Search results for: international teaching and learning

Authors: Marie Taylor, Catriona Murphy

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The aim of this paper is to identify the factors of success in community based heritage tourism initiatives. Heritage and community are central to many tourism initiatives with heritage tourism having the potential to act as a catalyst for community development. This paper presents the findings of research that examined the relationship between heritage tourism and community development. The findings recognised that heritage tourism had economic, social and cultural benefits for a community as well as a role in strengthening concepts such as sense of identity, place, and authenticity. In addition, this paper proposes an assessment framework for sustainable community based heritage tourism to identify factors and contextual influences involved in their success or failure. In evaluating the sustainability of such initiatives, a number of issues are investigated including the continued role of stakeholders, the role of funding, the influence of collaboration and the changing role of rural development and its impact on community engagement. The research is descriptive, evaluative and explanatory research, exploring and analysing issues such as the development of community structures in community based heritage tourism. Thus, it will contribute to the development of potential tourism and community development policies and strategies at a local, national and international level. An interpretative and inductive approach is utilised, and a mixed method approach followed as it encapsulates the best of quantitative and qualitative research methods. The case studies focus on social enterprises in relation to tourism and community based tourism cooperatives as there are limited study and knowledge of these. Consequently, this research will contribute to the discourse on community based heritage tourism as an aspect of community development.

Keywords: collaboration, community-based heritage tourism, stakeholders, sustainable tourism

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Authors: Thodoris Tsagkaris, Marios Stavropoulos, Panagiotis Theodosis-Nobelos, Charalampos Triantis

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Isotretinoin is a widely used therapeutic for the treatment of acne vulgaris and various other skin disorders. However, since its approval, many side effects and contraindications have been described, particularly important, such as teratogenicity as well as liver disease and dermal deterioration. In a very important allegation, isotretinoin has been linked with psychiatric symptoms like depression, suicidal ideation, schizophrenia, and hypervitaminosis A syndrome characteristics. These adverse effects have raised significant concerns regarding the safety of isotretinoin. Numerous studies and research have associated isotretinoin with side effects on the mental health of patients and have proposed plausible mechanisms regarding this suspected causative relationship. However, the evidence is still contradicting, and the data disperse, making their validity less valuable. Thus, in the present study, we aim to analyze further the available literature and present a complete analysis of the side effects of isotretinoin, with particular emphasis on the effects it may have on the mental health of patients. The review is based on international articles from broad scientific electronic databases like PubMed and Scopus. This review concludes that although many studies have associated isotretinoin with mental effects like depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and suicidal ideation, the data are still insufficient and often contradictory. In fact, additional studies with accurate data and larger double-blinded samples, and more analytic systematic reviews are required. It is especially important to monitor the dose and the intervals that isotretinoin has to be administered in order to potentially cause mental health problems, as well as the duration of treatment and the role that the patient's medical and pharmaceutical history may play.

Keywords: acne, depression, isotretinoin, mental health

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Authors: Routsukol Sunalai

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This research was to study the relationship between the organizational culture like bureaucratic system, and patronage system in government hospitals with hospital accreditation and its impact on the quality of service in the government hospital accredited. Qualitative research was applied in this study by in-depth interviews with samples containing 20 public welfare service providers, i.e. doctors, nurses and practical nurses and 20 service recipients in the units of study. It was found that the bureaucracy still existed and was evidenced by the structure of the line of command; work systems, clear cut duty divisions, procedures and plans, and the patronage system hindered the quality of service in the government hospitals under the process of development and accreditation. The administrators should encourage and support the creation of a learning process in the organization for self-improvement and work development.

Keywords: hospital in Dusit Area, organization culture, the quality of service, economics and financial engineering

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Authors: Pascal Horni, Sandro Fuchs

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In presence of increasing deficits and public debt among OECD countries, the debate on fiscal disciple and mechanisms to constrain public spending policy heated up and gave rise to the institutionalization of fiscal rules. Considering the notions from political economy literature and the therein advocated axiom of maximization of votes, introduction of institutional mechanisms and rules to govern public spending is likely to be coined by electoral motives. While there exists a series of research concerned with the rise of creative accounting in the presence fiscal rules, implementation of accrual government accounting and its impact on the biting of fiscal rules has to authors’ best knowledge never been explored. This paper serves the illumination of the connection between debt break mechanisms and the adoption of accrual public sector accounting standards such as the IPSAS in the interface of political economy in the Swiss context. By explicitly considering the technical accounting dimension, this paper develops an integrated conceptual view on well-established Public Financial Management (PFM) institutions and elaborates how their interdependencies can co-create value with regard to the contemporary challenge of fiscal sustainability. Derivation of this integrated view follows an explorative approach, taking into account expert interviews with director level staff from cantonal finance administrations and policy documents, as well as literature from both research areas – public sector accounting and political economy.

