Child Mortality in new industrial localities and opportunities for change: a survey in an Indian steel town

As Asia becomes increasingly urbanized the effect of new industrial development on child mortality becomes of increasing interest. In India, considerable investment has been made in the social infrastructure of industrial new towns. This survey of Durgapur steel town in West Bengal shows that although the average level of child mortality in the working class population is favourable in comparison with other Indian cities, considerable differentials, that can be related to social, economic and environmental differences within the population, have arisen since the creation of the city in the late 1950s. The paper argues that the undertaking of selective sanitary interventions to improve access to drinking water (in particular) would be administratively feasible in these industrial new towns, of immediate impact, and indeed necessary if the differentials in mortality are to be eliminated

Ecocide, Genocide, Capitalism and Colonialism: Consequences for indigenous peoples and glocal ecosystems environments

Continuing injustices and denial of rights of indigenous peoples are part of the long legacy of colonialism. Parallel processes of exploitation and injustice can be identified in relation to non-human species and/or aspects of the natural environment. International law can address some extreme examples of the crimes and harms of colonialism through the idea and legal definition of genocide, but the intimately related notion of ecocide that applies to nature and the environment is not yet formally accepted within the body of international law. In the context of this special issue reflecting on the development of green criminology, the article argues that the concept of ecocide provides a powerful tool. To illustrate this, the article explores connections between ecocide, genocide, capitalism and colonialism and discusses impacts on indigenous peoples and on local and global (glocal) eco-systems

The anatomy of moral agency: A theological and neuroscience inspired model of virtue ethics

VirtuosA (‘virtuous algorithm’) is introduced, a model in which artificial intelligence (AI) systems learn ethical behaviour based on a framework adapted from Christian philosopher Dallas Willard and brought together with associated neurobiological structures and broader systems thinking. To make the inquiry concrete, the authors present a simple example scenario that illustrates how a robot might acquire behaviour akin to the virtue of kindness that can be attributed to humans. References to philosophical work by Peter Sloterdijk help contextualise Willard’s virtue ethics framework. The VirtuosA architecture can be implemented using state-of-the-art computing practices and plausibly redescribes several concrete scenarios implemented from the computing literature and exhibits broad coverage relative to other work in ethical AI. Strategies are described for using the model for systems evaluation —particularly the role of ‘embedded evaluation’ within the system—and its broader application as a meta-ethical device is discussed

The urban demography of industrialisation and its economic implications, with particular reference to a region in India from 1951-1971.

This thesis is an examination of the demographic characteristics of urban localities that were subject to a planned industrialisation strategy in India beginning in the 1950s. It studies the local age and sex structures that emerged and evolved in these populations over time, down to 1971, using the Censuses as the main sources of data, and focusing on the iron and steel producing region of Eastern India, with comparisons drawn from the West of the country. To aid interpretation a simulation model of urban demographic growth is constructed, and various growth patterns are projected. At the same time, the empirical evidence of migration and fertility differentials in different types of towns is explored. The study addresses the hypothesis that modern technology, in combination with factor proportions typical of a developing country (with relatively abundant labour) gives rise to the formation of local population structures that are unusual if not unique in history - (some comparative historical material from 19th Century England is presented here) and that these demographic features, as they emerge over time, carry exceptional implications for the allocation of local welfare expenditure (especially in the field of housing), and for the local labour market, as subsequent generations enter the labour force. The implications are of most interest in the case of the fastest growing localities (related to heavy industry), and the slowest growing localities, and these therefore are discussed the most. The welfare and employment implications are further analysed at the level of the household (using additionally the 1959 Labour Bureau survey data), and the strategies adopted by the households themselves to mitigate the more adverse consequences, especially in single-industry towns, are investigated and assessed. Similarly, strategies that have been adopted by the State are reviewed, and alternatives suggested

ImageSpirit: Verbal Guided Image Parsing

Humans describe images in terms of nouns and adjectives while algorithms operate on images represented as sets of pixels. Bridging this gap between how humans would like to access images versus their typical representation is the goal of image parsing, which involves assigning object and attribute labels to pixel. In this paper we propose treating nouns as object labels and adjectives as visual attribute labels. This allows us to formulate the image parsing problem as one of jointly estimating per-pixel object and attribute labels from a set of training images. We propose an efficient (interactive time) solution. Using the extracted labels as handles, our system empowers a user to verbally refine the results. This enables hands-free parsing of an image into pixel-wise object/attribute labels that correspond to human semantics. Verbally selecting objects of interests enables a novel and natural interaction modality that can possibly be used to interact with new generation devices (e.g. smart phones, Google Glass, living room devices). We demonstrate our system on a large number of real-world images with varying complexity. To help understand the tradeoffs compared to traditional mouse based interactions, results are reported for both a large scale quantitative evaluation and a user study.Comment: http://mmcheng.net/imagespirit

From social interaction to ethical AI: a developmental roadmap

AI and robot ethics have recently gained a lot of attention because adaptive machines are increasingly involved in ethically sensitive scenarios and cause incidents of public outcry. Much of the debate has been focused on achieving highest moral standards in handling ethical dilemmas on which not even humans can agree, which indicates that the wrong questions are being asked. We suggest to address this ethics debate strictly through the lens of what behavior seems socially acceptable, rather than idealistically ethical. Learning such behavior puts the debate into the very heart of developmental robotics. This paper poses a roadmap of computational and experimental questions to address the development of socially acceptable machines. We emphasize the need for social reward mechanisms and learning architectures that integrate these while reaching beyond limitations of plain reinforcement learning agents. We suggest to use the metaphor of “needs” to bridge rewards and higher level abstractions such as goals for both communication and action generation in a social context. We then suggest a series of experimental questions and possible platforms and paradigms to guide future research in the area

Harmonic Versus Chaos Controlled Oscillators in Hexapedal Locomotion

The behavioural diversity of chaotic oscillator can be controlled into periodic dynamics and used to model locomotion using central pattern generators. This paper shows how controlled chaotic oscillators may improve the adaptation of the robot locomotion behaviour to terrain uncertainties when compared to nonlinear harmonic oscillators. This is quantitatively assesses by the stability, changes of direction and steadiness of the robotic movements. Our results show that the controlled Wu oscillator promotes the emergence of adaptive locomotion when deterministic sensory feedback is used. They also suggest that the chaotic nature of chaos controlled oscillators increases the expressiveness of pattern generators to explore new locomotion gaits

Efficient salient region detection with soft image abstraction

Detecting visually salient regions in images is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision. We propose a novel method to decompose an image into large scale per-ceptually homogeneous elements for efficient salient region detection, using a soft image abstraction representation. By considering both appearance similarity and spatial dis-tribution of image pixels, the proposed representation ab-stracts out unnecessary image details, allowing the assign-ment of comparable saliency values across similar regions, and producing perceptually accurate salient region detec-tion. We evaluate our salient region detection approach on the largest publicly available dataset with pixel accurate annotations. The experimental results show that the pro-posed method outperforms 18 alternate methods, reducing the mean absolute error by 25.2 % compared to the previous best result, while being computationally more efficient. 1