Explaining varieties of corruption in the Afghan justice sector

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. Judicial reform in Afghanistan is seriously undermined by systemic corruption that has resulted in low legitimacy of the state and weak rule of law. This article reviews the main shortcomings in the Afghan justice system with reference to 70 interviews conducted in Kabul. Building on legal pluralism and a political economic approach, the shortcomings and causes and consequences of corruption in the Afghan justice sector are highlighted. These range from low pay, resulting in bribery; criminal and political intrusion into the judiciary; non-adherence to meritocracy, with poorly educated judges and prosecutors; and low funding in the judicial sector resulting in weak case tracking and human rights abuses in the countryside. This is followed by sociological approaches: understanding corruption from a non-Western approach and emphasis on religion, morality and ethics in order to curb it

i4d programme report on IDRC support for January 2006-December 2006

To view issues of i4d magazine, click the link aboveInformation for development (i4D) magazine and online platform is an ICT for development (ICT4D) media initiative of Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies (CSDMS) based in India. This report provides a detailed review of initiatives, outputs and outcomes of the i4d project. CSDMS regularly organises national and international seminar/conferences, which brings ICT4D practitioners face to face to facilitate learning and experience-sharing

Content Analysis of Media Coverage of the 2015 British General Election

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.These data consist of analysis of media coverage of the 2015 British General Election. Media included are national newspapers, local newspapers, national and regional television news, and radio. The complete list of outlets is included in the codebooks. This study was conducted as part of the ESRC Media in Context and The 2015 General Election: How Traditional and Social Media Shape Elections and Governing award. It was timely and important in an era of declining support for the major parties. In the last two elections the leading parties have formed governments with roughly 35% of the vote, with 2015 at the time of the research promising a similar scenario and possibly another coalition. The election also promised debates - including more leaders' debates- on major constitutional issues pertaining to national and regional devolution and their consequences for Westminster, as well as on the possibility of a referendum on continuing EU membership, all in a context of continuing austerity. Media reporting and framing of such subjects was likely to be critical to the dynamics of the election, to public opinion, and to the election's aftermath. Yet although their effects on voters have consumed research on electoral politics in Britain, the US and other democracies since the 1940s, the question of media effects remains unsettled. Moreover, the issue of the difference that social media has made, supplementing or replacing the information provided by traditional media - television, newspapers and radio - further muddied the waters. In this research the team sought to address several pressing questions pertaining to media effects on governance and elections and also to gather timely and high quality data on media coverage during and after the 2015 British General Election, to share with the user community. The substantive questions examined were:The flow of campaign information. Traditional academic models depict campaign information flows as linear, from elites to opinion leaders to masses, but this may no longer be accurate in a world in which social media can provide a platform for opinion leaders (and masses) to produce information. While some think that social media have made opinion leaders even more important, others argue that it has cut them out of the picture, with information flowing directly to the consumer. The changing media landscape matters in a second way - not in terms of the flow of information but, more straightforwardly, for where if at all people obtain political information in a world of declining newspaper readership and trust in media. Moreover, the traditional media no longer play the same gatekeeping role, potentially diluting their influence on the issue agenda. For example, traditional campaigns in the UK followed a pattern in which parties held morning press conferences that launched the 'theme of the day'. While the media may not have always framed the theme in the way parties would have wished, the press conference set the issue agenda for 24 hours. That no longer seems to be the case. The role of the media, both social and traditional, in the post-election period. Interpretations of election results may be important in two respects: in conferring legitimacy upon the outcome and thus fostering what is sometimes known as "losers' consent", and in providing a narrative about the mandate the incoming government enjoys.The study also addressed four deficiencies in existing studies of British media election coverage: that they tend to focus on election coverage, ignoring non-election coverage and thus not permitting analysis of the overall news context or the prominence of the election as an issue; that the data are either not made publicly available or only made available years after the election; that recent British election studies have permitted little understanding of media effects due to very few questions about media habits; and that British media studies tend to rely exclusively on survey data, ignoring the benefits for establishing causation and effect sizes offered by field experiments. The proposed research brought together investigators with a unique combination of expertise in human and automated traditional and social media content analysis and statistical modelling skills. Main Topics:The content analysis data can be linked to the British Election Survey Wave 5, which has been included in the study with additional variables at the end of the files. The additional variables are derived from the open ended variables pertaining to media use asked in the BES (tv1_1, tv2_1, tv3_1, radio1_1, radio2_1, radio3_1, paper1_1, paper2_1, paper3_1, internet1_1, internet2_1, internet3_1). The new variables are named paper1, paper2, paper3, internet1, internet2, internet3, tv1, tv2, tv3, radio2, radio1 and radio3. Users of the data may either wish to link all the content of the outlets used by an individual respondent to a measure of media exposure or to weight it by frequency of use of that media. Frequency of use is contained in the BES file in variables infoSourceTV, infoSourcePaper, infoSourceRadio and inforSourceInternet. The original BES data used can be downloaded from Wave 5 of the 2014-2018 British Election Study Internet Panel

Spatially Variant Super-Resolution (SVSR) benchmarking dataset

The Spatially Variant Super-Resolution (SVSR) benchmarking dataset contains 1119 low-resolution images that are degraded by complex noise of varying intensity and type and their corresponding noise free X2 and X4 high-resolution counterparts, for evaluation of the robustness of real-world super-resolution methods. Additionally, the dataset is also suitable for evaluation of denoisers

RELLISUR: A Real Low-Light Image Super-Resolution Dataset

The RELLISUR dataset contains real low-light low-resolution images paired with normal-light high-resolution reference image counterparts. This dataset aims to fill the gap between low-light image enhancement and low-resolution image enhancement (Super-Resolution (SR)) which is currently only being addressed separately in the literature, even though the visibility of real-world images is often limited by both low-light and low-resolution. The dataset contains 12750 paired images of different resolutions and degrees of low-light illumination, to facilitate learning of deep-learning based models that can perform a direct mapping from degraded images with low visibility to high-quality detail rich images of high resolution

The Difference between Trust Measurement and Behavior: Investigating the Effect of Personalizing a Robot's Appearance on Trust in HRI

With the increased use of social robots in critical applications, like elder care and rehabilitation, it becomes necessary to investigate the user’s trust in robots to prevent over- and under-utilization of the robotic systems. While several studies have shown how trust increases through personalised behaviour, there is a lack of research concerned with the influence of personalised physical appearance. This study explores the effect of personalised physical appearance on trust in human-robotinteraction (HRI)