Keywords: accounting, fiscal rules, International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS), public financial management

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Authors: Kostas Kouvaris, Anastasia Eleftheriou, Georgios A. Sarantitis, Apostolos Chondronasios

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To achieve the objective of almost zero carbon energy solutions by 2050, the EU needs to accelerate the development of integrated, highly efficient and environmentally friendly solutions. In this direction, district heating and cooling (DHC) emerges as a viable and more efficient alternative to conventional, decentralized heating and cooling systems, enabling a combination of more efficient renewable and competitive energy supplies. In this paper, we develop a forecasting tool for near real-time local weather and thermal energy demand predictions for an entire DHC network. In this fashion, we are able to extend the functionality and to improve the energy efficiency of the DHC network by predicting and adjusting the heat load that is distributed from the heat generation plant to the connected buildings by the heat pipe network. Two case-studies are considered; one for Vransko, Slovenia and one for Montpellier, France. The data consists of i) local weather data, such as humidity, temperature, and precipitation, ii) weather forecast data, such as the outdoor temperature and iii) DHC operational parameters, such as the mass flow rate, supply and return temperature. The external temperature is found to be the most important energy-related variable for space conditioning, and thus it is used as an external parameter for the energy demand models. For the development of the forecasting tool, we use state-of-the-art deep neural networks and more specifically, recurrent networks with long-short-term memory cells, which are able to capture complex non-linear relations among temporal variables. Firstly, we develop models to forecast outdoor temperatures for the next 24 hours using local weather data for each case-study. Subsequently, we develop models to forecast thermal demand for the same period, taking under consideration past energy demand values as well as the predicted temperature values from the weather forecasting models. The contributions to the scientific and industrial community are three-fold, and the empirical results are highly encouraging. First, we are able to predict future thermal demand levels for the two locations under consideration with minimal errors. Second, we examine the impact of the outdoor temperature on the predictive ability of the models and how the accuracy of the energy demand forecasts decreases with the forecast horizon. Third, we extend the relevant literature with a new dataset of thermal demand and examine the performance and applicability of machine learning techniques to solve real-world problems. Overall, the solution proposed in this paper is in accordance with EU targets, providing an automated smart energy management system, decreasing human errors and reducing excessive energy production.

Keywords: machine learning, LSTMs, district heating and cooling system, thermal demand

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Authors: Mamoun S. Ideis, Zein Salah

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Virtual Rehabilitation (VR) refers to using Virtual Reality’s hardware and simulations as means of exercising tools to rehabilitate patients in need. These patients will undergo their treatment exercises while playing different computer games, which helps achieve greater motivation for patients undergoing their therapeutic exercises. Virtual Rehabilitation systems adopt computer games as part of the treatment therapy. In this paper, we present a preliminary proposal to using adaptive computer games in Virtual Rehabilitation therapy. We also present some tips in designing those adaptive computer games by using different machine learning algorithms in order to create a personalized experience for each patient, which in turn, increases the potential benefits of the treatment that each patient receives. Furthermore, we propose a method of comparing the results of treatment using the adaptive computer games with the results of using static and classical computer games.

Keywords: virtual rehabilitation, physiotherapy, adaptive computer games, post-stroke, game design

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Authors: Steven Sam, Ximena Schmidt, Hugh Dickinson, Jens Jensen

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The goal of this study is to explore the potential of data science and citizen science approaches to develop an interactive, digital, open infrastructure that pulls together African indigenous agriculture and food systems data from multiple sources, making it accessible and reusable for policy, research and practice in modern food production efforts. The World Bank has recognised that African Indigenous Knowledge (AIK) is innovative and unique among local and subsistent smallholder farmers, and it is central to sustainable food production and enhancing biodiversity and natural resources in many poor, rural societies. AIK refers to tacit knowledge held in different languages, cultures and skills passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. AIK is a key driver of food production, preservation, and consumption for more than 80% of citizens in Africa, and can therefore assist modern efforts of reducing food insecurity and hunger. However, the documentation and dissemination of AIK remain a big challenge confronting librarians and other information professionals in Africa, and there is a risk of losing AIK owing to urban migration, modernisation, land grabbing, and the emergence of relatively small-scale commercial farming businesses. There is also a clear disconnect between the AIK and scientific knowledge and modern efforts for sustainable food production. The study combines data science and citizen science approaches through active community participation to generate and share AIK for facilitating learning and promoting knowledge that is relevant for policy intervention and sustainable food production through a curated digital platform based on FAIR principles. The study adopts key informant interviews along with participatory photo and video elicitation approach, where farmers are given digital devices (mobile phones) to record and document their every practice involving agriculture, food production, processing, and consumption by traditional means. Data collected are analysed using the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council’s proven methodology of citizen science (Zooniverse) and data science. Outcomes are presented in participatory stakeholder workshops, where the researchers outline plans for creating the platform and developing the knowledge sharing standard framework and copyrights agreement. Overall, the study shows that learning from AIK, by investigating what local communities know and have, can improve understanding of food production and consumption, in particular in times of stress or shocks affecting the food systems and communities. Thus, the platform can be useful for local populations, research, and policy-makers, and it could lead to transformative innovation in the food system, creating a fundamental shift in the way the North supports sustainable, modern food production efforts in Africa.

