Hasil untuk "America"

Michelle Alexander

The subject that I intend to explore today is one that most Americans seem content to ignore. Conversations and debates about race-much less racial casteare frequently dismissed as yesterday's news, not relevant to the current era. Media pundits and more than a few politicians insist that we, as a nation, have finally "moved beyond race." We have entered into the era of "post-racialism," it is said, the promised land of colorblindness. Not just in America, but around the world, President Obama's election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America. This triumphant notion of post-racialism is, in my view, nothing more than fiction-a type of Orwellian doublespeak made no less sinister by virtue of the fact that the people saying it may actually believe it. Racial caste is not dead; it is alive and well in America. The mass incarceration of poor people of color in the United States amounts to a new caste system-one specifically tailored to the political, economic, and social challenges of our time. It is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. I am well aware that this kind of claim may be hard for many people to swallow. Particularly if you, yourself, have never spent time in prison or been labeled a felon, the claim may seem downright absurd. I, myself, rejected the notion that something akin to a racial caste system could be functioning in the United States more than a decade ago-something that I now deeply regret. I first encountered the idea of a new racial caste system in the mid-1990s when I was rushing to catch the bus in Oakland, California and a bright orange poster caught my eye. It screamed in large bold print: THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW. I recall pausing for a moment and skimming the text of the flyer. A radical group was holding a community meeting about police brutality, the new three-strikes law in California, the drug war, and the expansion of America's prison system. The meeting was being held at a small community church a few blocks away; it had seating capacity for no more than fifty people. I sighed and muttered to myself something like, "Yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in many ways, but it really doesn't help to make such absurd comparisons. People will just think you're crazy." I then crossed the street and hopped on the

Eric Foner

Lauren Berlant

In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City , Lauren Berlant focuses on the need to revitalize public life and political agency in the United States. Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, she addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution. By beaming light onto the idealized images and narratives about sex and citizenship that now dominate the U.S. public sphere, Berlant argues that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. She asks why the contemporary ideal of citizenship is measured by personal and private acts and values rather than civic acts, and the ideal citizen has become one who, paradoxically, cannot yet act as a citizen—epitomized by the American child and the American fetus. As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture. From the fantasy of the American dream to the lessons of Forrest Gump, Lisa Simpson to Queer Nation, the reactionary culture of imperilled privilege to the testimony of Anita Hill, Berlant charts the landscape of American politics and culture. She examines the consequences of a shrinking and privatized concept of citizenship on increasing class, racial, sexual, and gender animosity and explores the contradictions of a conservative politics that maintains the sacredness of privacy, the virtue of the free market, and the immorality of state overregulation—except when it comes to issues of intimacy. Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City is a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. As it opens a critical space for new theory of agency, its narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be American and to seek salvation in its promise.

Rafi Zahedi, Amin Zamani, Rahul Anilkumar

Large loads are expanding rapidly across North America, led by data centers, cryptocurrency mining, hydrogen production facilities, and heavy-duty charging stations. Each class presents distinct electrical characteristics, but data centers are drawing particular attention as AI deployment drives unprecedented capacity growth. Their scale, duty cycles, and converter-dominated interfaces introduce new challenges for transmission interconnections, especially regarding disturbance behavior, steady-state performance, and operational visibility. This paper reviews best practices for large-load interconnections across North America, synthesizing utility and system operator guidelines into a coherent set of technical requirements. The approach combines handbook and manual analysis with cross-utility comparisons and an outlook on European directions. The review highlights requirements on power quality, telemetry, commissioning tests, and protection coordination, while noting gaps in ride-through specifications, load-variation management, and post-disturbance recovery targets. Building on these findings, the paper proposes practical guidance for developers and utilities.

C. Clapperton

D. Hollinger

Carmen Bonfacio, Fernando Schapachnik, Fabio Porto

This survey explores the impact perceived by employers and employees of GenAI in their work activities in Brazil. Generative AI (GenAI) is gradually transforming Brazil workforce, particularly in micro and small businesses, though its adoption remains uneven. This survey examines the perceptions of employers and employees across five sectors: Sales, Customer Service, Graphic Design or Photography, Journalism or Content Production, and Software Development or Coding. The results are analyzed in light of six key dimensions of workforce impact. The findings reveal a mix of optimism, apprehension, and untapped potential in the integration of AI tools. This study serves as a foundation for developing inclusive strategies that maximize AI's benefits while safeguarding workers' rights. The IIA-LNCC supports open research and remains committed to shaping a future where technology and human potential progress together.

Guido Ivetta, Pietro Palombini, Sofía Martinelli et al.

