scholarly journals Boris Johnson in hospital: a Chinese gaze at Western democracies in the COVID-19 pandemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 177 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Altman Yuzhu Peng ◽  
Ivy Shixin Zhang ◽  
James Cummings ◽  
Xiaoxiao Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Question Answering ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Original Data ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Community Question Answering ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Democratic Systems ◽  
The Uk

In this article, we examine Chinese assessments of Western democratic systems in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This research is based on an up-to-date case study of how Chinese Internet users discussed the UK Prime Minister – Boris Johnson’s infection with COVID-19 in late March and early April 2020. The research collected original data from the Chinese community question-answering (CQA) site – Zhihu. Using a mixed-method approach, consisting of content analysis (CA) and thematic analysis (TA), we show how Zhihu users evaluate the incident (1) as a way to express their sentiments towards Boris Johnson, (2) as a case to assess British politics and (3) as a vehicle for rationalizing their views on Western democratic systems in relation to China’s domestic politics. The research findings shed new light on a Chinese gaze at Western democratic systems in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

scholarly journals Data-Driven Campaigning in the 2015 United Kingdom General Election

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Anstead
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
The United States ◽  
General Election ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Use Of Data ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Depth Interviews

While we know something of data-driven campaigning practices in the United States, we know much less about the role of data in other national contexts. The 2015 United Kingdom General Election offers an important case study of how such practices are evolving and being deployed in a different setting. This article draws on thirty-one in-depth interviews with political practitioners involved in the use of data for six major UK parties and electoral regulators. These interviews are employed to explore the perceived importance of data in contemporary British campaigns, to understand the data-based campaign techniques being used by UK parties, and to assess how data-driven practices are interacting with the preexisting institutional context of British politics. Going beyond the specifics of the UK case, this study raises questions about the comparative, theoretical, and normative dimensions of data-driven politics.

Values and Significance: A case study uncovering the search for meaning among young people in Central and Eastern Europe

2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-63
Author(s):  
Sarah Dunlop
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Case Study Research ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Traditional Church ◽  
Living Space ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
The Uk

This paper will present a few of the results of qualitative, case study research conducted among students in six cities in Central and Eastern Europe. It will describe the use of images in interviews and how this enabled digging beyond cultural, customary religious belief to uncover a search for ultimate meaning and spirituality. A summary of the findings regarding the emerging values of the young people and their descriptions of what is significant to them in life will be related to Savage, Collins-Mayo and Mayo's research conducted in the UK, specifically to their theories of formative and transformative spirituality and the happy midi-narrative. The tension between a young person's actual situation and their dream about their ideal life will be discussed in terms of the research findings regarding the students' use of celebrity images in their living space. The young people's values, as they emerged from the research, will be contrasted with the values and practices of churches in this region, as seen through the young people's perceptions of traditional church and as articulated by local church leaders. The paper will include a short analysis of the current religious situation in former Soviet countries in light of the finding of the research..

scholarly journals Interactive Text Ranking with Bayesian Optimization: A Case Study on Community QA and Summarization

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 759-775
Author(s):  
Edwin Simpson ◽  
Yang Gao ◽  
Iryna Gurevych
Keyword(s):  
Question Answering ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Bayesian Optimization ◽  
Small Data ◽  
Large Space ◽  
Reward Function ◽  
Community Question Answering ◽  
Interactive Text ◽  
Text Ranking

For many NLP applications, such as question answering and summarization, the goal is to select the best solution from a large space of candidates to meet a particular user’s needs. To address the lack of user or task-specific training data, we propose an interactive text ranking approach that actively selects pairs of candidates, from which the user selects the best. Unlike previous strategies, which attempt to learn a ranking across the whole candidate space, our method uses Bayesian optimization to focus the user’s labeling effort on high quality candidates and integrate prior knowledge to cope better with small data scenarios. We apply our method to community question answering (cQA) and extractive multidocument summarization, finding that it significantly outperforms existing interactive approaches. We also show that the ranking function learned by our method is an effective reward function for reinforcement learning, which improves the state of the art for interactive summarization.

Domestic politics of Japan's foreign policy: a case study of the ratification of the non-proliferation treaty

1977 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 254-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Frankel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Political System ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
General Application ◽  
Simple Hypothesis ◽  
Democratic Systems

Although our theorizing about the making of foreign policy is meant to be of general application, it is based predominantly upon Western, often only United States practices. The purpose of this paper is to look in some depth into a case study of foreign policy-making in Japan in order to ascertain to what extent the analytical categories evolved in the West apply and what peculiarities of the Japanese political system need to be considered. More specifically, I shall test the simple hypothesis that in all ‘democratic’ systems1 the substance of the domestic processes shows great similarities while their forms greatly differ.

scholarly journals ACTSMLT: Automatic Classification of Text Summarization using Machine Learning Technique

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 5445-5457
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Question Answering ◽  
Multinomial Logistic Regression ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Retrieval Task ◽  
Text Data ◽  
Common Information ◽  
Community Question Answering ◽  
Internet Users