Keywords: Africa indigenous agriculture knowledge, citizen science, data science, sustainable food production, traditional food system

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Authors: Joanne F. Hayek

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This study explores the use of gamification to promote citizen e-participation in urban planning. The research departs from a case study: the ‘Shape Your City’ web app designed and programmed by the author and presented as part of the 2021 Dubai Design Week to engage citizens in the co-creation of the future of their city through a gamified experience. The paper documents the design and development methodology of the web app and concludes with the findings of its pilot release. The case study explores the use of mobile interactive mapping, real-time data visualization, augmented reality, and machine learning as tools to enable co-planning. The paper also details the user interface design strategies employed to integrate complex cross-sector e-planning systems and make them accessible to citizens.

Keywords: gamification, co-planning, citizen e-participation, mobile interactive mapping, real-time data visualization

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Authors: Ethan Shafer, Timothy Graziano

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This research seeks to answer whether first-year courses at institutions of higher learning can impact STEM major selection. Unlike many universities, an entry-level technology course (often referred to as CS0) is required for all United States Military Academy (USMA) students–regardless of major–in their first year of attendance. Students at the academy choose their major at the end of their first year of studies. Through student responses to a multi-semester survey, this paper identifies a number of factors that potentially influence STEM major selection. Student demographic data, pre-existing exposure and access to technology, perceptions of STEM subjects, and initial desire for a STEM major are captured before and after taking a CS0 course. An analysis of factors that contribute to student perception of STEM and major selection are presented. This work provides recommendations and suggestions for institutions currently providing or looking to provide CS0-like courses to their students.

Keywords: education, STEM, pedagogy, digital literacy

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Authors: Innocent Atuhe, Alfred Jatho, Yusuf Mulumba, Babra Nalwadda, Jackson Orem

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Statement of the Problem: Malnutrition and cachexia are common in cancer and often contribute to poor health outcomes. Advanced cervical cancer patients are at an increased risk of malnutrition, chemo-toxicity, poor quality of life (QoL), and higher mortality. It is recommended to assess all cancer patients for malnutrition, risk of malnutrition, and QoL in order to provide targeted care, especially for advanced cancer patients. Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of malnutrition or risk of malnutrition and health-related quality of life in advanced cervical cancer patients with cachexia. Methodology: This was a longitudinal study of 212 advanced cervical cancer patients with a confirmed diagnosis of cachexia receiving chemotherapy at the Uganda Cancer Institute between January 2022 and September 2023. We confirmed the diagnosis of cachexia using the international consensus definition. We evaluated each patient for malnutrition using the Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) tool and assessed their QoL using the Feeling of well-being (FWB) on the Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS) questionnaire and the Distress Thermometer (DT) questionnaire. Data was analyzed using Excel and presented using frequencies and percentages. Results: Of the 212 advanced cervical cancer patients with cachexia, 65 (31.7%) of the respondents were malnourished, and 118 (57.6%) were at risk of malnutrition; the average ESAS score was 3, indicating less symptom burden while 115 (54.2%) were extremely distressed with pain as major distress. Conclusion and Significance: The majority of the patients with advanced cervical cancer cachexia were at risk of malnutrition. There is an urgent need to assess all patients with advanced cancer for malnutrition and risk of malnutrition and immediate referral of those with malnutrition to the nutritionist for interventions to improve QoL and overall survival.

Keywords: malnutrition, QoL, cachexia, cancer

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Authors: Shreyas Jayasimha, Suneel Anand Sundharesan, Rohan Tigadi

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In the recent past, the United States of America and Russia were the only two dominant players in the field of space exploration and had a virtual monopoly in the field of space and technology. However, this has changed over the past few years. Many other nation states such as India, China, and the UK have made significant progress in this field. Amongst these nations, the growth and development of the Indian space program have been nothing short of a miracle. Starting recently, India has successfully launched a series of satellites including its much acclaimed Mangalyaan mission, which placed a satellite in Mars’ orbit. The fact that India was able to attain this feat in its attempt demonstrates the enormous growth potential and promise that the Indian space program holds for the coming years. However, unlike other space-faring nations, India does not have a comprehensive and consolidated space insurance policy. In this regard, it is pertinent to note that, the costs and risks involved in a administering a space program are enormous. Therefore, in the absence of a comprehensive space insurance policy, any losses from an unsuccessful will have to be borne by the state exchequer. Thus, in order to ensure that Indian space program continues on its upward trajectory, the Indian establishment should seriously consider formulating a comprehensive insurance policy. This paper intends to analyze the international best practices followed by other space-faring nations in relation to space insurance policy. Thereafter, the authors seek to examine the current regime in India relating to space insurance policy. Finally, the authors will conclude by providing a series of recommendations regarding the essential elements that should be part of any Indian space insurance policy regime.

