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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Constituting Agricultural And Food Policy In Malawi: The Role Of The State And International Donors In The Farm Input Subsidy Program (Fisp), Peter Rock Nkhoma Nov 2016

Constituting Agricultural And Food Policy In Malawi: The Role Of The State And International Donors In The Farm Input Subsidy Program (Fisp), Peter Rock Nkhoma

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Numerous studies have been undertaken on the political economy of agricultural policies in developing countries. These studies have explained agricultural policies in terms of urban bias, economic reforms, and domestic politics. Recently, the emphasis has been on explanations that reference the existence of a rational-legal and patronage element within the African state. Such explanations tend to underplay the extent to which agricultural policies are devised in a context of power asymmetries between the state and international donors or financial institutions. In the Malawian context specifically, limited attention has been paid to the possibility that policies are a negotiated outcome of …


A Context-Sensitive Conceptual Framework For Activity Modeling, Rahul Deb Das, Stephan Winter Jun 2016

A Context-Sensitive Conceptual Framework For Activity Modeling, Rahul Deb Das, Stephan Winter

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Human motion trajectories, however captured, provide a rich spatiotemporal data source for human activity recognition, and the rich literature in motion trajectory analysis provides the tools to bridge the gap between this data and its semantic interpretation. But activity is an ambiguous term across research communities. For example, in urban transport research activities are generally characterized around certain locations assuming the opportunities and resources are present in that location, and traveling happens between these locations for activity participation, i.e., travel is not an activity, rather a mean to overcome spatial constraints. In contrast, in human-computer interaction (HCI) research and in …


Institutional Resilience Along The Mississippi Gulf Coast In The Context Of Pre- And Post-Hurricane Katrina, Khai Hoan Nguyen Jan 2015

Institutional Resilience Along The Mississippi Gulf Coast In The Context Of Pre- And Post-Hurricane Katrina, Khai Hoan Nguyen

Theses and Dissertations

Building resilience to disasters helps reduce loss of life and property, allowing communities to recover more quickly from shocks and disruptions. Governing institutions are tasked with tremendous responsibility in terms of mitigating risks and enhancing resilience of local communities through proactive planning and policies. It is important to examine how institutional policies have changed pre- and post-disaster to determine their contribution to community resilience. Metrics and indicators can be used to quantitatively assess, establish baseline, track, and monitor resilience at the community level. Few studies have attempted to measure institutional resilience using a set of indicators and metrics, and even …


Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent Aug 2014

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …


Approaching The Notion Of Place By Contrast, Stephan Winter, Christian Freksa Dec 2012

Approaching The Notion Of Place By Contrast, Stephan Winter, Christian Freksa

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Place is an elusive notion in geographic information science. This paper presents an approach to capture the notion of place by contrast. This approach is developed from cognitive concepts and the language that is used to describe places. It is complementary to those of coordinate-based systems that dominate contemporary geographic information systems. Accordingly the approach is aimed at explaining structures in verbal place descriptions and at localizing objects without committing to geometrically specified positions in space. We will demonstrate how locations can be identified by place names that are not crisply defined in terms of geometric regions. Capturing the human …


The Semantics Of Similarity In Geographic Information Retrieval, Krzysztof Janowicz, Martin Raubal, Werner Kuhn Oct 2012

The Semantics Of Similarity In Geographic Information Retrieval, Krzysztof Janowicz, Martin Raubal, Werner Kuhn

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Similarity measures have a long tradition in fields such as information retrieval artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Within the last years these measures have been extended and reused to measure semantic similarity; i.e. for comparing meanings rather than syntactic differences. Various measures for spatial applications have been developed but a solid foundation for answering what they measure; how they are best applied in information retrieval; which role contextual information plays; and how similarity values or rankings should be interpreted is still missing. It is therefore difficult to decide which measure should be used for a particular application or to compare …