Search results for: media organizations

Authors: Alena Radina

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On the global stage, national image is shaped by historical memory of wars and alliances, government ideology and particularly media stereotypes which represent countries in positive or negative ways. News magazine covers are a key site for national representation. The object of analysis in this paper is the portrayals of the US, Germany, China, and Russia in the front pages and cover stories of “Time”, “Der Spiegel”, “Beijing Review”, and “Expert”. Political comedy helps people learn about current affairs even if politics is not their area of interest, and thus satire indirectly sets the public agenda. Coupled with satirical messages, cover images and the linguistic messages embedded in the covers become persuasive visual and verbal factors, known to drive about 80% of magazine sales. Preliminary analysis identified satirical elements in magazine covers, which are known to influence and frame understandings and attract younger audiences. Multimodal and transnational comparative framing analyses lay the groundwork to investigate why journalists, editors and designers deploy certain frames rather than others. This research investigates to what degree frames used in covers correlate with frames within the cover stories and what these framings can tell us about media professionals’ representations of their own and other nations. The study sample includes 32 covers consisting of two covers representing each of the four chosen countries from the four magazines. The sampling framework considers two time periods to compare countries’ representation with two different presidents, and between men and women when present. The countries selected for analysis represent each category of the international news flows model: the core nations are the US and Germany; China is a semi-peripheral country; and Russia is peripheral. Examining textual and visual design elements on the covers and images in the cover stories reveals not only what editors believe visually attracts the reader’s attention to the magazine but also how the magazines frame and construct national images and national leaders. The cover is the most powerful editorial and design page in a magazine because images incorporate less intrusive framing tools. Thus, covers require less cognitive effort of audiences who may therefore be more likely to accept the visual frame without question. Analysis of design and linguistic elements in magazine covers helps to understand how media outlets shape their audience’s perceptions and how magazines frame global issues. While previous multimodal research of covers has focused mostly on lifestyle magazines or newspapers, this paper examines the power of current affairs magazines’ covers to shape audience perception of national image.

Keywords: framing analysis, magazine covers, multimodality, national image, satire

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Authors: Mustafa Eruyar, Ersoy Pehlivan, Fatih Kafalı, Fatih Gundogan

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All megacities are not only under the pressure of common urbanization and growth problems but also dealing with different challenges according to their specific circumstances. However, the majority of cities focuses mainly on popular smart city projects, which are usually driven by strong private sector, regardless of their characteristics, each city needs to develop customized projects within a tailor-made smart city roadmap to be able to solve its own challenges. Smart city manifest, helps citizens to feel the action better than good reading smart city vision statements, which consists of five elements; namely purpose, values, mission, vision, and strategy. This study designs a methodology for smart city roadmap based on a top-down approach, breaking down of smart city manifest to feasible projects for a systematic smart city transformation. This methodology was implemented in Istanbul smart city transformation program which includes smart city literature review, current state analysis, roadmap, and architecture projects, respectively. Istanbul smart city roadmap project followed an extensive literature review of certain leading smart cities around the world and benchmarking of the city’s current state using well known smart city indices. In the project, needs of citizens and service providers of the city were identified via stakeholder, persona and social media analysis. The project aimed to develop smart city projects targeting fulfilling related needs by implementing a gap analysis between current state and foreseen plans. As a result, in 11 smart city domains and enablers; 24 strategic objectives, 50 programs, and 101 projects were developed with the support of 183 smart city stakeholder entities and based on 125 citizen persona profiles and last one-year social media analysis. In conclusion, the followed methodology helps cities to identify and prioritize their needs and plan for long-term sustainable development, despite limited resources.

Keywords: needs-based, manifest, roadmap, smart city, top-down approach

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Authors: Titin Handayani, Adi Mulyanto, Fajar Eko Priyanto

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It is generally recognized, that algae could be an interesting option for reducing CO₂ emissions. Based on light and CO₂, algae can be used for the production various economically interesting products. Current algae cultivation techniques, however, still present a number of limitations. Efficient feeding of CO₂, especially on a large scale, is one of them. Current methods for CO₂ feeding to algae cultures rely on the sparging pure CO₂ or directly from flue gas. The limiting factor in this system is the solubility of CO₂ in water, which demands a considerable amount of energy for an effective gas to liquid transfer and leads to losses to the atmosphere. Due to the current ineffective methods for CO₂ introduction into algae ponds very large surface areas would be required for enough ponds to capture a considerable amount of the CO₂. The purpose of this study is to assess technology to capture carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions generated by industry by utilizing of microalgae Chlorella sp. The microalgae were cultivated in a bioreactor culture pond raceway type. The result is expected to be useful in mitigating the effects of greenhouse gases in reducing the CO₂ emissions. The research activities include: (1) Characterization of boiler flue gas, (2) Operation of culture pond, (3) Sampling and sample analysis. The results of this study showed that the initial assessment absorption of the flue gas by microalgae using 1000 L raceway pond completed by heat exchanger were quite promising. The transfer of CO₂ into the pond culture system was run well. This identified from the success of cooling the boiler flue gas from the temperature of about 200 °C to below ambient temperature. Except for the temperature, the gas bubbles into the culture media were quite fine. Therefore, the contact between the gas and the media was well performed. The efficiency of CO₂ absorption by Chlorella sp reached 6.68 % with an average CO₂ loading of 0.29 g/L/day.

Keywords: Chlorella sp., CO2 emission, heat exchange, microalgae, milk industry, raceway pond

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Authors: Amreth Chandrasehar

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Machine Learning (ML) Models are developed and run in production to solve various use cases that help organizations to be more efficient and help drive the business. But this comes at a massive development cost and lost business opportunities. According to the Gartner report, 85% of data science projects fail, and one of the factors impacting this is not paying attention to Model Observability. Model Observability helps the developers and operators to pinpoint the model performance issues data drift and help identify root cause of issues. This paper focuses on providing insights into incorporating model observability in model development and operationalizing it in production.

