On-Device and System-Wide Audio Live Captioning with Language Translation

This publication describes techniques and apparatuses that enable an electronic device (e.g., a smartphone) to provide on-device (e.g., offline), system-level (e.g., operating system), live captioning with language translation in a language that a user can choose (select). Therefore, the smartphone enables the user to read live captioning in the language of their choice without relying on an internet connection, cellular data, or any wired and/or wireless communication with a remote server. Also, the smartphone enables the user to read live captioning in the language of their choice on any medium with audio content supported by the smartphone

A global agenda for advancing freshwater biodiversity research

Global freshwater biodiversity is declining dramatically, and meeting the challenges of this crisis requires bold goals and the mobilisation of substantial resources. While the reasons are varied, investments in both research and conservation of freshwater biodiversity lag far behind those in the terrestrial and marine realms. Inspired by a global consultation, we identify 15 pressing priority needs, grouped into five research areas, in an effort to support informed stewardship of freshwater biodiversity. The proposed agenda aims to advance freshwater biodiversity research globally as a critical step in improving coordinated actions towards its sustainable management and conservation

A global agenda for advancing freshwater biodiversity research

Global freshwater biodiversity is declining dramatically, and meeting the challenges of this crisis requires bold goals and the mobilisation of substantial resources. While the reasons are varied, investments in both research and conservation of freshwater biodiversity lag far behind those in the terrestrial and marine realms. Inspired by a global consultation, we identify 15 pressing priority needs, grouped into five research areas, in an effort to support informed stewardship of freshwater biodiversity. The proposed agenda aims to advance freshwater biodiversity research globally as a critical step in improving coordinated actions towards its sustainable management and conservation.Peer reviewe

Responsibility in Uncertain Times: An Institutional Perspective on Precaution

Precaution is a key issue in environmental governance. Variously defined, intensively debated and introduced in many regulations, its meaning, scope and application remain problematic. This article argues that the controversy on precaution is a matter of culturally patterned expectations concerning the production and use of knowledge and the related social positions and responsibilities. The way uncertainty and its role in the policy process are understood is crucial. For some precaution is a flawed concept, to be accommodated to the current expert-based cooperative scheme. For others it is a major innovation requiring a rearrangement of the latter. Precautionary policies may evolve in different directions. They may either strengthen the role of means-ends rationality, increasing people's dependence on expert knowledge and shrinking the opportunity and scope of public debate or, on the contrary, enhance the role of value-commitments, leading to a decline in the legitimacy of established hierarchies and an intensification of intractable controversies. (c) 2008 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Desecuritizar la 'guerra contra las drogas'

This chapter makes use of Colombian-US bilateral relations as a window to trace the evolution of the US-designed ‘war on drugs’, highlighting the role of securitization in the development of counternarcotics activities in Colombia and discussing the process through which the shortcomings of this policy have created opportunities to engage in desecuritization and to design alternative strategies. It explores the principles that have sustained the ‘war on drugs’ and the evolution of Colombian-US relations since 1998, providing an overall assessment of the anti-drug strategy that helps to analyse the possibilities of desecuritization in the light of the Copenhagen school’s securitization theory. Finally, the chapter identifies the challenges that drug policy reform currently faces in Colombia and Latin America more generally

Peripheral possibilities: revealing originality and encouraging dialogue through a reconsideration of ‘marginal’ IR scholarship

This article presents a framework for revealing the original contributions of certain forms of ‘peripheral’ IR scholarship and for encouraging dialogue between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ scholars. Often, peripheral research is dismissed by the core for being, presumably, a ‘mere copy’ of ‘core scholarship’. Our framework, however, provides a means of re-evaluating peripheral scholarship that, at first, may seem ‘similar’, in order to reveal the differences and, at times, even resistant scholarly moves. We apply three abstract propositions (hybridity, mimicry and the denationalisation of ideas) that help spell out the original character of these ‘similar yet different’ peripheral contributions. What results is an affirmation of the potential for novelty on the periphery of IR, a perception that, firstly, restores agency to marginalised subjects; secondly, it highlights the relevance of their contribution to the discipline; and thirdly, it encourages dialogue with the core. The article examines how the framework presented here can operate as a series of possibilities to be adopted by peripheral scholars in order to generate dialogue and intellectual exchanges with the core, with the hope that such exchanges may begin to alter the present asymmetrical power relations