Hospitality and the ethico-political: Collective gestures for welcoming others – critique and possibilities

What is hospitality? Who is it addressed to? Hospitality aims at welcoming those who arrive; it demands giving space and time and sharing our own resources with others. In view of the current global migration crisis and in the midst of the social debates and a critique of the failure of affluent countries and Western democracies to respond in solidarity to those in need, this article attempts to re-consider the space for hospitality drawing from the ethical and the political as the two fundamental pillars of social architecture. In an effort to discuss collective grassroots reactions to this general lack of hospitality, I address the Catalan social platform Volem Acollir (2017) in their request to the state to open up the borders for the reception of a larger number of migrants. Far from being an individual choice, or an optional political decision, hospitality confronts us with the moral dilemma of the human response to our cultural others

Grading and Reporting Purposes and Practices in Catholic Secondary Schools and Grades\u27 Efficacy in Accurately Communicating Student Learning

Few aspects of school are as controversial as the practice of grading, for grades affect students\u27 educational opportunities. The purpose of this study was to identify the practices Catholic high-school teachers employed in determining students\u27 grades. The study investigated the extent to which academic achievement comprised the grades teachers reported, and the extent to which teachers\u27 practices are consistent with their expressed purposes for grading. The study also explored the extent to which Catholic teachers\u27 grading practices are consistent with their schools\u27 purpose for grading. Using random sampling, 486 Catholic secondary school teachers and 50 administrators from 33 high schools in California, Nevada, and Hawai\u27i were surveyed to determine the purposes for which teachers grade, the practices they employ in determining those grades, and the purposes for which their schools grade. A thematic analysis of school grading documents was completed to examine schools\u27 purposes for grading and school-wide grading policies. Results revealed that Catholic teachers\u27 employ a wide variety of grading practices in determining students\u27 grades. Teachers reported that academic achievement is the primary purpose for which they report grades. While the grades that teachers reported for their students emphasized achievement, nearly half reported that they communicate grades to report more than achievement alone and include sources of evidence that are not indicative of achievement, even those teachers who claimed to grade solely to report academic achievement. Teachers of different subject areas emphasized academic achievement variously. A majority of Catholic high schools did not have a statement of purpose for grading, and samples of schools that did publish a grading purpose revealed ambiguity about the purpose. Finally, an examination of the data revealed little variation in purpose and practice even among educators who had higher degrees in education or who had received additional training in the practice of grading. These prevalent practices diminish the reliability of grades as communications of student learning and as data to guide adjustments in instruction that can address students\u27 learning needs. Moreover, they hinder Catholic secondary schools\u27 mission of meeting the needs of its students, especially those who struggle and are socially or educationally disadvantaged

Segments of a Historically Political Existence: Diaries & Scrapbooks a History in the Making

From 1850 to 1877, a man by the name of Charles T. Cotton wrote 15 pocketbook diaries that displayed his daily thoughts and an account of the political situation in Washington D. C. during the Civil War. Alexander Gumby (a virtually unknown aspiring artist whom at one point took a job as a waiter at Columbia University in New York City), created a collection of 138 scrapbooks documenting American black history, and the discourse surrounding black leaders from the Civil War to the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. This essay will juxtapose both collections to convey how both objects present a historical narrative that explores the potential and underbelly of American democracy. In doing so, a letter correspondence between James Madison and Thomas Jefferson will become the locus for how both collections construct the democratic political landscape. Aside from themes in the American political tradition, memory studies from the perspective of Maurice Halwbachs, Susan Crane, and Alon Confino argue that forms of memory, like scrapbooks and diaries, neutralize a dominant form of history that tends to hide historical representations of political practices that are specific to different groups. The use of both collections, allows the modern reader to understand what is hidden and explicit in the politics of American history. This essay calls for a re-envisioning of how the practice of diary keeping and scrapbook making documents a form of history that engages the modern reader with the cultural nuances of the body politic. These types of repetitive practices develop the possibility of repudiating or revising the ills of the past, and re-envisioning how poor populations historicize life in the American body politic

Fixed Pattern Noise Non-Uniformity Correction Through K-Means Clustering

Imagery obtained with poorly calibrated sensors is often corrupted with fixed pattern noise. Fixed pattern noise presents itself through a non-uniform distribution and therefore is hard to target in noise removal. Traditional noise removal techniques assume that the noise is uniformly distributed and subsequently produces inadequate corrections. Noise correction methods that target fixed pattern noise rely on dynamically identifying present noise and adjust correction values appropriately using nearby information or general assumptions about the image’s composition. If noise identification is not accurate, the correction values will also suffer from low accuracy. Inaccurate correction values can affect the imagery’s quality, and in some cases, produce a corrected image worse off than an uncorrected image. The proposed algorithm utilizes local and global information to find more accurate correction values on a row-by-row basis. This paper will also introduce a standard dataset and evaluation metrics for comparison against other established non-uniformity correction methods

Armed Conflict in Bicol: The Price Does Not Come Cheap

The Bicol region is one of the poorest regions in the Philippines. In fact, it has the worst poverty situation in Luzon. It is also one of the most affected areas in the country in terms of armed conflict, which further exacerbates the poverty and underdevelopment within various communities in Bicol. This Notes shows that the price of the armed conflict in Bicol does not come cheap, with social, financial, and economic costs involved as well as some spillovers. Details are given in the Notes.armed conflict, relative deprivation, human rights violations, insurgency, marginalization, landlessness, resource exploitation, Bicol region

Another country XV

Another Country XV (2001) by John Timberlake, purchased by the Imperial War Museum in 2004, included in group exhibition of contemporary art in the collection of the IWM, curated by Sara Beva

The Effect of Interactivity and Instructional Exposure on Learning Effectiveness and Knowledge Retention: A Comparative Study of Two U.S. Air Force Computer-Based Training (CBT) Courses for Network User Licensing

The United States Air Force (USAF) currently employs the use of computer-based training (CET) across a host of requirements. One such requirement is in the Information Assurance (IA) arena and involves the training/licensing of over one-million computer network end-users. USAF use of CETs has been shown to possess a potential for substantial fiscal savings. However, studies investigating the learning outcomes of learning effectiveness (initial learning) and knowledge retention (sustained learning) associated with USAF CETs are lacking

Uniform Complexity for Text Generation

Large pre-trained language models have shown promising results in a wide array of tasks such as narrative generation, question answering, and machine translation. Likewise, the current trend in literature has deeply focused on controlling salient properties of generated texts including sentiment, topic, and coherence to produce more human-like outputs. In this work, we introduce Uniform Complexity for Text Generation or UCTG which serves as a challenge to make existing models generate uniformly complex text with respect to inputs or prompts used. For example, if the reading level of an input text prompt is appropriate for low-leveled learners (ex. A2 in the CEFR), then the generated text by an NLG system should also assume this particular level for increased readability. In a controlled narrative generation task, we surveyed over 160 linguistic and cognitively-motivated features for evaluating text readability and found out that GPT-2 models and even humans struggle in preserving the linguistic complexity of input prompts used. Ultimately, we lay down potential methods and approaches which can be incorporated into the general framework of steering language models towards addressing this important challenge