A Neocolonial Warp of Outmoded Hierarchies, Curricula and Disciplinary Technologies in Trinidad’s Educational System

I re-appropriate the image of a space-time warp and its notion of disorientation to argue that colonialism created a warp in Trinidad’s educational system. Through an analysis of school violence and the wider network of structural violence in which it is steeped, I focus on three outmoded aspects as evidence of this warp--hierarchies, curricula and disciplinary technologies--by using data (interviews, documents and observations) from a longitudinal case study at a secondary school in Trinidad. Colonialism was about exclusion, alienation, violence, control and order, and this functionalism persists today; I therefore contend that hierarchies, curricula and disciplinary technologies are all enforcers of these tenets of (neo)colonialism in Trinidad’s schools. I conclude with some nascent thoughts on a Systemic Restorative Praxis (SRP) model as a way of de-stabilizing the warp, by stitching together literature/approaches from systems thinking, restorative justice and Freirean notions of praxis. SRP implies that colonialism (and this modern-day warp) has rendered much psychic and material damage, and that any intervention to address structural violence has to be systemic and iterative in scope and process, include healing, be participatory, and foster an ethic of horizontalization in human relations

The SP theory of intelligence: benefits and applications

This article describes existing and expected benefits of the "SP theory of intelligence", and some potential applications. The theory aims to simplify and integrate ideas across artificial intelligence, mainstream computing, and human perception and cognition, with information compression as a unifying theme. It combines conceptual simplicity with descriptive and explanatory power across several areas of computing and cognition. In the "SP machine" -- an expression of the SP theory which is currently realized in the form of a computer model -- there is potential for an overall simplification of computing systems, including software. The SP theory promises deeper insights and better solutions in several areas of application including, most notably, unsupervised learning, natural language processing, autonomous robots, computer vision, intelligent databases, software engineering, information compression, medical diagnosis and big data. There is also potential in areas such as the semantic web, bioinformatics, structuring of documents, the detection of computer viruses, data fusion, new kinds of computer, and the development of scientific theories. The theory promises seamless integration of structures and functions within and between different areas of application. The potential value, worldwide, of these benefits and applications is at least $190 billion each year. Further development would be facilitated by the creation of a high-parallel, open-source version of the SP machine, available to researchers everywhere.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1212.022

TGVizTab: An ontology visualisation extension for Protégé

Ontologies are gaining a lot of interest and many are being developed to provide a variety of knowledge services. There is an increasing need for tools to graphically and in-teractively visualise such modelling structures to enhance their clarification, verification and analysis. Protégé 2000 is one of the most popular ontology modelling tools currently available. This paper introduces TGVizTab; a new Protégé plugin based on TouchGraph technology to graphically visualise Protégé?s ontologies

An application of machine learning to the organization of institutional software repositories

Software reuse has become a major goal in the development of space systems, as a recent NASA-wide workshop on the subject made clear. The Data Systems Technology Division of Goddard Space Flight Center has been working on tools and techniques for promoting reuse, in particular in the development of satellite ground support software. One of these tools is the Experiment in Libraries via Incremental Schemata and Cobweb (ElvisC). ElvisC applies machine learning to the problem of organizing a reusable software component library for efficient and reliable retrieval. In this paper we describe the background factors that have motivated this work, present the design of the system, and evaluate the results of its application

The calculative reproduction of social structures : The field of gem mining in Sri Lanka

Peer reviewedPostprin

Towards an Intelligent Database System Founded on the SP Theory of Computing and Cognition

The SP theory of computing and cognition, described in previous publications, is an attractive model for intelligent databases because it provides a simple but versatile format for different kinds of knowledge, it has capabilities in artificial intelligence, and it can also function like established database models when that is required. This paper describes how the SP model can emulate other models used in database applications and compares the SP model with those other models. The artificial intelligence capabilities of the SP model are reviewed and its relationship with other artificial intelligence systems is described. Also considered are ways in which current prototypes may be translated into an 'industrial strength' working system

RelBAC: Relation Based Access Control

TheWeb 2.0, GRID applications and, more recently, semantic desktop applications are bringing the Web to a situation where more and more data and metadata are shared and made available to large user groups. In this context, metadata may be tags or complex graph structures such as file system or web directories, or (lightweight) ontologies. In turn, users can themselves be tagged by certain properties, and can be organized in complex directory structures, very much in the same way as data. Things are further complicated by the highly unpredictable and autonomous dynamics of data, users, permissions and access control rules. In this paper we propose a new access control model and a logic, called RelBAC (for Relation Based Access Control) which allows us to deal with this novel scenario. The key idea, which differentiates RelBAC from the state of the art, e.g., Role Based Access Control (RBAC), is that permissions are modeled as relations between users and data, while access control rules are their instantiations on specific sets of users and objects. As such, access control rules are assigned an arity which allows a fine tuning of which users can access which data, and can evolve independently, according to the desires of the policy manager(s). Furthermore, the formalization of the RelBAC model as an Entity-Relationship (ER) model allows for its direct translation into Description Logics (DL). In turn, this allows us to reason, possibly at run time, about access control policies