season it also provides discounts to its customers which attracts them to their store and hence increasing their productivity.
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Technology
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It emphasises on promoting brand through its own mobile application by which it operates its business. This promotion helps the company to increase its demand and helps in high productivity of the organization.
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It emphasises on promoting its brand through social media platform This promotion helps the company in increasing its brand name among the customers which are although not using it's products. This will increase the demand and hence production increases.
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Marketing Strategy
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This company has a great investment in the advertising of its products. To advertise, it emphasises on bundle pricing strategy through which the customers attracts. This helps the operations to increase their selling.
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This company also emphasise on advertising but they mainly focus on psychological pricing (Byers, 2017). This mainly attracts the customers to their doors and helps to increase the business.
LO2: Evaluate the influences that drivers of change have on organizational behaviour
Ways through which internal and external drivers of change affect leadership, team, and individual behaviors
There are two types of changes by which leadership, teams, and individual behaviors are affected.
Internal Drivers of change
Following are the drivers of internal changes.
Resources:
Resources are the basics of an organization which can include human resources raw materials etc. If the resources are not managed properly by Waitrose then the affect of this on behaviours of:
- Leadership: Leadership is the ability of leader in which it makes the objectives and goals of organization (Jabbour, 2015). In Waitrose, if resources are not managed properly then the goals and objectives set by the leader cannot be achieved. This can affect the performance and productivity of organization.
- Teams: Teams are make to perform a specific task which should be specific in the goals and objectives set by the leader (Doppelt, 2017). If human resources are not managed properly in team, then the performance of each employee will not go to meet the requirement set by leader. This will adversely affect the performance of team and hence the goals and objectives of Waitrose cannot be achieved.
- Individual: Individual are assigned to perform a specific task so as to achieve the target set by leader of Waitrose. If the essentials of an individual is not satisfied then it can adversely affect its performance. This will increase dissatisfaction in employee and the task assigned to it will not be achieved by its goal.
Dissatisfaction:
This phenomenon adversely affect the performance of an individual and team and hence the leadership also affected. The affect of this internal change on:
- Leadership: A leader has role of assigning task to its followers. If task assigned to its followers get misinterpreted and not get a proper direction to achieve, this leads to dissatisfaction to the leader. This will surely affect its performance and the goals and objectives of Waitrose cannot be achieved.
- Teams: A team can be dissatisfied by the task assigned to it is not achievable. The task assigned to each employee in team should be achievable (Drover and Ariel, 2015). If dissatisfaction occurs, this will surely affect their performance and hence the productivity of Waitrose also decreased.
- Individual: They are assigned to perform a specific task, if task is not specific and varies, it will dissatisfy the individual. This phenomenon will also affect its performance and the performance and hence productivity of Waitrose affected directly.
External drivers of change
The drivers of external changes are as follows:
Political:
Political changes occurs when the government of a country in which business is operating is not stable. The affect of this instability on the behaviour of:
- Leadership: A leader has the responsibility of setting up the goals of Waitrose. It is operating its business in UK. If there is political instability in UK, this will influence the working of a leader and hence also affects its behaviour of decision-making.
- Team: If the goals set by a leader changes frequently due to political instability, this will affect the working performance of a team (Glassandand, 2015). Since task assigned will not remain specific hence, their behaviour is also affected adversely to manage the goals accordingly. This will decrease the performance of Waitrose.
- Individual: If performance of leaders is affected by political instability then the individuals behaviour will affected automatically and hence decrease the Waitrose productivity.
Economical:
If economy of UK is fluctuating and the purchasing power of customers is not good, then affect of this change on the behaviour of:
- Leadership: The behaviour of leader affected when purchasing power of customers is low, they have to change their policy and decrease the price of their product. Waitrose will face serious consequences of this situation.
- Teams: Due to change in policy, the performance of teams affected. The profit of Waitrose will decrease consequently.
- Individual: If economical changes are frequent and people have not so much money to purchase, the employee of Waitrose can be fired from the organization to cut the cost.
Social:
In UK social factor includes the increase in demand of product Waitrose among customers. The affect of these changes on :
- Leadership: If demand increases rapidly then the policies made by leader should be change accordingly (Cook, 2016). Hence this will increase its power of bearing pressure and its performance will increase.
- Teams: There will be test for the team at the time of high demand. This will surely increase their pressure and performance.
- Individual: Increase in demand will increase the performance of an individual. This will surely help Waitrose to increase its productivity.
Technological:
If technology changes in Waitrose, then the effect of this on:
- Leadership: Due to technological changes, a leader should provide more flexibility to its followers in order to adopt the new technology (Hillson and Murray-Webster, 2017. This will increase faith of followers to it.
- Teams: Teams should adopt new technology and implement on their work. This will help them to improve their efficiency and productivity.
- Individuals: As above individuals should also adopt new technology and hence improve their performance and productivity.
Measures to minimize negative impact of change on organizational behaviour.
Following are the measures to minimize the negative impact of change on organizational behaviour.
Change should be clearly defined and aligned to business goals
The organization should clearly define the changes which are must because without specifying these changes it cannot be implemented by a leader. It must require a critical review to analyse the pros and cons of that change. The change should meet the organizational goals and objectives so that business of Waitrose will go in right direction. This step also help in identifying the inputs and efforts required to invest. Therefore this step determines the requirements and need of change.
Determining the impact of change
Once the change is clearly defined, now is the turn to determine the impact of such changes on each level of organization (Jacobs, Rouse and Parsons, 2014). The changes which are going to make should meet the goal of each level at Waitrose. The effect of such changes should be critically analysed so that particular change is meeting the structure of organization. This process will determine to know where this change is affecting the most and whether it is required or not. This step also helps to form a blue print to determine where the training and support is required most.
Communication among leaders and followers
After get to know about where the change is needed, there should be effective communication among the leaders and followers to know the followers what change is going to do. This is necessary for the employee of Waitrose to know because they are going to face such changes. The communication should be effective enough so that employee can be motivated to go for changes. After getting to know for employees about the changes, the leaders should be ready for the feedback from employees. If the feedback is necessary for the implementation of change then it should be attained by the leaders.
Effective training
After the third step, an effective training session is required for the employees, so that they will be prepared for the new change applied. In Waitrose, if technological change is applied than employees who are required to use that technology should be trained enough to implement the changes (Lopez and Wise, 2015). The training can be provided by face to face sessions or by online modules which must include all the required knowledge to implement such changes. This training session also let to know about the required skills for a change. The training delivery sessions should be effective enough so that it helps the employee to learn.
Implementation of the support structure
In the training session, an employee should be assisted by a support structure so that it may be helped to build proficiency of behaviours and technical skills to meet the goal of Waitrose. Most of the times there can be redundancy in the changes occurred, so as to overcome such issue a support should be there to help the employees in navigating the situation. In order to help the employee, a mentor with open door policy should be established to ask any question. This step is helpful in finding the type of support require to implement a change.
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Measuring the changing process
This is the final step of minimizing the negative impact on organizational behaviour (Rogers and Marres, 2016.). The changes which are implementing, at a situation should be measured in a way that whether they are going in a right direction or not. If there are any changes required to implement in order to achieve the desires of Waitrose, then it should be implemented. This step also helps to find the whether the change management process is successful or not. Through this process, a leader is able to know about other solution in case of failure.
LO3: Determine how barriers to change influence leadership decision-making
Different barriers of change and how it influence leadership decision making
When there is a change, their is a barrier. A company should bring change after analysing the forces that supports the changes or resist the change. Waitrose is a supermarket chain which provides products of different company and did not manufacture anything on their own. Waitrose should start manufacturing as they have the resources which is needed by the company to produce and apart from that they have a brand equity in the market which can help the company to sell more. Force field analysis is a method of monitoring and analysing the forces which can affect the change which will make by the company in the future (Rogers, 2016). If the driving forces are bigger and stronger than the restraining forces than Waitrose should made the change and vice versa. While analysing the forces, each forces should be assigned a points according to their importance and maximum points should decide that company should go for a change or they should not. Force field analysis with functional example is discussed below,
Driving forces: These are the kind of forces which supports the company to go for a change. These forces includes the strength of the Waitrose and how it can help the company to attain their business objectives. Driving forces of Waitrose is discussed,
- Waitrose should produce unique and different product as customer always seeks for new products. Waitrose should understand the unmet needs of the customer and then make their product according to them. (1 point)
- Waitrose is one of the largest supermarket chain in the world thus have enough resources like funds to start their own projects. (3 points)
- Waitrose is the only supermarket chain in UK which has Royal warrant from the Queen of England. Hence the goodwill of the company will help the company to increase their sales. (4 points)
- Due to ample of funds, Waitrose can use latest technology to increase their quality and reduce their cost price so they can maximize their profits thus helping the gain the competitive advantage over other. (4 points)
Restraining forces: These are the kind of forces which are against the changes which will be made by the company. This includes weakness of the company like manpower planning, return on investment etc. If this forces is more stronger than the driving forces than company should not apply the changes planned by them. If they are equal to driving forces than company should modify their plan so to make the driving forces stronger (Marresand, 2016. Restraining forces of Waitrose are explained below:
Manufacturing business will incur huge cost for the company as the equipments and facility cost is high when starting for the first time. So the risk of investing the money is high consequently it will take many years to recover the cost incurred by the Waitrose.( 2 points)
- Time taken to establish the manufacturing business is high. By the time of making the plant if any new technology or external factors changes than it will take more time to replace or modify it thus increase the time and cost for the company, (2 points)
- Manpower planning will be hard as after the plant they have to manage the many employees (Soehner, 2015). Waitrose work is to reduce the gap between the workforce in the company and required workforce. Maintaining these work will be hectic and can affect the profitability of the Waitrose for a shorter period of time. (1 points)
- Waitrose relationship with other brands can be affected in a negative way as after their personal product they will prefer to sell it to earn more profit rather than selling other company's product and earns a commission on it.( 4 points)
So according to the above analysis, Waitrose should go for the manufacturing plant as driving forces has more points overall as compare to the restraining forces. We provide the best essay writing services from professional writers at the best price. Contact our experts.
LO4: Apply a range of leadership approaches to a change initiative
Different leaderships approaches to deal with changes
Leadership style plays an importance part in the success of the organizations. Leader work is to help the employees to attain their goals with maximum utilization of resources. Thus helping the company to improve their performance and productivity. Waitrose should use the leaderships style according to the scenario. Kurt lewin has proposed change theory model which helps the company to implement the changes so to attain the highest level of utilization. According to Change model, leader should follow these steps the implement the change in the organization i.e., Changes should be made after analysing all the impacts of the change (Wagner, 2016). Beside this structure of the organization should be changed as it will affect the performance of the employees. At last leader should be sure that implementation is done for the permanent basis rather than for the shorter period of time. All the three steps of this model will be discussed below with the help of functional example,
- Unfreeze: This is one of the most crucial stage of the change model as it makes the path for the employees to change for the betterment. Waitrose leader should opt a transformational leadership in which they motivates other to change for their betterment as well as company betterment. Their work is to set the challenging target for the employees and then help the employees to attain them with their expertise and knowledge. Communication of the leader is important in this stage as their work is to make employees aware of the opportunities they are seeing and how it can help the employees for their professional and individual growth.
- Change: In this stages employees of the Waitrose are now accepting the change and try to modify their action according to the requirements of the environment (White and Robinson, 2014). Waitrose leader should opt participative style in this. Leader work is to work with the employees to clear the hurdles which they are facing. Effective communication and motivation is required by the leader in this stage. If the employees are motivated enough to accomplish their work than leader has achieved their work with full perfection.
- Unfreeze: This is the last stage of the change in which employees of the Waitrose are now stable and happy while working and adopting change. In this stage, Waitrose leader should opt supportive style in which leader should support their employees while working. For the great work by the employees, Waitrose should reward their employees with incentives, bonus, trips etc so that they can improve their performance. The employees are happy from the change and working with their productivity then the vision they have set while making the change with be achieved.
CONCLUSION
From this report it can be concluded that changes in a business environment should be implemented well enough to achieve the organizational goal. Sometimes the changes also forced to change the mission and objective if they are not implemented properly. In this report, Waitrose is compared with M&S in different aspects of changes which affects the operation and strategies of companies. After that, the effect of internal and external changes on the behaviour of leadership, teams and individuals is discussed. The effect of barriers to change influence leadership decision-making and range of leadership approaches to change initiative is also discussed in this report. | https://www.instantassignmenthelp.com/free-samples/organisational-behaviour/impact-of-changes-on-an-organizations-strategies-and-operations-waitrose |
We"ve all met that dynamic, charismatic person that just has a way with others, and has a way of being remembered. Your participants will identify ways of creating a powerful introduction, remembering names, and managing situations when you’ve forgotten someone’s name.
Personal time management skills are essential for professional success in any workplace. Those able to successfully implement time management strategies are able to control their workload rather than spend each day in a frenzy of activity reacting to crisis after crisis - stress declines and personal productivity soars! These highly effective individuals are able to focus on the tasks with the greatest impact to them and their organization.
The Time Management workshop will cover strategies to help participants learn these crucial strategies. Your participants will be given a skill set that includes personal motivation, delegation skills, organization tools, and crisis management. We"ll cover all this and more during this workshop. | https://www.mandatorytraining.co.uk/collections/career-development-online-training-courses-programs |
A leader’s workforce management responsibilities covers a range of activities. Many of these are centered around effective time management, such as staff scheduling, vacation and leave planning, and task prioritization and completion. As teams become more remote and work undertaken increases in complexity, time management itself increases in both complexity and necessity.
For many organizations, especially those who operate in time-sensitive markets and undertake time sensitive tasks, the need to manage time more effectively is being met by using software that helps to prioritize and track tasks, workflow, and staff. The benefits of doing so include improved employee and team performance, better workplace and workforce planning, improved attendance tracking, a reduction in operational costs, and improved customer service.
In this article, you’ll learn why using a task manager can help a manager or leader to time management and lead more effectively.
Task managers help to focus on what needs to be done by the workforce, when it needs to be done, and how each task integrates with others in the achievement of personal and organizational goals. Here are seven benefits that managers access by using a task manager in their time management regime.
When your mind is awash with the tasks that must be done, it becomes harder to focus. An overloaded brain risks some tasks being forgotten, and an overly active impedes necessary functions such as sleep. By moving tasks from the brain into a task management system, the mind is emptied, safe in the knowledge that tasks will not be forgotten. This enables you to respond to requests and emergencies more effectively with a clear mental and emotional state, uninhibited by distractions and with a better sense of focus.
Long term objectives are likely to remain vague goals without giving them the focus they require to be achieved. By reflecting on long-term strategic objectives and breaking them into task oriented milestone goals, to be managed in your task manager, you help to energize and motivate employees with collective purpose. This also helps to eliminate the procrastination that kills the achievement of goals.
Using a task manager forces you to examine each task, assess how it fits into goal achievement, and therefore focus on what is most important. This provides focus for individuals and teams, as prioritized tasks are undertaken in a more timely fashion.
A task manager provides an overview of a team’s calendar, highlighting when key employees are on leave or busy with other time-sensitive work. With this level of information, progress toward goals is more easily managed and disruptions due to absence or working on other tasks are avoided.
A manager and his or her team relies on their reputation to get things done. Customers may forgive one late delivery, but when missed deadlines become habitual they will quickly look elsewhere. Effective use of a task manager to control personal and team workflows should eliminate missed deadlines, aiding more accurate estimates of the time it takes to deliver projects.
As tasks are completed and progress is evidenced, the motivation to continue increases. In his book, ‘The art of procrastination’, Professor John Perry of Stanford University recommends adding all tasks – no matter how small or mundane – to a to-do-list can energize motivation, as each completed task becomes a step nearer to eventual goals.
A task manager enables the leader to understand the availability of each member of the team in real time, aiding in planning future project work and preventing sub teams and individual employees suffering from task overload that destroys work/life balance.
A task manager is an invaluable tool, helping individuals to control their time, work, and personal tasks and managers to lead their teams more effectively – not only by managing workflow but by helping to focus minds, improve productivity, and increase motivation and employee engagement.
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A leader must have followers
It is a relationship through which one person influences the behavior or actions of other people. A leader must have followers. Leaders create a vision and then communicate the vision to his followers. Leader energies, inspire and motivate others to translate the vision into achievement. A good leader must have qualities, personality, characteristics or ‘traits’. Leadership traits include personal magnetism or charisma (gift from GOD), interpersonal skills, analytical thinking, imagination, decisiveness, trustworthiness, persuasiveness, self motivation, flexibility and vision. There are some styles of leadership:
Autocratic:
The manager makes all the decisions and issues instructions which must be obeyed without question.
Advantages:
Quick decisions can be made when speed is required
It is most efficient type of leadership for highly programmed, routine work
Disadvantages:
Communication between the manager and subordinate will be one way. There may be lack of helpful feedback
It does not encourage contribution or initiative from subordinates
Persuasive:
The manger still makes all the decisions, but explains them to subordinates, and attempts to motivate subordinates to carry them out willingly.
Advantages:
Selling decisions to staff might make them more willing
Staff will have a better idea of what to do when unforeseen events arise in their work, because the manager will have explained his intensions.
Disadvantages:
Subordinates will not necessarily be committed to decisions in which they have not been involved
There is no contribution or feedback of subordinates
Democratic:
Leader and followers make the decision together, on the basis of consensus, or compromise and agreement.
Advantages:
It can provide high commitment to the decision reached
It takes advantage of the knowledge and expertise of individuals in different areas, for high quality, flexible decision making
Disadvantages:
The authority of the manager might be undermined
Decision making might become a very long process
Clear cut decisions might be difficult to reach
Participative:
The manager confers with subordinates and takes their views and feelings into account, but retains the right to make the final decision.
Advantages:
Employees are involved in decisions. This encourages motivation through greater interest and involvement.
Employees can contribute knowledge and experience, to help in solving problems related to their work.
Disadvantages:
it might take longer to reach decisions
subordinates might be limited in their viewpoint on organizational issues
if the manager does not take employees advice, they might perceive the process to be meaningless
P7: explain the different motivational theories and their application within the workplace
Motivation:
Motivation is the driving force which causes us to achieve goals. Motivation may be rooted in the basic need to minimize physical pain and maximize pleasure, or it may include specific needs such as eating and resting, or a desired object, goal, state of being, ideal, or it may be attributed to less apparent reasons such as altruism, selfishness, morality, or avoiding mortality.
F.W. Taylor:
Taylor made the first serious attempt to analyze worker motivation in order to advise management on the best ways to increase worker performance or productivity. The techniques he used of establishing an idea or an hypothesis, studying and recording performance at work, altering working methods and re-recording performance are still used in modern industry. This approach has become known as ‘scientific management’ due to the detailed recording and analysis of results that it involved. His main aim was to reduce the level of inefficiency that existed in the US manufacturing industry. The scope for efficiency gains in early twentieth century manufacturing plants was huge. The vast mass of workers were untrained and non-specialized. They were poorly led by supervisors and managers with little or no formal training in dealing with people. There was usually no formal selection or appraisal system of staff and many were recruited on a daily or weekly basis with no security of employment.
How to improve productivity (Taylor’s scientific approach):
Select workers to perform a task.
Observe them performing the task and note the key elements of it.
Record the time taken to do each part of the task.
Identify the quickest method recorded.
Train all workers in this quickest method and do not allow them to make any changes in it.
Supervise workers to ensure that this ‘best way’ is being carried out and to time them to check that the set time is not being exceeded.
Pay workers on the basis of results (based on the theory of economic man)
The theory of ‘economic man’ was widely held, and Taylor himself supported this notion. The view was that man was driven or motivated by money alone and the only factor that could stimulate further effort was the chance of earning extra money. He always maintained that workers should be paid a ‘fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’ and that the amount should be directly linked up to output through a system known as ‘piece rate’. This means paying workers a certain amount for each unit produced. To encourage high output a low rate per unit can be set for the first units produced and then higher rates become payable if output targets are exceeded.
Elton Mayo:
Elton Mayo is best known for his ‘Hawthorne Effect’ conclusions. These were based on a series of experiments he and his team conducted over a five year period at the Hawthorne factory of Western Electric Co. in Chicago. His work was initially based on the assumption that working conditions (lightning, heating, rest periods and so on) had a scientific effect on workers’ productivity. Experiments were undertaken to establish the optimum working conditions at all. The results surprised all observers, as lightning and all other conditions were changed, both improved and worsened, so productivity rose in all groups including the control group. This forced Mayo to accept that:
Working conditions in themselves were not that important in determining productivity levels
Other motivational factors needed to be investigated further before conclusions could be drawn.
Subsequent experiments were carried out with a group of assembly line workers. Changes to rest periods, payment systems, assembly bench layout and canteen food were made at twelve week intervals. Crucially, before every major change, the researchers discussed the new changes with the work group. At the end of the experiments the working conditions and work hours were returned to how they had been before the start of the trial. Output rose far above the original level.
Maslow hierarchy theory:
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in 1943. Then in 1954 this theory was fully expressed in his book Motivation and Personality. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often portrayed in the shape of a pyramid, with the largest and most fundamental levels of needs at the bottom, and the need for self-actualization at the top. The most fundamental and basic four layers of the pyramid contain what Maslow called ‘deficiency needs’ or ‘d-needs’: esteem , friendship and love, security, and physical needs. With the exception of the most fundamental (physiological) needs, if these ‘deficiency needs’ are not met, the body gives no physical indication but the individual feels anxious and tense. Maslow’s theory suggests that the most basic level of needs must be met before the individual will strongly desire (or focus motivation upon) the secondary or higher level needs.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, represented as a pyramid with the more basic needs at the bottom:
This hierarchy was interpreted by Maslow as follows:
individuals’ needs start on the lowest level
once one level of need has been satisfied, humans will strive to achieve the next level
self-actualization or self-fulfillment is not reached by many people but everyone is capable of reaching their potential
once a need has been satisfied it will no longer motivate individuals to action, thus when material needs have been satisfied the offer of more money will not increase productivity
Herzberg and the ‘Two factor theory’:
Despite basing his research on just 200 professionally qualified workers, Herzberg’s conclusions and famous two factor theory have had the greatest impact on motivational practices since Taylor’s work almost 60 years earliest. His research was based around questionnaires and interviews with employees with the intension of discovering:
those factors that led to them having very good feelings about their jobs and
those factors that led to them having very negative feelings about their jobs.
His conclusions were that:
Job satisfaction resulted from five main factors: achievement, recognition for achievement, the work itself, responsibility and advancement. He called these factors the ‘motivators’. He considered the last three to be the most significant.
Job dissatisfaction resulted from five different factors: company policy and administration, supervision, salary, relationships with others and working conditions. He termed these ‘hygiene factors’. These were the factors that surround the job itself (extrinsic factors) rather than the work itself (intrinsic factors).
Herzberg considered that the hygiene factors had to be addressed by management to prevent dissatisfaction, but even if they were in place they would not, by themselves, create a well-motivated workforce.
Vroom’s theory:
Vroom’s theory assumes that behavior results from conscious choices among alternatives whose purpose it is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. The key elements to this theory are referred to as Expectancy, Instrumentality, and Valence.
The Expectancy Theory of Victor Vroom deals with motivation and management. Vroom’s theory assumes that behavior results from conscious choices among alternatives whose purpose it is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Together with Edward Lawler and Lyman Porter, Vroom suggested that the relationship between people’s behavior at work and their goals was not as simple as was first imagined by other scientists. Vroom realized that an employee’s performance is based on individuals’ factors such as personality, skills, knowledge, experience and abilities. The expectancy theory says that individuals have different sets of goals and can be motivated if they believe that:
There is a positive correlation between efforts and performance,
Favorable performance will result in a desirable reward,
The reward will satisfy an important need,
The desire to satisfy the need is strong enough to make the effort worthwhile.
P8: Assess the relationship between motivation theory and the practice of management.
Payment or financial reward system:
Hourly wage rate:
This is the most common way of paying manual, clerical and ‘non-management workers’. An hourly ‘time rate’ is set for the job – perhaps by comparing with other firms or similar jobs – and the wage level is determined by multiplying this by the number of hours worked. This total is usually paid weekly.
Piece rate:
A rate is fixed for the production of each unit, and the workers’ wages therefore depend on the quantity of output produced. The piece rate can be adjusted to reflect the difficulty of the job and the ‘standard’ time needed to complete it. These issues are determined by work study. The level of the rate can be very important. If set too low it could demotivate the workers but if too high it could reduce the incentives, because workers will be able to meet their target wage level by producing relatively few units.
Salary:
This is an annual sum that is usually paid on a monthly basis. It is the most common form of payment for professional, supervisory and management staff. The salary level is fixed each year and it is not dependent on the number of hours worked (time rate) or the number of units produced (piece rate). The fixing of the salary level for each job is a very important process because it helps to determine the status of that post in the whole organization. Job evaluation techniques may be used to assist in deciding the salary bands and the differences between them. In most organizations, all jobs will be put into one of a number of salary bands and the precise income earned within each band will depend upon experience and progress. It is always possible to gain promotion to another job in a higher salary band. Firms that are interested in creating a ‘single status’ within their organization are now increasingly putting all staff – manual and managerial – on to annual salaries to give the benefits of security and status to all employees.
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Each output consists of divided subtasks. These tasks must be fulfilled for a successful outcome. We may not always be able to focus on just one task. There may be multiple tasks to be done or the time allotted for the task may be very limited. Task management helps us to finish our work with maximum efficiency by organizing time and to-do.
What Role Does Task Management Play in Your Success?
According to Gallup employee burnout research, study shows that 23% of employees reported feeling burned out at work very often or always, while an additional 44% reported feeling burned out sometimes. One of the reasons for burnout stated in the study is unmanageable workload.
Incorrect task planning and wrong time management not only cause disruption of work, but also negatively affect the mental health of the employee.
How to Manage Your Task?
While there are many techniques for task management, here are the six most effective task management methods:
Divide and Conquer
Most of us have seen this method as a political tactic in the history books. But this tactic can also be used for task management. First of all, this method can be applied for any desired result. Doing a task that needs to be done by dividing it into small parts also motivates you when each small task is completed. Dividing the work that needs to be done into small pieces also prevents loss of productivity by trying to do everything at once.
Let’s say you are a blog writer. You need to write a new article on a given topic. It may seem a little scary when viewed as a whole but breaking it up into small pieces takes that fear away. First of all, you can do your research and then determine the sub-headings for the text and write at least one sentence for each title and make a rough draft. You can create the text by opening these sentences. The next stage may be the preparation of images and SEO optimization.
This will motivate you even more if you make a note of the sub-tasks and indicate that each task is completed by crossing it out or ticking it when it is finished. Having a digital or regular to-do list can not only provide a visual track of what needs to be done, but also increase your motivation.
Setting a Time Limit
Limiting your tasks to be done by time shortens the task’s execution time. If you don’t set a due date for a task, that task will expand over time. Having a due date motivates us.
Assign a due date to any task, even if it doesn’t have a due date. So, you can finish that task early and deal with other tasks.
It’s good to be realistic when limiting a task over time. The time limit puts pressure on us and affects our performance but setting an unrealistic deadline can cause stress and negatively affect performance.
Take a Break
A machine can finish a job faster without a break, but humans are not machines. Continuing to work without a break causes physical and mental fatigue, reduces performance and motivation, causing the work to not reach the time it should be finished.
Break management is just as important as business management. Working and focusing time, charging time may vary from person to person. You can use techniques such as the Pomodoro Technique to adjust your study time. The Pomodoro Technique consists of four repetitions of a 25-minute work and a 5-minute break set, but as mentioned above, the focus time may vary from person to person, so you can tailor the Pomodoro Technique to suit you. For example, 30 minutes of work and 5 minutes of breaks, or 1 hour of work and 10 minutes of breaks.
Breaks can be used not only as means of rest, but also as rewards. Assign yourself tasks to complete within a set time and reward yourself with a nice break if you succeed. This will motivate you and help you have a productive rest break.
Get Rid of Distractions
Distractions are a problem not only in business but in life in general. Distractions can be a result of your desire to avoid work, or they can be a reason for avoiding work.
For example, if you have not planned the right time and task management, you may not even want to start that job, and even reading a book in this process can be considered a distraction. Chatting with your friends for a long time, having another coffee may be the tactics you use to escape from work.
There are also factors that appear when we really want to focus on work and hinder us. For example, when a friend comes and wants to chat, or a notification comes to your phone.
Getting rid of distractions, combined with good time and task management, is a trigger that increases your productivity and speed.
Prioritization
The first thing to do when starting a job is to determine what to do and create a to-do list, and the second thing is to prioritize between tasks.
Prioritization is important because it can cause stress if tasks are not prioritized. For example, it is a big mistake to make a presentation that you have to finish next week when you have a report to be finished by tomorrow. Or if you have two presentations that need to be prepared for tomorrow, but one is much more important, it may be the wrong move to deal with the other.
So how can we prioritize tasks? That’s what the Eisenhower Matrix was invented for. You can draw a table like the matrix below and position your tasks. The Eisenhower Matrix visually presents you which tasks are urgently needed.
Communication
Lack of communication within the team can affect task and time management, reduce employee motivation and productivity. Even if some employees are assigned a single task, the content of the task may require a lot of effort as it is intense, while some employees may deal with more than one task that is not so intense. The team leader’s consideration of this issue while assigning a task reduces the workload, resulting in a more efficient work process.
An employee may find the workload excessive for special reasons, or indeed the workload may be too high. In such cases, keeping in touch with the leader and teammates and asking for help reduces the workload and helps the work to be completed on time.
Using a Digital Planner for Task Management: PeerBie
Using a digital planner is one of the best ways for an organization in general. It is preferred because it is accessible and easy to use. Another reason why it is preferred is that it enables teamwork and facilitates communication.
Business management in general is even easier with digital planners like PeerBie. You can prioritize your tasks on your calendar, set a due date, share your calendar with your friends, and get things done quickly by keeping in touch with our team. | https://peerbie.com/6-effective-task-management-tips/ |
One of the oldest, and most difficult, areas in psychology is the fundamental problem of why people are motivated to do anything at all, and if they do something, why that and not something else. The issue is really two fold; the nature of the driving force (where it comes from: what are its properties) and the direction and maintenance of the drive (what affects does it have on individual behavior).
For Westwood (1992:288), motivation, as a concept, has certain specific features:
Motivation is an internal state experienced by the individual. Whilst external factors including other people, can affect a person’s motivational state, it develops within the individual and is unique to that individual.
The individual experiences a motivational state in a way that gives rise to a desire, intention and pressure to act.
Motivation has an element of choice, intention or willingness. That is, the individual experiencing a state of arousal (externally or internally generated), responds by choosing to act in a way and at a level of intensity that they determine.
Action and performance are a function, at least in part, of motivation. It is therefore important in our ability to predict and understand actions and performance.
Motivation is multi-faceted. It is a complex process with several elements and the possibility of multiple determinants, options and outcomes.
Individuals differ in terms of their motivational state and the factors that affect it.
Furthermore, the motivational state of an individual is variable; it is different across time and across situations.
(John Arnold et al, 1995)
There are two types of motivation as originally identified by Hertzberg et al (1957):
Intrinsic motivation-The self generated factors that influence people to behave in a particular direction. These factors include responsibility, autonomy (freedom to act), scope to use and develop skills and abilities, interesting and challenging work and opportunities for advancement.
Extrinsic motivation-what is done to or for people to motivate them. This includes rewards, such as increased pay, praise, or promotion, and punishments, such as disciplinary action, withholding pay, or criticisms.
2.2 The process of motivation
Motivating other people is about getting them to move in the direction you want them to go in order to achieve a result. Motivating yourself is about setting the direction independently and then taking a course of action, which will ensure that you get there. Motivation can be described as goal -directed behavior. People are motivated when they expect that a course of action is likely to lead to the attainment of a goal and a valued reward-one that satisfies their needs. But managers still have a major part to play in using their motivating skills to get people to give of their best, and to make good use of motivational processes provided by the organization. To do this it is necessary to understand the process of motivation-how it works and the different types of motivations that exist. A need -related model of the process of motivation is shown in the figure below. This suggests that motivation is initiated by the conscious or unconscious recognition of unsatisfied needs. These needs create wants, which are desires to achieve or obtain something. Goals are then established which is believed will satisfy these needs and wants and a behaviour pathway is selected which is expected will achieve the goal. If the goal is achieved, the need will be satisfied and the behaviour is likely to be repeated, the next time a similar need emerges. If the goal is not achieved, the action is less likely to be repeated. This process of repeating successful behaviour or actions is called reinforcement or the law of effect (Hull, 1951). It has, however, been criticized by Allport (1954) as ignoring the influence of expectations and therefore constituting ‘hedonism of the past’. (Michael Armstrong, 2001: 155).
Attain Goal
Need
Take Action
Establish Goal
Figure2.1: The motivation process
(Source: Michael Armstrong, 2001:155).
2.3 Approaches to motivation
2.3.1 Theory X and Theory Y
Douglas Mc Gregor proposed two distinct views of human beings: one basically negative, labeled theory X, and the other basically positive, labeled theory Y.
Under Theory X, the 4 assumptions held by managers are:
Employees inherently dislike work, whenever possible, will attempt to avoid it.
Since employees dislike work, they must be coerced, controlled, or threatened with punishment to achieve goals.
Employees will avoid responsibilities and seek formal direction whenever possible.
Most workers place security above all other factors associated with work and display little ambitions.
In contrast to these negative views the nature of human being, Mc Gregor listed 4 positive assumptions that he called Theory Y:
Employees can view work as being as natural as rest or play.
People will exercise self-direction and self-control if they are committed to the objectives.
The average person can learn to accept, even seek responsibility.
The ability to make innovative decision is widely dispersed throughout the population and is not necessarily the sole province of those in management position.
Mc Gregor himself held to the being that Theory Y assumptions were more valid than Theory X. Therefore, he proposed such idea as participate in decision making, responsible and challenging jobs, and good go up relation as approaches that would maximize an employee’s job motivation.
Critics of the theory: Unfortunately, there is no evidence to confirm that either set of assumptions is valid or that accepting theory y assumptions and altering one’s acknowledgment will lead to more motivated workers.
(Stephen P. Robins, 1993: 208)
2. 3.2 Human Relation Approach
The main emphasis of the classical approach was on structure and the formal organization as the basic for achieving high levels of work performance. But during the 1920’s greater attention began to be given to the social factors at work and to the behaviour of people in the organization that is human relations. The major impetus to the human relations approach came with the famous Hawthorne studies at the Western Electric company in America (1924 – 1932).
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The Hawthorne Studies have been subject to criticize and to a number of different interpretation. But however, the results are regarded; the studies have important implications for organizational structures. They generated new ideas on social interaction, output restrictions and individuals within work groups. The human relations approach marked a change in emphasis away from the precision of scientific management and led to ideas on increasing productivity by humanizing the work organization with the human relations approach, recognition was given to the importance of the informal organization which will always be seen as individuals and members of a social group, with their behaviour and attitude as the key effectiveness. (Laurie J. Mullins, 1992:59)
2.3.3 Scientific Management Approach
The scientific management movement was pioneered by the American, Frederic W. Taylor. He saw workers who do manual work to be motivated by money, the ‘greedy robot’, and to be too stupid to develop the ‘one best way’ of doing the task. The role of management was to analyze scientifically all the tasks to be done and then to design jobs to eliminate wasted time and motion.
The application of scientific management resulted in significant productivity increases. However, the emphasis on specialization was to become one of the targets of critics of scientific management. They argued, that specialization was ultimately inefficient but, more importantly; it did not allow people to achieve their full potential at work. (Henry L. Tosi et al, 1994:9)
Scientific management is often referred to as a machine theory model. It adopts an instrumental view of human behaviour together with the application of specialization and standard procedures of work. Workers were viewed less as isolated individuals and more as units of production to handle in much the same way as machines. The scientific study of work can lead to jobs becoming repetitive, boring and requiring little skills. The ideas behind scientific management have been largely discredited by subsequent management writers. There has been strong criticism of scientific as representing close management control over workers. By removing decisions about their work is cairned out, by division of labour, and by dictating precise stages and methods for every aspect of work performance, management could gain control of the actual process of work. The rationalization of production processes and division of labour tends to result in de-skilling of work, and thus may be a main strategy of management. (Laurie J. Mullins, 1992:56)
2.4 The motivation theories
2.4.1 Content theory
2.4.1.1 Maslow theory
Without doubt the best-known theory is of Maslow (1954). Maslow supposed that people have 5 types of needs that are activated in a hierarchical manner, and are then aroused in a specific order such that a lower order need must be satisfied before the next higher order- need is activated. Once need is met, the next highest need is the hierarchy is triggered and and so forth.
Higher Order
order of progression
Self-actualisation needs
Self-esteem needs
Social needs
Safety needs
Psychological needs
Lower Order
Figure2.2: Maslow’s need hierarchy
Source: A.H.Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition,
New York: Harper & Row, 1976)
Psychological needs
Psychological needs are the lowest-order most basic needs and refer to satisfying fundamental biological drives such as the need for food, air, water and shelter. To satisfy these positive needs, organizations must provide employees with a salary that allows them to afford adequate living conditions e.g. food and shelter. Employees need sufficient rest breaks to allow them to meet their psychological needs. Organizations may provide exercise and physical fitness facilities for their employees, because providing such facilities may also be recognized as an attempt to help employees stay healthy by gratifying their psychological needs.
Safety needs
Safety needs are activated only after physiological needs are met. Safety need refer to needs for a secure, predictable, habitable, non-threatening environment free from threats of either physical or psychological harm. Organizations may provide employees with life and health insurance plans, opportunity for savings, pensions, and safety equipment and secure contracts that enable work to be performed without fear and harm.
Social needs
Social needs are activated after both physiological and safety needs. They refer to the need to be affiliative-to have friends, to be liked, included and accepted by other people. Friends, relations and work colleagues help meet social needs, and organizations may encourage participation in social events such as office parties, sports days, competitions which provide an opportunity for meeting these needs. Many organizations spend vast sums of money on facilitate for out-of-work hours activities for their staff so that people in the same organization, but different sections or departments, may meet, chat and affiliate.
Esteem needs
Esteem needs refer to a person’s desire to develop self-respect and to gain the approval of others. The desires to achieve success have personal prestige and are recognized by others all fall into this category. Companies may have awards, prizes or banquets to recognize distinguished achievements. Printing articles in company newsletters describing an employee’s success, assigning private parking spaces, and posting signs identifying the “employee of the month” are all examples of things that can be done to satisfy esteem. The inflation of job titles could also be seen as an organizational attempt to boost employee’s self-esteem.
Self-actualizations needs
Self-actualization needs refer to the need for self-fulfillment-the desire to become all that one is capable of being, developing one’s potential and fully realizing one’s abilities. By working to their maximum creative potential, employees who are self-actualised can be an extremely valuable asset to their organizations. Individuals who have become self-actualised supposedly work at their peak, and represent the most effective use of an organization’s human resources.
Critics of the theory: The theory has enthusiascally applied to the world of work. However, few have been able to find evidence of the five-(or two-) their system (Mitchell &Nowdgill 1976), and there is precious little evidence that needs are activated in the same order. Furthermore, it is not certain how, when or why the gratification of one stimulates or activates the next highest category (John Arnold et al, 1995).
2.4.1.2 Adelfer’s ERG theory
Growth needs
Existence needs
Relate dress needs
Least concrete Most concrete
Figure 2.3: Adelfer’s continuum of ERG needs.
(Paul M.Muchinsky, 1993)
Adelfer’s ERG theory is much simpler than Maslow’s theory, in that Adelfer specifies that there are only 3 types of needs, but that they are not necessarily activated in any specific order. Further, according to this theory any need may be activated at any time. The 3 needs specified by ERG theory are existence, relatedness, and growth.
Existence needs
These are material and are satisfied by environmental factors such as food, water, pay, fringe benefits, and working conditions.
Relatedness needs
These involve relationship with “significant others”, such as co-workers, superiors, subordinates, family and friends.
Growth needs
These involve the desire for unique personal development. They are met by developing whatever abilities and capabilities are important to the individual.
Critics of the theory: ERG theory suggests that, although basic categories of need do exist, they are not exactly as specified by Maslow. The theory has not attracted as much attention as Maslow theory, but seems a reasonable modification of it. However, like Maslow theory it is potentially rather difficult to test (Furnham, 1992).
2.4.1.3 Hertzberg’s two-factor theory
According to the two factors theory, people have two major types of needs. The first of these Hertzberg called hygiene needs, which are influenced by the physical and psychological conditions in which people work. Hertzberg called the second set of needs motivator needs, and described them as being very similar to the higher order needs in Maslow’s (1954) need hierarchy theory.
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Hertzberg at al. (1959) claimed that different types of outcomes or rewards satisfied these two types of needs. Hygiene needs were said to be satisfied by hygiene factors or dissatisfiers, such as supervision, interpersonal relation, physical working conditions, salary, company policies and administrative practices, benefits and job security. When these factors are unfavorable, the job dissatisfaction is the result. Conversely, when hygiene factors are positive, such as when worker perceive that their pay is fair and that their working conditions are good, than barriers to job satisfaction are removed. However, the fulfillment of hygiene needs cannot by itself result in job satisfaction. Unlike hygiene needs, motivation needs are fulfilled by what Hertzberg et al. (1959) called motivator factors or satisfiers such as achievement, recognition, work itself, responsibility and advancement.
According to the theory, the factors that lead to job satisfaction are those that satisfy an individual’s need for self-actualization (self-fulfillment) in their work, and it is only from the performance of their task that individuals can enjoy the reward that will reinforce their aspirations. Compared to hygiene factors, which results in a ‘neutral state’ (neither satisfied nor dissatisfied) when present, positive motivator factors result in job satisfaction.
Critics of the theory: Attractive though the theory is, it has little empirical support. There is no doubt attributable to the fact that various methodological errors were introduced in the early theory-testing work. These included the real possibility that all the results were the result of classic attribution errors, such that personal failure is attributed externally (to hygiene factors) and success internally (to motivator factors). Secondly, the theory testing work was nearly all done on white-collar workers (accountants and engineers) who are hardly representive of the working population.
2.4.1.4 McClelland’s Achievement Motivation Theory
The need for achievement underlies the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy and also one of Hertzberg’s motivating factors. The importance of achievement is emphasised by Mc Lellands, who has developed a theory of motivation which is noted in culture. The work of Mc Lelland is based on the concept of 3 main sets of needs and socially developed motives:
The need for Affiliation
The need for Power; and
The need for Achievement
People possess all 3 needs but the relative intensity of affiliation, power and achievement varies among individuals and different occupations. (Laurie J. Mullins, 1992: 206)
Those most interested in power seeks positions of control and influence, those for whom affiliation is most important seek pleasant relationship and enjoy helping others; achievement seekers want success, fear failure, are task oriented and self-reliant. These 3 needs are not mutually exclusive. Many people are well motivated by all 3, but invariably one area is predominant. The implication of the theory in practice are that managers can identify employees who are self-motivated, those who rely more on internal incentives and those who could increase their achievement drive through training. (Shaun Tyson et al, 2000: 15)
Critics of the theory: Mc Lelland’s theory implies an individualistic approach to the motivation of staff. The behaviour and performance of work group is as important as for individual motivation. (Laurie J. Mullins, 1992:207)
2.4.2 Process theories
2.4.2.1 Equity theory
Equity theories, borrowed by psychologists from economics (Adams 1965), views motivation from the perspective of the comparisons people make among themselves. It proposes that employees are motivated to maintain fair, or ‘equitable”, relationships among themselves and to change those relationships that are unfair or “inequitable”. Equity theory suggests that people make social comparison between themselves and others with respect to two variables-outcomes (benefits, rewards) and inputs (effort, ability). Outcomes refer to the things workers believe they and others get out of their jobs, including pay, fringe benefits or prestige. Inputs refer to the contribution employees believe they and others make to their jobs, including the amount of time worked, the amount of effort expended, the number of units produced, or the qualifications brought to the job. Not surprisingly, therefore workers may disagree about constitutes equity and inequity in the job. Equity is therefore a subjective, not objective, experience, which makes it more susceptible to being influenced by personality factors (Furnham 1992:139).
Equity theory states that people compare their outcomes and inputs to those of others in the form of ratio. Specifically, they compare the ratio of their own outcomes and inputs to the ratio of other people’s outcomes and inputs, which can result in any of the 3 states: overpayment, underpayment, or equitable payment.
Implication for managers:
The management implications are two-fold: firstly that comparative pay and benefits between different groups, sections and levels in an organization, are a major source of motivation and demotivation; secondly, employees need to feel they are fairly dealt with -that they and their colleagues are rewarded equitably for their efforts.
Critics of the theory: As one might expect, equity theory has its problems: how to deal with the concept of negative inputs; the point at which equity becomes inequity, and the belief that people prefer and value equity equality. Moreover, the theory is too individualistic. (John Arnold et al, 1995).
2.4.2.2 Reinforcement theory
These theories, for there are many, specify how a history of past benefits (or punishments), or reinforcements, modify behaviour so that future benefits will be secured. The direct application of behavioral modification principles to the work situation claims to provide procedures by which human performance can be shaped and altered. At the centre of behaviour modification is the concept of reinforcement contingency: the rate of performance will increase when valued outcomes (reinforcers) are made contingent on the performance. It makes no difference to the theory what the person needs, expects, values or wants, although these factors may impact on the differential power or effect of each reward (and punishment). Furthermore, people perform certain work-related acts that are subject to reinforcement (or punishment and extinction) contingencies. People work with a certain degree of effectiveness, and when a particular behavior result in a reward (there is reinforcement contingency between, say, payment and work efficiency), performance improves.
Learning theorists assert that all behaviour is shaped and sustained through the action of contingent reinforcement; work-related behaviours are simply special examples of this more universal phenomenon. (Furnham, 1992).
Reinforcement and learning theories are among the oldest in psychology. There has long been a debate concerning the usefulness or otherwise of punishment as a strategy. Problems such as resentment and sabotage may accompany a manager’s use of punishment (negative reinforcement) is usually not effective, since it suppresses rather than eliminate undesirable responses. They also noted the more quickly reinforcement is given after the response, the more effective it becomes.
Implication for managers:
Jablonsky and De Vries (1972) have suggested the following guidelines for applying operant conditioning as a motivating technique:
Avoid using punishment as a primary means of obtaining desired performance
Positively reinforce desired behaviour and ignore undesired behaviour if possible.
Minimize the time-lag between response and reinforcement
Apply positive reinforcement frequently on a variable ratio schedule
Determine environmental factors that are considered positive and negative by individual
Critics of the theory: Being very practically oriented, it is very unclear what managers should do to motivate their staff if they are followers of learning theory. Sensitively, subtly and discretely applied, it works well, but sophisticated workforce is sometimes hostile to it. (John Arnold et al, 1995).
2.4.2.3 Expectancy theory
Expectancy theory asserts that people are mostly motivated to work when they expect they will be able to achieve and obtain the things they want from their jobs. Expectancy theory characterizes people as rational, logical and cognitive beings, who think about what they have to do to be rewarded and how much the reward means to them before they perform their jobs. Expectancy theory specifies that motivation is the result of 3 different types of beliefs cognitions that people have. These are known as:
Expectancy-
The belief that one’s effort will result in performance
Instrumentality
The belief that one’s performance will be rewarded
Valence-
The perceived value of the rewards to the recipient
Employee may believe that a great deal of efforts will result in getting much accomplished, whereas others believe there are other occasions in which hard work will have little effects on how much gets done. It is possible that even if an employee works hard and performs at a high level, motivation may falter if that performance is not suitably rewarded by the organization-that is if the performance was not perceived as instrumental in bringing about the rewards. If behaviour is not explicitly rewarded, people are unlikely to repeat it. Furthermore, even if employees receive rewards based on their performance, they may be poorly motivated if those so-called “rewards” have a low valence to them.
Porter and Lawler
Over the years, Porter and Lawler (1968) adapted and expanded the theory. According to this model, job performance is a multiple combination of abilities and skills, effort and role perceptions. If individuals have clear role perceptions, if they possess the necessary skills and abilities, and if they are motivated to exert sufficient effort, the model suggests that they will perform well. Abilities and skills refer to both physical and psychological characteristics.
Role perceptions refer to the clarity of the job description and to whether individuals know how to direct their efforts towards effectively completing the task. Those who have clear perceptions of their role perceptions apply their efforts where they will count, and perform correct behaviours. Those who have incorrect role perceptions tend to spend much of their time in unproductive efforts that do not contribute to effective job performance.
Expectancy
Expectancy
Instrumentality
Extrinsic
outcome / reward
Outcome /
Reward
Satisfaction
Performance
Effort
Intrinsic
outcome / reward
Perceived equity of outcomes / rewards
Job design,
Organizational policies
and practice
Ability and traits,
Role clarity organizational
supports, etc
Figure 2.4: Porter and Lawler’s expanded expectancy model
Source: Adapted from Porter and Lawler (1968)
Implication for managers: Arnold et al. (1991:176) argues that, if expectancy theory were correct it would have important implications for managers wishing to ensure that employees were motivated to perform their work duties:
They would need to ensure that all 3 of the following conditions were satisfied:
Employees perceived that they possessed the necessary skills to do their jobs at least adequately (expectancy)
Employees perceived that if they performed their jobs well, or at least adequately, they would be rewarded (instrumentality).
Employees found the rewards offered for successful job performance attractive (valence).
Critics of the theory: Although some specific aspects of the Expectancy theory have been supported (particularly the impact of expectancy and instrumentality on motivation), others have not (such as the contribution of valence to motivation, and the assumption that expectancy, instrumentality and valence are multiplied.) Arnold et al. (1991) note how little attention the theory pays in explaining why an individual values or does not value particular outcomes: no concept of need is involved to address this question. The theory proposes that people should ask someone how much they value something, but not bother about why they value it. (John Arnold et al, 1995)
2.4.2.4 Goal Setting Theory
This approach to motivation was pioneered by Ed Loche and his associate, starting in the 1960s and continuing with increasing strength and sophistication ever since. The above figure represents goal setting theory, and shows that the characteristics of a goal and attitudes towards it are thought to be influences by incentives, self-perceptions and the manner in which goals are set. In turn, those goals characteristics and attitudes are thought to determine behavioural strategies, which lead to performance within the constraints of ability knowledge of results (also called feedback) is thought to be essential to further refinement of behavioural strategies.
Goal Setting Theory
Participation in goal setting
(Self-perceived) ability
Financial incentive
Goal commitment
Goal acceptance
Goal difficulty
Goal specification
Direction
Intensity
Persistence
Strategies
Knowledge of results
Ability
Performance
Figure 2.5 Goal Setting Theory
Source: Adapted from Psychology of work Behaviour by F. Landy. Copyright © 1989, 1985, 1980, 1976. Brooks / Cole Publishing Company, a division of International Thomson Publishing Inc. By permission of the publisher.
What does research say about goal setting?
Some further comments can be made on the basis of research evidence first financial incentives can indeed enhance performance. Loche et al. (1981) report that this occurs either through raising goal level, or through increasing commitment to a goal. Second, and unsurprisingly, ability also affects performance. Third, research on goal setting has been carried out in a range of context and fourth, goal setting is magnificently deal about how managers can enhance the performance of their employees. Some other research has directly investigated specific potential limitations of goal setting.
Earley et al. (1989) suggested that goal setting may be harmful where a task in novel and where a considerable numbers of possible strategies are available to tackle it. It seems that when people are tackling unfamiliar and complex tasks, goal setting can induce them to pay much attention to task strategy and not enough to task performance itself.
Goal setting could be criticized in its early days for being a technology rather than a theory. It successfully described how goal focus behaviour, without really addressing why or through what process goals influenced behaviour. Furthermore, goal setting, suggests that people are most motivated by difficult tasks where success is (presumably) not certain.
A continuing issue in goal setting concerns participation. Locke et al. (1981) concluded that there was no evidence from published research that participation in goal setting by the person attempting to achieve the goal produced better performance than if the goal was assigned to him or her by someone else.
Kanfer et al. (1994) got students to attempt a simulated air traffic control task and repeated the findings that goal setting can harm performance of unfamiliar complex tasks. But they also found that giving people time to reflect on their performance between repeated attempts at similar tasks eliminate that effect. The breaks enabled them to devote intentional resources to their strategies without having simultaneously to tackle the task itself. (John Arnold et al, 1998)
2.5 Job satisfaction and motivation
Locke (1976) defined job satisfaction as a ‘pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job or job experience’. The concept generally ref
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Legos and motivation
At my workplace, we received recently a survey to measure our engagement at work. We were asked to evaluate different aspects of our daily job, such as the work atmosphere, productivity, performance…, and each question would accumulate points for our working team. For those items in which our team scored less, we were required to follow up with actions for improvement. The survey has been outsourced to an external party and the whole process is taking several working hours from each of us. Why our employer is taking such an effort and is spending so much money in evaluating our engagement? Of course, this should eventually lead to more motivated people and thus better performance at work. However, why such a hassle? To be practical here, distribute the costs of this survey as extra payment in the salaries and motivated employees will flourish in the company. Or will not? Here is the question, what does bring us motivation and willingness to perform in our jobs?
The underlying and extended thought that money equals motivation turns to be false. Money is certainly one contributor to the equation, but there are other factors that also play a role in shaping our motivation. For example, pride, helping others or purpose can be important drivers for many of us. In particular, the sense of purpose in our work plays a crucial role as incentive. A couple of weeks ago, a friend talked to me very upset about a situation in her job. For several weeks, she had been working in a deliverable, and when it was almost finished, an email from her colleague indicated that it was not needed anymore. Basically, all her output from the previous weeks could be directly discarded. My friend was completely demotivated. But why such a big disappointment? If we think about it, the email from her colleague did not impact her activity in the previous weeks at all. During all that time, she had worked as usual in the given assignment, she had done the usual number of hours, and she had actually enjoyed the task. After the notification, however, the outcome of her work suddenly lots its purpose, and the very fact of missing the meaning annihilated her motivation.
To measure the relation between purpose and motivation, Dan Ariely, Emir Kamenica, and Drazen Prelec 1 conducted a number of experiments in a lab environment, where subjects were tested on their willingness to continue working on a certain task by manipulating its perceived meaning.
In the first round of experiments, the subjects were given a sheet of paper with sequences of letters, where they were asked to find ten instances of two consecutive letters (e.g. “ss”). When finished, they should hand the sheet to the experimenter for which they would get paid an amount of money. The subject could continue with subsequent sheets, but the paid rate per sheet would decrease every time. The process would continue until the subject decided to stop.
This task was presented in three different conditions, called by the experimenters Acknowledged, Ignored and Shredded conditions. In the Acknowledged condition, the subjects would write their names on the paper and, at the end, the experimenter would examine their work and file it. In the Ignored condition, the experimenter would take the sheet and put it on a pile of paper without looking at it. Finally, in the Shredded condition, the experimenter would directly place the sheet through a paper shredder without even looking at it.
The experimenters measured the number of sheets that the subjects were willing to take before deciding to stop. The results are shown in Figure 1 for each of the conditions.
The results showed that there is a significant difference between the Acknowledged and the other two conditions. While the subjects would complete an average of 9.03 sheets in the Acknowledged condition, they would only take an average of 6.77 and 6.34 for the Ignored and Shredded conditions, respectively.
These results indicate that the mere act of acknowledging the results by the experimenter, even by just a fast scan through the sheet before piling it on the desk, was enough to induce in the subject the motivation to further continue with this repetitive task. When ignoring or destroying the sheets, the subjects would stop with the task as soon as the money started to decrease. Note here that the Shredded condition offered the possibility of easy money by cheating the answer, since nobody would check on it. Still, the willingness to continue in the Shredded condition was less than in the Acknowledged condition.
The results also show that there is no significant difference between the Ignored and Shredded conditions or, in other words, ignoring the task shows to be almost equivalent to destroying it. On the one side, it seems to be relatively easy to boost motivation with just a simple recognition of the work, but on the other side, it turns out that a lack of attention at somebody’s work has devastating effects for the motivation.
In the same article, the authors propose a second experiment, with other type of task, where the subjects are asked to assemble a Bionicle (toys of Lego, shown in Figure 2). Following the same method as in the previous experiment, the subject was paid per Bionicle assembled, and the rate per piece would decrease for each subsequent one that they decided to build. The experimenters measured the total number of Bionicles assembled before the subject would choose to stop.
In this experiment, the so called Meaningful and Sisyphus conditions were used. In the Meaningful condition, the Bionicles assembled by the subjects were collected on the side by the experimenter. In the Sisyphus condition, instead, there were Lego pieces only for two figures: when the subject would start with the second Bionicle, the experimenter would disassemble in front of him the first one, and use the pieces for the next assembly. The same process would repeat in the rest of the experiment. The Sisyphus conditioned received its name in relation to Sisyphus, a character of the Greek mythology. According to the myth, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to eternally roll a rock to the top of a hill, from where it would fall back again. This setup of cyclical condition of a task is the ultimate example of making a vain effort, and of perceiving the work as with no purpose at all.
The results showed an average of 10.6 and of 7.2 Bionicles built in the Meaningful and Sisyphus conditions respectively. The authors also measured the productivity in both cases, by counting the time taken to build the Bionicles. Not only the Meaningful condition results in more number of Bionicles, but also the subjects took shorter time per piece than in the Sisyphus condition.
According to the authors, meaning derives, at least in part, from the connections between work and purpose. Even an insignificant purpose for the person, defines a radical different motivation than a situation with no purpose at all. We all have the intuition that meaning is an ingredient to drive our willingness for work. However, the common believe that money boosts motivation underlies the current “bonus culture” in the companies, where money is offered to the employee as the incentive for performance and motivation improvement. The result of this experiment proves that motivation is not uniquely driven by money but also by meaning, even for the simplest tasks. Employers should probably rethink their strategies and recognize that meaning is an essential factor that contributes to a better productivity and motivation at work. | https://mappingignorance.org/2013/05/03/legos-and-motivation/ |
Employees play a very important role in a corporation’s success. Depending on their performance, they can drive the company’s productivity in an upward or downward shift. But which manager would want productivity to go down? Nobody. This standpoint is where Human Resource Management arises. The Human Resource Management department’s primary task is to improve the match between individuals and jobs. Human Resource managers should use job analysis to obtain job description information about what each job needs to accomplish in terms of quality and quantity. Up-to-date job descriptions are essential for proper employee selection, appraisal, training and development for wage and salary administration and for labor negotiations. In addition to that, it is vital for summarizing the companywide human resources in terms of employee skill categories. Early human resource managers saw that people positively respond to monetary incentives, at least behaviorally. It is known as the greatest motivator until latter researches saw that money is not just about everything. Rather, the quality of work life is pointed to be another of the greatest motivator and in the long run, the quality of work life comes first to motivating employees. Human resource managers have also found out that a good quality of work life in an organization reduce employee dissatisfaction and unionization efforts, thereby, increasing productivity, effectivity, and efficiency. However, this aspect of motivation is intangible or immeasurable. And by tangible measures, the researcher meant cash and other monetary incentives, insurances, allowances, and other physical benefits received by employees.This research study shall make use of an actual company as a subject for assessment. | http://www.peabodysgunrange.com/strategic-human-resource-management-in-achieving/ |
What is Motivation?
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What is Motivation?
Motivation
Motivation is a human psychological characteristic that contributes to a persons degree of commitment.
Motivation in management
Motivating is a management process of influencing other peoples behavior based on the knowledge of what makes people tick
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Common assumptions about Motivation?
Motivation is commonly assumed to be a good thing.
Motivation is in short supply and it need of periodic replenishment
Motivation is a tool with which managers can design job relations in an organization
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Reflex
Influenceable zone
Habits
Early views of motivation?
The Traditional model
is associated with Fredrich Taylor. Here manager determine the most efficient way to perform a task and then motivate the worker with a system of wage incentives.
The underlying assumption is that, managers understand the work better than the worker who are actually lazy and can be motivated only by money.
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Early views of motivation
The Human Relations Model
They found that the boredom and repetition of a task actually reduce motivation. While social contacts help to create and sustain motivation.
The underlying assumption is that, managers can motivate workers by acknowledging their social needs and by making them feel important and useful.
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Early views of motivation
The Human Relations Model
They found that the boredom and repetition of a task actually reduce motivation. While social contacts help to create and sustain motivation.
The underlying assumption is that, managers can motivate workers by acknowledging their social needs and by making them feel important and useful.
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Early views of motivation
Human Resource Model
Associated with Doglas McGregor.
The underlying assumption is that, in modernindustrial life, to take advantage of the employeesinnate willingness and ability to work, managersshould provide a climate that gives employeescope for personal improvement.
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Maslows need theory
Physiological needs - air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sleep, etc.
Safety needs - protection from elements, security, order, law, limits, stability, etc.
Social needs - work group, family, affection, relationships, etc.
Esteem needs - self-esteem, achievement, mastery, independence, status, dominance, prestige, managerial responsibility, etc.
Self-Actualization needs - realising personal potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences
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Maslows need theory
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ERG theory
The letters ERG stand for three levels of needs: Existence, Relatedness, and Growth.
Similarities to Maslow's Hierarchy Like Maslow's model, the ERG theory is hierarchical -
existence needs have priority over relatedness needs, which have priority over growth.
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ERG theory
Differences from Maslow's Hierarchy Unlike Maslow's hierarchy, the ERG theory allows
for different levels of needs to be pursued simultaneously.
The ERG theory allows the order of the needs be different for different people.
The ERG theory acknowledges that if a higher level need remains unfulfilled, the person may regress to lower level needs that appear easier to satisfy.
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The two factor theory
Fredrich Herzberg and his associates conducted a study if thejob attitude of 200 engineers and accountants.
The hygiene factors do little contribution toprovide job satisfaction. He called them"dissatisfiers' as their absence causedissatisfaction but their presence is not motivatingbut only prevent dissatisfaction.
Motivating factors act as forces of job satisfaction.They create positive and a longer lasting effect onemployees performance and are related to workitself.
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The two factor theory
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The two factor theory
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Equity Theory
People develop beliefs about what is a fair reward for one job contribution - an exchange
People compare their exchanges with their employer to exchanges with others-insiders and outsiders called referents
If an employee believes his treatment is inequitable, compared to others, he or she will be motivated to do something about it --that is, seek justice.
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Equity Theory
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Reinforcement Theory(B. F. Skinner)
Reinforcement theory is the process of shapingbehavior by controlling the consequences of thebehavior. In reinforcement theory a combination ofrewards and/or punishments is used to reinforcedesired behavior or extinguish unwanted behavior.
Positive Reinforcement
Negative Reinforcement
Punishment
Extinction
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Reinforcement Theory(B. F. Skinner)
Positive Reinforcement
results when the occurrence of a valued behavioral consequence has theeffect of strengthening the probability of the behavior being repeated.
Negative reinforcement
results when an undesirable behavioral consequence is withheld, with theeffect of strengthening the probability of the behavior being repeated.
Punishment
Punishment is the administration of an undesirable behavioralconsequence in order to reduce the occurrence of the unwanted behavior.
Extinction
The process of extinction begins when a valued behavioral consequence iswithheld in order to decrease the probability that a learned behavior willcontinue.
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Expectancy theory of motivation
When deciding among behavioral options, individuals select the option with the greatest motivation forces (MF).
The motivational force for a behavior, action, or task is a function of three distinct perceptions: Expectancy, Instrumentality, and Valance. The motivational force is the product of the three perceptions:
MF = Expectancy x Instrumentality x Valence
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Expectancy theory of motivation
Expectancy probability: based on the perceived effort-performance relationship.If I work harder than everyone else in the plant will I produce more?
Instrumentality probability: based on the perceived performance-reward relationship.If I produce more than anyone else in the plant, will I get a bigger raise or a faster promotion?
Valence: refers to the value the individual personally places on the rewards. Do I want a bigger raise? Is it worth the extra effort? Do I want a promotion?
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Leadership
Module-2
Leadership
Leadership is a process of directing and influencing task related activities of group members.
Leadership involves people like employees and followers by their willingness to accept the direction. They help to define the status of the leader and make the leadership process possible.
There is an unequal distribution of power between leaders and group members.
Leaders have the ability to use different form of power to shape the followers behavior in a number of ways. Ex : commander influence the soldiers to kill.
Leadership is about values. Followers need to be given enough choices when it comes to respond to leaders proposal. Leader who ignored moral component of leadership may well go down to history.
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Leader vs. Manager
Subject Leader Manager
Focus Leading people Managing work
Have Follower Subordinates
Horizon Long-term Short-term
Seeks Vision Objectives
Power Personal charisma Formal authority
Appeal to Heart Head
Dynamic Proactive Reactive
Direction New roads Existing roads
Credit Gives Takes
Blame Takes Blames
Conflict Uses Avoids
Risk Takes Minimizes
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Trait Approach of leadership
Leaders usually are selfconfident, extrovert, brighterand well, may be taller. Butthese are not certain. There areexceptions. Abraham Linconwas introvert and moody.Nepolean was rather short.Some traits identified may bethe result of leadershipexperience rather thanleadership ability.
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Behavioral Approach of Leadership
Behaviors can be learned. So individuals trained in more appropriate leadership behavior would be able to lead more effectively.
Leadership functions. To operate effectively group need someone to perform two major functions.
Task-oriented or problem solving function.
Group maintenance or social function.
Leadership style. Task oriented style- Closely supervise employee to be sure that the task is performed satisfactory. Employee oriented style
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Managerial Grid
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Contingency approach of leadership
Hesrey and blanchard's situational leadership model
They believed that the relationship between managers and follower moves through four phases. As the employee develop, manager need to vary their leadership style accordingly.
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Fiedler Model
Fiedler measured the leadership style on a scale that indicated "The degree to which a man described favorably or unfavorably his least preferred co-worker (LPC).
Fiedler identifies three Leadership situations" or variables that help determine which leadership style will be effective.
Leader-member relations: It can be good or poor
Task Structure: It can be structured or unstructured.
Position power: It can be strong or weak.
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Fiedler Model
So from the theory the effectiveness of leadership can be summarized as follows:
Low LPC Leaders who are task oriented or authoritarian were most successful or effective in extreme situation. Here leader either have great power and influence or very little power or influence.
High LPC leaders who are employee oriented were most effective in situation where leaders have moderate power and influence.
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Team and teamwork
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Team and Team work
A team is defined as two or more people who interact and influence each other toward a common goal or purpose.
Formal team or group are created deliberately by managers and charged with carrying out a specific task to help the organization to achieve the goal.
Informal Team emerge whenever people come together and interact regularly. Members of informal team tend to fulfill some of their individual needs together as a whole.
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Types of Formal team
Command Team: it includes manager and all employee tat report to that manager.
Committee: It generally lasts a long time and deals with recurrent problems and decisions
Project team/ Task Force: This team is created to deal with a specific problem and is usually disbanded when the task is completed or problem is solved. BD govt. creates project team to investigate corruption in different govt. office.
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Types of Formal team
Super team or high performance team: It is a group of 3 to 30 workers drawn from different areas of
corporation.
They ignore the traditional, strict up and down arrangement ofhierarchy
They have some power to take decision. They can be created to workon a specific projects or problems and can become a permanent partof the organization. At Johnsonville a super team of blue collar workerhelped CEO to proceed for a plant expansion.
Required when a complex problem to solve; layers of progress-delaying management to cut through(cross-functionalism); notsuitable for all organization culture
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Functions of informal team
They maintain and strengthen norms (expected behavior) and values that they hold in common.
It gives members the feeling of social satisfaction, status and security. It enables the members to share jokes, eat together and socialize after work.
Informal group help their member to communicate.
Informal group help solve problem. They might help a sick worker or exchange work to deal with boredom.
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Stages of Team development
Forming: During this initial stage group forms and learns what sort of behavior is acceptable to the group.
Storming: As group member become more comfortable with one another they may oppose the formation of the group structure by asserting personality.
Norming: At this stage conflicts are hopefully solved. Group unity emerges as members establish common goals, norms and ground rules.
Performing: Now the group begins to operate as a unit.
Adjourning: For temporary groups such as task force, this is the stage of wrap up activities. | https://dokumen.tips/documents/motivation-leadership-team-and-team-and-leadershippdf-motivation-leadership.html |
How to inculcate, the productivity culture in small businesses?
Culture has been a buzzword in the corporate world for sometime now. A company’s culture is defined as a set of values and beliefs that companies develop over time. In other words, culture is the personality of the organization from the perspective of the employee and includes the company’s mission, expectations and work atmosphere. In fact, growth in the business can be directly attributed to the company’s productive culture. To be productive it requires active participation of both employer and employee on a regular basis for working effectively on set targets. This article here tries to identify actions that will culminate in a productive culture in a small business:
Trusting employees –
- It is important that employees are trusted by the management in carrying out the tasks set forth. The employees should not merely be puppets at the hands of the management but should rather have the liberty of taking productive measures into consideration as per their abilities to execute tasks.
- The company should trust the employee after giving general guidelines to perform a specific task as per their own discretion. This will make the employees to be feeling genuinely part of the company and improve productivity levels.
Having realistic targets –
- To improve productivity in the business, it is necessary that the organization sets realistic targets and goals. Any organization that is overly ambitious and sets forth ambitious goals is surely setting up its employees for failure as the results from over ambitious goals is bound to be counter productive.
- It is important that the organization keeps its goals and objectives clear to keep the productivity and the employee morale high.
- Keep projects at manageable scale, is to break them into smaller steps, this will help show clear progress and keep employees motivated as they advance towards the final results. Simply assigning a project for 2 months can be overwhelming, by breaking it up keeps the productivity levels high to complete the project.
Following Up on Targets –
- For a small business, it is not enough to set the goals and lay back and think the employees will take care of the rest. As a business, it becomes essential that employers follow up on the targets and deadlines.
- With follow up, employees will become aware of the loopholes and the tools required to improvise on efficiency. Keeping track of the goals being pursued will help measure individual performance of the employee and the measures taken to improve in-efficient performance. Proper follow-up will help measure individual productivity.
Acknowledging Performances –
- To keep a tab on productivity, it is essential that good performances are noted and rewarded. This will keep the motivation of the performing employees high and make him eager to perform better the next time around.
- It is important to ensure the bad performer is made aware of his/ her performance and made known about the inadequacies in performance on a one-to-one basis without harming the employee’s dignity in the organization.
- Studies have shown that employees are most productive when their interests including incentive based pay are aligned.
Training for employees –
- Every employer needs to keep track of the latest developments in his domain and also arrange for training sessions regarding the same. The training will help the employee to stay abreast with the latest workflow procedures and adopt them on requirement.
- Training is meant for employees for gaining knowledge regarding their profession and for improving productivity.
- Studies have shown that employees are motivated by a sense of responsibility when it comes to their work and maintaining high productivity levels. Training should be imparted into employees as an incentive, this way more people will be attuned to receiving training with serious motivation at organizations. By maintaining high motivation levels, employees are able to improve business productivity.
- Training employees on new skills can give them a new sense of purpose. It lets them know that the organization is willing and able to evolve. When employees are trained on new methods it is a win-win situation.
Enhanced communication between employer and employee –
- It is important that employees are given the privilege to report matters directly to the management. By being able to report directly to the management, the employee will be convinced about his voice being heard in the company. This will ensure new vigor and vitality in his/her work performance in the company.
- Two and fro communication between employee and employer is essential because if adequate information is not conveyed, it can lead to delay and at times non-completion of the task at hand. So clear communication between employer and employee is essential for keeping productivity scales high.
Flexible working hours –
- By following relaxed working hours option, it will become easy on the employee to perform well, without getting constrained to limited working hours.
- The 9 to 5 schedule is under attack with the availability of internet connectivity and laptops, which makes it easier for employees to complete their tasks beyond the working hours.
- Efficient managers ensure the best use of resources with flexible work patterns address workplace pressures by optimizing the available labor.
- Flexible working hours can lead to increased job satisfaction, improved staff morale, engagement and motivation leading to good productivity.
Management’s responsibility –
- It is the responsibility of the management to ask the right questions to when the productivity levels are not high.
- There is a need to put in efforts to avoid micro-management; it hinders the sense of accomplishment on the part of the employee. It can feel great from a manager’s point of view of holding the reigns tightly, however, it is always advisable to believe in your team and allow them to make judgment calls for the projects they own.
- Management can help employees prioritize their work. An employee should not be overwhelmed by the long to-do lists but should be concentrating on one task at a time. The management should communicate the top team priorities, so everyone knows where to focus their energy.
Conclusion – Although enough has been said about bringing in a culture of productivity in a small business. The onus is on the management to chart a path of productivity. If the management is serious about productivity, the above-mentioned steps will surely help shape up the productivity in a small business setup.
A notable way to improve your productivity is through delegating your set of tasks. If you are short on time and want immediate results outsourcing is a good avenue. By outsourcing, you will able to assign your set of tasks to virtual administrative assistant, who will take care of the tasks on immediate basis. For hiring a virtual assistant you can approach GetFriday, where VAs can help you in providing solutions to assigned tasks. | https://www.getfriday.com/blog/how-to-inculcate-the-productivity-culture-in-smaller-businesses/ |
The proliferation of digital and networking technologies enables us to rethink, restructure, and redefine teaching and learning. Transmedia storytelling takes advantage of the rapid convergence of media and allows teachers and learners to participate in rich virtual (and physical) environments that have been shown to foster students’ real emotional engagement with the process of learning. Transmedia learning applies storytelling techniques across multiple platforms to create immersive educational experiences that enable manifold entry and exit points for learning and teaching. By utilizing constructivist and connectivist precepts in the application of these techniques, we can create pedagogies that are transformative on many levels. Encapsulating these notions in the concept of the Transmedia LearningWorld (TLW) allows educators to combine the exciting affordances of the digital technologies with real-life experiences and truly learner-focused pedagogies to produce profoundly productive and powerful learning experiences. In the US, the advent of Common Core State Standards is pushing schools and districts across the country to consider carefully the requirements for digital learning, including aspects of personalization, interoperability, taking our understanding of eLearning beyond a narrow focus on digital content, and encouraging significant shifts in pedagogical thinking and practice. The application of transmedia techniques and, in particular, the recognition of the power of the TLW give teachers tools that allow them to reach every child, including otherwise “reluctant” learners, and indeed that allow children themselves to drive their own learning. The digital novel Inanimate Alice is a proven example of a transmedia resource that can immerse students in an intense and motivating learning experience over time. Transmedia techniques leverage the power of collective intelligence in learners, and they enable educators to weave the narrative of curricula through media in a seamless and wholly interactive and participative fashion.
