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Copyright of Bulletin of the 'Carol I' National Defence University / Buletinul Universitatii Nationale de Aparare 'Carol I' is the property of Carol I National Defence University 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.)

Hate speech detection is an important issue in sentiment analysis and natural language processing. This study aims to improve the effectiveness of hate speech detection in English text using the BERT model, along with modified preprocessing techniques to enhance the F1-score. The dataset, sourced from Kaggle, contains English text with hate speech content. Evaluation results show a significant improvement in the model's accuracy and overall text classification performance. The BERT model achieved 89.11% accuracy on test data, correctly predicting 85 out of 95 samples. While the model excels at classifying offensive text with around 95% accuracy, it struggles to distinguish between hate and offensive text, with some confusion between neither and offensive categories. The classification report shows F1-scores of 0.43 for the hate class, 0.94 for the offensive class, and 0.84 for the neither class, with a weighted average F1-score of 0.89 and a macro average of 0.73. These results indicate that the BERT model delivers solid performance in detecting hate speech, though there is room for improvement, particularly in distinguishing certain classes.

HELL Pizza's advertising is characterized by its provocative art, audacious copy and bold tactics that relishes in its hellish reputation. Rather than merely relying on attention-grabbing stunts, the brand employs strategies that tap into the deep-seated cultural norms of its audience. Often deemed controversial, HELL's advertising elicits strong public reactions, serving as a mirror reflecting the evolving cultural and moral sensitivities and the place of Christianity in Aotearoa New Zealand. This article critically examines the official complaints about the use of religious references in HELL's advertising to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in Aotearoa New Zealand. Using thematic analysis, we analyse how 'offense' and references to Christianity are navigated by the public complainant, the ASA and the brand, in 79 rulings between 2005 and 2021. We conclude that while the brand consistently negotiates a fine line between edgy humour and potential offense, the ASA rulings suggest a societal trend leaning towards freedom of artistic expression, even when intertwined with religious undertones, particularly when a brand has a well-established identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incivility in parliaments is always prominently displayed in media reports, often with the implicit or explicit commentary that the situation is getting worse. This paper processes and analyses the records of verbal interactions in the Australian Parliament for over 100 years to provide a first approximation on the evolution of civility. It provides a framework for understanding the multidimensional nature of civility that examines both 'politeness' and 'argumentation', with the latter grounded in notions of public-mindedness. The analysis focuses on the interactions between parties of the orators and the party in power, the chamber of utterance, and the year. The results indicate that instances of impoliteness have increased since the 1970s but only modestly and remain highly infrequent. Minor parties, particularly those representing right-wing and Green politics are more likely to use dismissive or offensive language than the dominant centre-left and centre-right parties, although direct insults and swearwords are the particular remits of right-wing 'system-wrecker' parties. All these minor parties, nonetheless, also display higher levels of argumentation in their interventions. This combination of aggressive language and increased argumentation highlights the pressures on minor parties to convey their points in a forceful way, a challenge that is particularly pressing in two-party systems like the Australian one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Objective This study investigated the concept of ‘game style’ in football, focusing on a team’s distinctive approach characterized by tactics, formations, and strategies. The objective is to compare goal-scoring patterns related to “non-offensive transition,” “set pieces,” “offensive transition,” and “positive outcomes” across different league groups. Methodology: The sample comprises 702 football games, categorized into three league groups: Top Leagues, Marginal Leagues, and Emerging Leagues. A total of 2140 goals were analyzed, classifying them into four types: “No Transitions”, “Set Pieces”, “Offensive Transitions (direct), and “Positive Outcomes” of offensive transitions. The study aims to identify relevant differences between two distinct competitive periods, namely “Rounds 1 to 5” and “Rounds Last 5.” Results: The analysis reveals no significant differences in scoring methods between “Rounds 1 to 5” and “Rounds Last 5” across all variables in the analyzed league groups, except for goals conceded by “No Transition” in the Emerging Leagues. Additionally, results indicate that goals resulting from direct offensive transitions and positive outcomes substantially impact the Top Leagues, constituting 54% of the total scoring. Conclusion: The study emphasizes the importance of establishing and maintaining consolidated game patterns, as demonstrated by the consistent scoring patterns across different league groups. While most leagues show no variations in scoring methods between early and late rounds, attention to goals conceded by “No Transition” in Emerging Leagues is warranted. The prominence of direct offensive transitions and positive outcomes in Top Leagues highlights the relevance of these strategies in the scoring process, emphasizing the need for teams to focus on developing and implementing effective game patterns.

