Achieving Gender Justice in Indonesia's Forest and Land Governance Sector: How Civil Society Organizations Can Respond to Mining and Plantation Industry Impacts

Land based industries, most significantly palm oil plantations, timber concessions and mining operations, are expanding quickly in Indonesia. With approximately 840,000 ha of forest loss per year (Margono et al 2014), Indonesia suffers the world's highest rate of deforestation. As civil society organizations (CSOs) implement forest conservation strategies and programs to respond to the issue of forest loss, there is a growing concern that they lack the ability to address gender justice, or more specifically, Gender, Environment and Development, one field of Gender and Development. 1 This weakness may undermine CSO's ability to ameliorate the gendered injustices that limit women and marginalized communities' participation in forest governance. It also limits CSO's ability to build grassroots constituencies, which are crucial for driving reform. Drawing on the Gender, Environment and Development literature, and a gender assessment of selected Indonesian environmental CSOs, this paper provides a brief overview of the major gender issues relevant to forest and land governance, and makes six recommendations to help CSOs develop more gender sensitive advocacy and programming. The paper aims to contribute to the overall objective of improving gender justice (including women's participation) in forest governance

Engineering Resilient Collective Adaptive Systems by Self-Stabilisation

Collective adaptive systems are an emerging class of networked computational systems, particularly suited in application domains such as smart cities, complex sensor networks, and the Internet of Things. These systems tend to feature large scale, heterogeneity of communication model (including opportunistic peer-to-peer wireless interaction), and require inherent self-adaptiveness properties to address unforeseen changes in operating conditions. In this context, it is extremely difficult (if not seemingly intractable) to engineer reusable pieces of distributed behaviour so as to make them provably correct and smoothly composable. Building on the field calculus, a computational model (and associated toolchain) capturing the notion of aggregate network-level computation, we address this problem with an engineering methodology coupling formal theory and computer simulation. On the one hand, functional properties are addressed by identifying the largest-to-date field calculus fragment generating self-stabilising behaviour, guaranteed to eventually attain a correct and stable final state despite any transient perturbation in state or topology, and including highly reusable building blocks for information spreading, aggregation, and time evolution. On the other hand, dynamical properties are addressed by simulation, empirically evaluating the different performances that can be obtained by switching between implementations of building blocks with provably equivalent functional properties. Overall, our methodology sheds light on how to identify core building blocks of collective behaviour, and how to select implementations that improve system performance while leaving overall system function and resiliency properties unchanged.Comment: To appear on ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulatio

Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

Initiating and Sustaining Female Networks in Computer Science and IT

Over the last decade, several networks and communities for women in IT have been initiated. It has been known that specific needs for support exist where members of a minority have difficulties in finding like-minded people in their everyday environment. This paper investigates different forms of female networks in Computer Science and IT. In particular, it analyses forms of network initiation, which often involve face-to-face meetings at regular events like conferences or, increasingly, at summer universities for female students. We conducted three studies to identify the attendees' expectations and needs for support using questionnaires, interviews, and a wiki analysis. This paper aims at identifying effective strategies for initiating female networks

Classroom Practices of Primary and Secondary Teachers Participating in English in Action: Third Cohort (2014)

This study reports on the third cohort of teachers and students to participate in EIA (2013–14). While the students and teachers in Cohort 3 underwent an essentially similar programme to those in Cohorts 1 and 2, they are much greater in number (there are over 8,000 teachers and 1.7 million students in Cohort 3, compared to 751 teachers and 118,000 students in Cohort 1). To enable ongoing increases in scale, the SBTD programme became increasingly decentralised, with less direct contact with English language teaching (ELT) experts, a greater embedding of expertise within teacher development materials (especially video) and a greater dependence upon localised peer support. The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether there had been changes in the classroom practice of teachers and students participating in EIA Cohort 3 (2013–14). Previous research in language teaching has established that when teachers take up most of the lesson time talking, this can severely limit students’ opportunities to develop proficiency in the target language (Cook 2008); a general goal of English language (EL) teachers is to motivate their students to speak – and to practise using the target language (Nunan 1991). This study therefore focuses upon the extent of teacher and student talk, the use of the target language by both, and the forms of classroom organisation (individual, pair, group or choral work) in which student talk is situated. The study addresses two research questions: 1. To what extent do the teachers of Cohort 3 show classroom practice comparable to the teachers of Cohort 1, particularly in relation to the amount of student talk and the use of the target language by teachers and students, post-intervention? 2. In what ways do the teachers of Cohort 3 show improved classroom practice (particularly in relation to the amount of student talk and use of the target language by teachers and students) in contrast to the pre-intervention baseline? This study is a repeat of studies on Cohorts 1 & 2 (EIA 2011a, 2012a & 2014)

Pattern languages in HCI: A critical review

This article presents a critical review of patterns and pattern languages in human-computer interaction (HCI). In recent years, patterns and pattern languages have received considerable attention in HCI for their potential as a means for developing and communicating information and knowledge to support good design. This review examines the background to patterns and pattern languages in HCI, and seeks to locate pattern languages in relation to other approaches to interaction design. The review explores four key issues: What is a pattern? What is a pattern language? How are patterns and pattern languages used? and How are values reflected in the pattern-based approach to design? Following on from the review, a future research agenda is proposed for patterns and pattern languages in HCI

PenDraw - A Language for Improving Take-Up of SVG

The case is presented for preferring a dedicated Computer Graphics (CG) language to the traditional conventional language plus add-on. PenDraw is presented as an existing language that overcomes many problems of CG add-ons, providing compile-time checking and reduced need for run-time debugging. PenDraw produces well-formed SVG. Evidence is given that PenDraw decreases development costs. Evidence is presented that PenDraw has brought CG programming to a wider ability range of potential users than professional programmers. It is argued that, given its qualities, PenDraw should be able to improve the take-up of CG programming. Such take-up is expected to be slow at first, given the market-place focus on interactivity and 3D. But it is believed that PenDraw's expressive power and cost benefits should lead to growth in its use, and in use of SVG