Receipt from Lanvin to Robert Goelet

https://digitalcommons.salve.edu/goelet-personal-expenses/1272/thumbnail.jp

A Human Rights-Based Approach to Truth and Reconciliation

This paper focuses on the work and experience of the United Nations (UN) Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in promoting and assisting truth-seeking and reconciliation processes from a human rights perspective, in the context of transitional justice processes. It maps the normative and operational framework to engage in such processes from a human rights perspective, describes the development of an internationally recognized right to the truth for victims of gross violations of human rights, and presents examples of participation and truth-seeking mechanisms for the realization of the right to the truth, namely national consultations and truth commissions. Finally, it addresses the issue of how human-rights-based truth and reconciliation processes can complement justice processes and result in improvements in access to justice for Indigenous Peoples

The global information technology report 2014

Executive summary When The Global Information Technology Report (GITR) and the Networked Readiness Index (NRI) were created more than 13 years ago, the attention of decision makers was focused on how to develop strategies that would allow them to benefit from what Time Magazine had described as “the new economy”: a new way of organizing and managing economic activity based on the new opportunities that the Internet provided for businesses. At present, the world is slowly emerging from one of the worst financial and economic crises in decades, and policymakers, business leaders, and civil society are looking into new opportunities that can consolidate growth, generate new employment, and create business opportunities. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to rank high on the list as one of the key sources of new opportunities to foster innovation and boost economic and social prosperity, for both advanced and emerging economies. For more than 13 years, the NRI has provided decision makers with a useful conceptual framework to evaluate the impact of ICTs at a global level and to benchmark the ICT readiness and usage of their economies

The global Information technology report 2015: ICTs for inclusive growth

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are transforming our economies and societies. Since 2001, The Global Information and Technology Report series and the Networked Readiness Index (NRI) have been taking the pulse of the ICT revolution worldwide. The NRI identifies the capacity of countries to leveraging ICT, by assessing the overall political and business environment, the level of ICT readiness and usage of ICT among the population, businesses and government, as well as the overall impacts of ICTs on the economy and society at large. The 2015 results, which covers 143 economies, confirms the dominance of advanced economies and the persistence of the multiple-faceted digital divides not only across but also within economies. They reveal the pervasive digital poverty that deprives the neediest from the opportunities offered by ICTs. Beyond this diagnosis, under the theme “ICTs for Inclusive Growth”, the 2015 edition of the report provides solutions from leading experts and practitioners to alleviate digital poverty and make the ICT revolution a global reality.&nbsp

Revisiting Occurrence Typing

We revisit occurrence typing, a technique to re ne the type of variables occurring in type-cases and, thus, capture some programming patterns used in untyped languages. Although occurrence typing was tied from its inception to set-theoretic types-union types, in particular-it never fully exploited the capabilities of these types. Here we show how, by using set-theoretic types, it is possible to develop a general typing framemork that encompasses and generalizes several aspects of current occurrence typing proposals and that can be applied to tackle other problems such as the inference of intersection types for functions and the optimization of the compilation of gradually typed languages

Subsurface ablation of tissue by ultrafast laser

Laser-induced optical breakdown (LIOB) is a multiphoton process which can be used for selective removal of material. It revolves around the creation of a plasma in the focal volume of a beam, and requires very high peak intensities in the order of the GW.cm-2. For this reason, ultrafast lasers sending high energy pulses with very short durations below 1 ps are favorite tools for triggering LIOB. The local creation of the plasma can induce a sharp rise in temperature and pressure over a few micrometers, which produce a cavitation bubble. The combined mechanical effects from the bubble creation and chemical effects from the free electrons in the plasma can induce dramatic changes in and around the focal volume. This is particularly true in sensitive samples such as biological tissues, where cells can be selectively destroyed by LIOB. The axial and lateral confinement of the plasma creation due to the multiphoton nature of LIOB opens interesting perspectives in the field of microsurgery. In this regard, the work presented in this thesis concerns the analysis of the effects of LIOB in soft biological tissues. More specifically, we investigate the case of arterial tissues and the opportunities this technique could offer in the treatment of atherosclerosis. First, we present the current knowledge on the mechanism and impact of LIOB on the surrounding medium, and particularly in biological samples. We discuss their modeling, both via simulation and replication in organic and inorganic phantoms. We consider the theory of the linear and non-linear mechanisms driving the evolution of the plasma density in the focal volume, the minimum requirements for the creation of a cavitation bubble, and optical effects which can modify the shape of a plasma. We then observe the behavior described by this theory in transparent and scattering phantoms mimicking biological tissues, and investigate scanning approaches to remove volumes of material. The following section of this thesis is devoted to investigating the effect of LIOB at the cellular level. We discuss an approach according to which LIOB may be of interest in the treatment of atherosclerosis or other pathologies which could benefit from the control of the population of cells undergoing controlled cell death (apoptosis). We then investigate the effect of LIOB on populations of epithelial cells in 2D and 3D cultures. We monitor the increase in the number of necrotic and apoptotic cells, in different regimes of ablation. We then present the methods and results of subsurface ablation in arterial tissue, both healthy and atherosclerotic. On ex-vivo experiments, we focus on the observation of a bubble produced by LIOB, and the structural damage generated. On in-vivo experiments, we investigate the effect on necrosis and apoptosis of cells around the target area, and compare our findings with the results obtained in cell cultures and phantoms. Finally, delivering the high intensities pulses to the target area in a minimally invasive way is essential in biomedical applications of LIOB, and we investigate this question in the final part of this thesis. We present two different approaches to answer this challenge: first by the use of transmission of pulses via a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber, and secondly by wavefront shaping of a pulse through a multicore fiber. Through both methods, we demonstrate subsurface ablation of biological tissue

