MEnDiGa: A Minimal Engine for Digital Games

Game engines generate high dependence of developed games on provided implementation resources. Feature modeling is a technique that captures commonalities and variabilities results of domain analysis to provide a basis for automated configuration of concrete products. This paper presents the Minimal Engine for Digital Games (MEnDiGa), a simplified collection of game assets based on game features capable of building small and casual games regardless of their implementation resources. It presents minimal features in a representative hierarchy of spatial and game elements along with basic behaviors and event support related to game logic features. It also presents modules of code to represent, interpret, and adapt game features to provide the execution of configured games in multiple game platforms. As a proof of concept, a clone of the Doodle Jump game was developed using MEnDiGa assets and compared with original game version. As a result, a new G-factor based approach for game construction is provided, which is able to separate the core of game elements from the implementation itself in an independent, reusable, and large-scale way

An Afro-Brazilian Landscape: African Oil Palms and Socioecological Change in Bahia, Brazil

Palm oil extracted from the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) is the world’s most produced vegetable oil, commanding a roughly 50 billion dollar global industry. In contrast to the agroindustrial firms and monocultures that dominate global production, a biodiverse cultural landscape of African oil palms in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia has for centuries supplied local alimentary and spiritual demands for palm oil—an essential resource in Afro-Brazilian cultures. Drawing on fieldwork, ethnography, archives, GIScience, quantitative analysis, and travelers’, rare, and secondary accounts, this dissertation provides the first comprehensive study of Bahia’s palm oil landscapes, cultures, and economies. Analyzing seven centuries of social and ecological change, the study contributes to environmental histories of colonialism and the African diaspora, and advances theories and practices of agricultural development, environmental governance, and the politics of knowledge. Native to West Africa, African oil palms have supported cultures and economies on that continent for millennia. During colonial overseas expansion, Elaeis guineensis and its products traversed the Atlantic as early African contributions to the Columbian Exchange of beings, biota, and ideas. The palm’s subsequent diffusion in Bahia combined African traditions of palm oil production and consumption with European and Indigenous knowledges in the Americas to found and sustain diasporic Afro-Brazilian cultures and economies. This study examines the early and ongoing development of Bahia’s African oil palm cultures and landscapes, connecting transatlantic cultural, ecological, and economic circulations to reconstruct the emergence of an Afro-Brazilian landscape. Building on its historical analyses, the study culminates with an ethnography of Bahia’s contemporary palm oil economy. Integrating theories of resistance, development, and complexity, the final chapter maps the constituents of, and flows of power through, Bahia’s palm oil economy to scrutinize the modern policies and interventions that seek to redirect and control the network. The dissertation concludes by juxtaposing Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian landscape with the epistemological constraints of modern development. It argues that diasporic knowledges, such as those underpinning Bahia’s palm oil economy, represent potent but generally untapped fonts of place-based development practice with potential to transform global palm oil production and enact more viable and abundant forms of development

COOPERATION PROGRAMS ON EDUCATION AND TEACHERS TRAINING: THE ROLE OF UNIVERSITY AND EFFECTIVENESS EVALUATION

Si intende sviluppare nel panel le strategie di pianificazione e sperimentazione di interventi brevi, finalizzati a garantire il diritto all’educazione in contesti con numerosi fattori di rischio. Si analizzerà il ruolo che può assumere l’università negli interventi di formazione, la necessità di approfondire le modalità di relazione con i partner per la realizzazione di interventi flessibili, adatti alla cultura locale e sostenibili. Si propone di approfondire anche il tema della valutazione di efficacia degli interventi, prendendo in considerazione i diversi soggetti su cui ricadono gli effetti degli interventi: gli alunni, i docenti o gli educatori formati, gli studenti universitari coinvolti nelle attività di cooperazione

“Welcome to Floripa” - The FIFA World Cup on the Magic Island: an apologia for sex tourism

During the preparations for the Football World Cup in Brazil, Florianópolis received, in February 2014, a delegation of coaches of the national teams classified for the tournament, as well as journalists from all over the world. Sectors linked to tourism and the press gave special highlights to the event, hoping to invigorate international tourism and show the welcoming potential of the state of Santa Catarina. On the first day of the event, the newspaper Diário Catarinense distributed a special supplement, a kind of tourist guide to the city, entitled “Welcome to Floripa;” its cover featured an advertisement for a nightclub, the Bokarra Club, bearing images of women in erotic poses, an explicit apologia for sex tourism. I analyze the media impacts of these images, offered as objects of desire; letters exchanged between a public agency and this press medium; the resonance of this publication for male and female readers regarding sex tourism. I observe the uses of female images in the media, from the perspective of gender relations

Rethinking Digital Inequalities: The Experience of the Marginalized in Community Technology Centers

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Informatics and Computing, 2015Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have emerged as symbols of modernity in the developing world, and currently policy makers and popular press perceived them as bridges to promote social and digital equalities. However, scholars have regularly demonstrated that digital inclusion projects have often failed to meet expectations related to human development objectives. Some postulate that the problem may not be entirely one of project failure, but rather of our limited understanding of the value that technology provides. Hence, this dissertation emphasizes the socio-cultural aspects of digital inclusion projects aimed at favela residents and attempts to understand ICTs aspects and practices from their perspective. Favelas, urban slums in Brazil, are considered marginalized areas due to the absence of State social and physical investments. As a consequence of this, such areas lack proper infrastructure, sanitation and road systems and provide their residents, the marginalized, with a low quality of life. Favela residents are deprived not only of proper services for their basic needs, such as health and education, but also of access to technology and Internet. Most of them rely on community technology centers (CTCs) to access ICTs. Based on an over eight-month ethnography in the favelas of Vitória, Brazil, this dissertation focuses on the motivations, engagements, and adoption of ICTs by favela residents in CTCs. It asks the following questions: (1) What is their experience using CTCs? (2) How does their experience inform the ways we should think about what constitutes empowerment and disempowerment vis-à-vis ICTs? It argues that theoretical positions stemming from technology utilitarianism need expanding, because mundane and non-instrumental practices observed in the favelas shed light on the importance of technology in a variety of dimensions within people’s lives. Encompassing such practices contributes to a broader comprehension of the engagements and strategies that help shape the daily use of technology by people who suffer the consequences of being poor and marginalized

