Search Results

This chapter studies the impact of technology on policing in Delhi. It shows that technology has affected both the methodology of crime and the law enforcing agencies. The chapter first looks at technology as a facilitator for criminals; cell phones are used as a means for communication among criminals, and the Internet provides ways for criminals to commit sophisticated crimes. It then views technology as a facilitator for better policing, which allow the police to counter criminal activities. Close circuit television cameras (CCTVs) are used as agents of silent policing, the Zonal Integrated Police Net allows police to access and exchange information among police forces, and the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and System (CCTNS) helps provide an integrated and comprehensive system that enhances the effectiveness of policing.

Students arrive at schools with a variety of different skills and experiences, but as Karolyn Tyson explains, schools can respond to those differences in ways that either build on strengths and ensure opportunities to learn or thatstratify expectations and opportunities. She describes how capable students of color in racially diverse schools are severely underrepresented in advanced classes, contributing substantially to the opportunity gap. Such tracking practices have repeatedly been shown to be detrimental, yet they persist in most American secondary schools.Creating conditions within schools to afford more students, and not just a select group, opportunities to learn advanced curricular materials will go a long way toward nurturing a sense of fairness among students and preparing a broader group of young people for a diverse array of opportunities in the labor market.

This chapter focuses on filmmaker Raja Amari. Amari was born into a middle-class family in Tunis in 1971. She studied French literature and civilisation at the University of Tunis I, before going on to study film at FEMIS in Paris, from which she graduated in 1998. Before making her first feature, Satin Rouge (2002), Amari made three short films, beginning with The Bouquet/Le Bouquet (1995). Her best known short is April/Avril (1998), an atmospheric thirty-minute piece shot in 35mm and dealing with a ten-year-old girl, Amina, who comes to Tunis to work as a maid to two lonely sisters. In 2004 Amari completed her first video documentary, Tracking Oblivion/Sur les traces de l'oubli, which deals with an emblematic figure in North African feminism, the nineteenth-century European explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, who lived with all the freedom of a man and had a particular regard for the spartan life of the Bedouin tribes.

The authors provide an additional eighteen examples of obfuscation. By contrast with the core cases of I.1, these examples are broader and more varied in their application, including speculative design projects, patents, file-sharing tools, and business and financial strategies. This section does not expand the fundamental lexicon of what obfuscation is and does, but instead shows how it is applied to specific kinds of challenges, including textual stylometry, facial recognition, loyalty cards, criminal investigations, and software code.

This chapter explores the tension between the ephemerality of swimming and its embodied and symbolic ‘realness’ for the swimmer, and investigates the multiple ways in which material and virtual artefacts are produced and mobilised to make swimming count and render it consumable. The chapter argues that in spite of the suspicions within the marathon swimming social world about the potentially corrupting effect of technology to the integrity of the sport, the everyday practice of marathon swimming is highly, if selectively, technologised. This technological ambivalence is negotiated via social world norms of data gathering, processing and sharing, with users positioning themselves as discriminating and restrained users. This highlights marathon swimming as a tradition-oriented practice with a profoundly contemporary inflection.

The chapter offers an account of “reproducers” in counterpoint to replicator concepts, treating development as entwined with heredity, to make conceptual room for the ongoing empirical revolutions in recent mechanistic studies of inheritance systems beyond the gene. The essay examines the character and status of “hybrids” as a means of exploring the role and nature of “developmental scaffolding” in reproduction processes. These ideas are put to work examining empirical tracking and labeling practices and the conceptual challenges that arise from them in narratives of the molecular hybridization events of HIV-1 retrovirus infection. HIV serves as an instructive exemplar for exploring possible applications of reproducer concepts to cognition and culture.