Keywords: India, space insurance policy, space law, Indian space research organization

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Authors: Mauro Masili, Fernanda O. Duarte, Liliane Ventura

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Ultraviolet (UV) radiation is electromagnetic waves from 100 – 400 nm wavelength. The World Health Organization and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) recommend guidelines on the exposure of the eyes to UV radiation because it is correlated to ophthalmic diseases. Those exposure limits for an 8-h period are 1) UV radiant exposure should not exceed 30 J/m2 when irradiance is spectrally weighted using an actinic action spectrum; 2) unweighted radiant exposure in the UV-A spectral region 315 – 400 nm should not exceed 10 kJ/m2. Sunglasses play an important role in preventing eye injuries related to Sun exposure. We have calculated the direct and diffuse solar UV irradiance in a geometry that refers to an individual wearing a sunglass, in which the solar rays strike on a vertical surface. The diffuse rays are those scattered from the atmosphere and from the local environment. The calculations used the open-source SMARTS2 spectral model, in which we assumed a clear sky condition, aside from information about site location, date, time, ozone column, aerosols, and turbidity. In addition, we measured the spectral transmittance of a typical sunglasses lens and the global solar irradiance was weighted with the spectral transmittance profile of the lens. The radiant exposure incident on the eye’s surface was calculated in the UV and UV-A ranges following the ICNIRP’s recommendations for each day of the year. The tested lens failed the UV-A safe limit, while the UV limit failed to comply with this limit after the aging process. Hence, the ICNIRP safe limits should be considered in the standards to increase the protection against UV radiation on the eye.

Keywords: ICNIRP safe limits, ISO-12312-1, sunglasses, ultraviolet radiation

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Authors: Mestawot Beyene Tafese, Erika Kopp

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Sustainable development, aimed at meeting current needs while safeguarding the needs of future generations, is a global imperative. Higher education stands as a pivotal force in fostering sustainable values and behaviors. However, most scholars and governments primarily focus on environmental and economic aspects. Consequently, this study examines the distribution patterns of higher education for social sustainability. The study highlights overall annual scientific production trends, leading journals and countries in scientific publication, most researched topics, and frequently used keywords. The study utilized a bibliometric method with the aid of the R Studio program. The analysis reveals Sustainability (Switzerland) as the leading journal, with 292 articles published, followed by the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, which published 186 articles. Additionally, the USA is identified as the leading country, with Spain ranking second in producing research related to higher education for socially sustainable development. Among the 54 African countries, only South Africa ranks 13th, contributing fifty-nine scientific articles. Furthermore, higher education for sustainability, sustainable education, sustainable development goals, etc., emerge as the most researched topics, while the term "higher education" is prevalent in 29% and "sustainability" in 28% of the documents. Notably, according to the analysis, social sustainability is the focus of only 3% of articles. This suggests that academics researching sustainable development and higher education have overlooked social sustainability, a crucial human component of sustainable development. Consequently, the researchers concluded that social academics who are interested in studying sustainable development and higher education should give priority to social sustainability.

Keywords: higher education, bibliometric analysis, social sustainability, sustainable development

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Authors: Mark Harmon, Abdolghani Ebrahimi, Patrick Lucey, Diego Klabjan

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In this paper, we predict the likelihood of a player making a shot in basketball from multiagent trajectories. Previous approaches to similar problems center on hand-crafting features to capture domain-specific knowledge. Although intuitive, recent work in deep learning has shown, this approach is prone to missing important predictive features. To circumvent this issue, we present a convolutional neural network (CNN) approach where we initially represent the multiagent behavior as an image. To encode the adversarial nature of basketball, we use a multichannel image which we then feed into a CNN. Additionally, to capture the temporal aspect of the trajectories, we use “fading.” We find that this approach is superior to a traditional FFN model. By using gradient ascent, we were able to discover what the CNN filters look for during training. Last, we find that a combined FFN+CNN is the best performing network with an error rate of 39%.

