Why the EU is failing in its neighbourhood: the case of Armenia

As the Arab Spring has made clear, the EU’s strategic aim of being surrounded by a ring of secure, democratic, and prosperous friends has not yet materialized. While most previous analyses have found fault with inconsistent application of conditionality, this article locates the root of the problem with an the EU’s institutional set-up. Starting from interviews and documentary analysis, it uses Armenia as a case study to demonstrate how competition within and between the European Parliament, the Council, and the Commission has led to internal, horizontal, and vertical inconsistencies that have seriously hampered the EU’s capacity to promote reforms. If recent institutional reforms have been designed to address precisely these problems, sociological rational choice and historical institutionalism suggest that it remains to be seen to what extent these recent reforms and initiatives will be able to bring about a change substantial enough to make the EU more successful in its neighbourhood

Management of Radio and Television Stations in Nigeria

Broadcasting is very important in Africa because majority of Africans get their information, education and entertainment chiefly from radio and television. Because of this vital role of broadcasting in developing countries, radio and television mediums have become the most controlled for both technical and political reasons. The study aimed at critically examining the role of government in the management and control of radio and television stations in Nigeria, its policy thrust and impact on editorial and programming independence. The study also examined how government strict monopoly affects programming content which in turn also affects political, social and cultural development of the country. The study relied mostly on historical data generated through documentary sources for analysis. The study found out that mass media policy which affects media management in Nigeria has been a sensitive, undecided and unconcluded phenomenon, not only because of diversity of the Nigerian society but also because of the failure of majority of Nigerians and their leaders to visualize the role of their mass media in the development of Nigeria. Mass media development in Nigeria has not only been painstakingly slow and erratic but has also followed the western pattern. The study therefore recommends that government must regard the media industry as an agglomeration of stakeholders all of whom are important to the business. It is improper to assume that all that is important to the formulation of media policies are government and journalists with a total disregard to the role of end-users

Academic Capitalism and the Public Good in Public and Private U.S. Higher Education: A Grounded Theory Study of Internationalization

Within the context of U.S. higher education, market forces inform institutional strategies at public and private universities alike (Rhoades & Slaughter, 2006). Despite existing studies on market-driven forces in the internationalization and transnationalization of U.S. higher education (Knight, 2004; Marginson, 2012; Rhoades, Lee and Maldonado-Maldonado, 2005; Stromquist, 2007), there is a relative lack of theoretical or methodological engagement with how the theory of academic capitalism informs our understanding of the dominance of market-driven strategies in internationalization and how those strategies and practices blur the boundaries between the market and the public good. Furthermore, no studies have explored how the intersection and coexistence of the public good and academic capitalism shapes universities’ internationalization strategies and approaches. Using social constructivist grounded theory methodology, this study considered how the “public” and “private” nature of two U.S. higher education institutions shaped their conceptualization of internationalization, and how academic capitalism and the public good rationales intersect in internationalization strategies. The study revealed that institutional strategies are shaped by both conflictual coexistence and complementary coexistence of public good- and market-driven rationales in the areas of market-driven approaches in internationalization as well as transnational applied research, community engagement, and emerging critical perspectives in internationalization. Conflictual coexistence produced several consequences and risks, including unequal access, cultures of exclusion, and lack of evaluation and assessment. This study also suggests that complementary coexistence strategies produce several unconventional and non-normative strategies, such as critical transnational pedagogies, the democratization of internationalization, multisector partnerships, and better collaboration and cooperation between organizational units. Drawing on these findings, this study informed a grounded theory of intersectional internationalization. Intersectional internationalization builds upon the theory of academic capitalism by positing internationalization as a site of intersection that blurs the boundaries between the public and private, market- and public good-driven approaches, and the local and global through complementary and conflictual coexisting public good-driven and market-shaped strategies. This framework of intersectional internationalization as a contested, conditional site of intersection comprised of conflictual coexistence and complementary coexistence can inform more critical educational, social, and policy strategic choices and outcomes among U.S. higher education leaders engaged in internationalization

Prompt Sapper: LLM-Empowered Software Engineering Infrastructure for AI-Native Services

Foundation models, such as GPT-4, DALL-E have brought unprecedented AI "operating system" effect and new forms of human-AI interaction, sparking a wave of innovation in AI-native services, where natural language prompts serve as executable "code" directly (prompt as executable code), eliminating the need for programming language as an intermediary and opening up the door to personal AI. Prompt Sapper has emerged in response, committed to support the development of AI-native services by AI chain engineering. It creates a large language model (LLM) empowered software engineering infrastructure for authoring AI chains through human-AI collaborative intelligence, unleashing the AI innovation potential of every individual, and forging a future where everyone can be a master of AI innovation. This article will introduce the R\&D motivation behind Prompt Sapper, along with its corresponding AI chain engineering methodology and technical practices

Designing and evaluating the usability of a machine learning API for rapid prototyping music technology

To better support creative software developers and music technologists' needs, and to empower them as machine learning users and innovators, the usability of and developer experience with machine learning tools must be considered and better understood. We review background research on the design and evaluation of application programming interfaces (APIs), with a focus on the domain of machine learning for music technology software development. We present the design rationale for the RAPID-MIX API, an easy-to-use API for rapid prototyping with interactive machine learning, and a usability evaluation study with software developers of music technology. A cognitive dimensions questionnaire was designed and delivered to a group of 12 participants who used the RAPID-MIX API in their software projects, including people who developed systems for personal use and professionals developing software products for music and creative technology companies. The results from the questionnaire indicate that participants found the RAPID-MIX API a machine learning API which is easy to learn and use, fun, and good for rapid prototyping with interactive machine learning. Based on these findings, we present an analysis and characterization of the RAPID-MIX API based on the cognitive dimensions framework, and discuss its design trade-offs and usability issues. We use these insights and our design experience to provide design recommendations for ML APIs for rapid prototyping of music technology. We conclude with a summary of the main insights, a discussion of the merits and challenges of the application of the CDs framework to the evaluation of machine learning APIs, and directions to future work which our research deems valuable