The means of smoke camouflage made it possible to carry out many effective operations, while saving and saving many soldiers' lives. The purpose of the work is to summarize the experience of using smoke to mask the combat operations of the Red Army troops during the Great Patriotic War. Materials and research methods. In chronological order, we analyzed documents stored in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (Podolsk), field manuals of the Red Army of that time, materials on various electronic resources and memoirs of participants in the events. The discussion of the results. If the first year of the war, smoke screens were used to a limited extent only on the Leningrad and Karelian fronts, then in the period from August 1942 to August 1943, 161 smoke screens were placed only on the Kalinin front in order to secure the flanks, as well as divert the attention of the enemy and blind him , which in many cases ensured the absence of irretrievable losses of personnel and combat vehicles. In 1943, the use of smoke became a means of ensuring crossings, for example, during the period of forcing the Dnieper River. The following data speak of the scale of the use of smoke in 1944: in the second half of the year alone, 1,449 smoke screens were delivered on a common front of 1,351 km. In April 1945, 630 smoke screens were delivered with a total front of 700.2 km, both on the main and secondary directions. They were used for operational camouflage on an army front scale. Conclusion. The facts of the use of masking smokes given in the review indicate that smokes were an active means of masking the military operations of troops during the Great Patriotic War, the principles of their use can be used during a special operation in Ukraine.

Understanding the physical fitness of table tennis (TT) players could be interesting in improving the training process and evaluating talent. This study aimed to assess the physical fitness of U14 TT players and differentiate between sex, age and playing style. A total of 352 players (203 males and 149 females) aged between 9 and 13 years participated in the present study. Furthermore, the sample was divided according to playing style: offensive (OFF) and mixed + defensive (M + D). A battery of tests was carried out to assess cardiorespiratory capacity, speed, strength, flexibility and power. Both sexes reported significant differences in cardiorespiratory capacity and speed (p

The defensive–offensive associations between algae and herbivores determine marine ecology. Brown algae utilize phlorotannin as their chemical defense against the predator Aplysia kurodai, which uses β-glucosidase (akuBGL) to digest the laminarin in algae into glucose. Moreover, A. kurodai employs Eisenia hydrolysis-enhancing protein (EHEP) as an offense to protect akuBGL activity from phlorotannin inhibition by precipitating phlorotannin. To underpin the molecular mechanism of this digestive–defensive–offensive system, we determined the structures of the apo and tannic acid (TNA, a phlorotannin analog) bound forms of EHEP, as well as the apo akuBGL. EHEP consisted of three peritrophin-A domains arranged in a triangular shape and bound TNA in the center without significant conformational changes. Structural comparison between EHEP and EHEP–TNA led us to find that EHEP can be resolubilized from phlorotannin precipitation at an alkaline pH, which reflects a requirement in the digestive tract. akuBGL contained two GH1 domains, only one of which conserved the active site. Combining docking analysis, we propose the mechanisms by which phlorotannin inhibits akuBGL by occupying the substrate-binding pocket, and EHEP protects akuBGL against this inhibition by binding with phlorotannin to free the akuBGL pocket.

No industry has been immune to the #MeToo movement since its inception. The restaurant industry is especially susceptible to incidents of sexual harassing behaviors due to certain characteristics of the business itself. The purpose of this research paper is to evaluate restaurant employees' perceptions of sexual harassment and the effects of the #MeToo movement has had on those perceptions. By analyzing the responses of restaurant employees in Hawaii, significant differences in sexual harassment perceptions were found among different groups depending on age, generation and job position. Through quantitative and qualitative examinations, the influence of the #MeToo movement on restaurant employees' perceptions of sexual harassment is explored. This study will provide timely information when it comes to sexual harassment in the restaurant industry and suggest policies and implications for the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are powerful and essential platforms where people express and share their ideas, knowledge, talents, and abilities with others. Users on social media also share harmful content, such as targeting gender, religion, race, and trolling. These posts may be in the form of tweets, videos, images, and memes. A meme is one of the mediums on social media which has an image and embedded text in it. These memes convey various views, including fun or offensiveness, that may be a personal attack, hate speech, or racial abuse. Such posts need to be filtered out immediately from social media. This paper presents a framework that detects offensive text in memes and prevents such nuisance from being posted on social media, using the collected KAU-Memes dataset 2582. The latter combines the “2016 U.S. Election” dataset with the newly generated memes from a series of offensive and non-offensive tweets datasets. In fact, this model uses the KAU-Memes dataset containing symbolic images and the corresponding text to validate the proposed model. We compare the performance of three proposed deep-learning algorithms to train and detect offensive text in memes. To the best of the authors knowledge and literature review, this is the first approach based on You Only Look Once (YOLO) for offensive text detection in memes. This framework uses YOLOv4, YOLOv5, and SSD MobileNetV2 to compare the model’s performance on the newly labeled KAU-Memes dataset. The results show that the proposed model achieved 81.74%, 84.1%, mAP, and F1-score, respectively, for SSD-MobileNet V2, and 85.20%, 84.0%, mAP, and F1-score, respectively for YOLOv4. YOLOv5 had the best performance and achieved the highest possible mAP, F1-score, precision, and recall which are 88.50%, 88.8%, 90.2%, and 87.5%, respectively, for YOLOv5.

