366 research outputs found

    Exploring Food System Transformations in Spain (1980-2021)

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    èng In this PhD Thesis, I examine the transformations of the Spanish food system from 1980 to the present, focusing on its socioeconomic structural changes and their impacts on sustainability and social equity. My research is grounded in agrarian history and political economy approaches, and also incorporates insights from ecological and feminist economics. The first and third Chapters are empirical in nature. Based primarily on data from Spanish national accounts, the results demonstrate the increasing integration of the Spanish agri-food system into the global one and the growing dependence of agriculture on external inputs. They also reveal a sharp decline in the agrarian population along with the increase in the share of salaried work. This is explained by the reduction in the number of farms throughout the period, particularly small family farms, which also show an aging process of their holders. The decline of the agrarian income has been a major determinant in this path. The combination of these trends jeopardizes the present and future reproduction of Spanish agroecosystems. I also examine the evolution of food expenditure of Spanish households, as a first exploration of the food cost in the reproduction of labouring population. The results show a halt in the reduction of its weight, but further research is needed for a definitive conclusion. Additionally, the results suggest an increasing inequality in the distribution of value added along the agri-food chain. In the second Chapter, I develop a research framework to investigate food systems at a national level, and particularly their role in the reproduction mechanisms of the capitalist system in which they are embedded, based on the approaches of the food regimes, social metabolism, and surplus/reproduction. This framework has helped me to interpret the results from the first and third Chapters from a more comprehensive approach. The framework includes six dimensions encompassing 36 elements linked through six key cross-cutting connections

    Revitalising Gija: Developing Genre-based Documentation and Description for Community Language Programs

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    Gija is a language spoken in the east Kimberley region of Western Australia. Based on a number of indicators of language vitality, it has been classified as Severely Endangered or Moribund. This research undertakes description of Gija, applying Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) typology and genre theory in the context of supporting the maintenance of this endangered Australian language. Many linguists now agree that if linguistic scholarship is to contribute directly to language revitalisation processes, it must consider language in use and in its cultural context. SFL, in its orientation towards meaning and its metafunctionally diversified, stratified model of language provides theoretically informed principles for making such a contribution. This study takes texts highly valued in the Gija community and used in language education as its data. It recognises three significant genres - the Ngarranggarni story, plant usage report and mantha. Applying a stratified model of text in context, the analyses investigate the patterns of language choice from a ‘top-down’ perspective. That is, chapters begin with genre, looking at how texts are staged to fulfill their social purpose and what configurations of register variables (known as field, mode and tenor) underpin each text. Within genre stages meanings are realised as unfolding phases, realised in turn as patterns of choice from discourse semantic systems. Finally, each genre becomes the way in to discussing how the verbal group in Gija contributes to ideational, textual and interpersonal meaning at clause, group and word rank. By taking these insights and recontextualising them in teacher training, Gija educators can be supported to bring their knowledge about Gija to consciousness, supporting their growing confidence as teachers of their own language. This study could also be utilised to develop linguistically informed resources for school and community-based Gija language teaching programs in the future

    Machine Learning Algorithm for the Scansion of Old Saxon Poetry

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    Several scholars designed tools to perform the automatic scansion of poetry in many languages, but none of these tools deal with Old Saxon or Old English. This project aims to be a first attempt to create a tool for these languages. We implemented a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model to perform the automatic scansion of Old Saxon and Old English poems. Since this model uses supervised learning, we manually annotated the Heliand manuscript, and we used the resulting corpus as labeled dataset to train the model. The evaluation of the performance of the algorithm reached a 97% for the accuracy and a 99% of weighted average for precision, recall and F1 Score. In addition, we tested the model with some verses from the Old Saxon Genesis and some from The Battle of Brunanburh, and we observed that the model predicted almost all Old Saxon metrical patterns correctly misclassified the majority of the Old English input verses

    How vaccines come to matter: A feminist STS encounter with the politics of vaccines

