Correlations, Causes and the Logic of Obscuration: Donor Shaping of Dominant Narratives in Indonesia's Irrigation Development

This article analyses policy trends in Indonesian irrigation, particularly during the last five decades, from the perspective of dominant narratives, as authored, suggested and pushed by international donors. It argues that international donors' adherence to ‘deferred maintenance’ as the core element of irrigation policy problem framing does not match with farmers' and the irrigation agency staff perceptions and practices. The logic of obscuration and the discursive manoeuvers that maintain it are analysed. The article concludes that there is space for more profound conceptual contestation and for alternative actions pathways even within the ‘dominant paradigm’ to address management problems more effectively

Re-thinking Regionalism: Europe and East Asia in Comparative Historical Perspective

Regionally-based processes of political and economic integration, security cooperation, and even social identification have become increasingly important and prominent parts of the international system. Nowhere have such processes gone further than in Western Europe. Somewhat surprisingly, similar patterns of regional integration have been steadily developing in East Asia - a region many observers consider unlikely to replicate the European experience. What are the factors that encourage regional political cooperation and economic integration? Are there common forces encouraging such outcomes in very different geographical areas and at very different moments in history? This paper uses an historically grounded comparative approach to examine the historical pre-conditions that underpinned the formation of the European Union, and then contrasts them with the situation in East Asia today. While the overall geopolitical and specific national contexts are very different, the East Asian experience may ultimately generate relationships and structures that are more like the European Union's than some of the sceptics imagine

The Natural Statistics of Audiovisual Speech

Humans, like other animals, are exposed to a continuous stream of signals, which are dynamic, multimodal, extended, and time varying in nature. This complex input space must be transduced and sampled by our sensory systems and transmitted to the brain where it can guide the selection of appropriate actions. To simplify this process, it's been suggested that the brain exploits statistical regularities in the stimulus space. Tests of this idea have largely been confined to unimodal signals and natural scenes. One important class of multisensory signals for which a quantitative input space characterization is unavailable is human speech. We do not understand what signals our brain has to actively piece together from an audiovisual speech stream to arrive at a percept versus what is already embedded in the signal structure of the stream itself. In essence, we do not have a clear understanding of the natural statistics of audiovisual speech. In the present study, we identified the following major statistical features of audiovisual speech. First, we observed robust correlations and close temporal correspondence between the area of the mouth opening and the acoustic envelope. Second, we found the strongest correlation between the area of the mouth opening and vocal tract resonances. Third, we observed that both area of the mouth opening and the voice envelope are temporally modulated in the 2–7 Hz frequency range. Finally, we show that the timing of mouth movements relative to the onset of the voice is consistently between 100 and 300 ms. We interpret these data in the context of recent neural theories of speech which suggest that speech communication is a reciprocally coupled, multisensory event, whereby the outputs of the signaler are matched to the neural processes of the receiver

P.J. Vatikiotis Oral History

P.J. Vatikiotis was an undergraduate student at AUC from 1944 to to 1948, later going on to a career as a prominent scholar of Middle East history at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and elsewhere. Of Greek heritage but coming from Palestine, he tells of how Cairo’s history and affordability attracted him, and explains the other reasons students attended, including the inability to enter other universities due to grades and the difficulty of pursuing study in Europe during the years of World War II. Vatikiotis offers a portrait of AUC’s student body in the 1940s, with a focus on its national and ethnic diversity (a minority of Egyptians among Greeks, Ethiopians, and others, including a large influx of Palestinians, all united through speaking French), as well as its religious mix. He also speaks about female students at AUC, typically Egyptians coming from American and English Schools in Egypt, and he discusses the social relations between male and female students on campus, including romantically. Vatikiotis explains how, like himself, most of his classmates made their future careers abroad, AUC being an effective departure point for study and work in the United States or Europe, or in other parts of the Middle East. He mentions the accomplishments of a number of classmates who relocated abroad, plus female graduates Laila El Hamamsy and Wedad Said who had successful careers at the American University in Cairo. AUC’s curriculum is outlined, together with a description of many faculty members, including their personalities, academic caliber, and interactions with students. He gives his impression of the continued Protestant Christian missionary influence at AUC in these years, and how it was expressed. The popularity of athletics at AUC is covered, along with other extracurricular activities like geology club trips and the glee club, plus theater and music performances organized by faculty member Worth Howard, whose parties are also recalled. He also recounts the international roster of musicians whose performances he witnessed at AUC’s Ewart Hall, such as Edith Piaf and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. Vatikiotis depicts an unsettled era in Cairo, recounting major demonstrations that brought violence to the edge of AUC’s campus, a cholera epidemic, and his survival of a 1947 bombing at Metro cinema. For this interview no audio is available