The widespread growth in social media platforms provides a plethora of opportunities to enhance interaction and bring awareness about recent activities happening across the countries. Many people use social media to share their thoughts and opinions on societal and political issues. Nonetheless, some individuals misuse these platforms by posting toxic, hostile, and insulting comments. Hence, detecting and controlling such content at its earliest stage is crucial since its spread can harm social relations and negatively impact a person's life. In current scenarios, social media text consisting non-English languages is increasing due to active participation from multilingual societies. Of several non-English languages, Hindi English code-mixed is more prevalent in India. Most of the previous work to detect cyber aggression concentrates on English texts; therefore, there is high scope left to work on other languages such as Hindi English code-mixed. This paper has proposed a code-mixed hybrid embedding (CMHE) at the character and word level to capture similarly spelled and contextually related words. Furthermore, proposed embedding contributes significantly to the reduction of out of vocabulary words and capture words having similar polarity. After this, a deep learning framework based on CMHE, and a self-attention mechanism is proposed to retrieve significant features for classification. To evaluate proposed model, experiments were performed with two publicly available datasets: TRAC 2-2020 Hindi English code-mixed dataset (77.54% accuracy, 77.09% weighted average f1 score) and hate speech dataset (75.23% accuracy, 73.34% weighted average f1 score). The attained experimental results validate the effectiveness of proposed approach against the state-of-the-art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the textual contents on online social media are highly unstructured, informal, and often misspelled, existing research on message-level offensive language detection cannot accurately detect offensive content. This feature of the social media to express something openly to the world have created the major problems for these online businesses and negatively impacted the well-being of the societal decorum. There are increasing cases of the abuse or offense on the social media like Hate speech, Cyber-bullying, Aggression or general Profanity. It is very much important to understand that this behavior can not only immensely affect the life of an individual or a group but could be suicidal in some cases adversely hampering the mental health of the victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores occasions during which offendees make intuitive judgments about, or offer reasons for, why they feel offended. In this respect, and by drawing on a corpus of online Twitter posts featuring #offended, the study discusses some of the judgments and reasons that offendees most frequently refer to when 'sanctioning' their offence. The study reveals that taking offence involves the offence taker attributing blame to the person who has caused the offence. These attributions of blame appear to be rooted in higher-order moral norms and are typically couched in the format of a complaint about the behaviour in question with a view to causing some remedial action on the part of the person who has caused the offence. • Taking offence involves a perceived clash between observed and expected behaviour. • When we take offence, we attribute some form of blame to the person who has allegedly caused the offence. • Interactants' perception of moral norms is an assumed ability. • Morally informed norms continue to exert an influence on the taking of offence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Strategic Affairs Magazine is the property of Strategic Affairs Magazine 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.)

Copyright of Lexicographica is the property of De Gruyter 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.)