Keywords: basketball, computer vision, image processing, convolutional neural network

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Authors: Phan Minh Trang, Joacim Rocklöv, Kim Bao Giang, Gunnar Kullgren, Maria Nilsson

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There are recent studies from high income countries reporting an association between heat waves and hospital admissions for mental health disorders. It is not previously studied if such relations exist in sub-tropical and tropical low- and middle-income countries. In this study from Vietnam, the assumption was that hospital admissions for mental disorders may be triggered, or exacerbated, by heat exposure and heat waves. A database from Hanoi Mental Hospital with mental disorders diagnosed by the International Classification of Diseases 10, spanning over five years, was used to estimate the heatwave-related impacts on admissions for mental disorders. The relationship was analysed by a Negative Binomial regression model accounting for year, month, and days of week. The focus of the study was heat-wave events with periods of three or seven consecutive days above the threshold of 35oC daily maximum temperature. The preliminary study results indicated that heat-waves increased the risks for hospital admission for mental disorders (F00-79) from heat-waves of three and seven days with relative risks (RRs) of 1.16 (1.01–1.33) and 1.42 (1.02–1.99) respectively, when compared with non-heat-wave periods. Heatwave-related admissions for mental disorders increased statistically significantly among men, among residents in rural communities and in elderly. Moreover, cases for organic mental disorders including symptomatic illnesses (F0-9) and mental retardation (F70-79) raised in high risks during heat waves. The findings are novel studying a sub-tropical middle-income city, facing rapid urbanisation and epidemiological and demographic transitions.

Keywords: mental disorders, admissions for F0-9 or F70-79, maximum temperature, heat waves

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Authors: Thomas LaRocca

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This study explores the development of a public-school music teacher’s professional identity within three domains: as an educator in the profession at large, as a music teacher in a school, and as a professional musician. An autoethnographic method is employed by calling upon undergraduate student teaching reflections, graduate writing assignments and presentations, cover letters for employment, professional correspondence, and reflective memos. These artifacts provide a reference for phenomenological insights into the values, hopes, and criticisms within each domain over time –all of which provide a window into the overall ontological perspective of one’s professional life at different moments in their career. While the topic of music teacher identity has been examined using autoethnographical methods before, by accessing materials over the course of ten years, the study is able to investigate the ‘how’ of identity development in a temporal context; from undergraduate student to established professional. Additionally, while the field offers a considerable amount of work surrounding the child and adolescent identity development, there are unmined opportunities to examine identity development in the adult years, especially surrounding adult professional life. Employing a postpositivist approach with social constructionism as a backdrop, this study examines adult identity formation and the contradictions, resonances, and priorities within each domain, between each domain, and perceived expectations of the professional community. What is revealed is a journey of self-improvement motivated by failure and success, marked by negotiation and sacrifice; as each domain competes for mental and temporal resources, identity is viewed as not just who one is, but also as what one leaves behind. These insights offer a window into the ontology of identity of a music educator and may provide considerations for differentiating professional development based on what stage educators are at in their careers.

Keywords: identity, longitudinal autoethnography, music teacher education, music teacher ontology

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Authors: Bubai Maji, Monorama Swain

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Speech is considered an essential and most natural medium for the interaction between machines and humans. However, extracting effective features for speech emotion recognition (SER) is remains challenging. The present studies show that the temporal information captured but high-level temporal-feature learning is yet to be investigated. In this paper, we present an efficient novel method using the Self-attention (SA) mechanism in a combination of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU) network to learn high-level temporal-feature. In order to further enhance the representation of the high-level temporal-feature, we integrate a Bi-GRU output with learnable weights features by SA, and improve the performance. We evaluate our proposed method on our created SITB-OSED and IEMOCAP databases. We report that the experimental results of our proposed method achieve state-of-the-art performance on both databases.

Keywords: Bi-GRU, 1D-CNNs, self-attention, speech emotion recognition

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Authors: Chothmal, Basant Agarwal

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Sentiment analysis means to classify a given review document into positive or negative polar document. Sentiment analysis research has been increased tremendously in recent times due to its large number of applications in the industry and academia. Sentiment analysis models can be used to determine the opinion of the user towards any entity or product. E-commerce companies can use sentiment analysis model to improve their products on the basis of users’ opinion. In this paper, we propose a new One-class Support Vector Machine (One-class SVM) based sentiment analysis model for movie review documents. In the proposed approach, we initially extract features from one class of documents, and further test the given documents with the one-class SVM model if a given new test document lies in the model or it is an outlier. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed sentiment analysis model.

