Development NGOs, semiclientelism, and the state in the Philippines: from “crossover” to double-crossed

Civil-society participation continues to be a considerable focus of debate surrounding politics and public-policy making at international and national scales, especially in the developing world. Important examples of such processes have occurred in the Philippines. The Philippine polity is widely regarded as embodying a culture of clan-based politics entailing considerable relationships of clientelism and semiclientelism. Yet there is also considerable evidence of widespread civil-society activism. This paper examines how politically left-of-center development nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and people’s organizations (POs) have attempted to “cross over” to state positions in order to implement social and economic reforms. Select engagement by key personnel from the NGO sphere has often been premised on the notion that it was aimed at transforming these features of Philippine politics. Engagement with two recent and (claimed to be) reforming governments has not led to positive outcomes. The Philippine experience, for the most part, is an expression of the problematic assumptions that have tended to inform the debate over civil society and state interaction in many developing-country contexts. Such conceptions have been inserted into an all-encompassing notion of democratic transition, whereby political and economic liberalization are supposed to emerge in synergy, with civil society acting as a form of “stabilizer” compensating for and complementing the role of the state. Given the predominance of such weak states as the Philippines in the developing world, it is important to consider what the impacts of development NGOs participation may be. Most important, what may be the impacts of such forms of participation in a society and polity characterized by entrenched clientelist relationships? Contrasting a Gramscian analysis with Putnam-inspired conceptions of civil society that underpin the transition model, the paper argues that far from being a conditioning force on the state, civil society is itself a sphere where clientelism and semiclientelism predominate. So powerful are these forces, that arguably well-intentioned NGO personnel who previously adopted a critical stance toward neo-clientelism ultimately become absorbed by these relationships.

Online stretching of directly electrospun nanofiber yarns

Nanofiber yarns are important building blocks for making three-dimensional nanostructures, e.g. through a knitting or weaving process, with better mechanical properties than nanofiber nonwovens and well-controlled fibrous construction. However, it still remains challenging to produce quality nanofiber yarns in a sufficient rate. In this study, we have proven that online stretching during electrospinning of nanofiber yarns can considerably improve fiber alignment and molecular orientation within the yarn and increase yarn tensile strength, but reduce fiber/yarn diameters. By compensating twist during online stretching, the device can prepare nanofiber yarns with different stretch levels, but maintaining the same twist multiplier. This allows us to examine the effect of stretching on fiber and yarn morphology. It was interesting to find that on increasing the stretching ratio from 0% to 95%, the yarn diameter reduced from 135.1 ± 20.3 μm to 46.2 ± 10.2 μm, and the fiber diameter reduced from 998 ± 141 nm to 631 ± 98 nm, whereas the yarn tensile strength increased from 48.2 ± 5.6 MPa to 127.7 ± 5.4 MPa. Such an advanced yarn electrospinning technique can produce nanofiber yarn with an overall yarn production rate as high as 10 m min−1. This may be useful for production of nanofiber yarns for various applications.

Efficient and precise interactive hand tracking through joint, continuous optimization of pose and correspondences

Fully articulated hand tracking promises to enable fundamentally new interactions with virtual and augmented worlds, but the limited accuracy and efficiency of current systems has prevented widespread adoption. Today's dominant paradigm uses machine learning for initialization and recovery followed by iterative model-fitting optimization to achieve a detailed pose fit. We follow this paradigm, but make several changes to the model-fitting, namely using: (1) a more discriminative objective function; (2) a smooth-surface model that provides gradients for non-linear optimization; and (3) joint optimization over both the model pose and the correspondences between observed data points and the model surface. While each of these changes may actually increase the cost per fitting iteration, we find a compensating decrease in the number of iterations. Further, the wide basin of convergence means that fewer starting points are needed for successful model fitting. Our system runs in real-time on CPU only, which frees up the commonly over-burdened GPU for experience designers. The hand tracker is efficient enough to run on low-power devices such as tablets. We can track up to several meters from the camera to provide a large working volume for interaction, even using the noisy data from current-generation depth cameras. Quantitative assessments on standard datasets show that the new approach exceeds the state of the art in accuracy. Qualitative results take the form of live recordings of a range of interactive experiences enabled by this new approach.