Surprise

About: Surprise is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4371 publications have been published within this topic receiving 99386 citations.

Keeping Our Activist Selves Alive in the Classroom: Feminist Pedagogy and Political Activism.

Abstract: traditional classes in which their experiences may not be validated. As a result they may feel that their active participation in the educational process is limited only to classes in which sexism, racism, homophobia, or class oppression are expressly written into the syllabus. They do not clearly see how the voice they had discovered and /or cultivated in a women's studies course can carry over to their other classroom experiences. The "chilly climate" that still pervades academia appears to be far too foreboding for many of our students, well trained as they are to receive rather than to claim an education, to challenge.3 As faculty, though, and as feminists, we hope that students' voices will carry over to their other classes. We also hope students will use their new knowledge to challenge their friends on campus and work toward the continued creation of a more just society. Without being able to "check in," though, on how real life compares with various feminist visions, as they can in a women's studies class, and with the overwhelming amount of contradictory information coming from the media, the fiction they read, and the somewhat independent yet highly structured nature of their social life on college campuses, it should be no surprise that much of what we encourage gets lost quickly in students' real-life experiences. How is a student to demand serious communication with her

Surprise Me If You Can: Serendipity in Health Information

Abstract: Our natural tendency to be curious is increasingly important now that we are exposed to vast amounts of information. We often cope with this overload by focusing on the familiar: information that matches our expectations. In this paper we present a framework for interactive serendipitous information discovery based on a computational model of surprise. This framework delivers information that users were not actively looking for, but which will be valuable to their unexpressed needs. We hypothesize that users will be surprised when presented with information that violates the expectations predicted by our model of them. This surprise model is balanced by a value component which ensures that the information is relevant to the user. Within this framework we have implemented two surprise models, one based on association mining and the other on topic modeling approaches. We evaluate these two models with thirty users in the context of online health news recommendation. Positive user feedback was obtained for both of the computational models of surprise compared to a baseline random method. This research contributes to the understanding of serendipity and how to "engineer" serendipity that is favored by users.

Labor, The State, and Class Struggle

Abstract: After a long period of sustained attack by governments of various stripes, a steady deterioration of working and living standards, and declines in membership and militancy, there are encouraging signs that organized labor is moving again. This may come as a surprise to many, not least on the left, who have long since written off the labor movement as an oppositional force; and it may begin to challenge some of the most widespread assumptions about the nature and direction of contemporary capitalism, assumptions often shared by activists and intellectuals on the left as well as the right.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Education, Income, and Wealth

Abstract: No surprise?people with more education often earn higher incomes and are unemployed less than those with less education. Those with higher incomes also tend to accumulate more wealth. Why? Research shows that well-educated people tend to make financial decisions that help build wealth. Their strategies, though, can be used by anyone. Learn valuable tips in the January 2017 issue of Page One Economics.

A fusion process based on belief theory for classification of facial basic emotions

Abstract: This paper presents a system of facial expressions classification based on a data fusion process using the belief theory. The considered expressions correspond to the six universal emotions (joy, surprise, disgust, sadness, anger, fear) as well as to the neutral expression. Since some of the six basic emotions are difficult to simulate by non-actor people, the performances of the classification system are evaluated only for four expressions (joy, surprise, disgust, and neutral). The proposed algorithm is based on the analysis of characteristic distances measuring the deformations of facial features, which are computed on skeletons of expression. The skeletons are the result of a contour segmentation process of facial permanent features (mouth, eyes and eyebrows). The considered distances are used to develop an expert system for classification. The performances and the limits of the recognition system and its ability to deal with different databases are highlighted thanks to the analysis of a great number of results on three different databases: the Hammal-Caplier database, the Cohn-Kanade database and the Cottrel database.