Yaounde, Cameroon — An estimated 8 million voters in Chad go to the polls Dec. 29 in legislative, local and district elections. Female leaders and activists, however, say women candidates are being underrepresented. Chadian officials say the legislative elections will mark an end to a three-year transition from military to civilian rule that began when General Mahamat Idriss Deby seized power in April 2021 following the death of his father, long-serving President Idriss Deby Itno. During the transitional period, Deby said he would make sure women, who constitute more than 51% of Chad's population, were nominated in legislative, provincial and district elections. He said Chad would respect its pledges as a signatory to the Maputo Protocol, a commitment by African nations through the African Union to ensure gender equality in political decision making. But activists say women constitute just over one-third of the candidates in this year’s races, in which 180 political parties have nominated more than 8,500 candidates. They say limiting women from elective positions prohibits a majority of the central African nation’s civilians from participating in their country's development and legislating and voting on laws that will improve living conditions. Ahmed Bartchiret, president of ANGE, Chad’s national elections management body, acknowledged the low number of women running for elected office.  He said women constitute less than 35% of the lists of nominees submitted by political parties, including Deby's Patriotic Salvation Movement, or MPS, for the Dec. 29 elections. ANGE also acknowledged that some nominations, including those of women, were turned down, but gave no further details. ANGE said anyone whose nomination was rejected can take up the issue through the courts. Women’s groups, including the Association of Indigenous Women and People and the Civil Society Group Against Injustice and Inequality, said in a release that ANGE rejected nomination papers of women candidates who could not pay the roughly $250 application fee. Activists, however, say some political parties are still very reluctant to nominate women, at times claiming that women are not educated enough to occupy political office. Amina Priscille Longoh is Chad's minister of women and child protection. Speaking Wednesday on state television, she noted that in some communities, there is resistance to women seeking higher office.   Longoh said Deby’s strong political will to involve more women in politics is facing opposition from communities, traditional rulers and some clerics, who think that women should stay at home to take care of their husbands and children. She said Deby has ordered that a mass education campaign be carried out to advocate for the respect of women's rights and political participation. Longoh also said many women lack the financial means to run in elections. Some Chadian women have complained that Prime Minister Allamaye Halina, whom Deby appointed on May 23 as part of a new civilian government, has reduced the number of female ministers from 12 to eight. Activists say the government has not respected a resolution of the central African nations’ 2022 Inclusive and Sovereign National Dialogue which states that more women should be appointed to government positions. Female leaders say women constitute the majority of Chad’s population and can have more influence than men in peacekeeping processes.

[VOA] Yaounde, Cameroon -- An estimated 8 million voters in Chad go to the polls Dec. 29 in legislative, local and district elections. Female leaders and activists, however, say women candidates are being underrepresented.

This work presents a first approach to the synthesis of Spanish Sign Language's (LSE) Classifier Constructions (CCs). All current attempts at the automatic synthesis of LSE simply create the animations corresponding to sequences of signs. This work, however, includes the synthesis of the LSE classification phenomena, defining more complex elements than simple signs, such as Classifier Predicates, Inflective CCs and Affixal classifiers. The intelligibility of our synthetic messages was evaluated by LSE natives, who reported a recognition rate of 93% correct answers.

Aim/Purpose: This article examines how learning activities draw on resources in the work context to learn. Background The background is that if knowledge no longer is seen mainly as objects, but processes, how then to understand boundary objects? Our field study of learning activities reveals the use of pictures, documents and emotions for learning in the geographically distributed Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority Methodology: The study is a qualitative study consisting of interview data, observation data, and documents. Contribution: Contribute to practice based theorizing. Findings: Three ideal types of representing practices have been identified, i.e., ‘Visualizing’, ‘Documenting’ and ‘Testing’. All three are combined with storytelling, sensing, reflections and sensemaking, which point at the importance of processes in learning. The article also add insights about how emotions can be an important resource for boundary spanning – and sensemaking – by creating the capability of reflecting upon and integrating different knowledge areas in the in- practice context. Recommendations for Practitioners: Look for boundary objects within your field to promote online learning. Recommendation for Researchers: Study boundary objects in work context to understand learning. Impact on Society Role of objects in human learning. Future Research: Focus on how emotions can be used for online learning.

