10 research outputs found
Tunisia
No full textIn the wake of the revolution, Tunisian
society is currently undergoing a significant
transformation. In late 2011, the country's first
representative government in more than three decades was
formed, as the Constituent Assembly was seated. Hundreds of
legitimate candidates ran in an election that was free,
fair, and enjoyed nearly 90 percent participation by
eligible voters. 'Tunisia: from revolutions to
institutions,' published one year after the exile of
Ben Ali, seeks to describe the factors driving this
transformation, examining how specific elements of society
have changed, or not changed, in the post-revolutionary
period. Information and communication technologies (ICTs),
which played a central role in the lead-up to the revolution
as well as the revolution itself, have continued to
influence rapid changes in the past year. This report charts
the application of these technologies by citizens, civil
society, entrepreneurs, and government stakeholders. It also
identifies openings to capitalize on technology's
ability to improve governance, expand economic opportunity,
and encourage social cohesion
Reading with the Author's Sex: Α Comparison of Two Seventeenth-Century Texts
No full textΗ διαφορά μεταξύ γυναικείας και ανδρικής γραφής είναι τελικά διαφορά στην ανάγνωση του ανδρικού και του γυναικείου κειμένου. Εφόσον ιστορικά οι γυναίκες και οι άνδρες δεν καταλαμβάνουν ίση θέση ως κοινωνικά υποκείμενα, η συγγραφική τους θέση είναι εξίσου άνιση και τα κείμενά τους δεν μπορούν να αναγνωστούν με τον ίδιο τρόπο. Ίδια "σημαίνοντα" αντιστοιχούν σε διαφορετικά "σημαινόμενα". Επομένως το φύλο του/της συγγραφέα θα πρέπει να αποτελεί σημείο αναφοράς στην κατασκευή εννοιών από τον αναγνώστη—αντίθετα με την άποψη των μεταδομιστών ότι ο/η ομιλών/ούσα είναι θέμα αδιάφορο. Η σύγκριση μεταξύ των έργων της Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedie of Mariam, και του Philip Massinger, The Duke of Milan, δείχνει ότι οι ελευθερίες τις οποίες παίρνει ο άνδρας συγγραφέας σε θέματα γλώσσας, κατασκευής χαρακτήρων και δραματικής μορφής βρίσκονται εκτός της κλίμακας επιλογών για την γυναίκα συγγραφέα, η οποία γράφει σε μια κουλτούρα που θεωρεί την συγγραφικότητα αποκλειστικά ανδρικό προνόμιο, αποσιωπά την γυναίκα, και συσχετίζει την δική της πνευματική φωνή στο δημόσιο χώρο με τη σεξουαλική διαφθορά.The difference in the writing of men and women is actually a difference in reading their texts. Since men and women have occupied greatly unequal subject positions in history, their texts cannot be read the same way. The same “signifiers” correspond to different “signifieds” in the male and the female text. Thus the sex of the author-or the gender of the speaking voice-should be a point of reference in constructing meaning, contrary to the post-structuralist view that the author-function is a matter of indifference. The comparison between Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedie of Mariam and Philip Massinger’s The Duke of Milan illustrates that liberties taken by the male author in language, characterization and dramatic form are outside the range of options for the female author, who is writing in a culture that considered authorship an exclusively male prerogatiνe, confined woman to silence and linked her voicing of ideas in public to sexual promiscuity
Hackathons as Participatory Design
No full text© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Breastfeeding is not only a public health issue, but also a matter of economic and social justice. This paper presents an iteration of a participatory design process to create spaces for re-imagining products, services, systems, and policies that support breastfeeding in the United States. Our work contributes to a growing literature around making hackathons more inclusive and accessible, designing participatory processes that center marginalized voices, and incorporating systems- and relationship-based approaches to problem solving. By presenting an honest assessment of the successes and shortcomings of the first iteration of a hackathon, we explain how we re-structured the second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon in service of equity and systems design. Key to our re-imagining of conventional innovation structures is a focus on experience design, where joy and play serve as key strategies to help people and institutions build relationships across lines of difference. We conclude with a discussion of design principles applicable not only to designers of events, but to social movement researchers and HCI scholars trying to address oppression through the design of technologies and socio-technical systems
Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance; English Women’s Voices, 1540-1700
No full textHierarchical frameworks for efficient prehensile rearrangement with a robotic manipulator
