Coming Out, Going Home

Despite the historical centrality of Western cities as sites of queer cultural settlement, larger global economic and political forces have vociferously shaped, dispersed, and altered dreams of mobility for gay Taiwanese millennials in the age of globalization. While Taiwanese gay millennials follow a seemingly universal “rural-to-urban,” “East-to-West” movement trajectory, this study also explicates local nuanced ramifications running against the common trend. Drawn upon five-year ethnographic studies in Taiwan, this study examines how parents could to some extent conform to societal pressures by co-creating a life narrative to the society. Parents/family appear to contribute to how participants' decision on spatial movement but gay male millennials with supportive parents are eventually “going home.” However, the concept of home is configured by multiple economic and social forces involving (1) the optimal distance with the biological family and (2) the proper performances of consumption policed and imposed by the gay community in the neoliberal Taiwanese society.

Breaking Physical Barriers With Mobile Technologies

Considering the growing popularity of mobile technologies and therefore social media tools, the idea of this study is not to promote or romanticise a social media tool but to explore the potential of social media for educational use by presenting a specific example. The study also aims to bring a deeper understanding of how mobile applications could be used to foster language education and consider their possible potential in education. Unlike the common trend investigating English vocabulary in the field, this study does not expose students to word lists but attempts to support the curriculum that students have to follow in their formal education. In this context, this chapter suggests an example of going beyond the physical constraint of language classroom by providing learners informal opportunities to practise English outside school in various contexts by using one of the most popular tools, namely WhatsApp.

Introduction: The Pursuit of “Integration” and “Robustness” in Japan’s Peacekeeping Policy

Here we will present two research questions: first, why did Japan suddenly discontinue a quarter-century history of troop contribution to United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (UNPKOs) in 2017; second, is there any possibility of resuming large-scale military deployment. Hypothetically, we will argue that Japan’s retreat from South Sudan in 2017 should be regarded not as the revival of old anti-militarism but as a recent tendency of reluctance among the Global North countries, concerning the personnel deployment to the UNPKOs. Since the start in 1992, Japan had deployed only the limited personnel contribution under the strict constitutional ban. To overcome this situation, Japan had tried to trace the global trends of “robustness” and “integration”: the former encourages more proactive use of arms for peacekeepers to remove obstacles for the UNPKOs, while the latter promotes peacebuilding-like military roles along with the cooperation with civilians. In the late 2010s, however, Japan could no longer accommodate the recent international trends, mainly due to the increasing insecurity in the UNPKOs today. Likewise, the other Global North countries had also become hesitant for the personnel contribution to the UNPKOs. We will argue that Japan’s retreat falls in the common trend among the Global North countries.

Revisiting Aguabuena Pottery-making Through Discontinuity

Discontinuity plays an important role in the social and material world of Aguabuena potters, a small rural community in the Colombian Andes. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the changes in modes of production and gender division of work during the last decades of the twentieth century and the fractures in space, memory, and materiality to address discontinuities in ceramic production. The wheel and its transformations are taken as an important factor of these processes. Against the common trend in the archaeology of Colombia to see pottery-making as a static craft, rooted in an indigenous past, this article aims to revisit ethnoarchaeological and ethnographic data to argue how cracks and gaps, besides empirical facts, can be seen as complex analytical lenses through which to embrace ruptures and less linear narratives.

Political Science in Central European Democracies Under Pressure

The chapter examines the challenges that six Central European Democracies (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) have faced in the development of political science during the last three decades. We argue that political science as a new social science has gone through many structural reforms: it has acquired a relatively well-institutionalised position, gained autonomy and managed to form its identity. Nevertheless, its position is endangered by the erosion of its legitimacy.In this chapter, we show that political science as a new social science in the Central and Eastern Europe region has acquired a relatively stable position. The discipline has gained autonomy and managed to form its own identity, and has shown a capacity to cope with several challenges that have arisen. However, some of the structural reforms, including the commodification of higher education and the proliferation of political science at universities and other teaching institutions, have recently undermined the stability it had previously gained, as it progressively suffers from a loss of public recognition. We argue that the oversimplified, technocratic approaches of governments in recent years have impaired the legitimacy of the social sciences, and of political science in particular. This common trend is observable in all of the selected countries, albeit with certain variations from one country to another.

Augmented Reality based Mobile Application for Energy Monitoring and IoT Device Control

IoT has become an integrated part of our lives changing ways in which we operate our everyday appliances. In addition to making our home appliances smart, it has become a common trend for companies to adopt industry 4.0, which uses various sensors to monitor the equipment, machinery, and the work environment. We often come across multiple brands which make smart appliances but each brand comes with its separate mobile application for the appliance's operation. This requires us to switch between Apps to control these appliances if we at all remember which App controls which appliance. We intend to solve these two major inconveniences by creating a single mobile application that can control all these appliances using Augmented Reality technology. All we have to do is point our camera at the appliance that we need to operate and the App will display control options in real-time AR. This paper produces five important contributions: 1) An AR-based mobile application to control IoT devices and monitor the environment. 2) Implementing the mobile application using Unity 3D engine and Vuforia SDK. 3) Integrating a commercially available IoT device with the mobile application. 4) Integrating custom-made hardware IoT device with mobile application. 5) Integrating this combination to make our industries and homes smarter Keywords:

Interventionism and Over-Time Causal Analysis in Social Sciences

The interventionist theory of causation has been advertised as an empirically informed and more nuanced approach to causality than the competing theories. However, previous literature has not yet analyzed the regression discontinuity (hereafter, RD) and the difference-in-differences (hereafter, DD) within an interventionist framework. In this paper, I point out several drawbacks of using the interventionist methodology for justifying the DD and RD designs. Nevertheless, I argue that the first step toward enhancing our understanding of the DD and RD designs from an interventionist perspective is to take advantage of the assumptions of common trend and continuity.

A Novel Learning-Based Binarization Scheme Selector for Swarm Algorithms Solving Combinatorial Problems

Currently, industry is undergoing an exponential increase in binary-based combinatorial problems. In this regard, metaheuristics have been a common trend in the field in order to design approaches to successfully solve them. Thus, a well-known strategy includes the employment of continuous swarm-based algorithms transformed to perform in binary environments. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach that contains discrete smartly adapted population-based strategies to efficiently tackle binary-based problems. The proposed approach employs a reinforcement learning technique, known as SARSA (State–Action–Reward–State–Action), in order to utilize knowledge based on the run time. In order to test the viability and competitiveness of our proposal, we compare discrete state-of-the-art algorithms smartly assisted by SARSA. Finally, we illustrate interesting results where the proposed hybrid outperforms other approaches, thus, providing a novel option to tackle these types of problems in industry.

A Novel Light Weight Approach For Identification of Psoriasis Affected Skin Lesion Using Deep Learning.

Psoriasis is a skin disorder which affects the people physically, mentally and emotionally. It is characterized as rough elevated scaly skin which is evident from surrounding skin area. There are various types of psoriasis which include plaque psoriasis, nail psoriasis, guttate psoriasis, inverse psoriasis, pustular psoriasis, erythrodermic psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. The common trend observed is that the people tend to face difficulties in differentiating and tracking the disorder which will worsen the situation of the affected skin. It is essential to keep track of the affected skin for the prognosis of the disorder. In this work, an attempt is made to identify the psoriasis affected area automatically using MobileNet machine learning model which will become an objective tool in accurate identification of the disorder which in turn helps in effective treatment of the disorder.