Fleming, Laura (2013) "Expanding Learning Opportunities with Transmedia Practices: Inanimate Alice as an Exemplar," Journal of Media Literacy Education, 5(2). | https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/jmle/vol5/iss2/3/ |
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This edition of IT, Computing and Communications (ITCC) Technology Opportunity Engine (TOE) provides a snapshot of the emerging ICT led innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR). This issue focuses on the application of information and communication technologies in alleviating the challenges faced across industry sectors in areas such as healthcare, retail, legal, ICT, real estate, and travel. In addition, this issue highlights emerging innovations and disruptive business models in a post-COVID scenario. ITCC TOE’s mission is to investigate emerging wireless communication and computing technology areas including 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Big Data, cloud computing, augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, virtualization and the Internet of Things and their new applications; unearth new products and service offerings; highlight trends in the wireless networking, data management and computing spaces; provide updates on technology funding; evaluate intellectual property; follow technology transfer and solution deployment/integration; track development of standards and software; and report on legislative and policy issues and many more. The Information & Communication Technology cluster provides global industry analysis, technology competitive analysis, and insights into game-changing technologies in the wireless communication and computing space. Innovations in ICT have deeply permeated various applications and markets. These innovations have profound impact on a range of business functions for computing, communications, business intelligence, data processing, information security, workflow automation, quality of service (QoS) measurements, simulations, customer relationship management, knowledge management functions and many more. Our global teams of industry experts continuously monitor technology areas such as Big Data, cloud computing, communication services, mobile and wireless communication space, IT applications & services, network security, and unified communications markets. In addition, we also closely look at vertical markets and connected industries to provide a holistic view of the ICT Industry. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Virtual Reality, Immersive Technologies, Image Recognition, Visual Intelligence, Connected Mats, Speech Recognition
FROST RADAR™: The Europe Contact Center BPO Market
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Emerging Technology Opportunities for Maritime Autonomous Ships
Opportunities of Emerging Sensor Technologies Impacting the Future of Smart Cities
Opportunities of Robotics in F&B Industry
Future of Software Development: Inching Towards the 'New Stack'
Accelerating Digital Transformation through Multi-Cloud Adoption
Towards Being Truly Intelligent: Next Wave of AI Technologies (Wave 2 - Reinforcement Learning)
Automating Multicloud Management Using AI
Innovations in Threat Intelligence, Web Security, and IoT Security
glucose monitoring devices market
virtual reality market
plastic recycling market
emulsifier market
heavy truck market
food preservatives market
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plastic waste management market
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Mazin E. Gilbert, Ph.D., MBA is Executive Director of Technical Research at AT&T Labs. His responsibilities include managing research and development in the areas of automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, web and speech mining, and multimodal voice search. His business areas of focus include product strategy and development, entrepreneurship, and corporate finance. He is the recipient of the AT&T Science and Technology Medal Award (2006).
WATSON Speech Recognition: Research in robust large-vocabulary speech processing, acoustic, and language modeling of speech. The project involves software development of next-generation plugin architecture to support a variety of voice applications including those for mobility, IPTV, and call center automation. WATSON was recently licensed to Vlingo, and received the SpeechTechMag.com, Leader award.
Multimodal Voice Search: The integration of VOIP with graphical browsers on desktop and mobile devices enables a new generation of multimodal services that support user input and system output over multiple modes such as speech and pen. Check out AT&T’s YellowPages Mobile Voice Search Applications from the Apple store including Speak4it!,YPMobile, and ChaCha.
Natural Language Search and Web Mining: Converting the World Wide Web into a structured set of information for the purpose of extracting intelligent information, and the creation of interactive chat-based or spoken dialog agents. The project involves research in question/answering, text summarization, supervised and unsupervised methods for active learning, active labeling and active evaluation, and information search from conversational speech, documents, and websites.
Speech Translation: Speech-to-speech translation, human/machine translation, multilingual text, and speech interfaces to existing applications. These applications range from human-machine dialog systems (e.g., information access systems) to human-human dialog systems (e.g. instant messaging).
Data Analytics: Machine learning, statistics and information search methods for analyzing speech, text and social media data. His division developed the Talkalytics web services tool that is currently supporting AT&T Mobility, and is currently developing Sonar, a social media analytics and visualization tool.
Spoken Language Services: Research and development into next generation conversational dialog systems including spoken language understanding, dialog management, and large vocabulary speech recognition. This technologies are currently driving AT&T VoiceTone, which specializes in creating sophisticated spoken-language dialog applications for large-business customers. VoiceTone has received many industrial awards including most recently the SpeechTechMag.com, Professional Services award.
Mazin earned his MBA Executives degree from the Wharton Business School. He also earned a B.Eng and a Ph.D. with first-class honors in Electronic Engineering from The University of Liverpool. He was ranked first over the Engineering School. His thesis was on “Neural Networks for Articulatory Speech Synthesis” which is currently in a book form entitled Artificial Neural Networks for Speech Analysis/Synthesis.
He was a Research Professor with James Flanagan at the CAIP Center, Rutgers University during 1991/1992. He has over 100 publications in the area of speech and language processing, holds 36 US patents, and has over 50 patents submitted. He is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Editorial Board and the ISCA Advisory Board.
His patents include Method For Building A Natural Language Understanding Model For A Spoken Dialog System, Active Learning Process For Spoken Dialog Systems, Active Labeling For Spoken Language Understanding, Speech Recognition Over Lossy Networks With Rejection Threshold, Reducing time for annotating speech data to develop a dialog application, and Spoken language understanding that incorporates prior knowledge into boosting. Read the full list of his patents!
Watch From the Labs: The Art of the Possible. Read Computers Learn to Listen, and Some Talk Back and Talking to Your Phone. Read his LinkedIn profile. | http://singularityscience.com/ex/bios.mazin.e.gilbert |
NANO uses a variety of Artificial Intelligence technologies to increase the speed and accuracy of business processes, enhance digital experiences, and provide our clients with a compelling competitive advantage.
Our Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence Services cover:
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Computational neuroscience
- Machine Learning
(NLP,NLU,NLI, Predictive and Recommendation system, Automation)
- Deep Learning
(Computer Vision, Pattern recognition, ANN,RNN,CNN,LSTM)
Whether we are using Natural Language Processing to create conversational interfaces for customer service applications, or using Machine Learning to identify patterns in data in order to drive personalized recommendations for Ecommerce, or help Enterprises make better data-driven predictions, NANO is always focused on using AI in practical ways to drive digital transformation.
You don’t need to have a team in-house to start your AI project. | https://nanowebgroup.com/artificial-intelligence/ |
PTC announced the newest addition to its Vuforia augmented reality (AR) enterprise platform, the Vuforia Engine Area Targets offering. This program supports the creation of immersive augmented reality (AR) experiences for spaces up to 300,000 square feet. Through the use of Area Targets, industrial organizations can create AR interfaces within their facilities to enable employees to better engage with machinery and understand how the environment is being used.
With support from Matterport and Leica 3D scanners, along with NavVis’s indoor mobile mapping systems, Area Targets users can generate photorealistic, survey-grade digital twins, empowering them to create digital canvases of spaces, such as factories, malls, or offices for spatial computing applications.
As one of the leading emerging technologies, spatial computing powers digital twin renderings to support the activities of machines and people, as well as the environments in which they operate. When deployed across the industrial enterprise, spatial computing enables seamless interactions between employees through AR, enabling companies to close the loop on performance management, improve machine learning capabilities with spatial analytics, and optimize design and factory floor operations. | https://www.3dcadworld.com/spatial-computing-supports-large-spaces/ |
Minimum qualifications:
-
- 5 years of experience coding in one or more of the following languages: C, C++, Java, or Python.
- Experience in computer vision, graphics, or machine learning or computational imaging.
Preferred qualifications:
-
- Experience with Augmented Reality.
- Experience in Human Computer Interaction.
About The Job
Google’s software engineers develop the next-generation technologies that change how billions of users connect, explore, and interact with information and one another. Our products need to handle information at massive scale, and extend well beyond web search. We’re looking for engineers who bring fresh ideas from all areas, including information retrieval, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking and data storage, security, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, UI design and mobile; the list goes on and is growing every day. As a software engineer, you will work on a specific project critical to Google’s needs with opportunities to switch teams and projects as you and our fast-paced business grow and evolve. We need our engineers to be versatile, display leadership qualities and be enthusiastic to take on new problems across the full-stack as we continue to push technology forward.
The Google Augmented Reality mission is to make information instantly and intuitively accessible. The Geometric and Human Perception team is building novel algorithms in the intersection of real-time computer vision, novel sensing, and applied machine learning to enable perception capabilities.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Our Devices & Services team combines the best of Google AI, Software, and Hardware to create radically helpful experiences for users. We research, design, and develop new technologies and hardware to make our user’s interaction with computing faster, seamless, and more powerful. Whether finding new ways to capture and sense the world around us, advancing form factors, or improving interaction methods, the Devices & Services team is making people’s lives better through technology.
Responsibilities
-
- Develop novel and effective computer vision/learning models for human input sensing for Google Augmented Reality products.
- Develop research to production and build pipelines to experiment, train, and iterate to production machine learning models.
- Optimize and adapt machine learning models for real-time performance on hardware such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and Digital Signal Processors (DSPs).
- Write production-quality C++, Python code, and tests.
Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also Google’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing this form . | https://aijobsboard.com/jobs/software-engineer-machine-learning-augmented-reality/ |
This course introduces Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) by providing a balanced mix of theory and practical experiences around machine learning systems and building things with them.
Lesson after lesson we will introduce fundamental concepts and stimulate discussions about these innovative technologies. We also believe that the best way for kids to learn about AI/ML is for them to get hands-on, first-hand experiences. If they can train a computer to do something, they will get a good understanding of the system at large.
In our practical activities we make use of kid-friendly platforms for training machine learning models to recognise text, numbers, images, or sounds. This builds on existing efforts to introduce and teach coding to children, by adding these models to educational coding platforms such as Scratch, and helping young coders create projects and build games with the machine learning models they train.
|Level||advanced|
|Age||12–16|
|Language||English|
|Locations||Tennoji, Osaka|
|Requisites||Reading and Writing in English
|
No programming experience required
|Number of lessons||24 classes|
|Group||1Group：2022年2月3日|
Topics and Objectives
By the end of the course students will understand several key concepts about AI, ML and algorithms, recognize different kinds of AI applications, know how to use data for Machine Learning and understand some of the issues that can arise with AI in society. In the last module of the course, students will work in teams or individually to design and build a prototype using machine learning algorithms.
These are the topics that we will touch during the course:
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AI and Machine Learning
What is Artificial Intelligence? What is Machine Learning? Students will become able to answer those questions and gain the knowledge necessary to grasp the immense potential and opportunities that these technologies bring.
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Image Recognition
We will discover and understand how facial recognition works, explore some of the uses of facial recognition, recognize some of the issues surrounding facial recognition (such as privacy and bias in facial recognition) and build a facial recognition application.
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Natural Language Processing
Language processing is at the base of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, automatic translators and chatbots. We appreciate real life applications of this technology, and build a natural language recognition model.
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Games AI
Games are a great way to introduce machine learning. The kids can train the computer to be able to do a job they know very well – playing a game – that would be difficult to do using the rules-based approach to coding that they normally use.
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AI in Context
The specific knowledge on AI is put in context by exploring a wide range of machine learning applications and assessing the social and ethical impact of the use of AI algorithms in society and how it can shape our future.
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Practical projects and final presentation
The many hands-on experiences done during the course will become the base for the planning, designing and prototyping of a final project done by students induvidually or in teams. It will be presented in front of parents.
Timetable 2022
DAYThursdays TIME17:10-18:10/18:30-19:30
Plans
-
LAUNCH DEAL
24 Classes
1 hour each, weekly pace¥ 4,500 / lesson¥ 4,050 / lesson 10% OFF
Classes materials ¥2,000 ¥1,000
Billed in total as ¥98,200Book a trial class
All classes provide:
- 1 Laptop and mouse for each student:
- Licences and accounts to specific software used in class:
- 1 Laptop and mouse for each student:
- All prices shown include tax.
Find “Ai for Kids” course
at the following classes: | https://youcode.jp/en/courses/ai/ |
Natural language processing, one of the sub-categories of artificial intelligence technologies, works through receiving and processing the human language by machines. Besides the machine language in computer worlds, NLP helps analyze voice texts. So, how can itbe created?
About Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing (NLP) encompasses understanding and reproducing the structures of languages such as Turkish, German, French, and English by analyzing them. It is widely used in many areas. According to the research of IBM, natural language processing is used in spam detections in emails, in chatbots such as Apple-Siri and Amazon-Alexa, sentiment analysis on social media platforms, and machine translations.
How Does It Work?
The unstructured data added to NLP is brought to a suitable form, defined, and analyzed according to the identified rules with a machine. Machine benefits from algorithms and codes to relational meanings for the studied languages. The data by Sas suggest that NLP also benefits from machine learning and deep learning to resolve uncertainty in different languages.
How to Create Natural Language Processing Pipeline
Natural language processing consists of a 5-step procedure. These are:
1) Sentence Segmentation: Voice texts should be analyzed by segmenting the sentences. This way, long texts can be separated into parts quickly.
2) Word Tokenization: Tokenization is a term that refers to digitalizing transactions. Tokenization of segmented sentences makes processing each sentence easier one by one.
3) Predicting Parts of Speech for Each Token: Word structures such as verb or subject are predicted after the tokenization. That allows the most accurate prediction by knowing all the roles of words in a sentence.
4) Text Lemmatization: Lemmatization is the process of finding out the simple form of words. There are differences between a word’s singular and plural versions in many languages. It is possible to figure out the simple forms of words by paragraph and word lemmatization.
5) Identifying Stop Words: Stop words such as “and, but, like” in texts are filtered and separated.
Morphologies to Know for Natural Language Processing
Among the essential points for NLP is the morphology of the language being worked on. Each language has its unique rules, writing, and pronunciation types. Therefore, it is crucial to categorize language features to work with NLP. While working with NPL, you should know the morphological levels of the relevant language. These levels are:
- Semantic level,
- Syntactic level,
- Pragmatic-discourse level,
- Morphological-lexical level.
What Are the Advantages of Natural Language Processing?
We can list the advantages that natural language processing work provides by using advanced technologies below:
- Automatic translations of written documents,
- Question-answer machines software,
- Command comprehension,
- Automatic conversations,
- Translations,
- Spell checks,
- Voice and character recognition analysis.
Reach Your Customers Through the Latest Technologies With Infoset
Benefiting from artificial intelligence and technologies such as NLP also provides a good customer experience at the enterprise level. Therefore, systems used to provide customer support while purchasing such products and services or customer feedback are significant. You can manage all your support and sales processes with Infoset and provide secure and efficient communication for your customers through the call center infrastructure. Start using Infoset today to offer a better experience to your customers! | https://infoset.app/blog/what-is-natural-language-processing-where-is-it-used/ |
Over the last decade, advances in machine learning coupled with the availability of large amounts of data have led to significant progress on long-standing AI challenges. In domains like computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation and image captioning, machines have reached and sometimes even exceeded human performance levels on specific problem sets. However, building end-to-end, multimodal interactive systems that bring together multiple AI technologies and interact with people in the open world remains an important challenge.
Challenges with Multimodal Interactive Systems
Consider a robot that can escort visitors from one location to another in a building, all the while interacting with them via natural language. Or consider a meeting room virtual assistant that tries to understand the dynamics of the human interactions and provide assistance on demand. These types of systems require assembling and coordinating a diverse set of AI technologies: localization and mapping, person detection and tracking, attention tracking, speech recognition, sound source localization, speech source and addressee detection, natural language processing, dialog management, natural language generation and more.
The sheer complexity of these systems creates significant engineering challenges that are further amplified by several unique attributes. These systems are highly multimodal; acting in the physical world requires that they process and fuse high density streams of data from multiple sensors. Multiple components need to process data in parallel, yet they also must be tightly coordinated to produce coherent internal states as well as timely results. Given the frequent use of machine learning and inference models, as well as interactivity needs, these systems often operate under uncertainty and under important latency constraints. Reasoning about time and uncertainty is therefore paramount. Unfortunately, these constructs are not yet core primitives in our programming languages and platforms.
Additional software engineering challenges arise in the realm of debugging and maintenance. Visualization tools for multimodal temporal data can be an important accelerator but also are largely missing. Interesting challenges also arise from the fact that these systems often couple human-authored deterministic components with multiple machine learning models that often are chained. We know a lot about how to solve individual inference problems via machine learning but not so much about how to resolve the software engineering and maintenance problems arising from integrating multiple such models in end-to-end systems.
At Microsoft Research, as part of the Situated Interaction research effort and in other robotics research teams, we have developed a host of physically situated, multimodal interactive systems, from robots that give directions, to embodied personal assistants, to elevators that recognize intentions to board versus walk by. In the process, we have experienced firsthand the challenges with building physically situated, multimodal interactive systems, and we have learned a number of important lessons. Given these challenges and the overhead involved, interesting research problems often are out of reach and remain unaddressed.
We believe that the right set of primitives and tools can significantly lower the barrier to entry for developing multimodal interactive systems and enable more researchers to tackle problems that only become evident when an end-to-end system is present and deployed in the real world. Over the last several years we’ve embarked on constructing a platform to help address these problems and we are now happy to announce the initial beta, open-source release of this framework, called Platform for Situated Intelligence.
Platform for Situated Intelligence
Platform for Situated Intelligence is an open-source, extensible framework intended to enable the rapid development, fielding and study of situated, integrative AI systems.
The term situated refers to the fact that the framework primarily targets systems that sense and act in the physical world. This includes a broad class of applications, including various cyberphysical systems such as interactive robots, drones, embodied conversational agents, personal assistants, interactive instrumented meeting rooms, software systems that mesh human and machine intelligence and so on. Generally, any system that operates over streaming data and has low-latency constraints is a good candidate. The term integrative AI refers to the fact that the platform primarily targets systems that combine multiple, heterogeneous AI technologies and components.
The platform provides an infrastructure, a set of tools and an ecosystem of reusable components that aim to mitigate some of the challenges that arise in the development of these systems. The primary goal is to speed up and simplify the development, debugging, analysis, maintenance and continuous evolution of integrative systems by empowering developer-in-the-loop scenarios and rapid iteration.
The platform also aims to enable fundamental research and exploration into the science of integrative AI systems. Currently, these systems are typically constructed as a tapestry of heterogeneous technologies, which precludes studying and optimizing of the system as a whole. There are a number of interesting problems and opportunities in the space of integrative AI, which are very difficult to explore in real systems designed using current technologies. Platform for Situated Intelligence aims to provide the underlying set of abstractions that will enable meta-reasoning (or system-level reasoning) and foster research into this nascent science of integrative systems.
Finally, Platform for Situated Intelligence is open and extensible. We have released it as open-source because success ultimately depends on engaging the community and enabling contributions at all levels of the framework by creating a thriving ecosystem of reusable AI components.
The following sections present a brief introduction to each of the three major areas of the framework:
- the runtime provides a programming and execution model for parallel, coordinated computation
- a set of tools and APIs that enable visualization, data processing and machine learning scenarios
- an open ecosystem of components that encapsulate a variety of AI technologies
Runtime
The runtime provides a programming and execution model for parallel, coordinated computation based on time-aware data streams. The runtime is implemented on the .NET framework and aims to simplify authoring of complex applications and components while maintaining the performance characteristics of carefully tuned native code.
Applications are written by connecting components via streams of data. A typical application usually leverages several categories of components, including sensor components such as cameras and microphones act as stream producers, processing components such as speech recognizers and face trackers process the incoming data, and effector components ultimately control output and action in the world. The connections between components are realized via streams of data that are strongly typed and time aware.
The runtime provides a number of primitives and facilities that directly target and simplify the development of multimodal, integrative AI systems: time-aware data streams, scheduling and synchronization, isolated execution, automatic cloning and persistence, data replay and remoting. Many additional features are also in the works. While each of these topics deserves its own detailed writeup, in this initial blog post we simply highlight some of the main features.
Time-aware data streams – Components in a Platform for Situated Intelligence application are connected via strongly typed data streams. More importantly, time is a core construct in the runtime. The messages flowing through the streams are time stamped at origin with an originating time that is carried downstream through the application pipeline. Consider, for instance, a simple pipeline that performs face tracking: video frames are captured by a camera component and sent to a component that converts the images to grayscale and then to a tracking component that produces face tracking results. The video frames emitted by a camera component are time stamped with an originating time that corresponds to the moment the frame was captured. As the image is passed along to a grayscale component and to the face tracker, the same originating time is carried along with the resulting messages. In addition, each message carries the time when it was created. This mechanism gives all components in the pipeline access to information about latencies with respect to the real world for all messages. Furthermore, these timestamps enable efficient scheduling as well as correct and reproducible synchronization.
Time-based synchronization – Time and synchronization are paramount in any multimodal application working with streaming data. The temporal nature of the streams enables a time-algebra and set of synchronization primitives that simplify development. As a concrete example, suppose we want to correlate the face tracking results from the pipeline described above with sound source localization information to determine which one of multiple people present in front of a robot is talking. Because the speech source identification component has access to the originating times of the messages on both incoming streams, it can pair and synchronize them, according to when the events actually happened in the world (rather than according to when they arrived at the component). The runtime provides a stream join operator that enables reproducible synchronization, freeing up the developer from having to think through the intricacies of temporal reasoning. Other time-related primitives, like sampling and interpolation, are also available.
Time-based scheduling – The temporal nature of streams also enables efficient scheduling. The runtime implements a scheduler that controls the execution of the various components in the pipeline by paying attention to the originating times of the messages arriving at the components and giving priority to the oldest ones (that is, those with the earliest originating times). The developer has control over how messages flow through the streams via delivery policies that specify where and when it is OK to drop messages or that can describe throttling behaviors.
Isolated execution – Multimodal, integrative-AI applications generally involve a large array of components that need to execute in a concurrent yet coordinated manner. The programming model implemented by the runtime allows for developing components as if they were single-threaded. At runtime, it couples them via a streaming message-passing system that allows for concurrent execution of components while providing isolation and protecting state. This approach is made possible by an automatic deep cloning subsystem and frees the component developer from having to think through the intricacies of concurrent execution, simplifying development efforts.
Persistence and data replay – The development of multimodal, integrative AI systems is often data-driven. Typically, an initial prototype is constructed and deployed and components are iteratively refined and tuned based on the data collected with the running system. Data and experimentation play a central role in this process. The runtime enables automatic persistence of the data flowing through the streams. The persistence mechanism is optimized for throughput and allows a developer to log in a unified manner all relevant data flowing through the application. Furthermore, because timing information is also persisted, data can be replayed from a store in a variety of ways, enabling experimentation scenarios. For instance, in the example described above, once the video and audio streams were captured, the developer can easily re-run the application opening these streams from a store rather than from the sensors, enabling the exploration of how tuning various parameters in the downstream components (face tracking, sound source localization and so on) might change the final results. APIs and mechanisms for coupling multiple stores in larger datasets and operating over entire datasets are also available.
Remoting – Oftentimes, multimodal, multi-sensor applications need to run distributed across multiple machines. The runtime enables parallel, coordinated computation in a single process or in a distributed fashion across multiple processes.
Tools
In addition to the set of primitives and the core programming and execution model provided by the runtime, a number of specialized tools and APIs are available, further enabling and supporting the development process.
Visualization – Given the complexity and number of components involved, the temporal nature of the data streams and the highly parallel nature of execution, data visualization is critical to accelerating the development, debugging and tuning of multimodal, integrative-AI applications. The framework includes a sophisticated visualization tool for temporal, multimodal data: Platform for Situated Intelligence.
The tool allows for inspecting and visualizing the various streams persisted by a Platform for Situated Intelligence application. Multiple visualizers are available: timeline visualizers show various types of data over time (for example, numerical, audio, speech recognition results and so on); 2D and 3D instant visualizers can show the data corresponding to a certain time-point (for example, images from a video stream). The visualizers can be composited and overlaid in a variety of ways; for instance, the second panel in the video above shows an image stream visualizer overlaid with a visualizer for face tracking results. The tool enables temporal navigation (with panning and zooming over time) as well as working with datasets that encompass stores persisted from multiple runs of a system. It enables both offline and live visualization; in live-mode, the tool can be invoked from or can connect to a running Platform for Situated Intelligence application and enables visualization of the live streams flowing through the application.
Data processing – Data-driven experimentation plays a central role in the development and tuning of multimodal, integrative AI applications. Supported by the data replay abilities in the runtime, APIs are provided that enable developers to define datasets that wrap the data obtained from multiple runs of an application and process and analyze this data offline, generating relevant statistics, or running batch experiments. Data import/export is another important area we plan to provide additional tools for.
Machine learning – Finally, we plan to soon include a set of APIs and tools that aim to simplify and accelerate the end-to-end machine learning development loop in the context of multimodal interactive systems and temporally streaming data. The tools and APIs will include support for creating and manipulating datasets based on data logged by applications written using the platform, data annotation capabilities that are tightly integrated with visualization, support for feature engineering and development, integration for training with various ML frameworks and services, in-app evaluation and model deployment.
Components
Ultimately, we believe lowering the barrier to entry for development of multimodal, integrative AI applications will rest to a large degree on creating an open, extensible, thriving ecosystem of reusable components. Researchers should be able to easily componentize the various technologies they develop and find and easily reuse each other’s work.
In this initial, beta release of Platform for Situated Intelligence we are providing a set of components that facilitate multimodal interactive scenarios by enabling capture and processing of audio-visual data. We have included a number of sensor components for typical USB cameras and microphones. In the audio domain we have included components for basic acoustic feature extraction and for voice-activity detection. Components for speech recognition and language understanding are also provided, including wrappers around three different speech recognition systems – the windows desktop System.Speech recognizer, the Microsoft Speech SDK and the Bing Speech API – as well as the Language Understanding (LUIS) service provided by Microsoft’s Cognitive Services. In the imaging domain we have provided capabilities for basic image processing and components for making use of Microsoft’s Cognitive Services Face and Vision APIs. Finally, we also are providing tools to enable the easy construction of finite state machine controllers that can be helpful when prototyping interactives systems. In addition, a couple of example projects illustrate how to bridge to other ecosystems, like OpenCV and ROS.
For discoverability and ease of use, we also are releasing these components in the form of NuGet packages. These packages are easy to use on Windows and Linux platforms and can be found on http://www.nuget.org, by searching for Microsoft.Psi.
Next Steps
We have made Platform for Situated Intelligence available as an open-source project at an early stage. In the near future, our roadmap includes further evolving the runtime by extending the time algebra and the set of primitives for synchronization, interpolation and sampling and by focusing more attention on the debugging experience. We plan to continue to extend the visualization capabilities and enable the visualization subsystem to run not only on Windows but also on Linux, like the rest of the framework. We plan to further enhance the data processing APIs and release the machine learning tools and APIs over the next few months. Finally, in terms of component ecosystem, we intend to improve and extend the current set of available components and develop and release an interaction toolkit that will provide representations and a set of configurable components geared towards physically situated language interaction, including reasoning from multiple sensors about people, groups, attention, conversational engagement, turn-taking and so on.
Various aspects of the platform are at different levels of completion and robustness. There are still probably bugs in the code and we will likely be making breaking API changes. We intend to engage the community early and incorporate feedback and contributions. We plan to listen closely and continuously improve the framework based on the feedback we receive and foster an ecosystem of components. We believe the runtime, tools, and component ecosystem will in the long run significantly lower the barrier to entry for developing multimodal interactive systems and will act as a basis for research and exploration in the nascent science of integrative-AI systems.
Acknowledgements
Many people have been involved in and have contributed to Platform for Situated Intelligence, from envisioning and guidance, to development, support, testing and feedback. We would like to thank Sean Andrist, John Elliott, Ashley Feniello, Don Gillett, Eric Horvitz, Mihai Jalobeanu, Anne Loomis-Thompson, Nick Saw and Patrick Sweeney for their contributions. We also thank our internal and external early adopters for the feedback they have provided. | https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/platform-situated-intelligence-tools-framework-multimodal-interaction-research/ |
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This edition of IT, Computing and Communications (ITCC) Technology Opportunity Engine (TOE) provides a snapshot of the emerging ICT led innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT) and natural language processing (NLP). This issue focuses on the application of information and communication technologies in alleviating the challenges faced across industry sectors in areas such as E-commerce, energy, utilities, construction, and retail.ITCC TOE’s mission is to investigate emerging wireless communication and computing technology areas including 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Big Data, cloud computing, augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, virtualization and the Internet of Things and their new applications; unearth new products and service offerings; highlight trends in the wireless networking, data management and computing spaces; provide updates on technology funding; evaluate intellectual property; follow technology transfer and solution deployment/integration; track development of standards and software; and report on legislative and policy issues and many more. The Information & Communication Technology cluster provides global industry analysis, technology competitive analysis, and insights into game-changing technologies in the wireless communication and computing space. Innovations in ICT have deeply permeated various applications and markets. These innovations have profound impact on a range of business functions for computing, communications, business intelligence, data processing, information security, workflow automation, quality of service (QoS) measurements, simulations, customer relationship management, knowledge management functions and many more. Our global teams of industry experts continuously monitor technology areas such as Big Data, cloud computing, communication services, mobile and wireless communication space, IT applications & services, network security, and unified communications markets. In addition, we also closely look at vertical markets and connected industries to provide a holistic view of the ICT Industry. Keywords: Artificial intelligence, cloud, SaaS, smart grid, Crypto Asset, IoT, smart energy management, autonomous machine vision, AR, VR, E-mail copywriting, conversational AI, computer vision, blockchain
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Tutorial and Workshop (12 Dec. 2017)
Five half-day tutorials and one workshop will be conducted at APSIPA ASC 2017. These tutorials and workshop are conducted in parallel. No additional charge for registered conference participants (both full and student). The tentative schedule is as follows:
1. Sequential Decision Making: Theories and Applications
by Yan Chen, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and
Chih-Yu Wang, Academia Sinica
Area: Wireless Communications and Networking, Social Network
Keywords: Sequential decision making, game theory, social learning, network externality, social networks, wireless communications and networking, Chinese Restaurant Game
Abstract:
Traditionally, the network and system management problem is formulated as an optimization problem with the assumption that all inputs are given at first and the decisions are made at a given time simultaneously. However, such an assumption is not realistic in many real world problems. Sequential decision making, a more general decision structure, exists commonly in our daily life, such as answer or vote on Q&A sites, tweets and comments on Twitter, access point association in wireless communications, channel access in cognitive radio networks, and so on. These examples share several characteristics: information asymmetry, network externality, and decision dependence. Such characteristics are the keys to understand how agents may behave under certain decision structure. Existing simultaneous decision making models cannot capture these key characteristics and therefore lead to inaccurate prediction or inefficient configuration, eventually degrade the system performance. In this tutorial, we present a series of game-theoretic frameworks to analyze and manage how rational users make sequential decisions with asymmetric information under different settings. We will provide in-depth theoretic analysis and share our experience in data-driven experimental results on various applications.
2. 3D Video Processing for AR/VR Contents Generation
by Yo-Sung Ho, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
Area: Video Communications and Coding, AR/VR
Keywords: 3D video, AR/VR, immersive media, 360 degree video
Abstract:
With the emerging market of AR/VR imaging products, 3D video has become an active area of research and development in recent years. 3D video is the key to provide more realistic and immersive perceptual experiences than the existing 2D counterpart. There are many applications of 3D video, such as 3D movie and 3DTV, which are considered the main drive of the next-generation technical revolution. Stereoscopic display is the current mainstream technology for 3DTV, while auto-stereoscopic display is a more promising solution that requires more research endeavors to resolve the associated technical difficulties. In this tutorial lecture, we are going to cover the current state-of- the-art technologies of 3D video capturing and processing for AR/VR applications. After defining the basic requirements for 3D realistic multimedia services, we will cover various multi-modal immersive media processing techniques for immersive 360 degree video applications.
3. Basics of compressed sensing
by Prof. Mrityunjoy Chakraborty,
Department of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engg., Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India.
Area: Compressive Sensing
Keywords: K-sparse, restricted isometry, L_1 norm, matching pursuit, subspace pursuit, basis pursuit, LASSO, group sparse, co-sparsity
Abstract:
Compressive sensing (CS) is a powerful technique to represent signals at a sub- Nyquist sampling rate while retaining the capacity of perfect (or near perfect) reconstruction of the signal, provided the signal is known to be sparse in some domain. In last few years, the CS technique has attracted considerable attention from across a wide array of fields like applied mathematics, statistics, and engineering, including signal processing areas like MR imaging, speech processing, analog to digital conversion etc. The framework of CS essentially leads to finding sparsest solution to a set of under-determined linear equations, say, y = A x where A is a M · N sensing matrix with M<<N, x is an unknown, sparse vector and y is a measurement vector. The ideal approach to this is based on minimization of the l_0 norm of x , i.e., || x ||_0 subject to y = A x . This, however, is non-convex and is NP hard. In CS, the above l_0 norm can, however, be replaced by the l_1 norm || x ||_1 by imposing certain constraints on A in the context of the so-called restricted isometric property (RIP). This then results in several convex relaxation based recovery algorithms that evaluate the sparsest x , like basis pursuit, LASSO, basis pursuit denoising etc. Separately, several greedy recovery algorithms have been proposed like the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), compressive sampling matching pursuit (CoSaMP), subspace pursuit, iterative hard thresholding etc which too exploit the RIP conditions on A and determine the sparsest x iteratively. Recently, the notion of sparsity has further been extended to group sparsity and co-sparsity. In this tutorial, we will provide an introduction to CS, focusing mostly on the recovery algorithms. No background knowledge will be assumed on part of the audience (except for basic matrix-vector algebra) and relevant vector space concepts will be developed in the beginning of the tutorial. The tutorial is intended mostly for those who find CS useful in their areas of research, but are not initiated to this.
4. Spoofing Attack of Speaker Recognition
by Prof. Hemant A. Patil, Ms. Madhu R. Kamble,
Speech Research Lab, DhirubhaiAmbani, Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT), Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India and
Prof. Haizhou Li,
Department of Electrical an Computer Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore.
Abstract:
Speech is most powerful form of communication between humans and it carries various levels of information such as linguistic content, emotion, acoustic environment, language, speaker’s identity and health conditions, etc. Speaker recognition deals with the identification of speaker’s identity with the help of machines. There are various research issues in speaker recognition such as variability in speaker microphone, intersession, acoustic noise, etc. In addition, one of the most challenging but practical research issue in this area is analysis of spoofing attacks and development of various countermeasures to alleviate such possible attacks. In this one day tutorial, we will present analysis of various spoofing attacks for voice biometrics. In particular, we will present work related to technological challenges voice conversion (VC), speech synthesis (SS), replay, twins and professional mimics. This tutorial presents in a coherent way following aspects.
- Introduction to Voice Biometrics
- Research issues in Voice Biometrics
- Various Types of Spoofing Attacks
- Spectrographic Analysis of Natural vs. Spoofed Speech: VC, SS, Replay, Mimicry, Twins.
- Relevant literature search
- Standard/Internationally Well Known Spoofing Databases :
- ASV Spoof 2015 Database
- AV Spoof Database
- ASV Spoof 2017
- Spoof Detection System: Features pattern classifiers, databases, performance measures
- Countermeasures: Spectral features, excitation source features, deep learning features
- Future Research Directions and Roadmap Ahead
5. Network Metrics and Measurements in the Era of the Digital Economies
by Dr. Pavel Loskot, Senior Lecturer,
College of Engineering, Bay Campus, Swansea University, United Kingdom
Area & Keywords: metrics, measurements, key performance indicators, service level agreements, best practices, standardization, data processing, machine learning, network engineering
Abstract:
This tutorial focuses on the metrics and measurements for heterogeneous telecommunication networks which are the backbone of the emerging cyber-physical systems. The metrics and measurements play a vital role in the whole life-cycle of these networks, from their planning, design, deployment, operation, and decommissioning. Our aim is to offer understanding how the metrics are created, selected, standardized and categorized. We will point out how the metrics evolve, and are bundled to match the ever increasing complexity of telecommunication networks which usually creates many challenging trade-offs. We will explain how the measurement procedures and conditions affect the metric values. We will also expose how telecommunication stakeholders have different spatio-temporal perceptions of the network, so they often adopt different metrics and measurement strategies. The background knowledge on metrics and measurements can be exploited to lay out more mathematical foundations of the subject which is the main emphasis of this tutorial. Mathematical models of the heterogeneous telecommunication networks will be introduced first. The metrics and measurements are reconsidered as the problems of system sensing and data or signal processing, respectively. Several optimality criteria are defined to obtain the metrics for given constraints and the application considered. The generality of metrics and measurements against their optimality is then discussed. Finally, the metrics utilizing the machine learned features are explored to support the development of self-configured intelligent systems. The discussions involve exposure to essential modeling and signal processing tools including statistical inference, network science, compressive sensing, sensitivity analysis and machine learning. In the last part, the metrics and measurements developed for telecommunication systems are explored in a wider context of cyber-physical systems such as smart grids, transportation and logistics networks. The metrics for the underlying telecommunication network are reexamined for the scenarios when the primary objective is the function and performance of the digitalized physical system.
6.Hands-on Workshop: Automating Measurements and Signal Processing with LabVIEW Graphical Programming and Modular Data Acquisition Hardware
by Wu Rong,
Marketing Engineer, National Instruments
Abstract:
During this workshop, National Instruments (NI) engineers will guide you through hands-on exercises designed to help you create a measurement application for acquiring, viewing, and storing measurement data using NI LabVIEW system engineering software and NI CompactDAQ modular data acquisition hardware. Explore key system configuration steps, build example DAQ applications, and familiarize yourself with automating measurement acquisition and signal processing. | http://apsipa.com/apsipa2017/tutorial_workshop/index.html |
The traditional media landscape is in the middle of a monumental shift: the new prosumer profile, the need for faster and more efficient communication, and the search for more user-driven and accessible multimedia experiences. New technologies (and more specifically, immersive environments) can provide great opportunities in the entertainment sector, and also in communication, learning, arts and culture. These technologies are gaining popularity due to the COVID-19 crisis as they enable interactive, hyper-personalised and engaging experiences anytime and anywhere. The EU-funded projects TRACTION (870610) and MEDIAVERSE (957252) are embracing new technologies in order to establish an effective participatory production workflow and are exploring novel audio-visual art representation formats. TRACTION will provide a bridge between opera professionals and specific communities at risk of exclusion based on trials, understood as experimental attempts at fostering an effective community dialogue between diverse individuals at risk of exclusion in three different situations, across three countries: Ireland, Portugal and Spain. MEDIAVERSE will enable the creation of a decentralised network of intelligent, automated, and accessible services, tools, and authoring platforms for digital asset management; legal and monetisable discovery and distribution of verified content, and barrier-free usage and integration in target media and platforms.
Este trabalho encontra-se publicado com a Licença Internacional Creative Commons Atribuição 4.0. | https://publication.avanca.org/index.php/avancacinema/article/view/340 |
The School of Computer Science at UCD invites applications for a Post-Doctoral Researcher to join the UCD team in the ADAPT Research Centre to investigate the embedding of multi-level speech representations. This project is part of the ADAPT Digital Content Transformation Strand.
While deep learning has led to huge performance gains in speech recognition and synthesis, only recently more focus is being placed on what deep learning may be able uncover about the patterns which humans use intuitively when interacting via speech and which distinguish native from non-native speakers. Such patterns are typically the focus of speech perception and experimental phonetic studies. This project aims to build on the notion of multi-linear or multi-tiered representations of speech, creating embeddings of multiple (sub- word) levels of representation – phonetic features, phonemes, syllable pieces and syllables – enabling a closer investigation of systematicity and variability of speech patterns. This research will find application in non-native speech recognition, in speech adaptation/accommodation for native and non-native interactions and in pronunciation training scenarios.
ADAPT is the world-leading SFI research centre for AI Driven Digital Content Technology, coordinated by Trinity College Dublin and based within Dublin City University, University College Dublin, Technological University Dublin, Maynooth University, Munster Technological University, Athlone Institute of Technology, and the National University of Ireland Galway. ADAPT's research vision is to pioneer new forms of proactive, scalable, and integrated AI-driven Digital Content Technology that empower individuals and society to engage in digital experiences with control, inclusion, and accountability with the long-term goal of a balanced digital society by 2030. ADAPT is pioneering new Human Centric AI techniques and technologies including personalisation, natural language processing, data analytics, intelligent machine translation human-computer interaction, as well as setting the standards for data governance, privacy and ethics for digital content.
ADAPT Digital Content Transformation Strand
From the algorithmic perspective, new machine learning techniques will both enable more users to engage meaningfully with the increasing volumes of content globally in a more measurably effective manner, while ensuring the widest linguistic and cultural inclusion. It will enhance effective, robust integrated machine learning algorithms needed to provide multimodal content experiences with new levels of accuracy, multilingualism and explainability.
The successful candidate will work under the direction of the Principal Investigator, helping to lead the research, setting a research agenda, engaging with industry projects and mentoring PhD candidates and students.
This is a research focused role, where you will conduct a specified programme of research supported by research training and development under the supervision and direction of a Principal Investigator.
The primary purpose of the role is to further develop your research skills and competences, including the processes of publication in peer-reviewed academic publications, the development of funding proposals, the mentorship of graduate students along with the opportunity to develop your skills in research led teaching. | https://www.ucd.ie/cs/vacancies/ucdpost-doctoralresearchfellowlevel1013901/ |
Symposium: "Plotting Poetry II: Bringing Deep Learning to Computational Poetry Analysis"
Plotting Poetry II : Bringing Deep Learning to Computational Poetry Analysis
12-14 September 2018, FU Berlin, KL 32 123
In 1917, commenting on the rise of new media, the french poet Apollinaire urged for “plotting/mechanising (“machiner”) poetry as has been done for the world”. A century later, the slogan’s rich metaphor is made all the sharper with the new technologies’ emergence in literary studies: The Digital Humanities (DH) have experienced an incredible gain in momentum over the last 10-15 years, providing literary scholars with copious and entirely new research data: digital editions of texts, images, musical pieces and other semiotic artifacts (accessible via Google Books, zeno org, large digital editions like PHI or the Perseus Digital Library and many others). This has also fueled advances in research methodology in the humanities, such as the influential "distant reading" approach (Moretti 2013), based on the idea of discovering patterns in searchable corpora of literature by explorative statistical methods, and using them for interpretation and literary analysis. In poetry analysis, computational tools have been devised in order to support and develop metrical and rhythmical analysis, readout poetry analysis, stylometry, and to ultimately enable computer-assisted interpretation.
Notwithstanding the success story of this data-driven approach, a “computational turn” (David M. Berry, 2011) has recently been advocated within the DH, bringing to the forefront the actual algorithms and computational techniques of pattern recognition, machine learning, and deep learning (Bishop, 2006). These technologies have become mainstream in many areas of digital processing, and have sparked much of the success of (and critical concerns about) digitization in our everyday life. They have also proven successful in all areas of natural language processing, prosodic data, and encoded textual data. Nevertheless, in literary studies as well as poetry analysis, an application of these new methods of deep learning is still lacking.
To fill this gap is the rationale of the proposed workshop. It will gather experts in computational poetry analysis as well as experts in deep learning techniques in order to improve the digital analysis of poetic language features – such as prosody, metrics, metaphors, coded text. The aim is to create opportunities for the sharing of good practice, hands-on practical applications, and the learning of specialized methods; to offer a platform for presenting and discovering ongoing research projects; and to reflect on the benefits and potential shortcomings of digital pattern recognition based on deep learning methods. Bringing these two groups into discussion means to send all contributions to the participants by electronic means before the meeting. In this way, our workshop will guarantee equal parts of expert presentations and discussions between scholars and experts of the literary and computational fields. | https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/v/rhythmicalizer/termine/Symposium-Plotting-Poetry_II--Bringing-Deep-Learning-to-Computational-Poetry-Analysis.html |
Web Services have experienced great interest during the last years as they were expected to play a key role as enablers of seamless application-to-application integration both within company boundaries and on a global, cross-organizational scale. As a technical foundation for the realization of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), Web Services encapsulate complexity inherent to individual applications and allow for their loose coupling. However, a truly global mesh of such services has not yet become reality due to various reasons. Novel technologies and design principles are currently about to emerge which allow human users to use, customize, combine, interconnect and finally expose Web-based content or functionality as new resources which are often referred to as Mash-ups. In this article, we provide an overview of existing Mash-ups as well as tools and platforms that empower users to build them in a highly efficient and intuitive fashion. Statistical data and case studies are lev...
Christoph Schroth, Oliver Christ
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Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a direction of artificial intelligence aimed at teaching a computer to process natural language of a human. The Centre for cognitive technologies provide the following solutions in natural language processing:
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Arrangement of textual information (search and storage of data; classification, indexing and routing of information)
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Introduction of support systems for decision-making
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Detection of negative feedback related to object/service aimed at reputation or service improvement, analysis of utterances and publications sentiment
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Textual smart counteraction with a customer
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Smart search in corporate data storages
SPEECH TECHNOLOGIES
Scope of applicability of speech technologies is increasing along with the demand of different businesses and industries for convenient voice interaction. The Centre for cognitive technologies possesses a wide range of competences needed for project implementation in this sphere:
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Speech recognition (transcribing)
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Text-to-speech engines (generation of voice signal on base of printed text) and voice announcement systems
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Smart voice helper, voice requests processing
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Systems of biometric control of access, logging and search
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Systems for call-centers quality and automation management
COMPUTER VISION
The Centre is developing expert investigation in elaboration and introduction of solutions on the base of computer vision (video-analytics) in the following directions:
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Facial biometrics, people recognition (recognition of sex, age, emotions and gestures), identification of congestion, crowd, queue; calculation of people
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Detection of intrusion, movement, running, fight, idleness, line crossing, upstream motion
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Smoke, fire, open flame, activity zone detection
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Recognition of transport, vehicle plate number, rail carriages, traffic offences, traffic jams
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Detection of left or carried away things, finding ownerless goods
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Identification and tracking of various objects (identification of object location and path of its motion by means of a camera)
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Analysis of occupational health and safety compliance at production site (identification whether the employees use individual protective gears, are present in a dangerous zone, etc.)
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Analysis of images, defect identification, analysis of material loss, parts wear, etc.)
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Recognition of wares on the shelf, control of operations execution, fullness of shelves and warehouses; identification of customer traffic in shops and other premises
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Generation of images, heightening image resolution and granularity
MACHINE LEARNING
Machine learning is a direction of artificial intelligence aimed at not direct solution of the task but at learning while solving a mass of similar tasks. Tools of calculus of probabilities and mathematical statistics, numerical methods, graph theories, optimization methods and other techniques of work with data are used.
Work with Big Data and Internet of Things
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Development and introduction of algorithms of data analysis from various sensors, senders and cameras
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Smart information reduction
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Development of unification approaches for heterogeneous data bases in order to perform their further processing by means of machine learning algorithms
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Systems of technological processes information collection and provision of the operator with recommendations in order to achieve necessary values
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Forecast of production and energy and resources consumption
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Analysis and forecast of various effects influence on operation factors of products and equipment
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Preventive alerts of probable abnormal situations
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Forecasting equipment failure and shift from service as per regulations to condition-based maintenance
Predictive analytics
This direction specializes in patterns search in accumulated historical records for their further use in order to perform event, changes forecasting, etc. Forecasting is necessary for making optimal managing decisions in any sphere. When applying predictive analytics technologies, we are able to help in providing solutions in the following areas:
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Forecast of target value alteration for all spheres
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Smart distribution of customers between groups according to their buying activity (segmentation of customer base)
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Identification of the most promising customers with respect to sales boost
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Forecast of customer outflow in order to take well-timed measures aimed at customer retention
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Development of recommendations aimed at proposing the most suitable goods to the customer
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Specification of market segments for various types of goods, identification of probable consumer groups
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Forecast of customer's behavior
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Forecasting the volume of sales and expenses (products, materials)
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Forecast of consumer demand and planning sales promotions
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Detection of abnormal users, objects and transactions
ROBOTIC AUTOMATION
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Introduction of RPA technology (Robotic Process Automation, a technology of business processes automation by means of software, replacing people by virtual robots for execution of homogenous operations at user interface level)
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Analysis of opportunities and planning of measures aimed at "Industry 4.0" standard introduction at manufacturing site
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Robotic automation of routine monotone operations
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Design of smart robotic systems
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Introduction of power-driven robots in order to perform motor and control functions at manufacturing site.
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Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) provides information about the microstructure of white matter in the human brain. From dMRI, streamlining tractography is often used to reconstruct computational representations of white matter tracts from which differences in structural connectivity can be explored. In the fiber tracking process, anatomical information can help reduce tracking errors caused by crossing fibers and image noise. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian method for estimating fiber orientations (FOs) guided by anatomical tract information using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which is a standard clinical and research dMRI protocol. The proposed method is named Fiber Orientation Reconstruction guided by Tract Segmentation (FORTS). A first step segments and labels the white matter tracts volumetrically, including explicit representations of crossing regions. A second step estimates the FOs using the diffusion information and the anatomical knowledge from segmented white matter tracts. A single FO is estimated in the noncrossing regions while two FOs are estimated in the crossing regions. A third step carries out streamlining tractography that uses information from both the segmented tracts and the estimated FOs. Experiments performed on a digital crossing phantom, a physical phantom, and brain DTI of 18 healthy subjects show that FORTS is able to use the anatomical information to produce FOs with better accuracy and to reduce anatomically incorrect streamlines. In particular, on the brain DTI data, we studied the connectivity of anatomically defined tracts to cortical areas, which is not straightforwardly achievable using only volumetric tract segmentation. These connectivity results demonstrate the potential application of FORTS to scientific studies. | https://jhu.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/a-bayesian-approach-to-fiber-orientation-estimation-guided-by-vol |
Robinson, Jennifer L.
Baxi, Madhura
Katz, Jeffrey S.
Waggoner, Paul
Beyers, Ronald
Morrison, Edward
Salibi, Nouha
Denney, Thomas S.
Vodyanoy, Vitaly
Deshpande, Gopikrishna
Published Versionhttps://doi.org/10.1038/srep36851
MetadataShow full item record
CitationRobinson, Jennifer L., Madhura Baxi, Jeffrey S. Katz, Paul Waggoner, Ronald Beyers, Edward Morrison, Nouha Salibi, Thomas S. Denney, Vitaly Vodyanoy, and Gopikrishna Deshpande. 2016. “Characterization of Structural Connectivity of the Default Mode Network in Dogs using Diffusion Tensor Imaging.” Scientific Reports 6 (1): 36851. doi:10.1038/srep36851. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep36851.
