A question of a voice: with what voice will I cry my sad fado?

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Who will answer my question on Stack Overflow?

Stack Overflow is a highly successful Community Question Answering (CQA) service for software developers with more than three millions users and more than ten thousand posts per day. The large volume of questions makes it difficult for users to find questions that they are interested in answering. In this paper, we propose a number of approaches to predict who will answer a new question using the characteristics of the question (i.e. Topic) and users (i.e. Reputation), and the social network of Stack Overflow users (i.e. Interested in the same topic). Specifically, our approach aims to identify a group of users (candidates) who have the potential to answer a new question by using feature-based prediction approach and social network based prediction approach. We develop predictive models to predict whether an identified candidate answers a new question. This prediction helps motivate the knowledge exchanging in the community by routing relevant questions to potential answerers. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our predictive models, achieving 44% precision, 59% recall, and 49% F-measure (average across all test sets). In addition, our candidate identification techniques can identify the answerers who actually answer questions up to 12.8% (average across all test sets).

The early shorebird will catch fewer invertebrates on trampled sandy beaches

Many species of birds breeding on ocean beaches and in coastal dunes are of global conservation concern. Most of these species rely on invertebrates (e.g. insects, small crustaceans) as an irreplaceable food source, foraging primarily around the strandline on the upper beach near the dunes. Sandy beaches are also prime sites for human recreation, which impacts these food resources via negative trampling effects. We quantified acute trampling impacts on assemblages of upper shore invertebrates in a controlled experiment over a range of foot traffic intensities (up to 56 steps per square metre) on a temperate beach in Victoria, Australia. Trampling significantly altered assemblage structure (species composition and density) and was correlated with significant declines in invertebrate abundance and species richness. Trampling effects were strongest for rare species. In heavily trafficked plots the abundance of sand hoppers (Amphipoda), a principal prey item of threatened Hooded Plovers breeding on this beach, was halved. In contrast to the consistently strong effects of trampling, natural habitat attributes (e.g. sediment grain size, compactness) were much less influential predictors. If acute suppression of invertebrates caused by trampling, as demonstrated here, is more widespread on beaches it may constitute a significant threat to endangered vertebrates reliant on these invertebrates. This calls for a re-thinking of conservation actions by considering active management of food resources, possibly through enhancement of wrack or direct augmentation of prey items to breeding territories.

‘You, my body, and my mind, one of these will go’: Madness as Disguise in Samuel Beckett's Murphy and Endgame

ithin the wide topic of disguise in literature, we could signal a subcurrent which can be found in a number of literary texts: the idea of madness as a disguise, i.e. the creation or invention of a ‘false self’ as a mask which is presented to the world and which conceals the real self. In The Divided Self (1960), R. D. Laing deals with the “personality, false self, mask, front or persona that (...) [schizophrenic] wear” (73). Using as a basis Laing’s theories on schizophrenia and the creation of a false-self system, we will analyze two works by Samuel Beckett: Murphy and Endgame, where we find the uses of madness as disguise in a series of ways: through the usage of ‘disguised’ language (what we could refer to as schizophrenese) which acts as a mask for real meaning; through odd ‘schizophrenic’ behaviour on the part of the characters (which screens real intentions), and, mainly, through the creation of a ‘false self’ which acts as a disguise and barrier between the inner self and the real world. These two works by Samuel Beckett, where real intentions and meanings are continuously concealed and disguised in a desperate attempt to preserve the inner self, lend themselves to an analysis of madness as disguise, precisely the one we attempt to carry out in our paper.

TOWARD A POLITICAL CONCEPTION OF MINORITY RIGHTS: RECONCILING SOVEREIGNTY, HUMAN RIGHTS AND MINORITY CLAIMS

The question that I will explore in this research dissertation is whether one can defend the rights of homeland minorities as a progressive extension of the existing norms of human rights. This question calls for several deeper inquiries about the nature, the function and the underlying justifications for both human rights and minority rights. In particular, this research project will examine the following issues: on what normative grounds the available norms of human rights and minority rights are justified; if there is any methodic way to use the normative logic of human rights to support substantial forms of minority claims, such as the right to self-determination; whether human rights can take the form of group rights; and finally, whether there is any non-sectarian basis for justifying the minority norms, which can be acceptable from both liberal and non-liberal perspectives. This research project has some implications for both theories of minority rights and human rights. On the one hand, the research employs the topic of minority rights to shed light on deficiencies of the existing political theories of human rights. On the other hand, it uses the political theory to shed light on how existing theories of minority rights could be improved and amended. The inquiry will ultimately clarify how to judge the merit of the claim that minority rights are or should be a part of human rights norms.

Para una crítica de la educación democrática

El propósito central de este trabajo consiste en hacer un análisis crítico de la idea de educación democrática. Como hilo conductor se discute la tesis desarrollada por Amy Gutmann, según la cual, la educación democrática tiene como fin garantizar la reproducción consciente de la sociedad. En este contexto, la tesis que se defiende afirma que la educación democrática exige, además de los principios de no represión y la no discriminación desarrollados por Gutmann, un principio de reconocimiento, que articule la orientación de las acciones educativas a fuentes de normatividad asociadas con una interpretación intersubjetivista de la autonomía, de manera que se puedan generar más elementos de juicio, sobre todo, aquellos incorporados en las dimensiones moral, ética, política, legal y social de la persona, al momento de proponer prácticas educativas encaminadas a la formación de una ciudadanía participativa y crítica. Para esto se propone una interpretación que integra las perspectivas deliberativa y agonal de la democracia, se defiende que la expresión clave del ejercicio de la ciudadanía democrática es la participación, que el ejercicio de la participación tiene por condición la realización de la autonomía personal, por lo cual, en la parte final se elabora una lectura intersubjetivista de la autonomía, a partir de los trabajos de Axel Honneth y Rainer Forst.

¡Porque ni putas, ni peluqueras, ni nada… somos ciudadanas!’: Reflexiones sobre ciudadanía desde un grupo trans en la ciudad de Bogotá

‘¡Porque ni putas, ni peluqueras, ni nada… somos ciudadanas!’. Se pregunta por cómo se puede entender la ciudadanía desde las acciones comunitarias que llevaron a cabo un grupo de mujeres trans en la ciudad de Bogotá . Según informes nacionales y a nivel Latinoamérica son las mujeres trans pertenecientes al sector LGBT las que dijeron sentir, en mayor número, vulnerados sus derechos entorno a trabajo, salud y educación en la capital del país en comparación a la población LGB. La causa de tal vulneración pareció coincidir con su identidad de género, por ejemplo, al no poder encontrar trabajo por las expresiones de género que utilizaban. Por ende era necesario abordar cómo se entiende la ciudadanía desde corporalidades que no han tenido un óptimo acceso a la ciudad teniendo como referencia sus experiencias personales. Siendo el tránsito un proceso que se hace a lo largo del tiempo.

Improvements in acid soil tolerance of Brazilian barley will require new allelic combinations.

2016