Web Design Attributes in Building User Trust, Satisfaction, and Loyalty for a High Uncertainty Avoidance Culture

In this study, we attempt to evaluate the user pref6 erences for web design attributes (i.e., typography, color, content 7 quality, interactivity, and navigation) to determine the trust, sat8 isfaction, and loyalty for uncertainty avoidance cultures. Content 9 quality and navigation have been observed as strong factors in 10 building user trust with e-commerce websites. In contrast, inter11 activity, color, and typography have been observed as strong de12 terminants of user satisfaction. The most relevant and interesting 13 finding is related to typography, which has been rarely discussed 14 in e-commerce literature. A questionnaire was designed to collect 15 data to corroborate the proposed model and hypotheses. Further16 more, the partial least-squares method was adopted to analyze the 17 collected data from the students who participated in the test (n 18 = 558). Finally, the results of this study provide strong support to 19 the proposed model and hypotheses. Therefore, all the web design 20 attributes were observed as important design features to develop 21 user trust and satisfaction for uncertainty avoidance cultures. Al22 though both factors seem to be relevant, the relationship between 23 trust and loyalty was observed to be stronger than between satis24 faction and loyalty; thus, trust seems to be a stronger determinant 25 of loyalty for risk/high uncertainty avoidance culture

Docencia en inglés en asignaturas de informática: experiencia práctica

El inglés sigue siendo la asignatura pendiente para los egresados universitarios españoles. El dominio de esta lengua resulta especialmente necesario en carreras técnicas ligadas a las nuevas tecnologías, en las que el reciclaje continuo y la autoformación cobra mayor importancia al depender de innovaciones tecnológicas cuya documentación queda prácticamente obsoleta antes de llegar a ser traducida al castellano. Desde hace cuatro años, en la Universidad de Oviedo [7] se ofrece a los docentes la posibilidad de impartir grupos de prácticas en inglés, de forma voluntaria y con ciertos incentivos. La EUITIO [6] ha sido pionera en esta experiencia dentro de esta universidad, cumpliéndose éste cuatro años desde que se comenzó con la primera asignatura duplicada. En este trabajo se presentan los resultados, impresiones y experiencias que, por medio de encuestas y entrevistas se ha podido recopilar

Multi sensor system for pedestrian tracking and activity recognition in indoor environments

The widespread use of mobile devices and the rise of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have allowed mobile tracking applications to become very popular and valuable in outdoor environments. However, tracking pedestrians in indoor environments with Global Positioning System (GPS)-based schemes is still very challenging. Along with indoor tracking, the ability to recognize pedestrian behavior and activities can lead to considerable growth in location-based applications including pervasive healthcare, leisure and guide services (such as, hospitals, museums, airports, etc.), and emergency services, among the most important ones. This paper presents a system for pedestrian tracking and activity recognition in indoor environments using exclusively common off-the-shelf sensors embedded in smartphones (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer and barometer). The proposed system combines the knowledge found in biomechanical patterns of the human body while accomplishing basic activities, such as walking or climbing stairs up and down, along with identifiable signatures that certain indoor locations (such as turns or elevators) introduce on sensing data. The system was implemented and tested on Android-based mobile phones. The system detects and counts steps with an accuracy of 97% and 96:67% in flat floor and stairs, respectively; detects user changes of direction and altitude with 98:88% and 96:66% accuracy, respectively; and recognizes the proposed human activities with a 95% accuracy. All modules combined lead to a total tracking accuracy of 91:06% in common human motion indoor displacement