67,460 research outputs found
Politics and the attack on FDR's economists : from the grand alliance to the Cold War
US government economists in the later years of the administration of Franklin Roosevelt were urged to treat the Soviet Union as an ally, in the interests of winning World War II and establishing the basis for peaceful cooperation after the war. The onset of the Cold War and the subsequent rise of McCarthyism sullied the reputations of many of them, especially the two most prominent: Lauchlin Currie (chief economist in the White House) and Harry Dexter White (chief economist in the Treasury). Close examination of the parallels between these two seemingly disparate cases reveals that recent attempts to revive the charges are no more firmly based than those of the early 1950s
Conversational Sensing
Recent developments in sensing technologies, mobile devices and context-aware
user interfaces have made it possible to represent information fusion and
situational awareness as a conversational process among actors - human and
machine agents - at or near the tactical edges of a network. Motivated by use
cases in the domain of security, policing and emergency response, this paper
presents an approach to information collection, fusion and sense-making based
on the use of natural language (NL) and controlled natural language (CNL) to
support richer forms of human-machine interaction. The approach uses a
conversational protocol to facilitate a flow of collaborative messages from NL
to CNL and back again in support of interactions such as: turning eyewitness
reports from human observers into actionable information (from both trained and
untrained sources); fusing information from humans and physical sensors (with
associated quality metadata); and assisting human analysts to make the best use
of available sensing assets in an area of interest (governed by management and
security policies). CNL is used as a common formal knowledge representation for
both machine and human agents to support reasoning, semantic information fusion
and generation of rationale for inferences, in ways that remain transparent to
human users. Examples are provided of various alternative styles for user
feedback, including NL, CNL and graphical feedback. A pilot experiment with
human subjects shows that a prototype conversational agent is able to gather
usable CNL information from untrained human subjects
Can You Hear Me Now? : Expectations of Privacy, False Friends, and the Perils of Speaking Under the Supreme Court\u27s Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence
Part I of this article offers a brief history of the development of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and the Court\u27s articulation and application of what has come to be known as the exclusionary rule, which forbids some (but not all) government use of evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Part II focuses on the false-friend cases, elaborating the Court\u27s reasoning and showing why, although the most famous cases involve varying kinds of activity from electronic recording to eavesdropping to simple reporting of the false friend\u27s observation, the Court\u27s method has united these cases under a single analytical rubric. Part III discusses the unavoidable implication of the Court\u27s approach, and Part IV examines whether there is a principled way out of the dilemma that the Court\u27s reasoning has created. It concludes that there is, but the solution requires recognizing two unstated assumptions that undergird the Court\u27s jurisprudence in this area, assumptions that, when exposed to light, are highly questionable. The Court needs to reconsider how expectations of privacy really work. It has tended to view expectation of privacy as an all-or-nothing proposition, so that for Fourth Amendment purposes, lack of a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to one person connotes that there cannot be a reasonable expectation with respect to anyone else. The Article suggests that this approach does not reflect the way that either those who wrote and ratified the Fourth Amendment or the majority of Americans today think about privacy. The Supreme Court should recognize, therefore, that when the government employs false friends to gather evidence for use in a criminal case, it does no more than to undertake a search with other eyes and ears and a seizure with other hands. It is a government intrusion all the same. Accordingly, the Fourth Amendment\u27s warrant requirement, which demands probable cause and the acquiescence of a neutral magistrate in the proposed search, should apply in full force
A Call to Action: Trustee Advocacy to Advance Opportunity for Black Communities in Philanthropy
This Call to Action encourages foundation Trustees to increase the representation of Black leadership among foundations' staff, vendors, consultants and grantees. It emerges from the Association of Black Foundation's (ABFE) initiative, "Leverage the Trust", which promotes the role of Black Trustees in making philanthropy more responsive to Black communities
MASTER’S PROJECT: CHALLENGING STRUCTURAL RACISM IN PHILANTHROPY THROUGH CREATIVE EXPRESSION AND DEEP LISTENING
This capstone project is an account of a personal transformation journey that started in March of 2017. It follows my deep and personal exploration of challenging systemic racism as I spoke with many leaders in the philanthropic and artistic communities. In addition, I created artwork to help incorporate and synthesize my emotions around white supremacy and process what I was learning. The qualitative information that was gathered was abundant and the supporting art journaling technique was useful in the translation of that information
A Most Secret Service: William Herle and the Circulation of Intelligence
This essay examines the letters of the Elizabethan intelligencer William Herle during
a period of intelligence-gathering in the Low Countries in 1582. Writing to his
patrons Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham, Herle’s letters offer a rich
landscape of detail and information. Yet these are not simply ‘administrative’ letters
devoid of emotive expression, but display epistolary structures designed to maintain
patronage, and attempting to recreate the distance between correspondent and
recipient. While Herle was in Antwerp, there was an assassination attempt against
William of Orange. Herle was keen to convey ‘breaking news’ as quickly as possible,
and bridge the geographical distance between the English court and Delft, where the
attempt occurred. In anticipation of pitfalls in postage, and to ensure that each of his
recipients received the same intelligence at the same time, Herle increasingly opted to
send ‘verbatim’ letters: duplicate copies of important correspondence. Letter-writers
could also employ diverse methods to avoid interception and perusal, such as ciphers
and the accompaniment of bearers. In this way, the letter might travel unnoticed, or
under protection. These ideas of envoys and letters disseminating through porous
membranes, ideally, but not necessarily, authorised and endorsed by the authorities
are tantalising. I explore this transmission and translation, and attempt to determine
through his letters the relationship between Herle and his correspondents; writing
from a location without, reinforcing his liminal status as both spy and informant,
decentralized yet essential to the English political landscape
Modeling two-language competition dynamics
During the last decade, much attention has been paid to language competition
in the complex systems community, that is, how the fractions of speakers of
several competing languages evolve in time. In this paper we review recent
advances in this direction and focus on three aspects. First we consider the
shift from two-state models to three state models that include the possibility
of bilingual individuals. The understanding of the role played by bilingualism
is essential in sociolinguistics. In particular, the question addressed is
whether bilingualism facilitates the coexistence of languages. Second, we will
analyze the effect of social interaction networks and physical barriers.
Finally, we will show how to analyze the issue of bilingualism from a game
theoretical perspective.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures; published in the Special Issue of Advances in
Complex Systems "Language Dynamics
Effectiveness of dismantling strategies on moderated vs. unmoderated online social platforms
Online social networks are the perfect test bed to better understand
large-scale human behavior in interacting contexts. Although they are broadly
used and studied, little is known about how their terms of service and posting
rules affect the way users interact and information spreads. Acknowledging the
relation between network connectivity and functionality, we compare the
robustness of two different online social platforms, Twitter and Gab, with
respect to dismantling strategies based on the recursive censor of users
characterized by social prominence (degree) or intensity of inflammatory
content (sentiment). We find that the moderated (Twitter) vs unmoderated (Gab)
character of the network is not a discriminating factor for intervention
effectiveness. We find, however, that more complex strategies based upon the
combination of topological and content features may be effective for network
dismantling. Our results provide useful indications to design better strategies
for countervailing the production and dissemination of anti-social content in
online social platforms
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