Gender and Asia : Why Study Media Culture?

Este artículo explora la experiencia cotidiana con los media de las mujeres en los países asiáticos, en contraposición a los enormes cambios y transiciones sociales. Los medios implican los complejos procesos del cambio y la transición social, desde el comportamiento de la vida diaria a la comprensión reflexiva del mundo global, o a la construcción de una nueva identidad y una constante tensión en su expresión dentro del día a día. Este artículo proporciona un análisis crítico de las consecuencias emergentes del consumo mediático en la vida diaria de las mujeres, en un momento en que los contextos políticos, económicos y tecnológicos son cada vez más globales. Se argumenta que la globalización de los media en Asia necesita ser reconocida como un recurso que se propaga, indispensable, altamente complejo y contradictorio para la construcción de la identidad dentro de la experiencia de la vida cotidiana.This article explores women’s everyday experience of the media in Asian countries in confrontation with huge social change and transition. The media involve the complex processes of social change and transition – from the conduct of everyday life, to the reflexive understanding of a global world, to the construction of a new identity and a constant tension in its expression within the everyday. This article provides a critical analysis of the emerging consequences of media consumption in women’s everyday life at a time when the political, economic and technological contexts are becoming increasingly global. It argues that the media globalization in Asia needs to be recognized as a proliferating, indispensable, yet highly complex and contradictory resource for the construction of identity within the lived experience of everyday life

Women, Television, and Everyday Life: Korean Women's Reflexive Experience of Television Mediated by Generation and Class

This thesis is about how television intersects with the everyday lives of women in transitional Korea, and how the experience of television is further implicated in the formation and transformation of identities. Within the larger socio-historical context of Korean modernity, it explores how_women deal with social change and make sense of their lives and identities with the cultural experience of television in everyday life, mediated by generation and class. This empirical work overall demonstrates the reflexive workings of popular television culture in its multifold manifestations. It reveals how critical ordinary women are in their engagement with television and how reflexivity actually operates in the variegated settings of their everyday lives. The thesis therefore argues for reflexivity at work: Reflexivity is constitutive of the experience of modem television. The practice of reflexivity is a defining characteristic of the experience of television, and television culture today has become a critical condition for reflexivity. Specifically, the thesis emphasizes the social dynamics of different forms of reflexivity with which to organize the project of self-identity, and the significant role of television as a resource for reflexivity. Reflexivity is organized around the axis of generation oriented toward different directions, which are the tradition-directed, the inner-directed, and the other-directed. The dialectical nature of the reflexivities of each generation is a push-and-pull of different tendencies towards modernity. Tradition in everyday life is now under threat, beginning to dissolve by the experience of modernity. As a consequence, the reflexive organization of the self becomes an inevitable unfinishable project to be worked at, and television, as historically-situated cultural experience, is integrated into the project of the self Television is an important resource for reflexivity in modem everyday life, which stimulates ordinary women to research their own lives and identities for a journey of hope

CELDA: Leveraging Black-box Language Model as Enhanced Classifier without Labels

Utilizing language models (LMs) without internal access is becoming an attractive paradigm in the field of NLP as many cutting-edge LMs are released through APIs and boast a massive scale. The de-facto method in this type of black-box scenario is known as prompting, which has shown progressive performance enhancements in situations where data labels are scarce or unavailable. Despite their efficacy, they still fall short in comparison to fully supervised counterparts and are generally brittle to slight modifications. In this paper, we propose Clustering-enhanced Linear Discriminative Analysis, a novel approach that improves the text classification accuracy with a very weak-supervision signal (i.e., name of the labels). Our framework draws a precise decision boundary without accessing weights or gradients of the LM model or data labels. The core ideas of CELDA are twofold: (1) extracting a refined pseudo-labeled dataset from an unlabeled dataset, and (2) training a lightweight and robust model on the top of LM, which learns an accurate decision boundary from an extracted noisy dataset. Throughout in-depth investigations on various datasets, we demonstrated that CELDA reaches new state-of-the-art in weakly-supervised text classification and narrows the gap with a fully-supervised model. Additionally, our proposed methodology can be applied universally to any LM and has the potential to scale to larger models, making it a more viable option for utilizing large LMs.Comment: ACL 202

Gender and Asia : Why Study Media Culture?

Este artículo explora la experiencia cotidiana con los media de las mujeres en los países asiáticos, en contraposición a los enormes cambios y transiciones sociales. Los medios implican los complejos procesos del cambio y la transición social, desde el comportamiento de la vida diaria a la comprensión reflexiva del mundo global, o a la construcción de una nueva identidad y una constante tensión en su expresión dentro del día a día. Este artículo proporciona un análisis crítico de las consecuencias emergentes del consumo mediático en la vida diaria de las mujeres, en un momento en que los contextos políticos, económicos y tecnológicos son cada vez más globales. Se argumenta que la globalización de los media en Asia necesita ser reconocida como un recurso que se propaga, indispensable, altamente complejo y contradictorio para la construcción de la identidad dentro de la experiencia de la vida cotidianaThis article explores women's everyday experience of the media in Asian countries in confrontation with huge social change and transition. The media involve the complex processes of social change and transition - from the conduct of everyday life, to the reflexive understanding of a global world, to the construction of a new identity and a constant tension in its expression within the everyday. This article provides a critical analysis of the emerging consequences of media consumption in women's everyday life at a time when the political, economic and technological contexts are becoming increasingly global. It argues that the media globalization in Asia needs to be recognized as a proliferating, indispensable, yet highly complex and contradictory resource for the construction of identity within the lived experience of everyday life

