Blog
Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes affect us and what we can do about them?
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I received the “Whistling Vivaldi: how stereotypes affect us and what we can do’’ book by Claude Steele as a Christmas gift and it was the best gift I got this year. The book explains, in a scientific way backed with experiments and publications, how negative stereotypes and stigmatizations related to certain groups influence the intellectual and physical ability of the people who belong to those groups. I found the book clarifying to me a lot of what I went through as a female Egyptian Ph.D. student in Computer Science in the UK. I could relate to the feelings, the struggles, and the experiences of the students who participated in the experiments described in the book. I finished the book in a week and decided to write this summary to spread knowledge.
Spatial and Temporal analysis of Electoral violence of the Nigerian Elections 2003
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Nigeria in 2003 held more than one election in the same month.It started with the House of the representative and Senate elections on the same day, 12th of April 2003. Then the presidential election was held on 19th of April 2003. Then on the 3rd of May 2003, the National Assembly election was conducted. According to the data collected by HRW, violence started earlier in Delta state from January to March as it is the most oil-producing state in Nigeria. The violent incidents included clashes between different ethnic groups and other clashes between armed groups and security forces. The most violent incidents were on 12th and 19th of April and the 3rd of May (on election days(s) violence). In most of the incidents the ruling party was the main perpetrator. Some incidents started earlier on 10th and 11th and some took place during the first three days of May. The violence started on 10th of April in Bassambiri area in Bayelsa state in the form of clashing thugs belong to opponent parties. On the 11th different violent incidents took place in different areas (Amadi-amain in River state and Warri in Delta state) in the form of the temporary displacement of people from their homes and attacks waged by the opponent’s party’s supporters.
Spatial and Temporal analysis of Electoral violence of the Kenyan Elections 2008
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In Kenya, after the 2007 presidential elections, the country was drowned in cycles of intensive violence for two months, resulting in 1200 killed and 100,000 displaced (Brown & Sriram, 2012). Kenya is one of the limited case studies in the literature where satellite images were used to detect the locations of violent incidents. This case study can help us to use spatial analysis to understand the diffusion pattern of electoral violence in Kenya and which approach of the aforementioned diffusion approaches, escalation, relocation and violence legitimacy, is applied.
Crowdsourcing
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What is crowdsourcing?
“Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D.” By Jeff Howe
Guidelines to Figure-Eight (CrowdFlower) Platform
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How does Figure-Eight works?
Figure-Eight is based on the idea of creating millions of simple online tasks to create a distributed computing machine. The business model of Figure-Eight is composed on a customer, a task and a contributor. Figure-Eight provides tools for the customer to upload their data and design their task either by drag and drop or using Crow-Flower Mark up Language (CML). Then, the task became available for the contributors (crowd) to perform. Figure-Eight provides a set of tools to set the desired quality, speed and cost of the task. This section describes the mechanisms provided to achieve the most possible quality in the task.