Keywords: model observability, monitoring, drift detection, ML observability platform

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Authors: Jennifer E Simpson

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Background and purpose: The ubiquitous use of the Internet and social media by children and young people has had a dual effect. The first is to open a world of possibilities and promise that is characterized by the ability to consume and create content, connect with friends, explore and experiment. The second relates to risks such as unsolicited requests, sexual exploitation, cyberbullying and commercial exploitation. This duality poses significant difficulties for a generation of foster carers and social workers who have no childhood experience to draw on in terms of growing up using the Internet, social media and digital devices. This presentation is concerned with the findings of a small qualitative study about the use of digital devices and the Internet by care-experienced young people to stay in touch with their families and the way this was managed by foster carers and social workers using specific parental mediation strategies. The findings highlight that restrictive strategies were used by foster carers and endorsed by social workers. An argument is made for an approach that develops a series of balanced solutions that move foster carers from such restrictive approaches to those that are grounded in co-use and are interpretive in nature. Methods: Using a purposive sampling strategy, 12 triads consisting of care-experienced young people (aged 13-18 years), their foster carers and allocated social workers were recruited. All respondents undertook a semi-structured interview, with the young people detailing what social media apps and other devices they used to contact their families via an Ecomap. The foster carers and social workers shared details of the methods and approaches they used to manage digital devices and the Internet in general. Data analysis was performed using a Framework analytic method to explore the various attitudes, as well as complementary and contradictory perspectives of the young people, their foster carers and allocated social workers. Findings: The majority of foster carers made use of parental mediation strategies that erred on the side of typologies that included setting rules and regulations (restrictive), ad-hoc checking of a young person’s behavior and device (monitoring), and software used to limit or block access to inappropriate websites (technical). It was noted that minimal use was made by foster carers of parental mediation strategies that included talking about content (active/interpretive) or sharing Internet activities (co-use). Amongst the majority of the social workers, they also had a strong preference for restrictive approaches. Conclusions and implications: Trepidations on the part of both foster carers and social workers about the use of digital devices and the Internet meant that the parental strategies used were weighted more towards restriction, with little use made of approaches such as co-use and interpretative. This lack of balance calls for solutions that are grounded in co-use and an interpretive approach, both of which can be achieved through training and support, as well as wider policy change.

Keywords: parental mediation strategies, risk, children in state care, online safety

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Authors: Ander Pomposo

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Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the impact that dialogue has on the relationship between shared leadership and innovative behavior and the importance of dialogue in innovation. This study wants to contribute to the literature by providing theorists and researchers a better understanding of how to move forward in the studies of moderator variables in the relationship between shared leadership and team outcomes such as innovation. Methodology: A systematic review of the literature, originally adopted from the medical sciences but also used in management and leadership studies, was conducted to synthesize research in a systematic, transparent and reproducible manner. A final sample of 48 empirical studies was scientifically synthesized. Findings: Shared leadership gives a better solution to team management challenges and goes beyond the classical, hierarchical, or vertical leadership models based on the individual leader approach. One of the outcomes that emerge from shared leadership is team innovative behavior. To intensify the relationship between shared leadership and team innovative behavior, and understand when is more effective, the moderating effects of other variables in this relationship should be examined. This synthesis of the empirical studies revealed that dialogue is a moderator variable that has an impact on the relationship between shared leadership and team innovative behavior when leadership is understood as a relational process. Dialogue is an activity between at least two speech partners trying to fulfill a collective goal and is a way of living open to people and ideas through interaction. Dialogue is productive when team members engage relationally with one another. When this happens, participants are more likely to take responsibility for the tasks they are involved and for the relationships they have with others. In this relational engagement, participants are likely to establish high-quality connections with a high degree of generativity. This study suggests that organizations should facilitate the dialogue of team members in shared leadership which has a positive impact on innovation and offers a more adaptive framework for the leadership that is needed in teams working in complex work tasks. These results uncover the necessity of more research on the role that dialogue plays in contributing to important organizational outcomes such as innovation. Case studies describing both best practices and obstacles of dialogue in team innovative behavior are necessary to gain a more detailed insight into the field. It will be interesting to see how all these fields of research evolve and are implemented in dialogue practices in the organizations that use team-based structures to deal with uncertainty, fast-changing environments, globalization and increasingly complex work.

Keywords: dialogue, innovation, leadership, shared leadership, team innovative behavior

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Authors: Sulmaz Mozaffari, Zahra Mozaffari, Saman Mozaffari

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Erotic literature is a branch in modern literature which has the key terms of woman and her sexual desire. It has so many supporters and it is growing to be more important everyday and in such a way that it is criticized on social medias. To create their work in that part of literature, the authors take the woman into consideration to explore the cultural, social, and political theories. In this research, the author gives an analysis of the erotic literature in Asia and the role of woman as the main element in it.

Keywords: erotic literature, social media, woman, attract addressee

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Authors: Raju Thapa

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Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are conducting activities in Nepal with the overall objective to strengthen peace, progress and prosperity in the society. Based on the research objectives, this study has tried to trace out the reasons behind massive growth of NGOs and the trends that have shaped the handling and functioning of NGOs in the Kailali district. The outcomes of this research are quite embarrassing for NGOs officials. Based on the findings of this research, NGOs are expected to review their guiding principal, integrity and conduct for the betterment of the society.

