Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement

Confronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example, I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global, technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: Facial Weaponization Suite, a series of masks and public actions, and Face Cages, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.

A theory of hypoellipticity and unique ergodicity for semilinear stochastic PDEs

We present a theory of hypoellipticity and unique ergodicity for semilinear parabolic stochastic PDEs with "polynomial" nonlinearities and additive noise, considered as abstract evolution equations in some Hilbert space. It is shown that if Hörmander's bracket condition holds at every point of this Hilbert space, then a lower bound on the Malliavin covariance operatorμt can be obtained. Informally, this bound can be read as "Fix any finite-dimensional projection on a subspace of sufficiently regular functions. Then the eigenfunctions of μt with small eigenvalues have only a very small component in the image of Π." We also show how to use a priori bounds on the solutions to the equation to obtain good control on the dependency of the bounds on the Malliavin matrix on the initial condition. These bounds are sufficient in many cases to obtain the asymptotic strong Feller property introduced in [HM06]. One of the main novel technical tools is an almost sure bound from below on the size of "Wiener polynomials," where the coefficients are possibly non-adapted stochastic processes satisfying a Lips chitz condition. By exploiting the polynomial structure of the equations, this result can be used to replace Norris' lemma, which is unavailable in the present context. We conclude by showing that the two-dimensional stochastic Navier-Stokes equations and a large class of reaction-diffusion equations fit the framework of our theory.

Cultural development and technical and financial assistance on the basis of the CDCE (Convention on diversity of cultural expressions)

info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Technical improvements possibly linked to higher success rate with intracytoplasmic single sperm injection

info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Book Review Sharon L. Lohr Sampling: Design and Analysis

There is no abstract for this record.

Public-public partnerships (PUPs) in water

Water operators need to be efficient, accountable, honest public institutions providing a universal service. Many water services however lack the institutional strength, the human resources, the technical expertise and equipment, or the financial or managerial capacity to provide these services. They need support to develop these capacities. The vast majority of water operators in the world are in the public sector – 90% of all major cities are served by such bodies. This means that the largest pool of experience and expertise, and the great majority of examples of good practice and sound institutions, are to be found in existing public sector water operators. Because they are public sector, however, they do not have any natural commercial incentive to provide international support. Their incentive stems from solidarity, not profit. Since 1990, however, the policies of donors and development banks have focussed on the private companies and their incentives. The vast resources of the public sector have been overlooked, even blocked by pro-private policies. Out of sight of these global policy-makers, however, a growing number of public sector water companies have been engaged, in a great variety of ways, in helping others develop the capacity to be effective and accountable public services. These supportive arrangements are now called 'public-public partnerships' (PUPs). A public-public partnership (PUP) is simply a collaboration between two or more public authorities or organisations, based on solidarity, to improve the capacity and effectiveness of one partner in providing public water or sanitation services. They have been described as: “a peer relationship forged around common values and objectives, which exclude profit-seeking”.1 Neither partner expects a commercial profit, directly or indirectly. This makes PUPs very different from the public–private partnerships (PPPs) which have been promoted by the international financial institutions (IFIs) like the World Bank. The problems of PPPs have been examined in a number of reports. A great advantage of PUPs is that they avoid the risks of such partnerships: transaction costs, contract failure, renegotiation, the complexities of regulation, commercial opportunism, monopoly pricing, commercial secrecy, currency risk, and lack of public legitimacy.2 PUPs are not merely an abstract concept. The list in the annexe to this paper includes over 130 PUPs in around 70 countries. This means that far more countries have hosted PUPs than host PPPs in water – according to a report from PPIAF in December 2008, there are only 44 countries with private participation in water. These PUPs cover a period of over 20 years, and been used in all regions of the world. The earliest date to the 1980s, when the Yokohama Waterworks Bureau first started partnerships to help train staff in other Asian countries. Many of the PUP projects have been initiated in the last few years, a result of the growing recognition of PUPs as a tool for achieving improvements in public water management. This paper attempts to provide an overview of the typical objectives of PUPs; the different forms of PUPs and partners involved; a series of case studies of actual PUPs; and an examination of the recent WOPs initiative. It then offers recommendations for future development of PUPs.

Two steps forward, one step back: developing the curriculum for training teachers for technical and further education England 1945-1956

This paper discusses the development of provision for the training of teachers in English further and technical education from 1945 to 1956. While these years saw little growth in this provision, they were formative in that the institutional and curricular patterns of teacher training for the diverse fields of technical and further education were developed at this time. The work of the three national centres in Bolton, London and Huddersfield, during the period of the Emergency Training Scheme (ETS) is summarised with particular reference to the influence of the Ministry of Education‟s conditions for ETS colleges and courses. With the ending of the ETS in 1951 the three centres were given permanent status as teacher training colleges which in turn brought them into association with their local universities as constituent colleges of their Area Training Organisations. The consequences of this transfer to the universities for the curriculum and assessment of technical teacher training and the 'policy dichotomy' of teacher training for secondary and technical education are examined.

Training teachers for further and technical education 1950-1982: staff perceptions of changing demands and policies

This paper aims to create a picture of aspects of the working lives of some trainers of technical and further education teachers in a specialist teacher training college in Bolton, Lancashire, from the 1950s to the 1980's. There is little reference to technical teacher training in the literature on teacher training in the second half of the twentieth century. With this gap in mind, this paper sets out to record some memories and impressions of staff involved during these years. Using data from a series of semi-structured interviews, the discussion centres upon their perceptions of their work: of their students, the working environment, the curriculum and their relationships with the technical colleges for whom they were training teachers. The paper has three sections. It begins with a brief discussion of the issues arising from the choice of research methods. The second section contextualises the study and traces the history of Bolton Technical Teachers' Training College from its establishment through to its merger with the Institute of Technology in 1982. This is followed by the presentation and discussion of the interview data.