Creative computing is one of the rapidly growing educational trends around the world. Previous studies have shown that creative computing can empower disadvantaged children and youth. At-risk youth tend to hold a negative view of self and perceive their abilities as inferior compared to “normative” pupils. The Implicit Theories of Intelligence approach (ITI; Dweck, 1999, 2008) suggests a way of changing beliefs regarding one’s abilities. This paper reports findings from an experiment that explores the impact of a short intervention among at-risk youth and “normative” high-school students on (1) changing ITI from being perceived as fixed (entity view of intelligence) to more flexible (incremental view of intelligence) and (2) the quality of digital self-representations programmed though a creative computing app. The participants were 117 Israeli youth aged 14-17, half of whom were at-risk youth. The participants were randomly assigned to the experimental and control conditions. The experimental group watched a video of a lecture regarding brain plasticity that emphasized flexibility and the potential of human intelligence to be cultivated. The control group watched a neutral lecture about brain-functioning and creativity. Following the intervention, all of the participants watched screencasts of basic training for the Scratch programming app, designed artifacts that digitally represented themselves five years later and reported their ITI. The results showed more incremental ITI in the experimental group compared to the control group and among normative students compared to at-risk youth. In contrast to the research hypothesis, the Scratch projects of the at-risk youth, especially in the experimental condition, were rated by neutral judges as being more creative, more aesthetically designed, and more clearly conveying their message. The results suggest that creative computing combined with the ITI intervention is a way of developing creativity, especially among at-risk youth. Increasing the number of youths who hold incremental views of intelligence and developing computational thinking may contribute to their empowerment and well-being, improve learning and promote creativity.

We study the effects of actors' audience-specific reputations on their levels of success with different audiences in the same field. Extending recent work that has emphasized the presence of multiple audiences with different concerns, we demonstrate that considering audience specificity leads to an improved understanding of reputation effects. Using data on emerging artists in the field of contemporary art from 2001 to 2010, we investigate the manner in which artists' audience-specific reputations affect their subsequent success with two distinct audiences: museums and galleries. Our findings suggest that audience-specific reputations have systematically different effects with respect to success with museums and galleries. Our findings also illuminate the extent to which audience-specific reputations are relevant for emerging research on the contingent effects of reputation. In particular, our findings support our predictions that audiences differ from one another in terms of the extent to which other signals (specifically, status and interaction with other audiences) enhance or reduce the value of audience-specific reputations. Our study thus advances theory by providing empirical evidence for the value of incorporating audience-specific reputations into the general study of reputation.

Washington — OSHA is seeking to revive an Obama administration policy that would allow workers to designate someone who doesn’t work for their employer – including someone from a union or other organization – to represent them during an OSHA “walkaround” inspection.

Washington — OSHA is accepting comment on a proposed rule that would let workers designate someone who doesn’t work for their employer to represent them during an OSHA “walkaround” inspection.

Washington — OSHA has pushed to Nov. 13 the deadline for comment on its proposal to allow workers to designate someone who doesn’t work for their employer to represent them during OSHA “walkaround” inspections.

Washington — A pair of lawmakers from opposites sides of the aisle, along with a coalition of organizations, express opposing viewpoints in comments on OSHA’s proposed rule on worker walkaround representation.

Washington — OSHA’s rule on worker walkaround representation is undergoing a final review, according to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs website.

Washington — OSHA’s final rule on worker walkaround representation is set to go into effect May 31.

Children's Geographies; 10/01/2023
(AN 173035615); ISSN: 14733285
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The post Improving Representation in Clinical Trials and Research: Building Research Equity for Women and Underrepresented Groups was curated by information for practice.

Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ahead of Print. How do humans build and navigate their complex social world? Standard theoretical frameworks often attribute this success to a foundational capacity to analyze other people’s appearance and behavior to make inferences about their unobservable mental states. Here we argue that this picture is incomplete. Human behavior leaves […]

The post Traces of Our Past: The Social Representation of the Physical World was curated by information for practice.

It is pointed out that many authors are unaware that the particular choice of unit-cell origin determines the irreducible representations to which octahedral tilts in perovskites belong. Furthermore, a recommendation is made that the preferred option is with the origin at the B-cation site rather than that of the A site.

In recent decades, sustained theoretical and software developments have clearly established that representation analysis and magnetic symmetry groups are complementary concepts that should be used together in the investigation and description of magnetic structures. Historically, they were considered alternative approaches, but currently, magnetic space groups and magnetic superspace groups can be routinely used together with representation analysis, aided by state-of-the-art software tools. After exploring the historical antagonism between these two approaches, we emphasize the significant advancements made in understanding and formally describing magnetic structures by embracing their combined use.

Conic sections are commonly used in reflective X-ray optics. Hyperbolic mirrors can focus a converging light source and are frequently paired with elliptical or parabolic mirrors in Wolter type configurations. This paper derives the closed-form expression for a mirror-centered hyperbolic shape, with zero-slope at the origin. Combined with the slope and curvature, such an expression facilitates metrology, manufacturing and mirror-bending calculations. Previous works consider ellipses, parabolas, magnifying hyperbolas or employ lengthy approximations. Here, the exact shape function is given in terms of the mirror incidence angle and the source and image distances.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine urges systemic action to change the culture in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) to address the underrepresentation of women in these fields.

A range of organizations across the tech ecosystem — tech companies, colleges and universities, professional societies, and government agencies — should take steps to improve the representation of women of color in tech fields and careers.

Lack of representation in research is compounding disparities in health outcomes, with serious consequences for underrepresented groups and the nation as a whole. Urgent actions are needed by NIH, FDA, and others to boost representation of racial and ethnic minority groups and other underrepresented populations in clinical trials and research.

What do logging and plumbing have in common? Jon Hatch for one. After a friend told him about a plumbing apprenticeship opening 15 years ago, Jon Hatch made the jump to the plumbing industry. 

Executive Billiards, makers of the DELTA-13 rack, is pleased to announce their marketing alignment with Samm Diep of Aurora, Colorado (creator of SammsPocket.com and PoolTipJar.com).

Scores of Businesses and Workers Losing Money In The Wake of the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapse

Spanish speakers injured in truck accidents? The Villarreal Law Firm ("The Law Champ") fights for you in McAllen & Brownsville. Bilingual attorneys secure fair compensation. Free consultations!

Empowering Women to Lead Boldly: Join Africa's Top Female Changemakers in Nairobi for The Audacity Conference 2024—Uniting Aspiring and Established Leaders to Shape a Future of Equality and Progress. Join us from November 27th to 30th, 2024.

Famous Frames Inc. Unveils New Site, Celebrating Over 40 Years of Artistic Excellence in Storyboarding and Illustration.

Earth Law Center will host a live reading of the 1,000 year old story. The play, which follows a group of animals who take humans to court for their poor treatment, alludes to the Rights of Nature movement ingraining the rights of animals into law.

TORONTO – Participating Canadian securities regulators today published the results of their 10th consecutive annual review of disclosures relating to women on boards and in executive officer positions, as well as the underlying data that was used to prepare the report.

Requirements and reference framework for digital representation of cultural relics and artworks using augmented reality

The Unicode Consortium has unveiled a new generation of emojis coming out this year, including images of people with disabilities.

