Linfield College: Study Abroad in France

This letter from returnee Virginia (Zander) Anderson explains the value of studying abroad in France

Responsible Autonomy

As intelligent systems are increasingly making decisions that directly affect society, perhaps the most important upcoming research direction in AI is to rethink the ethical implications of their actions. Means are needed to integrate moral, societal and legal values with technological developments in AI, both during the design process as well as part of the deliberation algorithms employed by these systems. In this paper, we describe leading ethics theories and propose alternative ways to ensure ethical behavior by artificial systems. Given that ethics are dependent on the socio-cultural context and are often only implicit in deliberation processes, methodologies are needed to elicit the values held by designers and stakeholders, and to make these explicit leading to better understanding and trust on artificial autonomous systems.Comment: IJCAI2017 (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Capacity building and disaster response : a case study of NGOs' response to Cyclone Evan in Samoa : a research report presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Masters of International Development at Massey University, New Zealand

With natural disasters increasing both in number and economic impact, the challenge for governments is to effectively respond to the needs of affected communities. In difficult conditions, and often with resource constraints, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have contributed to meeting the needs of affected communities during disaster responses. NGOs usually have flexible structures, which enable them to respond to a rapidly changing environment. They also often have strong links to the communities in which they work, which creates good synergies when responding to disasters. The involvement of NGOs in a disaster response has been discussed widely in the international community. The challenge is to ensure that NGOs have the capacity to respond effectively when the need arises. This report has a particular focus on Samoa and uses a capacity building lens to investigate a disaster response. It looks closely at the ability of NGOs to assist the Samoan government in a disaster response. The report used a document analysis and semi-structured interviews, with representatives from NGOs involved in the response to Cyclone Evan in 2012, to investigate capacity building in NGOs with a view to enabling them to respond effectively in disaster. The key finding of the report is that the ability of NGOs to form relationships with other stakeholders and to maintain those relationships between disaster responses is important to building partnerships that contribute to the effectiveness of a response

Disintegrating Democracy at Work

[Excerpt] This book is about the role that labor unions can and should play in modern service workplaces. Its central motivating question is whether strong and cooperative industrial relations institutions characteristic of social Europe have the potential to give service workers similar benefits to those achieved in the golden age of postwar manufacturing: productive and stable employment characterized by high job quality and low wage inequality. Past academic and policy debates on the relationship between national institutions, management strategies, and worker outcomes have focused overwhelmingly on large export-oriented sectors such as the global auto industry. Institutions in most service industries look a lot less coherent than those described in these accounts. Union membership and works council presence are much lower in services than in manufacturing. Service workers are also less likely to be covered by a union contract or to have traditional occupational training, and their jobs tend to be lower paid and less secure

Research and learning environment: the role of the teacher

In this paper, starting from a didactical proposal about the introduction of the concept of natural number, already experienced in some primary school classes, we report about the subsequent reorganization of it in a new experience, quite different from the previous one. This transformation arises from the necessity of taking into account both: the pupils as they are, namely as members of a community with certain characteristics and not others; and the teacher herself, if she wants to actively take part in the learning project that she is going to realise

Turnover rate of staff nurses

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit