Implementing peace settlements: multiple motivations, factionalism and implementation design

This research seeks to explain the obstacles to the implementation of peace settlements and to the consolidation of more co-operative and stable political systems in the aftermath of civil conflicts. Peace processes are explored through comparative observation and the theoretical modelling of strategic interactions in the immediate post-settlement implementation process. The study develops the argument that in the factionalism that characterises parties to a civil conflict, and in the multiple motivations that drive individual and group members to support these factions, he the explanations for successful, stalled or unravelled implementation processes. It further considers the proposal that the design of the implementation process, and the political economy at the regional and international level, will have a determining effect on the outcome of implementation to the extent that they impact on the intra-party struggle between factions In developing this argument a new model of implementation - the ‘mtraformation factionalism' or IFF model - is proposed The plausibility of the ‘mtraformation factionalism5 model and its predictions on the design of the implementation process are empirically explored by the application of a number of hypotheses to a dataset of 25 post-settlement civil conflicts This is supported by a further analysis of three in-depth case studies in which the institutional procedures that appear to facilitate the successful implementation of negotiated peace settlements are highlighted

Linguistic Markers of Deception in Computer-Mediated Communication: An Analysis of Politicians' Tweets

The aim of this master‘s thesis was to examine the lies of English-speaking politicians by determining whether relevant scientific data on deception applies to the statements they communicated on social media. Specifically, the goal was to analyse the studies on deception and see if one could make use of the data to detect deception in their messages. In addition to set format of this work, the reason for concentrating solely on messages transmitted via website such as Twitter is its popularity, availability and overall use of it among politicians. In order to analyse dishonesty, falsehood and disinformation in messages they communicate, the author first had to define deception, describe the characteristics of participants in a deceptive exchange and point out cues that signal deceptive behaviour. He compiled a summary of several studies which focused on describing the profile of deceptive behaviour and enumerated the linguistic features that characterize deceitful messages. Finally, given that the author looked into statements published on the Internet, it was also necessary to become acquainted with aspects of computer-mediated communication and the features of deception and its detection in this medium. In the following analysis the objective was to recognize those features in the selected false statements in order to discover if one can rely on language components when determining the truthfulness of a politician‘s proclamation, testimony or assurance. Therefore, the author presented examples of several American politicians‘ tweets containing different linguistic markers which, according to Interpersonal Deception Theory and several additional studies, point to deception. Namely, these are levellers, modifiers, negative emotion words, sensory words and qualifiers. Additionally, it was demonstrated that, when it comes to transmitting messages via Twitter, the rates of group references as opposed to self-references and the choice of verb tense are not reliable as indicators of deception. On the other hand, at the beginning of the section the author enumerated motion verbs as another marker which he attempted to identify in the false tweets; however, he was not able to come across any of them. Lastly, in addition to false tweets which contained no markers of deception, the author provided a handful of examples of truthful tweets, which suggest the markers can appear in truthful statements as well. Taking into account the characteristics of computer-mediated communication and a limited number of examined tweets, it can be argued that identifying the markers may be used as a method of detecting deception in statements published on Twitter. However, the method is far from being failsafe and these findings strengthen the importance of non-verbal cues, some of which, as we know, are necessarily omitted in text-based computer-mediated communication

Netprov

Netprov is an emerging interdisciplinary digital art form that offers a literature-based “show” of insightful, healing satire that is as deep as the novels of the past. This accessible history of Netprov emerges out of an ongoing conversation about the changing roles and power dynamics of author and reader in an age of real-time interactivity. Rob Wittig describes a literary genre in which all the world is a platform and all participants are players. Beyond serving as a history of the genre, this book includes tips and examples to help those new to the genre teach and create netprovs

A Guide to Text Analysis with Latent Semantic Analysis in R with Annotated Code: Studying Online Reviews and the Stack Exchange Community

In this guide, we introduce researchers in the behavioral sciences in general and MIS in particular to text analysis as done with latent semantic analysis (LSA). The guide contains hands-on annotated code samples in R that walk the reader through a typical process of acquiring relevant texts, creating a semantic space out of them, and then projecting words, phrase, or documents onto that semantic space to calculate their lexical similarities. R is an open source, popular programming language with extensive statistical libraries. We introduce LSA as a concept, discuss the process of preparing the data, and note its potential and limitations. We demonstrate this process through a sequence of annotated code examples: we start with a study of online reviews that extracts lexical insight about trust. That R code applies singular value decomposition (SVD). The guide next demonstrates a realistically large data analysis of Stack Exchange, a popular Q&A site for programmers. That R code applies an alternative sparse SVD method. All the code and data are available on github.com

Aeronautical engineering: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 255)

This bibliography lists 529 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in June 1990. Subject coverage includes: design, construction and testing of aircraft and aircraft engines; aircraft components, equipment and systems; ground support systems; and theoretical and applied aspects of aerodynamics and general fluid dynamics