Chapter 3 probes the meaning of the word ‘equality’. It outlines a multidimensional, substantive conception of equality, as adopted by the UN Committee for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. But it notes the Act’s lack of engagement with some aspects of this ideal. The Act’s scope is both more limited and more individualised than this substantive concept might demand. Making sense of what law might intend to contribute to meeting equality ideals is difficult but necessary, as it can provide a benchmark against which to evaluate the law. With this in mind, this chapter proposes five potential objectives, which are guided by the Act’s scope. These range from changing attitudes and shaping perceived social norms through to influencing behaviours or compensating victims of negative treatment. These potential objectives are used as a framework for assessment of law’s contribution throughout the rest of the book.

This chapter develops a framework for algorithmic governance, including considerations of the nature and consequences of the decision through processes of impact assessment. It analyzes ex ante AI design issues, such as mechanisms for sourcing technology through departmental or agency development or procurement processes, the calibration of error rates, level of human oversight, and participatory processes. Following this, the chapter considers the implementation of models of internal and external algorithmic auditing. The chapter then canvasses the trend towards centralized coordination of AI policies and principles across government, both through horizontal mechanisms of central agencies and regulators and vertical arrangements at the supranational and international organizational level imposed upon nation states. It also discusses transparency measures, including central publication of algorithmic tools, and individual notification and explanation of automated decisions.

Investment facilitation, aiming for improvements in the transparency, efficiency, and predictability of domestic investment frameworks, plays an important role in complementing currently prevailing international measures for attracting external development. Finance and various investment facilitation reform initiatives are under way at multiple levels. However, empirical evidence on currently prevailing levels of adoption of investment facilitation measures and resulting reform and support needs is still scarce.

In Chapter 2, we first discuss what we regard as three major pitfalls in the field: (1) following an ethnocentric view of one’s data, (2) uncritically associating values with political actors and entities, and (3) using one’s research to prove a pre-held conviction. We argue that these analytic traps are interrelated and reflect a typically top-down view of political language use. Second, we discuss the three key pragmatic units of expressions, speech acts and discourse in detail. In studying political language use with the aid of these units, it is recommended to look at conventional pragmatic patterns, which allow us to conduct replicable analyses. Further, we argue that political language use can be effectively interpreted if we look at its ritual manifestations. Ritualised political language use imposes a frame on the participants; that is, in many political contexts the rights and obligations of the participants are defined and language is generally used according to such rights and obligations. We finally discuss how our analytic units can be brought together with a contrastive view of language and politics.

In this final chapter, a wide-angle perspective is provided on the major issues that arise when one thinks globally about literacy. Despite many important differences across the globe, literacy development suggests some general patterns that reflect nearly universal phases and shared operating principles. Although the “development” of literacy begins early through natural processes of language development and conceptual development, it is school experiences, explicitly designed to teach reading, that we expect to ensure the achievement of literacy. Each classroom within a school is its own literacy ecosystem, with one or more teachers, students, literacy curriculum materials, assesments, and regulated interactions. The classroom itself is embedded within other systems – the school, the community, the larger school administrative units, and local, regional, and national government control agents. A Global Literacy Framework is presented, showing that literacy development is embedded in language development and can be predicted by (a) system factors, referring to variations in the linguistic and writing systems, (b) child factors, associated with the neurobiological foundation of children’s learning capacity, and (c) support factors, associated with processes in the home and at school. All these influences exist within a sociopolitical context that exerts influence broadly across the system.

