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Terrorism and the US Drone Attacks in Pakistan ::Killing First /
No full textThis book analyses the US drone attacks against terrorists in Pakistan to assess whether the pre-emptive' use of combat drones to kill terrorists is ever legally justified. Exploring the doctrinal discourse of pre-emption vis--vis the US drone attacks against terrorists in Pakistan, the book shows that the debate surrounding this discourse encapsulates crucial tensions between the permission and limits of the right of self-defence. Drawing from the long history of God-given and man-made laws of war, this book employs positivism as a legal frame to explore and explain the doctrine of pre-emption and analyses the doctrine of the state's rights to self-defence as it stretches into pre-emptive or preventive use of force. The book investigates why the US chose the recourse to pre-emption through the use of combat drones in the war on terror' and whether there is a potential future for the pre-emption of terrorism through combat drones. The author argues that the policy to kill first' is easy to adopt; however, any disregard for the web of legal requirements surrounding the policy has the potential to undercut the legal claims of an armed act. The book enables the framing and analysis of such controversies in legal terms as opposed to a choice between law and policy. An examination of the legal dilemma concerning drone warfare, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of international relations, Asian politics, South Asian studies, and security studies, in particular, global security law, new wars, and emerging technologies of warfare
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Mapping multilingual ecology: Exploring sociocultural aspects of learners’ investment in EFL in Pakistan
No full textIn the multilingual context of Pakistan, the role of English in education has gained increasing attention during the last two decades against the backdrop of the rise of global extremism and the positioning of Pakistan in the so-called "War on Terror". Research and policy documents often link better English education in the country with promoting tolerant views about the western developed countries. Students from upper social classes often have access to quality instruction in private schools as compared to the government schools. Although most private schools use "English-medium instruction" as a catchphrase to attract students, there are significant differences among these schools in terms of the actual use of English on campus and the quality of English teaching. In Pakistan, research often explores issues around English learning outcomes in terms of social constructs like socioeconomic class, gender, and ethnicity, or macro factors like language policy failure and parallel school systems in Pakistan. This study argues that, complementary to these factors, a focus on learners' subjective experiences and their multilingual identities might be an important missing aspect of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning. Using the naturalistic ethnographic methodology, the study investigated the language perceptions of six students (age 16 to 18 years) from two private schools belonging to high-fee (Global School) and low-fee (Ummah School) categories in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Research tools included semi-structured interviews, classroom and general school observations, ethnographic field notes, documents and artifacts from the field, and reflexive research tools including researcher bracketing interviews and a bracketing research journal. An extended stay in the field lasted for eight months. Data coding was assisted by qualitative analysis software NVivo and was analyzed using thematic analysis. Although both private schools claim English medium instruction, findings suggest that learning EFL is influenced by complex sociocultural factors related to the way languages are perceived in the multilingual context of the learners. As compared to Ummah, Global School is locally known for quality English education and is attended by learners from affluent backgrounds. However, in spite of significant differences in terms of students' social class, school infrastructure and quality of English instruction, both groups of learners seemed to struggle against the hierarchical perception of languages and negative attitudes towards English in social domains that restricted their functional use of the target language. Learners avoided practicing speaking English in social and domestic environments to maintain a positive face and avoid being viewed as westernized. Inside the schools, monolingual school policies and a focus on English to secure good grades were found to be misaligned with the students' EFL goals of using English for authentic communication in daily interaction and in online social media platforms. Findings also suggest that learners' investment in English learning was based on instrumental goals (for example, higher education and career abroad) and integrative goals (outward social mobility and gaining access to imagined communities in the western developed world). Conflictual elements in socio-domestic and academic environments were found to be implicated in learners forming subordinate identities as learners and speakers of English. These aspects can have a negative influence on learners' EFL learning outcomes
Privacy-preserving mechanisms for targeted mobile advertising
Full text linkTargeted advertising is a complex mechanism to identify, track and profile users behaviour for their activities over Internet/mobile apps and to serve them advertisements (ads) according to their (profile) interests. Advertising companies develop tracking technologies and embed them into user's Internet browsers and mobile apps, which have raised concerns over privacy issues. Mobile users are uncertain whether to trust targeted ads and advertising companies, however, they tend to view ads relevant to their (profile) interests provided that their information is kept private.
This thesis focuses on collection of user's personal information for classification of mobile ads and characterising and quantifying privacy issues arising in mobile ads. In addition, this thesis introduces two novel privacy preserving mechanisms, which address three issues: privacy, control of information, and private user profiling for targeted advertising. First, the ProfileGuard, is an app-based obfuscation mechanism of suggesting obfuscating apps via different strategies, which removes prevalence amongst private interests present in a user profile. Under the assumptions that users will be operating in resource-constrained scenarios, such as fixed 4G data plan, limited processing and battery powers, the ProfileGuard presents, analytically and via experimentations, a good trade-off between the level of efforts required by obfuscating strategies and resulting privacy protection. Second, a framework for privacy preserving mobile advertising system that enables device-based private user profiling, targeted ads and private billing of retrieved/clicked ads. This proposal relies on the use of cryptographic techniques to query ads databases for matching (to profile) ads, without the databases learning the contents or result of queries. This thesis demonstrates, using experimentations, the feasibility of this framework by measuring processing times, communication delays and bandwidth usage, in addition to, its responsiveness and scalability under the scenario where huge number of users operate in parallel. In addition to analytical and experimental evaluations of above mechanisms, this thesis demonstrates the practicality of these mechanisms by developing prototype mobile applications that can be used on smartphones. These mechanisms guarantee to protect user privacy, do not necessitate the re-design of current advertising systems and can operate in parallel to existing systems
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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