The essays included in this volume provide both an assessment of key areas and current trends in sociology, specifically with regard to contemporary sociology in Latin America, as well as a collection of innovative empirical studies. The volume serves as an effective bridge of communication allowing sociological academies to mobilize and disseminate research dynamics from Latin America to the rest of the world.
Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded internationally before oil became the world’s prime resource. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, cane sugar production was pre-eminent in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Subsequently, cane sugar industries in the Americas were transformed by a fusion of new and old forces of production, as the international sugar economy incorporated production areas in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Sugar’s global economic importance and its intimate relationship with colonialism offer an important context for probing the nature of colonial societies. This book questions some major assumptions about the nexus between sugar production and colonial societies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, especially in the second (post-1800) colonial era.
Implementing a National Assessment of Educational Achievement, the third volume in the five-part National Assessments of Educational Achievement series, focuses on practical issues in the implementation of a national assessment. These include the representation of key educational stakeholders, required personnel and facilities, and the sequence of administrative activities in implementing an assessment. Particular attention is focused on sampling, such as defining the population to be assessed, elements of sampling theory, and the selection of schools and students to take part in an assessment. Readers are guided through the selection of a sample by working on a set of concrete tasks presented in the text, using data files in an accompanying CD. One section of Volume 3 is devoted to typical tasks involved in preparing, validating and managing data. Users are expected to develop competence in data preparation skills by carrying out the practical exercises in the CD. They are also shown how to complete important pre-analysis steps such as compute survey weights, calculate means and their sampling errors, and how to deal with non-responses and oversize and undersize schools. This volume is intended primarily for teams who are responsible for conducting national assessments and graduate students interested in technical aspects of large-scale surveys.
This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Applied Technologies, ICAT 2020, held in Quito, Ecuador, in December 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. The 53 papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 145 submissions. The papers are organized according to the following topics: communication; computing; e-government and e-participation; e-learning; electronics; intelligent systems; machine vision; security; technology trends.