Facial hacking: the twisted logic of electro-facial choreography

This research addresses the development of a computational facial language that enables systematic exploration of the external controlled human face with the aim to identify fundamental electro-facial choreographic patterns. Rewiring the human face to an external digital control system, has sparked a radical new way of thinking about the human facial display. Radical, as facial movement is now rooted in digital instead of neural computation. The human face has become an extension of a digital control system inheriting its characteristics: i.e. temporal accuracy, consistency of execution and high programmability. How do we conceptualize the thinking about the human face as a digital computational display device? What are the implications of the “regime change” from neural to digital? The research addresses these issues within the contextual framework where it also originated, in the practice of hacking. It uses the results oriented methods and strategies of hacking to analyze, explore and contextualize the human facial display as a site for digital computational expression. The contributions of this work include the following. 1) External facial control transgresses the neural performance limitations and enables us to think about facial movement from a digital computational choreographic paradigm. 2) A facial language, the Language of Facial E-motion, that allows systematic computational exploration of possible facial movement patterns. Choreologic probing of dynamic face space has brought about unseen facial movement patterns and has uncovered a latent expressive potential of the facial hardware

Parallel programming paradigms and frameworks in big data era

With Cloud Computing emerging as a promising new approach for ad-hoc parallel data processing, major companies have started to integrate frameworks for parallel data processing in their product portfolio, making it easy for customers to access these services and to deploy their programs. We have entered the Era of Big Data. The explosion and profusion of available data in a wide range of application domains rise up new challenges and opportunities in a plethora of disciplines-ranging from science and engineering to biology and business. One major challenge is how to take advantage of the unprecedented scale of data-typically of heterogeneous nature-in order to acquire further insights and knowledge for improving the quality of the offered services. To exploit this new resource, we need to scale up and scale out both our infrastructures and standard techniques. Our society is already data-rich, but the question remains whether or not we have the conceptual tools to handle it. In this paper we discuss and analyze opportunities and challenges for efficient parallel data processing. Big Data is the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity, and many solutions continue to appear, partly supported by the considerable enthusiasm around the MapReduce paradigm for large-scale data analysis. We review various parallel and distributed programming paradigms, analyzing how they fit into the Big Data era, and present modern emerging paradigms and frameworks. To better support practitioners interesting in this domain, we end with an analysis of on-going research challenges towards the truly fourth generation data-intensive science.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Toward an understanding of the democratic reconceptualization of physical education teacher education in post-military Brazil

Background: Teacher education, including physical education teacher education (PETE), around the world remains highly autocratic and content focused [Apple, M. W. 2000. Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age. New York: Routledge]. Scholars in physical education [O’Sullivan, M., D. Siedentop, and L. F. Locke. 1992. “Toward Collegiality: Competing Viewpoints among Teacher Educators.” Quest 44 (2): 266 –280] as well as in and education more broadly [McAllister, G., and J. J. Irvine. 2000. “Cross Cultural Competency and Multicultural Teacher Education.” Review of Educational Research 70 (1): 3– 24] have noted the limited opportunities for the discussion of democratic practices, critical pedagogy, and citizenship education. However, since the fall of the military dictatorship, Brazil has had the opportunity to reconstruct teacher education with a focus on democracy. Many of these changes have been influenced by the philosophy of Paulo Freire [1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum; 1985. The Politics of Education. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey; 1998a. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield; 1998b. Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare to Teach. Boulder, CO: Westview] whose conceptualization of democracy embraces an interactional perspective. Through the eyes of Gylton, a PETE student, this study depicts new possibilities for democratization in PETE. Participants: Gylton, the first author of the article, was the primary participant and Maria served as an informant. The setting of the study was Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), a large university in Brazil where Gylton was a student and Maria was a faculty member. Method: A qualitative design structured around the tenants of existential phenomenology was adopted. Gylton and Maria were participated in two semistructured interviews [Patton, M. Q. 2002. Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage] and follow-up telephone interviews and email correspondence. Findings: The data analysis revealed that Gylton’s experiences during childhood had a profound impact on his initial appraisals of the purpose of democratic practices in PETE. During his time at UFMG, Gylton experienced a shift in his consciousness and came to realize the importance of democratic practices in PETE. Gylton engaged in transformative action at the micro- and macro-levels through his exposure to democratic practices. Interactions with Maria led Gylton to resist the authoritarian system of education and reconceptualize the role of physical education

The Generative Capacity of Digital Artifacts: A Mapping of the Field

The concept of generativity as the capacity of a technology or a system to be malleable by diverse groups of actors in unanticipated ways has recently gained considerable traction in information systems research. We review a sample of the body of knowledge and identify that scholars commonly investigated generativity in conjunction with digital infrastructures and digital platforms, both of which are complex, networked, and evolving socio-technical systems. Interestingly, other types of digital artifacts have been neglected, despite our initial assumption that the distinct attributes (e.g., reprogrammability, distributedness) of any digital artifact match well with generativity. The literature review also reveals that innovation brought about heterogeneous groups of actors is universally regarded as the goal of generativity, discounting the possibility of exploiting generative systems towards other valuable ends such as organizational agility. Furthermore, scholars commonly discuss generativity in conjunction with the logic of modularity, leading to unresolved questions on how these two concepts might complement each other. Another important contribution of this paper is the systematization of various meanings of generativity, spanning from the philosophical–e.g., generative mechanisms in critical realist research–to a more literal understanding, for instance generativity as synonym to ‘creation of a particular solution’