Working the Systemoffers key insights into the politics of the everyday in twenty-first-century dominant party and neo-authoritarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere. Detailing the many ways ordinary ...Angolans fashion their relationships with the system-an emic notion of their current political and socioeconomic environment-Jon Schubert explores what it means and how it feels to be part of the contemporary Angolan polity.
Schubert finds that for many ordinary Angolans, the benefits of the post-conflict "New Angola," flush with oil wealth and in the midst of a construction boom, are few. The majority of the inhabitants of the capital, Luanda, struggle to make ends meet and live on under $2.00 per day. The "New Angola" as promoted by the ruling MPLA, Schubert contends, is an essentially urban, upwardly mobile, and aspirational project, premised on the acceptance of the regime's political and economic dominance by its citizens. In the first ethnography of Angola to be published since the end of that country's twenty-seven years of intermittent violent internal conflict in 2002, Schubert traces how Angolans may question and resist the system within an atmosphere of apparent compliance. Working the System will appeal to anthropologists and political scientists, urban sociologists, and scholars of African studies.
The learning-based super-resolution reconstruction method inputs a low-resolution image into a network, and learns a non-linear mapping relationship between low-resolution and high-resolution through ...the network. In this study, the multi-scale super-resolution reconstruction network is used to fuse the effective features of different scale images, and the non-linear mapping between low resolution and high resolution is studied from coarse to fine to realise the end-to-end super-resolution reconstruction task. The loss of some features of the low-resolution image will negatively affect the quality of the reconstructed image. To solve the problem of incomplete image features in low-resolution, this study adopts the multi-scale super-resolution reconstruction method based on guided image filtering. The high-resolution image reconstructed by the multi-scale super-resolution network and the real high-resolution image are merged by the guide image filter to generate a new image, and the newly generated image is used for secondary training of the multi-scale super-resolution reconstruction network. The newly generated image effectively compensates for the details and texture information lost in the low-resolution image, thereby improving the effect of the super-resolution reconstructed image.Compared with the existing super-resolution reconstruction scheme, the accuracy and speed of super-resolution reconstruction are improved.
What we owe Iraq Feldman, Noah
2004., 20090110, 2009, 2004, 2005-01-01, 20040101
eBook
America is up to its neck in nation building--but the public debate, focused on getting the troops home, devotes little attention to why we are building a new Iraqi nation, what success would look ...like, or what principles should guide us. What We Owe Iraq sets out to shift the terms of the debate, acknowledging that we are nation building to protect ourselves while demanding that we put the interests of the people being governed--whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, or elsewhere--ahead of our own when we exercise power over them. Noah Feldman argues that to prevent nation building from turning into a paternalistic, colonialist charade, we urgently need a new, humbler approach. Nation builders should focus on providing security, without arrogantly claiming any special expertise in how successful nation-states should be made. Drawing on his personal experiences in Iraq as a constitutional adviser, Feldman offers enduring insights into the power dynamics between the American occupiers and the Iraqis, and tackles issues such as Iraqi elections, the prospect of successful democratization, and the way home.
Building the Nationdraws from foreign-policy reports and interviews with U.S. military officers to investigate recent U.S.-led efforts to "nation-build" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Heather Selma Gregg ...argues that efforts to nation-build in both countries mistakenly focused more on what should be called state-building, or how to establish a government, rule of law, security forces, and a viable economy. Considerably less attention was paid to what mighttrulybe called nation-building-the process of developing a sense of shared identity, purpose, and destiny among a population within a state's borders and popular support for the state and its government.According to Gregg, efforts to stabilize states in the modern world require two key factors largely overlooked in Iraq and Afghanistan: popular involvement in the process of rebuilding the state that gives the population ownership of the process and its results and efforts to foster and strengthen national unity. Gregg offers a hypothetical look at how the United States and its allies could have used a population-centric approach to build viable states in Iraq and Afghanistan, focusing on initiatives that would have given the population buy-in and agency. Moving forward, Gregg proposes a six-step program for state and nation-building in the twenty-first century, stressing that these efforts are as much abouthowstate-building is done as they are about specific goals or programs.
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