Social Media, Gender and the Mediatisation of War: Exploring the German Armed Forces’ Visual Representation of the Afghanistan Operation on Facebook

Studies on the mediatisation of war point to attempts of governments to regulate the visual perspective of their involvements in armed conflict – the most notable example being the practice of ‘embedded reporting’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper focuses on a different strategy of visual meaning-making, namely, the publication of images on social media by armed forces themselves. Specifically, we argue that the mediatisation of war literature could profit from an increased engagement with feminist research, both within Critical Security/Critical Military Studies and within Science and Technology Studies that highlight the close connection between masculinity, technology and control. The article examines the German military mission in Afghanistan as represented on the German armed forces’ official Facebook page. Germany constitutes an interesting, and largely neglected, case for the growing literature on the mediatisation of war: its strong antimilitarist political culture makes the representation of war particularly delicate. The paper examines specific representational patterns of Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan and discusses the implications which arise from what is placed inside the frame of visibility and what remains out of its view

Collaborative Problem Solving using an Open Modeling Environment

This paper presents ModelsCreator version 3 (MC3) an environment that supports collaborative building of various kinds of models. MC3 is an environment that permits synchronous interaction of students at a distance who collaborate in building models out of primitive objects. The open character of MC3 means that students have access to an open set of primitive objects that can be used for building these models. A result of this characteristic is that the collaborating partners may reason using heterogeneous sets of primitive objects, in order to obtain a solution. In this paper we concentrate on the architecture of MC3 and the basic functionality of the environment. In particular we study the effect of the open character of the environment in collaboration and problem solving. Through experimentation it is demonstrated that the users of MC3 can have rich interaction in order to build or exchange at run time the necessary primitive objects for model building

Neural and Neuro-Fuzzy Integration in a Knowledge-Based System for Air Quality Prediction.

NoIn this paper we propose a unified approach for integrating implicit and explicit knowledge in neurosymbolic systems as a combination of neural and neuro-fuzzy modules. In the developed hybrid system, training data set is used for building neuro-fuzzy modules, and represents implicit domain knowledge. The explicit domain knowledge on the other hand is represented by fuzzy rules, which are directly mapped into equivalent neural structures. The aim of this approach is to improve the abilities of modular neural structures, which are based on incomplete learning data sets, since the knowledge acquired from human experts is taken into account for adapting the general neural architecture. Three methods to combine the explicit and implicit knowledge modules are proposed. The techniques used to extract fuzzy rules from neural implicit knowledge modules are described. These techniques improve the structure and the behavior of the entire system. The proposed methodology has been applied in the field of air quality prediction with very encouraging results. These experiments show that the method is worth further investigation