AbstractDiffusion tensor imaging (DTI) provides us an insight into the micro-architecture of white-matter tracts in the brain. This method has proved promising in understanding and investigating the neuronal tracts and structural connectivity between the brain regions in primates as well as rodents. The close evolutionary relationship between canines and humans may have spawned a unique bond in regard to social cognition rendering them useful as an animal model in translational research. In this study, we acquired diffusion data from anaesthetized dogs and created a DTI-based atlas for a canine model which could be used to investigate various white matter diseases. We illustrate the application of this atlas by calculating DTI tractography based structural connectivity between the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) regions of the default mode network (DMN) in dogs. White matter connectivity was investigated to provide structural basis for the functional dissociation observed between the anterior and posterior parts of DMN. A comparison of the integrity of long range structural connections (such as in the DMN) between dogs and humans is likely to provide us with new perspectives on the neural basis of the evolution of cognitive functions. | https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/29625984 |
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Thalamic shape and connectivity abnormalities in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder
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by Xia et al
Abstract
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is characterized by widespread structural and functional abnormalities in the cortico-striato-thalmo-cortical (CSTC) loops that subserve attention and executive functions. In this study, we analyzed thalamic shape and its white matter connections using structural MRI and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data acquired from children with ADHD (n=19) and controls (n=19). Shape morphology of the thalamus was assessed using shape-based analysis, while connectivity between the thalamus and other brain regions was determined using probabilistic diffusion tractography. Shape-based analysis indicated significant regional atrophy in the left thalamus in children with ADHD compared to controls. Group analyses of white matter connectivity measures showed significantly decreased mean fractional anisotropy (FA) and volume of the tracts between thalamus and striatum, hippocampus, and prefrontal lobe in children with ADHD compared to controls. The structural abnormalities within the thalamus and the reduced integrity of the white matter tracks between thalamus and other brain regions, as shown from the results of this study, may be the anatomical bases of the impaired cognitive performances in the attention and executive function domains in ADHD. | http://www.stresstherapysolutions.com/kb/entry/118/ |
Neonatal Functional and Structural Connectivity Are Associated with Cerebral Palsy at Two Years of AgeFunding Financial support for this project was received from the Thrasher Research Fund, project 9190 (Merhar) and KL2 TR001426 (Merhar).
Publication History
04 September 2018
05 February 2019
Publication Date:
27 March 2019 (online)
Abstract
Objective The accuracy of structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to predict later cerebral palsy (CP) in newborns with perinatal brain injury is variable. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and task-based functional MRI (fMRI) show promise as predictive tools. We hypothesized that infants who later developed CP would have reduced structural and functional connectivity as compared with those without CP.
Study Design We performed DTI and fMRI using a passive motor task at 40 to 48 weeks' postmenstrual age in 12 infants with perinatal brain injury. CP was diagnosed at age 2 using a standardized examination.
Results Five infants had CP at 2 years of age, and seven did not have CP. Tract-based spatial statistics showed a widespread reduction of fractional anisotropy (FA) in almost all white matter tracts in the CP group. Using the median FA value in the corticospinal tracts as a cutoff, FA was 100% sensitive and 86% specific to predict CP compared with a sensitivity of 60 to 80% and a specificity of 71% for structural MRI. During fMRI, the CP group had reduced functional connectivity from the right supplemental motor area as compared with the non-CP group.
Conclusion DTI and fMRI obtained soon after birth are potential biomarkers to predict CP in newborns with perinatal brain injury. | https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/abstract/10.1055/s-0039-1683874 |
Abstract: Very little is currently known about the cerebral characteristics that underlie the complex processes of meditation as only a limited number of studies have addressed this topic. Research exploring structural connectivity in meditation practitioners is particularly rare. We thus acquired diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data of high angular and spatial resolution and used atlas-based tract mapping methods to investigate white matter fiber characteristics in a well-matched sample of long-term meditators and controls (n=54). A broad field mapping approach estimated the fractional anisotropy (FA) for twenty different fiber tracts (i.e., nine tracts in each hemisphere and two inter-hemispheric tracts) that were subsequently used as dependent measures. Results showed pronounced structural connectivity in meditators compared to controls throughout the entire brain within major projection pathways, commissural pathways, and association pathways. The largest group differences were observed within the corticospinal tract, the temporal component of the superior longitudinal fasciculus, and the uncinate fasciculus. While cross-sectional studies represent a good starting point for elucidating possible links between meditation and white matter fiber characteristics, longitudinal studies will be necessary to determine the relative contribution of nature and nurture to enhanced structural connectivity in long-term meditators. | https://sources.mandala.library.virginia.edu/source/enhanced-brain-connectivity-long-term-meditation-practitioners |
Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a powerful MRI technique that can be used to estimate both the microstructural integrity and the trajectories of white matter pathways throughout the central nervous system. This fiber tracking (aka, “tractography”) approach is often carried out using anatomically-defined seed points to identify white matter tracts that pass through one or more structures, but can also be performed using functionally-defined regions of interest (ROIs) that have been determined using functional MRI (fMRI) or other methods. In this study, we performed fMRI-guided DTI tractography between all of the previously defined nodes within each of six common resting-state brain networks, including the: dorsal Default Mode Network (dDMN), ventral Default Mode Network (vDMN), left Executive Control Network (lECN), right Executive Control Network (rECN), anterior Salience Network (aSN), and posterior Salience Network (pSN). By normalizing the data from 32 healthy control subjects to a standard template-using high-dimensional, non-linear warping methods—we were able to create probabilistic white matter atlases for each tract in stereotaxic coordinates. By investigating all 198 ROI-to-ROI combinations within the aforementioned resting-state networks (for a total of 6336 independent DTI tractography analyses), the resulting probabilistic atlases represent a comprehensive cohort of functionally-defined white matter regions that can be used in future brain imaging studies to: (1) ascribe DTI or other white matter changes to particular functional brain networks, and (2) compliment resting state fMRI or other functional connectivity analyses. | https://jhu.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/probabilistic-atlases-of-default-mode-executive-control-and-salie-4 |
Neuronavigation Based on Track Density Image Extracted from Deterministic High-Definition Fiber Tractography.
- Medicine
- World neurosurgery
- 2017
The results show that the HDFT navigation method is a promising technique that preserves neural function and allows for the visualization of anatomic features such as fanning and angling and helps to identify the range of a given tract. Expand
Human brain asymmetry in microstructural connectivity demonstrated by diffusional kurtosis imaging
- Medicine, Psychology
- Brain Research
- 2014
The results suggest that DKI-based tractography can improve the identification of asymmetrical connectivity patterns, thereby serving as an additional tool in the evaluation of the structural bases of functional lateralization. Expand
Mapping the Orientation of White Matter Fiber Bundles: A Comparative Study of Diffusion Tensor Imaging, Diffusional Kurtosis Imaging, and Diffusion Spectrum Imaging
- Medicine
- American Journal of Neuroradiology
- 2016
The authors evaluate fiber bundle orientations from DTI and diffusional kurtosis compared with diffusion spectrum imaging as a criterion standard to assess the performance of each technique and conclude that fiber bundle orientation estimates from diffusionalKurtosis imaging have less systematic error than those fromDTI. Expand
Functional Informed Fiber Tracking Using Combination of Diffusion and Functional MRI
- Computer Science, Medicine
- IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
- 2019
A novel tractography algorithm combining DWI and functional MRI (fMRI) was proposed, and a spatio-temporal correlation tensor that characterizes the anisotropy of fMRI signals in white matter was introduced to complement the estimation of fiber orientation density function from DWI. Expand
References
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In vivo fiber tractography using DT‐MRI data
- Physics, Medicine
- Magnetic resonance in medicine
- 2000
Fiber tract trajectories in coherently organized brain white matter pathways were computed from in vivo diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT‐MRI) data, and the method holds promise for elucidating architectural features in other fibrous tissues and ordered media. Expand
Validation of diffusion spectrum magnetic resonance imaging with manganese-enhanced rat optic tracts and ex vivo phantoms
- Computer Science, Materials Science
- NeuroImage
- 2003
DSI can resolve crossing fiber orientation accurately and the effect of finite gradient pulse widths on the primary orientation is not critical, and two sequences of DSI using short and long gradient pulses were performed in a rat brain. Expand
High angular resolution diffusion imaging reveals intravoxel white matter fiber heterogeneity
- Physics, Medicine
- Magnetic resonance in medicine
- 2002
To test whether a geodesic, high b‐value diffusion gradient sampling scheme could resolve multiple fiber orientations within a single voxel, the diffusion signal was modeled as arising from a discrete mixture of Gaussian diffusion processes in slow exchange, and the underlying mixture of tensors was solved for using a gradient descent scheme. Expand
White matter tractography using diffusion tensor deflection
- Psychology, Medicine
- Human brain mapping
- 2003
Simulations show that the deflection term is less sensitive than the major eigenvector to image noise and is promising for mapping the organizational patterns of white matter in the human brain as well as mapping the relationship between major fiber trajectories and the location and extent of brain lesions. Expand
Diffusion MRI of complex tissue structure
- Physics
- 2002
Magnetic resonance diffusion imaging provides an exquisitely sensitive probe of tissue microstructure. Owing to the microscopic length scale of diffusion in biological tissues, diffusion imaging can… Expand
Mapping complex tissue architecture with diffusion spectrum magnetic resonance imaging
- Chemistry, Medicine
- Magnetic resonance in medicine
- 2005
Methods are presented to map complex fiber architectures in tissues by imaging the 3D spectra of tissue water diffusion with MR, showing correspondence between the orientational maxima of the diffusion spectrum and those of the fiber orientation density at each location. Expand
An error analysis of white matter tractography methods: synthetic diffusion tensor field simulations
- Mathematics, Computer Science
- NeuroImage
- 2003
A Monte Carlo simulation was used to investigate the impact of SNR, tensor anisotropy, and diffusion tensor encoding directions on the accuracy of six tractography algorithms and found that the mean tract trajectory was found to deviate from the ideal pathway for curved trajectories. Expand
Direct estimation of the fiber orientation density function from diffusion-weighted MRI data using spherical deconvolution
- Computer Science, Medicine
- NeuroImage
- 2004
This study proposes a novel method for estimating the fiber orientation distribution directly from high angular resolution diffusion-weighted MR data without the need for prior assumptions regarding the number of fiber populations present, assuming that all white matter fiber bundles in the brain share identical diffusion characteristics. Expand
Association fibre pathways of the brain: parallel observations from diffusion spectrum imaging and autoradiography. | https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Diffusion-spectrum-magnetic-resonance-imaging-(DSI)-Wedeen-Wang/ab0da6c75606a17fd35dbad061ce317e51bf200c |
Background: Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and white matter tractography (WMT) are promising techniques for estimating the course, extent, and connectivity patterns of the white matter (WM) structures in the human brain. In this study, we investigated the ability of DTI and WMT to visualize white matter tract involvement for the preoperative surgical planning and postoperative assessment of brainstem lesions.
Methods: Preoperative and postoperative DTI data (echo-planar, 1.5T) were retrospectively analyzed in 10 patients with brainstem lesions (3 diffuse, 7 focal). WMT applying a tensor deflection algorithm was used to reconstruct WM tracts adjacent to the lesions. Reconstructed tracts included corticospinal tracts and medial lemnisci. The clinical and imaging follow-up data were also compared and analyzed.
Findings: WMT revealed a series of tract alteration patterns including deviation, deformation, infiltration, and apparent tract interruption. WMT reconstructions showed that the major WM tracts were preserved during surgery and improved in position and appearance postoperatively. These findings correlated with the improvement or preservation of neurological function as determined by clinical assessment.
Conclusions: Compared with the information provided by conventional MR imaging, DTI and WMT provided superior quantification and visualization of lesion involvement in eloquent fibre tracts of the brainstem. Moreover, DTI and WMT were found to be beneficial for white matter recognition in the neurosurgical planning and postoperative assessment of brainstem lesions. | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17712509/?dopt=Abstract |
Little is known about neural network connectivity immediately after a traumatic axonal injury (TAI). This is the first longitudinal study in TAI to examine functional connectivity in the Default Mode Network (DMN) and Central Executive Network (CEN) within 48 hours after traumatic brain injury with repeat imaging 7 months later. Aims: (a) characterize connectivity in these networks at the sub-acute stage of injury, (b) evaluate longitudinal change in networks with recovery, and (c) explore how this change might be associated with structural connectivity and neurocognitive outcome. Resting-state fMRI and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scans were acquired from 21 patients with moderate-severe brain injuries consistent with TAI compared with 8 non-injured controls. Neurocognitive outcome was assessed at 7 months. Results revealed lower resting-state DMN connectivity 48 hours after TAI compared to non-injured controls, and this persisted 7 months after injury. CEN connectivity was comparable between acutely injured patients and controls, though patients demonstrated increased CEN connectivity at 7 months. These patterns of functional connectivity in patients were associated with alterations in structural connectivity, where areas of decreased functional connectivity were associated with decreased integrity of white matter tracts connecting those regions. However, some regions within these networks demonstrated increased functional connectivity despite presence of structural damage. Taken together, results suggest disruptions in functional and structural connectivity are present as early as 48 hours after a TAI. Alterations in functional connectivity during the recovery period may be explained either by structural damage or could suggest the presence of neural compensation in functional connectivity. | https://utswmed-ir.tdl.org/handle/2152.5/3594 |
An emerging trend in AD research is brain network development including graphic metrics and graph mining techniques. To construct a brain structural network, Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) in conjunction with T1 weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) can be used to isolate brain regions as nodes, white matter tracts as the edge, and the density of the tracts as the weight to the edge. To study such network, its sub-network is often obtained by excluding unrelated nodes or edges. Existing research has heavily relied on domain knowledge or single-Thresholding individual subject based network metrics to identify the sub network. In this research, we develop a bi-Threshold frequent subgraph mining method (BT-FSG) to automatically filter out less important edges in responding to the clinical questions. Using this method, we are able to discover a subgraph of human brain network that can significantly reveal the difference between cognitively unimpaired APOE-4 carriers and noncarriers based on the correlations between the age vs. network local metric and age vs. network or global metric. This can potentially become a brain network marker for evaluating the AD risks for preclinical individuals. | https://mayoclinic.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/bi-threshold-frequent-subgraph-mining-for-alzheimer-disease-risk- |
background The pathophysiology and symptomatology of schizophrenia might be related to disturbed communication or impaired connectivity between individual nerve cells and between regions of the brain. Regions of the brain communicate with each other via the axons, which form brain white matter.
objective To review the literature that reports results of studies on brain white matter in schizophrenia patients.
method The literature was reviewed with the help of Medline, using as key words 'schizophrenia', 'corpus callosum' and 'white matter'. Studies with structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI), magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and post-mortem studies were included.
results Twelve post-mortem and 36 MRI studies of brain white matter have produced conflicting results. One MRS study and 5 out of the 7 DTI studies point to disruption of the white matter in schizophrenia.
conclusion The abnormalities found in the white matter give some support to the hypothesis that schizophrenia is associated with impaired connectivity. More advanced MRI techniques like MRS and DTI may be better suited than sMRI to reveal and explain white matter abnormalities in patients with schizophrenia. | http://www.tijdschriftvoorpsychiatrie.nl/en/issues/3/articles/27 |
What is mean diffusivity in the brain?
Mean diffusivity (MD), which describes the rotationally invariant magnitude of water diffusion within brain tissue, is another measure obtained from DTI data that has been used to examine differences of brain structural integrity in schizophrenia.
What does high Mean diffusivity mean?
DTI provides a measure of the directions of diffusion of molecules, mainly water, within the brain. An increase in overall diffusion (mean diffusivity (MD)) is typically consistent with increased water content (i.e., edema and inflammation) and thus relatively less resistance, and therefore, higher diffusion rates.
What is axial diffusivity in the brain?
Axial diffusivity refers to the magnitude of diffusion parallel to fiber tracts. Lower AD might reflect axonal injury, reduced axonal caliber, or less coherent orientation of axons. There is evidence that AD is not influenced by myelin.
What does diffusion tensor imaging measure?
Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is a technique that detects how water travels along the white matter tracts in the brain (Fig. 2). White-matter tracts connect different parts of the brain and must be protected during surgery.
What does diffusivity mean?
diffusivity. / (ˌdɪfjuːˈsɪvɪtɪ) / noun. a measure of the ability of a substance to transmit a difference in temperature; expressed as the thermal conductivity divided by the product of specific heat capacity and density.
What is axial and radial diffusivity?
Axial diffusivity, λ║ ≡ λ1 > λ2, λ3, describes the mean diffusion coefficient of water molecules diffusing parallel to the tract within the voxel of interest. Similarly, radial diffusivity, λ┴ ≡ (λ2 + λ3)/2, can be defined as the magnitude of water diffusion perpendicular to the tract (19, 20).
Is Mean diffusivity same as ADC?
Is Mean diffusivity same as ADC? The sum of the eigenvalues (λ1+λ2+λ3) is called the trace, while their average (= trace/3) is called the mean diffusivity or apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC).
What is radial diffusivity?
The radial diffusivity (RD) is the apparent water diffusion coefficient in the direction perpendicular to the axonal fibers. It represents a parameter of demyelination or glia cell impairment [4. P. J. Basser, J.
What does white matter do in the brain?
Function. White matter essentially functions in affecting learning and brain functions, modulating the distribution of action potential, and coordinating communication between the different brain regions.
What is diffusion sensor?
Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is an magnetic resonance imaging‑based neuroimaging technique that makes it possible to estimate the location, orientation, and anisotropy of the white matter tracts of the brain.
What is brain MRI with DTI?
Diffusion tensor imaging tractography, or DTI tractography, is an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) technique that measures the rate of water diffusion between cells to understand and create a map of the body’s internal structures; it is most commonly used to provide imaging of the brain.
How does Diffusion MRI work?
In diffusion MRI, magnetic field gradients are employed to sensitize the image to diffusion in a particular direction. The direction is different for each image, resulting in a different pattern of signal loss (dark areas) due to anisotropic diffusion.
What is restricted diffusion in brain?
Cerebral cortical restricted diffusion or gyriform restricted diffusion refers to curvilinear hyperintense signal involving the cerebral cortex on DWI images with a corresponding low signal on ADC images.
What does restricted diffusion in the brain mean?
Restricted diffusion is the hallmark imaging feature of acute cerebral infarction and its most widely appreciated association, usually developing within 1 hour of insult.
What causes diffusion restriction?
Many pathologies cause restricted extracellular diffusion of water protons including infarction, cytotoxic edema, high cellularity within tissue, viscous fluid, demyelination, and metabolic disturbances.
What does cortical restricted diffusion mean?
Cerebral cortical restricted diffusion or gyriform restricted diffusion refers to curvilinear hyperintense signal involving the cerebral cortex on DWI images with a corresponding low signal on ADC images.
Do cysts have restricted diffusion?
We found a strongly hyperintense signal, indicating restricted diffusion, in brain abscesses, epidermoid cysts and cholesteatoma; all the remaining lesions were hypointense or mildly hyperintense.
What is flair in brain MRI?
Fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) is an MRI technique that shows areas of tissue T2 prolongation as bright while suppressing (darkening) cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) signal, thus clearly revealing lesions in proximity to CSF, such as cerebral cortical lesions.
Does T2 FLAIR mean MS?
T2 sequences may be used to count the total number of MS lesions or “MS lesion burden.” MS lesions look like white spots on T2 sequences. Fluid attention inversion recovery (FLAIR) sequences are special T2 scans in which signals from the fluid surrounding brain tissue (cerebrospinal fluid or CSF) has been removed.
What is cortical lesion?
Consequently, cortical lesions were defined as those lesions appearing hyperintense on DIR images compared to surrounding normal-appearing gray matter, entirely or partly located in the cortical gray matter and occupying at least three voxels.
What is a brain flare?
Flares occur because of inflammation in the central nervous system — the brain and spinal cord — causing damage to the myelin or underlying nerve fibers. To be considered a true flare, a relapse must occur at least 30 days after the previous flare, and the new or recurring symptoms must last for at least 24 hours.
What is the Supratentorial?
The supratentorial area (the upper part of the brain) contains the cerebrum, lateral ventricle and third ventricle (with cerebrospinal fluid shown in blue), choroid plexus, pineal gland, hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and optic nerve.
What are the white spots on brain MRI?
What Are White Spots? Spots on a brain MRI are caused by changes in water content and fluid movement that occur in brain tissue when the brain cells are inflamed or damaged. These lesions are more easily seen on T2 weighted images, a term that describes the frequency (speed) of the radio impulses used during your scan.
What was your first brain tumor symptom?
New onset or change in pattern of headaches. Headaches that gradually become more frequent and more severe. Unexplained nausea or vomiting. Vision problems, such as blurred vision, double vision or loss of peripheral vision.
Where are most brain tumors located?
Their most common locations are the base of the skull and the lower portion of the spine. Although these tumors are benign, they may invade the adjacent bone and put pressure on nearby neural tissue.
What vision problems do brain tumors cause?
If a brain tumor exerts enough pressure on the optic nerve, blindness can occur. For many patients, the loss of vision is gradual, beginning with blurry vision, double vision or an increasing blind spot. As the tumor grows, however, it will compress the optic nerve, resulting in greater vision loss. | https://goodmancoaching.nl/what-does-mean-diffusivity-tell-me-about-the-connectivity-of-cortical-areas/ |
In schizophrenia, abnormalities in structural connectivity between brain regions known to contain mirror neurons and their relationship to negative symptoms related to a domain of social cognition are not well understood. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scans were acquired in 16 patients with first episode schizophrenia and 16 matched healthy controls. FA and Trace of the tracts interconnecting regions known to be rich in mirror neurons, i.e., anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), inferior parietal lobe (IPL) and premotor cortex (PMC) were evaluated. A significant group effect for Trace was observed in IPL-PMC white matter fiber tract (F (1, 28) = 7.13, p = .012), as well as in the PMC-ACC white matter fiber tract (F (1, 28) = 4.64, p = .040). There were no group differences in FA. In addition, patients with schizophrenia showed a significant positive correlation between the Trace of the left IPL-PMC white matter fiber tract, and the Ability to Feel Intimacy and Closeness score (rho = .57, p = 0.034), and a negative correlation between the Trace of the left PMC-ACC and the Relationships with Friends and Peers score (rho = remove -.54, p = 0.049). We have demonstrated disrupted white mater microstructure within the white matter tracts subserving brain regions containing mirror neurons. We further showed that such structural disruptions might impact negative symptoms and, more specifically, contribute to the inability to feel intimacy (a measure conceptually related to theory of mind) in first episode schizophrenia. Further studies are needed to understand the potential of our results for diagnosis, prognosis and therapeutic interventions. | https://pnl.bwh.harvard.edu/index.php/impaired-white-matter-connectivity-between-regions-containing-mirror-neurons-and-relationship-to-negative-symptoms-and-social-cognition-in-patients-with-first-episode-schizophrenia/ |
Multilevel Deficiency of White Matter Connectivity Networks in Alzheimer’s Disease: A Diffusion MRI Study with DTI and HARDI Models - Download this document for free, or read online. Document in PDF available to download.
Copyright © 2016 Tao Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Alzheimer’s disease AD is the most common form of dementia in elderly people. It is an irreversible and progressive brain disease. In this paper, we utilized diffusion-weighted imaging DWI to detect abnormal topological organization of white matter WM structural networks. We compared the differences between WM connectivity characteristics at global, regional, and local levels in 26 patients with probable AD and 16 normal control NC elderly subjects, using connectivity networks constructed with the diffusion tensor imaging DTI model and the high angular resolution diffusion imaging HARDI model, respectively. At the global level, we found that the WM structural networks of both AD and NC groups had a small-world topology; however, the AD group showed a significant decrease in both global and local efficiency, but an increase in clustering coefficient and the average shortest path length. We further found that the AD patients had significantly decreased nodal efficiency at the regional level, as well as weaker connections in multiple local cortical and subcortical regions, such as precuneus, temporal lobe, hippocampus, and thalamus. The HARDI model was found to be more advantageous than the DTI model, as it was more sensitive to the deficiencies in AD at all of the three levels. | http://libros.duhnnae.com/2017/jun9/149849434644-Multilevel-Deficiency-of-White-Matter-Connectivity-Networks-in-Alzheimers-Disease-A-Diffusion-MRI-Study-with-DTI-and-HARDI-Models.php |
In diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (DMRI) the Brownian motion of the water molecules, within biological tissue, is measured through a series of images. In diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) this diffusion is represented using tensors. DTI describes, in a non-invasive way, the local anisotropy pattern enabling the reconstruction of the nervous fibers - dubbed tractography. DMRI constitutes a powerful tool to analyse the structure of the white matter within a voxel, but also to investigate the anatomy of the brain and its connectivity. DMRI has been proved useful to characterize brain disorders, to analyse the differences on white matter and consequences in brain function. These procedures usually involve the virtual dissection of white matters tracts of interest. The manual isolation of these bundles requires a great deal of neuroanatomical knowledge and can take up to several hours of work. This thesis focuses on the development of techniques able to automatically perform the identification of white matter structures. To segment such structures in a tensor field, the similarity of diffusion tensors must be assessed for partitioning data into regions, which are homogeneous in terms of tensor characteristics. This concept of tensor homogeneity is explored in order to achieve new methods for segmenting, filtering and enhancing diffusion images. First, this thesis presents a novel approach to semi-automatically define the similarity measures that better suit the data. Following, a multi-resolution watershed framework is presented, where the tensor field’s homogeneity is used to automatically achieve a hierarchical representation of white matter structures in the brain, allowing the simultaneous segmentation of different structures with different sizes. The stochastic process of water diffusion within tissues can be modeled, inferring the homogeneity characteristics of the diffusion field. This thesis presents an accelerated convolution method of diffusion images, where these models enable the contextual processing of diffusion images for noise reduction, regularization and enhancement of structures. These new methods are analysed and compared on the basis of their accuracy, robustness, speed and usability - key points for their application in a clinical setting. The described methods enrich the visualization and exploration of white matter structures, fostering the understanding of the human brain. | https://research.tue.nl/en/publications/homogeneity-based-segmentation-and-enhancement-of-diffusion-tenso |
Our research in data analysis emphasizes the importance of combining the mathematics we have developed with biomedical research applications, and delivering these tools and techniques to the research community. We are developing methods for analyzing various biomedical data. We have identified four key areas on which we will focus our efforts; these include methods for image segmentation, surface analysis, diffusion tensor imaging analysis, and biosequence analysis.
