Teorizando las Relaciones Internacionales y el ascenso de China: una investigación preliminar

This paper critically analyses the case study of Chinese international relations theory through the lens of a non-Western International relations theoretical framework.There should be an attempt to democratise the existing international relations discipline because societal interactions among the countries across the globe cannot be judged by the yardstick of Western experiences. Non-Western international relations theories can be also generated under the post-positivist methodological framework, as it is equally important to include the localised voices and experiences of Asian, African and Latin American countries by reactivating their local historical traditions and ancient philosophies, sociological perspective and ontological, epistemological and axiological dimension of international relations theories 3. Key words: International Relations Theory - Tribute System – Confucian Model of Governance – World OrderEste artículo analiza críticamente la teoría china de las relaciones internacionales, como estudio de caso, desde la perspectiva del marco teórico de las relaciones internacionales no occidentales. Debe haber un intento de democratizar la disciplina existente de las relaciones internacionales ya que las interacciones sociales entre los países del globo no pueden ser juzgadas desde la perspectiva de las experiencias occidentales. Las teorías de las relaciones internacionales no occidentales también pueden ser generadas dentro del marco metodológico post-positivista ya que es igualmente importante incluir las voces y experiencias localizadas de los países asiáticos, africanos y latinoamericanos a partir de la reactivación de sus tradiciones históricas locales y sus filosofías antiguas, la perspectiva sociológica y la dimensión ontológica, epistemológica y axiológica de las teorías de las relaciones internacionales. Palabras Claves: Teoría de las Relaciones Internacionales - Sistema de tributo – modelo confuciano de gobernanza – orden mundi

The Contributions of Open and Distance Learning (ODL) Towards Job Performance of Veterinary Practitioners

An analytical study was conducted on Open and Distance Learning (ODL) programmes by veterinary university, Chennai for veterinary practitioners in Erode, Salem and Coimbatore districts of Tamil Nadu, India. Field veterinarians working in the public dispensaries / hospitals formed the sample for the study. The data was collected by mailing questionnaires to the respondents. The study revealed that the ODL courses effectively enhanced the job performance of the veterinarians in the areas of diagnosis (57.14 per cent) followed by medical treatment (49.86 per cent) at a frequency ranging from often to most often. Three-fourths (75.00 per cent) of the participants and non-participants (87.50 per cent) had medium to high level of job performance. The ‘Z’ test was statistically non-significant for job performance between the participants and the non-participants. Among the 14 independent variables, access to computer and training exposure was found to have a highly significant relationship with job performance in case of participants while all other variables were non-significant. The results would help the ODL developers to improve the contents and facilitate better delivery of distance education courses, so as to enhance the job performance of the veterinarians. [Editor\u27s Note] This article was published on March 29, 201

Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Exemplar Object Trajectories and Pre-Grasps

Learning diverse dexterous manipulation behaviors with assorted objects remains an open grand challenge. While policy learning methods offer a powerful avenue to attack this problem, they require extensive per-task engineering and algorithmic tuning. This paper seeks to escape these constraints, by developing a Pre-Grasp informed Dexterous Manipulation (PGDM) framework that generates diverse dexterous manipulation behaviors, without any task-specific reasoning or hyper-parameter tuning. At the core of PGDM is a well known robotics construct, pre-grasps (i.e. the hand-pose preparing for object interaction). This simple primitive is enough to induce efficient exploration strategies for acquiring complex dexterous manipulation behaviors. To exhaustively verify these claims, we introduce TCDM, a benchmark of 50 diverse manipulation tasks defined over multiple objects and dexterous manipulators. Tasks for TCDM are defined automatically using exemplar object trajectories from various sources (animators, human behaviors, etc.), without any per-task engineering and/or supervision. Our experiments validate that PGDM's exploration strategy, induced by a surprisingly simple ingredient (single pre-grasp pose), matches the performance of prior methods, which require expensive per-task feature/reward engineering, expert supervision, and hyper-parameter tuning. For animated visualizations, trained policies, and project code, please refer to: https://pregrasps.github.io