Comunicación para el desarrollo y el cambio social: Influencia de las normas sociales para una sociedad inclusiva en Montenegro

UNICEF and the Government of Montenegro implemented a communication strategy “It’s about ability” to challenge the existing, exclusionary practices and promote new, inclusive social norms for children with disability. Drawing on communication for development principles and social norms theory, a 2010-2013 nation-wide campaign mobilized disability rights NGOs, parents associations, media and private sector to stimulate inclusive attitudes and practices towards children with disabilities. As a result, the percentage of citizens who find it acceptable for a child with disability to attend the same class with theirs increased from 35 before the campaign to 80 percent at the end of it. Similarly, the percentage of Montenegrin citizens who find it acceptable for a child with disability to be the best friend of their child increased from 22 before the campaign to 51 percent at the end of it. The campaign was participatory, audience-centred and guided by the key communication planning principles.UNICEF y el Gobierno de Montenegro implementaron la estrategia de comunicación “Se trata de la habilidad” para desafiar las prácticas existentes y excluyentes y promover nuevas normas sociales inclusivas para los niños con discapacidad. Basándose en los principios de la comunicación para el desarrollo y las normas sociales, una campaña nacional del 2010-2013 movilizó a las ONG de derechos de las personas con discapacidad, asociaciones de padres, los medios de comunicación y el sector privado para estimular las actitudes y prácticas inclusivas hacia los niños con discapacidades. Como resultado, el porcentaje de ciudadanos que encuentran aceptable para un niño con discapacidad asistir a la misma clase que los suyos aumentó de un 35%, antes de la campaña, a un 80% al final de la misma. Del mismo modo, el porcentaje de ciudadanos montenegrinos que encuentran aceptable que un niño con discapacidad pueda ser el mejor amigo de sus hijos incrementó de un 22% anterior a la campaña a un 51% al final de la misma. La campaña fue participativa, centrada en el público y guiada por los principios clave de planificación de la comunicación

Geometric path planning without maneuvers for nonholonomic parallel orienting robots

Current geometric path planners for nonholonomic parallel orienting robots generate maneuvers consisting of a sequence of moves connected by zero-velocity points. The need for these maneuvers restrains the use of this kind of parallel robots to few applications. Based on a rather old result on linear time-varying systems, this letter shows that there are infinitely differentiable paths connecting two arbitrary points in SO(3) such that the instantaneous axis of rotation along the path rest on a fixed plane. This theoretical result leads to a practical path planner for nonholonomic parallel orienting robots that generates single-move maneuvers. To present this result, we start with a path planner based on three-move maneuvers, and then we proceed by progressively reducing the number of moves to one, thus providing a unified treatment with respect to previous geometric path planners.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Alvarado Revisited: A Missing Element in Alaska’s Quest to Provide Impartial Juries for Rural Alaskans

In Alvarado v. State, the Alaska Supreme Court declared that an impartial jury is a cross section of the community and that the community where the events at issue transpired must be represented in the jury. This decision spurred changes to jury selection procedures and the creation of Criminal Rule 18, an effort to ensure defendants from remote villages are judged by a jury representative of these rural areas. The Alaska Court of Appeals recently addressed an issue of first impression regarding the application of Criminal Rule 18. In Joseph v. State, the defendant was convicted of murdering his girlfriend in the tiny Native village of Rampart. His trial was conducted in Fairbanks by a jury selected from an area that does not include Rampart or any other similar Native village. Criminal Rule 18 allowed the defendant a limited time to transfer his trial to Nenana, which more closely resembles the characteristics of Rampart. However, the defendant was never informed of this right. His trial counsel believed trial location was a decision for the attorney and did not see a need to request the change. In a memorandum opinion that creates no binding precedent, the Court of Appeals agreed with this view and held it did not violate the defendant’s due process rights not to be informed of the opportunity to have his case heard at an alternative trial site. This Article challenges that view, arguing it fails to safeguard the spirit and purpose of the constitutional right to an impartial jury. To remote villagers in Bush Alaska whose customs, culture, and ways of life are vastly different than in larger cities within the state, the opportunity to be judged by those sharing similarities is of upmost importance. Consequently, decisions of trial venue, for purposes of Criminal Rule 18, should be knowingly made or waived by the defendant

New Reflections on Gravitational Duality

In general terms duality consists of two descriptions of one physical system by using degrees of freedom of different nature. There are different kinds of dualities and they have been extremely useful to uncover the underlying strong coupling dynamics of gauge theories in various dimensions and those of the diverse string theories. Perhaps the oldest example exhibiting this property is Maxwell theory, which interchanges electric and magnetic fields. An extension of this duality involving the sources is also possible if the magnetic monopole is incorporated. At the present time a lot has been understood about duality in non-Abelian gauge theories as in the case of N=4 supersymmetric gauge theories in four dimensions or in the Seiberg-Witten duality for N=2 theories. Moreover, a duality that relates a gravitational theory (or a string theory) and a conformal gauge theory, as in the case of gauge/gravity correspondence, have been also studied with considerable detail. The case of duality between two gravitational theories is the so called gravitational duality. At the present time, this duality has not been exhaustively studied, however some advances have been reported in the literature. In the present paper we give a general overview of this subject. In particular we will focus on non-Abelian dualities, applied to various theories of gravity as developed by the authors, based in the Rocek-Verlinde duality procedure. Finally, as a new development in this direction, we study the gravitational duality in Hitchin's gravity in seven and six dimensions and their relation is also discussed.Comment: 17 pages, paper to be published in Frontiers in Physic

Generalised asymptotic equivalence for extensive and non-extensive entropies

We extend the Hanel and Thurner asymptotic analysis to both extensive and non-extensive entropies on the basis of a wide class of entropic forms. The procedure is known to be capable to classify multiple entropy measures in terms of their defining equivalence classes. Those are determined by a pair of scaling exponents taking into account a large number of microstates as for the thermodynamical limit. Yet, a generalisation to this formulation makes it possible to establish an entropic connection between Markovian and non-Markovian statistical systems through a set of fundamental entropies $S_{\pm}$, which have been studied in other contexts and exhibit, among their attributes, two interesting aspects: They behave as additive for a large number of degrees of freedom while they are substantially non-additive for a small number of them. Furthermore, an ample amount of special entropy measures, either additive or non-additive, are contained in such asymptotic classification. Under this scheme we analyse the equivalence classes of Tsallis, Sharma-Mittal and R\'enyi entropies and study their features in the thermodynamic limit as well as the correspondences among them.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure