Deeper Roots: Strengthening Community Tenure Security and Community Livelihoods

Utilizes concrete experiences from Bolivia, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, Tanzania, India, Nepal, Indonesia, and the Philippines to highlight emerging issues, and offers strategies for advancing community forest tenure security

The global cultural commons after Cancun: identity, diversity and citizenship

The cultural politics of global trade is a new and unexplored terrain because the public domain of culture has long been associated with national sovereignty. States everywhere have invested heavily in national identity. But in an age of globalization, culture and sovereignty have become more complex propositions, subject to global pressures and national constraints. This paper argues three main points. First, new information technologies increasingly destabilize traditional private sector models for disseminating culture. At the same time, international legal rules have become more restrictive with respect to investment and national treatment, two areas at the heart of cultural policy. Second, Doha has significant implications for the future of the cultural commons. Ongoing negotiations around TRIPS, TRIMS, GATS and dispute settlement will impose new restrictions on public authorities who wish to appropriate culture for a variety of public and private ends. Finally, there is a growing backlash against the WTO’s trade agenda for broadening and deepening disciplines in these areas. These issues have become highly politicized and fractious, and are bound to vex future rounds as the global south, led by Brazil, India and China flexes its diplomatic muscle

Introduction

Intellectual property law is one of the fastest growing fields of law worldwide. This unprecedented, rapid evolution and the accompanying massive upsurge in the use of the intellectual property system had four main triggers-- the advent of the Internet (to many, the heart of the digital revolution); unprecedented advances in science and technology; the emergence of intangible assets, such as knowledge, information and innovation, as the main drivers of economic development; and the growing interdependence of nations resulting from the internationalization of commerce. Of these, the digital revolution alone has had a profound effect on all aspects of the creation, protection, and use of intellectual property. Trillions of dollars are forecast to change hands in electronic commerce transactions, most of which have an intellectual property component, spotlighting the key contribution of intellectual property law in securing the commercial viability of innumerable industries, employing millions of people and generating revenues essential to the economic well-being of Nations. The increasing prominence of intellectual property considerations in this, and many other areas, has given additional weight to the recognition by economists that the way in which a Nation uses intellectual property to capture the value of the creativity and innovation of its people and convert it into concrete economic assets, is part of the answer to the riddle of why some countries prosper while others do not. In a world marked by huge material disparities, intellectual property is a means by which individuals, companies of all sizes, universities and other research institutions, and economies at the local, national, and regional levels can empower themselves to compete more effectively in the international marketplace. Wielded in the correct way, intellectual property can be used as an effective power tool to help build sustainable economic growth. These factors have not only propelled intellectual property to the forefront of policy-making circles generally, but they have forced the intellectual property law community to re-think established paradigms. The debate and discussion that flow from publications such as the Fordham International Law Journal and its series of issues-related books are the seedbed for new ideas and approaches that are indispensable in ensuring that the intellectual property system continues to grow and adapt in a way that fosters the creativity and innovation that is the springboard of economic growth and social well-being, while serving the public good within a rapidly changing technological environment

Scalable and Sustainable Deep Learning via Randomized Hashing

Current deep learning architectures are growing larger in order to learn from complex datasets. These architectures require giant matrix multiplication operations to train millions of parameters. Conversely, there is another growing trend to bring deep learning to low-power, embedded devices. The matrix operations, associated with both training and testing of deep networks, are very expensive from a computational and energy standpoint. We present a novel hashing based technique to drastically reduce the amount of computation needed to train and test deep networks. Our approach combines recent ideas from adaptive dropouts and randomized hashing for maximum inner product search to select the nodes with the highest activation efficiently. Our new algorithm for deep learning reduces the overall computational cost of forward and back-propagation by operating on significantly fewer (sparse) nodes. As a consequence, our algorithm uses only 5% of the total multiplications, while keeping on average within 1% of the accuracy of the original model. A unique property of the proposed hashing based back-propagation is that the updates are always sparse. Due to the sparse gradient updates, our algorithm is ideally suited for asynchronous and parallel training leading to near linear speedup with increasing number of cores. We demonstrate the scalability and sustainability (energy efficiency) of our proposed algorithm via rigorous experimental evaluations on several real datasets

The OpenupEd quality label: benchmarks for MOOCs

In this paper we report on the development of the OpenupEd Quality Label, a self-assessment and review quality assurance process for the new European OpenupEd portal (www.openuped.eu) for MOOCs (massive open online courses). This process is focused on benchmark statements that seek to capture good practice, both at the level of the institution and at the level of individual courses. The benchmark statements for MOOCs are derived from benchmarks produced by the E xcellence e learning quality projects (E-xcellencelabel.eadtu.eu/). A process of self-assessment and review is intended to encourage quality enhancement, captured in an action plan. We suggest that a quality label for MOOCs will benefit all MOOC stakeholders