Education is a spring… it bubbles

[From the introduction]: Asians, Americans, Australians. A handful of Africans and a couple of Arabs. A sprinkling of Canadians, Mexicans, Finns. An Israeli, a Chilean and quite a few others. In total, 450 people from some 50 countries. In common: they’re all lecturers and trainers. Busy swopping notes in Singapore at the first-ever World Journalism Education Congress [WJEC] in July. It’s a resource-rich pool of ideas and experiences

Professionalism and training for mass communication: challenges and opportunities for Southern Africa

[From OPENSPACE Editor Alice Kanengoni's editorial]: Closely linked to a critical media citizenry that can demand better of the media, is the challenge of professionalism and training in the region. Professor Guy Berger illuminates the challenges that the region faces in this regard, a key one being the ability to to match the inputs with the outcomes ... where measuring whether the quality of media products is directly linked to the inputs in training needs to be explored further

New Opportunities in Monitoring Safety of Journalists through the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda

This article highlights the potential for increased and more standardised monitoring of a range of aspects of the safety of journalists. This is in the light of a specific indicator that has been agreed by the UN as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The indicator concerned treats the safety of journalists as a benchmark for tracking progress on SDG target 16.10, which specifies “public access to information and fundamental freedoms” (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, n.d.) as a development aspiration. Inclusion of this indicator in the SDGs provides a universally legitimated framework with strong catalytic potential. All this holds a promise of improved, more comparative, and increased research output, as compared to the previous situation. The results of new research stimulated by this development, particularly at country level, could have real impact on the safety of journalists

Theorising African communications: the bad news signalled by broadcast digital migration policy

Broadcasting digital migration (BDM) in Africa reflects deadlines agreed by the continent at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The case suggests a negative answer to the question about a uniquely African contribution to communication theory. This is because there is a disjuncture between the ideology of BDM, as evolved in developed countries and copied in African countries, and a critical theorisation of African communications which could surface a different vantage point. The embedded theory that informs African accord on BDM assumes unquestioningly that this particular development in advanced economies has to be emulated in Africa. As a result, primary African communications characteristics are ignored, including the case for investing in radio or mobile internet rather than BDM. Also missed is the value of democratic and interactive communications, meaning that the BDM Set Top Boxes (STBs) are seen merely as decoders of one-way content flows. In sum, the experience of BDM as a particular intersection of communications technology and social conditions reflects an inadequate African communication theorisation

Part of the story: 10 years of the South African National Editors' Forum (SANEF)

[From the text] Neither union nor NGO, Sanef is a forum. It brings together editors, senior journalists and journalism educators across the divides of race, institution and media platform to participate in the new South African democracy. Over 10 years, its members have worked to deepen media freedom and overcome old injustices still present within the industry. The organisation has led debate and projects about the quality of Journalism and journalism training

Learning Discrete Weights and Activations Using the Local Reparameterization Trick

In computer vision and machine learning, a crucial challenge is to lower the computation and memory demands for neural network inference. A commonplace solution to address this challenge is through the use of binarization. By binarizing the network weights and activations, one can significantly reduce computational complexity by substituting the computationally expensive floating operations with faster bitwise operations. This leads to a more efficient neural network inference that can be deployed on low-resource devices. In this work, we extend previous approaches that trained networks with discrete weights using the local reparameterization trick to also allow for discrete activations. The original approach optimized a distribution over the discrete weights and uses the central limit theorem to approximate the pre-activation with a continuous Gaussian distribution. Here we show that the probabilistic modeling can also allow effective training of networks with discrete activation as well. This further reduces runtime and memory footprint at inference time with state-of-the-art results for networks with binary activations

Quantum transport of slow charge carriers in quasicrystals and correlated systems

We show that the semi-classical model of conduction breaks down if the mean free path of charge carriers is smaller than a typical extension of their wavefunction. This situation is realized for sufficiently slow charge carriers and leads to a transition from a metallic like to an insulating like regime when scattering by defects increases. This explains the unconventional conduction properties of quasicrystals and related alloys. The conduction properties of some heavy fermions or polaronic systems, where charge carriers are also slow, present a deep analogy.Comment: 4 page

Social structure and rural economic development

New concepts and a synthesis of existing theories may assist in studying the relationship between social structure, development and rural development. The concept of social structure encompasses the concept of economic structure which may be analysed in terms of three "Moments" of production. On this basis, one can distinguish between heterogeneous and homogeneous relations of production structures. "Homogeneous relations" together with "system dynamics" and ''reproduction", define the concept of a mode of production. "Development" refers to the expansion of total productive capacity, premissed on advanced means of production, and corresponding to the particular relations and forces of production in an economic system. The capitalist mode of production has both tendencies and countertendencies to development. The latter prevail in the Third World due to the admixture and heterogeneity of production relations there, and to their subordinate articulation within an international capitalist economic system. In this context, underdevelopment is the result of the specific factors of monopoly competition, dependence-extraversion, disarticulation-unevenness, the three-tier structure of the peripheral economy, surplus transfer, and class structures and struggles. Rural development can be understood in terms of the specific contribution of agriculture to development, theorized as the "Agrarian Question". Agrarian capitalism has been slow to develop in the Third World, and the state of agriculture remains a problem there. "Rural development" has emerged as a deliberate and interventionist state strategy designed to restructure agrarian relations for development. This has contributed to the formation of particular heterogeneous relations of production articulated to the capitalist mode. In this context, the character of the associated classes has left the Agrarian Question unresolved. "Rural development" continues because it has an important~ and even primary, political significance - although this is not without contradictions

The new media maelstrom:

South Africa's democracy decade coincided with the popularisation of the Internet on a global scale. New society, new media, it seemed