Read all about it : the free press, the public sphere and democracy in Iraq

Despite a wealth of recent research which has detailed the impact that new media outlets and technologies have had on the Middle East’s nascent public sphere and its role in promoting democracy, there has been little investigation into the re-emergence of the free press in Iraq following the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the corresponding end to his tight control over the nation’s media sector. This paper begins by reviewing Iraq’s long relationship with the written word and its corresponding public sphere. It traces the introduction of the printing press to Iraq by the Ottomans and details those periods when the Iraqi press was truly free, fostering the emergence of a civil society and democratic reforms (such as under the Young Turks, the early Hashemite era and following the Second World War). It also examines those periods when the Iraqi media was most restricted and did little else than praise the regime at hand (such as under Ottoman rule and most recently under the Ba†th regime, especially under Saddam Hussein). Following on, this article reviews the developments since the fall of Saddam Hussein and, despite the extensive interference in Iraq’s media sector from governmental entities both outside and inside Iraq, it concludes by arguing that these papers have been central to the re-emergence of an Iraqi public sphere which has openly debated and discussed the issues pertinent to post-Saddam Iraq.

Research methodologies in creative practice : literacy in the digital age of the twenty first century - learning from computer games

Literacy remains one of the central goals of schooling, but the ways in which it is understood are changing. The growth of the networked society, and the spread of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), has brought about significant changes to traditional forms of literacy. Older, print based forms now take their place alongside a mix of newer multi-modal forms, where a wide range of elements such as image, sound, movement, light, colour and interactivity often supplant the printed word and contribute to the ways in which meaning is made. For young people to be fully literate in the twenty-first century, they need to have clear understandings about the ways in which these forms of literacy combine to persuade, present a point of view, argue a case or win the viewers’ sympathies. They need to know how to use them themselves, and to be aware of the ways in which others use them. They need to understand how digital texts organise and prioritise knowledge and information, and to recognise and be critically informed about the global context in which this occurs. That is, to be effective members of society, students need to become critical and capable users of both print and multimodal literacy, and be able to bring informed and analytic perspectives to bear on all texts, both print and digital, that they encounter in everyday life.

This is part of schools’ larger challenge to build robust connections between school and the world beyond, to meet the needs of all students, and to counter problems of alienation and marginalisation, particularly amongst students in the middle years. This means finding ways to be relevant and useful for all students, and to provide them with the skills and knowledge they will need in the ICT-based world of the Twentyfirst century. With respect to literacy education, engagement and technology, we urgently need more information as to how this might be best achieved.

On the automated interpretation and indexing of American football

This work combines natural language understanding and image processing with incremental learning to develop a system that can automatically interpret and index American Football. We have developed a model for representing spatio-temporal characteristics of multiple objects in dynamic scenes in this domain. Our representation combines expert knowledge, domain knowledge, spatial knowledge and temporal knowledge. We also present an incremental learning algorithm to improve the knowledge base as well as to keep previously developed concepts consistent with new data. The advantages of the incremental learning algorithm are that is that it does not split concepts and it generates a compact conceptual hierarchy which does not store instances.

Combining NL processing and video data to query American football

We explore the use of natural language understanding and image processing to index and query American Football tapes. We present a model for representing spatio-temporal characteristics of multiple objects in dynamic scenes in this domain, and a recognition system which uses the model to recognise American Football plays.

A bayesian nonparametric joint factor model for learning shared and individual subspaces from multiple data sources

Joint analysis of multiple data sources is becoming increasingly popular in transfer learning, multi-task learning and cross-domain data mining. One promising approach to model the data jointly is through learning the shared and individual factor subspaces. However, performance of this approach depends on the subspace dimensionalities and the level of sharing needs to be specified a priori. To this end, we propose a nonparametric joint factor analysis framework for modeling multiple related data sources. Our model utilizes the hierarchical beta process as a nonparametric prior to automatically infer the number of shared and individual factors. For posterior inference, we provide a Gibbs sampling scheme using auxiliary variables. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated through its application on two real world problems - transfer learning in text and image retrieval.

Incorrigible and undisciplined lines in visual social research : ways of ‘writing’ and ‘drawing’ at the interstices

In this paper the author traces the possibilities afforded by engaging with the aesthetic, historic and socio-political nature of shodo (Japanese calligraphy) as an intersectional space. Shodo literally translated as 'the way of writing' is an artistic practice bringing together ink, brush and paper. It is simultaneously a juncture between studied discipline and an ongoing mediation of subjectivities. The calligrapher/writer/drawer communicates to the reader through the bold or subtle brush strokes, the pressure and movement at the completion of each stroke. The calligrapher/writer/drawer draws across the boundaries of text and image to meet the reader blurring the lines between subject and object. This discussion re-examines the hierarchical binaries of writing/drawing, text/image, self/Other as they play out from vanishing lines of distinction between truth and conjecture. Crossing these binaries opens up opportunity for decentring and questioning representational practice by enabling other possible meanings and practices to emerge (Lather, 2007). I work from a stance of theoretical promiscuity in order to disrupt constitutive discourses and restore the liminal in social research. Drawing across the fragments of research projects I illustrate the generative and speculative space of visualising pedascapes in educational research.

Hypothesis generation and testing in event profiling for digital forensic investigations

The need for an automated approach to forensic digital investigation has been recognized for some years, and several authors have developed frameworks in this direction. The aim of this paper is to assist the forensic investigator with the generation and testing of hypotheses in the analysis phase. In doing so, the authors present a new architecture which facilitates the move to automation of the investigative process; this new architecture draws together several important components of the literature on question and answer methodologies including the concept of ‘pivot’ word and sentence ranking. Their architecture is supported by a detailed case study demonstrating its practicality.

