Border Patrol in the Borderless World: Negotiating Intercultural Internet Discussion

Public Internet discussion forums appear to offer limitless opportunities for communication across linguistic, geographical and cultural borders. Closer inspection, however, reveals that cordial intercultural exchanges are far from widespread in this genre. And yet, such forums have a great deal to offer the independent language learner in terms of ease of access, potential for meaningful language practice and feedback, and exposure to different cultural conventions. This paper explores obstacles to the participation of advanced language learners in public forums of this kind through an examination of the speaking positions most readily available to the non-native speaker. A case study of sustained intercultural interaction on a public discussion thread suggests an alternative to these. Here a core of Francophone and Anglophone participants manage to negotiate an intercultural identity in order to pursue their communicative goals. The paper traces the way in which participants shift footing to regulate insider and outsider status on the forum and draws conclusions regarding the conditions for successful intercultural exchange in this genre

The patrol officers and Tom Kabu: power and prestige in the Purari Delta

In 1946, Tom Kabu returned to the Gulf of Papua determined to reinvent the communities of the Purari Delta. A man of quiet determination, in the first few years he and his followers resisted the assistance of the Australian Administration in Palma and New Guinea. Kabu's popularity in the villages of the Purari, coupled with his independent stance, caused resentment within the local expatriate community. The field staff working for the Department of District Services and Native Affairs especially felt threatened by Kabu's influence and sought to regain government control by opposing his ventures. Through the study of patrol reports written by these officers, this paper seeks to examine the reasons for this resentment and the methods employed by the officers to crush Kabu's company.

A border-based approach for hiding sensitive frequent itemsets

Sharing data among organizations often leads to mutual benefit. Recent technology in data mining has enabled efficient extraction of knowledge from large databases. This, however, increases risks of disclosing the sensitive knowledge when the database is released to other parties. To address this privacy issue, one may sanitize the original database so that the sensitive knowledge is hidden. The challenge is to minimize the side effect on the quality of the sanitized database so that nonsensitive knowledge can still be mined. In this paper, we study such a problem in the context of hiding sensitive frequent itemsets by judiciously modifying the transactions in the database. To preserve the non-sensitive frequent itemsets, we propose a border-based approach to efficiently evaluate the impact of any modification to the database during the hiding process. The quality of database can be well maintained by greedily selecting the modifications with minimal side effect. Experiments results are also reported to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2005 IEEE