Accountability for serious crimes and national reconciliation in Timor-Leste: progress or wishful thinking?

"Nach der 24 Jahre andauernden Besetzung durch Indonesien stimmte die Bevölkerung Timor-Lestes 1999 für die Unabhängigkeit. Timoresische Milizen und das indonesische Militär reagierten darauf mit ausgedehnten und systematischen Übergriffen auf die Zivilbevölkerung, unter anderem durch Ermordungen, Vergewaltigungen, Folter und Deportationen. Um strafrechtliche Verantwortung für die Menschenrechtsverletzungen und Versöhnung zu schaffen, wurden zahlreiche Institutionen auf internationaler, nationaler und regionaler Ebene in Timor-Leste und Indonesien errichtet. Trotz des komplexen Zusammenwirkens dieser Organisationen, einschließlich Gerichtshöfen und Wahrheitskommissionen, wurde keine Gerechtigkeit hergestellt. Ausgehend von den Errungenschaften und Unzulänglichkeiten dieser Institutionen untersucht dieser Artikel, warum die Erwartungen vieler unerfüllt blieben, und zeigt auf, wie politische Entscheidungen die Arbeit der Institutionen beeinflussten. Zugleich kann aus jüngeren Entwicklungen Hoffnung geschöpft werden, dass in Hinblick auf die Ahndung der Gräueltaten Gerechtigkeit nicht endgültig verwehrt bleiben wird." (Autorenreferat)"In 1999 - after 24 years of Indonesian occupation - the people of Timor-Leste voted for their independence. However, Timorese anti-independence militias and the Indonesian military reacted with widespread and systematic attacks against the civilian population in the form of murder, rape, torture and deportation. In order to achieve accountability for the human rights atrocities and reconciliation, various mechanisms at the international, national and regional level were established in Timor-Leste and Indonesia. Despite this multi-layered approach, including courts and alternative justice mechanisms such as truth commissions, justice failed to be delivered. Drawing from the achievements and shortcomings of these institutions, this paper explores why many expectations were left unmet and highlights the influence politics had on the functioning of the organizations. Yet, some hope can be drawn from recent developments that justice for the atrocities committed in Timor-Leste will not be denied for good." (author's abstract

Komfort- und Diskomfortempfinden bei ergonomischen Sicherheitsschuhen

Ziel dieser Studie war es zu untersuchen, ob Mitarbeiter(innen) die ergonomischen Eigenschaften von Sicherheitsschuhen wahrnehmen können und welche Rolle dabei die ästhetischen Charakteristiken der Schuhe spielen. Im Mittelpunkt stand das Modell von Zhang et al. (1996), das Komfort und Diskomfort als zwei unabhängige Dimensionen betrachtet. Ein weiteres Ziel dieser Untersuchung war die Überprüfung der gesundheitlichen Auswirkung vom Tragen der Sicherheitsschuhe. In Zusammenarbeit mit der AUVA wurde die Studie im Zeitraum 4.-20. März 2008 in der Firma Magna Heavy Stamping in Albersdorf, Österreich durchgeführt. Von anfänglich 161 Untersuchungsteilnehmer(inne)n nahmen insgesamt 81 Mitarbeiter(innen) an allen vier Erhebungszeitpunkten teil. Um zu überprüfen, ob Mitarbeiter(innen) die ergonomischen Eigenschaften von Sicherheitsschuhen wahrnehmen können, wurden drei Paar Sicherheitsschuhe miteinander verglichen, die sich in ergonomischen sowie in ästhetischen Kriterien unterscheiden. Die ergonomischen Unterschiede zwischen den Sicherheitsschuhen konnten von den Versuchspersonen nur zum Teil wahrgenommen werden. Des weiteren ließen sich die Mitarbeiter(innen) bei der Bewertung der ergonomischen Kriterien von den ästhetischen Eigenschaften der Schuhe beeinflussen. Der schönere Schuh wurde als bequemer und der unmodische Schuh als unbequemer bewertet. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass das Modell von Zhang et al. (1996) bei Sicherheitsschuhen keine Gültigkeit hat. Die Unterschiede zwischen den Schuhen in Bezug auf Diskomfort veränderten sich überraschenderweise nicht über die Zeit. Dies bedeutet, dass sich die Mitarbeiter(innen) bereits nach einem Tag ein unveränderbares Bild über den Sicherheitsschuh gemacht haben. Unterschiedliche Verläufe in Bezug auf Beschwerden am Stütz- und Bewegungsapparat zwischen den drei Schuhen konnten über die zwei Wochen keine festgestellt werden. Um die gesundheitsfördernde Wirkung von Sicherheitsschuhen zu prüfen, sollte die Tragedauer wesentlich verlängert werden

