PAR and Digital Inclusion, An Analysis Using the Capabilities Approach and Critical Pedagogy

This paper draws upon the capability approach and critical pedagogy to analyse the value of using Problem-posing Education, a participatory action research method, in a digital inclusion initiative in Brazil. First it the capability approach and explains why using critical pedagogy is a valuable way to deal with issues of power, collective conscientisation and adaptive preference. Freire's pedagogy is then presented and conscientisation is explained as a process of raising critical awareness and praxis. The case study, presents empirical work conducted in Campinas, together with a NGO named CDI, which offers free internet access and basic ICT skills using a Freire's inspired methodology. Findings are then explained and discussed using the theoretical framework. This paper concludes that there is great value in using Freire's critical pedagogy for digital inclusion, but that further research is necessary to identify less resource intense solutions that can provide students with both conscientisation and skills.

What Can Adaptive Preferences and Transformative Experiences Do for Each Other?

This chapter explores the connection between transformative experience and adaptive preferences, or preferences resulting from the fact that a given option was the best available from within a limited set. Employing the concept of transformative experience can help us to see how a person’s adaptive preferences can be genuinely beneficial for her, and thus to see such a person as a competent judge of her own good. This insight is used to develop an account of adaptive preference with the potential to provide guidance about whether or not to allow ourselves and others to undergo transformative experiences.

Examining the Process of Modal Choice for Everyday Travel Among Older People

Modal choice is a prominent concept within transport studies. However, the term is often used quite loosely, with little known about the factors lying behind the choice, the alternatives available to a person, and whether the person had a ‘choice’ to begin with. This study draws on a travel survey among older people living in Sweden’s large metropolitan regions. The questions posed as part of this survey facilitate a greater insight into the processes at play behind modal choice. An analysis of the differences between: (1) the range of modal options available to respondents and (2) the modes selected from this range (modal choice) is presented. An analysis of the respondents’ reasoning for choosing the modes they did and not the others they could have chosen is also presented. It was found that more than a quarter of respondents have the option to use and actually use all modes for everyday travel. The car is more inclined to be selected among those who have a range of different modal options. Suitability and comfort are the two main reasons given for modal choice. More positive reasons are given for actively selecting walking and cycling, whereas the motives behind the selection of the car instead tend to be framed as reasons for not selecting other modes. Adaptive preference and adjustment effects are also apparent in the selection processes. This study gives us a deeper understanding of the intricate mechanisms and reasoning at play behind the process of modal choice among this group. In this way, we have a better basis for shaping and implementing measures to promote and encourage sustainable mobility, in such a way that the well-being of older people is also supported.

Active Preference Learning Based on Generalized Gini Functions: Application to the Multiagent Knapsack Problem

We consider the problem of actively eliciting preferences from a Decision Maker supervising a collective decision process in the context of fair multiagent combinatorial optimization. Individual preferences are supposed to be known and represented by linear utility functions defined on a combinatorial domain and the social utility is defined as a generalized Gini Social evaluation Function (GSF) for the sake of fairness. The GSF is a non-linear aggregation function parameterized by weighting coefficients which allow a fine control of the equity requirement in the aggregation of individual utilities. The paper focuses on the elicitation of these weights by active learning in the context of the fair multiagent knapsack problem. We introduce and compare several incremental decision procedures interleaving an adaptive preference elicitation procedure with a combinatorial optimization algorithm to determine a GSF-optimal solution. We establish an upper bound on the number of queries and provide numerical tests to show the efficiency of the proposed approach.

Male Vocal Quality and Its Relation to Females’ Preferences

In both correlational and experimental settings, studies on women’s vocal preferences have reported negative relationships between perceived attractiveness and men’s vocal pitch, emphasizing the idea of an adaptive preference. However, such consensus on vocal attractiveness has been mostly conducted with native English speakers, but a few evidence suggest that it may be culture-dependent. Moreover, other overlooked acoustic components of vocal quality, such as intonation, perceived breathiness and roughness, may influence vocal attractiveness. In this context, the present study aims to contribute to the literature by investigating vocal attractiveness in an underrepresented language (i.e., French) as well as shedding light on its relationship with understudied acoustic components of vocal quality. More specifically, we investigated the relationships between attractiveness ratings as assessed by female raters and male voice pitch, its variation, the formants’ dispersion and position, and the harmonics-to-noise and jitter ratios. Results show that women were significantly more attracted to lower vocal pitch and higher intonation patterns. However, they did not show any directional preferences for all the other acoustic features. We discuss our results in light of the adaptive functions of vocal preferences in a mate choice context.

What’s Wrong with “You Say You’re Happy, but . . . ” Reasoning?

Disability-positive philosophers often note a troubling tendency to dismiss what disabled people say about their well-being. This chapter seeks to get clearer on why this tendency might be troubling. It argues that recent appeals to lived experience, testimonial injustice, and certain challenges to adaptive-preference reasoning do not fully explain what is wrong with questioning the happiness of disabled people. It then argues that common attempts to debunk the claim that disabled people are happy are worrisome because they threaten everyone’s well-being and are further challenged by an argument from moral risk.