Keywords: NGO, trends, increasing, conduct, integrity, guiding principle, legal, governance, human resources, public trust, financial, collaboration, networking

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Authors: Chee Wee Gan, Anthony Herr Cheun Ng, Yee Shan Wong, Subbu Venkatraman, Lynne Hsueh Yee Lim

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Otitis media with effusion (OME) is the leading cause of hearing loss in children worldwide. Surgery to insert grommet tube into the eardrum is usually indicated for OME unresponsive to antimicrobial therapy. It is the most common surgery for children. However, current commercially available grommet tubes are non-bioresorbable, not drug-treated, with unpredictable duration of retention on the eardrum to ventilate middle ear. Their functionality is impaired when clogged or chronically infected, requiring additional surgery to remove/reinsert grommet tubes. We envisaged that a novel fully bioresorbable grommet tube with sustained antibiotic release technology could address these drawbacks. In this study, drug-loaded bioresorbable poly(L-lactide-co-ε-caprolactone)(PLC) copolymer grommet tubes were fabricated by microinjection moulding technique. In vitro drug release and degradation model of PLC tubes were studied. Antibacterial property was evaluated by incubating PLC tubes with P. aeruginosa broth. Surface morphology was analyzed using scanning electron microscopy. A preliminary animal study was conducted using guinea pigs as an in vivo model to evaluate PLC tubes with and without drug, with commercial Mini Shah grommet tube as comparison. Our in vitro data showed sustained drug release over 3 months. All PLC tubes revealed exponential degradation profiles over time. Modeling predicted loss of tube functionality in water to be approximately 14 weeks and 17 weeks for PLC with and without drug, respectively. Generally, PLC tubes had less bacteria adherence, which were attributed to the much smoother tube surfaces compared to Mini Shah. Antibiotic from PLC tube further made bacteria adherence on surface negligible. They showed neither inflammation nor otorrhea after 18 weeks post-insertion in the eardrums of guinea pigs, but had demonstrated severe degree of bioresorption. Histology confirmed the new PLC tubes were biocompatible. Analyses on the PLC tubes in the eardrums showed bioresorption profiles close to our in vitro degradation models. The bioresorbable antibiotic-loaded grommet tubes showed good predictability in functionality. The smooth surface and sustained release technology reduced the risk of tube infection. Tube functional duration of 18 weeks allowed sufficient ventilation period to treat OME. Our ongoing studies include modifying the surface properties with protein coating, optimizing the drug dosage in the tubes to enhance their performances, evaluating their functional outcome on hearing after full resoption of grommet tube and healing of eardrums, and developing animal model with OME to further validate our in vitro models.

Keywords: bioresorbable polymer, drug release, grommet tube, guinea pigs, otitis media with effusion

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Authors: Hamidreza Fallah Lajimi , Elham Karami, Fatemeh Ali nasab, Mostafa Mahdavikia

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Being responsive is an increasingly important skill for firms in today’s global economy; thus firms must be agile. Naturally, it follows that an organization’s agility depends on its supply chain being agile. However, achieving supply chain agility is a function of other abilities within the organization. This paper analyses results from a survey of 71 Iran manufacturing companies in order to identify some of the factors for agile organizations in managing their supply chains. Then we classification this company in four cluster with fuzzy c-mean technique and with four validations functional determine automatically the optimal number of clusters.

Keywords: agile supply chain, clustering, fuzzy clustering

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Authors: Faizan Sultan

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Non-government organizations (NGOs) in Pakistan have the potential to deliver services such as health, education, and rural development through targeting the most vulnerable communities of society. Having this significant importance, NGOs are facing numerous challenges in service delivery. So, there is a need to identify the challenges NGOs face in community development, particularly post-conflict development. The current study has analyzed the social and political constraints in development projects in the post-conflict region of the Swat district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The objectives of this study are “What are the social and political constraints faced by the nongovernmental organizations in the implementation of development aid Projects in post-conflict development of Swat and to examine the challenges in coordination mechanism between government departments, NGOs, and community in reconstruction activities”. This research is based upon both the quantitative and qualitative data that is being gathered from the NGO representatives, government officials, and community members who were involved in post-conflict development interventions in the Swat region. A purposive sampling technique was used to select respondents from the community members/activists (25 in number) and government and NGO officials (10 in number). Based on analysis against our objectives, NGOs have faced numerous constraints such as Insecurity, Negative Perceptions about NGOs, restrictions on women's mobility, government policies and regulations, lack of coordination and networking, trust deficit, and political interference while implementing their project interventions. These findings concluded that constraints have affected project implementation to a greater extent, including women's participation, involvement of marginalized populations, and equal distribution of resources. In the Swat region, NGOs cannot openly discuss sensitive projects such as human rights, gender-based projects, or women empowerment as these issues are very sensitive to the local community due to their cultural values. The community may not allow their females to go outside their homes as this region is a male-dominated society. Similarly, lack of communication and poor networking for the arrangements of the project meetings were also the major constraints.

Keywords: national disaster management authority, millennium development goals, provincial disaster management authority, provincial reconstruction, rehabilitation and settlement authority

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Authors: Claudia Matassa, Matthias Hohne, Dominic Ormerod, Yamini Satyawali

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Chiral amines integrate the backbone of several active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) used in modern medicine for the treatment of a vast range of diseases. Despite the demand, their synthesis remains challenging. Besides a range of chemicals and enzymatical methods, chiral amine synthesis using transaminases (EC 2.6.1.W) represents a useful alternative to access this important class of compounds. Even though transaminases exhibit excellent stereo and regioselectivity and the potential for high yield, the reaction suffers from a number of challenges, including the thermodynamic equilibrium, product inhibition, and low substrate solubility. In this work, we demonstrate a membrane assisted strategy for addressing these challenges. It involves the use of high molecular weight (HMW) amine donors for the transaminase-catalyzed synthesis of 4-phenyl-2-butylamine in both aqueous and organic solvent media. In contrast to common amine donors such as alanine or isopropylamine, these large molecules, provided in excess for thermodynamic equilibrium shifting, are easily retained by commercial nanofiltration membranes; thus a selective permeation of the desired smaller product amine is possible. The enzymatic transamination in aqueous media, combined with selective product removal shifted the equilibrium enhancing substrate conversion by an additional 25% compared to the control reaction. Along with very efficient amine product removal, there was undesirable loss of ketone substrate and low product concentration was achieved. The system was therefore further improved by performing the reaction in organic solvent (n-heptane). Coupling the reaction system with membrane-assisted product removal resulted in a highly concentrated and relatively pure ( > 97%) product solution. Moreover, a product yield of 60% was reached, compared to 15% without product removal.

