609 research outputs found
Intervención internacional a través de los medios de comunicación en sociedades posguerra: Perspectivas a partir de las epistemologÃas del sur
Over the past two decades, international intervention
in post-war settings has strictly followed liberal
assumptions and practices. Efforts to build and
shape the media in the aftermath of armed conflict
are no exception. In setting the foundations for
the rule of law, liberal democracy and free market,
external actors have (re)defined what constitutes
the mediascape – that is, the various spheres of
communication within public discourse – and how to
(re)construct it. Imprinted with modernity’s tenets
and western assumptions about the public space, this
approach has understood the mediascape narrowly
as limited to traditional, established, liberal media,
serving to validate particular actors and processes
whilst obscuring, neglecting and shutting off global
diversity. Law and technology, this paper argues, are
the two main axes through which legitimation and
exclusion are effected. A myopic focus on legal and
technological aspects of the media reduces a rich
space of local discourses, norms and practices to
western-like media legislation, training and outlets,
narrowing in turn the sites for addressing violence
and building peace.Durante las últimas dos décadas, la intervención
internacional en contextos posguerra ha seguido
estrictamente los supuestos y prácticas liberales. Los
esfuerzos para construir y dar forma a los medios
de comunicación después de los conflictos armados
no son una excepción. Al sentar las bases del estado
de derecho, de la democracia liberal y del libre
mercado, los actores externos han definido lo que
constituye el paisaje mediático, es decir, las diversas
esferas de la comunicación en el discurso público y
cómo reconstruirlo. Imbuido con los principios de
la modernidad y los supuestos occidentales sobre
el espacio público, este enfoque ha entendido el
panorama mediático estrechamente como limitado
a los medios tradicionales, establecidos y liberales,
sirviendo para validar actores y procesos particulares
mientras oscurece, descuida y cierra la diversidad
global. El derecho y la tecnologÃa, sostiene este
documento, son los dos ejes principales a través de los
cuales se efectúan la legitimación y la exclusión. Un
enfoque miope en los aspectos legales y tecnológicos
de los medios de comunicación que reduce un rico
espacio de discursos, normas y prácticas locales a la
legislación, la formación y los medios de comunicación
de los medios occidentales, reduciendo a su vez los
sitios para abordar la violencia y construir la paz
The JStar language philosophy
This paper introduces the JStar parallel programming language, which is a Java-based declarative language aimed at discouraging sequential programming, en-couraging massively parallel programming, and giving the compiler and runtime maximum freedom to try alternative parallelisation strategies. We describe the execution semantics and runtime support of the language, several optimisations and parallelism strategies, with some benchmark results
Examining the Relationship between Stomiiform Fish Morphology and their Ecological Traits
Trait-based ecology characterizes individuals’ functional attributes to better understand and predict their interactions with other species and their environments. Utilizing morphological traits to describe functional groups has helped group species with similar ecological niches that are not necessarily taxonomically related. Within the deep-pelagic fishes, the Order Stomiiformes exhibits high morphological and species diversity, and many species undertake diel vertical migration (DVM). While the morphology and behavior of stomiiform fishes have been extensively studied and described through taxonomic assessments, the connection between their form and function regarding their DVM types, morphotypes, and daytime depth distributions is not well known. Here, three computer-aided morphometric techniques were used to analyze stomiiform fishes body shapes to examine the relationship between their morphology and established functional traits. Additionally, the feasibility of the three techniques to quantify preserved specimens’ shapes was assessed by measuring their ability to predict an individual\u27s taxonomic identity. In the present study, computer-aided morphometric techniques were relatively successful in distinguishing between some taxa. Still, the extent of its success varied according to the taxa and the technique used. Functional traits associated with DVM and vertical distributions were generally significant but showed similar variability across techniques and taxa. The results of this study showed that combining computer-aided morphometric techniques with taxonomic and traditional assessments can open a wide range of new potential applications to further understand deep-sea fish morphologies and how they relate to their functioning within the deep sea. Computer-aided morphometric techniques are considered suitable methods for exploring deep-sea fish morphology variability and for a rough assessment of ecological traits within and between individuals
Catala: A Programming Language for the Law
Law at large underpins modern society, codifying and governing many aspects
of citizens' daily lives. Oftentimes, law is subject to interpretation, debate
and challenges throughout various courts and jurisdictions. But in some other
areas, law leaves little room for interpretation, and essentially aims to
rigorously describe a computation, a decision procedure or, simply said, an
algorithm. Unfortunately, prose remains a woefully inadequate tool for the job.
The lack of formalism leaves room for ambiguities; the structure of legal
statutes, with many paragraphs and sub-sections spread across multiple pages,
makes it hard to compute the intended outcome of the algorithm underlying a
given text; and, as with any other piece of poorly-specified critical software,
the use of informal language leaves corner cases unaddressed. We introduce
Catala, a new programming language that we specifically designed to allow a
straightforward and systematic translation of statutory law into an executable
implementation. Catala aims to bring together lawyers and programmers through a
shared medium, which together they can understand, edit and evolve, bridging a
gap that often results in dramatically incorrect implementations of the law. We
have implemented a compiler for Catala, and have proven the correctness of its
core compilation steps using the F* proof assistant. We evaluate Catala on
several legal texts that are algorithms in disguise, notably section 121 of the
US federal income tax and the byzantine French family benefits; in doing so, we
uncover a bug in the official implementation. We observe as a consequence of
the formalization process that using Catala enables rich interactions between
lawyers and programmers, leading to a greater understanding of the original
legislative intent, while producing a correct-by-construction executable
specification reusable by the greater software ecosystem
Using theory in criminal justice evaluation
This chapter examines the nature and role of theory in criminal justice evaluation. A distinction between theories of and theories for evaluation is offered to clarify what is meant by ‘theory’ in the context of contemporary evaluation practice. Theories of evaluation provide a set of prescriptions and principles that can be used to guide the design, conduct and use of evaluation. Theories for evaluation include programme theory and the application of social science theory to understand how and why criminal justice interventions work to generate desired outcomes. The fundamental features of these three types of theory are discussed in detail, with a particular focus on demonstrating their combined value and utility for informing and improving the practice of criminal justice evaluatio
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