Advances and Applications of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) for Information Fusion (Collected Works), Vol. 4

The fourth volume on Advances and Applications of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) for information fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics. The contributions (see List of Articles published in this book, at the end of the volume) have been published or presented after disseminating the third volume (2009, http://fs.unm.edu/DSmT-book3.pdf) in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals. First Part of this book presents the theoretical advancement of DSmT, dealing with Belief functions, conditioning and deconditioning, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Decision Making, Multi-Criteria, evidence theory, combination rule, evidence distance, conflicting belief, sources of evidences with different importance and reliabilities, importance of sources, pignistic probability transformation, Qualitative reasoning under uncertainty, Imprecise belief structures, 2-Tuple linguistic label, Electre Tri Method, hierarchical proportional redistribution, basic belief assignment, subjective probability measure, Smarandache codification, neutrosophic logic, Evidence theory, outranking methods, Dempster-Shafer Theory, Bayes fusion rule, frequentist probability, mean square error, controlling factor, optimal assignment solution, data association, Transferable Belief Model, and others. More applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the third book of DSmT 2009. Subsequently, the second part of this volume is about applications of DSmT in correlation with Electronic Support Measures, belief function, sensor networks, Ground Moving Target and Multiple target tracking, Vehicle-Born Improvised Explosive Device, Belief Interacting Multiple Model filter, seismic and acoustic sensor, Support Vector Machines, Alarm classification, ability of human visual system, Uncertainty Representation and Reasoning Evaluation Framework, Threat Assessment, Handwritten Signature Verification, Automatic Aircraft Recognition, Dynamic Data-Driven Application System, adjustment of secure communication trust analysis, and so on. Finally, the third part presents a List of References related with DSmT published or presented along the years since its inception in 2004, chronologically ordered

Investigating the radical democratic potential of social media use by new social movements in South Africa

Since its inception, the internet ‒ and in particular Web 2.0 ‒ have been valorized as potentially revolutionary democratic spaces. Despite the emergence of concerns over the progressively neoliberal orientation and narcissistic effects of the internet, evidence of the radical democratic potential of this media has received considerable attention. This thesis is orientated around both an exploration of such evidence, and a consideration of its relevance for South Africa. In this regard, the thesis commences with an exploration of the neoliberal underpinnings of the internet and the growing translation of dominant neoliberal discourses into the online practices of mainstream liberal democratic politics. Focus then shifts toward the mounting influence of alternative radical democratic positions online, through an investigation of the virtual manifestations of deliberative, autonomous, and agonistic approaches to radical democracy. And following an examination of the online political practices of selected recent global social movements, the primacy of agonism in online expressions of radical democracy is advanced. In turn, resonances and dissonances between the online activity and practices of such global social movements, and the use of the internet and social media by well-known South African new social movements, are explored. Finally, this thesis concludes by recommending a fourfold new media approach through which the agonistic radical democratic potential of the internet can be realized more fully by the new social movements of South Africa

