Researcher as Artist/Artist as Researcher

This is a postmodern article that is nontraditional in its form, content, and mode of representation. Upon recognizing that we share interests and common experiences as artists, we decided to collect life history information from each other about our artistic experiences. Thus we have become, simultaneously, "the researched" and "the re searcher." In these conversations, we explore the ways in which we were each guided by our past, very strong aesthetic and artistic experiences. We also include the voices of other researchers and artists in our conversations as we explore the influences of art in the formation of our worldviews.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68774/2/10.1177_107780049500100107.pd

Partners No More: Relational Transformation and the Turn to Litigation in Two Conservationist Organizations

The rise in litigation against administrative bodies by environmental and other political interest groups worldwide has been explained predominantly through the liberalization of standing doctrines. Under this explanation, termed here the floodgate model, restrictive standing rules have dammed the flow of suits that groups were otherwise ready and eager to pursue. I examine this hypothesis by analyzing processes of institutional transformation in two conservationist organizations: the Sierra Club in the United States and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). Rather than an eagerness to embrace newly available litigation opportunities, as the floodgate model would predict, the groups\u27 history reveals a gradual process of transformation marked by internal, largely intergenerational divisions between those who abhorred conflict with state institutions and those who saw such conflict as not only appropriate but necessary to the mission of the group. Furthermore, in contrast to the pluralist interactions that the floodgate model imagines, both groups\u27 relations with pertinent agencies in earlier eras better accorded with the partnership-based corporatist paradigm. Sociolegal research has long indicated the importance of relational distance to the transformation of interpersonal disputes. I argue that, at the group level as well, the presence or absence of a (national) partnership-centered relationship determines propensities to bring political issues to court. As such, well beyond change in groups\u27 legal capacity and resources, current increases in levels of political litigation suggest more fundamental transformations in the structure and meaning of relations between citizen groups and the state

Rules and Networks, The Légal Culture of Global Business Transactions

Appelbaum R.P., L.F. Felstiner W., Gessner V. Rules and Networks, The Légal Culture of Global Business Transactions. In: Revue internationale de droit comparé. Vol. 55 N°4, Octobre-décembre 2003. pp. 993-995

Evaluation of image annotation using amazon mechanical turk in ImageCLEF

With the increasing amount of digital information in the Web and on personal computers, the need for systems that are capable of automated indexing, searching, and organizing multimedia documents is incessantly growing. Automated systems have to retrieve information with high performance in order to be accepted by industry and end users. Multimedia retrieval systems are often evaluated on different test collections with different performance measures, which makes the comparison of retrieval performance impossible and limits the benefits of the approaches. Benchmarking campaigns counteract these tendencies and establish an objective comparison among the performance of different approaches by posing challenging tasks and by pushing the availability of test collections, topics, and performance measures. As part of the THESEUS research program, Fraunhofer IDMT organized the "Visual Concept Detection and Annotation Task" (VCDT) of the international benchmark ImageCLEF, with the goal of enabling the comparison of technologies developed within THESEUS CTC to international developments. While the test collection in 2009 was assessed with expert knowledge, the relevance assessments for the task have been acquired in a crowdsourcing approach since 2010 by using the platform of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). In this article the evaluation of THESEUS core technologies within ImageCLEF is explained in detail. A special focus lies on the acquisition of ground truth data using MTurk. Advantages and disadvantages of this approach are discussed and best practices are shared

(Re)constructing the Head Teacher: legal narratives and the politics of school exclusions

Book synopsis: School exclusions are a site of political and social contestation and in recent years statutory reforms and popular demands have focused on increasing the autonomy of head teachers. This article explores this trend and questions why, in a culture of human and children's rights, head teachers have such extensive powers within their schools and why law has, to a large extent, failed to provide a check on these powers. It does so not by doctrinal analysis of domestic and human rights law but, rather, by enquiring into how legal narratives construct the role of the head teacher and by locating the practice of exclusions within a broader social and political context. It suggests that demanding that the head teacher be unfettered in his or her decisions relating to exclusions ought not to be understood as a policy of ‘non‐intervention’ or a return to a ‘reassuring’ past but, rather, as a contemporary policy that reinforces the construction of excluded pupils as marginalized non‐citizens

The purchase of information technology products by Dutch SMEs : problem resolution

This research focuses on the purchase of information technology (IT) products by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Netherlands. Based on nationwide representative survey data (a total of 1,252 IT transactions), the research considers the problems that Dutch SMEs are faced with and the way in which these problems are dealt with. On average, 28 percent of transaction are completed without problems. If problems are encountered, they mostly involve inadequate documentation (45 percent of all transactions). Frequently mentioned problems, such as incompatibility with other IT products and being over budget, occur much less frequently (about 25 percent of all transactions). Moreover, strong support was found for the existence of a specific sequence in dealing with ex-post problems. Nearly all SMEs at least communicate the problem to the supplier; if that does not solve the issue, it is almost always followed by active deliberation with the supplier about a solution. If that does not help, about half of the SMEs impose some kind of sanction (most of the time delaying the payment). If that still does not settle the issue, virtually all SMEs give up on it. Third parties, such as arbitration committees or the courts, are rarely invoked