After The First Trial: A Population-Based Survey on Knowledge and Perception of Justice and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
On July 26, 2010, Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, was convicted of crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions for events that took place three decades earlier under the Khmer Rouge regime. Following this important milestone for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the present study was implemented to (1) monitor public awareness and knowledge of the ECCC’s work, as well as of outreach and victim participation initiatives organized by the tribunal and local non-governmental organizations; (2) assess attitudes about justice and the desire for reparations for past crimes; and 3) recommend ways in which the ECCC, civil society, and the international community can continue to engage Cambodians in the work of the ECCC. This report presents the results of a survey of 1,000 Cambodians, aged 18 or above, randomly selected throughout the country to be representative of the adult population. The interviews were conducted anonymously and confidentially in December 2010 by a team of trained interviewers using a structured questionnaire. This is the second population-based survey conducted in Cambodia by the Initiative for Vulnerable Populations at UC Berkeley’s School of Law Human Rights Center. It is hoped that the findings will contribute to establishing a dialogue between the ECCC, the government, the Cambodian population, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the international actors on the role and impact of the ECCC, expectations of the population, and beyond the Court, what must be done to deal with the violent past.
So We Will Never Forget: A Population-Based Survey on Attitudes about Social Reconstruction and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
After a decade of negotiations leading to the adoption of its internal rules in June 2007, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) is the first serious effort to bring the law to bear, however belatedly and incompletely, on the horrendous crimes committed by leaders of the Khmer Rouge more than a quarter of a century ago. In power for just under four years (1975 to 1979), the Khmer Rouge more than decimated Cambodia. At least 1.7 million Cambodians, fully one quarter of the population, were killed or died as a result of the oppressive policies imposed by the Khmer Rouge, with execution, starvation, exhaustion from slave labor, malnutrition, and torture as the leading causes of death. This report presents the findings of a nationwide, population-based survey undertaken by the Human Rights Center’s Initiative on the Vulnerable in Cambodia. The survey sought to capture opinions and attitudes about accountability, social reconstruction, and the ECCC. Teams of interviewers used a structured questionnaire to interview 1,000 Cambodians 18 years old or older, randomly selecting 125 communes out of 1,621 using systematic random sampling proportionate to population size. Two villages were randomly selected from each commune, resulting in a sample size of 250 villages. Analysis of the report concluded with specific recommendations of ways in which the ECCC, Cambodian judicial and administrative institutions, civil society, and the international community can ensure that Cambodians become engaged participants in - and not merely auxiliaries to - the work of the court.
Hedy: A Gradual Language for Programming Education
One of the aspects of programming that learners often struggle with is the syntax of programming languages: remembering the right commands to use and combining those into a working program. Prior research demonstrated that students submit source code with syntax errors in 73% of cases and even the best students do so in 50% of cases. An analysis of 37 million compilations by 250.000 students found that the most common error was a syntax error, which occurred in almost 800.000 compilations. It was also found that Java and Perl are not easier to understand than a programming language with randomly generated keywords, stressing the difficulties that novices face in understanding syntax. This paper presents Hedy: a new way of teaching the syntax of a programming language to novices, inspired by educational methods by which punctuation is taught to children. Hedy starts as a simple programming language without any syntactic elements such as brackets, colons or indentation. The rules slowly and gradually change until the novices are programming in Python. Hedy is evaluated on 9714 programs.