Social capital society and peace: Reflections on conflict transformation in the Philippines

Civil society is recognised as comprising complex and multifaceted entities, resilient to and yet responsive to both the state apparatus and global market processes. Civil society in the Philippines, long regarded as one of the most vibrant, diverse and innovative in Asia, has emerged as a significant actor in the field of conflict resolution and peace-building. In thinking about the work of peace, this paper engages with the effectiveness of civil society in mobilising societal awareness for a ‘just and lasting peace’ in the southern Philippines. Shaped by development paradigms that privilege concepts such as social capital, the paper aims to interrogate how such concepts situated within the development–security nexus proposed by the Philippine government and funding agencies have influenced conflict-transformation initiatives in Mindanao, Philippines.

State–society relations in a dynamic framework:the case of the Far East and Sub-Saharan Africa

According to the textbook approach, the developmental states of the Far East have been considered as strong and autonomous entities. Although their bureaucratic elites have remained isolated from direct pressures stemming from society, the state capacity has also been utilised in order to allocate resources in the interest of the whole society. Yet, society – by and large –has remained weak and subordinated to the state elite. On the other hand, the general perception of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been just the opposite. The violent and permanent conflict amongst rent-seeking groups for influence and authority over resources has culminated in a situation where states have become extremely weak and fragmented, while society – depending on the capacity of competing groups for mobilising resources to organise themselves mostly on a regional or local level (resulting in local petty kingdoms) – has never had the chance to evolve as a strong player. State failure in the literature, therefore, – in the context of SSA – refers not just to a weak and captured state but also to a non-functioning, and sometimes even non-existent society, too. Recently, however, the driving forces of globalisation might have triggered serious changes in the above described status quo. Accordingly, our hypothesis is the following: globalisation, especially the dynamic changes of technology, capital and communication have made the simplistic “strong state–weak society” (in Asia) and “weak state–weak society” (in Africa) categorisation somewhat obsolete. While our comparative study has a strong emphasis on the empirical scrutiny of trying to uncover the dynamics of changes in state–society relations in the two chosen regions both qualitatively and quantitatively, it also aims at complementing the meaning and essence of the concepts and methodology of stateness, state capacity and state-society relations, the well-known building blocks of the seminal works of Evans (1995), Leftwich (1995), Migdal (1988) or Myrdal (1968).

SentiCircles for contextual and conceptual semantic sentiment analysis of Twitter

Lexicon-based approaches to Twitter sentiment analysis are gaining much popularity due to their simplicity, domain independence, and relatively good performance. These approaches rely on sentiment lexicons, where a collection of words are marked with fixed sentiment polarities. However, words' sentiment orientation (positive, neural, negative) and/or sentiment strengths could change depending on context and targeted entities. In this paper we present SentiCircle; a novel lexicon-based approach that takes into account the contextual and conceptual semantics of words when calculating their sentiment orientation and strength in Twitter. We evaluate our approach on three Twitter datasets using three different sentiment lexicons. Results show that our approach significantly outperforms two lexicon baselines. Results are competitive but inconclusive when comparing to state-of-art SentiStrength, and vary from one dataset to another. SentiCircle outperforms SentiStrength in accuracy on average, but falls marginally behind in F-measure. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.

Assisting national governments in governance, risk, and compliance:implementation of project management offices

Currently, there are many instances where public sector organizations and government entities collapse and are unable to provide the required services to the public. Such organizations do not have effective mechanisms of control or any specific department which manages projects occurring in the organization. However, this study suggests the incorporation of the Project Management Office (PMO) in public sector organizations for the purpose of managing project management. There are other relevant roles of the PMO discussed in this study. The study is contextualized with respect to Corporate Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) and the study shows how PMO can benefit or compliment GRC and provide overall better standards of practice for public sector organizations. The study uses a mixed methodology for data collection and the findings contribute to the body of knowledge regarding PMO's and GRC.

State–society relations in a dynamic framework: The case of the Far East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

According to the textbook approach, the developmental states of the Far East have been considered as strong and autonomous entities. Although their bureaucratic elites have remained isolated from direct pressures stemming from society, the state capacity has also been utilised in order to allocate resources in the interest of the whole society. Yet, society – by and large –has remained weak and subordinated to the state elite. On the other hand, the general perception of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been just the opposite. The violent and permanent conflict amongst rent-seeking groups for influence and authority over resources has culminated in a situation where states have become extremely weak and fragmented, while society – depending on the capacity of competing groups for mobilising resources to organise themselves mostly on a regional or local level (resulting in local petty kingdoms) – has never had the chance to evolve as a strong player. State failure in the literature, therefore, – in the context of SSA – refers not just to a weak and captured state but also to a non-functioning, and sometimes even non-existent society, too. Recently, however, the driving forces of globalisation might have triggered serious changes in the above described status quo. Accordingly, our hypothesis is the following: globalisation, especially the dynamic changes of technology, capital and communication have made the simplistic “strong state–weak society” (in Asia) and “weak state–weak society” (in Africa) categorisation somewhat obsolete. While our comparative study has a strong emphasis on the empirical scrutiny of trying to uncover the dynamics of changes in state–society relations in the two chosen regions both qualitatively and quantitatively, it also aims at complementing the meaning and essence of the concepts and methodology of stateness, state capacity and state-society relations, the well-known building blocks of the seminal works of Evans (1995), Leftwich (1995), Migdal (1988) or Myrdal (1968).

