State as resource,mediator and performer: understanding the local and global politics of gold mining in Kyrgyzstan

The inability of the state to maintain security and the rule of law for the purposes of foreign direct investment and industrial production is often taken as a sign of its weakness. However, such judgments say little about the actual functions of the state for global extraction industries and local political forces which demand their share of the pie. Whilst coercive state power may have decreased since Kyrgyzstan became independent, more important is the fact that the state itself has been transformed under the ruptures of, on the one hand, economic and political liberalization and, on the other, the effects of so-called ‘revolutions' of 2005 and 2010 which led to the wholesale restructuring of national structures of clientelism. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Talas province, documentary sources and interviews with gold mining companies and state officials, the paper investigates the state's shifting roles with respect to Kyrgyzstan's gold mining sector. Firstly, it explores the state as a source of rents for officials who grant and rescind licences in exchange for formal and informal payments from foreign investors, often via offshore vehicles. Secondly, it considers the role of the state as mediator between foreign investors and their access to sites. Finally, it identifies the state as performer of its status as sovereign power despite its inability to prevent uprisings and actually guarantee the promised access to its territory.     

胃脘痛证候的聚类分析及因子分析研究

目的 采用聚类分析及因子分析的数据挖掘方法,对胃脘痛的中医临床证候及四诊信息进行研究。方法 收集640例755诊次胃脘痛病例,记录症状、舌象和脉象等临床资料,对临床资料进行聚类分析及因子分析。结果 胃脘痛临床证候可分为六类:脾胃虚寒、肝气犯胃、湿热中阻、脾胃气虚、痰湿内蕴、瘀血停胃,每一类证候对应贡献率不同的特异的四诊信息。结论 胃脘痛有特异的证候分类及四诊信息,通过数据挖掘方法深入研究,对胃脘痛的规范化诊断提供了有效的数据支持,能提高辨证准确性。     

Performing the ‘India Permitida’: The Counter-Gift of Indigenous Women Targeted by a Corporate Social Responsibility Programme (Chile)

Relying on ethnographic data, this article critically analyses the pro-mining position adopted in Chile's Atacama Region by a group of Diaguita women who benefited from a corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme to revive indigenous culture. While the desire to escape from poverty (salir adelante, moving forward) appears as the main reason for participating, the benefits generated a sense of indebtedness resulting in allegiance to the company. The investigation also shows how this programme played a part in building a scenario in which indigenous females perform subjects apparently more suited than men to the neoliberal and multiculturalist governmentality of the Chilean State, whose politics favours mining.     

A model for adoption of mobile banking services using classification and regression trees

The analysis and improvements of bank performance is a challenging issue for bank managers. Among various banking services, mobile banking is one of the most risky fields that is prone to customer resistance. Mobile banking is a form of banking transaction carried out via a mobile phone. Mobile banking allows bank customers to check their account balances and perform credit card transaction, as well as provide information on the latest transaction made by customers. This paper summarizes experiences and results of productively using knowledge discovery and data mining techniques in a large detail bank data. Data mining is the process of extracting patterns from data. We review prior literature on mobile payments, analyze the various factors that impact mobile payment services markets, and suggest directions for future research in this risk management field. Our research work demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of data mining in analysis of retailing bank performance. We use classification and regression tree learning algorithm for proposing a customer adoption model of mobile banking according to some personal characteristics of customers.     

Using Cluster Analysis and ICP‐MS to Identify Groups of Ecstasy Tablets in Sao Paulo State,Brazil

The variations found in the elemental composition in ecstasy samples result in spectral profiles with useful information for data analysis, and cluster analysis of these profiles can help uncover different categories of the drug. We provide a cluster analysis of ecstasy tablets based on their elemental composition. Twenty‐five elements were determined by ICP‐MS in tablets apprehended by Sao Paulo's State Police, Brazil. We employ the K‐means clustering algorithm along with C4.5 decision tree to help us interpret the clustering results. We found a better number of two clusters within the data, which can refer to the approximated number of sources of the drug which supply the cities of seizures. The C4.5 model was capable of differentiating the ecstasy samples from the two clusters with high prediction accuracy using the leave‐one‐out cross‐validation. The model used only Nd, Ni, and Pb concentration values in the classification of the samples.     

