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European pharmaceutical companies have a legal requirement to provide non-promotional Medical Information (MI) services to support healthcare professionals (HCPs) who are using their medicinal products. While the industry has self-regulating bodies with established Codes of Practice, these mainly focus on promotional messaging and commercial activities. In the absence of similar frameworks for MI, such services struggle to understand how to meet HCP digital expectations, often in fear of breaching the promotional codes. This is limiting access to the wealth of non-promotional patient-focussed information held within the industry. Meanwhile, a large volume of unregulated, low-quality information can be readily found on the internet. To understand the current status, the Medical Information Leaders in Europe (MILE) industry association performed a benchmarking survey which explored the online MI service provision of 13 mid-large pharmaceutical companies across Europe. This highlighted a great diversity in approach in terms of geographical coverage and content. Visibility and access for HCPs is complex, compromising online engagement and website utilisation. This MILE position paper highlights the critical need to establish a clear governance model, which empowers pharmaceutical company MI functions to provide unbranded, non-promotional, medicinal product information sources to support HCP online information needs. It is essential to build confidence, transparency and trust by establishing a practical quality framework with principles and standards for online MI services for HCPs.

Analysis of roll products at the final stage of production is the main stage for identifying defects, disrupted integrity or homogeneity, etc. Paper production is a typical example of such an operation in an industrial setting. It is proposed to use the results of the assessment for opacity, described by several standardized and statistical estimates, as the main characteristic for the quality of paper products. Studies of the dependence of the quality of the paper web on the production conditions and the properties of raw materials produce considerable variance, so that it is impossible to make accurate predictions. For this reason, we used a neural network modeling technology to develop an intelligent system for monitoring the quality of the paper web. Online quality control allows to assess the efficiency of the paper machine and rapidly adjust the manufacturing execution system. Special technologies such as computer vision systems can be introduced for this purpose, making it possible to make a transition from subjective assessment of the structure and defects of the paper web to obtaining objective quantitative estimates of these indicators. We considered a procedure for determining the estimates of structural heterogeneity of the paper web at the final stage of its production. We suggest to expand the classification of finished product samples by using neural fuzzy interpolation of linguistic values of such indicators. The approach introduced is aimed at improving the efficiency of the production process.

Electryo is a paper-based voting protocol that implements the Selene mechanism for individual verifiability. This short paper aims to provide the first formal model of Electryo, with security proofs for vote-privacy and individual verifiability. In general, voting protocols are complex constructs, involving advanced cryptographic primitives and strong security guarantees, posing a serious challenge when wanting to analyse and prove security with formal verification tools. Here we choose to use the \({{\,\mathrm{\textsc {Tamarin}}\,}}\) prover since it is one of the more advanced tools and is able to handle many of the primitives we encounter in the design and analysis of voting protocols.

Intriguing unforced regularities in human behaviors have been reported in varied research domains, including scientometrics. In this study we examine the manuscript submission behavior of researchers, with a focus on its monthly pattern. With a large and reliable dataset which records the submission history of articles published on 10 multidisciplinary journals and 10 management journals over a five-year period (2013-2017), we observe a prominent turn-of-the-month submission effect for accepted papers in management journals but not multidisciplinary journals. This effect gets more pronounced in submissions to top-tier journals and when the first day of a month happens to be a Saturday or Sunday. Sense of ceremony is proposed as a likely explanation of this effect, since the first day of a month is a fundamental temporal landmark which has a 'fresh start effect' on researchers. To conclude, an original and interesting day-of-the-month effect in the academia is reported in this study, which calls for more research attention.

Searching information by keywords is a simple and effective method used for a long time. Unfortunately, its usefulness is not well exploited in certain contexts. Indeed, in the case of scholarly resources (scientific papers, thesis, courses, etc.) what is generally done is a classification of documents by field (speciality), or by category (thesis, course materials, etc.). We consider the context of a user (student/teacher) who wants to search for resources on a particular field, but he does not know where to look, we consider also the context of a researcher who wants to search scientific papers. The existence of a dedicated search engine is thus useful in this case of problem. The purpose of this paper is to present an efficient engine of academic and scientific documents and more specifically a function to weight documents in the context of academic resources. Our approach is based on a multi-criteria weighting method that uses the average document score, the Okapi BM25 score and the number of downloads of documents. Alerts can also be programmed to keep the user informed about new publications.

Quality outcomes in emergency surgery are achieved by knowledge and training in emergency surgery. This requires standards and KPIs which need to be measured and reported regularly.