In today’s world, due to the steep rise in internet users, Community Question Answering (CQA) has attracted many research communities. In order to provide the correct and perfect answer to the user asked question from a given large collection of text data, understanding the question properly to suggest a precise answer is a challenging task. Therefore, Question Answering (QA) system is a challenging task than a common information retrieval task done by many search engines. In this paper, an automatic prediction of the quality of CQA answers is proposed. This is accomplished by using five well known machine learning algorithms. Usually, questions asked by the user are based on a topic or theme. We try to exploit this feature in our work by identifying the category of the question posted and further map with the corresponding question. Similarly, for the answers posted by the multiple user’s are processed as answer for category mapping. Here, the results show that for Question Classification (QA), Linear Support Vector Classification (LSVC) is found to be the best classifier and Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR) is the most suitable for Answer Classification (AC). The MS Macro dataset is used as the underlying dataset for retrieving and testing the question and answer classifiers. The Yahoo Answers are used as a golden reference during the testing throughout our experiments. Experiments results show that the proposed technique is efficient and outperforms Metzler and Kanungo’s (MK++) [1] while providing the best answer summary satisfying the user’s queries.

The Effects of Teaching Reflection Diaries on In-Service High School Teachers in Japan

Relay Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 80-99
Author(s):  
Naoya Shibata
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
High School Teachers ◽  
Illustrative Case ◽  
Teaching Beliefs ◽  
Experienced Teacher ◽  
Female Teachers ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Illustrative Case Study

Although teaching reflection diaries (TRDs) are prevalent tools for teacher training, TRDs are rarely used in Japanese secondary educational settings. In order to delve into the effects of TRDs on teaching development, this illustrative case study was conducted with two female teachers (one novice, and one experienced) at a Japanese private senior high school. The research findings demonstrated that both in-service teachers perceived TRDs as beneficial tools for understanding their strengths and weaknesses. TRDs and class observations illustrated that the novice teacher raised their self-confidence in teaching and gradually changed their teaching activities. On the other hand, the experienced teacher held firm teaching beliefs based on their successful teaching experiences and were sometimes less willing to experiment with different approaches. However, they changed their teaching approaches when they lost balance between their class preparation and other duties. Accordingly, although teachers’ firm beliefs and successful experiences may sometimes become possible hindrances from using TRDs effectively, TRDs can be useful tools to train and help teachers realise their strengths and weaknesses.

Neither Victors nor Victims

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Whetham
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
High Street ◽  
National Survival ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Realistic Goal

Between 2007 and 2011, Wootton Bassett, a small Wiltshire town in the UK, became the focus of national attention as its residents responded to the regular repatriations of dead soldiers through its High Street. The town’s response came to symbolize the way that broader attitudes developed and changed over that period. As such, it is a fascinating case study in civil–military relations in the twenty-first century. Success may be the same as victory, but victory, at least as it has been traditionally understood, is not a realistic goal in many types of contemporary conflict. Discretionary wars—conflicts in which national survival is not an issue and even vital national interests may not be at stake—pose particular challenges for any government which does not explain why the cost being paid in blood and treasure is ‘worth it’.

The political economy of and practical policies for inclusive growth—a case study of Scotland

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Houston ◽  
Georgiana Varna ◽  
Iain Docherty
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Regional Governance ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
Inclusive Growth ◽  
Key Policy ◽  
Inclusive Governance ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Civic Institutions

Abstract The concept of ‘inclusive growth’ (IG) is discussed in a political economy framework. The article reports comparative analysis of economic and planning policy documents from Scotland, England and the UK and findings from expert workshops held in Scotland, which identify four key policy areas for ‘inclusive growth’: skills, transport and housing for young people; city-regional governance; childcare; and place-making. These policies share with the ‘Foundational Economy’ an emphasis on everyday infrastructure and services, but add an emphasis on inter-generational justice and stress the importance of community empowerment as much as re-municipalisation. Factors enabling IG policy development include: the necessary political powers; a unifying political discourse and civic institutions; and inclusive governance and participatory democracy.

scholarly journals Rain Erosion Maps for Wind Turbines Based on Geographical Locations: A Case Study in Ireland and Britain

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Pugh ◽  
M. M. Stack
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Meteorological Data ◽  
Turbine Blades ◽  
Weather Conditions ◽  
Annual Rainfall ◽  
Wind Turbine Blades ◽  
Weather Patterns ◽  
The Uk

AbstractErosion rates of wind turbine blades are not constant, and they depend on many external factors including meteorological differences relating to global weather patterns. In order to track the degradation of the turbine blades, it is important to analyse the distribution and change in weather conditions across the country. This case study addresses rainfall in Western Europe using the UK and Ireland data to create a relationship between the erosion rate of wind turbine blades and rainfall for both countries. In order to match the appropriate erosion data to the meteorological data, 2 months of the annual rainfall were chosen, and the differences were analysed. The month of highest rain, January and month of least rain, May were selected for the study. The two variables were then combined with other data including hailstorm events and locations of wind turbine farms to create a general overview of erosion with relation to wind turbine blades.

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