Smallpox vaccination, the establishment of vaccination boards, and state formation in Venezuela and Cuba in the nineteenth century

The Balmis expedition, sent to America by the Spanish monarch Charles IV in 1803, was a watershed in the history of Medicine as it made smallpox vaccination available for the first time, effectively prevented the disease from spreading, and saved thousands of lives. Immunization required complex administrative measures and political decisions including the creation of Vaccination Boards, all of which involved different sectors of Spanish American society. This dissertation argues that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the Spanish American colonial state had reached some level of maturity and cohesion that made it capable of executing this complex project in public health. The significance of this mobilization and the every-day experience in implementing this new public health measure is the center of this work. It is situated geographically in Venezuela and Cuba, entities which took different evolutionary paths in the nineteenth century. The organization and functioning of Vaccination Boards in these two areas are used to illustrate the state formation process, and sharp political differences in this critical period.

Latin America and the Caribbean in 2011 and Beyond: A conversation among Latin America and Caribbean Specialists.

For the first time in more than fifty years, the domestic and external conflicts in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are not primarily ideological in nature. Democracy continues to thrive and its promise still inspires hope. In contrast, the illegal production, consumption, and trading of drugs – and its links to criminal gangs and organizations – represent major challenges to the region, undermining several States’ already weak capacity to govern. While LAC macroeconomic stability has remained resilient, illegal economies fill the region, often offering what some States have not historically been able to provide – elements of human security, opportunities for social mobility, and basic survival. Areas controlled by drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) are now found in Central America, Mexico, and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, reflecting their competition for land routes and production areas. Cartels such as La Familia, Los Zetas, and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC-Brazil), among others, operate like trade and financial enterprises that manage millions of dollars and resources, demonstrating significant business skills in adapting to changing circumstances. They are also merciless in their application of violence to preserve their lucrative enterprises. The El Salvador-Guatemala-Honduras triangle in Central America is now the most violent region in the world, surpassing regions in Africa that have been torn by civil strife for years. In Brazil’s favelas and Guatemala’s Petén region, the military is leaving the barracks again; not to rule, however, but to supplement and even replace the law enforcement capacity of weak and discredited police forces. This will challenge the military to apply lessons learned during the course of their experience in government, or from the civil wars that plagued the region for nearly 50 years during the Cold War. Will they be able to conduct themselves according to the professional ethics that have been inculcated over the past 20 years without incurring violations of human rights? Belief in their potential to do good is high according to many polls as the Armed Forces still enjoy a favorable perception in most societies, despite frequent involvement in corruption. Calling them to fight DTOs, however, may bring them too close to the illegal activities they are being asked to resist, or even rekindle the view that only a “strong hand” can resolve national troubles. The challenge of governance is occurring as contrasts within the region are becoming sharper. There is an increasing gap between nations positioned to surpass their “developing nation” status and those that are practically imploding as the judicial, political and enforcement institutions fall further into the quagmire of illicit activities. Several South American nations are advancing their political and economic development. Brazil in particular has realized macro-economic stability, made impressive gains in poverty reduction, and is on track to potentially become a significant oil producer. It is also an increasingly influential power, much closer to the heralded “emerging power” category that it aspired to for most of the 20th century. In contrast, several Central American States have become so structurally deficient, and have garnered such limited legitimacy, that their countries have devolved into patches of State controlled and non-State-controlled territory, becoming increasingly vulnerable to DTO entrenchment. In the Caribbean, the drug and human trafficking business also thrives. Small and larger countries are experiencing the growing impact of illicit economies and accompanying crime and violence. Among these, Guyana and Suriname face greater uncertainty, as they juggle both their internal affairs and their relations with Brazil and Venezuela. Cuba also faces new challenges as it continues focusing on internal rather than external affairs and attempts to ensure a stable leadership succession while simultaneously trying to reform its economy. Loosening the regime’s tight grip on the economy while continuing to curtail citizen’s civil rights will test the leadership’s ability to manage change and prevent a potential socio-economic crisis from turning into an existential threat. Cuba’s past ideological zest is now in the hands of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, who continues his attempts to bring the region together under Venezuelan leadership ideologically based on a “Bolivarian” anti-U.S. banner, without much success. The environment and natural disasters will merit more attention in the coming years. Natural events will produce increasing scales of destruction as the States in the region fail to maintain and expand existing infrastructure to withstand such calamities and respond to their effects. Prospects for earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes are high, particularly in the Caribbean. In addition, there are growing rates of deforestation in nearly every country, along with a potential increase in cross-sector competition for resources. The losers might be small farmers, due to their inability to produce quantities commensurate to larger conglomerates. Regulations that could mitigate these types of situations are lacking or openly violated with near impunity. Indigenous and other vulnerable populations, including African descendants, in several Andean countries, are particularly affected by the increasing extraction of natural resources taking place amongst their terrain. This has led to protests against extraction activities that negatively affect their livelihoods, and in the process, these historically underprivileged groups have transitioned from agenda-based organization to one that is bringing its claims and grievances to the national political agenda, becoming more politically engaged. Symptomatic of these social issues is the region’s chronically poor quality of education that has consistently failed to reduce inequality and prepare new generations for jobs in the competitive global economy, particularly the more vulnerable populations. Simultaneously, the educational deficit is also exacerbated by the erosion of access to information and freedom of the press. The international panorama is also in flux. New security entities are challenging the old establishment. The Union of South American Nations, The South American Defense Council, the socialist Bolivarian Alliance, and other entities seem to be defying the Organization of American States and its own defense mechanisms, and excluding the U.S. And the U.S.’s attention to areas in conflict, namely Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan – rather than to the more stable Latin America and Caribbean – has left ample room for other actors to elbow in. China is now the top trading partner for Brazil. Russian and Iran are also finding new partnerships in the region, yet their links appear more politically inclined than those of China. Finally, the aforementioned increasing commercial ties by LAC States with China have accelerated a return to the preponderance of commodities as sources of income for their economies. The increased extraction of raw material for export will produce greater concern over the environmental impact that is created by the exploitation of natural resources. These expanded trade opportunities may prove counterproductive economically for countries in the region, particularly for Brazil and Chile, two countries whose economic policies have long sought diversification from dependence on commodities to the development of service and technology based industries.

