scholarly journals The Material Conditions of Platforms: Monopolization Through Decentralization

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630512097163
Author(s):  
Tobias Blanke ◽  
Jennifer Pybus
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Source Code ◽  
Economic Dynamics ◽  
Digital Platform ◽  
Mobile Ecosystem ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Technical Integration

In this article, we add research on technical integration and dependency to the theories of platformization. Our research seeks to understand how platforms have been able to technically integrate themselves into the fabric of the mobile ecosystem, transforming the economic dynamics that allow these largely enclosed entities to compete. We therefore want to consider platforms as service assemblages to account for the material ways in which they have decomposed and recomposed themselves for developers, enabling them to shift the economic dynamics of competition and monopolization in their favor. This article will argue that this shift in the formation of platform monopolies is being brought about by the decentralization of these services, leading to an overall technical integration of the largest digital platform such as Facebook and Google into the source code of almost all apps. We present new digital methodologies to surface these relations and material conditions of platforms. These methodologies offer us a whole new toolkit to investigate how decentralized services depend on each other and how new power relations are formed.

scholarly journals Bourdieusian Reading of Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Pegah Marandi ◽  
Alireza Anushiravani
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Caryl Churchill ◽  
The Social ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Material Conditions

<p>Caryl Churchill is one of the most widely performed female dramatists in contemporary British theatre. She is arguably the most successful and best-known socialist-feminist playwright to have merged from Second Wave feminism. Her plays have been performed all over the world. In her materialist plays, she shows the matters of culture, education, power, politics, and myth. Her oeuvre hovers over the material conditions which testify to the power relations within society at a given time in history. Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, and theorist in cultural studies points out the dynamics of power relations in social life throughout ideas such as capital, field, habitus, symbolic violence, theories concerned with class and culture. The overarching concern for the purpose of this essay is to analyse Churchill’s <em>Serious Money </em>(1987) in the light of Bourdieu’s sociological concepts. In accordance with Bourdieu, there exist various kinds of capital (cultural, economic, social, and symbolic) which distinguish every individual’s status both in society and in relation to other individuals. The present study attempts to show that in <em>Serious Money</em>, the capital especially economic capital forms the foundation of social life and dictates one’s position within the social order and respectively, determining the power discourse in the matrix of social life.</p>

scholarly journals mixtureS: a novel tool for bacterial strain genome reconstruction from reads

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Li ◽  
Haiyan Hu ◽  
Xiaoman Li
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Samples ◽  
De Novo ◽  
Source Code ◽  
Supplementary Information ◽  
Supplementary Data ◽  
Bacterial Strains ◽  
Metagenomic Sample ◽  
Almost All ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Strain Genome

Abstract Motivation It is essential to study bacterial strains in environmental samples. Existing methods and tools often depend on known strains or known variations, cannot work on individual samples, not reliable, or not easy to use, etc. It is thus important to develop more user-friendly tools that can identify bacterial strains more accurately. Results We developed a new tool called mixtureS that can de novo identify bacterial strains from shotgun reads of a clonal or metagenomic sample, without prior knowledge about the strains and their variations. Tested on 243 simulated datasets and 195 experimental datasets, mixtureS reliably identified the strains, their numbers and their abundance. Compared with three tools, mixtureS showed better performance in almost all simulated datasets and the vast majority of experimental datasets. Availability and implementation The source code and tool mixtureS is available at http://www.cs.ucf.edu/˜xiaoman/mixtureS/. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

scholarly journals The Role and Possibilities of Hungarian Narrow-Gauge Railways in Tourism

2021 ◽  
pp. 132-139
Author(s):  
Péter Pavletits ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Tourist Attraction ◽  
Extra Effort ◽  
Points Of Interest ◽  
Tourism Potential ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Basic Infrastructure ◽  
Almost All

Since the 1980’s almost all of the the Hungarian narrow-gauge railway lines made a complete change of function. In the following decade with a few exceptions the freight was completely abolished and replaced by tourism. We need to address several factors if we want to determine the tourism potential of a particular narrow-gauge railway. One of these is accessibility, which shows what extra effort a tourist needs to make to get to a particular attraction. It is not enough just to look at accessibility, we also need to look how narrow-gauge railways can get involved in the tourism system. In a tourism approach we can examine points of interest from several perspectives. The interdependent material conditions of tourism include basic infrastructure, attraction and tourism infrastructure. The basic infrastructure in tourism means the existence of conditions that are essential to see the attraction. Several narrow-gauge railways also play a role in the basic infrastructure, however, their most significant role is the dynamic infrastructure. The narrow-gauge railway transports tourists to the tourist attraction, or due to its nature, attracts tourists. Most of the Hungarian narrow-gauge railway fall into the category of dynamic infrastructure. Attraction is difficult to define, because there are a lot of subjective elements, but most of the Hungarian narrow-gauge railways we can definitely highlight and call as real attractions. It is important to talk about seasonality. Not all of them offer the same experience in summer as in winter, they are not the same attractions in all seasons. By tourist milieu we mean the attraction of the destination, the totality of the experiences gained there.