Keywords: amine donor, chiral amines, in situ product removal, transamination

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Authors: Zhi-Wei Zheng, Zhong-Qi Liu, Jia-Ling Qiu, Shan-Qing Guo, Zhong-Wei Jia, Chun Hao

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Objectives: The purpose of this study was to understand and examine the association between diurnal mood variation and sexual/health-related status among men who have sex with men (MSM) using data from MSM Chinese Twitter messages. The study consists of 843,745 postings of 377,610 MSM users located in Guangdong that were culled from the MSM Chinese Twitter App. Positive affect, negative affect, sexual related behaviors, and health-related status were measured using the Simplified Chinese Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Emotions, including joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust were measured using the Weibo Basic Mood Lexicon. A positive sentiment score and a positive emotions score were also calculated. Linear regression models based on a permutation test were used to assess associations between affective states and sexual/health-related status. In the results, 5,871 active MSM users and their 477,374 postings were finally selected. MSM expressed positive affect and joy at 8 a.m. and expressed negative affect and negative emotions between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. In addition, 25.1% of negative postings were directly related to health and 13.4% reported seeking social support during that sensitive period. MSM who were senior, educated, overweight or obese, self-identified as performing a versatile sex role, and with less followers, more followers, and less chat groups mainly expressed more negative affect and negative emotions. MSM who talked more about sexual-related behaviors had a higher positive sentiment score (β=0.29, p < 0.001) and a higher positive emotions score (β = 0.16, p < 0.001). MSM who reported more on their health status had a lower positive sentiment score (β = -0.83, p < 0.001) and a lower positive emotions score (β = -0.37, p < 0.001). The study concluded that psychological intervention based on an app for MSM should be conducted, as it may improve mental health.

Keywords: affect, men who have sex with men, sexual related behavior, health-related status, social media

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Authors: Liza Ireni-Saban

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The 6.6 magnitude quake event that occurred in 2003 (Bam, Iran) made it impossible for the Iranian government to handle disaster relief efforts domestically. In this extreme event, the Iranian government reached out to the international community, and this created a momentum that had to be carried out by trust-building efforts on all sides, often termed ‘Disaster Diplomacy’. Indeed, the circumstances were even more critical when one considers the increasing political and economic isolation of Iran within the international community. The potential for transformative political space to be opened by disaster has been recognized by dominant international political actors. Despite the fact that Bam 2003 post-disaster relief efforts did not catalyze any diplomatic activities on all sides, it is suggested that few international aid agencies have successfully used disaster recovery to enhance their popular legitimacy and reputation among the international community. In terms of disaster diplomacy, an actor’s reputational capital may affect his ability to build coalitions and alliances to achieve international political ends, to negotiate and build understanding and trust with foreign publics. This study suggests that the post-disaster setting may benefit from using the ecology of games framework to evaluate the role of bridging actors and mediators in facilitating collaborative governance networks. Recent developments in network theory and analysis provide means of structural embeddedness to explore how reputational capital can be built through brokerage roles of actors engaged in a disaster management network. This paper then aims to structure the relations among actors that participated in the post-disaster relief efforts in the 2003 Bam earthquake (Iran) in order to assess under which conditions actors may be strategically utilized to serve as mediating organizations for future disaster events experienced by isolated nations or nations in conflict. The results indicate the strategic use of reputational capital by the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as key broker to build a successful coordinative system for reducing disaster vulnerabilities. International aid agencies rarely played brokerage roles to coordinate peripheral actors. U.S. foreign assistance (USAID), despite coordination capacities, was prevented from serving brokerage roles in the system.

Keywords: coordination, disaster diplomacy, international aid organizations, Iran

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Authors: Sunita Kumawat, Sumit Kumar Vishwakarma

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The present study fundamentally focuses on analyzing the limitations and transference of horizontally polarized Shear waves(SH waves) in a four-layered compounded cylinder. The geometrical structure comprises of concentric cylinders of infinite length composed of self-reinforced (SR), fibre-reinforced (FR), piezo-magnetic (PM), and piezo-electric(PE) materials. The entire structure is assumed to be pre stressed along the azimuthal direction. In order to make the structure sensitive to the application pertaining to sensors and actuators, the PM and PE cylinders have been categorically placed in the outer part of the geometry. Whereas in order to provide stiffness and stability to the structure, the inner part consists of self-reinforced and fibre-reinforced media. The common boundary between each of the cylinders has been essentially considered as imperfectly bounded. At the interface of PE and PM media, mechanical, electrical, magnetic, and inter-coupled types of imperfections have been exhibited. The closed-form of dispersion relation has been deduced for two contrast cases i.e. electrically open magnetically short(EOMS) and electrically short and magnetically open ESMO circuit conditions. Dispersion curves have been plotted to illustrate the salient features of parameters like normalized imperfect interface parameters, initial stresses, and radii of the concentric cylinders. The comparative effect of each one of these parameters on the phase velocity of the wave has been enlisted and marked individually. Every graph has been presented with two consecutive modes in succession for a comprehensive understanding. This theoretical study may be implemented to improvise the performance of surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors and actuators consisting of piezo-electric quartz and piezo-composite concentric cylinders.

Keywords: self-reinforced, fibre-reinforced, piezo-electric, piezo-magnetic, interfacial imperfection

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Authors: Seyedeza Baharisaravi

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As we know, we are living in the hyper competitive environment and all of companies strive hard to engross more and more customers. Thus, in this milieu, we should produce and deliver diverse commodities, regarding with the consumers' interests. So, all companies elicit that they should pay attention on the external resources besides the internal ones. Hence, the meaning of supply chain management has been introduced as a fundamental issue for global e-business, e-commerce and e-government. The present paper explains prominences, challenges, keys, various descriptions, advantages and disadvantages, globalization and the future of one of the vital issues in the business realm which is supply chain management (SCM). This issue is one of the newest concepts of business science that has transformed the essence of every business and attitude of marketers.