Select, Link and Rank: Diversified Query Expansion and Entity Ranking using Wikipedia

A search query, being a very concise grounding of user intent, could potentially have many possible interpretations. Search engines hedge their bets by diversifying top results to cover multiple such possibilities so that the user is likely to be satisfied, whatever be her intended interpretation. Diversified Query Expansion is the problem of diversifying query expansion suggestions, so that the user can specialize the query to better suit her intent, even before perusing search results. We propose a method, Select-Link-Rank, that exploits semantic information from Wikipedia to generate diversified query expansions. SLR does collective processing of terms and Wikipedia entities in an integrated framework, simultaneously diversifying query expansions and entity recommendations. SLR starts with selecting informative terms from search results of the initial query, links them to Wikipedia entities, performs a diversity-conscious entity scoring and transfers such scoring to the term space to arrive at query expansion suggestions. Through an extensive empirical analysis and user study, we show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art diversified query expansion and diversified entity recommendation techniques.

Postdigital play and the aesthetics of recruitment

This paper analyses reconfigurations of play in newly emergent material and digital configurations of game design. It extends recent work examining dimensions of hybridity in playful products by turning attention to interfaces, practices and spaces, rather than devices. We argue that the concept of hybrid play relies on predefining clear and distinct entities that then enter into hybrid situations. Drawing on concepts of the ‘interface’ and ‘postdigital’, we argue the distribution of computing devices creates difficulties for such presuppositions. Instead, we propose an ‘aesthetic of recruitment’ that is adequate to the new openness of social and technical play.

Navigating control and illusion: functional interactivity versus ‘faux-interactivity’ in transmedia dance performance

Interactivity – a networked loop in which a performer’s live data feeds a digital system – can bridge the divide between live performance and digital entities in transmedia dance performances. In the ‘entanglement scene’ of Australian Dance Theatre’s Multiverse (2014), choreographer Garry Stewart and the creative coders and animators at the Deakin Motion.Lab utilise ‘faux-interactivity’, or a perceived relationship between the dancers and digital entities that exists only from the perspective of the audience. The spectre of ‘faux-interactivity’ challenges the spontaneity in live, embodied performance art because it both integrates live performance with prerendered digital content and offers a potential structure for a shared, dispersed creative and choreographic process across numerous and shared artistic and technological platforms. This paper investigates the concept of ‘faux-interactivity’, suggesting that its use can be a catalyst for moving beyond the limitations and values of ‘real’, or functional interactive systems within a theatrical context, and positing that definitions of ‘interactivity’ might be further expanded to accommodate the shifting timelines inherent in the disparate creative processes of human performance and coding.