Alegria: The Rise of Brazil's "Carnival of Popular Participation," Salvador da Bahia, 1950-2000s

In the second half of the twentieth century, the annual carnival in the economically depressed northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia underwent a series of transformations that brought it from relative anonymity in Brazil--where festivities in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Recife had long been given pride of place--to the status of (inter)national showpiece in terms of cultural and entrepreneurial innovation and touristic appeal. It became a dominant factor in year-round local music production. In an era of political constraint, it appeared to embody the collective performance of multiple democracies including race and free-market consumerism. New forms of popular participation were linked to innovations in carnival that, in other national carnival sites, would have been precluded by regulation and tradition. This dissertation draws from debates and analysis in Brazil's intellectual, policy, and media spheres regarding carnival, folklore, tourism, Bahian culture, mass culture, and national identity to argue that 1) the traits of creative spontaneity and popular participation in Salvador's carnival gained prominence as both national ambivalence over "folklore" increased, and dictatorial regimes constrained political democracy; 2) the state, rather than discursively and economically controlling Salvador's carnival, has more often reacted to artistic production and market forces, its hegemony configured through strategies of support and appropriation linked to tourism and an internally amplified social ethic of alegria; and 3) media and cultural commentators have made Salvador's modern carnival a new locus for longstanding national conversations over Brazilian identity, regionalism, race, and cultural imperialism, casting its innovation as simultaneously a promising engine of renovation and a threat to both local and national traditions. Salvador carnival's progressive implications of participation and inclusion have been blunted by a process of political redemocratization that was associated with neoliberal policies at the national and local levels; its internal contradictions and commercialism have challenged both its national and local symbolic power

Mothers in the Family of Saints: Gender and Race in the Making of Afro-Brazilian Heritage

Candomblé temples produce histories and subjectivities at the nexus of Africa and the Americas. The dissertation combines historical and ethnographic methods to show how Candomblé priestesses and “matriarchy” are constructed, ritually valued, and externally rewarded as key sources of African heritage in Brazil. The dissertation tacks between the concept of Black matriarchy as understood within the ritual family of saints and as appropriated in the public and political sphere. The convergence of the central symbol of gestation in the religion’s initiation process on one hand, and understandings of sex and kinship as defined by birth, on the other, make women especially respected because of their vital role in perpetuating both ritual and biological lineages of African descent. When biological and ritual notions of kinship align through the figure of “matriarchy,” claims to ancestral knowledge and African religious authority exert the strongest impact on the Brazilian public. Temples able to persuasively present the ideals of “African” matriarchy are therefore most successful in gaining recognition from the state as bona fide sites of cultural heritage. Popular and scholarly depictions of Candomblé have differentiated the nações (nations) by the gender of their leader, upholding the “matriarchal” status of the Yoruba, while portraying the Angolan nation as predominantly male-led, and less African, often placing Angolan temples at a disadvantage in the cultural heritage market. My research demonstrates that regardless of the temple’s ritual nation or the gender of their ‘official’ leader, Candomblé practitioners value Black Mothers as the most powerful cultivators and propagators of the African ancestral force in Brazil. Within the ritual family traditional notions of femininity as domestic motherhood restrict female-born initiates who must perform labor based on their biological sex. The reverence for Black Mothers specifically within the family of saints creates a hierarchy among the possible expressions of gender and sexuality, some of which are deemed more valuable and permissible in the ritual system than others. The ethnography demonstrates how femininity is a more accessible ritual category than masculinity, contributing to the prominence of the “effeminate male” figure in the family of saints. However, full expressions of gender non-conformity are restricted by biological understandings of sex, marginalizing masculine cisgender women, as well as transgender and travesti initiates. By revisiting the histories and contemporary roles of the Candomblé priestesses—the Mothers—in Brazil, the dissertation documents how select priestesses seek recognition from the state as official Afro-Brazilian “heritage,” for the stakes of financial resources and land titles. The state’s recognition of Candomblé as cultural heritage has mostly been contingent on the presence of Black female leadership, widely considered as a crucial “African” contribution to social organization in Brazil. The problem is that cultural heritage policies directed towards the Candomblé temples draw from tropes of Black women as key cultural figures without addressing structural inequalities, religious racism or the legacies of state persecution that continually affect Candomblé communities.PHDAnthropology and HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163114/1/ajamie_1.pd

Australia and Latin America

This is a good time to reflect on opportunities and challenges for Australia in Latin America. Impressive economic growth and opportunities for trade and investment have made Latin America a dynamic area for Australia and the Asia Pacific region. A growing Latin American population, Australia’s attractiveness to Latin American students, a fascination with the cultural vibrancy of the Americas and an awareness of Latin America’s increasingly independent stance in politics and economic diplomacy, have all contributed to raising the region’s profile. This collection of essays provides the first substantial introduction to Australia’s evolving engagement with Latin America, identifying current trends and opportunities, and making suggestions about how relationships in trade, investment, foreign aid, education, culture and the media could be strengthened