Keywords: SCM concepts, supply chain management, the importance of SCM, SCM in organization

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Authors: Vinod Balakrishnan, Chrisalice Ela Joseph

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The Burmese Exodus of 1942, which left more than 4 lakh as refugees and thousands dead, is one of the worst forced migrations in recorded history. Adding to the woes of the refugees is the lack of credible documentation of their lived experiences, trauma, and stories and their erasure from recorded history. Media reports, national records, and mainstream narratives that have registered the exodus provide sanitized versions which have reduced the refugees to a nameless, faceless mass of travelers and obliterated their lived experiences, trauma, and sufferings. This attitudinal problem compels the need to stem the insensitivity that accompanies institutional memory by making a case for a more humanistically evolved policy that puts in place protocols for the way the humanities would voice the concern for the refugee. A definite step in this direction and a far more relevant project in our times is the need to build a comprehensive refugee archive that can be a repository of the refugee experiences and perspectives. The paper draws on Hannah Arendt’s position on the Jewish refugee crisis, Agamben’s work on statelessness and citizenship, Foucault’s notion of governmentality and biopolitics, Edward Said’s concepts on Exile, Fanon’s work on the dispossessed, Derrida’s work on ‘the foreigner and hospitality’ in order to conceptualize the refugee condition which will form the theoretical framework for the paper. It also refers to the existing scholarship in the field of refugee studies such as Roger Zetter’s work on the ‘refugee label’, Philip Marfleet’s work on ‘refugees and history’, Lisa Malkki’s research on the anthropological discourse of the refugee and refugee studies. The paper is also informed by the work that has been done by the international organizations to address the refugee crisis. The emphasis is on building a strong argument for the establishment of the refugee archive that finds but a passing and a none too convincing reference in refugee studies in order to enable a multi-dimensional understanding of the refugee crisis. Some of the old questions cannot be dismissed as outdated as the continuing travails of the refugees in different parts of the world only remind us that they are still, largely, unanswered. The questions are -What is the nature of a Refugee Archive? How is it different from the existing historical and political archives? What are the implications of the refugee archive? What is its contribution to refugee studies? The paper draws on Diana Taylor’s concept of the archive and the repertoire to theorize the refugee archive as a repository that has the documentary function of the ‘archive’ and the ‘agency’ function of the repertoire. It then reads Ayya’s Accounts- a memoir by Anand Pandian -in the light of Hannah Arendt’s concepts of the ‘refugee as vanguard’ and ‘story telling as political action’- to illustrate how the memoir contributes to the refugee archive that provides the refugee a place and agency in history. The paper argues for a refugee archive that has implications for the formulation of inclusive refugee policies.

Keywords: Ayya’s Accounts, Burmese Exodus, policy protocol, refugee archive

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Authors: Jelena Kovačević Vorgučin, Sibila Petenji Arbutina

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The postmodern age brings a rapid development of technology which inevitably leads to man's need to adapt to modern lifestyle. On the one hand, technological achievements have made human life easier, but there are numerous risks involved. Moreover, man's awareness and perception is changing and adapting unconsciously to the world we live in, while communication in the 21st century is predominantly based on the consumption of images. This paper presents sociological aspects of a community which is confined due to turbulent political-economic circumstances and its impact on the development of media literacy in Serbia. Previous researches led to the conclusion that the media culture is on an extremely low level, and that it can have a strong influence on the general development of the society, starting from the youngest segment of the population. Our aim is to use the conceptual authorial photographs inspired by the obtained research results to emphasize the importance that the impact of visual art has in delivering the message, its role in education and in raising awareness of universal social problems. The paper presents a number of stages involved in the conceptual project which is designed to last over a longer period of time in order to facilitate dissemination of information. First, a survey was carried out in several preschool institutions. This resulted in obtaining the necessary information on the habitual use of the medium of television in children and their carers-parents. The second stage focused on the relationship between the parent and the child in TV consumption. Further, an overview of the visual part of the project was made, which consisted of photographs in various dimensions, ranging from miniature to large dimensions, and following various exhibition principles in both gallery and alternative spaces. This stage of the project placed particular emphasis on the non-standard exhibiting formats and alternative exhibition principles which are increasingly present in all kinds of visual art aimed at achieving a higher level of information noticing and memorizing. The motif on the authorial photographs is children's portraits taken while they are watching different television contents, with emphasis on their emotional response. The importance of the medium of TV is particularly emphasized due to the fact that its consumption is the highest, even though there are newer and more advanced information-technological achievements. The already realized part of the project was used for an analysis of the results in the last stage of the project, which led to the conclusion that the response to the entire visual expression campaign was extremely positive, and action as such very useful indeed. The results obtained speak in favour of widening and continuation of the project, both on a greater number of sites locally as well as in other communities in Serbia with the aim of guiding people towards meaningful consumption of the television medium.

Keywords: alternative space exhibiting, children and TV, conceptual portrait photography, media literacy

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Authors: Oktia Woro Kasmini Handayani, Bambang Budi Raharjo, Efa Nugroho, Bertakalswa Hermawati