Web-based public participatory GIS

Decision support systems (DSS) have evolved rapidly during the last decade from stand alone or limited networked solutions to online participatory solutions. One of the major enablers of this change is the fastest growing areas of geographical information system (GIS) technology development that relates to the use of the Internet as a means to access, display, and analyze geospatial data remotely. World-wide many federal, state, and particularly local governments are designing to facilitate data sharing using interactive Internet map servers. This new generation DSS or planning support systems (PSS), interactive Internet map server, is the solution for delivering dynamic maps and GIS data and services via the world-wide Web, and providing public participatory GIS (PPGIS) opportunities to a wider community (Carver, 2001; Jankowski & Nyerges, 2001). It provides a highly scalable framework for GIS Web publishing, Web-based public participatory GIS (WPPGIS), which meets the needs of corporate intranets and demands of worldwide Internet access (Craig, 2002). The establishment of WPPGIS provides spatial data access through a support centre or a GIS portal to facilitate efficient access to and sharing of related geospatial data (Yigitcanlar, Baum, & Stimson, 2003). As more and more public and private entities adopt WPPGIS technology, the importance and complexity of facilitating geospatial data sharing is growing rapidly (Carver, 2003). Therefore, this article focuses on the online public participation dimension of the GIS technology. The article provides an overview of recent literature on GIS and WPPGIS, and includes a discussion on the potential use of these technologies in providing a democratic platform for the public in decision-making.

Comprehensive Australian study of entrepreneurial emergence (CAUSEE): project presentations an early results

It is widely acknowledged that entrepreneurship is one of the most important forces shaping changes in the economic landscape (van Praag and Versloot 2007). An understanding of the process by which new economic activity and business entities emerge is therefore vital. The Comprehensive Australian Study of Entrepreneurial Emergence (CAUSEE) is a research project that aims to uncover the factors that initiate, hinder, or facilitate the process of emergence, survival, and success of new independent businesses.

Land Contracts in Queensland

This book provides a systematic and comprehensive account of the law relating to buyers and sellers of freehold land in Queensland. It analyses relevant clauses of the standard contracts in common use and the plethora of court decisions relating to the area.Its contents comprise a full transactional analysis of a conveyance from negotiation by a real estate agent through to completion. In addition, it contains chapters on special conditions, remedies, GST and stamp duty provisions.

Voices of experience : opportunities to influence creatively the designing of school libraries

Using a critical ethnographic approach this study investigates the potential for multiple voices of experience, of educators, designers/architects, education facility planners and students/learners, to influence creatively the designing of school libraries. School libraries are considered as social and cultural entities within the contexts of school life and of wider society. It is proposed that school library designing is a social interaction of concern to those influenced by its practices and outcomes. School library designing is therefore of significance to educators and students as well as to those with professionally accredited involvement in school library designing, such as designers/architects and education facility planners. The study contends that current approaches to educational space designing, including school libraries, amplify the voices of accredited designers and diminish or silence the voices of the user participants. The study is conceptualised as creative processes of discovery, through which attention is paid to the voices of experience of user and designer participants, and is concerned with their understandings and experiences of school libraries and their understandings and experiences of designing. Grounded theory coding (Charmaz) is used for initial categorising of interview data. Critical discourse analysis (CDA, Fairclough) is used as analytical tool for reflection on the literature and for analysis of the small stories gathered through semi-structured interviews, field observations and documents. The critical interpretive stance taken through CDA, enables discussions of aspects of power associated with the understandings and experiences of participants, and for recognition of creative possibilities and creative influence within and beyond current conditions. Through an emphasis on prospects for educators and students as makers of the spaces and places of learning, in particular in school libraries, the study has the potential to inform education facility designing practices and design participant relationships, and to contribute more broadly to knowledge in the fields of education, design, architecture, and education facility planning.

Assessing financial reporting comparability across institutional settings : the case of pension accounting

The drive for comparability of financial information is to enable users to distinguish similarities and differences in economic activities for an entity over time and between entities so that their resource allocation decisions are facilitated. With the increased globalisation of economic activities, the enhanced international comparability of financial statements is often used as an argument to advance the convergence of local accounting standards to international financial reporting standards (IFRS). Differences in the underlying economic substance of transactions between jurisdictions plus accounting standards allowing alternative treatments may render this expectation of increased comparability unrealistic. Motivated by observations that, as a construct, comparability is under-researched and not well understood, we develop a comparability framework that distinguishes between four types of comparability. In applying this comparability framework to pension accounting in the Australian and USA contexts, we highlight a dilemma: while regulators seek to increase the likelihood that similar events are accounted for similarly, an unintended consequence may be that preparers are forced to apply similar accounting treatment to events that are, in substance, different.