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    This thesis examines the relationship between bodies, politics, and vaccines. I am writing in the context of a pandemic during which vaccines are at the centre of public, political, scientific and media attention. The pandemic has quite clearly exposed the uncertainties and complexities of vaccine research in practice, and the inadequacy of understanding scientific practices as smooth, universalised and disentangled from social dynamics. This thesis tells the story of vaccines as political material encounters. This framing problematises the technological hubris that reduces medical accomplishments to purely biological terms, and questions reinvigorated calls to separate science from politics. Informed by a science and technology studies (STS) perspective and more specifically feminist sensitivities of STS work, I point to the entangled nature of social and scientific events, and to the non-universality of the subject of medical research. The central claim that I make, and work with, across this thesis is that the indeterminacy of vaccines – their social, political and material contingency – is in fact key to the way in which vaccines work. At a time of heightened concern around the public uptake of vaccines, where heroic narratives of the ways in which vaccines work have come to dominate public discourse, in this thesis I explore the grounds for a humbler disposition toward vaccination. I argue that, understanding the situated material configuration of vaccines and their broader social and political co-production provides a vantage point for reassessing the conditions that enable vaccines to work. This insight allows me to claim that vaccines only exist through the material relations they emerge from. I call these relations ‘encounters’ and my exploration of the indeterminacies of vaccines as a practice of ‘encountering’. Rather than ask what vaccines ‘are’, my thesis askes how vaccines come to matter, how they relate to, and at the same time make and enact, specific ideas of bodies, immunity, health and collectivity. I analyse how vaccines encounter nature through the pathogens they are developed to build protection from; how they encounter multispecies bodies in the laboratory practices that produce them; how vaccines encounter the immune system through the phenomenon of immunological memory; and finally, how vaccines encounter communities of bodies through the phenomenon of herd immunity. For each of these encounters, first I consider how these relations are often understood as neutral, fixed, and predetermined outcomes. Then, a further consideration of their material intricacies and the meanings they enact allows me to expose the political and ethical stakes of these arrangements. Understanding vaccines as encounters, focusing on the situated, material, relational condition of their enactments, will open up the possibility to propose different configurations of these encounters and alternative political and ethical sensibilities related to vaccines as relational technologies of bodies, health and community

    The universe without us: a history of the science and ethics of human extinction

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    This dissertation consists of two parts. Part I is an intellectual history of thinking about human extinction (mostly) within the Western tradition. When did our forebears first imagine humanity ceasing to exist? Have people always believed that human extinction is a real possibility, or were some convinced that this could never happen? How has our thinking about extinction evolved over time? Why do so many notable figures today believe that the probability of extinction this century is higher than ever before in our 300,000-year history on Earth? Exploring these questions takes readers from the ancient Greeks, Persians, and Egyptians, through the 18th-century Enlightenment, past scientific breakthroughs of the 19th century like thermodynamics and evolutionary theory, up to the Atomic Age, the rise of modern environmentalism in the 1970s, and contemporary fears about climate change, global pandemics, and artificial general intelligence (AGI). Part II is a history of Western thinking about the ethical and evaluative implications of human extinction. Would causing or allowing our extinction be morally right or wrong? Would our extinction be good or bad, better or worse compared to continuing to exist? For what reasons? Under which conditions? Do we have a moral obligation to create future people? Would past “progress” be rendered meaningless if humanity were to die out? Does the fact that we might be unique in the universe—the only “rational” and “moral” creatures—give us extra reason to ensure our survival? I place these questions under the umbrella of Existential Ethics, tracing the development of this field from the early 1700s through Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, the gloomy German pessimists of the latter 19th century, and post-World War II reflections on nuclear “omnicide,” up to current-day thinkers associated with “longtermism” and “antinatalism.” In the dissertation, I call the first history “History #1” and the second “History #2.” A main thesis of Part I is that Western thinking about human extinction can be segmented into five distinction periods, each of which corresponds to a unique “existential mood.” An existential mood arises from a particular set of answers to fundamental questions about the possibility, probability, etiology, and so on, of human extinction. I claim that the idea of human extinction first appeared among the ancient Greeks, but was eclipsed for roughly 1,500 years with the rise of Christianity. A central contention of Part II is that philosophers have thus far conflated six distinct types of “human extinction,” each of which has its own unique ethical and evaluative implications. I further contend that it is crucial to distinguish between the process or event of Going Extinct and the state or condition of Being Extinct, which one should see as orthogonal to the six types of extinction that I delineate. My aim with the second part of the book is to not only trace the history of Western thinking about the ethics of annihilation, but lay the theoretical groundwork for future research on the topic. I then outline my own views within “Existential Ethics,” which combine ideas and positions to yield a novel account of the conditions under which our extinction would be bad, and why there is a sense in which Being Extinct might be better than Being Extant, or continuing to exist