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Obesity prevalence and severe malnutrition in Indonesia has increased from 2007 to 2013. The utilization of local resources in nutritional program planning can be used to program efficiency and to reach the goal. The aim of this research is to plan a nutrition program based on local resources for urban fringe areas in a developing country. This research used a qualitative approach, with a focus on local resources including social capital, social system, cultural system. The study was conducted in Mijen, Central Java, as one of the urban fringe areas in Indonesia. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques are used to determine participants. A total of 16 participants took part in the study. Observation, interviews, focus group discussion, SWOT analysis, brainstorming and Miles and Huberman models were used to analyze the data. We have identified several local resources, such as the contributions from nutrition cadres, social organizations, social financial resources, as well as the cultural system and social system. The outstanding contribution of nutrition cadres is the participation and creativity to improve nutritional status. In addition, social organizations, like the role of the integrated health center for children (Pos Pelayanan Terpadu), can be engaged in the nutrition program planning. This center is supported by House of Nutrition to assist in nutrition program planning, and provide social support to families, neighbors and communities as social capitals. The study also reported that cultural systems that show appreciation for well-nourished children are a better way to improve the problem of balanced nutrition. Social systems such as teamwork and mutual cooperation can also be a potential resource to support nutritional programs and overcome associated problems. The impact of development in urban areas such as the introduction of more green areas which improve the perceived status of local people, as well as new health services facilitated by people and companies, can also be resources to support nutrition programs. Local resources in urban fringe areas can be used in the planning of nutrition programs. The expansion of partnership with all stakeholders, empowering the community through optimizing the roles of nutrition care centers for children as our recommendation with regard to nutrition program planning.

Keywords: developing country, local resources, nutrition program, urban fringe

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Authors: Berkas Khaoula

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Based on selection characteristics, high-density polyethylene (HDPE) extruded pipes are among the most economical and durable materials as well-designed solutions for water and gas transmission systems. The main reasons for such a choice are the high quality-performance ratio and the long-term service durability under aggressive conditions. Due to inevitable interactions with soils of different chemical compositions and transported fluids, aggressiveness becomes a key factor in studying resilient strength and life prediction limits. This phenomenon is known as environmental stress cracking resistance (ESCR). In this work, the effect of 3 acidic environments (5% acetic, 20% hydrochloric and 20% sulfuric) on HDPE-100 samples (~10x11x24 mm3). The results presented in the form (Δm/m0, %) as a function of √t indicate that the absorption, in the case of strong acids (HCl and H2SO4), evolves towards negative values involving material losses such as antioxidants and some additives. On the other hand, acetic acid and deionized water (DW) give a form of linear Fickean (LF) and B types, respectively. In general, the acids cause a slow but irreversible alteration of the chemical structure, composition and physical integrity of the polymer. The DW absorption is not significant (~0.02%) for an immersion duration of 69 days. Such results are well accepted in actual applications, while changes caused by acidic environments are serious and must be subjected to particular monitoring of the OIT factor (Oxidation Induction Time). After 55 days of aging, the H2SO4 and HCl media showed particular values with a loss of % mass in the interval [0.025-0.038] associated with irreversible chemical reactions as well as physical degradations. This state is usually explained by hydrolysis of the polymer, causing the loss of functions and causing chain scissions. These results are useful for designing and estimating the lifetime of the tube in service and in contact with adverse environments.

Keywords: HDPE, environmental stress cracking, absorption, acid media, chemical aging

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Authors: Emmanuel C. Ngerem

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The ever-increasing depletion of the dominant global form of energy (fossil fuels) calls for the development of sustainable and green alternative energy sources such as bioethanol, biohydrogen, and biodiesel. The production of the major biofuels relies on biomass feedstocks that are mainly derived from edible food crops and some inedible plants. One suitable feedstock with great potential as raw material for biofuel production is microalgal biomass. Despite the tremendous attributes of microalgae as a source of biofuel, their cultivation requires huge volumes of freshwater, thus posing a serious threat to commercial-scale production and utilization of algal biomass. In this study, a multi-media wastewater mixture for microalgae growth was formulated and optimized. Moreover, the obtained microalgae biomass was pre-treated to reduce sugar recovery and was compared with previous studies on microalgae biomass pre-treatment. The formulated and optimized mixed wastewater media for biomass and lipid accumulation was established using the simplex lattice mixture design. Based on the superposition approach of the potential results, numerical optimization was conducted, followed by the analysis of biomass concentration and lipid accumulation. The coefficients of regression (R²) of 0.91 and 0.98 were obtained for biomass concentration and lipid accumulation models, respectively. The developed optimization model predicted optimal biomass concentration and lipid accumulation of 1.17 g/L and 0.39 g/g, respectively. It suggested 64.69% dairy wastewater (DWW) and 35.31% paper and pulp wastewater (PWW) mixture for biomass concentration, 34.21% DWW, and 65.79% PWW for lipid accumulation. Experimental validation generated 0.94 g/L and 0.39 g/g of biomass concentration and lipid accumulation, respectively. The obtained microalgae biomass was pre-treated, enzymatically hydrolysed, and subsequently assessed for reducing sugars. The optimization of microwave pre-treatment of Chlorococcum sp. was achieved using response surface methodology (RSM). Microwave power (100 – 700 W), pre-treatment time (1 – 7 min), and acid-liquid ratio (1 – 5%) were selected as independent variables for RSM optimization. The optimum conditions were achieved at microwave power, pre-treatment time, and acid-liquid ratio of 700 W, 7 min, and 32.33:1, respectively. These conditions provided the highest amount of reducing sugars at 10.73 g/L. Process optimization predicted reducing sugar yields of 11.14 g/L on microwave-assisted pre-treatment of 2.52% HCl for 4.06 min at 700 watts. Experimental validation yielded reducing sugars of 15.67 g/L. These findings demonstrate that dairy wastewater and paper and pulp wastewater that could pose a serious environmental nuisance. They could be blended to form a suitable microalgae growth media, consolidating the potency of microalgae as a viable feedstock for fermentable sugars. Also, the outcome of this study supports the microalgal wastewater biorefinery concept, where wastewater remediation is coupled with bioenergy production.