Recent history clearly shows that improvements in knowledge capital are possible and within the reach of nations. But, a wide variety of specific policies have been implemented within various countries without much evidence of success in either achievement or economic terms, generally reflecting the pursuit of policies for which there is little empirical support. This chapter, drawing on relevant research and findings from a variety of sources, distils a few key conclusions about which broad sets of policies are promising and which are not. The evidence across countries suggests simple resource policies have proved inconsistent and ineffective, not only for developed but also for developing countries. At the same time, some policies from developed countries, such as school autonomy, may not be equally effective in developing countries, and vice versa. Overall, the evidence points to the general importance of focusing incentives on educational outcomes, something that is best achieved by constructing the institutional structures of the education system with specific focus on outcomes. A number of education institutions – most notably, developing effective accountability systems, promoting choice and competition, and providing direct rewards for good performance – potentially lead to higher teacher quality and offer promise. Finally, some policies (such as pre-school programs) promise both improved equity and increased growth, while others (such as early tracking) offer the opposite.

This concluding chapter discusses Tracking Transience, a performance both of the law and for the law. It stages the surveillance techniques of the national security state as they concentrate on the artist's racialized body. In addition, the play demonstrates the links between law and performance in the process of racialization. To do so, it draws on the tradition of body artists, such as Hanna Wilke, Yoko Ono, Chris Burden, and Karen Finley, who use the body in performance to stage, a “dislocation of normative subjectivity, reconfiguring identity politics (the way in which the subject comes to meaning in the social) and the very parameters of subjectivity itself.”

In 2012, alongside its part-privatisation of the Probation Service, the Ministry of Justice secretly conceived a strategy, hubristically named ‘New World’, to upgrade ‘obsolete’ Radio Frequency (RF) electronic monitoring technology with Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking, and subject unprecedented numbers of offenders to it by 2020. Replacing the existing private sector delivery infrastructure with a hitherto untried model was pursued more openly, but obscured larger ambitions. Over five years ‘New World’ failed spectacularly, and expensively. Subsequent official audits indicted its implementation and actually questioned its conception, but neglected the ideological context and the disruptive political strategy which underpinned it. ‘New World’ was a calculated exercise in ‘disruptive’ neo-liberal statecraft, and the failure of its first iteration does not mean the end of it.

The chapter sketches how Fodor and I, beginning from different perspectives, were led to make a sharp distinction between registering certain distal objects in visual perception and categorizing and recognizing these objects. The precategorical or nonconceptual operations in categorizing were unlike cognitive processes in general in that they were insensitive to beliefs or to inferences from background knowledge, thus they were barred from using expectations even when the latter were relevant to correct decisions or goal-driven actions. We postulated certain fixed mechanisms of perception—what I called perceptual architecture and Fodor called modules. I explored these mechanisms empirically which led to the notion of indexing by a mechanism I called a FINST.

The Supreme Court in Swann drove the yellow school bus down the road of racial reform. And a bumpy journey it would prove to be. Why, one wonders, did the Court choose busing among all the alternatives available? Why, moreover, was that choice unanimous? Why, lastly, had several justices even swallowed their personal misgivings to join the opinion? For the Court’s commitment to this fateful step, there exist various explanations. One is that the Court never anticipated just how much opposition compulsory busing would provoke. Northern sentiment had not yet been aroused at the time of Swann; South Boston was but a speck on the racial horizon. The justices might still have believed opposition to busing just another eruption of the same southern temper that had produced Little Rock, Prince Edward, and the ugly happenings at Lamar. By 1970, moreover, the Court was most impatient with the South and more than a little embarrassed that sixteen years after Brown the task of southern integration remained incomplete. Thus Swann seemed the final step in the South’s subjugation. That busing would soon become the hottest issue of national domestic politics, the justices had not as yet fully foreseen. There was more to the Court’s approval of busing than integrating the South. Green had whetted the Court’s appetite for numbers. Black-white percentages at last gave the Court a concrete measuring rod, an objective determinant of a school board’s good faith. If one’s goal for schools was statistical racial balance, busing seemed the most direct way to achieve it. In fact, busing seemed the only way to achieve it in the urban metropolis where the races lived largely apart. But something more profound motivated the Court’s probusing stance in 1971: a mystical force in the catacombs of the Supreme Court known as the spirit of Brown. Brown’s legacy was a special race consciousness, an understanding among justices that blacks were henceforth to enjoy constitutional priority.