Sensing the story: structure and improvisation in writing for performance.

This article discusses the process of writing through devising in performance. It takes as a case study Apart of and A Part From in which muscle and sense memory – touch, smell, taste, sound and sight – were the points of departure for a contemporary performance piece on migration and identity. This was a practice-as-research project aimed to better understand the artist’s body (myself) in improvisation with memory fragments. Working from a non-verbal frame the writing experience began as actions in space, then new memories in my body, to maps on paper, to key word and some staging patterns, to systematic capturing of the textual, rhythmic and spatial structures in the emerging 30-minute performance. Various objects were incorporated to give aesthetic coherence of the piece. The article reports on the processes of writing in action, the writing and performing as lived experience and how the writing emerged from the spaces in between – self and other, self and object, self and space, present self and past self.

Reproducibility of aortic intima-media thickness in infants using edge-detection software and manual caliper measurements

Background: Aortic intima-media thickness measured by transabdominal ultrasound (aIMT) is an intermediate phenotype of cardiovascular risk. We aimed to (1) investigate the reproducibility of aIMT in a population-derived cohort of infants; (2) establish the distribution of aIMT in early infancy; (3) compare measurement by edge-detection software to that by manual sonographic calipers; and (4) assess the effect of individual and environmental variables on image quality. Methods. Participants were term infants recruited to a population-derived birth cohort study. Transabdominal ultrasound was performed at six weeks of age by one of two trained operators. Thirty participants had ultrasounds performed by both operators on the same day. Data were collected on environmental (infant sleeping, presence of a sibling, use of sucrose, timing during study visit) and individual (post-conception age, weight, gender) variables. Two readers assessed image quality and measured aIMT by edge-detection software and a subset by manual sonographic calipers. Measurements were repeated by the same reader and between readers to obtain intra-observer and inter-observer reliability. Results: Aortic IMT was measured successfully using edge-detection in 814 infants, and 290 of these infants also had aIMT measured using manual sonographic calipers. The intra-reader intra-class correlation (ICC) (n = 20) was 0.90 (95% CI 0.76, 0.96), mean difference 1.5 μm (95% LOA -39, 59). The between reader ICC using edge-detection (n = 20) was 0.92 (95% CI 0.82, 0.97) mean difference 2 μm (95% LOA -45.0, 49.0) and with manual caliper measurement (n = 290) the ICC was 0.84 (95% CI 0.80, 0.87) mean difference 5 μm (95% LOA -51.8, 61.8). Edge-detection measurements were greater than those from manual sonographic calipers (mean aIMT 618 μm (50) versus mean aIMT 563 μm (49) respectively; p < 0.001, mean difference 44 μm, 95% LOA -54, 142). With the exception of infant crying (p = 0.001), no associations were observed between individual and environmental variables and image quality. Conclusion: In a population-derived cohort of term infants, aIMT measurement has a high level of intra and inter-reader reproducibility. Measurement of aIMT using edge-detection software gives higher inter-reader ICC than manual sonographic calipers. Image quality is not substantially affected by individual and environmental factors. © 2014 McCloskey et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

Tree-based iterated local search for Markov random fields with applications in image analysis

The maximum a posteriori assignment for general structure Markov random fields is computationally intractable. In this paper, we exploit tree-based methods to efficiently address this problem. Our novel method, named Tree-based Iterated Local Search (T-ILS), takes advantage of the tractability of tree-structures embedded within MRFs to derive strong local search in an ILS framework. The method efficiently explores exponentially large neighborhoods using a limited memory without any requirement on the cost functions. We evaluate the T-ILS on a simulated Ising model and two real-world vision problems: stereo matching and image denoising. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods are competitive against state-of-the-art rivals with significant computational gain.

On the weak monotonicity of Gini means and other mixture functions

Weak monotonicity was recently proposed as a relaxation of the monotonicity condition for averaging aggregation, and weakly monotone functions were shown to have desirable properties when averaging data corrupted with outliers or noise. We extended the study of weakly monotone averages by analyzing their ϕ-transforms, and we established weak monotonicity of several classes of averaging functions, in particular Gini means and mixture operators. Mixture operators with Gaussian weighting functions were shown to be weakly monotone for a broad range of their parameters. This study assists in identifying averaging functions suitable for data analysis and image processing tasks in the presence of outliers.

Reverberation and the parodic: an invitation to the spaces of sound

Jacques Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics speaks of artistic practices ‘as ways of ‘doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making’ (2013: 8). ‘Reverberation’ in the various dimensions explored by this paper is the compelling and parodic force, which signals the transformative potential of the spaces of music, word and sound collaborations. This paper will present the mixed impulse of parody as repetition with difference in Deleuze’s sense, or ironic ‘trans-contextualisation’ (Hutcheon 2000: 32), contextualised by Foucault’s heterotopic thought, Steve Reich’s minimalist music, and Brian Eno’s recognition of ambient sound in 1975 (Howard 2004: 91). Also explored is Hutcheon’s investigation of the etymology of parody as ‘counter-song’, which suggests intimacy and accord. The latter understanding of parody will be of particular importance in a discussion of New York-based band, The National.

Dissociation

Dissociation is an abstract materialist film that has migrated from 16mm film to the digital. It is made up of scratches, half-baked images and flicker. The film explores the tension between the image, the written text and the spoken word and the consequent struggle for meaning. A report on the anti-social nature of corporate space inspired by the first non-sense poem “The Great Lalula” by Christian Morgenstern.