The paper first examines the contours of artificial intelligence (AI) at its beginnings, more than sixty years ago, and points out the important place that machine learning already had at that time. The ambition of AI of making machines capable of performing any information processing task that the human mind can do, means that AI should cover the two modes of human thinking: the instinctive (reactive) one and the deliberative one. This also corresponds to the difference between mastering a skill without being able to articulate it and holding some pieces of knowledge that one can use to explain and teach. In case a function-based representation applies to a considered AI problem, the respective merits of learning a universal approximation of the function vs. a rule-based representation are discussed, with a view to better draw the contours of AI. Moreover, the paper reviews the relative positions of knowledge and data in reasoning and learning, and advocates the need for bridging the two tasks. The paper is also a plea for a unified view of the various facets of AI as a science.

Technology is shaping our lives in a multitude of ways. This is fuelled by a technology infrastructure, both legacy and state of the art, composed of a heterogeneous group of hardware, software, services, and organisations. Such infrastructure faces a diverse range of challenges to its operations that include security, privacy, resilience, and quality of services. Among these, cybersecurity and privacy are taking the centre-stage, especially since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. Traditional security and privacy techniques are overstretched and adversarial actors have evolved to design exploitation techniques that circumvent protection. With the ever-increasing complexity of technology infrastructure, security and privacy-preservation specialists have started to look for adaptable and flexible protection methods that can evolve (potentially autonomously) as the adversarial actor changes its techniques. For this, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL) were put forward as saviours. In this paper, we look at the promises of AI, ML, and DL stated in academic and industrial literature and evaluate how realistic they are. We also put forward potential challenges a DL based security and privacy protection system has to overcome. Finally, we conclude the paper with a discussion on what steps the DL and the security and privacy-preservation community have to take to ensure that DL is not just going to be hype, but an opportunity to build a secure, reliable, and trusted technology infrastructure on which we can rely on for so much in our lives.

Citation recommendation for research papers is a valuable task that can help researchers improve the quality of their work by suggesting relevant related work. Current approaches for this task rely primarily on the text of the papers and the citation network. In this paper, we propose to exploit an additional source of information, namely research knowledge graphs (KGs) that interlink research papers based on mentioned scientific concepts. Our experimental results demonstrate that the combination of information from research KGs with existing state-of-the-art approaches is beneficial. Experimental results are presented for the STM-KG (STM: Science, Technology, Medicine), which is an automatically populated knowledge graph based on the scientific concepts extracted from papers of ten domains. The proposed approach outperforms the state of the art with a mean average precision of 20.6% (+0.8) for the top-50 retrieved results.

Peer review is the widely accepted method of research validation. However, with the deluge of research paper submissions accompanied with the rising number venues, the paper vetting system has come under a lot of stress. Problems like dearth of adequate reviewers, finding appropriate expert reviewers, maintaining the quality of the reviews are steadily and strongly surfacing up. To ease the peer review workload to some extent, here we investigate how an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered review system would look like. We leverage on the paper-review interaction to predict the decision in the reviewing process. We do not envisage an AI reviewing papers in the near-future, but seek to explore a human-AI collaboration in the decision-making process where the AI would leverage on the human-written reviews and paper full-text to predict the fate of the paper. The idea is to have an assistive decision-making tool for the chairs/editors to help them with an additional layer of confidence, especially with borderline and contrastive reviews. We use cross-attention between the review text and paper full-text to learn the interactions and henceforth generate the decision. We also make use of sentiment information encoded within peer-review texts to guide the outcome. Our initial results show encouraging performance on a dataset of paper+peer reviews curated from the ICLR openreviews. We make our codes and dataset (https://github.com/PrabhatkrBharti/PEERAssist) public for further explorations. We re-iterate that we are in an early stage of investigation and showcase our initial exciting results to justify our proposition.

This paper explores the characteristics of 106 award-winning papers from the Library and Information Science (LIS) journals published by Emerald Publishing between 2008 and 2019, focusing on collaboration type, paper type, topic, and citation count to illustrate the developmental trends of LIS scholarship. The findings show that the top three topics of the award-winning papers were information service activities, professions and information institutions, and user studies. More than half of the award-winning papers were written by teams, among which inter-institutional collaboration and intradepartmental collaboration accounted for the largest proportion, while interdepartmental collaboration within an institution accounted for the smallest proportion. There were 65 empirical research papers in the sample, among which qualitative studies were dominant, followed by quantitative research and mixed methods research. The award-winning papers had a higher mean and median in citation counts than the average papers concurrently published by the journals. The research results provide implications for researchers and can help them understand the trends in research topics and common analytical types in LIS for their future studies.