Keywords: feature selection methods, machine learning, NB, one-class SVM, sentiment analysis, support vector machine

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Authors: Asuman Tezcan Mirer

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This proposed paper discusses nationalist socialist and communist propaganda struggles in the Turkish press during World War II. The paper aspires to analyze how government agencies directed and organized the Turkish press to prevent the "5th column" from influencing public opinion. During the Second World War, one of the most emphasized issues was propaganda and how Turkish citizens would be protected from the effects of disinformation. Istanbul became a significant headquarters for belligerent countries' intelligence services, and these services were involved in gathering intelligence and disseminating propaganda. The main motive of national socialist propaganda was "anti-communism" in Turkey. Subsidizing certain magazines, controlling German companies' advertisements and paper trade, spreading rumors, printing propaganda brochures, and showing German propaganda films are some tactics that the nationalist socialists applied before and during the Second World War. On the other hand, the communists targeted Turkish racist/ultra-nationalist groups and their publications, which were influenced by the Nazi regime. They were also involved in distributing Marxist publications, printing brochures, and broadcasting radio programs. This study composes of three parts. The first part describes the nationalist socialist and communist propaganda activities in Turkey during the Second World War. The second part addresses the debates over propaganda among selected newspapers representing different ideologies. Finally, the last part analyzes the Turkish government's press policy. It explains why the government allowed ideological debates in the press despite its authoritarian press policy and "active neutrality" stance in the international arena.

Keywords: propaganda, press, 5th column, World War II, Turkey

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Authors: Maria Angela Bedini, Fabio Bronzini

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Most of the Italian territory is at seismic risk. Many earthquakes have hit Italy, and devastating effects have been generated. The specific objective of the research is to distinguish the negative approaches that have generated unacceptable social situations of marginalization, abandonment, and economic regression, from positive methodological approaches. On the basis of the different situations examined, the study proposes strategies and guidelines to obtain the best possible results, in Italy or abroad, in the event of new earthquakes. At national and international level, many theoretical studies address the aspects of prevention, while the comparisons, carried out in this study, between the techniques and the operative procedures applied and the results obtained are rare. The adopted methodology compares the different pre-earthquake urban-planning approaches, for the emergency (temporary urban planning), and for the post-earthquake (socio-economic-territorial processes) in Italy. Attention is placed on the current consolidated planning and programming acquisitions, pre and post-earthquake. The main results of the study concern the prospects in Italy of protection from seismic risks in the next decades. An integrated settlement system for a new economic and social model, aimed at the rebirth of territories in crisis, is proposed. Finally, the conclusions describe the disciplinary positions, procedures and the fundamental points generally shared by the scientific community for each approach, in order to identify the strategic choices and the disciplinary and management paths that will be followed in the coming decades.

Keywords: post-earthquake, seismic emergency, seismic prevention, urban planning interventions in Italy

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Authors: Elijah Cavan

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In Major League Sports (MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL), it is the Front Office Staff (FOS) who make decisions about who plays for their respective team. The FOS bear the brunt of the responsibility for acquiring players through drafting, trading and signing players in free agency while typically contesting with maximum roster salary constraints. The players themselves are volatile assets of these teams- their value fluctuates with age and performance. A simple comparison can be made when viewing players as assets. The problem here is similar to that of optimizing your investment portfolio. The The goal is ultimately to maximize your periodic returns while tolerating a fixed risk (degree of uncertainty/ potential loss). Each franchise may value assets differently, and some may only tolerate lower risk levels- these are examples of factors that introduce additional constraints into the model. In this talk, we will detail the mathematical formulation of this problem as a constrained optimization problem- which can be solved with classical machine learning methods but is also well posed as a problem to be solved on quantum computers

Keywords: optimization, financial mathematics, sports analytics, simulated annealing

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Authors: Gupta Indu

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This paper aims to examine the relationship between foreign direct investment and globalization. Foreign direct investment plays an important role in globalization. It is dramatically increasing in the age of globalization. It has played an important role for economic growth in this global process. It can provide new markets and marketing channels, cheaper production facilities, access to new technology, products to a firm. FDI has come to play a major role in the internationalization of business. FDI has become even more important than trade. Growing liberalization of the national regulatory framework governing investment in enterprises and changes in capital markets profound changes have occurred in the size, scope and methods of FDI. New information technology systems, decline in global communication costs have made management of foreign investments far easier than in the past. FDI provide opportunities to host countries to enhance their economic development and opens new opportunities to home countries to optimize their earnings by employing their ideal resources. Smaller and weaker economies can drive out much local competition. For small and medium sized companies, FDI represents an opportunity to become more actively involved in international business activities. In the past decade, foreign direct investment has expanded its role by change in trade policy, investment policy, tariff liberalization, easing of restrictions on foreign investment and acquisition in many nations, and the deregulation and privatization of many industries. In present competitive scenario, FDI has become a prominent external source of finance for developing countries.

