Un metaverificador de firmas y su aplicación en la inscripción de organizaciones políticas en el Perú

En el Perú, para lograr una inscripción como organización política se debe contar con una relación de adherentes (planillones de firmas) la cual es verificada por el Registro Nacional de Identificación y Estado Civil, utilizando la técnica del cotejo visual. La problemática radica en que esta técnica es completamente manual, propensa al error humano influenciado por los tiempos cortos para homologación y alta demanda en época electoral, lo cual está ocasionando que la verificación de firmas no se realice de manera exhaustiva, llegando a aceptar firmas cuya originalidad no ha sido completamente verificada. En consecuencia, algunas organizaciones políticas están logrando su inscripción en el ROP con firmas falsificadas, las cuales posteriormente son denunciadas en los medios de comunicación, generando desconfianza en la ciudadanía. Este trabajo de investigación propone el desarrollo de un metaverificador de firmas, el cual realizará la verificación de los patrones de la firma en cuestión con las firmas genuinas, determinando la originalidad de la misma. La propuesta incluye el uso de nuevas características y un motor de verificación compuesto por dos módulos, el primer módulo tiene como función verificar si la firma en cuestión es falsa, y el segundo, realizar una verificación más detallada de las firmas que no fueron detectadas como falsas en el primer módulo. Los resultados demuestran que el metaverificador propuesto logra obtener una precisión del 93.3%, lo cual es bastante alto en comparación con resultados señalados en la literatura, usando solo 3 firmas genuinas para el entrenamiento.Perú. Ministerio de la Producción. Programa Nacional de Innovación para la Competitividad y Productividad (Innóvate Perú)Tesi

Building a Strong Undergraduate Research Culture in African Universities

Africa had a late start in the race to setting up and obtaining universities with research quality fundamentals. According to Mamdani [5], the first colonial universities were few and far between: Makerere in East Africa, Ibadan and Legon in West Africa. This last place in the race, compared to other continents, has had tremendous implications in the development plans for the continent. For Africa, the race has been difficult from a late start to an insurmountable litany of problems that include difficulty in equipment acquisition, lack of capacity, limited research and development resources and lack of investments in local universities. In fact most of these universities are very recent with many less than 50 years in business except a few. To help reduce the labor costs incurred by the colonial masters of shipping Europeans to Africa to do mere clerical jobs, they started training ―workshops‖ calling them technical or business colleges. According to Mamdani, meeting colonial needs was to be achieved while avoiding the ―Indian disease‖ in Africa -- that is, the development of an educated middle class, a group most likely to carry the virus of nationalism. Upon independence, most of these ―workshops‖ were turned into national ―universities‖, but with no clear role in national development. These national ―universities‖ were catering for children of the new African political elites. Through the seventies and eighties, most African universities were still without development agendas and were still doing business as usual. Meanwhile, governments strapped with lack of money saw no need of putting more scarce resources into big white elephants. By mid-eighties, even the UN and IMF were calling for a limit on funding African universities. In today‘s African university, the traditional curiosity driven research model has been replaced by a market-driven model dominated by a consultancy culture according to Mamdani (Mamdani, Mail and Guardian Online). The prevailing research culture as intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bones classroom activity, seminars and workshops have migrated to hotels and workshop attendance going with transport allowances and per diems (Mamdani, Mail and Guardian Online). There is need to remedy this situation and that is the focus of this paper

Challenges of Public Housing in a Democratic Nigeria: a Case Study of the Presidential Mandate Housing Scheme

This study examined the challenges of public housing in a democratic Nigeria using the Presidential Mandate Housing Scheme as a case study. Data were derived from purposively selected members of staff of public institutions charged with the responsibility of implementing this scheme in urban areas of Southern Nigeria through interview enquiries and participant observation. These were analyzed using content analysis. The result shows that the scheme was implemented in very few States in Southern part of Nigeria with miniscule number of housing units constructed in those States. Poor programme conception and planning, funding inadequacies and the dearth of preferred building materials were identified as the key challenges that led to the failure of this scheme. The paper argues that despite the return of democratic rule in 1999 and subsequent adoption of the New National Housing and Urban Development Policy in 2002, low organizational capacity of public housing agencies, the lack of collaborations between these agencies and private sector organizations and the none availability of reliable local building materials constitute serious impediments to smooth and successful implementation of public housing programmes in Nigeria. It therefore suggests that the prospects of public housing in democratic Nigeria are contingent upon addressing these challenge