Read more: Inclusive new emojis offer representation for people with disabilities

Iraq's Stolen Election: How Assyrian Representation Became Assyrian Repression

Founded in 1905, Rotary International is known for its community work worldwide…

As we know, American attorneys regularly represent clients in mediation.  There’s a ton of theory about mediation generally but much less about mediation representation. I just posted an article, Theory and Practice of Mediation Representation, which presents a theoretical analysis based on Real Practice System Theory.  The following graphic provides an overview, which the article … Continue reading Theory and Practice of Mediation Representation →

The US election could create the need for a G7 alternative – without American representation Expert comment jon.wallace 15 October 2024

Traditional allies of the US need to find a way to work together on some global policy issues even when the US itself is not engaged. A ‘G6 plus’ group could provide an answer.

When Jamaica pulled out of the nascent West Indies Federation in 1961, Trinidad and Tobago’s then prime minister, Dr Eric Williams, famously said ‘One from ten leaves nought’. In the run up to the US elections on 5 November, the US’s longstanding allies need to ask themselves if the same logic must apply to the G7. 

A Donald Trump victory will result in stark differences between the US and its closest partners on key global economic issues. US allies would no doubt try and persuade the new president to moderate his position, but experience suggests that this will have little, if any, effect.  

They may then want to work around the US, or on a parallel track. But doing so will be very hard unless they have a framework for discussing and developing ideas collectively. Could some form of ‘G6 plus’ forum help?

The role of the G7 today

The G7 no longer acts as a steering group for the global economy. However, it remains a critical forum for the US and its allies to coordinate their efforts to help solve global problems, to defend common Western interests, to resolve internal disputes and to underpin information exchange. 

In the past two years, the G7 has come to be seen by the US and other members as one of the most effective international mechanisms. It has played a critical role coordinating Western efforts to recover from the last pandemic and prepare for future ones.  

It has been pivotal in weakening Russia’s economy following the attack on Ukraine and has acted to strengthen Western economic security and resilience more broadly.  

The G7 has also responded to ‘Global South’ calls for help in dealing with the pandemic aftermath and the Ukraine war. 

Trump’s approach to the G7

The problem is that the G7’s effectiveness depends critically on full US engagement, sometimes as a leader of initiatives (such as the decision to impose an ‘oil price cap’ on Russia in autumn 2022) or as an essential partner. 

If elected, former President Trump is likely to abandon the G7 as an instrument of international economic policy. This is effectively what happened during his first presidency and there are reasons to expect this to be repeated. 

Many of Trump’s international economic policies are highly controversial with US allies, including his apparent determination to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, impose across the board 10-20 per cent tariffs and even punish countries for not using the dollar. His domestic policies, including mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and aggressive deregulation and fiscal easing could lead to further sharp disagreements.  

Furthermore, Trump demonstrates general antipathy towards multilateralism. Under his presidency, US representatives in the G7 and G20 sought to weaken core values and policies that have underpinned international economic cooperation for decades – including the importance of a rules based international system, the IMF’s global safety net role, and the responsibility of the advanced world to assist the poorest countries financially.  

Other G7 and G20 countries tried to preserve as much as possible of the previous consensus. But in the case of climate change, the only solution was to have a separate text for the US. Critically, such efforts diverted time and attention from the enormous challenges facing the world at the time. 

Trump went through four different G7/G20 Sherpas during his presidency and disowned the final declaration of the 2018 Canadian G7 summit after hundreds of hours of negotiation, and despite previously signing off on the text. The US failed to host a final leaders’ summit, even virtually, during his administration’s G7 presidency.  

Of course, how far Trump carries through his most radical policies will depend, among other things, on the outcome of the Congressional elections and the stance taken by US courts. 

He may also have second thoughts if elected. His first administration sometimes supported significant multilateral economic initiatives, notably the G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative and ‘Common Framework’ for debt rescheduling. 

But, in the event of a second Trump administration, the most likely scenario for the G7 is a repeat of the paralysis of 2017-20, which would be even more costly today.

Should Vice President Kamala Harris win on 5 November, the situation should in theory be very different. She will likely continue with President Joe Biden’s collaborative approach to the G7.

