Opening the Black Box

Opening the Black Box PDF Author: Gavin Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134085753
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras are a prominent, if increasingly familiar, feature of urbanism. They symbolize the faith that spatial authorities place in technical interventions for the treatment of social problems. CCTV was principally introduced to sterilize municipalities, to govern conducts and to protect properties. Vast expenditure has been committed to these technologies without a clear sense of how precisely they influence things. CCTV cameras might appear inanimate, but Opening the Black Box shows them to be vital mediums within relational circulations of supervision. The book principally excavates the social relations entwining the everyday application of CCTV. It takes the reader on a journey from living beneath the camera, to working behind the lens. Attention focuses on the labour exerted by camera operators as they source and process distanced spectacles. These workers are paid to scan monitor screens in search of disorderly vistas, visualizing stimuli according to its perceived riskiness and/or allurement. But the projection of this gaze can draw an unsettling reflection. It can mean enduring behavioural extremities as an impotent witness. It can also entail making spontaneous decisions that determine the course of justice. Opening the Black Box, therefore, contemplates the seductive and traumatic dimensions of monitoring telemediated ‘riskscapes’ through the prism of camera circuitry. It probes the positioning of camera operators as ‘vicarious’ custodians of a precarious social order and engages their subjective experiences. It reveals the work of watching to be an ambiguous practice: as much about managing external disturbances on the street as managing internal disruptions in the self.

Opening the Black Box

Opening the Black Box PDF Author: Gavin Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134085753
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Get Book

Book Description
Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras are a prominent, if increasingly familiar, feature of urbanism. They symbolize the faith that spatial authorities place in technical interventions for the treatment of social problems. CCTV was principally introduced to sterilize municipalities, to govern conducts and to protect properties. Vast expenditure has been committed to these technologies without a clear sense of how precisely they influence things. CCTV cameras might appear inanimate, but Opening the Black Box shows them to be vital mediums within relational circulations of supervision. The book principally excavates the social relations entwining the everyday application of CCTV. It takes the reader on a journey from living beneath the camera, to working behind the lens. Attention focuses on the labour exerted by camera operators as they source and process distanced spectacles. These workers are paid to scan monitor screens in search of disorderly vistas, visualizing stimuli according to its perceived riskiness and/or allurement. But the projection of this gaze can draw an unsettling reflection. It can mean enduring behavioural extremities as an impotent witness. It can also entail making spontaneous decisions that determine the course of justice. Opening the Black Box, therefore, contemplates the seductive and traumatic dimensions of monitoring telemediated ‘riskscapes’ through the prism of camera circuitry. It probes the positioning of camera operators as ‘vicarious’ custodians of a precarious social order and engages their subjective experiences. It reveals the work of watching to be an ambiguous practice: as much about managing external disturbances on the street as managing internal disruptions in the self.

Opening the Black Box

Opening the Black Box PDF Author: Helene Grandvoinnet
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464804826
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Opening the Black Box: Contextual Drivers of Social Accountability fills an important knowledge gap by providing guidance on how to assess contextual drivers of social accountability effectiveness. This publication aims to more strategically support citizen engagement at the country level and for a specific issue or problem. The report proposes a novel framing of social accountability as the interplay of constitutive elements: citizen action and state action, supported by three enabling levers: civic mobilization, interface and information. For each of these constitutive elements, the report identifies 'drivers' of contextual effectiveness which take into account a broad range of contextual factors (e.g., social, political and intervention-based, including information and communication technologies). Opening the Black Box offers detailed guidance on how to assess each driver. It also applies the framework at two levels. At the country level, the report looks at 'archetypes' of challenging country contexts, such as regimes with no formal space or full support for citizen-state engagement and fragile and conflict-affected situations. The report also illustrates the use of the framework to analyze specific social accountability interventions through four case studies: Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Yemen, and the Kyrgyz Republic.