This is a conceptual paper on the effect of behavioral factors on job performance, and to investigate the mediating effect of employee engagement between behavioral factors and job performance in Jordanian commercial banks. This paper aims to present literature reviews related to investigating behavioral factors. Also, this paper proposed a model that enables the organization to achieve job performance by includes some factors which are talent management, quality of work-life, and organizational climate. However, employee performance refers to behaviors that are relevant to organizational goals and that are under the control of individual employees. Job performance is the feeling of the employee about his job. Likewise, all factors need to harmonize and align together to reach the desired progress, success, and sustainability. This paper suggests statistical techniques such as normality tests, multicollinearity test, and EFA using the SPSS. For the measurement model and hypothesis testing using smart PLS. Likewise, the conclusion that was drawn is that the effect of investigating Behavioral factors including talent management, quality of work-life, and organizational climate maybe help increase job performance. For future research, this paper recommends that all variables affecting the individual factors of employees should be included and applied to a service sector to confirm the results.

The task of keyphrase generation aims to generate the key phrases that capture the primary content of a document. An external domain-specific gazetteer can assist in generating keyphrases that are literally absent in the document (i.e., do not match any contiguous sub-sequence of source text) but relevant to the content of the document. In this paper, we present a technique to integrate knowledge from a gazetteer in order to improve keyphrase generation from research papers. We also present a copy mechanism that helps our model to utilize the gazetteer vocabulary to deal with the out-of-vocabulary words in keyphrases. Since constructing and maintaining relevant high-quality gazetteer by hand is very expensive, we also propose a method for automatic construction of a gazetteer given the input document, by leveraging similar documents in the training corpus. The thus constructed gazetteer helps focus on corpus-level information carried by other similar documents. Although this external information is crucial, it is never considered in previous studies. Experiments on real world datasets of research papers demonstrate that our proposed approach improves the performance of the state-of-the-art keyphrase generation models.

This paper gives an overview of the ongoing project STellaR – A stationary telepresence counselling system for collaborative work on paper documents. The system consists of dedicated rooms for video counselling, which clients can use to connect to a remotely located counselor without requiring any knowledge about computers or the internet. STellaR rooms are equipped with a large monitor, high quality microphone, camera, and sound system, which represent the counselor in life size.

This paper shows the automatic classification of research papers published in Scopus. Our classification is based on the research lines of the university. We apply the K-nearest neighbor classifier and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Various stages were used from information gathering, creating the vocabulary, pre-processing and data training, and supervised classification in this work. The experiment involved 596 research articles published in SCOPUS from 2003–2017. The results show an overall accuracy of 88.44%.

This paper analyzes the significance of international conferences for higher education institutions’ (HEIs) promotion of sustainability by examining their published papers. This study not only allows the understanding of the state of the art but also, based on the identified gaps, sheds light and gives a north for future studies of Sustainable Development. The citations of works published from 2015 to 2019 were analyzed in a sample of 489 articles published in international periodicals included in the Web of Science database related to the subject of sustainable development in higher education. Classic text statistics, similarity analysis and word cloud are used to analyze the articles published on the World Sustainability Symposium, Bridge International Conference 2019 exploring its results and contributions to promote sustainability. The findings suggest that in addition to cooperation, participation and collaboration between institutions, international conferences sponsored or organized by HEIs have the potential to promulgate interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to addressing global sustainability challenges. In the international conferences analyzed the diverse array of disciplines and research teams illustrate this point. International conferences may be used for communicating the scientific results to stakeholders and send strong messages on sustainability-related issues.

Paper-based books in university libraries are important learning materials for university students, but there are some drawbacks in traditional reading methods, and it is necessary to utilize scientific and technological means to solve the pain points of users, i.e. the students. With the development of information technology, augmented reality (AR) technology has gradually penetrated into all areas of the students’ lives. The fusion of AR technology and traditional paper books brings a potential new approach of reading and a sense of experience. At present, the application of AR technology in library is mainly for book navigation and book protection. AR technology has also appeared in some children’s books, but most of the books are still in the traditional way of reading. Therefore, this research aims to implement AR technology with traditional reading methods, optimize the reading experience of paper books, and enhance the interactivity and interest of paper book reading. This article selects university students in the library of South China University of Technology for the case study. Firstly, it finds the application method of AR technology in the library through the literature, and then observes and interviews the students to summarize the pain points and design opportunities from traditional reading. Based on AR technology, this paper designed a social reading application with a human-oriented design concept, thereby optimizing the reading experience of paper books for library.

