The Triad of Governance, Devolution, and National Prosperity

I am privileged to have the opportunity to speak to this august audience of distinguished development economists very briefly, on what I have called the ‘Triad of Governance, Devolution and National Prosperity’. This, triad, I believe, lies at the heart of what constitutes the theme of this conference, namely ‘Institutional Change, Growth and Poverty’. The National Reconstruction Bureau which I was privileged to create and lead for all the three years of General Musharraf’s tenure as Chief Executive of Pakistan, was meant to transtate into reality the vision we crystallised for addressing the persistent failure of the institutions of state to provide solutions to the ever growing political, administrative, financial, judicial and social problems that the people of Pakistan faced since independence. The vision was ‘Reconstruction of the Institutions of State for Establishing Genuine and Sustainable Democracy to ensure Durable Good Governance for an Irreversible Transfer of Power to the People of Pakistan as soon as possible’. I will first give you a fleeting birds eye view of the wide spectrum over which our National Reconstruction endeavour in pursuit of this vision was spread. In the second part of this talk, which will contain the core of what I want to put across today, I will talk about financial devolution of the state. The third part of my talk will deal briefly with the burning issue of what we should do for turning our common citizens’ poverty into prosperity

Plato\u27s Parmenides: On Being and Non-Being

In this paper I will discuss the Eight Hypotheses in Plato\u27s Parmenides and draw out my own conclusion from them without any external help or secondary literature. I will then use this conclusion to address problems concerning the Parmenides in the Platonic Scholarship. The main conclusion I have drawn is that the Hypotheses are closing the gulf between Being and Non-Being via the concepts of Sameness, Difference, Becoming, Time and the Instant. In addition, the confluence of Being and Non-Being illuminates a subsidiary conclusion of this text possessing grounds for a new metaphysical presupposition of Being-Non-Being. I propose in this paper that this new metaphysical presupposition and structure of a sensible thing should replace the traditional One and Many metaphysical presupposition because of its insoluble problem of participation. The problems I will be addressing from the scholarship towards the end of the paper consist of the unity of the two halves of the text itself and the bearing of the text on Plato\u27s grand Theory of Forms

Recognizing point clouds using conditional random fields

Detecting objects in cluttered scenes is a necessary step for many robotic tasks and facilitates the interaction of the robot with its environment. Because of the availability of efficient 3D sensing devices as the Kinect, methods for the recognition of objects in 3D point clouds have gained importance during the last years. In this paper, we propose a new supervised learning approach for the recognition of objects from 3D point clouds using Conditional Random Fields, a type of discriminative, undirected probabilistic graphical model. The various features and contextual relations of the objects are described by the potential functions in the graph. Our method allows for learning and inference from unorganized point clouds of arbitrary sizes and shows significant benefit in terms of computational speed during prediction when compared to a state-of-the-art approach based on constrained optimization.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

The political imaginaries of blockchain projects: discerning the expressions of an emerging ecosystem

There is a wealth of information, hype around, and research into blockchain’s ‘disruptive’ and ‘transformative’ potential concerning every industry. However, there is an absence of scholarly attention given to identifying and analyzing the political premises and consequences of blockchain projects. Through digital ethnography and participatory action research, this article shows how blockchain experiments personify ‘prefigurative politics’ by design: they embody the politics and power structures which they want to enable in society. By showing how these prefigurative embodiments are informed and determined by the underlying political imaginaries, the article proposes a basic typology of blockchain projects. Furthermore, it outlines a frame to question, cluster, and analyze the expressions of political imaginaries intrinsic to the design and operationalization of blockchain projects on three analytic levels: users, intermediaries, and institutions.</p