No full textRearranging multiple objects is a critical skill for robots so that they can effectively deal with clutter in human spaces. This is a challenging problem as it involves combinatorially large, continuous C-spaces involving multiple movable bodies and complex kinematic constraints. This work aims to identify ways of decomposing such problems into a hierarchy of challenges that can be addressed effectively individually, while their composition can provide a solution to the overall instance. The first direction for such a hierarchical decomposition aims to take advantage of developments in the multi-robot community, where there are efficient solvers for the “pebble motion on a graph” problem. Unlabeled rearrangement problems with a robotic manipulator are decomposed into a sequence of subproblems, each one of which can be viewed as a “pebble motion on a graph” problem. The labeled case, however, is not easily decomposed to a “pebble motion on a graph” problem instances. To deal with general object rearrangement, including both the labeled and the unlabeled case, this work builds on top of prior work that was able to compute solutions for labeled monotone instances through a backtracking search process. Monotone instances are those where every object needs to be transferred at most once to achieve a desired arrangement. This thesis extends the backtracking process to a method that addresses many non-monotone challenges. In order to solve the non-monotone cases the method is using solutions to the Minimum Constraint Removal (MCR) path problem so as to transfer each object to its target. An MCR path minimizes the number of constraints that need to be removed from the path of an object. This work then utilizes the monotone or the non-monotone backtracking search process as local connection primitives in the context of a higher-level task planner, which operates similar to a Probabilistic Roadmap Method (PRM), that searches the space of object placements. It is shown that the integration of these primitives with the higher-level planner achieves probabilistic completeness guarantees for the general object rearrangement problems. To improve the efficiency of the above hierarchical framework, this work introduces approximate but significantly faster primitives for monotone and non-monotone rearrangement instances. The methods avoid backtracking search by building a dependency graph between objects given solutions to the Minimum Constraint Removal (MCR) path planning problem to transfer each object to its target. From this graph, the approach discovers the order of moving objects by performing topological sorting. These new approximate but fast primitives that do not need backtracking search are incorporated in a higher-level incremental search algorithm for general rearrangement planning, which operates similar to a Bi-directional Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (Bi-RRT). Given a start and a goal object arrangement, tree structures of reachable new arrangements are generated by using the new and fast approximate primitives as an expansion procedure. These methods have been evaluated in simulation using models of robotics manipulators, such as a Baxter or a Motoman robot arm, in order to study their capability in solving difficult instances of rearrangement problems. This work compares the different alternatives in terms of success ratio, running time, scalability and path quality. Overall, this work aims to emphasize the benefit of using more powerful primitives, which are reasoning about the combinatorial and the underlying multi-object nature of the rearrangement problem, in the context of high-level task planning for robotic manipulation.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Athanasios Krontiri
Positioning Patronage: Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judæorum and the Countess of Cumberland in Time and Place
No full textThis article places the composition and publication of Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judæorum within the context of particular periods in the life of Margaret Russell, Countess of Cumberland and her daughter, Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset. Lanyer's use of mirroring, shared discourse, possible worlds and reconstruction of memory all relate to these periods and were designed to engage the interest of Russell and Clifford. Through the identification of the period of the women's stay in Cookham in 1604, Lanyer's poetic strategies – directly appealing to Russell – can be identified. Lanyer's decision to publish her verse collection in 1610 was also influenced by events in the lives of Russell and Clifford, thus providing insight into Lanyer's canny understanding of patronage in the period
"The Personal is Political": Hackathons as Feminist Consciousness Raising
No full textInitially conceived as problem-focused programming events, hackathons have expanded to encompass a range
of issue areas, stakeholders and activities. There have been important critiques of hackathons in relation
to their format and structure, their epistemological assumptions, and their outputs and impacts. Scholars
working in Feminist HCI have proposed design considerations for more inclusive hackathons that focus on
social justice outcomes for marginalized groups. Evaluative work on hackathons has assessed entrepreneurial
contributions, skill development, and affective impacts, but largely absent from the analysis is a view of longterm personal impacts on participants. What kinds of lasting impacts (if any) do issue-focused hackathons
have on participants themselves? In this paper, we describe a post-hoc qualitative study with participants and
organizers of a postpartum health hackathon in the U.S., one year after the event took place. Our goals were
to understand people’s motivations for participating, what impact (if any) their participation had on their
lives, and how (if at all) their participation shaped how they now understand postpartum health. Our findings
indicate that the hackathon functioned as a space of "feminist consciousness raising" in that it provided
space for navigating and sharing personal experiences, contextualizing and connecting those experiences to
structural oppression, and developing participants’ self- and collective-efficacy to create design interventions