ICT is fast-growing and changing field. A lot of researches are being done in various area of ICT, and results are presented in various platforms like conferences, journal and books. This is common observations in the publications from developing countries (especially in sub – Saharan africa) are not being published in reputed and established publishers even their technical/experiments are good. This is due to lack of several factors including professional presentation, the novelty of the topic, quality of literature review etc. This work guides final year bachelor’s students, PG students (masters and PhD) and young researchers, especially working in computing-related disciplines, on how to convert their project works into quality publications. The authors provide details on how these researchers can select suitable project topics, do a proper review, write up the key components of a paper and present their results in an appropriate form (that is, writing style starting from abstract to conclusion). This paper also presents and guides on how to write various types of review papers.

This chapter investigates the historical and social context of cultural rights in Taiwan, and analyses specifically how researchers, artists, cultural practitioners, and the public have taken part in the managing, mismanaging, and upward-managing process of the project ‘2017 National Cultural Congress and Culture White Paper’ (2017 NCCWP). The authors suggest that a co-designed democratic mechanism, together with the empowering strategies, and co-governing/co-management strategies adopted by the Ministry of Culture, NPOs, and fence-straddling entities (e.g. advisory committees) are the key to facilitate people’s cultural rights in the case of 2017 NCCWP. Furthermore, everyday contacts between various cultural groups will benefit public participation in cultural affairs and strengthen peoples’ cultural rights. This chapter also explores the implications of the 2017 NCCWP case and the challenges of cultural rights in contemporary Taiwan.

But, according to the authors, understanding pathogen history and evolution holds the key to saving technological humanity from the onslaught of those many EIDs that have yet to explore the immense opportunity space that climate change and human civilization have provided them with By taking us on a whirlwind tour through the history of such diverse topics as evolutionary biology, the history of vaccines, past pandemics, and climate change, Brooks, Hoberg, and Boeger dismantle our preconceived notions about host-pathogen co-evolution, they explain how we got into the current mess, as they aptly call it, and propose a possible way to get out of it before it is too late Daniel R Brooks, Eric P Hoberg, Walter A Boeger, The Stockholm Paradigm: Climate Change and Emerging Disease [Extracted from the article] Copyright of History & Philosophy of the Life Sciences is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )

On 27 December 2016, the Information Office of China’ State Council released the new version of the country’s 5-year policy guidelines for national space activities. Published in the form of a government White Paper, the document highlights the major developments of the past 5 years (2011–2015) and provides a comprehensive description of the programmatic intentions for the sector over the period 2016–2020.

Some countries, human rights organizations, artificial intelligence experts and academics have expressed doubts about the moral, ethical, and legal development and use of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS). The United States, United Kingdom, Israel, Russia and many other countries have disagreed with these concerns. This paper will argue that (1) LAWS already exist and are in use by many countries for both defensive and offensive purposes and (2) LAWS cannot be legislated away; the technology is pervasive from smart cars and autonomous ships to military self-protection systems. As long as countries and their respective militaries follow internationally accepted norms when using LAWS such as the Laws of War, principles of war, and have a systematic legal review process, militaries will have the sufficient and necessary controls to address those who criticize and oppose their development and use.

Increased job performance is an essential goal for businesses to sustain them market growth. The corporate initiative is geared towards optimizing performance outcomes, taking into account the organizational sense in which performance is generated. This study aims to identify the mediating role of employee engagement between quality of work-life and job performance in Jordanian commercial banks. This paper found that there are indications that the level of engagement is positively associated with job performance in terms of financial benefits, greater client loyalty and better adaptation to the working environment. However, engagement is positively related to finance. Lastly, work engagement has a positive impact on engagement when job demands are high. In addition, work engagement has a positive effect on job performance.

Paper documentation has been used in the flight deck for a long time on commercial aircraft. Pilots are familiar with tons of manuals to search information during flight to help them perform procedures to ensure safety, efficiency and comfort on commercial aircrafts. Management of interconnections among these flight manuals can be a challenge for pilots, especially when time workload is high in normal, abnormal, and emergency situations. This paper is an overview on the development from paper documentation moving to Onboard Information System (OIS), which fulfills the function of an Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) system. Today the EFB or OIS does not simply provide electronic documentation onboard, it could be a multi-function device interacting with other systems and pilots in the flight deck. This overview also discusses the significance of contextual information on OIS facilitates access to appropriate operational content at the right time through case study. Tangible Cockpit (i.e., Full-Glass Cockpit) could be a trend of flight deck design in the near future, which is easy to use, update, and maintenance. However, it may bring new problems during flight operations.

