The good our field can hope to do, the harm it should avoid

This paper tries to achieve a balanced view of the ethical issues raised by emotion-oriented technology as it is, rather than as it might be imagined. A high proportion of applications seem ethically neutral. Uses in entertainment and allied areas do no great harm or good. Empowering professions may do either, but regulatory systems already exist. Ethically positive aspirations involve mitigating problems that already exist by supporting humans in emotion-related judgments, by replacing technology that treats people in dehumanized and/or demeaning ways, and by improving access for groups who struggle with existing interfaces. Emotion-oriented computing may also contribute to revaluing human faculties other than pure intellect. Many potential negatives apply to technology as a whole. Concerns specifically related to emotion involve creating a lie, by simulate emotions that the systems do not have, or promoting mechanistic conceptions of emotion. Intermediate issues arise where more general problems could be exacerbated-helping systems to sway human choices or encouraging humans to choose virtual worlds rather than reality. "SIIF" systems (semi-intelligent information filters) are particularly problematic. These use simplified rules to make judgments about people that are complex, and have potentially serious consequences. The picture is one of balances to recognize and negotiate, not uniform good or evil. © 2010-2012 IEEE.

Applying an International Human Rights Framework to State Budget Allocations: Rights and Resources

Human rights based budget analysis projects have emerged at a time when the United Nations has asserted the indivisibility of all human rights and attention is increasingly focused on the role of non-judicial bodies in promoting and protecting human rights. This book seeks to develop the human rights framework for such budget analyses, by exploring the international law obligations of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in relation to budgetary processes. The book outlines international experiences and comparative practice in relation to economic and social rights budget analysis and budgeting.

The book sets out an ICESCR-based methodology for analysing budget and resource allocations and focuses on the legal obligation imposed on state parties by article 2(1) of ICESCR to progressively realise economic and social rights to 'the maximum of available resources'. Taking Northern Ireland as a key case study, the book demonstrates and promotes the use of a ‘rights-based’ approach in budgetary decision-making.

The book will be relevant to a global audience currently considering how to engage in the budget process from a human rights perspective. It will be of interest to students and researchers of international human rights law and public law, as well as economic and social rights advocacy and lobbying groups.

‘Playing it by the rules': the politics of research in ‘race' and education

This article offers an examination of the interplay between politics, ethics, theory and methodology as they impact upon social research, through a critical analysis of the ethnographic study conducted by Peter Foster. It will be argued that his highly contentious claim to have found no manifestations of racism (either direct or indirect) throughout his study of an inner-city, multi-ethnic comprehensive school was, in the last analysis, both misleading and inaccurate. It will be contended that such claims were based upon a research design and methodology which were ultimately determined by his own political orientation and the ethical and theoretical positions which he developed as a consequence.

Improved structure optimization for fuzzy-neural networks

Fuzzy-neural-network-based inference systems are well-known universal approximators which can produce linguistically interpretable results. Unfortunately, their dimensionality can be extremely high due to an excessive number of inputs and rules, which raises the need for overall structure optimization. In the literature, various input selection methods are available, but they are applied separately from rule selection, often without considering the fuzzy structure. This paper proposes an integrated framework to optimize the number of inputs and the number of rules simultaneously. First, a method is developed to select the most significant rules, along with a refinement stage to remove unnecessary correlations. An improved information criterion is then proposed to find an appropriate number of inputs and rules to include in the model, leading to a balanced tradeoff between interpretability and accuracy. Simulation results confirm the efficacy of the proposed method.

Equidiscrimination contours around an achromatic colour are convex but not balanced

A model based on the postreceptor channels followed by a Minkowski norm (Minkowski model) is widely used to fit experimental data on colour discrimination. This model predicts that contours of equal discrimination in colour space are convex and balanced (symmetrical). We have tested these predictions in an experiment. Two new statistical tests have been developed to analyse convexity and balancedness of experimental curves. Using these tests we have found that while they are in line with the convexity prediction, our experimental contours strongly testify against balancedness. It follows that the Minkowski model is, generally, inappropriate to model colour discrimination data. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).

Ixaru's Extended Frequency Dependent Quadrature Rules for Slater Integrals: Parallel Computation Issues

We describe recent progress of an ongoing research programme aimed at producing computational science software that can exploit high performance architectures in the atomic physics application domain. We examine the computational bottleneck of matrix construction in a suite of two-dimensional R-matrix propagation programs, 2DRMP, that are aimed at creating virtual electron collision experiments on HPC architectures. We build on Ixaru's extended frequency dependent quadrature rules (EFDQR) for Slater integrals and examine the challenge of constructing Hamiltonian matrices in parallel across an m-processor compute node in a block cyclic distribution for subsequent diagonalization by ScaLAPACK.

Session 4: Getting balanced nutrition messages across Nutrition communication: consumer perceptions and predicting intentions

Health claims on food products, which aim at informing the public about the health benefits of the product, represent one type of nutrition communication; the use of these is regulated by the European Union. This paper provides an overview of the research on health claims, including consumers' perceptions of such claims and their intention to buy products that carry health-related claims. This is followed by a discussion on the results from some recent studies investigating public perceptions and willingness to use products with health claims. In these studies, claims are presented in the form of messages of different lengths, types, framing, with and without qualifying words and symbols. They also investigate how perceptions and intentions are affected by individual needs and product characteristics. Results show that adding health claims to products does increase their perceived healthiness. Claim structure was found to make a difference to perceptions, but its influence depended on the level of relevance, familiarity and individuals' need for information. Further, the type of health benefit proposed and the base product used also affected perceptions of healthiness. The paper concludes that while healthiness perceptions relating to products with health claims may vary between men and women, old and young and between countries, the main factor influencing perceived healthiness and intention to buy a product with health claim is personal relevance.

'All Good Things Must Come to an End': Terminating Co-Ownership Under the 'Old' Partition and Sale Rules

Despite its benefits, co-ownership of land creates problems where relations between the parties
have soured, or one person simply wants to extricate themselves from this arrangement. The
remedies of compulsory partition and sale allow one joint tenant or tenant in common to terminate
co-ownership against the wishes of the others, by seeking a court order to this effect. Throughout
parts of the common law world, this has be en based on nineteenth century English legislation namely
the Partition Act 1868, the key elements of which remain in force in Western Australia,
South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory. This article provides an up-to-date
analysis of the law on compulsory partition and sale as derived from the 1868 Act and analogous
provisions, drawing not only on Australian cases, but on frequently overlooked decisions from
courts in both parts of Ireland and in parts of Canada, as well as ‘old’ English judgments on the
1868 Act.