The ultimate goal of structural image analysis is to extract, compare, and represent (i.e., model) anatomical information from volumetric data. Extending our tissue classification methods, the CCB processes multiple modalities and identifies pathologic structures such as lesions. Segmentation methods also aid in identifying various structures in MRI. Validating these methods using expert-labeled data, CCB explores the performance of these methods on sub-groups of data. By combining level-set segmentation approaches, atlas methods elucidate neuroanatomical structures such as subcortical gray matter bodies. We are examining various segmentation methods. We validate these methods on expert-labeled and phantom data models, and then archive this information in our Knowledge Management system. By investigating the performance of different strategies on various biomedical imaging segmentation problems and the impact of these on the results of subsequent analyses, we are able to provide recommended practices to our Investigators as well as other users of our tools. Finally, we are applying multi-layer level-set segmentation approaches to the variety of methods for surface extraction.
Diffusion Tensor Imaging is a relatively new technology that takes advantage of the fact that water diffusion in the brain is not isotropic in all tissues. Specifically, white matter tracts, which are organized into parallel fiber bundles, allow for significantly greater diffusivity along their paths than perpendicular to them. This anisotropy can not only distinguish white matter from gray matter, but the principal axis, obtained from a diagonalization of the diffusion tensor, can be utilized to generate fiber pathways in the brain. As part of this effort, we are developing a collection of tools for computing standard DTI measures (e.g., fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity). We also are developing a novel approach to segment tracts within the DTI data collected from the brain. Our proposed method uses a physical model of the diffusion process itself, based on the measurements made during a DTI imaging sequence. To assess the validity of this algorithm, we will develop a digital phantom model. This model will be built from multiple data sources, including MRI, DTI, histological stains, anatomical atlases, and the expertise of experienced neuroanatomists. We will model a brain with multiple fiber tracts, and then simulate the effects of an acquisition protocol on that brain. This model will provide a validation standard similar to that provided by the Montreal Neurological Institute’s BrainWeb Phantom for structural imaging and segmentation.
Alternative splicing has recently emerged as a major mechanism of functional regulation in the human genome. Previously considered to be an unusual event, it has been detected by many genomics studies in 40-60% of human genes. Moreover, it appears to be of central importance for the nervous system and for temporal development of differentiated cells and tissues. However, of the more than 30,000 alternative splice events detected in the human transcripts, fewer than 20% have been characterized functionally. To give biologists a basis for choosing which alternative splice forms to focus on, we are developing tools needed for identifying meaningful patterns and associations with specific tissues, developmental stages and disease states. We demonstrate the value of interval logic and alignment query tools for analyzing alternative splicing. We are building these basic capabilities into a power tool that everyone can use, by integrating them into an extensible, open-source database system (PostgreSQL) that will make it relatively fast and easy for biologists to query alternative splice functions. | http://ccb.loni.usc.edu/research/data-analysis/ |
Findings from a recent study published in the journal NeuroImage: Clinical showed that altered gray and white matter morphometry in cerebellar and frontal cortical regions may contribute to, or result from, pain-relevant dysfunction in patients with Fibromyalgia (FM).
Chronic pain is a key symptom of patients suffering from FM. This functional pain disorder is characterized by altered resting functional connectivity, associated with spontaneous pain intensity, and which can be normalized following longitudinal therapy. FM also exhibits decreased gray matter volume in the medial frontal gyri and increased gray matter volume in cerebellum. Altered white matter microstructure in FM has been noted with DTI in the thalamus and post central gyrus. Advances in non-invasive structural neuroimaging, including voxel-based morphometry (VBM), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and surface-based cortical thickness analyses, have been used to investigate altered brain structure associated with several conditions.
In order to provide a detailed analysis of brain structural connectomics in FM patients suffering from chronic pain, in their study titled “Fibromyalgia is characterized by altered frontal and cerebellar structural covariance brain networks,” Hyungjun Kim from the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Harvard Medical School along with colleagues compared the voxel-based morphometry structural covariance networks in 42 patients with fibromyalgia patients and in 63 age- and sex-matched pain-free adults. Using spectral partitioning, the researchers examined network topology and also investigated white matter connectivity between regions comprising these submodules and assessed the relationship between probabilistic white matter tractography and pain-relevant clinical metrics.
Based on the structural covariance network analysis the results revealed in the patients with FM more connections within the cerebellum, and in the healthy individuals more connections in the frontal lobe. Results from the spectral partitioning identified in FM patients a distinct submodule with cerebellar connections to medial prefrontal and temporal and right inferior parietal lobes, whose gray matter volume was related with depression severity. The researchers also found a relationship between evoked pain sensitivity and volume for a submodule encompassing lateral orbitofrontal, inferior frontal, postcentral, lateral temporal, and insular cortices. Results also showed that the number of white matter fibers between specific submodule regions was also related to measures of clinical pain interference and evoked pain sensitivity.
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Tell us how we can improve this post? | https://fibromyalgianewstoday.com/2015/04/16/researchers-discover-altered-gray-and-white-matter-in-fibromyalgia-patients-brains/ |
Several lines of evidence provide support for a model of abnormal connectivity to explain the underlying neuropathology of autism. However, no study has provided converging evidence of both functional and structural connectivity abnormalities in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In this proposal, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) will be used to investigate abnormalities in neural connectivity in ASD. We will study two domains of impairment (face perception and response to social information) and determine how neural connectivity relates to symptom severity. Twenty- five individuals with high functioning ASD (FSIQ >80) and 25 typically developing (TD) individuals will participate in the study. The TD group will be matched to the ASD group according to age, gender, and FSIQ. White matter structural abnormalities (reduced fractional anisotropy) are hypothesized to be correlated to abnormal functional connectivity in ASD. The degree of abnormality in measures of structural and functional connectivity is expected to be mediated by clinical severity. A Career Development Award is requested in order to develop the skills necessary to conduct multimodal imaging research. The applicant will obtain training in DTI and develop methods for combining and statistically analyzing imaging data from different imaging modalities. Consultation and training from experts in the fields of neuroimaging and autism spectrum disorders will be augmented by coursework and seminars. The implementation of this training plan will yield a cohesive and thorough assessment of the integrity of white matter connections that underlie specific impairments in ASD. | https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/K01-NS059675-05 |
The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.
4,326
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About This Class
Short films are the ultimate calling card in the movie industry, and can be your ticket to an agent, a contract, and even (yes!) an Oscar. In this class, you will learn how to write the screenplay for a ten minute short film, which you can then use as a writing sample or to pursue production.
This class is for anyone wishing to learn the basics of screenwriting in a supportive space. Drawing from my own professional screenwriting experience, I'll teach you how to pitch, outline, write and workshop a 10-minute short film.
This class covers:
- The basics of storytelling: three-act structure and the clockwork of compelling stories
- Elements of Style for screenwriting: how to format it on the page
- The anatomy of a good short film
- How to write a treatment, or synopsis, of your idea
- Developing character: making it seem real
- How to effectively process feedback without feeling dejected
- Seeking production and professional advancement
How it will be taught
The course will be taught as a series of pre-recorded lecture videos that introduce the concepts and how-tos of storytelling and screenwriting.
Students are able to seek feedback from one another by uploading their work to the Project Gallery.
Students will also have access to a Q&A forum where they can find answers to their questions, should they get stuck.
Hope you enjoy!
Meet Your Teacher
Hello! My name is Sarah Zucker. I'm a screenwriter, filmmaker and visual artist based in Los Angeles. I'm a co-founder of The Current Sea, a design team that specializes in Animated GIF.
I am also a JEOPARDY! Champion.
Originally from Canton, OH, I earned a BA in Theater and Creative Writing for the Media from Northwestern University, and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, where I was the recipient of the Venable Herndon Award for Excellence in Graduate Screenwriting.
I served as the Program Administrator for the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation from 2009-2010, and am a professional reader for The Black List, Hollywood's premiere Film and TV script repository.
Hands-on Class Project
Write the screenplay for a 10-minute short film
Storytelling and The Short Film
- Watch the video...
After you’ve watch the video lecture on Three Act Structure and the Anatomy of a Short Film, you should be thinking about the basic elements that make for a good story.
- 3 ideas for a short film
Come up with 3 ideas for a short film to pitch to others - classmates or friends. Since these are pitches, I want you to try and make them as succinct as possible, no more than a paragraph each.
Please post in your WORKSHOP GROUPS and give each other feedback. If you haven't joined a workshop group yet, please do! You will find that feedback from your classmates will be the most invaluable tool as you learn more about the craft of screenwriting.
- Tips From Me...
Tips From Me: Try to be analytical and honest, but always constructive when you read each other's ideas and give feedback. Think about which basic concepts make for more compelling stories, and guide your peers toward choosing the story that would be ideal for a short film.
- Select a Story to Write
Of the Three Pitches you posted in the projects section, select one idea based on the feedback you receive from the instructor and your peers. This will be the idea you write for this class (and please stick to it...even if it gets tricky, it will make for a better learning experience to stick with one idea than to switch to others)
Developing Characters and Writing Treatments
- Write a treatment
Write a treatment of the short film idea you selected from your three pitches. Use this week's lectures on Character Development and Writing a Treatment to guide you, and check out this sample film treatment to familiarize yourself with the formatting.
Elements of Style for Screenwriting and Writing Visually
-
Formatting Tip
When you are finished with your first draft, the easiest way for you to share it in your project is to save it as a .pdf and embed a link.
The easiest way to link to the .pdf is to upload it to your dropbox public folder, and link to it within your project.
- Post a 1-2 page selection
I also encourage you to post a 1-2 page selection within the body of the project itself: This will both illuminate the strongest part of the script for you, as well as entice your classmates to download and read the full script.
- Elements of Style: The Book
***If you really want to continue with screenplay and improve your formatting abilities, I highly recommend the book Elements of Style for Screenwriters, which gave me the title of my lecture. It is an in-depth guide to all the standardized screenwriting style elements.
- First draft of 10-page screenplay.
Share the first draft of your screenplay in .pdf format (use dropbox or google docs), and post a link in your project.
I encourage everyone participating to read each other's scripts and give clear constructive feedback: the best way to learn screenwriting is to give and receive feedback!
Rewriting and Seeking Production
- Project feedback!
We're in the thick of project feedback now! Submit a rewritten draft of your screenplay based on the feedback you've been getting from classmates in the project section.
All students who participate in the class and submit a draft of a screenplay will receive feedback from the instructor, using a rubric of story structure, visual writing, character development, and elements of style.
- Completed 10-pg screenplay
All students who have participated in the course will receive feedback from the instructor.
Students are highly encouraged to read each other's work and give constructive feedback, as this will make you think analytically about what makes a screenplay work.
Additional Resources
-
Resources for This Unit:
- Three Act Structure Guidesheet
- The Maiden and the Princess (password: hammond)
When watching The Maiden and the Princess take note of the film's plot structure, and how it differs from that of a longer, feature-length film. If you have any questions or interesting observations, please post them in the discussion section!
One of the best ways to learn the correlation between page and screen is to read screenplays for films you can watch. Check out the collection of sample screenplays I have provided for the purpose of this class.
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Character Development Worksheet
(In editable .doc form for ease of use if you wish to fill it out)
(This shows you the style your treatment should be written in. Keep it to one page maximum, single-spaced in a 12pt font)
(A discussion forum here where you can find short films to watch, and add your own!)
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This week's resources:
- Elements of Style Guide for Screenwriting
- Workarounds for Word Processors
- Screenplay for North by Northwest (Cropduster scene: pgs. 97-99)
The Elements of Style guide will be especially useful, as you will begin writing the first draft of your screenplay this week. The best way to get started is to jump right in and see what you can express in the screenplay format.
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Make sure to keep reading screenplays of films! This is the best way to teach yourself the correlation between the page and the screen.
Take a look at the sample screenplays I have provided for the purposes of this class.
Class Ratings
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Reviews Archive
In October 2018, we updated our review system to improve the way we collect feedback. Below are the reviews written before that update.
Why Join Skillshare? | https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Screenwriting-Writing-the-10-minute-Short/1928011380 |
Building on the skills learned in ENG 203, students will refine their critical ability to analyze and evaluate screenplays, and their visual storytelling skills, in order to produce an effective first act of a full-length screenplay.
Recognize the underlying principles behind writing a script, including harnessing conflict, creating drama, developing dynamic characters, and telling a story visually.
Appraise the traditional three-act structure, setup, development and resolution of a screenplay.
Evaluate peer screenplays with respect to dramatic premise, dialogue, action points, complications, subplots, reversals, character development, structure, climax, resolution, and unity of theme.
Apply the accepted format for screenplay to define the aspects of visual storytelling that separate the screenplay form from other forms of writing.
Apply course concepts in the completion of a draft of the first act (25-30 pages) of a feature-length script.
Weekly reading and writing assignments. Viewing of and response to required films. Participation in online discussion boards in a workshop format. A 25-30 page draft of the first act of a screenplay, written in proper screenplay format. | https://www.nu.edu/ourprograms/collegeoflettersandsciences/artsandhumanities/courses/eng303/ |
* 1. How likely are you to sign up for the following CMCM workshops?
Not likely at all. Somewhat likely. Very likely.
ABCs of Audio Engineering (Fundamental principles of achieving great audio -- on location or in the studio.) Not likely at all.
ABCs of Audio Engineering (Fundamental principles of achieving great audio -- on location or in the studio.) Somewhat likely.
ABCs of Audio Engineering (Fundamental principles of achieving great audio -- on location or in the studio.) Very likely.
After Effects Essentials (Take your video to the next level with motion graphics and visual effects.) Not likely at all.
After Effects Essentials (Take your video to the next level with motion graphics and visual effects.) Somewhat likely.
After Effects Essentials (Take your video to the next level with motion graphics and visual effects.) Very likely.
Digital Storytelling (Learn to structure your story for maximum impact from beginning to end.) Not likely at all.
Digital Storytelling (Learn to structure your story for maximum impact from beginning to end.) Somewhat likely.
Digital Storytelling (Learn to structure your story for maximum impact from beginning to end.) Very likely.
Film Music History: Art of the Film Score (How music supports film's aesthetic & narrative elements.) Not likely at all.
Film Music History: Art of the Film Score (How music supports film's aesthetic & narrative elements.) Somewhat likely.
Film Music History: Art of the Film Score (How music supports film's aesthetic & narrative elements.) Very likely.
Improv for Life (Channel the skills necessary to think on your feet and instantly expand on an idea.) Not likely at all.
Improv for Life (Channel the skills necessary to think on your feet and instantly expand on an idea.) Somewhat likely.
Improv for Life (Channel the skills necessary to think on your feet and instantly expand on an idea.) Very likely.
Interview Techniques (Draw out your subject with insightful thought-provoking questions.) Not likely at all.
Interview Techniques (Draw out your subject with insightful thought-provoking questions.) Somewhat likely.
Interview Techniques (Draw out your subject with insightful thought-provoking questions.) Very likely.
Making Music Videos (Interpret a song visually through art direction, camera work, and editing.) Not likely at all.
Making Music Videos (Interpret a song visually through art direction, camera work, and editing.) Somewhat likely.
Making Music Videos (Interpret a song visually through art direction, camera work, and editing.) Very likely.
Manifest Your (tele)Vision (Clarify your concept and get clear about the process of pre-production.) Not likely at all.
Manifest Your (tele)Vision (Clarify your concept and get clear about the process of pre-production.) Somewhat likely.
Manifest Your (tele)Vision (Clarify your concept and get clear about the process of pre-production.) Very likely.
Photoshop Fundamentals (Get comfortable and confident manipulating digital images.) Not likely at all.
Photoshop Fundamentals (Get comfortable and confident manipulating digital images.) Somewhat likely.
Photoshop Fundamentals (Get comfortable and confident manipulating digital images.) Very likely.
Presentation & Performance (Improve your communication skills on camera -- and off!) Not likely at all.
Presentation & Performance (Improve your communication skills on camera -- and off!) Somewhat likely.
Presentation & Performance (Improve your communication skills on camera -- and off!) Very likely.
Screenwriting (Uncover the secrets of creating a compelling script -- from concept to climas.) Not likely at all.
Screenwriting (Uncover the secrets of creating a compelling script -- from concept to climas.) Somewhat likely.
Screenwriting (Uncover the secrets of creating a compelling script -- from concept to climas.) Very likely.
Sketch Writing (Create your own sketch idea and capture it on video in the Marin TV studio.) Not likely at all.
Sketch Writing (Create your own sketch idea and capture it on video in the Marin TV studio.) Somewhat likely.
Sketch Writing (Create your own sketch idea and capture it on video in the Marin TV studio.) Very likely.
Social Media (Learn to leverage today's communication platforms to your full advantage.) Not likely at all.
Social Media (Learn to leverage today's communication platforms to your full advantage.) Somewhat likely.
Social Media (Learn to leverage today's communication platforms to your full advantage.) Very likely.
Works-in-Progress (Bring in a clip of your project for feedback from a former Hollywood film editor.) Not likely at all.
Works-in-Progress (Bring in a clip of your project for feedback from a former Hollywood film editor.) Somewhat likely.
Works-in-Progress (Bring in a clip of your project for feedback from a former Hollywood film editor.) Very likely.
* 2. Do you prefer one-session, three-session, or four-session workshops?
* 3. How affordable do you find CMCM classes?
Dirt cheap Reasonably priced Too rich for my blood!
* 4. In general, how helpful do you find CMCM classes?
Useless. Helpful. I couldn't live without them.
* 6. Would you like a Marin TV T-shirt? If so, give us your name and come into CMCM to pick it up. Thanks! | https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Z52Y839 |
With the shift from individual acquisition to artifact mediated collaborative participation, using different modes of technology in teaching writing is a great opportunity to further enhance students’ writing competency. We have begun to ask questions about how digital video assignments enhance the student's composition process. Results from this study and the collected data—including students' brainstorming activities, interactions, script writings and revisions, reflections, and feedback—will hopefully initiate a community of inquiry and discussion/reflections about curriculum design and encourage important adjustments based on students’ feedback and progress.
Digital Media continues to diversify the way we teach. Specifically, it offers fresh challenges and options to enhance student-teacher interactions in our classrooms. Within the Academic Writing Blended Learning initiative, we find that such interactions are fostered through the implementation of video/screencasting coursework. In particular, we’ve implemented two key projects—"digital storytelling" and "group rhetorical analysis.” With the individual digital storytelling project students are required to create a video which builds academic inquiry through a personal experience. This gives students the unique opportunity to employ both audio and visual elements (along with scripts/text) to initiate the inquiry process and engage with their own storytelling/questions. The group rhetorical analysis project proves more challenging as it requires analysis of key rhetorical concepts. The video elements in this case help students to employ these concepts while analyzing them in videos of their choice. These assignments enhance teaching and student learning as they actively engage students by having them create/collaborate on animated conversations/videos. In fact, these videos/screencasts become digital windows for inquiry and research since students critically address and actively engage their audiences while investigating issues from different angles. These assignments are creative but critical tools for literally moving students beyond the personal space to research and consider an issue from various perspectives. Research suggests that when students are invited to begin a writing or research task with a personal reaction or experience, they develop a good foundation for later critical thinking (citation). As students get acquainted with the first digital assignment, they become more creative while critical of their writing/composing practices when producing their group digital projects.
Student evaluations/feedback through self assessment reveal strong evidence of effectiveness. Select feedback is provided below. :
Editing and revising were the two common writing strategies we used when creating our project. There were many aspects of the argument we continued to identify as we worked on our project.
During out drafting we took advantage of the planning and all worked together to draft out script so it would be ready to go to make into the video.
Planning and drafting were the two most used writing strategies for this project. We planned the script and the project before actually writing the script. Then we drafted it and finished the project.
My group used the revising portion the most. We divided the work very evenly but before we would submit something the other two group members would look over it just to double check.
This assignment in my opinion was targeted at making my writing clear and concise. Communication was key in this project.
Using multiple modes made this assignment more organized and effective. Having an individual rhetorical analysis gave each one of us a good idea of what this project would entail, and a written script gave us a good starting point for the assignment. We could then use these written portions and incorporate them into the video and make sure that we included all the necessary aspects required by the rubric.
This assignment helped me improve my writing skills, because since the final product was a video, we had to make sure that the writing was concise and to the point in order to convey a clear message within the allotted time. It also helped me develop a clear thesis and effective supporting evidence.
Our group focused on drafting and revising. We spend a large portion of our time drafting the script for the video, and then going back to make sure that everything we needed to include was there and to make our language more precise.
I liked using multiple modes, as making video projects are always hard work but fun to do! And having good skills in communication and writing are great things to have and improving them never hurts.
I think our group did a good job of including all of the important aspects of a rhetorical analysis into the video and including clips/pictures that kept the audience engaged. We also exhibited great teamwork, because all of the members gave constructive criticism to one another's work, which was more helpful than just agreeing with everything to get the work done faster.
I think this assignment helped with my group working skills.
The combination of the of the modes I felt were beneficial to the group project because it made you think in different ways in order to prepare and complete the project, instead just writing a paper explaining the argument.
It helped me improve my organization, because you needed to make sure everything you were saying was in a logical manner.
Explanation and editing were the strategies we used the most. Explaining is important because you need to make sure your audience understands what you are talking about. Editing is important to make sure you did not make any dumb mistakes that may confused the audience.
My writing improved because I was editing a lot of what my other group members wrote, so I got to see a contrast in writing style, which I may include in my future writings.
The most beneficial aspect was learning how to critically and deeply evaluate our video.
I liked using the multiple modes. I think that is what 'blended learning' is supposed to be about. In today's world, balancing these multiple forms of communication is a necessary skill.
By having personal interactions with other view points, I think I was able to see my writing from different perspectives, in turn allowing me to revise my writing while catering to the audience. Seeing actual reactions to your writing as a beginning writer gets the point across better.
The assignment made my writing skills more analytical and concise by making me aware of rhetorical appeals and better able to decide what to include in a final analysis.
I do believe that the script format helped me to write in a more consistent way, because I had to ensure that my speaking roles in the video flowed smoothly with the roles of my teammates. The assignment also pushed me to write more concisely and to more precisely choose my diction, in efforts to keep the attention of my audience and to refrain from droning on.
The combination of the different modes helps foster a more creative approach.
The strengths are in showing examples of my analysis in the film. I was able to make a claim in my analysis and immediately back it up with a clip.
The assignment allowed me to realize what kind of powerful arguments are going on in present day society. In addition, I view commercial ads much differently than I used to. Instead of casually watching various ads, I begin to analyze and see what kind of argument each ad is trying to make and what rhetorical strategies they are using.
I believe I was able to work on the evaluation portion of our writing process because the rhetorical analysis assignment involved thoroughly examining an ad and locating specific rhetorical devices that were used for the author to really make his argument impacting. After finding the devices, I then had to analyze them which I believe is a crucial ability necessary for writing assignments because a student could take apart a source and analyze certain points of it for their paper.
I believe that rhetorical analysis project teaches students that when writing a paper, a source must be investigated thoroughly to hand pick certain areas and then analyze those areas to use for your paper.
We have begun to ask questions about how these assignments enhance the student composition process, and our project here is to continue the research into this question. We aim to collect further date by analyzing students’ texts, composing practices, and presentations, while paying particular attention to how the students use multimodalties to collaborate and interact to present their thoughts and arguments to their intended audiences. The goal our project is to allow research and practice to inform each other in ways that help develop pedagogical practices aimed at engaging writers in 21st century academic literacy skills. By effectively interacting with the students, instruction and research will be integrated into a dynamic learning process.
Very little equipment is 'necessary' to employ digital video assignments in our classrooms. Popular Digital Storytelling software includes but is certainly not limited to:
iMovie - import video footage and edit video clips (Mac)
Final Cut Express- video editing software (Mac)
Garage Band - used to create and edit music (Mac)
Audacity - digital audio editor and recording application
Adobe Photoshop - graphics editing
Camtasia - screen video capture program
Windows MovieMaker- video editing (PC)
Microsoft Photo Story 3- for Windows XP
Students have access to many of these resources.
Again, very little equipment and/or cost is 'necessary' to employ digital video assignments in our classrooms. Popular Digital Storytelling software includes but is certainly not limited to:
Students have access to many of these resources for free and can even create video projects through their home computers, cell phones, and/or tablets.
A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI): http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/owiprinciples
Handa, Carolyn. 'Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook.' Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004.
The goal of this project is to allow research and practice to inform each other in ways that help develop pedagogical practices aimed at engaging writers in 21st century academic literacy skills. Thank you for your consideration. | https://secure.onlinelearningconsortium.org/effective_practices/moving-individual-communal-space-through-digital-multimodal-composing |
Update: Here’s our full paper announcement with source-code release…
I am working on a project to support the use of Natural Language Processing in the clinical domain. Modern NLP systems often make use of machine learning techniques. However, physicians and other clinicians, who are interested in analyzing clinical records, may be unfamiliar with these methods. Our project aims to enable such domain experts make use of Natural Language Processing using a point-and-click interface . It combines novel text-visualizations to help its users make sense of NLP results, revise models and understand changes between revisions. It allows them to make any necessary corrections to computed results, thus forming a feedback loop and helping improve the accuracy of the models.