This article aims to lay a foundation for learning and practicing music online. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are growing as we are moving to online classes. Current music courses through MOOCs mostly focus on peer evaluation for assessing the students’ performance. However, this technique may not be practical when it is applied to larger class sizes. Therefore, in this research, the main goal is to reduce the instructor’s load and provide online real-time performance feedback. As a contribution to music education, we propose a new technological framework to automate music lessons for learning how to play any favorite songs via existing machine learning (ML) techniques for adaptability to various learning styles.

Context and motivation. Collaborative AI systems aim at working together with humans in a shared space. Building these systems, which comply with quality requirements, domain specific standards and regulations is a challenging research direction. This challenge is even more exacerbated for new generation of systems that leverage on machine learning components rather than deductive (top-down programmed) AI.

Creativity and invention? Many experiments by psychologists show that a disorderly work environment can be favorable.

Technological solutions have been playing an important role in health care provision and their implementation in social care area, though a bit slower, promises good outcomes in terms of the quality of care delivery. The study reported in this paper analysed the shifting process from a typical paper registration to a registration performed by a web-based platform (i.e., the Ankira® platform) in a Portuguese social care institution. In order to gather evidence and best practices, 13630 registries were analysed, 6390 in paper format and 7240 from the web-based platform. The results show that the shifting from paper to the web-based platform lead to a significant error rate decline in all type of registers, which demonstrates the significant impact of the introduction of information technologies to support social care provision.

Paper and pulp industries play vital role in socio-economic development of India. These units are present in both small scale and large scale providing employment to millions. Paper production process is water-intensive and also produces huge amount of wastewater. Due to the toxicity of pollutants and quantity of waste produced Central Pollution Control Board classifies them into red category industries. Wastewater from these units primarily consists of organic compounds from raw material processing and inorganic compounds used in production process. These units currently employ a combination of physicochemical and biological treatment methods to attain the prescribed discharge limits. These methods are energy-intensive and costly and produce secondary pollutants. Added to these a worldwide call for sustainable waste treatment technology emphasizes on energy efficiency. Anaerobic treatment for biogas production is the only available technology to harvest energy from wastewater. Though anaerobic treatment is capable of being energy positive, its lower treatment efficiency requires tertiary treatment. Hence a novel treatment technology capable of energy generation and better treatment efficiency is the future of wastewater treatment plants.

Paper and writing implements can be adjuvants to the act of creation, which inevitably involves some degree of tinkering or bricolage. In addition, the material analysis of manuscripts reveals that the writer’s hand acts upon the paper medium in many significant but initially imperceptible ways. After all, manuscripts are not just written artifacts but also three-dimensional objects. Through her codicological examination of holograph drafts from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Claire Bustarret scrutinizes such influential acts and composition strategies as the folding and unfolding, cutting and pasting, and rotating of the paper medium. Rousseau’s playing cards, Proust’s and Marguerite Duras’s elaborate collages, or Emily Dickinson’s ‘inside out’ envelopes all testify to the process of editing which eventually leads to the final work. Such an analysis of the invisible hand sheds a new light on the writing practices of many writers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP) was established almost sixteen years ago. Based on data from Scopus database, a total of 789 papers have been published in between years of 2002 and 2018. We employed bibliometrics analysis and topic modeling with R/RStudio to analyze these published papers from various dimensions, including the most active authors, collaboration of authorship, most cited papers, used keywords and trends of probable topics from the titles and abstracts of those papers. The results show that the first five years of XP conference cover nearly 40% of the papers published until now and almost 62% of the XP papers have been cited at least once. Mining of XP conference paper titles and abstracts result in these hot research topics: “Coordination”, “Technical Debt”, “Teamwork”, “Startups” and “Agile Practices”, thus strongly focusing on practical issues and problems faced by the practitioners in the industry. The results highlight the most influential researchers and institutions, and the collaboration between the authors in the conference papers. The approach applied in this study can be extended to other software engineering venues and can be applied to large-scale studies.

