1,534 research outputs found
Book review: Hiding in plain sight: the pursuit of war criminals from Nuremberg to the war on terror by Eric Stover, Victor Peskin and Alexa Koenig
No full textHiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremburg to the War on Terror gives a historical account of how states and international courts have attempted to find and capture those suspected of war crimes and ‘crimes against humanity’. Eric Stover, Victor Peskin and Alexa Koenig present meticulous and legal research that covers the flight of Nazi war criminals, the recent Balkan wars, the Rwandan genocide and the pursuit of suspected terrorists post-9/11. This book will ensure that readers learn exactly who still evades indictment for such crimes and the obstacles that face the international community in the struggle to uphold human rights, writes Esther Adaire
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Graphic ::trauma and meaning in our online lives /
No full textToday, almost anyone can upload and disseminate newsworthy content online, which has radically transformed our information ecosystem. Yet this often leaves us exposed to content produced without ethical or professional guidelines. In Graphic, Alexa Koenig and Andrea Lampros examine this dynamic and share best practices for safely navigating our digital world. Drawing on the latest social sciences research, original interviews, and their experiences running the world's first university-based digital investigations lab, Koenig and Lampros provide practical tips for maximizing the benefits and minimizing the harms of being online. In the wake of the global pandemic, they ask: How are people processing graphic news as they spend more time online? What practices can newsrooms, social media companies, and social justice organizations put in place to protect their employees from vicarious trauma and other harms? Timely and urgent, Graphic helps us navigate the unprecedented implications of the digital age while staying engaged with the human struggles of our times
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Bringing Evidence of War Crimes From Twitter to the Hague
No full textThe internet is increasingly emerging as a source for identification and documentation of war crimes, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has devastatingly proven yet again. But how does an image of a possible war crime go from social media to before a tribunal in a potential war crimes prosecution? On a recent episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Nick Waters, the lead on Justice and Accountability at Bellingcat, about how open-source investigators go about documenting evidence of atrocity. This week on the show, Evelyn and Quinta interviewed Alexa Koenig, the executive director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on using digital evidence for justice and accountability. They talked about how international tribunals have adapted to using new forms of evidence derived from the internet, how social media platforms have helped—and hindered—collection of this kind of evidence, and the work Alexa has done to create a playbook for investigators downloading and collecting material documenting atrocities.Because of the nature of the conversation, this discussion contains some descriptions of violence that might be upsetting for some listeners. </p
The construction of Karen Karnak: The multi-author-function
No full textThis thesis is situated within the comparatively recent developments of Web 2.0 and the emergence of interactive WikiMedia, and explores the mode of authorship within a Read/Write culture compared to that of a Read/Only tradition. The hypothesis of this study is that the role of the audience has become merged with the author, and as such, represents new functions and attributes, distinct from a more conventional concept of authorship, in which the roles of audience and author are more separate. Read/Write and participatory culture, as defined by this study, is focused on collaboration, and includes the influences of D.I.Y. culture, Open-Source practices and the production of text by multiple authors. Multi-authorship presents a re-thinking of several concepts which support the notion of the individual author, since the focus of multi-authorship is not on attribution and ownership of a finished text, but on the continued malleability of a text. Modes of multi-authorship, demonstrated in the use of the pseudonyms Alan Smithee and Karen Eliot, represent declarative authors whose names signify multiple origins, whilst concurrently indicating a distinct body of work. The function of these names form an important context to this study, since primary research involves the construction of an experimental mode of multi-authorship utilising WikiMedia technology and the interaction of thirty nine participants, who are invited to create a body of work under the collective pseudonym Karen Karnak. The data generated by this experiment is analysed using aspects of Michel Foucault's author-function to identify and determine power structures inherent in the WikiMedia context. The interplay of power structures, including concepts such as identity, ownership and the body of work, affect the resulting mode of authorship and contribute to the construction of Karen Karnak, suggesting further areas of research into the emerging multi-author
The Magazine Women Believed in: "Marriage Advice" 1950-1955
No full textIn the United States society, the 1950s is seen as a time of great conservatism where both men and women were placed into specific gender roles that dictated much of how they lived their lives. One institution that verified these gender roles and stereotypes to be true was women's magazines. These magazines contained sections such as fashion segments, helpful cooking guidelines, advertisements, and advice columns that seemed to target middle class, white, suburban married housewives. One advice column that seemed to particularly focus on the idea of a happy housewife and married life was the column Making Marriage Work, which appeared in the magazine Ladies Home Journal during this 1950s time period. The author of this column, Clifford R. Adams, idealized the 1950s perfect housewife existence and through his advice he encouraged women to strive for this lifestyle, while there were other sources demonstrating that this perceived notion of the perfect housewife did not exist during the 1950s time period
Alexa Discussion Board Skill
