title: Physical death, digital life, and post-self: That dragon, cancer as a digital memorial

authors: Schott, Gareth R.

abstract: That Dragon, Cancer represents one of the first notable biographical documentary games to address terminal illness and personal loss. This article highlights how the actionable properties of games are repeatedly reversed to generate a thoughtful reflection on the impact of medical jurisdiction over the dying and its regulation over the end of life. Liberating the medium’s reliance on certain commonplace and overused design principles, That Dragon, Cancer seeks to foster empathy, and urge care, hesitation and preservation rather than progression, advancement and winning states. The resultant game is a poignant digital commemoration of the game creator’s son, Joel, whose life was affected and curtailed by cancer. In addition to being a document of parental grief and loss that offers an emotionally resonant and candid articulation of the effect of disease on the trajectory of life and biography of a child, this article also reasons that the game comprises Joel’s constructed post-self, allowing his life to be extended post-mortem.

text: Physical death, digital life, and post-self: That dragon, cancer as a digital memorial That Dragon, Cancer represents one of the first notable biographical documentary games to address terminal illness and personal loss. This article highlights how the actionable properties of games are repeatedly reversed to generate a thoughtful reflection on the impact of medical jurisdiction over the dying and its regulation over the end of life. Liberating the medium’s reliance on certain commonplace and overused design principles, That Dragon, Cancer seeks to foster empathy, and urge care, hesitation and preservation rather than progression, advancement and winning states. The resultant game is a poignant digital commemoration of the game creator’s son, Joel, whose life was affected and curtailed by cancer. In addition to being a document of parental grief and loss that offers an emotionally resonant and candid articulation of the effect of disease on the trajectory of life and biography of a child, this article also reasons that the game comprises Joel’s constructed post-self, allowing his life to be extended post-mortem.

year: 2020

title: Are the citizens of a democracy a just target for terrorists?

authors: McKeogh, Colm

subjects: civilian

abstract: This article investigates how issues of political responsibility connect to the combatant/civilian distinction in armed conflict. It does so by looking at an attempted moral justification of terrorism in a democracy by a just war theorist. The attempt was by Igor Primoratz, who claims that civilians who actively support injustice do not merit immunity from targeting. Primoratz suggests amending the principle of civilian immunity to permit targeting of civilians who are culpable for an unjust war. This article argues that culpability plays no role in the justification of targeting combatants and cannot be used to justify the targeting of civilians. Combatants may be targeted in war because of a convention-dependent permission that they may be treated as instruments. Civilians may not be targeted in war because no such convention-dependent permission exists (and there are no benefits to creating such a convention). Nor can the justification of self-defence be used to justify the targeting of civilians in armed conflict because there is a threshold of culpability to be met before self-defence is permitted, and the citizens of a democracy do not meet that minimum standard.

text: Are the citizens of a democracy a just target for terrorists? This article investigates how issues of political responsibility connect to the combatant/civilian distinction in armed conflict. It does so by looking at an attempted moral justification of terrorism in a democracy by a just war theorist. The attempt was by Igor Primoratz, who claims that civilians who actively support injustice do not merit immunity from targeting. Primoratz suggests amending the principle of civilian immunity to permit targeting of civilians who are culpable for an unjust war. This article argues that culpability plays no role in the justification of targeting combatants and cannot be used to justify the targeting of civilians. Combatants may be targeted in war because of a convention-dependent permission that they may be treated as instruments. Civilians may not be targeted in war because no such convention-dependent permission exists (and there are no benefits to creating such a convention). Nor can the justification of self-defence be used to justify the targeting of civilians in armed conflict because there is a threshold of culpability to be met before self-defence is permitted, and the citizens of a democracy do not meet that minimum standard.

year: 2011

title: Diacritic Restoration and the Development of a Part-of-Speech Tagset for the Māori Language

authors: Cocks, John

subjects: Māori

abstract: This thesis investigates two fundamental problems in natural language processing: diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging. Over the past three decades, statistical approaches to diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging have grown in interest as a consequence of the increasing availability of manually annotated training data in major languages such as English and French. However, these approaches are not practical for most minority languages, where appropriate training data is either non-existent or not publically available. Furthermore, before developing a part-of-speech tagging system, a suitable tagset is required for that language. In this thesis, we make the following contributions to bridge this gap:

Firstly, we propose a method for diacritic restoration based on naive Bayes classifiers that act at word-level. Classifications are based on a rich set of features, extracted automatically from training data in the form of diacritically marked text. This method requires no additional resources, which makes it language independent. The algorithm was evaluated on one language, namely Māori, and an accuracy exceeding 99% was observed.

Secondly, we present our work on creating one of the necessary resources for the development of a part-of-speech tagging system in Māori, that of a suitable tagset. The tagset described was developed in accordance with the EAGLES guidelines for morphosyntactic annotation of corpora, and was the result of in-depth analysis of the Māori grammar.

text: Diacritic Restoration and the Development of a Part-of-Speech Tagset for the Māori Language This thesis investigates two fundamental problems in natural language processing: diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging. Over the past three decades, statistical approaches to diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging have grown in interest as a consequence of the increasing availability of manually annotated training data in major languages such as English and French. However, these approaches are not practical for most minority languages, where appropriate training data is either non-existent or not publically available. Furthermore, before developing a part-of-speech tagging system, a suitable tagset is required for that language. In this thesis, we make the following contributions to bridge this gap:

Firstly, we propose a method for diacritic restoration based on naive Bayes classifiers that act at word-level. Classifications are based on a rich set of features, extracted automatically from training data in the form of diacritically marked text. This method requires no additional resources, which makes it language independent. The algorithm was evaluated on one language, namely Māori, and an accuracy exceeding 99% was observed.

Secondly, we present our work on creating one of the necessary resources for the development of a part-of-speech tagging system in Māori, that of a suitable tagset. The tagset described was developed in accordance with the EAGLES guidelines for morphosyntactic annotation of corpora, and was the result of in-depth analysis of the Māori grammar.

year: 2012