Nonetheless, major issues may still arise where America’s allies want to take a fundamentally different approach and need a mechanism to do so. These could include policy on the WTO, de-risking the economic relationship with China, restricting carbon leakage, and regulating US-dominated big tech.  

How should US allies respond?

No US ally will want to be seen to be leading development of a new ‘G6’ that excludes the US. The top priority will be securing the best possible relationship with the incoming president. Political weakness and/or new governments in France, Germany, the UK and Japan will add to this hesitancy.

Any new forum will therefore need to be as low profile as possible. The concept should initially be discussed in private by sherpas from each participating country. Once established, officials should as far as possible meet online. Leaders should only meet online, at least initially.  

Participants should be fully transparent about the forum’s existence and avoid any grand ‘framing’ along the lines of the EU’s ‘strategic autonomy’. Instead, it should be described as a practical, largely technocratic forum intended to coordinate activity among Western economic powers in those areas where the US chooses not to engage. A suitably innocuous name – such as the ‘the sustainable growth club’ could help.

Topics should be limited to those requiring urgent collective global action, such as climate, health, tech governance, development finance and trade – and where the US federal government is not an ‘essential’ partner. Such a forum should not therefore address defence.  

A. V. Silantyev
Trans. Moscow Math. Soc. 83 (), 75-149.
Abstract, references and article information

A. P. Starovoitov and N. V. Ryabchenko
Trans. Moscow Math. Soc. 83 (), 15-31.
Abstract, references and article information

10 September 2020

The justices declined to take up a major challenge to exclusive-bargaining arrangements for teachers' unions and other public employee labor organizations.

Umut Güçlü
Jul 8, 2015; 35:10005-10014
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Neural responses are naturally variable from one moment to the next, even when the stimulus is held constant. What factors might underlie this variability in neural population activity? We hypothesized that spontaneous fluctuations in cortical stimulus representations are created by changes in arousal state. We tested the hypothesis using a combination of fMRI, probabilistic decoding methods, and pupillometry. Human participants (20 female, 12 male) were presented with gratings of random orientation. Shortly after viewing the grating, participants reported its orientation and gave their level of confidence in this judgment. Using a probabilistic fMRI decoding technique, we quantified the precision of the stimulus representation in the visual cortex on a trial-by-trial basis. Pupil size was recorded and analyzed to index the observer's arousal state. We found that the precision of the cortical stimulus representation, reported confidence, and variability in the behavioral orientation judgments varied from trial to trial. Interestingly, these trial-by-trial changes in cortical and behavioral precision and confidence were linked to pupil size and its temporal rate of change. Specifically, when the cortical stimulus representation was more precise, the pupil dilated more strongly prior to stimulus onset and remained larger during stimulus presentation. Similarly, stronger pupil dilation during stimulus presentation was associated with higher levels of subjective confidence, a secondary measure of sensory precision, as well as improved behavioral performance. Taken together, our findings support the hypothesis that spontaneous fluctuations in arousal state modulate the fidelity of the stimulus representation in the human visual cortex, with clear consequences for behavior.

Different people listening to the same story may converge upon a largely shared interpretation while still developing idiosyncratic experiences atop that shared foundation. What linguistic properties support this individualized experience of natural language? Here, we investigate how the "concrete–abstract" axis—the extent to which a word is grounded in sensory experience—relates to within- and across-subject variability in the neural representations of language. Leveraging a dataset of human participants of both sexes who each listened to four auditory stories while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate that neural representations of "concreteness" are both reliable across stories and relatively unique to individuals, while neural representations of "abstractness" are variable both within individuals and across the population. Using natural language processing tools, we show that concrete words exhibit similar neural representations despite spanning larger distances within a high-dimensional semantic space, which potentially reflects an underlying representational signature of sensory experience—namely, imageability—shared by concrete words but absent from abstract words. Our findings situate the concrete–abstract axis as a core dimension that supports both shared and individualized representations of natural language.