Doing Queer in the Everyday of Academia: Reflections on Queering a Conference in International Law

The pioneering 1990s movement in critical theory has generated path-breaking scholarship seeking to queer law. Efforts to queer international law have produced important research uncovering the role of international law as a performative discourse and as a transnational governance framework reproducing gendered and sexual hegemonies. However, these efforts have done very little to destabilize the structures and workings of the very site where international law is theorized and taught: the university. Queering international law has mostly entailed looking at how the state, international organizations, international lawyers, scholars, and civil society produce or resist the heteronormative matrix, “that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized.” But what about the role of the university and its everyday routines––themselves byproducts of the aforementioned matrix––in reproducing and/or resisting (gendered) hierarchies and exclusions? We have raised this question as young scholars involved in organizing a week-long event on queer methods in international legal scholarship. The present essay is a first attempt at grappling with what the queering of an academic conference in international law meant for us, and for the university itself. It echoes a recent trend in scholarship on queer pedagogies, which, however, remain mostly silent on practices of scientific exchange. By reflecting on our efforts to queer a workshop in the field of international law, we also hope to inspire others to pursue their own queer processes of knowledge production.

Farmers’ Perception towards Transformation of Rice-based Cropping System intoTea Garden

Transformation of agricultural lands into non-farm lands or plantations has got tremendousecological chaos and ripples. Northern part of West Bengal is undergoing rapid changes inrural areas where new opportunities are emerging in the form of demand-driven and market-driven agriculture. Due to persistent low returns from traditional rice cultivation, thetransformation of paddy fields into tea gardens has been a recent trend for this part ofWest Bengal. The present study has been conducted by selecting purposively three blocksfrom Alipurduar district and sixty respondents through random sampling, those who havealready transformed their crop field into tea gardens from these blocks. The farmers’perception towards transformation is taken as dependent variable along with a score offourteen independent variables. The responses are collected through a structured interviewschedule. The study envisaged that the farmers’ education level, number of family membersengaged in the garden, their economic motivation, sources of information, risk orientationbehaviour and distance from the tea processing factory showed significant contributiontowards the transformation behaviour. The future impact of such transformation on theecological dynamics in terms of livelihood, biodiversity restoration and ecological resiliencecan be brought under policy frameworks.

Stock Prediction Model Using TensorFlow

In Stock Market Prediction, the aim is to predict the future value of the financial stocks of a company. The recent trend available in market prediction technologies is that the use of machine learning that makes predictions on the basis of values of current stock exchange indices by training on their previous values. Machine learning itself employs completely different models to create prediction easier and authentic. The paper focuses on the use of Regression and LSTM based Machine learning to predict stock values. Considering the factors are open, close, low, high and volume. Keywords: Stock Prediction, Machine Learning, Data Visualization, Yahoo Finance Dataset

How Would You Prescribe the Dialysate Sodium Concentration for Your Patients?

Low sodium dialysate was commonly used in the early year of hemodialysis to enhance diffusive sodium removal beyond its convective removal by ultrafiltration. However, disequilibrium syndrome was common, particularly when dialysis sessions were reduced to 4 h. The recent trend of lowering the DNa from the most common level of 140 mEq/L has been associated with intradialytic hypotension and increased risk of hospitalization and mortality. Higher DNa also has disadvantages, such as higher blood pressure and greater interdialytic weight gain, likely due to increased thirst. My assessment of the evidence leads me to choose DNa at the 140 level for most patients and to avoid DNa below 138. Patients with intradialytic symptoms may benefit from DNa 142 mEq/L, if they can avoid excessive fluid weight gains.

Profiling Attached Residents in an Urban Community in the U.S.: An Empirical Study of Social–Landscape Interactions within a Park

Community attachment has been studied predominantly in terms of the social dimensions of community life, which explains what makes residents feel connected to a locality. Following a more recent trend within the community attachment literature, this study examined the role of communities’ physical dimensions in fostering sentiments of rootedness and connections to communities. More specifically, the study sought to better understand the role that urban parks play in predicting community attachment using a discriminant analysis technique to profile attached residents. We selected Discovery Green Park in Houston, Texas, as the study site, where we administered 606 total surveys to park visitors inquiring about their interactions with the park itself, emotional connections to it, and social interactions within the park. We found that strongly attached residents tend to be older, have a greater reliance on the park service and programs, and have meaningful interactions with new people in the park and frequently visit the park in groups to socialize and relax. Additionally, those who are strongly attached to the community attribute greater symbolic meanings to Discovery Green and more strongly identify with the park. The profile of residents attached to the community, given their interactions with the park and its visitors, provides important knowledge to both park managers and community leaders; they can use this information to create conditions, fostering more strongly attached residents who tend to be active agents of positive change in the community.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns for Malls Using a Novel Interpretable Machine Learning Model

