Asian Futures, Old and New

In this keynote address to the York Centre for Asian Research’s (YCAR) 2013 international graduate student conference, Tania Murray Li tackled a number of entrenched ideas about “Asia” as the shining future, which underpin the “new” discourses motivating and shaping many contemporary engagements with and analyses of the region. Her reflections on the implications for Asian studies of this “old” often orientalist discourse in the guise of the “new,” contributed to the conference’s theme, (Re) Constructions: Researching and Rethinking Asia. It also sparked the kind of critical, multidisciplinary discussion envisioned by the organizers, which aimed to rethink what it means to study Asia and Asian diaspora, especially by reconstructing existing conceptual frameworks

Gamification approaches for education and engagement on pro-environmental behaviors: searching for best practices

Education is a key factor to respond to the threat of climate change, increasing not only knowledge but also encouraging changes in attitudes and behaviors to adopt sustainable lifestyles. Scholars and practitioners in the field of education call for innovative ways of engaging youth—a reason why gamification has gained more attention in recent years. This paper aims at exploring the role of gamification in aecting pro-environmental behavioral change and searching for best practices for educational purposes. For that aim, pro-environmental gamification platforms are identified and analyzed by applying two dierent frameworks: the Octalysis Framework and the Climate Change Engagement through Games Framework. After scanning 181 cases, a final sample of six is analyzed and two of them are selected as best practices with higher potential to engage users in pro-environmental behavioral change: SaveOhno and JouleBug. Meaning, ownership, and social influence, as well as achievability, challenge, and credibility, are seen as core elements that can increase the success of gamification platforms. In conclusion, the more attributes are enclosed in the gamification design, the stronger physical and mental connections it builds up with participants. Insights from this study can help educators to select best practices and gamification designers to better influence behavioral change through game mechanics

Social impacts of oil palm in Indonesia: A gendered perspective from West Kalimantan

CIFOR Occasional Paper no. 124Oil palm plantations and smallholdings are expanding massively in Indonesia. Proponents highlight the potential for job creation and poverty alleviation, but scholars are more cautious, noting that social impacts of oil palm are not well understood. This report draws upon primary research in West Kalimantan to explore the gendered dynamics of oil palm among smallholders and plantation workers. It concludes that the social and economic benefits of oil palm are real, but restricted to particular social groups. Among smallholders in the research area, couples who were able to sustain diverse farming systems and add oil palm to their repertoire benefited more than transmigrants, who had to survive on limited incomes from a 2-ha plot. Over time, plantations that monopolized large areas of land constrained smallholder options and limited opportunities to prosper from oil palm or other crops, such as rubber. Among plantation workers, who were initially recruited as couples, privileged positions in the plantation core deteriorated; plantations began to employ more casual workers and recruit men and women from distinct labor pools. Situating this particular, site-specific trajectory in the context of broad historical trends and spatial dynamics indicates that further expansion of plantation-based oil palm poses a serious risk of impoverishment, especially for women. Conversely, support for independent oil palm smallholding offers good prospects for empowering both women and men, and enhancing their prosperity. Investment in oil palm processing would be especially beneficial for young women

Fixing Non-market Subjects: Governing Land and Population in the Global South

Expert knowledge about society and human nature is essential to governing human conduct.  It figures in the formulation of the liberal and neoliberal rationalities of government that Foucault analyzed in his later work.  It also figures in particular assemblages in which a governmental rationality is brought to bear on the definition of problems and the formulation of solutions.  This article explores the use of expert knowledge in governmental assemblages directed towards optimizing relations between people and land in the global south.  Since colonial times liberal versions of these assemblages have highlighted cultural difference, and attempted to fix particular populations into non-market niches.  Elements from liberal assemblages have been grafted into neoliberal ones, producing the curious figure of homo economicus minus the market, the collectivized and arborealized subject of contemporary conservation initiatives

Les engagements anthropologiques vis-à-vis du développement

Je propose de distinguer 3 types d’engagements anthropologiques face au développement, chacun d’entre eux étant accompagné d’un ensemble particulier de relations sur le terrain et de tensions caractéristiques. Pour moi, ces trois types d’engagements ne sont pas compatibles - ils ne sont pas connectés séquentiellement et ne sont habituellement pas conduits simultanément. D’où l’importance de nous situer, nous et nos pratiques, par rapport à eux. Ces trois types sont : L’anthropologie au servi..

A Mock Data Challenge for the Einstein Gravitational-Wave Telescope

Einstein Telescope (ET) is conceived to be a third generation gravitational-wave observatory. Its amplitude sensitivity would be a factor ten better than advanced LIGO and Virgo and it could also extend the low-frequency sensitivity down to 1--3 Hz, compared to the 10--20 Hz of advanced detectors. Such an observatory will have the potential to observe a variety of different GW sources, including compact binary systems at cosmological distances. ET's expected reach for binary neutron star (BNS) coalescences is out to redshift $z\simeq 2$ and the rate of detectable BNS coalescences could be as high as one every few tens or hundreds of seconds, each lasting up to several days. %in the sensitive frequency band of ET. With such a signal-rich environment, a key question in data analysis is whether overlapping signals can be discriminated. In this paper we simulate the GW signals from a cosmological population of BNS and ask the following questions: Does this population create a confusion background that limits ET's ability to detect foreground sources? How efficient are current algorithms in discriminating overlapping BNS signals? Is it possible to discern the presence of a population of signals in the data by cross-correlating data from different detectors in the ET observatory? We find that algorithms currently used to analyze LIGO and Virgo data are already powerful enough to detect the sources expected in ET, but new algorithms are required to fully exploit ET data.Comment: accepted for publication in Physical Review D -- 18 pages, 8 figure