scholarly journals Genealogi Wabah dalam Cerita-cerita Dewi Sekardadu

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-90
Author(s):  
Mashuri Mashuri ◽  
Jauharoti Alfin
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Almost All

This research traces the genealogy of the wabah (pandemic) in Dewi Sekardadu's stories. Dewi Sekardadu’s story in this study is taken from the Javanese writing tradition. This paper aim to describe the origin of the wabah in the story (Dewi Sekardadu) and the power relations of knowledge in Java from the point of view of origin and meaning. The theory used is triangulation folklore theory, comparative literature and archo-genealogy of knowledge. The results were (1) almost all Javanese chronicles or chronicles always included Dewi Sekardadu's story because it was always mentioned in the stories of Maulana Ishak or Seh Wali Lanang and Sunan Giri; (2) the position and causes of the wabah in Dewi Sekardadu's storyline in the old writing tradition varied depending on the writing period; and (3) the genealogy of the wabah in Dewi Sekardadu's stories can be traced to several previous Javanese sources or literature, namely the stories of prophets, guardians, and pre-Islamic treasures in Java.

Futures for Literary Studies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Jay
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
Institutional Sustainability ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Impact

The future of literary studies will be shaped by new and emerging trends in scholarly, critical, and theoretical work, by changes in the material conditions that enable that work, and, perhaps most importantly, by how the institutions within which it functions respond to recent changes in higher education that increasingly threaten the viability of almost all humanities disciplines. The material conditions that shape work in literary studies have changed dramatically in recent decades. The impact of digital technology has been nothing short of transformative, and the changes it has introduced are bound to continue to reshape the field. At the same time, the expansion of the canon, the transnationalizing of literary studies, the revitalization of narratological, formalist, and aesthetic criticism, the emergence of new interdisciplinary fields including the study of sexuality and gender, ecocriticism, affect theory, and disability studies, promise to continue to exert influence in the coming decades. The future from these perspectives looks promising. At the same time, however, the institutional sustainability of literary studies has come under threat as the liberal arts model of higher education has increasingly given way to a stress in higher education on vocational training in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines, which has worked to undercut the value and the attraction of literary studies. How the field responds to these changes in the coming decade will be crucial to determining its future viability.

Applied AI matters: AI4Code

AI Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-20
Author(s):  
Kartik Talamadupula
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Real World ◽  
Probabilistic Model ◽  
Source Code ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Recent Attention

The marriage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to problems surrounding the generation, maintenance, and use of source code has come to the fore in recent years as an important AI application area1. A large chunk of this recent attention can be attributed to contemporaneous advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and sub-fields. The naturalness hypothesis, which states that "software is a form of human communication" and that code exhibits patterns that are similar to (human) natural languages (Devanbu, 2015; Hindle, Barr, Gabel, Su, & Devanbu, 2016), has allowed for the application of many of these NLP advances to code-centric usecases. This development has contributed to a spate of work in the community --- much of it captured in a survey by Allamanis, Barr, Devanbu, and Sutton (2018) that focuses on classifying these approaches by the type of probabilistic model applied to source code. This increase in the variety of AI techniques applied to source code has found various manifestations in the industry at large. Code and software form the backbone that underpins almost all modern technical advancements: it is thus natural that breakthroughs in this area should reflect in the emergence of real world deployments.

scholarly journals Recommendation Based on Java Code Analysis and Search

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shanqing Fu ◽  
Bing Li ◽  
Yi Cai ◽  
Zhuang Liu ◽  
Junxia Guo
Keyword(s):  
Recommendation System ◽  
Source Code ◽  
Auxiliary Function ◽  
Code Analysis ◽  
Annotation Information ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Integrated Development Environments ◽  
Full Text Retrieval ◽  
Function Code ◽  
Almost All