1 Introduction

2 A Framework for Reviewing Mobile GBL Applications

3 Context-Aware Mobile Learning and Mobile Games

 3.1 Space and Location Awareness and Time (Spatio-Temporal Dimension)

  3.1.1 Summary of Spatio-Temporal Characteristics and Strategies

 3.2 Collaboration and Social Dimension

  3.2.1 Summary of Collaboration and Social Characteristics and Strategies

 3.3 Short Duration and Flexible Mini Games (Session Dimension)

  3.3.1 Summary of Session Characteristics and Strategies

 3.4 Personalization Dimension

  3.4.1 Personalization Strategies

  3.4.2 Summary of Personalization Characteristics and Strategies

 3.5 Data Security and the Privacy Dimension

  3.5.1 Summary of Data Security and Privacy Characteristics

 3.6 Pedagogy Dimension

4 Discussion

 4.1 U-learning and Context Awareness

 4.2 Adaptivity

 4.3 Personalization

 4.4 Data Privacy and Security

 4.5 Motivation, Engagement, and Technological Trends

5 Future Directions

6 Conclusion

The framework of this book reflects the complexity of the situation of the species at different scales. To position the Little Owl in the cultural context we look at the history and cultural traditions connected to the species. We describe the taxonomy and subspecies to settle some taxonomic discussions of the species based upon major genetic, morphological and biogeographical findings. The distribution of the different subspecies and recent population estimates for the Western Palearctic are given to illustrate the geographic diversity. The habitat is described and its relationships with the species. Food as principle biotic factor delivers the crucial energy input for the birds. Abiotic factors such as breeding cavities and perches show their importance for breeding and foraging efficiency to minimize the energetic cost. Next we focus on the breeding season, discussing clutch size, hatching and fledging success in relation to the age of the birds. We then describe behavior mainly based upon two decades of webcam observations. Next we zoom in on limiting factors that influence populations in a given geographic environment, e.g., immigration, re-introduction or supplementation, and mechanisms of interaction between local populations, such as migration, meta-populations and sinks/sources. After describing the main causes for declines in the species, we summarize knowledge into a conservation and management strategy. We conclude this chapter with an overview of the key points raised, with an overview of the most important open questions and suggestions for future studies.

The exponential development of information technologies (IT) which has been described as the digital revolution has led to different IT outcomes at individual, organizational and societal levels. The chapter theorizes these different IT outcomes as digitally led emancipation and digitally led exploitation. The chapter postulates that the attainment of the outcomes depends on different power mechanisms and their associated fault lines. Power mechanisms and IT are theorized to create a framework explicating these dynamics. Power mechanisms are outlined as episodic power and digitally led emancipation (collective action, participation), episodic power and digitally led exploitation (manipulation, information asymmetries), systemic power and digitally led emancipation (empowerment, inclusion) and systemic power and digitally led exploitation (surveillance/monitoring, automation/algorithmification). The chapter concludes with a research agenda to understand these power mechanisms, which may enable digitally led emancipation and digitally led exploitation.

The chapter theorizes power, knowledge and digitalization in the digital era. It theorizes the roles of knowledge and power in the current era and how these are impacted, reinforced, redistributed, challenged and transformed through increased digitalization. The chapter develops a Knowledge-Power-Digitalization framework where the influence of episodic and systemic power on knowledge and the role of Information Systems and digitalization are outlined. The framework outlines the following quadrants: power as possession, power as asymmetries, power as empowerment and power as practice. The role of digitalization is outlined within these quadrants. The Knowledge-Power-Digitalization framework developed outlines avenues for future research in the digital era pertinent to digitalization, knowledge and power dynamics, which are important current and complex phenomena in need of qualitative research understanding and theorization.

This chapter provides a unified discussion of the framework for model validation. It describes how model validation developed over time across various disciplines. It then describes the various approaches that are applied for validation of risk management models at financial institutions.

As discussed in Chapter 1, corpus representativeness depends on two sets of considerations: domain considerations and distribution considerations. Domain considerations focus on describing the arena of language use, and operationally specifying a set of texts that could potentially be included in the corpus. The linguistic research goal, which involves both a linguistic feature and a discourse domain of interest, forms the foundation of corpus representativeness. Representativeness cannot be designed for or evaluated outside of the context of a specific linguistic research goal. Linguistic parameter estimation is the use of corpus-based data to approximate quantitative information about linguistic distributions in the domain. Domain considerations focus on what should be included in a corpus, based on qualitative characteristics of the domain. Distribution considerations focus on how many texts should be included in a corpus, relative to the variation of the linguistic features of interest. Corpus representativeness is not a dichotomy (representative or not representative), but rather is a continuous construct. A corpus may be representative to a certain extent, in particular ways, and for particular purposes.