The Return of Inequality

Review Article Inequality, Growth, and Poverty in an Era of Liberalization and Globalization G A Cornia (ed), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 Inequality in Latin America and the Carribbean: Breaking with History? D de Ferranti, G Perry, F Ferreira, & M Walton, Washington, DC: World Bank Latin American and Caribbean Studies, The World Bank, 2004 Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality B Milanovic, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005 Equity and Development: World Development Report 2006 World Bank, New York: The World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2005 University of Texas Inequality Project (UTIP), Under the leadership of Prof James K Galbraith, http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/

The sexual politics of the head: the legal history of the veil

To trace the origins of legal provisions pertaining to the veiling of women, Mesopotamian legal documents of the early second and first millennia BCE are scrutinized in order to determine their first entries regarding the veil, the specific intentions of the legislator, and the cultural background of the legislation. Were the investigation to reveal only the material detail of the first legislation on veiling, the historical impact of patriarchy would remain obscure. Consequently the introduction of the veiling laws is evaluated against the background of a tradition of patriarchy which had a total disregard for the equality of women and reified their sexuality. The importance of this aspect lies in the fact that this inculcated degradation of women persists, even without the veil, in contemporaneous patriarchal societies. However, marked  changes in the “sexual politics of the head” are currently discernible nationalist movements within Muslim countries and communities

When Can the Rabble Redistribute? Democratization and Income Distribution in Low- and Middle-income Countries

In contrast to the experience in high-income OECD countries, the introduction of democracy in most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has been followed, as a rule, by a concentration of income. Using the median voter hypothesis as analytical tool, this paper explores the conditions under which positive regime change can lead to the mitigation of income inequality in LMICs. Analysis of panel data over the period 1960 to 1999 supports the contention that the degree to which popular sovereignty had been institutionalised through regime change is an important condition. Contrary to mainstream theory, economic openness in general tends to increase and not mitigate income inequality in countries where skilled labour is in short supply. Only in those countries with the requisite state capacity to disseminate skills amongst their populace on a broad scale, the electorate can use the vote effectively to reduce the effects of this tendency.Income distribution; redistribution; democratisation; median voter hypothesis

Indigenous knowledge systems and language practice : interface of a knowledge discourse

Published ArticleThe paper seeks to engage constructively with the challenges and opportunities Indigenous Knowledge (IK) may offer disciplines in Language Practice. The approach will be contextualized in terms of the theoretical shift in knowledge production and use, as well as the current debate pertaining to the feasibility of the incorporation of IK into curricula. Specific attention will be rendered to topics of Africanizing scholarship, a performance model of knowledge, the socio-cultural embeddedness of language, and brief thoughts on the translation of the oral. These thematic issues are of particular importance to Language Practice, perceived here to be at the gateway between theory of language/communication and receiver communities

Measurement of digital photographic image quality : survey of psychophysics just noticeable threshold difference method

Abstract: The modeling and quantification of digital photographic image quality has, from a psychophysics perspective, traditionally followed two paths, one of which is the discriminable small or just noticeable difference (local psychophysics) as detected in an image pair; further extended to cover a wide range of attribute artefactual quality variation. This method has its roots in the mathematical and psychological modeling of psychophysics and boasts a long history starting with the work of researchers such as Bernoulli, Weber and Fechner (18th, 19th century). The method models human perception of difference as a full scale logarithmic law and will be surveyed for its value in the determination of the quantitative quality of digital images

Foreground segmentation in atmospheric turbulence degraded video sequences to aid in background stabilization

Abstract: Video sequences captured over a long range through the turbulent atmosphere contain some degree of atmospheric turbulence degradation (ATD). Stabilization of the geometric distortions present in video sequences containing ATD and containing objects undergoing real motion is a challenging task. This is due to the difficulty of discriminating what visible motion is real motion and what is caused by ATD warping. Due to this, most stabilization techniques applied to ATD sequences distort real motion in the sequence. In this study we propose a new method to classify foreground regions in ATD video sequences. This classification is used to stabilize the background of the scene while preserving objects undergoing real motion by compositing them back into the sequence. A hand annotated dataset of three ATD sequences is produced with which the performance of this approach can be quantitatively measured and compared against the current state-of-the-art

Home Away from Home: One US Reader’s Response to Home Words

Review of: Reimer, Mavis, ed. Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2010.002

The sexual politics of the head: the legal history of the veil

To trace the origins of legal provisions pertaining to the veiling of women, Mesopotamian legal documents of the early second and first millennia BCE are scrutinized in order to determine their first entries regarding the veil, the specific intentions of the legislator, and the cultural background of the legislation. Were the investigation to reveal only the material detail of the first legislation on veiling, the historical impact of patriarchy would remain obscure. Consequently the introduction of the veiling laws is evaluated against the background of a tradition of patriarchy which had a total disregard for the equality of women and reified their sexuality. The importance of this aspect lies in the fact that this inculcated degradation of women persists, even without the veil, in contemporaneous patriarchal societies. However, marked  changes in the “sexual politics of the head” are currently discernible nationalist movements within Muslim countries and communities