No full textabstract: A common challenge faced by students is that they often have questions about course material that they cannot ask during lecture time. There are many ways for students to have these questions answered, such as office hours and online discussion boards. However, office hours may be at inconvenient times or locations, and online discussion boards are difficult to navigate and may be inactive. The purpose of this project was to create an Alexa skill that allows users to ask their Alexa-equipped device a question concerning their course material and to receive an answer retrieved from discussion board data. User questions are mapped to discussion board posts by use of the cosine similarity algorithm. In this algorithm, posts from the discussion board and the user’s question are converted into mathematical vectors, with each term in the vector corresponding to a word. The values of these terms are computed based on the word’s frequency within the vector’s corresponding document, the frequency of that word within all the documents, and the length of the document. After the question and candidate posts are converted into vectors, the algorithm determines the post most similar to the user’s question by computing the angle between the vectors. With the most similar discussion board post determined, the user receives the replies to the post, if any, as their answer. Users are able to indicate to their Alexa device whether they were satisfied by the answer, and if they were unsatisfied then they are given the opportunity to either rephrase their question or to have the question sent to a database of unanswered questions. The professor can view and answer the questions in this database on a website hosted by use of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. The Alexa skill does well at answering questions that have already been asked in the discussion board. However, the skill depends heavily on the user’s word choice. Two questions that are semantically identical but different in phrasing are often given different answers. This is because the cosine algorithm measures similarity on the basis of word overlap, not semantic meaning, and thus the application never truly “understands” what type of answer the user desires. Improving the performance of this Alexa skill will require a more advanced question answering algorithm, but the limitations of Amazon Web Services as a development platform make implementing such an algorithm difficult. Nevertheless, this project has created the basis of a question answering Alexa skill by demonstrating a feasible way that the resources offered by Amazon can be utilized in order to build such an application
Author Correction: Hippocampal oxytocin receptors are necessary for discrimination of social stimuli
No full textThe original version of this Article contained an error in the spelling of the author Alexa H. Veenema, which was incorrectly given as Alexa Veenema. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.</jats:p
Interchromophoric Interactions Between TMR, Alexa, and BODIPY Fluorophores
No full textabstract: The fundamental photophysics of fluorescent probes must be understood when the probes are used in biological applications. The photophysics of BODIPY dyes inside polymeric micelles and rhodamine dyes covalently linked to proteins were studied. Hydrophobic boron-dipyrromethene (BODIPY) dyes were noncovalently encapsulated inside polymeric micelles. Absorbance and fluorescence measurements were employed to study the photophysics of these BODIPY dyes in the micellar environments. Amphiphilic polymers with a hydrophobic character and low Critical Micelle Concentration (CMC) protected BODIPYS from the aqueous environment. Moderate dye loading conditions did not result in ground-state dimerization, and only fluorescence lifetimes and brightnesses were affected. However, amphiphilic polymers with a hydrophilic character and high CMC did not protect the BODIPYS from the aqueous environment with concomitant ground-state dimerization and quenching of the fluorescence intensity, lifetime, and brightnesses even at low dye loading conditions. At the doubly-labeled interfaces of Escherichia coli (E. coli) DNA processivity β clamps, the interchromophric interactions of four rhodamine dyes were studied: tetramethylrhodamine (TMR), TMR C6, Alexa Fluor 488, and Alexa Fluor 546. Absorbance and fluorescence measurements were performed on doubly-labeled β clamps with singly-labeled β clamps and free dyes as controls. The absorbance measurements revealed that both TMR and TMR C6 readily formed H-dimers (static quenching) at the doubly-labeled interfaces of the β clamps. However, the TMR with a longer linker (TMR C6) also displayed a degree of dynamic quenching. For Alexa Fluor 546 and Alexa Fluor 488, there were no clear signs of dimerization in the absorbance scans. However, the fluorescence properties (fluorescence intensity, lifetime, and anisotropy) of the Alexa Fluor dyes significantly changed when three methodologies were employed to disrupt the doubly-labeled interfaces: 1) the addition of sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) detergent to denature the proteins, 2) the addition of clamp loader (γ complex) to open one of the two interfaces, and 3) the use of subunit exchange to decrease the number of dyes per interface. These fluorescence measurements indicated that for the Alexa Fluor dyes, other interchromophoric interactions were present such as dynamic quenching and homo-Förster Resonance Energy Transfer (homo-FRET).Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Chemistry 201
University of Chicago East Asia by the Book! Author Talk: Shakespeare and East Asia, Tuesday May 25, 2021 at 5 pm CDT / 6 pm EDT
No full textRegister at https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jyEzkIZYQZ6bKzjjr3faZg :::: The University of Chicago East Asia by the Book! Author Talks is proud to present a book launch of Alexa Alice Joubin's Shakespeare and East Asia (Oxford University Press). Chair: Haun Saussy (University of Chicago). Discussant: Michael Saenger (Southwestern University). The event is co-sponsored by the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore. ::::: How did Kurosawa influence George Lucas' Star Wars? Why do critics repeatedly use the adjective Shakespearean to describe Gong Joon-ho's film Parasite (2019)? How do East Asian cinema and theater portray vocal disability and transgender figures
Ethical Considerations for Open-Source Investigations into International Crimes
No full textOver the past decade, the field of digital open-source investigations has both expanded and matured. Open source investigations rely on information that anyone can access from the Internet, and have been increasingly deployed by legal investigators, human rights researchers, and journalists. The investigatory methods include Boolean searches; sourcing videos, photographs, and other data from social media; determining locations of events by comparing photos and videos to satellite images; mining the deep web for government records; determining time of day by analyzing shadows in photos; and more. In this essay, I argue that digital open-source investigators can (and should) rely on a three-step process when faced with an investigations-related dilemma: (1) identifying what the law says they can or cannot do according to their professional identity, intended purpose, and relevant jurisdiction; (2) soliciting guidance from their professional code of ethics (if they have one); and (3) weighing their options against the values of safety, accuracy, and dignity. Given space constraints and prior coverage of the first two steps, I focus here on step three. The values of safety, accuracy, and dignity arguably apply to all open-source investigations and investigators, regardless of jurisdiction or professional identity, and their application reflects a relatively novel attempt to help set ethics-based boundaries around investigation-related activities
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