Spartan Daily, February 22, 2006

Volume 126, Issue 16https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10216/thumbnail.jp

Sustaining Digital History

This project seeks to build a scholarly community for the practice of the emerging field of digital history by 1.) enhancing communication and collaboration among scholars and journal editors, 2.) creating model forms of scholarship and peer review, and 3.) establishing a clearinghouse for all peer-reviewed digital history scholarship. Digital History has grown up in the last fifteen years through and around the explosion of the World Wide Web, but historians have only just begun to explore what history looks like in the digital medium. Increasingly, university departments seek scholars to translate history into this fast-paced environment and to work in digital history; however, they have found that without well-defined examples of digital scholarship, established best practices, and, especially, clear standards of peer review for tenure, few scholars have fully engaged with the digital medium. Our challenge now is to create a wider scholarly community around Digital History

Spartan Daily, April 9, 2003

Volume 120, Issue 46https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9842/thumbnail.jp

South African Private Security Contractors Active in Armed Conflicts: Citizenship, Prosecution and the Right to Wor

South Africa has adopted two pieces of legislation since 1998 aimed at restricting one of the fastest growing sectors of the global economy: the private security industry. Not only is this legislation completely unique, but it appears wholly at odds with international opinion. In this article we place private security contractors (PSCs) under the microscope of international law, exploring the role they play in armed conflicts, and the status afforded them by international humanitarian law (IHL). We address the issue of prohibited mercenarism, questioning whether PSCs should be categorised as mercenaries. We then shift our focus to the South African legislation and discuss the ambit of its application as compared with international law obligations to outlaw mercenaries. We discuss the likelihood of successful prosecution of PSCs, and the potential penalties that PSCs might face in terms of the South African legislation. Lastly we consider the constitutional challenges which might emerge as this legislation, and a proposed amendment to the South African Citizenship Act threaten the constitutionally protected rights of South African PSCs to practise a profession and enjoy citizenship

Robust Dialog Management Through A Context-centric Architecture

This dissertation presents and evaluates a method of managing spoken dialog interactions with a robust attention to fulfilling the human user’s goals in the presence of speech recognition limitations. Assistive speech-based embodied conversation agents are computer-based entities that interact with humans to help accomplish a certain task or communicate information via spoken input and output. A challenging aspect of this task involves open dialog, where the user is free to converse in an unstructured manner. With this style of input, the machine’s ability to communicate may be hindered by poor reception of utterances, caused by a user’s inadequate command of a language and/or faults in the speech recognition facilities. Since a speech-based input is emphasized, this endeavor involves the fundamental issues associated with natural language processing, automatic speech recognition and dialog system design. Driven by ContextBased Reasoning, the presented dialog manager features a discourse model that implements mixed-initiative conversation with a focus on the user’s assistive needs. The discourse behavior must maintain a sense of generality, where the assistive nature of the system remains constant regardless of its knowledge corpus. The dialog manager was encapsulated into a speech-based embodied conversation agent platform for prototyping and testing purposes. A battery of user trials was performed on this agent to evaluate its performance as a robust, domain-independent, speech-based interaction entity capable of satisfying the needs of its users

Automobile Recycling Policy: Findings and Recommendations

Findings and recommendations presented to the Automobitive Board of Governors, World Economic Forum, Davos.This report focuses on recycling. As an objective neutral party, MIT has compiled a knowledge base that examines the many complex issues relating to re-cycling. Although this report was prepared at the request of the Automotive board of Governors, it was not prepared solely as an industry response document. Rather, it attempts to focus on the concerted actions that both industry and government should take. MIT hopes that the document can serve as the basis for forging international consensus on a rational approach to recycling policy. This document presents the findings and recommendations of this group to the Board of Governors. In addition to these recommendations, supporting materials in the form of four appendices, tracing specific aspects of the problem of vehicle recycling and the ways in which these problems can be analyzed, are appended.International Motor Vehicle Program, Materials Systems Laborator

Phonetic study and text mining of Spanish for English to Spanish translation system

Projecte realitzat en col.laboració amb el centre University of Southern Californi

Proceedings

Proceedings of the NODALIDA 2009 workshop Nordic Perspectives on the CLARIN Infrastructure of Language Resources. Editors: Rickard Domeij, Kimmo Koskenniemi, Steven Krauwer, Bente Maegaard, Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson and Koenraad de Smedt. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 5 (2009), v+45 pp. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9207

How Citizen Organizations Can Monitor Abuse of States Resources in Elections

Political corruption and the abuse of state resources can undermine the core principles of electoral integrity, subverting equal electoral competition and the will of voters. Through systematic monitoring of the abuse of state resources, citizen monitors can promote accountability for such abuses and seek to prevent them altogether. This guide provides a framework for citizen election observers and civil society organizations to make strategic decisions about how to monitor the abuse of state resources and its impact on electoral integrity. The guide provides a detailed overview of the abuse of institutional, coercive, regulatory and budgetary resources in elections, with additional information on monitoring the abuse of media and legislative resources. It reviews various methodologies – including direct observation, key informant interviews, analysis of official data, in-depth investigation, verified citizen reports, and monitoring of traditional and social media – and discusses which are best suited to monitor different types of abuses, as well as strategies to develop communications plans. The guide also highlights successful and varied election monitoring strategies used to document abuse of state resources around the world