“Emancipated” African Americans

This chapter looks at the ways in which settler colonial interests have shaped social relations and governmental policies since the abolition of slavery. Following the Civil War, the gains of the Reconstruction era were quickly rolled back as formerly enslaved persons were geographically contained, subjected to social violence and terror, criminalized, and forced into convict labor. A pervasive system of apartheid was implemented and not legally dismantled until the 1950s, and racial segregation remains pervasive today. Despite the changes brought by the civil rights era, with deindustrialization African Americans have increasingly been viewed as a “surplus” population. One result has been the pervasive policing of Black communities and mass incarceration.

CLASSY: A Conversational Aware Suggestion System

Over the last few years, pervasive systems have seen some interesting development. Nevertheless, human–human interaction can also take advantage of those systems by using their ability to perceive the surrounding environment. In this work, we have developed a pervasive system – named CLASSY – that is aware of the conversational context and suggests documents potentially useful to the users based on an Information Retrieval system, and proposed a new scoring approach that uses semantics and distance based on proximity data in order to classify the relationship between tokens.

Definition of a Pervasive Architecture for a Central Monitoring of Homecare Systems

Every year the queues in hospitals publics and privates grows due to, among others, the increasing of the world population and the delay in the patients service. This is a serious problem faced by administrators of hospitals, which believe that it is increasingly difficult to offer a service of quality to those who search for them. One of the ways to decrease these queues is through the development of homecare systems that allow the patient to receive the clinic treatment directly in his house. The development of these kinds of systems would help to decrease the queues and consequently, would improve the attendance of those who goes to the hospitals looking for assistance. Considering this, this work has as main purpose to present the architecture modeling of a pervasive system to be applied in homecare environments. The pervasive systems developed from this modeling aim to improve the services provided by healthcare professionals in the treatment of patients that are located in their houses. The architecture proposed by the methodology uses concepts of pervasive computing to provide access to information any- time and wherever the user is, once that a homecare environment has a high level of dynamicity. The knowledge representation of the homecare environment needed in the modeling of the architecture is made through ontologies due to the possibility of reuse of the information stored, as well as the interoperability of information among different computational devices. To validate the proposed methodology, we present two use cases, which are also used to demonstrate the workflow of the pervasive system of homecare.

Fracturing Communities: Aid Distribution in a Palestinian Refugee Camp

This article examines the practices of humanitarian aid distribution from the perspective of aid recipients rather than providers through an immersion in the daily home life of Palestinian residents of Nahr al-Barid refugee camp (north Lebanon) in 2011. It argues that in the name of distributing aid fairly, humanitarian aid providers put in place a pervasive system of surveillance to monitor, evaluate, and compare residents' misery levels by relying on locally recruited aid workers. This regime of visibility was designed to be one directional; NGOs never disclosed how much aid they had available, nor when or how it would be distributed. The inclusion of local aid workers in this opaque framework turned a process that relied on community and neighborhood ties into an impersonal machine that fostered doubt and suspicion and ultimately hindered the community's ability to engage in collective political action.