iCLIC Data Mining and Data Sharing workshop: The present and future of data mining and data sharing in the EU

Held at Southampton University's Highfield campus and hosted by iCLIC, an interdisciplinary core on Law, the Internet and Culture, the Data Mining and Data Sharing workshop brought together attendees and speakers from industry, government, academia and a range of disciplines alike. The workshop comprised two sessions, each with a keynote and an associated panel. The first session was chaired by Eleonora Rosati and dealt with copyright and database rights, data mining and data sharing. The second session, chaired by Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, focussed on data protection, data mining and data sharing. The following report covers both sessions, associated panel discussions and the subsequent question and answer sessions.     

Bioinformatics and genetic privacy: The impact of the Personal Data Protection Act 2010

Bioinformatics refers to the practise of creation and management of genetic data using computational and statistical techniques. In Malaysia, data obtained from genomic studies, particularly for the purpose of disease identification produces a tremendous amount of information related to molecular biology. These data are created from DNA samples obtained from diagnostic and research purposes in genomic research institutes in Malaysia. As these data are processed, stored, managed and profiled using computer applications, an issue arises as to whether the principles of personal data privacy would be applicable to these activities. This paper commences with an illustration of the salient features of the Personal Data Protection Act 2010. The second part analyses the impact of the newly passed Personal Data Protection Act 2010 on the collection of DNA sample, the processing of data obtained from it and the profiling of such data. The third part of the paper considers whether the various personal data protection principles are applicable to the act of DNA profiling and the creation of bioinformatics.     

Author gender identification from text

Text is still the most prevalent Internet media type. Examples of this include popular social networking applications such as Twitter, Craigslist, Facebook, etc. Other web applications such as e-mail, blog, chat rooms, etc. are also mostly text based. A question we address in this paper that deals with text based Internet forensics is the following: given a short text document, can we identify if the author is a man or a woman? This question is motivated by recent events where people faked their gender on the Internet. Note that this is different from the authorship attribution problem.In this paper we investigate author gender identification for short length, multi-genre, content-free text, such as the ones found in many Internet applications. Fundamental questions we ask are: do men and women inherently use different classes of language styles? If this is true, what are good linguistic features that indicate gender? Based on research in human psychology, we propose 545 psycho-linguistic and gender-preferential cues along with stylometric features to build the feature space for this identification problem. Note that identifying the correct set of features that indicate gender is an open research problem. Three machine learning algorithms (support vector machine, Bayesian logistic regression and AdaBoost decision tree) are then designed for gender identification based on the proposed features. Extensive experiments on large text corpora (Reuters Corpus Volume 1 newsgroup data and Enron e-mail data) indicate an accuracy up to 85.1% in identifying the gender. Experiments also indicate that function words, word-based features and structural features are significant gender discriminators.     

Beyond the Blame Game: Political Strategies for State Funding Reform

There is growing concern that intergovernmental financial relations in the Australian federation are becoming increasingly acrimonious and dysfunctional. This paper argues that it is necessary to analyse State funding as a whole, including the critical relationship between State‐level taxation and its reform and the broader Commonwealth Grants Commission regime, if we are to establish a system of State funding which is financially sustainable, promotes economic efficiency and is broadly congruent with established norms of Australian federalism. Above all, based on international experience, we argue Commonwealth leadership is required to achieve this goal. We conclude with a case study concerning resource taxation which demonstrates how the Commonwealth could provide leadership using a ‘bundled’ approach to policy reform. It is argued that such an approach has the potential to alleviate wider intergovernmental conflicts which currently afflict Australian federalism.     

Policy Change and Industry Associability: The Australian Mining Sector

In this paper we use evidence from the recent trajectories of mining industry associations in the Australian federation to argue for the significance of institutional explanations for the formation and maintenance of interest groups. We argue that the recent lack of consultation by the Commonwealth government with the Minerals Council of Australia over resources rent taxation proposals reflected a weakness that resulted from the shifting basis of associability stemming from institutional changes.