How to improve the efficiency and quality of software development is an ongoing concern in the field of software engineering. As a useful auxiliary function, code recommendation is embedded in almost all integrated development environments. There has been increasing interest and research in the area of code recommendation in recent years due to its convenience for project development. Existing research has made a lot of contributions to this field, but there are still many issues that need further study. One of the key points is the low success rate of recommendation. Focusing on this problem, this paper proposes a method to recommend Java source code after parsing massive amounts of source code information. We propose a new source code analysis algorithm for the scraped source code data. A source file is parsed into classes, methods, and attributes as recommendation objects. At the same time, the annotation information is bound to the annotated objects. Finally, the parsed information is indexed at the project, class, and method levels for code recommendations in a hierarchical recommendation manner. A code recommendation system is implemented by combining this with full-text retrieval technology for class library, class, and method level recommendation. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper has better performance in recommendation accuracy than existing code recommendation engines.

scholarly journals Critical Discourse Analysis of Technology-Based Rural Government System in Bengkalis Riau

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rijalul Fikri ◽  
Muhammad Faisal Amrillah ◽  
Budi Mulianto
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
The State ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Rural Government ◽  
Governing System ◽  
The Government ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Rural Program

The Government of Indonesia has formed a team to accelerate the implementation of the Electronic-Based Government System from the national government to the rural government. The main target is the empowerment of the rural government through a technology-based rural government system. By making an application for the rural government system, like ePlanning, eBudgeting, eProcurement, eAudit, etc. One of the areas that are intensely doing this, is the Bengkalis Regency Government, through the implementation of the Broadband Rural program, almost all rurals in Bengkalis Regency already have websites. The interesting question is does the rural have to understand technology? Does the rural have to implement a technology-based government system? Does the state forget that the rural and they community have a Self Governing System?. This will be answered by using discourse analysis. Because discourse believes that power relations in society influence and shape ways, how knowledge is created. The discourse in this paper is the implementation of a Technology-Based Government System, which is believed to be a tool that forms power relations in society through processes of defining, isolating, justifying. This paper then tries to express the state power represented in its efforts to implement a technology-based Rural government system.

scholarly journals A Study of Institutions in Dickens’s Bleak House as a Representation of Foucault’s Disciplinary Society

2016 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 53-61
Author(s):  
Mani Ghadamkheir ◽  
Mahboubeh Mahmoudzadeh
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Disciplinary Structure ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Poor Area ◽  
Almost All

This study employs Foucault's views on the strategies of power to analyze that the institutional world of Bleak House makes a disciplinary structure. The intrusion of these institutions in all strata of society in the novel, from the aristocratic Dedlocks to the poor area of Tom-All-Alone shapes a panoptic structure in which everyone is visible through a permanent and omniscient gaze. Under the matrix of various institutions almost all the characters in the novel, directly or indirectly, are trapped and engaged. This study shows the modernity of Dickens views on power relations in society and gives readers new maps to read Bleak House and new perspectives from which to view it.

scholarly journals Blockchain-based Multi-Party Authorization for Accessing IPFS Encrypted Data

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ammar Battah ◽  
Mohammad Madine ◽  
Hamad Alzaabi ◽  
Ibrar Yaqoob ◽  
Khaled Salah ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Source Code ◽  
File Systems ◽  
Smart Contracts ◽  
Encrypted Data ◽  
Shared Data ◽  
Smart Contract ◽  
Reputation Mechanisms ◽  
Encryption Algorithms ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Malicious Behaviors

Multi-party authorization (MPA) typically involves multiple parties to control and grant access to shared data. MPA is used to solve the insider’s attack problem by ensuring that a single authority or party is not acting alone. Currently, almost all existing implementations of MPA are centralized and fall short in providing logs and events related to provenance of granting permissions in a trusted, secure, immutable, auditable, and decentralized manner. Moreover, for sharing data, proxy re-encryption algorithms are often used to give secure access to encrypted shared data. These schemes and algorithms are also centralized and cannot be trusted. In this paper, we propose a fully decentralized blockchain-based solution in which MPA is implemented using Ethereum smart contracts, and proxy re-encryption algorithms (which are computationally expensive) are implemented using multiple oracles to give access to encrypted shared data stored on a public and decentralized storage platform, such as the Interplanetary File Systems (IPFS). The smart contracts help to validate results based on the majority of encrypted results determined by the oracles. For this, we incorporate reputation mechanisms in the proposed smart contracts to rate the oracles based on their malicious and non-malicious behaviors. We present algorithms along with their full implementation, testing, and validation details. We evaluate the proposed system in terms of security, cost, and generalization to show its reliability and practicality. We make the smart contract source code publicly available on Github.

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