At first glance Allan Bakke seemed to be just another ordinary citizen whom landmark litigation was about to cast up from obscurity. The fortuity of other Supreme Court decisions had earlier taken Linda Brown, Clarence Earl Gideon, and Danny Escobedo and made them household names for a spell. Now the Court would do so for Allan Bakke. But, in fact, in at least one significant aspect Bakke was different. For years the focus of the Constitution had been the underside of American life. The Court had reached into shabby schools and mean alleys to succor the lowly, the despised, the dispossessed. One recalls Linda Brown, daughter of a welder on the Rock Island Railroad, standing plain-dressed before the drab edifice that was the segregated Monroe School in Topeka. Or Clarence Earl Gideon, the drunken woebegone from the Florida panhandle whose dogged requests for a lawyer became one of the most significant criminal cases of our century. The Constitution, it was thought, might help those who could not help themselves. But Allan Bakke did not exactly fit the mold. He had blue eyes, blond hair, and Norwegian ancestry, and stood just under six feet tall. Above all, Bakke was a structured, shaped-up person. He struck Dr. Theodore West of the Davis Medical School as “pleasant, mature . . . tall and strong and Teutonic in appearance . . . , a believer in personal health and fitness; he is careful about his diet and vices, runs every day and is generally interested in improving his actuarial statistics.” But another admissions officer thought him “humorless” and “zealous,” like a “character out of a Bergman film.” Bakke was never especially wealthy or advantaged. His was a storybook life of middle-class virtue. His father was a mailman, his mother a teacher. Bakke himself attended the University of Minnesota, majored in mechanical engineering, and earned just under a straight A average. To help finance his education, he joined the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corp., then fought after graduation as a Marine captain in Vietnam.

Beginning with students’ reflections on the racial/ethnic divides on campus, this chapter provides the book’s socio-political and academic context. I challenge the limitations of studies and policies that focus on a so-called achievement gap. I then explain the neoliberal and neoconservative context, how this work adds to the academic scholarship, the book’s macro-meso-micro framework (which includes a brief history of Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and Korean Americans). The introduction ends with a chapter outline.

Teachers and administrators explain the educational differences between students. Such explanations focus on biological and cultural arguments where Asian Americans are assumed to value schooling and hard work more than Latinas/os. Along with a discussion of the general silence regarding Whites, white privilege, and whiteness in general at the school, there is also consideration of how federal educational policies that emphasize performance on standardized tests influence school discourses and practices.

Students describe the school policies and practices influencing their educational trajectories and peer relationships. Of particular importance are the significance of segregated and unequally valued middle schools and the inequalities attached to a rigid track system that includes placement in the International Baccalaureate Program, Advancement Via Individual Determination Program, or non-honors college preparatory classes.

Students reveal unequal patterns of surveillance and regulation by race/ethnicity, class, gender, and academic track. While students in the school’s top classes describe having a free pass to move around campus, students outside of these courses, especially Latinas/os, encounter control and punishment. Asian Americans, on the other hand, express more academic restrictions where they are held to higher standards because of the racialized academic profiling that expects them to excel in their courses.

This chapter reveals the intensification of a tutoring industry. Some students—primarily middle and upper middle class Asian American students–receive extensive tutoring in Chinese schools and from for-profit organizations. In contrast, many Latina/o students across class position receive no tutoring or limited tutoring. Such unequal access to tutoring fuels academic and social differences, and some teachers are even changing their curriculum in ways that benefit students with tutoring.

The chapter focuses on the academic and social hierarchies at the school and students’ roles in perpetuating such hierarchies. Examples focus on how students of color are differently labeled “smart,” “stupid,” “sporty,” or “stupid” while White students are believed to be less identifiable. There are also examples of anti-immigrant posturing among some Asian Americans that is linked to larger assimilationist imperatives.