Connecting scholarship on Latin American Magical Realism with debates on “realness” and “Black Girl Magic” in the #blacklivesmatter movement and the simultaneous criminalization and erasure of undocumented immigrants from the Southern hemisphere, Rohrleitner shows how Salvador Plascencia’s 2005 novel The People of Paper reinvents Magical Realism as a mode of active resistance to racialized violence in the United States. Drawing on Glissant’s “aesthetics of turbulence” the chapter focuses on the discursive opposition of Little Merced, the main protagonist’s daughter who is entirely made of paper, to the commodification of her story by an authoritarian narrator/author, highlighting how Plascencia’s specific brand of Magical Realism critiques current immigration policies.

The number of papers, published in different fields, is continually increasing, but the quality of papers varies widely. Scholars evaluate the quality and influence of a paper by the number of times the paper was cited, but the result of this citation quantity method is not accurate enough especially for new papers. Our society needs an accurate, objective and fair evaluation of papers. To address these problems, this article presents a method for evaluating the impact of papers. We analyze the influence of each academic paper in the citation network based on the improved PageRank algorithm and combined with the personal influence of the authors and the published date. Thus, this method tends to select high-quality authors and high-quality citations as high-impact papers. The comparison results showed that our method outperformed the traditional method of citation number and PageRank algorithm.

This paper is a plea for developing possibilistic learning methods that would be consistent with if-then rule-based reasoning. The paper first recall the possibility theory-based handling of cascading sets of parallel if-then rules. This is illustrated by an example describing a classification problem. It is shown that the approach is both close to a possibilistic logic handling of the problem and can also be put under the form of a max-min-based matrix calculus describing a function underlying a structure somewhat similar to a max-min neural network. The second part of the paper discusses how possibility distributions can be obtained from precise or imprecise statistical data, and then surveys the few existing works on learning in a possibilistic setting. A final discussion emphasizes the interest of handling learning and reasoning in a consistent way.

The study presented in this article aimed to analyze the shifting process from a typical paper registration to a registration performed by a web-based platform in two different services for older adults of a social care institution. A total of 16,960 registers related to a nursing home and a home care service were analyzed. With the web-based platform, the rate of inconsistencies declined 21.08% for the nursing home and 24.89% for the home care service.

Double-spending attacks on fast payments are one of the fatal architectural problems in Cryptocurrencies. Dmitrienko et al. proposed an offline fast payment scheme that relies on tamper-proof wallets produced by trustworthy manufacturers. With the wallets, the payee can immediately trust the transactions generated by the wallets without waiting for their registration to the blockchain. Secure coin-preloading to the wallet is important, while illegal coin-preloading can cause over/double-spending by the trusted wallets. For this, they proposed an interesting protocol that makes use of a fragment of the main blockchain to prove to the wallets the legitimacy of preloaded coins. One drawback is that, in proving that the fragment are from honest miners, their protocol requires a trusted online time-stamp server so that the wallets can verify the timestamps to see if the blocks in the fragment is mined with sufficiently large amount of computing resources. Otherwise, it sacrifices usability. In order to eliminate such an online trustee, in this paper we took the opposite approach that the payee (not the wallets) verifies the legitimacy of preloaded coins at the time of offline payment. As a consequence, our result shows that, with light-weight tamper-proof wallets, completely decentralized offline payment is possible without any modification to the existing Bitcoin network.

Fleet optimisation can significantly reduce the time vehicles spend traversing road networks leading to lower costs and increased capacity. Moreover, reduced road use leads to lower emissions and improved air quality. Heuristic approaches such as Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) are effective at solving fleet optimisation but scale poorly when dealing with larger fleets. The Partial-ACO technique has substantially improved ACO’s capacity to optimise large scale vehicle fleets but there is still much scope for improvement. A method to achieve this could be to integrate simple mutation with Partial-ACO as used by other heuristic methods. This paper explores a range of mutation strategies for Partial-ACO to both improve solution quality and reduce computational costs. It is found that substituting a majority of ant simulations with simple mutation operations instead improves both the accuracy and efficiency of Partial-ACO. For real-world fleet optimisation problems of up to 45 vehicles and 437 jobs reductions in fleet traversal of approximately 50% are achieved with much less computational cost enabling larger scale problems to be tackled. Moreover, CO\(_{2}\) and NO\(_{\text {x}}\) emissions are cut by 3.75 Kg and 1.71 g per vehicle a day respectively improving urban air quality.

Effluents from the paper mill are highly toxic and are one of the major sources of aquatic pollution. Their toxic nature is derived from the presence of several naturally occurring and xenobiotic compounds, which are formed and released during various stages of papermaking. In the present study, mill effluents are collected from three different stations around the Cachar paper mill (CPM) in Assam and samples are analyzed for 17 parameters such as appearance, color, odour, conductivity, total dissolved solids, pH, total alkalinity, hardness (total and Ca), chloride, nitrite, BOD and COD along with the heavy metals As, Cu, Cd, Cr, Fe, Pb and Zn. The results are compared with water quality standards prescribed by World Health Organization. Multivariate statistical analyses are performed on data sets obtained to gain a better understanding of the nature of each parameter in the sampling stations. The results show variation amongst stations that may be due to spatial variations amongst them. The results from this study can be used for water quality monitoring purposes.

The goal of this writing is to consider only that of geometry, which has common cultural worth, and therefore, justifies that it be taught also to people that do not have an aptitude for mathematics, and in their further life will not come in contact with mathematics, nor with its applications.

Despite the successful collection of thirteen life stories of working-class women of Greek background in their late sixties, who had migrated to Sweden in the 1970s, the two researchers who engaged in the study—Despina, herself a child of migrant Greek parents, and Diana, a political refugee from Argentina—were unable to publish the results. The aim of this chapter is to listen to women’s narratives by bringing into conversation the concept of social suffering through the use of a psychosocial approach. The aim is also to explore our inability (as migrants and daughters of migrants ourselves) to acknowledge what over-exploitation, gender and racial regimes can, and indeed do, to people regarding their sense of self and well-being. The chapter contains four sections. First, the text provides a short introduction to Swedish racial formation, followed by relevant efforts to conceptualise human pain, inspired by the work of Black British feminist scholars Gail Lewis and Yasmin Gunaratnam. Their theoretical intervention suggests the value of a synthesis of politicised psychoanalytic approaches to the dynamics of ‘race’ and emotional labor; providing a frame for a reflection of our own emotions, with special focus on shame and guilt. The central focus of the chapter is in the section ‘What (We Think) Hurts the Most’, which explores the stories collected organised through three topics—(failed) motherhood, broken bodies and (racist) respectability.

We revisit the 1997 PayWord credit-based micropayment scheme from Rivest and Shamir. We observe that smart contracts can be used to augment this system, apply to ‘claim or refund’ paradigm of cryptocurrencies to remove the counter-party risk inherent in PayWorld, and use a smart contract to ‘staple’ real value (in Ether) to payments in the system. Our implementation is more concise than any Ethereum payment channel we are aware of and the offline payments are very compact values (264 bits). It only uses hash functions and not digital signatures. EthWord becomes cheaper than standard Ethereum transfers when more than 16 payments between the same participants are made and appears to maintain its advantage for up to 1000+ transactions, at which point signature-based payments become cheapest. The main drawback of EthWord is the moderate gas price of using the system—despite dropping signatures, it is still priced out of the micropayments use-case. Like any payment channel, requires only two on-blockchain function calls to open and close the channel, while allowing the rest to be made off-blockchain.

We study blockchain-based integrity-protected smart contracts as an implementation mechanism for municipal government processes. To this end, we attempted a prototype implementation of such a process in collaboration with a Danish Municipality. We find that such an implementation is possible, despite the obvious confidentiality requirements, and that it does provide benefits: integrity guarantees, verifiability, direct collaboration and payments between the parties. These benefits come at the cost of latency, pr. transactions charges, immutability of errors, and a very concerning single point of failure the municipal government: losing blockchain private keys means losing control over municipal government casework, with no recourse. Our municipal government partner felt that altogether no immediately pressing problem was solved by the implementation, and that the latter risk clearly outweighed any benefits. We note that smart contract implementations of government processes needs to be immutable and outside of the government’s control when running; however, they also need to be updatable when laws change, and provide an “out” for the rare case when errors in the contract implementation result in unlawful behaviour. We propose these conflicting requirements as a foundational research challenge for blockchain to be applicable to governmental processes.

We present an approach for performing the tallying work in the coercion-resistant JCJ voting protocol, introduced by Juels, Catalano, and Jakobsson, in linear time using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). The suggested enhancement also paves the path towards making JCJ quantum-resistant, while leaving the underlying structure of JCJ intact. The pairwise comparison-based approach of JCJ using plaintext equivalence tests leads to a quadratic blow-up in the number of votes, which makes the tallying process rather impractical in realistic settings with a large number of voters. We show how the removal of invalid votes can be done in linear time via a solution based on recent advances in various FHE primitives such as hashing, zero-knowledge proofs of correct decryption, verifiable shuffles and threshold FHE. We conclude by discussing some of the advantages and challenges resulting from our proposal, followed by an outline of future work and possible lines of attack.