    Systematic Approaches for Telemedicine and Data Coordination for COVID-19 in Baja California, Mexico

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    Conference proceedings info: ICICT 2023: 2023 The 6th International Conference on Information and Computer Technologies Raleigh, HI, United States, March 24-26, 2023 Pages 529-542We provide a model for systematic implementation of telemedicine within a large evaluation center for COVID-19 in the area of Baja California, Mexico. Our model is based on human-centric design factors and cross disciplinary collaborations for scalable data-driven enablement of smartphone, cellular, and video Teleconsul-tation technologies to link hospitals, clinics, and emergency medical services for point-of-care assessments of COVID testing, and for subsequent treatment and quar-antine decisions. A multidisciplinary team was rapidly created, in cooperation with different institutions, including: the Autonomous University of Baja California, the Ministry of Health, the Command, Communication and Computer Control Center of the Ministry of the State of Baja California (C4), Colleges of Medicine, and the College of Psychologists. Our objective is to provide information to the public and to evaluate COVID-19 in real time and to track, regional, municipal, and state-wide data in real time that informs supply chains and resource allocation with the anticipation of a surge in COVID-19 cases. RESUMEN Proporcionamos un modelo para la implementación sistemática de la telemedicina dentro de un gran centro de evaluación de COVID-19 en el área de Baja California, México. Nuestro modelo se basa en factores de diseño centrados en el ser humano y colaboraciones interdisciplinarias para la habilitación escalable basada en datos de tecnologías de teleconsulta de teléfonos inteligentes, celulares y video para vincular hospitales, clínicas y servicios médicos de emergencia para evaluaciones de COVID en el punto de atención. pruebas, y para el tratamiento posterior y decisiones de cuarentena. Rápidamente se creó un equipo multidisciplinario, en cooperación con diferentes instituciones, entre ellas: la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, la Secretaría de Salud, el Centro de Comando, Comunicaciones y Control Informático. de la Secretaría del Estado de Baja California (C4), Facultades de Medicina y Colegio de Psicólogos. Nuestro objetivo es proporcionar información al público y evaluar COVID-19 en tiempo real y rastrear datos regionales, municipales y estatales en tiempo real que informan las cadenas de suministro y la asignación de recursos con la anticipación de un aumento de COVID-19. 19 casos.ICICT 2023: 2023 The 6th International Conference on Information and Computer Technologieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3236-

    Where there are no Footprints: An Ethnography of Contemporary Art in Kolkata

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    This dissertation is an ethnographic exploration of contemporary art in Kolkata. It closely follows several individual artists and art groups who endeavour to defy established conventions and create new works of art. Yet, confronted with a new work of art, a doubt sets in. Wasn’t this made before? Can we be sure that it’s not a copy? The doubt of novelty and originality has always troubled the visual arts, and was particularly pronounced in (post)colonial Calcutta, where works were condemned by some as belated repetitions of European modern art. Convictions of belatedness have been successfully debunked, but with the emergence of ‘contemporary’ art the doubt of novelty emerges yet again. To understand the predicament of artistic novelty this dissertation unfolds a cyclical ritual theory of contemporary art that includes the practices surrounding the artwork, while not forgetting the artwork itself – an analysis that involves the entire set of practices implicated in the production, exhibition, circulation, and preservation of art. This theory is subsequently applied to the field of contemporary art in Kolkata. The ethnographic chapters focus on the tension between artistic attempts to make new works of art and the various limitations that artists encounter; artists are not just caught up in artistic conventions, but are simultaneously impeded by limited economic means and trapped in a peripheral position where they always seem to lag behind, caught up in a city that doesn’t seem to live up to its own history. Yet, by making ambiguous works that resonate with the city in various ways, artists defy conventions, bypass limitations, and offer moments in which the world can be experienced anew

    CLARIN

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    The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium
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