Classification of Dance Music by Periodicity Patterns

This paper addresses the genre classification problem for a specific subset of music, standard and Latin ballroom dance music, using a classification method based only on timing information. We compare two methods of extracting periodicities from audio recordings in order to find the metrical hierarchy and timing patterns by which the style of the music can be recognised: the first method performs onset detection and clustering of inter-onset intervals; the second uses autocorrelation on the amplitude envelopes of band-limited versions of the signal as its method of periodicity detection. The relationships between periodicities are then used to find the metrical hierarchy and to estimate the tempo at the beat and measure levels of the hierarchy. The periodicities are then interpreted as musical note values, and the estimated tempo, meter and the distribution of periodicities are used to predict the style of music using a simple set of rules. The methods are evaluated with a test set of standard and Latin dance music, for which the style and tempo are given on the CD cover, providing a "ground truth" by which the automatic classification can be measured

Exploring Music Collections by Browsing Different Views

The availability of large music collections calls for ways to efficiently access and explore them. We present a new approach which uses descriptors derived from audio analysis and meta-information to create different views of a collection. Such views can have a focus on timbre, rhythm, artist, style or other aspects of music. For each view the pieces of music are organized on a map in such a way that similar pieces are located close to each other. The maps are visualized using an Islands of Music metaphor where islands represent groups of similar pieces. The different maps are linked to each other using a new technique to align Self-Organizing Maps. The user is able to browse the collection and explore different aspects by gradually changing focus from one view to another. We demonstrate our approach on a small collection using a user defined view and two views generated from audio analysis, namely, beat periodicity as an aspect of rhythm and spectral information as an aspect of timbre

Exploring Large Digital Library Collections Using a Map-Based Visualisation

In this paper we describe a novel approach for exploring large document collections using a map-based visualisation. We use hierarchically structured semantic concepts that are attached to the documents to create a visualisation of the semantic space that resembles a Google Map. The approach is novel in that we exploit the hierarchical structure to enable the approach to scale to large document collections and to create a map where the higher levels of spatial abstraction have semantic meaning. An informal evaluation is carried out to gather subjective feedback from users. Overall results are positive with users finding the visualisation enticing and easy to use

Sea surface temperature patterns on the West Florida Shelf using growing hierarchical self-organizing maps

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society 2006. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology 23 (2006): 325–338, doi:10.1175/JTECH1848.1.Neural network analyses based on the self-organizing map (SOM) and the growing hierarchical self-organizing map (GHSOM) are used to examine patterns of the sea surface temperature (SST) variability on the West Florida Shelf from time series of daily SST maps from 1998 to 2002. Four characteristic SST patterns are extracted in the first-layer GHSOM array: winter and summer season patterns, and two transitional patterns. Three of them are further expanded in the second layer, yielding more detailed structures in these seasons. The winter pattern is one of low SST, with isotherms aligned approximately along isobaths. The summer pattern is one of high SST distributed in a horizontally uniform manner. The spring transition includes a midshelf cold tongue. Similar analyses performed on SST anomaly data provide further details of these seasonally varying patterns. It is demonstrated that the GHSOM analysis is more effective in extracting the inherent SST patterns than the widely used EOF method. The underlying patterns in a dataset can be visualized in the SOM array in the same form as the original data, while they can only be expressed in anomaly form in the EOF analysis. Some important features, such as asymmetric SST anomaly patterns of winter/summer and cold/warm tongues, can be revealed by the SOM array but cannot be identified in the lowest mode EOF patterns. Also, unlike the EOF or SOM techniques, the hierarchical structure in the input data can be extracted by the GHSOM analysis.Support was provided by the Office of Naval Research under Grant N00014-98-1-0158 for observations and modeling of the west Florida continental shelf circulation and Grant N00014-02-1-0972 for the Southeast Atlantic Coastal Ocean Observing System

Некоторые вопросы моделирования центробежных насосов

This work presents a novel object tracking approach, where the motion model is learned from sets of frame-wise detections with unknown associations. We employ a higher-order Markov model on position space instead of a first-order Markov model on a high-dimensional state-space of object dynamics. Compared to the latter, our approach allows the use of marginal rather than joint distributions, which results in a significant reduction of computation complexity. Densities are represented using a grid-based approach, where the rectangular windows are replaced with estimated smooth Parzen windows sampled at the grid points. This method performs as accurately as particle filter methods with the additional advantage that the prediction and update steps can be learned from empirical data. Our method is compared against standard techniques on image sequences obtained from an RC car following scenario. We show that our approach performs best in most of the sequences. Other potential applications are surveillance from cheap or uncalibrated cameras and image sequence analysis.DIPLEC

Visualizing the Organization of the SOM and GTM

In this paper I will present the results of my project work for the course ”Self-Organizing Map