The paper industry is the industry with the third highest energy consumption in the European Union. Using recycled paper instead of fresh fibers for papermaking is less energy consuming and saves resources. However, adhesive contaminants in recycled paper are particularly problematic since they reduce the quality of the resulting paper-product. To remove as many contaminants and at the same time obtain as many valuable fibres as possible, fine screening systems, consisting of multiple interconnected pressure screens, are used. Choosing the best configuration is a non-trivial task: The screens can be interconnected in several ways, and suitable screen designs as well as operational parameters have to be selected. Additionally, one has to face conflicting objectives. In this paper, we present an approach for the multi-criteria optimization of pressure screen systems based on Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming. We specifically focus on a clear representation of the trade-off between different objectives.

Countries promote the development of pulp and paper industry through industrial, technology and innovation policy measures. Direct interventions and regional and environmental policies, together with more general governmental measures on trade negotiations, taxation, labour policies, and infrastructure development (e.g. roads, energy) have also had an impact on shaping the geographical location of and investments in the pulp and paper industry. This chapter presents an historical overview of government support on pulp and paper industry in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from roughly the 1970s to the 1990s. As the earlier literature suggests, in countries where this industry was a dominant line of business, attention was paid to create a favourable regulatory environment, as the companies had bargaining power in influencing governmental policies. The Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden and Norway) are the primary examples of this kind of pattern. On the contrary, in countries in which the pulp and paper industry did not play a significant role, state aid played a less important role. State aid also influenced on the technological development of the industry. peerReviewed

This chapter explores the commonalities between nineteenth-century boys’ and girls’ culture by comparing the correspondence sections in the Religious Tract Society’s Boy’s Own Paper (1879–1967) and Girl’s Own Paper (1880–1956), two of the longest-running British children’s magazines in the Victorian and Edwardian period, particularly in how they represent ideas of employment, health, and hobbies. While the letters submitted to the magazines are rarely ever quoted, this correspondence provides evidence of nineteenth-century children’s voices. These voices are, inevitably, mediated and transformed through their publication in the periodicals; yet, they demonstrate that British children’s interests in the late nineteenth century are not dissimilar, reflecting common interests, concerns, and anxieties. They demonstrate the extent to which child readers were invested in the communities created through their magazines.

Generally, your paper will become available online as an “in press” pre-print within about a month after you confirm the final printer’s proofs. Depending on how unmodern and unprofessional the publisher is, it can be up to several months before the final print version of your paper becomes available. But when it does, you should read it again. At this point, it is too late to make any further corrections to the printed version, and most publishers will therefore also not alter the electronic version (except in cases of serious ethical, safety, or legal concerns). But journals can and will print a Corrigendum (your fault) or an Erratum (their fault), even for tiny details, especially if an error has meaningful implications [1–4]. So it is worth the effort to check the quality of your final paper, because that is the only version anyone else is ever going to read. Moreover, reading the final printed version (months later) may give you a different impression and/or a feel of satisfaction for your work.

This chapter covers the early-1970s, it analyses how a broadened remit of music papers to report on extra-musical issues contributed to new ways of writing about music. The chapter describes the influx of new writers, editors and titles that reshaped the music press. It considers the advent of music journalists, who had previously written in the underground press, who brought a mediated version of the underground into the mainstream. It subsequently unpacks the constitution and politics of the ‘rock community’—a shorthand for young people who were invested in popular music and read music papers. Finally, the chapter explores anxieties about concert-going that culminated in the Isle of Wight Festival and an attempt by Conservative MPs to legislate against any overnight festivals.

Paper is a medium that, despite its long history, doesn’t cease to fascinate. When some unrelated technology is eventually transferred to a paper basis, human beings respond with wonder and amazement. Thus we find that people often are prepared to invest much personal effort to help facilitate this step. In some cultures, notably in China and Japan, paper is traditionally treated with great respect, and to this day paper crafts are maintained to a high degree of sophistication. The respect afforded to paper applications is certainly no different for paper-based medical diagnostics. One might consider the cause of this fascination. Paper is certainly ubiquitous, and most likely strongly linked to our childhood experiences, so that most people actually possess fairly considerable paper skills and intuitions by the time they reach into adulthood. But more than that, we observe that paper is so uncanningly versatile, which encourages us to seek new applications beyond the obvious. In this contribution we take a look at paper from this perhaps unusual perspective, complementing the more detailed scientific viewpoints in the remainder of this book.