The evaluation of societal biases in NLP models is critically hindered by a geo-cultural gap, This leaves regions such as Latin America severely underserved, making it impossible to adequately assess or mitigate the perpetuation of harmful regional stereotypes in language technologies. This paper presents LACES, a stereotype association dataset, for 15 Latin American countries. This dataset includes 4,789 stereotype associations manually created and annotated by 83 participants. The dataset was developed through targeted community partnerships across Latin America. Additionally, in this paper, we propose a novel adaptive data collection methodology that uniquely integrates the sourcing of new stereotype entries and the validation of existing data within a single, unified workflow. This approach results in a resource with more unique stereotypes than previous static collection methods, enabling a more efficient stereotype collection. The paper further supports the quality of LACES by demonstrating reduced efficacy of debiasing methods on this dataset in comparison to existing popular stereotype benchmarks.

Zhongtang Luo, Ethan Dickey

Competitive programming (CP) contests are often treated as interchangeable proxies for algorithmic skill, yet the extent to which results at lower contest tiers anticipate performance at higher tiers, and how closely any tier resembles the ubiquitous online-contest circuit, remains unclear. We analyze ten years (2015--2024) of International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) standings, comprising five long-running superregional championships (Africa \& Arab, Asia East, Asia West, North America, and Northern Eurasia), associated local regionals of North America and Northern Eurasia, and the World Finals. For 366 World Finalist teams (2021--2024) we augment the dataset with pre-contest Codeforces ratings. Pairwise rank alignment is measured with Kendall's $τ$. Overall, superregional ranks predict World Final ranks only moderately (weighted $τ=0.407$), but regional-to-superregional consistency varies widely: Northern Eurasia exhibits the strongest alignment ($τ=0.521$) while Asia West exhibits the weakest ($τ=0.188$). Internal consistency within a region can exceed its predictive value for Worlds -- e.g., Northern Eurasia and North America regionals vs. superregionals ($τ=0.666$ and $τ=0.577$, respectively). Codeforces ratings correlate more strongly with World Final results ($τ=0.596$) than any single ICPC tier, suggesting that high-frequency online contests capture decisive skill factors that many superregional sets miss. We argue that contest organizers can improve both fairness and pedagogical value by aligning problem style and selection rules with the formats that demonstrably differentiate teams, in particular the Northern-Eurasian model and well-curated online rounds. All data, scripts, and additional analyses are publicly released to facilitate replication and further study.

S. Bowles, H. Gintis

Pedro Azevedo, Emanuella Araújo, Gabriel Pierre et al.

Current datasets for vehicular applications are mostly collected in North America or Europe. Models trained or evaluated on these datasets might suffer from geographical bias when deployed in other regions. Specifically, for scene classification, a highway in a Latin American country differs drastically from an Autobahn, for example, both in design and maintenance levels. We propose VWise, a novel benchmark for road-type classification and scene classification tasks, in addition to tasks focused on external contexts related to vehicular applications in LatAm. We collected over 520 video clips covering diverse urban and rural environments across Latin American countries, annotated with six classes of road types. We also evaluated several state-of-the-art classification models in baseline experiments, obtaining over 84% accuracy. With this dataset, we aim to enhance research on vehicular tasks in Latin America.

Sifat Ishmam Parisa, Md Awsaf Alam Anindya, Anindya Iqbal et al.

Since the beginning of 2020, the novel coronavirus has begun to sweep across the globe. Given the prevalence of smartphones everywhere, many countries across continents also developed COVID-19 contract tracing apps that users can install to get a warning of potential contacts with infected people. Unlike regular apps that undergo detailed requirement analysis, carefully designed development, rigorous testing, contact tracing apps were deployed after rapid development. Therefore such apps may not reach expectations for all end users. Users share their opinions and experience of the usage of the apps in the app store. This paper aims to understand the types of topics users discuss in the reviews of the COVID-19 contact tracing apps across the continents by analyzing the app reviews. We collected all the reviews of 35 COVID-19 contact tracing apps developed by 34 countries across the globe. We group the app reviews into the following geographical regions: Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, Middle East, and Australasia (Australia and NZ). We run topic modeling on the app reviews of each region. We analyze the produced topics and their evolution over time by categorizing them into hierarchies and computing the ratings of reviews related to the topics. While privacy could be a concern with such apps, we only find privacy-related topics in Australasia, North America, and Middle East. Topics related to usability and performance of the apps are prevalent across all regions. Users frequently complained about the lack of features, user interface and the negative impact of such apps on their mobile batteries. Still, we also find that many users praised the apps because they helped them stay aware of the potential danger of getting infected. The finding of this study is expected to help app developers utilize their resources to address the reported issues in a prioritized way.

