abstract: Evolutionary and economic theories of fertility variation argue that novel subsistence opportunities associated with market economies shape reproduction in ways that both increase parental investment per child and lower overall fertility. I use demographic and ethnographic data from Guatemala as a case study to illustrate how ethnic inequalities in accessing market opportunities have shaped demographic variation and the perceptions of parental investments. I then discuss two projects that use secondary data sets to address issues of conceptualizing and operationalizing market opportunities in national and cross-population comparative work. The first argues that social relationships are critical means of accessing market opportunities, and uses Guatemala household stocks of certain forms of relational wealth are associated with greater parental investments in education. The second focuses on a methodological issue in how common measures of wealth in comparative demographic studies conflate economic capacity with market opportunities, and how this conceptual confusion biases our interpretations of the observed links between wealth and fertility over the course of the demographic transition. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Anthropology 2019

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / We use gestures frequently in daily life—to interact with people, pets, or objects. But interacting with computers using mid-air gestures continues to challenge the design of touchless systems. Traditional approaches to touchless interaction focus on exploring gesture inputs and evaluating user interfaces. I shift the focus from gesture elicitation and interface evaluation to touchless interaction mechanics. I argue for a novel approach to generate design guidelines for touchless systems: to use fundamental interaction principles, instead of a reactive adaptation to the sensing technology. In five sets of experiments, I explore visual and pseudo-haptic feedback, motor intuitiveness, handedness, and perceptual Gestalt effects. Particularly, I study the interaction mechanics in touchless target selection. To that end, I introduce two novel interaction techniques: touchless circular menus that allow command selection using directional strokes and interface topographies that use pseudo-haptic feedback to guide steering–targeting tasks. Results illuminate different facets of touchless interaction mechanics. For example, motor-intuitive touchless interactions explain how our sensorimotor abilities inform touchless interface affordances: we often make a holistic oblique gesture instead of several orthogonal hand gestures while reaching toward a distant display. Following the Gestalt theory of visual perception, we found similarity between user interface (UI) components decreased user accuracy while good continuity made users faster. Other findings include hemispheric asymmetry affecting transfer of training between dominant and nondominant hands and pseudo-haptic feedback improving touchless accuracy. The results of this dissertation contribute design guidelines for future touchless systems. Practical applications of this work include the use of touchless interaction techniques in various domains, such as entertainment, consumer appliances, surgery, patient-centric health settings, smart cities, interactive visualization, and collaboration.

No description available.

Abstract Stelarc, the performance artist, has since the middle of the twentieth century, harnessed technology to enable an ongoing challenge to the physical body. Embracing ever evolving technology, Stelarc provokes the art world with a series of works that he claims demonstrate the body as limited and obsolete. The body positioned as limited enables Stelarc to seek the transcendence of the same body through the use of the body/technology symbiosis in the form of medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems and the Internet. Acknowledging that this body/technology symbiosis has brought with it changes in embodied and disembodied experiences, this study reclaims the “obsolete” body as the lived experiential body by exploring Stelarc’s contradictions both in his rhetoric and his performance. The established contradictions substantiate the body as corporeal and embodied and as necessary to exist in and make sense of our surrounding world.

This project aims to explore how interactive tangible playthings can be designed to enhance the roleplaying aspect of Dungeons & Dragons. Further, the project juxtaposed D&D and interaction design as practices to examine if D&D can contribute to interaction design. The project adopted research through design methodology and applied different methods, emphasizing playful and movement-based approaches. A handful of tangible electronic prototypes were created using Arduino Nano BLE Sense, gesture recognition combined with a NeoPixel Circle, a Humidifier, and a Vibration motor combined with 3D-printed objects. The prototypes were tested during a D&D playing session to evaluate their impact on the roleplaying experience. The result of the project suggests that interactive tangible artifacts enhance the experiential, expressive, and sensory qualities of roleplaying in D&D by adding interactivity and tangibility. Furthermore, the results suggest that the playthings increase the player's connection to their character. Finally, the project's result suggests that interaction design can learn from D&D's playful and creative nature by adopting the Magic Circle concept to interaction design methodology.

After timber harvesting, carbon in wood is transferred to products pool and remains entrapped for a considerable time. It is necessary to estimate this carbon flux in the harvested wood products (HWP); otherwise, carbon emission estimates of a country will be overestimated at the time of harvest. Furthermore, carbon estimates of the HWP must be assessed for uncertainties which need to be reduced as far as possible. Environmental implications might be associated with the HWP traded in the national and international markets. In the current context, there is a lack of economic-environmental studies that relate to the trade of HWP. The first part of this dissertation estimated the U.S. HWP contribution to carbon removals or emissions from 1990 to 2014 using the stock-change, production, atmospheric flow, and simple decay approaches. It concluded that the U.S. HWP stored carbon under all accounting approaches. Net annual carbon stored in the HWP, however, declined under all approaches from 1990 to 2014. The second part of the dissertation investigated uncertainty in the estimates of carbon stock in HWP using Monte Carlo simulation. A sensitivity analysis was also performed. Results showed that the net annual carbon accumulation in HWP was affected by uncertainty associated with input parameters. Carbon estimates in the HWP were most sensitive to uncertainty in the parameter for the carbon conversion factor for roundwood. The third part of the dissertation used a multi-regional input-output model to analyze embodied carbon emissions in the U.S. trade of HWP with its major trading partners – Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, Mexico, and Russia. Results demonstrated that the U.S. was a net importer of carbon emissions involving HWP. China was the major contributor of imported emissions, and Canada was the biggest recipient of the U.S. exported emissions. The consumption-based method had a higher emissions inventory in the HWP than the production-based method. Per-capita emissions in the HWP increased with an increase in per-capita GDP. These studies can be informative for policy makers in incorporating HWP in climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, and in understanding the economic-environmental relationships of international trade of HWP.

Women and men face differences in how they experience the work environment concerning health and safety and their needs within the workspace. Depending on age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, women and men face different stigmas, thus impacting their difficulties within their work environments. Owing to this knowledge, the purpose of this research was to explore this difference in the workplace and understand how women experience the workplace differently. Specifically, from a perspective of embodiment and the needs, women are often inclined to have as a result of biology in the workplace. This insightful study explored the personalisation of embodiment by examining the diversified understanding of embodied needs of women that existed within different levels of an organisational hierarchy and had varied roles that required different levels of skills, manual labour, and knowledge. Using qualitative interviews and a phenomenological approach, the realities of these women with different embodied needs, and embodied stages were explored. The central insight being that while women may suffer the same injustices in the workplace and share the same biology, their embodied needs and experience still vary and cannot be painted with the same brush. Through this qualitative insight, key themes such as pregnancy and maternal needs, workplace accommodations, women clinic services and women workplace accommodations were identified as components of the female embodied needs. This exploratory study brought light to this understanding by exploring the varied experience of 12 participants.

No description available.

Learning, as embodied familiarization, is described as an embodied, non-representational, and non-mechanistic experience. Within this theoretical framework, a qualitative study is presented that offers a deeper understanding of the learner's encounter with unfamiliarity -- a key lived experience of embodied familiarization. Assertions related to encounters with unfamiliarity are made through a multiple case study analysis and a deeper understanding of the assertions is offered by way of a narrative-oriented framework. From this perspective, agentive, concernful, dispositional and meaningful aspects of learning are discernible.

Studien undersöker hur fysisk gestaltning i pedagogiskt drama formas under ett lärotillfälle i skolmiljö. Studien använder sig av ett socialsemiotiskt synsätt och en multimodal ansats för att undersöka eleven som utövare av fysisk gestaltning. Fysisk gestaltning betraktas som ett medium och sammanhanget analyseras utifrån ett designteoretiskt perspektiv på lärande. Två grupper elever i 10 års-åldern har filmats och observerats. Resultaten visar att påverkan från regler i skolan, instruktioner och pedagogen beskriver elevernas formella design. Influenser från elevernas värderingar av fysiska egenskaper, teman från deras vardag, från styrande elever och från det sociala samspelet beskriver elevernas informella design. Design i fysisk gestaltning uppstår i kroppsliga uttryck, i tempo, i rum och i material. Formell design, informell design och mediet fysisk gestaltning samspelar i förklaringen av hur elever ordnar sin design i fysisk gestaltning och hur semiotiska resurser används och förändras i fysisk gestaltning. / This is an examination of how embodied communication transforms during a session of drama education set in a school environment. Social semiotics and multimodality are used in order to examine the students as users of embodied communication. Embodied communication is treated as a medium and the context is analyzed through a design theoretic perspective on learning. Two groups of 10 year old students have been video recorded and observed. The results show that the students’ formal process of designing embodied communication is influenced by existing rules in school, the teacher and the instructions. The informal process of designing embodied communication is affected by social interactions among students, student leaders, the students’ bodily values and themes from their everyday life. Embodied communication, and in part the designing of it, is described as an interaction between body expressions and the use of time, space and materials. How the students designs the embodied communication and how it transforms during the examined session is explained in combining the analytical themes ”formal design”, ”informal design” and ”embodied communication”.