HD-DEMUCS: General Speech Restoration with Heterogeneous Decoders

This paper introduces an end-to-end neural speech restoration model, HD-DEMUCS, demonstrating efficacy across multiple distortion environments. Unlike conventional approaches that employ cascading frameworks to remove undesirable noise first and then restore missing signal components, our model performs these tasks in parallel using two heterogeneous decoder networks. Based on the U-Net style encoder-decoder framework, we attach an additional decoder so that each decoder network performs noise suppression or restoration separately. We carefully design each decoder architecture to operate appropriately depending on its objectives. Additionally, we improve performance by leveraging a learnable weighting factor, aggregating the two decoder output waveforms. Experimental results with objective metrics across various environments clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over a single decoder or multi-stage systems for general speech restoration task.Comment: Accepted by INTERSPEECH 202

What can veterinary professionals do? Measuring the effect of one domestic violence training pilot program on veterinary professionals' capacity to recognize, respond, and refer human victims of domestic violence

IntroductionVeterinary professionals have a key role in facilitating multi-agency collaboration to prevent and respond to domestic violence (DV) in situations where animals may be directly or indirectly involved. Yet despite their position as potential touchpoints for victim-survivors with animals, many veterinary professionals do not feel equipped to act on suspicions or disclosures of DV. In response to this identified need, one service operating in Melbourne, Australia, developed the Vet-3R's training program (Recognize-Respond-Refer) which was piloted on 65 veterinary professionals in Melbourne's Eastern Metropolitan Region.MethodsThis is an exploratory study aimed at measuring the effect of the Vets 3-R's program on veterinary professionals' confidence and capacity to recognize, respond and refer victims of DV. Participants were invited to complete online surveys before and after the training to evaluate their understanding of DV and their capacity to support suspected victim-survivors with animals who present at their service.ResultsThe pre-training self-evaluation scores indicated that while most veterinary professionals are aware of the link between animal abuse and DV, they lack the confidence to respond and refer individuals when confronted with suspicions or disclosures of abuse. However, upon completion of the Vets 3-R's program, participants reported marked improvements in their ability to recognize, respond, and refer victim-survivors. The most significant improvement could be seen in participants' self-reported ability to respond appropriately to suspicions of DV.DiscussionWhile results are indicative only due to the small sample size, this study suggests that veterinary professionals may be an underutilized intervention point for DV victim-survivors with animals. The Vet-3R's training program can be a useful tool for increasing effectiveness of this intervention point to safely assist DV victim-survivors. More research on similar programs with a larger cohort of participants would be beneficial to measure the impact of such programs on a wider scale

A Wideband Doherty Combiner with Phase Variation Compensation Using LTCC Applicable for High Power Transmission

In this paper, we propose a small-sized Doherty combiner with phase variation compensation using low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) substrate. The proposed design theory for the Doherty combiner is derived using the phase calculation of the S-parameter based on the relation between the input and output ports. The proposed circuit is designed after determining the band edge frequency and the targeted degree of the phase balance. The proposed circuit is verified using the microstrip line and the LTCC substrate. The implemented structure, using LTCC as the substrate, is operated under a high-power test of continuous wave 50 W, the results of which also show that the amplitude and phase balance have variations within 0.2 dB and ±1°, respectively. The high-power test shows that the implemented structure is applicable for high power Doherty amplifiers or combiners

Reinventing ‘Many Voices’: MacBride and a Digital New World Information and Communication Order

The MacBride Commission Report was arguably one of the most significant multilateral interventions in the history of international communication. This article charts its emergence at the time of deeply contested Cold War politics, coinciding with the rise of the southern voices in the global arena, led by the non-aligned nations. Thirty-five years after the report's publication, has the global media evolved into a more democratic system, demonstrating greater diversity of views and viewpoints? Despite the still formidable power of US-led western media, the article suggests that the globalisation and digitisation of communication has contributed to a multi-layered and more complex global media scene, demonstrating the “rise of the rest”

A survey of security issue in multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems have attracted the attention of researchers because of agents' automatic, pro-active, and dynamic problem solving behaviors. Consequently, there has been a rapid development in agent technology which has enabled us to provide or receive useful and convenient services in a variety of areas such as banking, transportation, e-business, and healthcare. In many of these services, it is, however, necessary that security is guaranteed. Unless we guarantee the security services based on agent-based systems, these services will face significant deployment problems. In this paper, we survey existing work related to security in multi-agent systems, especially focused on access control and trust/reputation, and then present our analyses. We also present existing problems and discuss future research challenges. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V 2011

Identification of a Rare Coding Variant in Complement 3 Associated with Age-related Macular Degeneration

Macular degeneration is a common cause of blindness in the elderly. To identify rare coding variants associated with a large increase in risk of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), we sequenced 2,335 cases and 789 controls in 10 candidate loci (57 genes). To increase power, we augmented our control set with ancestry-matched exome sequenced controls. An analysis of coding variation in 2,268 AMD cases and 2,268 ancestry matched controls revealed two large-effect rare variants; previously described R1210C in the CFH gene (fcase = 0.51%, fcontrol = 0.02%, OR = 23.11), and newly identified K155Q in the C3 gene (fcase = 1.06%, fcontrol = 0.39%, OR = 2.68). The variants suggest decreased inhibition of C3 by Factor H, resulting in increased activation of the alternative complement pathway, as a key component of disease biology