Keywords: foreign direct investment, globalization, economic development, information technology systems new opportunities

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Authors: Fouzia Ajmal

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Global Citizenship Education (GCED) could prove to be the best solution to prevent violent extremism as it will sustain a respect for all and build up a feeling of having a place with humankind. To meet the target 4.7 of sustainable development goals, it is important to focus on global citizenship education at all levels of education in general and in pre-service teacher education in particular so that the message and practices reach the young masses. The pre-service education is imperative to develop knowledge, skills and disposition of prospective teachers. The current study was conducted to investigate the integration of GCED in pre-service teacher education curriculum of Pakistan. The study was delimited to B.Ed (hons) Elementary Education programme. The curriculum of B.Ed Elementary developed by Higher Education Commission was analyzed through Curriculum Alignment Matrix. 31 course outlines were analyzed, and percentage was used to analyze the level of integration of GCED in courses. The analyses depicted that the concepts of civic sense, tolerance, duties and rights of citizens and fundamental rights of humans are partially aligned in a few of the courses. The tolerance, active citizenship, and respect for cultural diversity and religious harmony are evident in Pakistan Studies and teaching of social studies courses. The relevant books are also mentioned as resources in these courses. The intercultural understanding is not very evident while globalization is mentioned in a few courses. It is recommended that a deliberate effort may be made to integrate concepts of Global Citizenship Education so as to enable the prospective teachers in developing necessary skills to play their active role in promoting peace and building resilience to extremism in elementary school students.

Keywords: curriculum analysis, global citizenship education, preservice teacher education, resilience building

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Authors: Rana Zeina

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Cognitive and behavioral symptoms may, in fact, overlap and be related to the level of the general cognitive function. We measured the behavioral aspects of autism and its correlation to the cognitive ability in 30 children with ASD. We used a neuropsychological battery CANTAB eclipse to evaluate the ASD children's cognitive ability. Individuals with ASDs and challenging behaviors showed significant correlation between some cognitive abilities and motor behavior aspects. Based on these findings we can conclude that the motor behavioral problems in autism affect specific cognitive abilities in ASDs such as comprehension, learning, reversal, acquisition, attention set shifting, and speed of reaction to one stimulus. Future research should also focus on the relationship between motor stereotypes and other subtypes of repetitive behaviors, such as verbal stereotypes, and ritual and routine adherence and use different types of CANTAB tests.

Keywords: cognitive ability, CANTAB test, behaviour motor aspects, autism spectrum disorders

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Authors: Michael Kho Lim

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This paper examines the status of the film industry as an industry in the Philippines—where or how it is classified in the Philippine industrial classification system and how this positioning gives the film industry an identity (or not) and affects (film) policy development and impacts the larger national economy. It is important to look at how the national government recognises Philippine cinema officially, as this will have a direct and indirect impact on the industry in terms of its representation, conduct of business, international relations, and most especially its implications on policy development and implementation. Therefore, it is imperative that the ‘identity’ of Philippine cinema be clearly established and defined in the overall industrial landscape. Having a clear understanding of Philippine cinema’s industry status provides a better view of the bigger picture and helps us determine cinema’s position in the national agenda in terms of priority setting, future direction and how the state perceives and thereby values the film industry as an industry. This will then serve as a frame of reference that will anchor the succeeding discussion. Once the Philippine film industry status is identified, the paper will then clarify how cultural policy is defined, understood, and applied in the Philippines in relation to Philippine cinema by reviewing and analyzing existing policy documents and pending bills in the Philippine Congress and Senate. Lastly, the paper delves into the roles that (national) cultural institutions and industry organisations play as primary drivers or support mechanisms and how they become platforms (or not) for the upliftment of the independent film sector and towards the sustainability of the film industry. The paper concludes by arguing that the role of the government and how government officials perceive and treats culture is far more important than cultural policy itself, as these policies emanate from them.

Keywords: cultural and creative industries, cultural policy, film industry, Philippine cinema

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Authors: Obe Olumide Olayinka, Victor Balanica, Eugen Neagoe

Abstract:

The effects of hypertension are often lethal thus its early detection and prevention is very important for everybody. In this paper, a neural network (NN) model was developed and trained based on a dataset of hypertension causative parameters in order to forecast the likelihood of occurrence of hypertension in patients. Our research goal was to analyze the potential of the presented NN to predict, for a period of time, the risk of hypertension or the risk of developing this disease for patients that are or not currently hypertensive. The results of the analysis for a given patient can support doctors in taking pro-active measures for averting the occurrence of hypertension such as recommendations regarding the patient behavior in order to lower his hypertension risk. Moreover, the paper envisages a set of three example scenarios in order to determine the age when the patient becomes hypertensive, i.e. determine the threshold for hypertensive age, to analyze what happens if the threshold hypertensive age is set to a certain age and the weight of the patient if being varied, and, to set the ideal weight for the patient and analyze what happens with the threshold of hypertensive age.

