After years of strict bans on the media, local radio in post-Taliban Afghanistan is undergoing an intense period of reconstruction. This thesis uses a multi-sited ethnographic investigation to examine local Afghan radio's various relationships with women in Afghanistan. In examining both the production and consumption contexts of local radio, it pinpoints areas of disjuncture that can and do le...

Is the Norwegian welfare state model under pressure? In this article we argue that this model will persist to the extent that there is a relatively strong consensus among the majority of the national elites to support it. The empirical results presented indicate that the majority of the Norwegian elites at the time of the study (2000) supported the basic institutions and policies in the model a...

LUCIA, a new Italian talking head based on a modified version of the Cohen-Massaro’s labial coarticulation model is described. A semi-automatic minimization technique, working on real cinematic data, acquired by the ELITE optoelectronic system, was used to train the dynamic characteristics of the model. LUCIA is an MPEG-4 standard facial animation system working on standard FAP visual parameter...

Yelp is one of the largest online searching and reviewing systems for kinds of businesses, including restaurants, shopping, home services et al. Analyzing the real world data from Yelp is valuable in acquiring the interests of users, which helps to improve the design of the next generation system. This paper targets the evaluation of Yelp dataset, which is provided in the Yelp data challenge. A...

During this period, four successive regimes in Bangladesh have felt reluctantly compelled to set up structures for local participation in government. Each found it had to reach out beyond the support of urban and rural elites and the military if it was to move beyond mere stability to real development of the country. Despite many problems. most notably local elite takeover at local level and mi...

Research Highlights and Abstract Building on recent efforts to bridge the elites/events dichotomy in the wartime opinion literature, we test the explanatory power of, and offer a theoretical extension to, the elasticity of reality hypothesis using the case of British support for the war in Afghanistan from 2001 through 2010. Marshaling an array of aggregate, individual-level and experimental su...

Using direct democracy, voters in a majority of states have considered, in recent years, whether the definition of marriage should include or exclude same-sex couples. This Article explores how individuals assessed three ballot measures that defined marriage in three states: two constitutional referendums that proposed to outlaw same-sex marriage in North Carolina and Minnesota, and a veto refe...

Prosodic variations in unit-based speech synthesis: the example of interrogative sentences This paper proposes an automatic method to increase the number of possible prosodic variations in non-uniform unit-based speech synthesis. More specifically, we are interested in the production of interrogative sentences through the eLite text-to-speech synthesis system, which relies on the selection of n...