and enact social change. Feminist consciousness raising is not just "awareness-raising", but rather a specific
historic and contemporary practice which we describe and situate in relation to personal experiences of
oppression around stigmatized topics. With these findings, we situate feminist consciousness raising in relation
to the literature on hackathons and Feminist HCI, speculate which aspects of the design of the event led to
it fostering feminist consciousness raising, and generate recommendations for how to intentionally bring
feminist consciousness raising to the design of hackathons and innovation events
Hackathons as Participatory Design: Iterating Feminist Utopias
No full textBreastfeeding is not only a public health issue, but also a matter of economic and social justice. This paper presents an iteration of a participatory design process to create spaces for re-imagining products, services, systems, and policies that support breastfeeding in the United States. Our work contributes to a growing literature around making hackathons more inclusive and accessible, designing participatory processes that center marginalized voices, and incorporating systems- and relationship-based approaches to problem solv-ing. By presenting an honest assessment of the successes and shortcomings of the first iteration of a hackathon, we explain how we re-structured the second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon in service of equity and systems design. Key to our re-imagining of conventional innovation structures is a focus on experience design, where joy and play serve as key strategies to help people and institutions build relationships across lines of difference. We conclude with a discussion of design principles applicable not only to designers of events, but to social movement researchers and HCI scholars trying to address oppression through the design of technologies and socio-technical systems
Grid-based virtual laboratory experiments for a graduate course on sensor networks
No full textThis paper presents the pedagogical and technical challenges the authors faced in developing a distributed laboratory for the execution of virtual scientific experiments (VSEs) superimposed on a Grid infrastructure, for a course on sensor networks that is part of the Master's in Information Networking (MSIN) program jointly offered by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA and Athens Information Technology (AIT), Athens, Greece. The MSIN program utilizes virtual classroom technologies because of its strong distance learning component. Courses taught by CMU faculty are attended in real-time by students in Athens, Greece, via video-wall teleconferencing sessions. Vice versa, visiting CMU faculty to AIT teach classes that are attended by students at CMU. Students in both institutions enjoy full interactivity with their classmates on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. A distributed shared virtual laboratory is needed for many of the more empirical courses. This paper describes the challenges and issues the authors faced in developing such a lab
The English translation of seventeenth-century French lyric poetry and epigrams during the Caroline period
No full textThis doctoral thesis is the first comprehensive study of contemporary English translations of French lyric poetry during the Caroline period. While there has been extensive study of translations from French literature of other genres, notably drama, translations of lyric poetry have been largely ignored. The thesis examines the translations within the context of literary and cultural trends in France and England during the seventeenth century. Differing cultural tendencies and reader expectations are evident both in the selection of particular poems for translation, and in the changes translators made to their source texts. Chapter one contains background information on the social and literary relations between France and England during the seventeenth century, and an overview of the social and political conditions in which poetry was written in each country. Chapter two investigates where and how translators obtained the texts of the poems they translated, and in particular the use of the recueils collectifs as sources for translations. Chapters three, four and five provide a thematic overview of the most significant and interesting translations. The themes chosen - eroticism, love and nature - constitute those most popular with translators, and the representation of these themes in both the original poems and the translations is closely connected to wider literary and cultural tendencies in both France and England. Having provided a thematic overview of the translations, chapters 6 and 7 examine some of the more technical and linguistic aspects of the practice of translating from contemporary French poetry in Caroline England. Chapter seven studies the translation of the French lyric voice, and the effects of this on the representation of themes, particularly love and nature. Chapter eight examines the English treatment of some aspects of seventeenth-century French prosody, placing these and the changes made by translators in the context of prosodic developments in both France and England. The conclusion highlights patterns identified in translators' handling of the source texts; these draw attention to the literary and cultural differences between France and England in the seventeenth century, and demonstrate that French poetry is altered in English translation to suit the tastes of translators and their intended English readership