Here’s the walk-through video of the prototype tool that we have built:
At this point we are redesigning some portions of our tool based on feedback from a formative user study with physicians and clinical researchers. Our next step would be to conduct an empirical evaluation of the tool to test our hypotheses about its design goals.
We will be presenting a demo of our tool at the AMIA Summit on Clinical Research Informatics and also at the ACM IUI Workshop on Visual Text Analytics in March. | https://www.trivedigaurav.com/blog/clinical-text-analysis-using-interactive-natural-language-processing/ |
INTERVIEW: Edward Norton, Writer/Director/Star of Motherless Brooklyn
Andrew Bloomenthal interviews Edward Norton on his passion project, the epic detective drama based on Jonathan Lethem's novel, Motherless Brooklyn, which Norton adapted, directed, and stars in.
SELLING YOUR SCREENPLAY: Writers/Director Heather DeVan and Jason DeVan Talk About The New Horror Movie Along Came The Devil 2
Writers Heather DeVan and Jason DeVan talk about their Supernatural, Horror Thriller, Movie Along Came The Devil 2. Jason Devan is also the director and Heather DeVan is an actor in the film. Topics include, moving to Los Angeles and making a movie sequel.
MEET THE READER: Main Elements of Dramatic Storytelling – Suspenseful Surprises
Ray Morton explains the power of using suspense and surprise in dramatic storytelling.
SELLING YOUR SCREENPLAY: Writers Henry Jacobson and Avra Fox-Lerner Discuss Their Latest Thriller, Bloodline
Screenwriters Henry Jacobson and Avra Fox-Lerner discuss their new crime thriller feature film, Bloodline, and how they were able to attach Seann William Scott to the project.
How to Process Feedback On Your Work
TV writer and showrunner Ross Brown shares invaluable advice on how to process feedback on your script to improve the story without taking it personally.
Understanding Screenwriting: Crash! Run! Invasion! Riot!
In his continuing column, Understanding Screenwriting, Tom Stempel analyzes Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw; Brittany Runs a Marathon; Official Secrets, and The Big House.
INTERVIEW: 19-Year-Old Tribeca Film Festival Winning Burning Cane Filmmaker Phillip Youmans
Susan Kouguell interviews 19-year old Phillip Youmans about his journey as a writer and filmmaker, and bringing Burning Cane to the screen.
Exploring the Roots of Evil, a New Series on CBS
Heather Taylor gives an overview of Evil, a new CBS series by the Robert and Michelle King, featured at the 2019 Tribeca TV Festival in New York City.
SELLING YOUR SCREENPLAY: Writer and Director Henry Alex Rubin Talks About His Latest Feature, the Military Action Drama Semper Fi
Writer/Director Henry Alex Rubin discusses his new feature film, Semper Fi, how he got involved with that project, and his award-winning documentary, Murderball, that launched his career as a director. | https://www.scriptmag.com/features |
Course applications are now being accepted. APPLICATION DEADLINE: Tuesday, June 22 at 2pm PT.
Acceptances start after the deadline, and occur on a rolling basis.
Revise your feature film screenplay, with an accomplished screenwriter as your guide. In this intensive live, eight-week online course, you will rewrite your screenplay through assignments and feedback from small group workshops.
In class sessions, you will examine successful screenplays, gain a deeper understanding of core screenwriting concepts and how they move from script to screen. You will then move into a small group breakout session with a course advisor where you will workshop your writing and those of your peers, and continue to revise your script. The course concludes with a one-on-one mentoring session with your advisor focused on your project.
By the end of the course, you will:
- sharpen your understanding of screenplay structure.
- hone your major dramatic question.
- refine the world and tone for your screenplay.
- further develop your characters, their dramatic problems, and antagonists.
- sharpen your dialogue.
- learn how to give notes to your peers and process notes from your peers and advisors.
- understand how to approach a rewrite.
This course is ideal for:
- writers who have completed a draft of their feature-length screenplay and are looking for guidance from other writers and/or experienced screenwriters in revising their screenplay.
- writers who have completed a full draft of their feature-length screenplay and want to receive more formal education about screenwriting and/or want to take their work into a workshop setting.
Participants will be placed in small group workshops of about nine. To apply, you should have completed a draft of the screenplay you plan to work on in the course.
COURSE DETAILS
The course will be held live in our virtual classroom. All sessions are recorded for registered participants who are unable to attend live.
Sundance Co//ab provides accommodations and support services to participants with disabilities. Accommodations and services are designed to meet the needs of each participant. Please email us at [email protected] to arrange for services. .
- DURATION: Eight weeks, July 20 - September 12
- SCHEDULE: Tuesday, 1pm - 3:30pm PT
- Extended last class session: Tuesday, August 31 - 1pm - 4pm PT
- One-on-one mentoring sessions are held between Sep 7 - Sep 12
- APPLICATION DEADLINE: Tuesday, June 22 at 2pm PT
TO APPLY
Click the yellow “Apply Now” button on the top right of the page.
We also offer a limited number of need-based scholarships for participants who would otherwise be unable to attend. (Scholarships are limited to one person per year (from date of issue)). Both the course application AND the scholarship application must be submitted before the application deadline. To apply for a scholarship FIRST submit your course application through the yellow button above. THEN submit your scholarship application through the link below. Submit BOTH before the application deadline has passed. Applications for a scholarship without a course application will not be considered. Apply for a scholarship to this course. | https://collab.sundance.org/catalog/Screenwriting-Revising-Your-Feature-202107 |
PhD course: Maximize the impact of your presentation
Learn at this course to structure presentations, target an audience, using body language, rhetorical devices and visual aids in your oral presentation.
Info about event
Time
Location
University of Copenhagen, Panum - room 7.15.149
Organizer
Dates for this course:
Day 1 (1pm – 4 pm): 6 February 2023
Day 2 (1pm – 4.30 pm): either 21, 22 , 24, 27 or 28 February (by registration let us know which date for the second course day you prefer)
Registration:
Limited vacancy (30 participants), first come first served. Send e-mail to [email protected] with “Communication” in subject line before the 30th of January 2023 (Free registration). When registering, please provide your preferred dates for the 2nd day of the course.
Download programme
Aim
The aim of this course is to improve the oral communication capacity of the individual participant. After the course the participants will increase their confidence in presenting their own research results to the public, foundations, decision-makers, colleagues, peers and students. The participants will receive personal guidance and feedback on their presentation technique, which will enable them to continue to work with the new skills on their own.
Content
The course emphasizes the practical element of the dissemination and is based on the participants’ own research. You will work with your own presentation – e.g. a conference or a poster presentation you are about to give. In this way, the course taps into a busy everyday life and serves as preparation for a given presentation activity. The course will cover aspects such as use of voice, body language, storytelling, methods for building a presentation, the use of visual instruments and structural tools. It should be pointed out that although the teaching is based on rhetorical and performative disciplines, it is not a question of making the participant an actor – but strengthening your performative preparedness (e.g. handling nervousness) skills and not least impact.
Form and duration
The course runs over two days (three hours a day).
The focus of the first day will be structuring presentations; targeting audience; body language; rhetorical devices; use of visual aids. The focus of the second day will be your performative competencies. You will be divided in small groups of 6 participants. You are expected to prepare a short oral presentation (duration max. 8 min.) prior to the second day of the course. The topic must be either a presentation of your own research project in general or of a central part of your PhD project. The presentation must comprise start, middle and end, and have a specific target group.
You will receive personal guidance and feedback on your presentation technique, including your visual aids, language, body language, content, and overall effectiveness.
Key learning outcomes
Upon completion of the course, participants are expected to have obtained: | https://dcacademy.dk/display/artikel/maximize-the-impact-of-your-presentation |
A journey map is a holistic, visual representation of a user’s experience with a product or service over time. Journey maps combine data and insight from other research and discovery methods to provide a detailed description from the user’s point of view of steps taken, decisions made, successes, pain points, and emotions felt.
Journey maps help designers understand the user’s motivations and needs at each step of a process, from the earliest earliest phases of researching a product or service all the way through adoption, providing crucial insight for designing solutions that better meet user and business needs. The journey map’s visual and storytelling elements also help it communicate research data and findings to broader audiences within an organization.
Preparation
Journey Mapping is often more effective when it is informed by these complementary methods.
Contextual Interviewing
Observation of users performing tasks in their own environment
Task Analysis
Observe users in action to understand how they perform tasks to achieve goals
Use Cases
Written descriptions of how users will perform tasks with your product or on your website
Scenarios
A specific user's context, motivations, and goals for visiting a website or app
Stakeholder Interviewing
Understanding the perspective and influence of those invested in a project's success
User Interviewing
Understand the tasks and motivations of the user group for whom you are designing
Steps
- Define business and user goals
Clearly articulate the organizational goals for the product or service, the design and business goals for the mapping exercise, and the goals of the target user the map is to represent.
- Gather research data
Effective journey maps are based on qualitative and quantitative data collected across a range of activities. Review and incorporate existing research as you create your journey map, and note where gaps in understanding indicate the need for additional research.
- Identify touchpoints and channels
Touchpoints describe what users do and how they do it. Channels describe where the interaction takes place (e.g. website, call center, native app, or in-store).
- Create an Empathy Map
Empathy maps describe what users do, think, feel, say, and hear in a given situation. They help you understand and articulate users’ emotional state, and provide the basis for illustrating the peaks and valleys of frustration, anxiety, happiness, etc.
- Sketch the journey
Visualize the order in which users exhibit behaviors, use information, make decisions, and feel emotions. Group elements into phases related to the narrative of each user. Integrate touchpoints, channels, empathy insights, and other research to show the user’s course of motion across the timescale as a whole. Include the user’s feelings at each touchpoint.
- Review, refine, and revise
Review your draft journey with team members and subject matter experts to gain new insight and integrate new perspectives. Use these to identify additional opportunities to make your journey map more accurate, more expressive of the data, and more useful for the design process. From time to time, evaluate your map to make sure it remains accurate. Revise as necessary to account for evolving research, product development, and user and business needs.
Outcomes
Journey Mapping typically produces insight and solutions focused on these areas:
User Preference
Elements, arrangements, or qualities of experience design that user state or show are valuable to them.
User Behavior
Information about how users currently use a site, service, or resource. | https://uxmethods.org/method/JourneyMapping/ |
This is Part 3 of Lesson 7 of Project Resilience curriculum.
Students use the resilience toolkit to design a detailed plan for adaptation projects that would benefit their school campus.
Learning Objectives
- Students will analyze and appreciate the value of resilience toolkits.
- Students will design projects to address environmental issues on their school campus as part of a school resilience plan.
Time
- Preparation time: about 10 minutes to gather supplies
- Class time: 50 minutes for activity
Educational Standards
Louisiana Student Standards for Science:
- HS-EVS1-3: Analyze and interpret data about the consequences of environmental decisions to determine the risk-benefit values of actions and practices implemented for selected issues.
- HS-ESS3-4: Evaluate or refine a technological solution that reduces impacts of human activities on natural systems.
Additional NGSS Dimensions:
- Science and Engineering Practices: Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions
- Disciplinary Core Ideas: ETS1.C: Optimizing the Design Solution
Materials
- Student access to computers/tablets
- Project Planning Student Sheet (PDF) (from Lesson 7: Part 2)
Preparation
- Talk to the school administration about the students’ projects. Let them know the students may be contacting them with questions about the impacts of environmental problems on their school campus. Students may also ask about the feasibility of their adaptation project designs on campus.
- Review theProject Planning Student Sheet
Directions
Dig in to project planning (50 min)
- Students will use Sections 2 and 3 of the Project Planning Student Sheet to outline their resilience projects. Have students begin with questions 1 and 2 of Section 2.
- With question 1, students should identify a goal for their project. This goal should be attainable and address their school problem. Let students know this goal may shift as they design the actual project, but the goal will help them design their project.
- Question 2 focuses on identifying possible secondary benefits of their projects (educational components, improving water quality, providing green space, etc.).
- Students should also make a sketch of their project. Have them label their sketch to identify the parts of the project (this will be a basic sketch to help students envision their ideal project and will not be part of their final presentation).
- Once students finish questions 1 and 2, they will move on to the project plan. Questions 3 through 5 ask students to outline their project, including the project’s location, steps for completion, and necessary materials. Have students divide responsibilities within their groups to complete the project plan and to prepare for the presentation. The presentation will need to follow the Project Planning Student Sheet and include the visual. Consider having each group fulfill the following roles:
- Visual Artist- This student will create a project sketch to serve as a visual in their presentation. The visual should be detailed and include all parts of the project.
- Students may need access to the internet to look up images of project examples and access to supplies to make a large sketch (poster board, etc.).
- The visual (or a picture of it) will be included in the final school resilience plan.
- Materials & Services Researcher- Will require two students. These students will create a detailed list of necessary materials for their project. If professional help is needed, students should also include a list of professionals and their contact information (contractors, engineers, etc.).
- Students may need access to the internet to look up similar projects and possible materials.
- Editor- This student will revise the plan document and create an outline for the presentation.
- They might need to do some additional research online or by reviewing content from Project Resilience Lessons 1-6.
- Visual Artist- This student will create a project sketch to serve as a visual in their presentation. The visual should be detailed and include all parts of the project.
- Before beginning the project plan (questions 3 through 5), have students look at Section 3 of the Project Planning Student Sheet document. As a group, they should brainstorm answers to the Thinking Deeply About Your Project section of the planning document to determine what roles are needed throughout the project as well as address any special considerations, anticipate challenges, pose questions that need to be answered, etc.
- Students should spend the remainder of class time working on their tasks for the project plan and presentation. By the end of class time, students should have a fairly complete rough draft of their project plan and presentation. Out of class time will likely be needed to complete the plans and prepare for presentations. Students will present their plans and have the opportunity to revise them based on peer feedback in the next lesson.
Assign Journal Prompt #18.
Prompt #18:Today’s lesson asked you to brainstorm possible adaptation plans for your school campus. What was challenging about making a list of adaptation projects? If unlimited funds were available, how would you adapt your school campus to face Louisiana’s land loss problem? List the projects that would be included in your adaptation plan and describe each project’s benefits to your school. Why are these projects not possible right now?
Note: Students will continue working on this journal entry for the next two parts.
Background
Refer to Lesson 5 & 6 background information as needed.
Credits
This activity was developed for Project Resilience, funded by the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. | https://scied.ucar.edu/activity/project-design |
To respond in writing 2: modify (anything, such as a story): induce it to be revised, as ina: prepare (contributed content) for publication b: to modify (previously published material) for use in a different publication or context c: to revise (a proposal, design, etc.) d: to alter by adding or removing parts e: to transform into a different form f: to make new written or printed.
(The first of two entries) transitive verb1: to write a response2: to revise (anything, such as a story): to induce it to be revised, as in opinion or style3: to make changes in (a manuscript) in preparation for publication4: to change something about (a person) so as to improve his or her qualities or character5: to alter (the text of) an existing writing, usually because you want to include more information or put it in a different form6: to create another version of (something written) - we rewrite stories all the time; sometimes we even rewrite history
Rewriting is the process of drafting and re-drafting a document with the aim of achieving satisfactory improvement. This may involve making many attempts at revision before finding one that satisfies you.
In journalism and literature, rewriting is the process of editing a document to correct grammar, syntax, and word choice. The goal is to produce a clear and concise piece of writing that holds readers' attention and does not contain any errors.
In advertising, rewriting refers to the practice of creating new advertisements by replacing or adding to parts of old ones. This is often done to increase effectiveness or save money.
2. To revise is to write again, especially in a new or improved manner. The editor felt that writing another version of the book would help it reach a wider audience.
3. Rewritten software is code written anew. Most programs are rewritten at some time in order to make them more efficient or compatible with new technologies.
4. A rewritten song is one that has been completely reworked by a new writer.
5. The rewritten screenplay will feature an entirely new set of characters and be set in a different time period.
6. The rewritten novel deals with different characters and takes place in a different setting.
7. The film adaptation of the rewritten script will use different actors than the original movie.
8. The rewritten article discusses issues that weren't included in the original paper.
To create a new or different version of (anything, such as a movie, music, or other work): to transform (something) into something else re-create. Noun: a new edition of a book, with changes made by the author or publisher.
The word "remake" comes from Latin meaning "to repeat," and this word is often used in reference to films or other creative works that reuse many of the elements of another film or novel. For example, when John Ford remade his own film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance he was simply making another version of the same story using similar settings and characters. Ford did not plagiarize Rogerenes' script; he just wanted to make another film about a principled man fighting for justice.
"Remake" has also become a popular term among film critics who feel that current movies are repeating themselves rather than innovating. For example, one critic wrote that Twilight was a "remake/rip-off/parody" of Harry Potter because both films feature young adults struggling to find their place in a world that seems unwilling to accept them.
In conclusion, the word "remake" means to create a new version of something existing or to repeat an existing version of something others may find interesting or useful.
Revise and resubmit implies exactly what it says: if you revise and resubmit the paper, we will take another look at it (hopefully with the same editor and reviewers, but not necessarily). Typically, this signifies that the needed adjustments are significant enough that it will be sent back to the reviewers. Sometimes authors decide that they want to submit their paper again even though many changes have been made; in this case, they first need to resolve all conflicts and then write a short letter explaining why they think their paper is now acceptable.
The main advantage of revise and resubmit is that it can lead to improvements which would otherwise have been impossible without changing the paper itself. For example, an author might have realized while writing up her/his response to comments that a necessary step was missing from the original submission. With revise and resubmit, this problem can be easily fixed by simply including it in the new version of the paper.
There is also some risk involved in revise and resubmit. If the paper is rejected again, then there is no way to fix errors discovered after starting work on the revision. Also, if the editor or reviewers feel that additional experiments are needed to support key claims in the paper, these may not be possible to perform within the time frame required for revise and resubmit.
Finally, authors should be aware of how long it takes for us to respond to revisions. | https://bartlesvilleschools.org/what-rewrite-means |
As someone who had never read a script in their life before writing a podcast, the writing was definitely one of the parts that gave me the most anxiety. I was worried that there were resources and tips and tricks I had no idea of, and didn’t even know where to look.
So the first thing I want to say is: you don’t have to have any kind of previous experience to be a good writer and storyteller! As social creatures whose cultures are literally built around stories, who bond over stories and who consume them regularly, you already have an innate sense of what a good story is. If you’re a prolific reader, watcher of movies/TV, or listener of fiction podcasts, all of that time you’ve spent consuming stories is honing your intuitive sense for what works and what doesn’t, even if you don’t know the academic terms for why it works.
That said, you can find the following on this page to help you refine those instincts and translate them into good audio stories:
- Resources specific to writing for fiction podcasts
- Resources for storytelling & writing for actual play podcasts
- General writing resources
- How to format your podcast scripts
- Writing apps/software
Podcast specific resources
As you can imagine, there isn’t a ton out there yet that’s specifically aimed at writing for fiction podcasts. However, there are a few things:
- Bombs Always Beep, an ebook by KC Wayland (now available in print form too)
- Start With This, a new podcast from the creators of Welcome to Night Vale (a lot of the exercises can be applied to any creative project, but it’s heavily contextualized through their work on WTNV and other fiction podcasts)
- Advice for Radio Drama Beginners via Gabriel Urbina, of Wolf 359 (who also has some other great resources on character creation and story structure)
- How is narration in audio a useful tool?
Storytelling & writing for DMs/GMs and actual play
When you’re a GM of an actual play podcast, the game itself is your medium as much as the audio created by you and the players is. Because of this, I definitely recommend reading up about mechanics and thinking about whether the metaphors and mechanics built into your game support the kind of story you’re trying to tell. Some games are more of a “blank palette” than others, but it’s still worth thinking critically about. (I wrote a little bit about how I think about this for Serendipity City here, and I’ll probably write more in the future.)
Given that, I definitely recommend the following resources for learning more:
- Stop Hack & Roll (particularly their episode on true genre)
- Modifier podcast
- The Roleplaying Game Design Panelcast
- RPG Design Friends podcast
Other resources I’ve found useful for improving the ways I think about telling stories through games (including actual play media) include:
- This thread on interactive storytelling (written by someone who makes videogames, but still very useful)
- The Tips at the Table podcast by the Friends at the Table crew isn’t free (it unlocks at $5/month on their Patreon) but I’ve found it thought-provoking & super useful, and it has insights for both players & DMs
- Listening to other DMs talk on podcasts (including I Am Hear and Game Closet)
And, as mentioned up top, just hearing other people who are amazing GMs do it well will change the way you think about your craft and help hone it. I recommend listening to other actual plays for that reason (and to support your fellow creators!). Some of my faves (outside of the very popular Friends at the Table and the Adventure Zone) are Unexplored Places, Ghostpuncher Corps, Party of One, Halcyon Station, and the Magpies. You can find a lot more at RPGCasts.
General writing/storytelling resources:
- Writing Excuses is one of my favorite writing resources and the only writing podcast I regularly listen to. It’s down-to-earth & focused on the craft of writing. The episodes are short (20m or less) and every one ends with an exercise. Some of the ones I’ve found most useful are the three-prong character development episodes, the elemental genre episodes, and the MICE quotient (touched on again here).
- A lot of people find resources created for screenplays to be useful for podcast writing; The Anatomy of Story comes highly recommended by people I trust.
- While they’re resources intended for prose, I found Write Your Novel From the Middle and Take Off Your Pants!: Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing (which is at least partially inspired by the Anatomy of Story) both helpful for thinking analytically about structure and how it impacts character development.
Miscellaneous writing-related posts/tidbits/articles I found helpful:
- How to Revise for Structure
- The Beat Sheet Calculator
- Character development charting tool
- Sanderson’s First Law (of magic systems in fiction)
- Brainstorming the Wound in Your Character’s Backstory
- The Writing With Color tumblr is a great resource on how to avoid basic errors when writing characters of color (their tropes/stereotypes to avoid masterlist is here)
- Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions
Formatting for podcast scripts
- This was another big hang-up for me when I started, but guess what: there’s no set format for podcast scripts!
- A lot of people use screenplay formatting for their podcasts – here’s more info on that. (I find screenplay formatting hard to use/learn, and it messes with my creative flow, so I just write with sound notes in (italicized parentheses) and make it clear who’s talking when.)
- The important thing is making sure that it makes sense and conveys the necessary information to you and anyone else you’re working with. If that’s good, then don’t worry about it.
Writing software & apps
For brainstorming:
- Gingko (free, online) is great for brainstorming and seeing structure at multiple levels
- Notebook.ai (free, online) is great for worldbuilding and saving/organizing your worldbuilding notes
- I like to save inspiration in an Evernote (free version available, online with app options) notebook, tagged with whatever project I think they might work for. I also have an ongoing “swipe file” note where I’ll jot down any random ideas I have so that I can return to them later and flesh them out, or look at it when I’m feeling uninspired and not sure what to work on next.
- MindMeister is a free mind-mapping tool
For writing:
Ask six writers what their favorite writing tool is and you’ll get ten different opinions. Here’s a few options:
- Draft (free, online) has version control and a minimal interface
- Novlr ($10/month, online) is intended for novels but has some intriguing organization features,
- Scrivener ($45, Mac, Windows, iOS) is a common favorite but can have a steep learning curve
- Ulysses ($5/mo or $40/yr, Mac, iOS) is my personal favorite for its intuitive and minimal interface but is Mac only
- Don’t get caught up on the tool, though — notebooks and/or Google Docs is plenty if you’re happy with it!
For writing in screenplay format: | https://selftaughtsolo.com/story/ |
Take measure of your assessment practices. Are they helping students understand and attain learning goals? Are they helping you refine your instruction, give feedback, and report on student progress? Learn research-based practices for using quality formative assessments aligned with solid grading practices, and enjoy the confidence that comes from knowing your instructional decisions are based on sound assessment data.
Select a one-day overview, or dig deeper over two days into three critical areas:
- Understand the types and uses of formative assessment.
- Examine current grading practices and how they relate to student learning.
- Connect formative assessment practices with grading practices that accurately reflect student achievement.
Learning Outcomes
- Understand what research reveals about feedback, assessment, and grading.
- Review and revise existing assessments for quality.
- Collaborate in teams to continuously improve assessments and instruction.
- Explore the uses of different kinds of formative assessments.
- Apply assessment information to gain formative, summative, or instructional feedback.
- Track student progress for a better overall picture of performance.
- Align grading and reporting practices with formative assessment strategies. | https://www.marzanoresources.com/formative-assess-standards-based-grading-pd |
Are you passionate about great UI and UX design?
Do you have experience in cross-functional teams?
Do you enjoy putting yourself in our customer shoes?
Do you think that design isn’t finished until somebody is using it?
UX research, development of mockups and prototypes.
Extensive experience in creating a UI design.
Ensurance of a consistent look and feel across products.
Collaboration with project management and developers to define and implement innovative solutions for the project direction, visuals and user experience.
Developing intuitive & engaging visual and interactive designs.
Creating prototypes for testing and refine interactions.
Revise/update designs and documentation based on continuing user testing and feedback from the users.
Maintain, guide and push the boundaries of HolidayPirates’ design.
Ability to prioritize and complete multiple projects in a timely manner.
Be comfortable about sharing your design decisions on a collaborative level, being open to listen and deliberate towards the best design solution for the product.
Proficient in English, both in verbal and written word.
Have communication skills that help you to succeed in your daily work with multidisciplinary international teams. | https://www.helloworld.rs/posao/UI-UX-Designer/Pirate-Technologies/220465 |
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