Keywords: wastewater cultivation, mixture design, lipid, biomass, nutrient removal, microwave, Chlorococcum, raceway pond, fermentable sugar, modelling, optimization

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Authors: Rakan Alajmi, Rahaf Alnazzawi, Yara Aljefri, Abdullah Alafif, Ali Alraddadi, Awadh Alamri

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Background: The distribution of physicians in different specialties across Saudi Arabia is determined by the career choices of medical students. Dermatology residency program is one of the highly competitive programs here in Saudi Arabia. Assessing and understanding the factors perceived to be attractive in choosing dermatology will aid the directors of the specialty programs to plan for a more balanced workforce distribution to better suit the needs of the specialties. Aim: The aim of our study is to determine and assess the factors perceived to be significantly attractive when choosing dermatology as a future specialty. Methods: The study is a cross-sectional study conducted in King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A validated questionnaire was sent electronically to clinical year medical students. In addition to the questionnaire, gender, grade point average, preferred specialty, and other socio-demographic data were assessed. Results: A total of 121 clinical years medical students completed the questionnaire, 8 (6.6%) preferred dermatology as a specialty. 76 (62.8%) of the participants score a grade point average of more than 4.5 and 83 students (68.6%) chose their specialty during clinical years. The appeal of being a dermatologist (P= 0.047), the portrayal of different specialities in the media (P= 0.005), and the likelihood that dermatologists can influence patients’ lives (P=0.010) were shown to be significantly attractive factors. Conclusion: There are many factors that are affecting students’ choices when choosing a medical specialty. The appeal of being a dermatologist, the portrayal of different specialities in the media, and the likelihood that dermatologists can influence patients’ lives were shown to be significantly attractive factors when choosing dermatology as a future specialty. Recognizing medical students’ specialty perception will lead them to a proper specialty tailored to their needs.

Keywords: dermatology, career choice, medical specialties, student's perception

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Authors: Manuel Valencia Alejaandro Paz, Luz Nidia Quintero Jairo Palacios

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In present paper a set of technical approaches to improve the energy efficiency in processes controlled by electric motor drive systems EMDS are listed and analyzed. Energy saving becomes fundamental to improve the sustainability and competitiveness of organizations all around the world; increasing costs of electricity had impulse the use of different strategies to reduce the electric power condition. A summary of these techniques is presented and evaluated in the potential for energy saving policies.

Keywords: energy saving, EMDS, induction motor, energy efficiency, sustainability

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Authors: Bamidele Olufemi Ifenowo

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The study examined the practice of managing business organizations in Nigeria today without unions. It explored how this phenomenon evolved and became popular in the newly emerging mega banks in Nigeria. Attitudes of selected banks' employees to this phenomenon were surveyed.Simple statistical tools were used for data analysis. The findings revealed that most new employees who form the bulk of the sample never really cared about unionism. On the other hand, old and experienced employees were positively disposed towards unionism. This category of employees abhorred the current display of authoritarianism cum paternalism which seemed to characterize the managerial practice of most new generation banks in Nigeria today.

Keywords: authoritarianism, corporate governance, deunionisation, unionization, paternalism

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Authors: A. Natsir, M. Nadir, S. Syahrir, A. Mujnisa

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In tropical countries such as in Indonesia, rice straw plays an important role in fulfilling the needs of feed for ruminant, especially during the dry season in which the availability of forage is very limited. However, the main problem of using rice straw as a feedstuff is low digestibility due to the existence of the links between lignin and cellulose or hemicellulose, and imbalance of its minerals content. One alternative to solve this problem is by application of biodecomposer (BS) derived from rumen bacterial of the ruminant. This study was designed to assess the effects of BS application on the changes of the chemical composition of rice straw. Four adults local buffalo raised under typical feeding conditions were used as a source of inoculum for BS development. The animal was fed for a month with a diet consisted of rice straw and elephant grass before taking rumen fluid samples. Samples of rumen fluid were inoculated in the carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) media under anaerobic condition for 48 hours at 37°C. The mixture of CMC media and microbes are ready to be used as a biodecomposer following incubation of the mixture under anaerobic condition for 7 days at 45°C. The effectiveness of BS then assessed by applying the BS on the straw according to completely randomized design consisted of four treatments and three replication. One hundred g of ground coarse rice straw was used as the substrate. The BS was applied to the rice straw substrate with the following composition: Rice straw without BS (P0), rice straw + 5% BS (P1), rice straw +10% BS (P2), and rice straw + 15% BS. The mixture of rice straw and BS then fermented under anaerobic for four weeks. Following the fermentation, the chemical composition of rice straw was evaluated. The results indicated that the crude protein content of rice straw significantly increased (P < 0.05) as the level of BS increased. On the other hand, the concentration of crude fiber of the rice straw was significantly decreased (P < 0.05) as the level of BS increased. Other nutrients such as minerals did not change (P > 0.05) due to the treatments. In conclusion, application of BS developed from rumen bacterial of buffalo has a promising prospect to be used as a biological agent to improve the quality of rice straw as feeding for ruminant.

Keywords: biodecomposer, local buffalo, rumen microbial, chemical composition

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Authors: Burak Oksuzoglu, Savas Yildirim, Ferhat Kutlu