Keywords: neural network, hypertension, data set, training set, supervised learning

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Authors: Shuchi Bharti

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This article intends to analyse the transforming nature of state and corporate sector relationship in the light of evolving regulatory and institutional aspects pertaining to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in India. The focus is on evaluating the accounts of law and decentred discourses, relevant within the changing regulatory and institutional paradigm that substantially goes ahead of formal legal control of state towards corporate actors. At this vantage point, it is important to understand the state’s posture towards a changing scenario particularly as the tone is set by regulatory parameters pertaining to CSR to drive process of engagement with the stakeholders. The tripartite framework of the article intends to focus on finding on the vital interconnected aspects of the CSR provisions (Section 135) of The Companies Act 2013 (The Act), rise of new institutions and the emergence of the decentred regulatory space. Thus is earmarked in a neo-liberal paradigm; state is witnessed to perform a responsive function in engendering enhanced public role for the corporate sector. In this overarching framework the aim is to undertake a causal, exploratory and relational analysis of aspects pertaining law, regulation and institutional transformations. Firstly, focus is drawn on to investigate the relational facets of the advent of law and regulatory framework of CSR. Secondly, in the light of the historical evolution, a causal connection is attempted between globalization, emergence of international soft law framework and the Indian case of CSR. Finally, I look into how the new Companies Act mandates CSR expenditure vis- a -vis multiple parameters and guidelines.

Keywords: corporate social responsibility, stakeholders, soft law, decentred regulation

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Authors: Qitao Xie, Qingquan Zhang, Xiaofei Zhang, Di Tian, Ruixuan Wen, Ting Zhu, Ping Yi, Xin Li

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Inspired by the recent movement of digital currency, we are building a question answering system concerning the subject of cryptocurrency using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The motivation behind this work is to properly assist digital currency investors by directing them to the corresponding knowledge bases that can offer them help and increase the querying speed. BERT, one of newest language models in natural language processing, was investigated to improve the quality of generated responses. We studied different combinations of hyperparameters of the BERT model to obtain the best fit responses. Further, we created an intelligent chatbot for cryptocurrency using BERT. A chatbot using BERT shows great potential for the further advancement of a cryptocurrency market tool. We show that the BERT neural networks generalize well to other tasks by applying it successfully to cryptocurrency.

Keywords: bidirectional encoder representations from transformers, BERT, chatbot, cryptocurrency, deep learning

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Authors: Rabia Bashir, Sajjad Akbar

Abstract:

There is an inevitable demand of web mining due to rapid increase of huge information on the Internet, but the striking variety of web structures has made required content retrieval a difficult task. To counter this issue, Web Content Mining (WCM) emerges as a potential candidate which extracts and integrates suitable resources of data to users. In past few years, research has been done on several extraction techniques for WCM i.e. agent-based, template-based, assumption-based, statistic-based, wrapper-based and machine learning. However, it is still unclear that either these approaches are efficiently tackling the significant challenges of WCM or not. To answer this question, this paper identifies these challenges such as language independency, structure flexibility, performance, automation, dynamicity, redundancy handling, intelligence, relevant content retrieval, and privacy. Further, mapping of these challenges is done with existing extraction mechanisms which helps to adopt the most suitable WCM approach, given some conditions and characteristics at hand.

Keywords: content mining challenges, web content mining, web content extraction approaches, web information retrieval

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Authors: T. Miková

Abstract:

This paper analyzes the effect of a single uniform accounting rule on reporting quality by investigating the influence of IFRS on earnings management. This paper examines whether earnings management is reduced after IFRS adoption through the use of “loss avoidance thresholds”, a method that has been verified in earlier studies. This paper concentrates on two European countries: one that represents the continental code law tradition with weak protection of investors (France) and one that represents the Anglo-American common law tradition, which typically implies a strong enforcement system (the United Kingdom). The research investigates a sample of 526 companies (6822 firm-year observations) during the years 2000 – 2013. The results are different for the two jurisdictions. This study demonstrates that a single set of accounting standards contributes to better reporting quality and reduces the pervasiveness of earnings management in France. In contrast, there is no evidence that a reduction in earnings management followed the implementation of IFRS in the United Kingdom. Due to the fact that IFRS benefit France but not the United Kingdom, other political and economic factors, such legal system or capital market strength, must play a significant role in influencing the comparability and transparency cross-border companies’ financial statements. Overall, the result suggests that IFRS moderately contribute to the accounting quality of reported financial statements and bring benefit for stakeholders, though the role played by other economic factors cannot be discounted.

Keywords: accounting standards, earnings management, international financial reporting standards, loss avoidance, reporting quality

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