679 research outputs found
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 artÃculo analiza crÃticamente la teorÃa 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 paÃses del globo no pueden ser juzgadas desde la perspectiva de las experiencias occidentales. Las teorÃas 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 paÃses asiáticos, africanos y latinoamericanos a partir de la reactivación de sus tradiciones históricas locales y sus filosofÃas antiguas, la perspectiva sociológica y la dimensión ontológica, epistemológica y axiológica de las teorÃas de las relaciones internacionales.
Palabras Claves: TeorÃa 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
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