Consumer agency and social change: Experiences from post-World War South Africa

[eng] This study proposes a novel approach to understanding the contribution that consumer action makes to social change, both at the level of conceptual generalisation and when applied to institutionalised practices in particular historical settings. Conceptually, I develop an anthropologically generalisable account of consumption, drawing especially on Marshall Sahlins’ pioneering Culture and practical reason (1976). Against economistic understandings of consumer agency, we do better to defend a more culturally self-aware and ethically articulate mode of explanation. From this perspective, I argue, it is the expressive potential of consumer practices that most fundamentally sets them apart from productive practices. In making this argument I nonetheless avoid the excessive culturalism that arises when ignoring both the effect of economic variables on consumer agency and the manner in which consumption is tied up with relationships of power. When analysing the institutional dimension of consumption, most existing literature approaches it as a form of action limited to the market, while taking the market to be synonymous with the economic domain as such. This way of approaching the subject draws attention to significant forms of consumption but obfuscates the historically specific and contingent complexity of human livelihoods even in societies in which market exchange and capitalist forms of market-oriented production are firmly established. In particular, such approaches tell us very little about how those poor in financial resources consume, both within societies characterised by comparatively high average income and beyond. Consumption is better approached as a form of action exercised within all three institutional spheres of the “human economy” discussed in Karl Polanyi’s later work: not only the market, but also redistribution and reciprocity. Prima facie significant fields of consumption can then be analysed in terms of their ability to create, alter or destroy widespread forms of social integration and political mobilisation, but such analysis must proceed in a manner that is fully alive to the peculiarities of given social formations. Drawing on both political-economic and ethnographic literature, I illustrate this approach by examining three fields of consumption in South Africa from 1948 to the present: clothing, housing and faith healing. These consumer practices have been dynamically bound up with both class and racial power dynamics, while leading to the formation of novel forms of solidarity of the sort commonly discussed in terms of sub-cultures, new social movements and sects or kinship groups. In light of these case studies, it is necessary to challenge three misleading but pervasive claims about consumption that continue to inform contemporary critical social theory. Firstly, the economistic dogma that the market form of integration, and market-oriented production in particular, has the capacity to systematically structure consumer practices offers little purchase on how people really behave when consuming. Secondly, conceptualising consumption as a form of reproduction of an entire social order is a functionalist canard that critical social theory still needs to disown. We encounter this tenet even in the sophisticated work of Pierre Bourdieu, which remains enormously influential throughout the contemporary social sciences and which is invoked in all major studies of consumption. A third problem, also perpetuated by Bourdieu’s thinking on the subject, is the critical tendency to reduce all consumer agency to a form of instrumental domination. This can only be sustained as a valid generalisation by offering a flattened account of consumer motivation that ultimately negates agency and that collapses qualitatively distinct ethical modes of evaluation and action into one another. While such an approach is of some limited use for unmasking the domination that reciprocity can entrench, the price one pays for generalising such claims is, ultimately, an inability to recognise the gift when one sees it

Fear and Loathing of the Public Sphere and the Privatization of Citizenship: How to Deconstruct a Knowledge Culture

Also CSST Working Paper #127.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51319/1/555.pd

A participatory action research investigation into an open, online Community Project exploring how teaching and learning occur in a non-institutional, non-specialist, technology enhanced learning environment

This Participatory Action Research (PAR) project begins by positing that online networks bring the possibility of meaning-making and knowledge creation developing outside institutions. The project has lasted for four years (and continues as a ‘live’ project) and this research covers the first 18 months of that period. This project considers what happens when online learning is made possible on a non-institutional platform with roles of teacher and student made open to anyone. The tag line of ‘anyone can teach, anyone can learn, anything at all, for free’ provides a platform for open access that will create opportunities at the heart of the action of this research. It seeks to explore not only ‘how’ learning takes place, but also ‘who’ is involved, ‘what’ in relation to how knowledge is defined and ‘why’ that questions common-sense assumptions of the purpose of education. Findings reveal complex identities of formal educators seeking space, free of institutional constraints. Community learning approaches reveal groups seeking spaces that avoid community gatekeepers and a desire for nuanced perspectives. Technology is encountered as a complex ecology in which institutional approaches suggest limited use as a deficit yet where project users define it in terms of privacy, ownership and appropriateness. My original contribution to knowledge is found in the revealing of outsider spaces that are at least as rigorous, reflective and powerful as those located within institutions. The findings reveal contested spaces and a willingness to develop ideas and networks that educate and inform. This is true of those with no links to institutional learning and makes clear the breadth of meaning-making that exists beyond the ‘usual spaces’. Findings also reveal that those working within educational institutions seek out spaces beyond often restrictive standardisation to create new thinking spaces, empower others and distribute opportunities to contribute. My original contribution comes also through the creation of an authentic learning space that proved an effective, if complex and often difficult to maintain, online space. Much of the value of the research comes through the originality of an online platform developed beyond institutional ownership. Participation rather than representation was a key component of this innovation. The alignment of theoretical positions that seek becoming, Deleuzo-Guattarian rhizomatic principles and Freirean popular education approaches, offer a strong foundation that challenges convention while providing a clear and coherent discourse. The location of the research is crucial in establishing originality of purpose. This research develops the discourse around MOOCS to include those voices beyond the institution. Here, they are not voices on the margins but voices from the centre

AUGMENTED ABILITY, INTEGRATED IDENTITY: UNDERSTANDING SAPIENISM, ADAPTIVE TECHNOLOGY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF DISABILITY

To some, individuals with disabilities are loathsome objects of pity, where wheelchairs are symbolic of confinement. While the words used to identify the disabled have changed, the connotative perceptions linger. Rather than choose another phrase that relies on the language of loss, this thesis calls for a language that depicts the true nature of the disability community, one of technological adaptation: a cyborg community. Ray Kurzweil and Donna Haraway believe the integration of technology into our bodies provides the opportunity to normalize or amplify human ability. David Noble and Willem Vanderburg argue this penetration subverts our humanity, a stance I dub sapienism. With Iain Banks and Richard Morgan’s perceptions on imbedded technology and identity, I suggest that while the adaptive technology used by the disabled may penetrate the body and alter our identity, it is a site for liberation rather than a source of limitation

