Civil Society Iraq: Ethnic, Religious, and Location Influences on Outgroup Perception

Civil Society Iraq: Ethnic, Religious, and Location Influences on Outgroup Perception Jon Gresham* April 2004 A significant research question in the immediate post-war (May 2003) environment of Iraq was: "How do Iraqis’ ethnicity, religious affiliation, and location affect expressed perceptions of threat from outgroups?" We collected 479 surveys of Iraqi opinions, in five locations in Iraq, Jordan, and The Netherlands, with a single page instrument. Religion, ethnic origin, and location alone had little direct bearing on respondents’ attitudes towards outgroups or change (another type of threat) in Iraq. However, certain sets of interacting elements did reflect significant differences in perceptions of threat. For example, Shi’a Muslims of urban Basra had very different expressions towards return of expatriate Iraqis than did Baghdad residents. A serendipitous innovation was that of publishing our research process onto a "wiki" web page where visitors could add to or change contents of the documents. The wiki live publishing helped fellow scientists, decision-makers, resource agencies, and Iraq fieldworkers participate in our project. Why Civil Society? The term describes both behavior and social systems and provides a sociological framework from which to explore social interactions in Iraq. Follow-up is warranted. We found, for example, that "moderate Arabs" in Iraq were the most opposed to foreign involvement and were the most opposed to expatriate Iraqis returning to Iraq. This finding is relevant to decision-makers and field workers in relief, development, and reconstruction in Iraq. This paper describes our research process in a post-regime-change environment. I would welcome comments onto the web site: http://CivilSocietyIraq.seedwiki.com. _____________ * Jon Gresham is a visiting scholar at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. His work focuses on the Cyprus-Syria-Iraq-Iran area. Special thanks are given to Hub Linssen, Assistant Professor at the University of Utrecht, with interest in cross-national comparative survey methodology

MIR task and evaluation techniques

Existing tasks in MIREX have traditionally focused on low-level MIR tasks working with flat (usually DSP-only) ground-truth. These evaluation techniques, however, can not evaluate the increasing number of algorithms that utilize relational data and are not currently utilizing the state of the art in evaluating ranked or ordered output. This paper summarizes the state of the art in evaluating relational ground-truth. These components are then synthesized into novel evaluation techniques that are then applied to 14 concrete music document retrieval tasks, demonstrating how these evaluation techniques can be applied in a practical context

Fundamental concepts in management research and ensuring research quality : focusing on case study method

This paper discusses fundamental concepts in management research and ensuring research quality. It was presented at the European Academy of Management annual conference in 2008

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design

Systematizing Genome Privacy Research: A Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Perspective

Rapid advances in human genomics are enabling researchers to gain a better understanding of the role of the genome in our health and well-being, stimulating hope for more effective and cost efficient healthcare. However, this also prompts a number of security and privacy concerns stemming from the distinctive characteristics of genomic data. To address them, a new research community has emerged and produced a large number of publications and initiatives. In this paper, we rely on a structured methodology to contextualize and provide a critical analysis of the current knowledge on privacy-enhancing technologies used for testing, storing, and sharing genomic data, using a representative sample of the work published in the past decade. We identify and discuss limitations, technical challenges, and issues faced by the community, focusing in particular on those that are inherently tied to the nature of the problem and are harder for the community alone to address. Finally, we report on the importance and difficulty of the identified challenges based on an online survey of genome data privacy expertsComment: To appear in the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs), Vol. 2019, Issue

Toward a Model for Fisheries Social Impact Assessment

This paper presents a model for Fisheries Social Impact Assessment (SIA) that lays the groundwork for development of fisheries-focused, quantitative social assessments with a clear conceptual model. The usefulness of current fisheries SIA’s has been called into question by some as incompatible with approaches taken by fisheries biologists and economists when assessing potential effects of management actions. Our model’s approach is closer to the economists’ and biologists’ assessments and is therefore more useful for Fishery Management Council members. The paper was developed by anthropologists initially brought together in 2004 for an SIA Modeling Workshop by the National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA. Opinions and conclusions expressed or implied are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of the National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA

Developing the scales on evaluation beliefs of student teachers

The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to investigate the validity and the reliability of a newly developed questionnaire named ‘Teacher Evaluation Beliefs’ (TEB). The framework for developing items was provided by the two models. The first model focuses on Student-Centered and Teacher-Centered beliefs about evaluation while the other centers on five dimensions (what/ who/ when/ why/ how). The validity and reliability of the new instrument was investigated using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis study (n=446). Overall results indicate that the two-factor structure is more reasonable than the five-factor one. Further research needs additional items about the latent dimensions “what” ”who” ”when” ”why” “how” for each existing factor based on Student-centered and Teacher-centered approaches

Civil Society Iraq: Location Influences on Outgroup Perception (June 2004)

A significant research question in the immediate post-war (May 2003) environment of Iraq was: "How do Iraqis’ location affect expressed perceptions of threat from outgroups?" We collected 479 surveys of Iraqi opinions, in five locations (in Iraq, Jordan, and The Netherlands), with a single page instrument. Religion, ethnic origin, like location alone, had little strong bearing on respondents’ expressed attitudes towards outgroups or the government in Iraq. However, certain sets of interacting elements did reflect significant differences in perceptions of threat. For example, Shi’a Muslims of urban Basra had very different expressions towards return of expatriate Iraqis than did Shi’a Muslims of rural Basra. A serendipitous innovation was that of publishing our research process onto a "wiki" web page where visitors could add to or change contents of the documents. The wiki live publishing helped fellow scientists, decision-makers, resource agencies, and Iraq fieldworkers participate in our project. Why Civil Society? The term describes both behavior and social systems and provides an overarching framework from which to explore social interactions in Iraq. Follow-up is warranted. We found, for example, that "moderate Arabs" in Iraq were the most opposed to foreign involvement and were the most opposed to expatriate Iraqis returning to Iraq. This finding is relevant to decision-makers and field workers in relief, development, and reconstruction in Iraq. This paper describes our research process in a post-regime-change environment. I would welcome comments onto the web site: http://CivilSocietyIraq.seedwiki.com