We develop a novel interpretable machine learning model, GANNM, and use newly available data to evaluate how different types of marketing campaigns and budget allocations influence malls’ customer traffic. We observe that the response curves that measure the impact of campaign budget on customer traffic differ for different categories of campaigns, with sales incentives or experience incentives, during peak periods, off-peak periods, or online promotion periods. Based on such accurate response curves from GANNM, the optimized budget allocation is estimated to yield a 11.2% increase in customer traffic compared with the original allocation. Our findings provide novel insights on managing mall campaigns. Mall managers should increase marketing spending to areas that were likely overlooked before and avoid over-crowding budget to campaigns during times with high levels of competition and are likely already over-marketed. We provide empirical evidence showing that the recent trend of employing novel approaches for enhancing customer experience in physical stores can effectively encourage customers to visit malls. Furthermore, we show that online promotions could also create opportunities for offline businesses—investing in campaigns in the major online promotion periods could significantly increase customer traffic for malls, given sufficient investment in the campaigns to raise customer awareness.

Global Warming Signals in Brazil and its Macro-Regions - Trend Analysis of Distributional Characteristics Characteristics

The aim of this research is to study global warming signals across Brazil. This investigation uses approximately 60 years of daily temperature data set and applies a recent trend test proposed by Rivas and Gonzalo (2020) which analyses not only the average but also different distributional characteristics. Besides, the test provides robust results for both I(0) and I(1) processes. We found significant trends in almost all characteristics in the analysis of the whole country. The mean and the maximum are increasing over time and the dispersion measures indicate decreasing trends. For the region analysis, we found out that, apart from the South, which does not appear to be drastically affected by global warming, the other regions present clear signs of global warming.

The Unstable Voting Behaviour: Tracing of the Voting Behaviour in Indonesia Post-Reformasi Era

Article aimed to analyses about construction of voting behavior in Indonesia election implementation. It urge and significant to elaborate and scrutinize political preferential which became base foundation to elect and submit their vote. There are two prominent factor can be main tools to covering voting behavior trend In Indonesia. Firstly, figures presumably primary sources to mention constructing public voting behavior. In Indonesia post authoritarian era, democracy has been suspended due to emergence of strong figure. This become ironic in implementation of democracy when hijacked oligarchic power that still persist and insist their resources in recent era. Secondly, analyzing of voting behavior in Indonesia has been swiftly in every election. It’s important to note that main character of voting behavior is swing voters dominated by young residents. Therefore, voting behavior trend fluctuated depending on issue and media news, become main consideration public to elect and submit their vote. In addition to both factor, emergence of political broker in recent election has indicated urgent needs to bridging voter and candidate in order to more engage. Those three factor will be primary focus to be elaborated in this paper, how recent trend in voting behavior in Indonesia and its impact to election event.AbstrakArtikel ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis konstruksi perilaku memilih dalam pemilu Indonesia. Isu ini menjadi penting dan siginifikan dalam melihat pola preferensi memilih ketika akan mencontreng kertas suara. Temuan dalam riset ini memuat dua faktor penting yang menjadi basis politik perilaku memilih Indonesia. Pertama, kekuatan personal seorang elite agaknya menjadi faktor penting dalam membaca perilaku memilih tersebut. Hal ini dikarenakan kondisi demokrasi Indonesia yang masih terbajak oleh kekuatan oligarki yang masih cukup kuat. Kedua, masih adanya masa pemilih mengambang, utamanya kalangan muda dan terdidik. Hal tersebut dikarenakan perilaku politik mereka masih dipengaruhi adanya isu dan kepentingan. Di luar dari kedua faktor tersebut, munculnya broker politik dan uang politik menjadi faktor yang tidak bisa terelakan dalam konstruksi perilaku memilih di Indonesia paskareformasi.

Trend and dynamics of card payment system in India

Payment system in India has undergone a dramatic change in recent years. The payment through cards, using both debit and credit cards, is one of the early innovations in the modern payment system in the country. Several intermediaries are involved in the effective functioning of card payment mechanism. As a result, the card payment infrastructure has grown remarkably well across India. The volume of payments made through these devices as well as the value of card payments increased rapidly in the last two decades. Among the commercial banks, the State Bank of India dominates in the maintenance of ATM infrastructure, the issue of cards and in the volume and value of card transaction. The private sector banks dominate in the installation of POS terminals and HDFC bank tops in the POS credit card transaction. However, the recent trend shows that the transaction through cards as a percentage of total retail electronic payments has been declining in India, as other retail payments platforms have become popular.