The Piratical Ethos: Textual Activity and Intellectual Property in Digital Environments

The Piratical Ethos: Textual Activity and Intellectual Property in Digital Environments examines the definition, function, and application of intellectual property in contexts of electronically mediated social production. With a focus on immaterial production - or the forms of coordinated social activity employed to produce knowledge and information in the networked information economy - this project ultimately aims to demonstrate how current intellectual property paradigms must be rearticulated for an age of digital (re)production. By considering the themes of Piracy , Intellectual Property , and Distributed Social Production this dissertation provides an overview of the current state of peer production and intellectual property in the Humanities and Writing Studies. Next, this project develops and implements a communicational-mediational research methodology to theorize how both discursive and material data lend themselves to a more nuanced understanding of the ways that technologies of communication and coordination effect attitudes toward intellectual property. After establishing both a methodology and an interdisciplinary grounding for the themes of the work, this dissertation presents a grounded theoretic analysis of piratical discourse to reveal what I call the piratical ethos , or the guiding attitudes of individuals actively contesting intellectual property in piratical acts of distributed social production. Congruently, this work also investigates the material dynamics of piratical activity by analyzing the cultural-historical activity systems wherein piratical subjectivity emerges, emphasizing the agenic capacity of interfacial technologies at the scales of user and system. Exploring the attitudes of piratical subjects and the technological genres that mediate piratical activity, I contend that the conclusions drawn from The Piratical Ethos can assist Writing Studies researchers with developing novel methodologies to study the intersections of intellectual property and distributed social production in digital worlds

Practising social justice: Community organisations, what matters and what counts

This thesis investigates the situated knowing-in-practice of locally-based community organisations, and studies how this practice knowledge is translated and contested in inter-organisational relations in the community services field of practices. Despite participation in government-led consultation processes, community organisations express frustration that the resulting policies and plans inadequately take account of the contributions from their practice knowledge. The funding of locally-based community organisations is gradually diminishing in real terms and in the competitive tendering environment, large nationally-based organisations often attract the new funding sources. The concern of locally-based community organisations is that the apparent lack of understanding of their distinctive practice knowing is threatening their capacity to improve the well-being of local people and their communities. In this study, I work with practitioners, service participants and management committee members to present an account of their knowing-in-practice, its character and conditions of efficacy; and then investigate what happens when this local practice knowledge is translated into results-based accountability (RBA) planning with diverse organisations and institutions. This thesis analyses three points of observation: knowing in a community of practitioners; knowing in a community organisation and knowing in the community services field of practices. In choosing these points of observation, the inquiry explores some of the relations and intra-actions from the single organisation to the institutional at a time when state government bureaucracy has mandated that community organisations implement RBA to articulate outcomes that can be measured by performance indicators. A feminist, performative, relational practice-based approach employs participatory action research to achieve an enabling research experience for the participants. It aims to intervene strategically to enhance recognition of the distinctive contributions of community organisations’ practice knowledge. This thesis reconfigures understandings of the roles, contributions and accountabilities of locally-based community organisations. Observations of situated practices together with the accounts of workers and service participants demonstrate how community organisations facilitate service participants’ struggles over social justice. A new topology for rethinking social justice as processual and practice-based is developed. It demonstrates how these struggles are a dynamic complex of iteratively-enfolded practices of respect and recognition, redistribution and distributive justice, representation and participation, belonging and inclusion. The focus on the practising of social justice in this thesis offers an alternative to the neo-liberal discourse that positions community organisations as sub-contractors accountable to government for delivering measurable outputs, outcomes and efficiencies in specified service provision contracts. The study shows how knowing-in-practice in locally-based community organisations contests the representational conception of knowledge inextricably entangled with accountability and performance measurement apparatus such as RBA. Further, it suggests that practitioner and service participant contributions are marginalised and diminished in RBA through the privileging of knowledge that takes an ‘expert’, quantifiable and calculative form. Thus crucially, harnessing local practice knowing requires re-imagining and enacting knowledge spaces that assemble and take seriously all relevant stakeholder perspectives, diverse knowledges and methods