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Opinion mining (OM) is one of the natural language processing (NLP) problems to determine the polarity of opinions, mostly represented on a positive-neutral-negative axis. The data for OM is usually collected from various social media platforms. In an era where social media has considerable control over companies’ futures, it’s worth understanding social media and taking actions accordingly. OM comes to the fore here as the scale of the discussion about companies increases, and it becomes unfeasible to gauge opinion on individual levels. Thus, the companies opt to automize this process by applying machine learning (ML) approaches to their data. For the last two decades, OM or sentiment analysis (SA) has been mainly performed by applying ML classification algorithms such as support vector machines (SVM) and Naïve Bayes to a bag of n-gram representations of textual data. With the advent of deep learning and its apparent success in NLP, traditional methods have become obsolete. Transfer learning paradigm that has been commonly used in computer vision (CV) problems started to shape NLP approaches and language models (LM) lately. This gave a sudden rise to the usage of the pretrained language model (PTM), which contains language representations that are obtained by training it on the large datasets using self-supervised learning objectives. The PTMs are further fine-tuned by a specialized downstream task dataset to produce efficient models for various NLP tasks such as OM, NER (Named-Entity Recognition), Question Answering (QA), and so forth. In this study, the traditional and modern NLP approaches have been evaluated for OM by using a sizable corpus belonging to a large private company containing about 76,000 comments in Turkish: SVM with a bag of n-grams, and two chosen pre-trained models, multilingual universal sentence encoder (MUSE) and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). The MUSE model is a multilingual model that supports 16 languages, including Turkish, and it is based on convolutional neural networks. The BERT is a monolingual model in our case and transformers-based neural networks. It uses a masked language model and next sentence prediction tasks that allow the bidirectional training of the transformers. During the training phase of the architecture, pre-processing operations such as morphological parsing, stemming, and spelling correction was not used since the experiments showed that their contribution to the model performance was found insignificant even though Turkish is a highly agglutinative and inflective language. The results show that usage of deep learning methods with pre-trained models and fine-tuning achieve about 11% improvement over SVM for OM. The BERT model achieved around 94% prediction accuracy while the MUSE model achieved around 88% and SVM did around 83%. The MUSE multilingual model shows better results than SVM, but it still performs worse than the monolingual BERT model.

Keywords: BERT, MUSE, opinion mining, pretrained language model, SVM, Turkish

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Authors: Rajbir Cheema

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In order to introduce an integrated research information system, this will provide scientific institutions with the necessary information on research activities and research results in assured quality. Since data collection, duplication, missing values, incorrect formatting, inconsistencies, etc. can arise in the collection of research data in different research information systems, which can have a wide range of negative effects on data quality, the subject of data quality should be treated with better results. This paper examines the data quality problems in research information systems and presents the new techniques that enable organizations to improve their quality of research information.

Keywords: Research information systems (RIS), research information, heterogeneous sources, data quality, data cleansing, science system, standardization

Procedia PDF Downloads 157

Authors: Mohammed Darwish

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Workplace injuries cost organizations significant amount of money. Causes of injuries at workplace are very well documented in the literature and attributed to variety of reasons. One important reason is the long working-hours. The purpose of this paper is to develop a mathematical model that finds the optimal working-hours at workplace. The developed model minimizes the expected total cost which consists of the expected cost incurred due to unsafe conditions of workplace, the other cost is related to the lost production due to work incidents, and the production cost.

Keywords: 8-hour workday, mathematical model, optimal working hours, workplace injuries

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Authors: Eftychia Kessopoulou, Styliani Xanthopoulou, Ypatia Theodorakioglou, George Tsiotras, Katerina Gotzamani

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Public sector managers frequently herald that implementing best practices as a set of standards, may lead to superior organizational performance. However, recent research questions the objectification of best practices, highlighting: a) the inability of public sector organizations to develop innovative administrative practices, as well as b) the adoption of stereotypical renowned practices inculcated in the public sector by international governance bodies. The process through which organizations construe what a best practice is, still remains a black box that is yet to be investigated, given the trend of continuous changes in public sector performance, as well as the burgeoning interest of sharing popular administrative practices put forward by international bodies. This study aims to describe and understand how organizational best practices are constructed by public sector performance management teams, like benchmarkers, during the benchmarking-mediated performance improvement process and what mechanisms enable this construction. A critical realist action research methodology is employed, starting from a description of various approaches on best practice nature when a benchmarking-mediated performance improvement initiative, such as the Common Assessment Framework, is applied. Firstly, we observed the benchmarker’s management process of best practices in a public organization, so as to map their theories-in-use. As a second step we contextualized best administrative practices by reflecting the different perspectives emerged from the previous stage on the design and implementation of an interview protocol. We used this protocol to conduct 30 semi-structured interviews with “best practice” process owners, in order to examine their experiences and performance needs. Previous research on best practices has shown that needs and intentions of benchmarkers cannot be detached from the causal mechanisms of the various contexts in which they work. Such causal mechanisms can be found in: a) process owner capabilities, b) the structural context of the organization, and c) state regulations. Therefore, we developed an interview protocol theoretically informed in the first part to spot causal mechanisms suggested by previous research studies and supplemented it with questions regarding the provision of best practice support from the government. Findings of this work include: a) a causal account of the nature of best administrative practices in the Greek public sector that shed light on explaining their management, b) a description of the various contexts affecting best practice conceptualization, and c) a description of how their interplay changed the organization’s best practice management.

Keywords: benchmarking, action research, critical realism, best practices, public sector

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Authors: Taoues Hadour

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Twitter has become a popular means of communication used in a variety of fields, such as politics, journalism, and academia. This widely used online platform has an impact on the way people express themselves and is changing language usage worldwide at an unprecedented pace. The language used online reflects the linguistic battle that has been going on for several decades in French society. This study enables a deeper understanding of users' linguistic behavior online. The implications are important and allow for a rise in awareness of intercultural and cross-language exchanges. This project investigates the mixing of French-English language usage among French users of Twitter using a topic analysis approach. This analysis draws on Gumperz's theory of conversational switching. In order to collect tweets at a large scale, the data was collected in R using the rtweet package to access and retrieve French tweets data through Twitter’s REST and stream APIs (Application Program Interface) using the software RStudio, the integrated development environment for R. The dataset was filtered manually and certain repetitions of themes were observed. A total of nine topic categories were identified and analyzed in this study: entertainment, internet/social media, events/community, politics/news, sports, sex/pornography, innovation/technology, fashion/make up, and business. The study reveals that entertainment is the most frequent topic discussed on Twitter. Entertainment includes movies, music, games, and books. Anglicisms such as trailer, spoil, and live are identified in the data. Change in language usage is inevitable and is a natural result of linguistic interactions. The use of different languages online is just an example of what the real world would look like without linguistic regulations. Social media reveals a multicultural and multilinguistic richness which can deepen and expand our understanding of contemporary human attitudes.

Keywords: code-switching, French, sociolinguistics, Twitter

Procedia PDF Downloads 137