Jean C. Cortissoz

We discuss the behavior of harmonic functions on Riemannian cones as defined below and Lioville's theorem.

Abraham Ramos-Torres, Laura N. Montoya

The growth of the tech startup ecosystem in Latin America (LATAM) is driven by innovative entrepreneurs addressing market needs across various sectors. However, these startups encounter unique challenges and risks that require specific management approaches. This paper explores a case study with the Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Available Market (SAM), and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) metrics within the context of the online food delivery industry in LATAM, serving as a model for valuing startups using the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) method. By analyzing key emerging powers such as Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama, and Ecuador, the study highlights the potential and profitability of AI-driven startups in the region through the development of a ranking of emerging powers in Latin America for tech startup investment. The paper also examines the political, economic, and competitive risks faced by startups and offers strategic insights on mitigating these risks to maximize investment returns. Furthermore, the research underscores the value of diversifying investment portfolios with startups in emerging markets, emphasizing the opportunities for substantial growth and returns despite inherent risks.

Agustina Yañez, Gonzalo J. Marquez, Olga G. Martinez

Este año se cumple el décimo aniversario del fallecimiento del Dr. Elías Ramón De La Sota, quien no sólo sentó las bases del estudio de los helechos y licofitas en Argentina, sino que fue un referente para la disciplina en toda América Latina. Por este motivo, propusimos a las autoridades de la Sociedad Argentina de Botánica realizar un número especial a quien fuera nuestro maestro. A 10 años de su partida, es inspirador ver su legado plasmado en la calidad y cantidad de los artículos publicados aquí, reflejo fiel de las investigaciones llevadas adelante actualmente por los científicos y científicas de la región.

Mattia De Vivo

Due to the pet and goods trade, several animals are now present in regions outside of their traditional native ranges. A peculiar situation has arisen in mantises, insects that are becoming more popular as pets: two genera (Hierodula and Tenodera) have begun to spread around the world, with two Hierodula species overlapping in Europe and two Tenodera species doing the same in North America. Such an event can lead to possible competition with both local taxa and alien congeneric sister species; the latter may reduce the impact of one of the invaders. Additionally, the situation allows the comparisons of niche shifts in displaced mantises, allowing us to understand whether such animals respect general patterns shown in terrestrial ectothermic invasive species. To do this, I adapted scripts from previous publications for analyzing niche overlap (Schoener’s D), niche expansion (E), and unfilling (U) through the centroid shift, overlap, unfilling, and expansion (COUE) scheme using presence records from GBIF and iNaturalist Research-Grade observations and bioclimatic variables available in BIOCLIM, selected according to variance inflation factor (VIF) values. I also evaluated the overlap between the sister species in the non-native range with D. Overall, there was relatively high niche expansion and unfilling patterns shared among the taxa, although species tended to have low abiotic overlap between native and alien ranges, and a relatively high niche overlap was present among congeneric species in the shared non-native area. However, such analyses may be biased due to chosen variables, taxonomic uncertainty, and lack of information on mantises’ ecology; particularly, the situation regarding H. tenuidentata/transcaucasica should be monitored and clarified, given the higher potential invasion risk of these species compared to other mantises and the uncertainties regarding which populations have reached Europe. Additionally, the biology of alien mantises should be studied in more detail in both native and non-native environments given the current critical lack of information.

D. Karemera, V. I. Oguledo, B. Davis

Wenbo Yang, N. Cicek, J. Ilg

I. Brodo, Sylvia Duran Sharnoff, Susan Laurie-Bourque et al.

Lichens are a unique form of plant life, the product of a symbiotic association between an alga and a fungus. The beauty and importance of lichens have long been overlooked, despite their abundance and diversity in most parts of North America and elsewhere in the world. This stunning book - the first accessible and authoritative guidebook to lichens of the North American continent - fills the gap, presenting superb colour photographs, descriptions, distribution maps, and keys for identifying the most common, conspicuous, or ecologically significant species. The book focuses on 805 foliose, fruticose, and crustose lichens (the latter rarely included in popular guidebooks) and presents information on another 70 species in the keys or notes, special attention is given to species endemic to North America. A comprehensive introduction discusses the biology, structure, uses, and ecological significance of lichens and is illustrated with 90 additional colour photos and many line drawings. English names are provided for most species, and the book also includes a glossary that explains technical terms. This visually rich and informative book will open the eyes of nature lovers everywhere to the fascinating world of lichens.

M. Field, A. Jette