Interpretable Machine Learning

Interpretable Machine Learning PDF Author: Christoph Molnar
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0244768528
Category : Artificial intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This book is about making machine learning models and their decisions interpretable. After exploring the concepts of interpretability, you will learn about simple, interpretable models such as decision trees, decision rules and linear regression. Later chapters focus on general model-agnostic methods for interpreting black box models like feature importance and accumulated local effects and explaining individual predictions with Shapley values and LIME. All interpretation methods are explained in depth and discussed critically. How do they work under the hood? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How can their outputs be interpreted? This book will enable you to select and correctly apply the interpretation method that is most suitable for your machine learning project.

Data Science for Economics and Finance

Data Science for Economics and Finance PDF Author: Sergio Consoli
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030668916
Category : Application software
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
This open access book covers the use of data science, including advanced machine learning, big data analytics, Semantic Web technologies, natural language processing, social media analysis, time series analysis, among others, for applications in economics and finance. In addition, it shows some successful applications of advanced data science solutions used to extract new knowledge from data in order to improve economic forecasting models. The book starts with an introduction on the use of data science technologies in economics and finance and is followed by thirteen chapters showing success stories of the application of specific data science methodologies, touching on particular topics related to novel big data sources and technologies for economic analysis (e.g. social media and news); big data models leveraging on supervised/unsupervised (deep) machine learning; natural language processing to build economic and financial indicators; and forecasting and nowcasting of economic variables through time series analysis. This book is relevant to all stakeholders involved in digital and data-intensive research in economics and finance, helping them to understand the main opportunities and challenges, become familiar with the latest methodological findings, and learn how to use and evaluate the performances of novel tools and frameworks. It primarily targets data scientists and business analysts exploiting data science technologies, and it will also be a useful resource to research students in disciplines and courses related to these topics. Overall, readers will learn modern and effective data science solutions to create tangible innovations for economic and financial applications.

Black Box Thinking

Black Box Thinking PDF Author: Matthew Syed
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 069840887X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Nobody wants to fail. But in highly complex organizations, success can happen only when we confront our mistakes, learn from our own version of a black box, and create a climate where it’s safe to fail. We all have to endure failure from time to time, whether it’s underperforming at a job interview, flunking an exam, or losing a pickup basketball game. But for people working in safety-critical industries, getting it wrong can have deadly consequences. Consider the shocking fact that preventable medical error is the third-biggest killer in the United States, causing more than 400,000 deaths every year. More people die from mistakes made by doctors and hospitals than from traffic accidents. And most of those mistakes are never made public, because of malpractice settlements with nondisclosure clauses. For a dramatically different approach to failure, look at aviation. Every passenger aircraft in the world is equipped with an almost indestructible black box. Whenever there’s any sort of mishap, major or minor, the box is opened, the data is analyzed, and experts figure out exactly what went wrong. Then the facts are published and procedures are changed, so that the same mistakes won’t happen again. By applying this method in recent decades, the industry has created an astonishingly good safety record. Few of us put lives at risk in our daily work as surgeons and pilots do, but we all have a strong interest in avoiding predictable and preventable errors. So why don’t we all embrace the aviation approach to failure rather than the health-care approach? As Matthew Syed shows in this eye-opening book, the answer is rooted in human psychology and organizational culture. Syed argues that the most important determinant of success in any field is an acknowledgment of failure and a willingness to engage with it. Yet most of us are stuck in a relationship with failure that impedes progress, halts innovation, and damages our careers and personal lives. We rarely acknowledge or learn from failure—even though we often claim the opposite. We think we have 20/20 hindsight, but our vision is usually fuzzy. Syed draws on a wide range of sources—from anthropology and psychology to history and complexity theory—to explore the subtle but predictable patterns of human error and our defensive responses to error. He also shares fascinating stories of individuals and organizations that have successfully embraced a black box approach to improvement, such as David Beckham, the Mercedes F1 team, and Dropbox.

The Black Box

The Black Box PDF Author: Michael Connelly
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1743435126
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
May 1992, and after four LAPD officers were acquitted after the savage beating of Rodney King, Los Angeles is ablaze. As looting and burning take over the city, law and order are swept away in a tidal wave of violence. But under threat of their lives, homicide detectives like Harry Bosch are still stubbornly trying to do their job. With no effective police presence on the streets, murder just got a whole lot easier--and investigating them got a whole lot harder. Escorted by national guard soldiers from murder scene to murder scene, Harry and his colleagues are only able to do the bare minimum in terms of collecting evidence. And for Harry that's not enough. When he finds the body of a female journalist executed in an alley, he cannot accept that he will never be able to bring her killer to justice, and her tragedy starts to eat into his soul. But then, twenty years later, Harry finds himself working in the Open Unsolved Unit, and suddenly the past comes back to haunt him once again, in a way he could never have imagined.

Opening the Black Box

Opening the Black Box PDF Author: Metin Gurcan
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1913118436
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
A scholarly analysis of the Turkish military in the 21st century by the Near East policy expert and author of What Went Wrong in Afghanistan. On July 15th, 2016, a faction within the Turkish Armed Forces attempted a coup d’état against sitting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Though the attempt was unsuccessful, the TAF would never be the same. In Opening the Black Box, former Turkish military advisor Metin Gurcan offers a rare look inside the TAF to examine how it has evolved in the 21stcentury. With twenty years of experience inside the Turkish military, both on the field and in the corridors of the Turkish General Staff, as well as extensive academic research, Gurcan provides two detailed snapshots of the TAF: one before July 15thand one after. Offering a complete view of this complex institution, Gurcan offers scholarly perspectives on the TAF as a security organization, a social institution and, in the case of career officers, a profession. Gurcan also examines the evolution of civilian-military relations in Turkey over the last decade with a specific focus on the impact of the July 15 Military Uprising on institutional identity.

Opening the Black Box of Cabinet-Level Politics

Opening the Black Box of Cabinet-Level Politics PDF Author: Sarah Sinram
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643911173
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
The book takes a look at social expenditure in affluent democracies in times of fiscal austerity. The study analyzes expenditure changes in nine social policy areas between 1980 - 2010, from an intra-cabinet perspective by considering the partisan affiliation of responsible spending ministers and effects of budgeting reforms. Thus, the analysis contributes to the question of whether parties or institutions matter.

Sound & Hearing

Sound & Hearing PDF Author: R. Duncan Luce
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1134775180
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
The major aim of this book is to introduce the ways in which scientists approach and think about a phenomenon -- hearing -- that intersects three quite different disciplines: the physics of sound sources and the propagation of sound through air and other materials, the anatomy and physiology of the transformation of the physical sound into neural activity in the brain, and the psychology of the perception we call hearing. Physics, biology, and psychology each play a role in understanding how and what we hear. The text evolved over the past decade in an attempt to convey something about scientific thinking, as evidenced in the domain of sounds and their perception, to students whose primary focus is not science. It does so using a minimum of mathematics (high school functions such as linear, logarithmic, sine, and power) without compromising scientific integrity. A significant enrichment is the availability of a compact disc (CD) containing over 20 examples of acoustic demonstrations referred to in the book. These demonstrations, which range from echo effects and filtered noise to categorical speech perception and total more than 45 minutes, are invaluable resources for making the text come alive.

University Rankings

University Rankings PDF Author: Jung Cheol Shin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400711166
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
This ground-breaking and exhaustive analysis of university ranking surveys scrutinizes their theoretical bases, methodological issues, societal impact, and policy implications, providing readers with a deep understanding of these controversial comparators. The authors propose that university rankings are misused by policymakers and institutional leaders alike. They assert that these interested parties overlook the highly problematic internal logic of ranking methodologies even as they obsess over the surveys’ assessment of their status. The result is that institutions suffer from short-termism, realigning their resources to maximize their relative rankings. While rankings are widely used in policy and academic discussions, this is the first book to explore the theoretical and methodological issues of ranking itself. It is a welcome contribution to an often highly charged debate. Far from showing how to manipulate the system, this collection of work by key researchers aims to enlighten interested parties.