It is no surprise that just like the previous years, this year as well China has expanded its military budget, put another ship to sea, demonstrated new weaponary at the military parade, etc. For the last two decades, all the combat arms of the Chinese army has been developing at a high rate. Many authors claim very specific reasons for the Chinese armaments especially highlighting the conflicts with its immediate neighbors. From a geopolitical point of view, an interesting balance of power is being formed in the East. It’s been several years now that there are some precise problems in China-Japan conflict related to the power over some islands. China actively builds artificial islands which can serve as military bases far away from its shores approximately at an operative depth. And this matter deeply concerns the Philippines and Vietnam. In this light, it would be very interesting to study the balance of forces in the region and to analyze the American military doctrine on the one hand and the Chinese specific military and military-political attempts to appose it on the other hand. It is common knowledge that in political and professional circles in the USA are concerned about the actions and capabilities of China and Russia, which can considerably restrict the US access to key regions of Eurasia: Today, China and Russia have great potential to influence on the traditional American Net-platform weaponary, Air Forces, Navy, command and control networks, and even the orbital groupings. The two countries mentioned above, which are perceived as potential adversaries in the USA, strive to reach the level of the American military by all possible means and develop powerful techonologies. Russia and especially China are designing powerful satellite systems, various long-range missiles, fighter jets, UAVs, etc. New Electronic Warfare (EW) systems are being developed, to suppress or weaken the command and management systems of the US or its allies. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China also has the capacity to destroy settelites, disrupt extraterrestrial intelligence, wreck command and control networks, etc. According to experts, there is no guarantee that the armed forces of the USA can ensure reliable and secure communication and conncetion during conflicts on the theater of military operations, in particular on operational and strategic levels.

Nowadays, people use Online Social Networks to express feelings and ideas and to communicate and share information. With the freedom space provided by such networks, some people tend to propagate hate speech and insults. An early detection of such content is crucial for predicting conflicts and could prevent the emotions from becoming actions or spreading widely. Hate speech detection work on the Arabic text is sparse and scant compared to other languages like English. Furthermore, the Arabic corpora of short texts in the Levantine dialect for hate speech are also scant. In this paper, we build our dataset of Arabic tweets from Syria and its neighbors with annotations of Normal and Hate. Therefore, word embedding with a combination of term frequency and inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) was concatenated for text representation in traditional classifiers; we used multiple classification algorithms, including Random Forest, Support Vector Machines, and three deep learning classifiers (AraBERT, ArabicBERT, and GigaBERT) which provide on our dataset to validate the effectiveness of our augmented dataset and different used feature representations. The experiment results show that concatenating word embedding and TF-IDF can improve the classification performance; besides, deep learning classifiers show better results compared to traditional ones. Our best model with GigaBERT significantly outperforms other used models with a 94.6% under the AUC-ROC curve (0.81 macro F1-score). These tests were made against other several datasets, and we got the best results for our dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread usage of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube allows sharing of opinions and suggestions across countries. On the contrary, these platforms are often misused to disseminate hate speech and offensive content. Moreover, in a multilingual society such as India, many users resort to code-mixing while typing on social media. Thus, we have focused on Hindi English (Hi–En) Code-Mixed hate speech and offensive text classification. Recently, numerous approaches have emerged, and most of these approaches use CNN and LSTM in a stacked manner to extract local and sequential semantic features. However, these arrangements diminish the comprehensive effect of local and sequential features. In addition, deep framework suffers from issue of vanising gradient. Therefore, in our work, we have proposed, local and sequential knowledge aware Fused Attention-based Network (FA-Net), which introduces a fusion of attention mechanism of collective and mutual learning between local and sequential features. The proposed network (FA-Net) is lower in depth more in breadth in comparison to the existing architectures. It has three building blocks: Code Mixed Hybrid Embedding, Locally Driven Sequential Attention-2 (LDSA-2), Locally Driven Sequential Attention-3 (LDSA-3). CMHE is developed using customized Hi-En code mixed data, aiming the network to initialize with relevant weights. LDSA-2 and LDSA-3 equip the model to build a comprehensive representation having past, future, and local contextual knowledge w.r.t any location in the sentence. Extensive experimentation on two benchmark datasets shows that FA-Net has outperformed other state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the Anglophone historiography has tended to marginalize the French contribution to the allied chemical war during the Great War 1914-1918, this study has attempted to re-balance the historical narrative by emphasizing the collective nature and importance of this joint Franco-British enterprise. By interrogating a raft of under-utilized primary evidence in the French and British archives, elements of the two armies' defensive and offensive gas warfare performance have been reassessed through the co-operation prism. The investigation demonstrates how closely, comprehensively, and effectively the two allies worked together in chemical weapon production and exchange, research and development, anti-gas protection, and indirect battlefield applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains the attitude that Iran shows towards the attacks, pressures, and condemnation of the United States, especially in its nuclear development program. Through Stephen van Evera's offensive-defensive theory, this article explains four determinants that led Iran to finally adopt a defensive attitude towards all offensive from the United States. The four determinants include the development of military technology, geographical conditions, socio-political constellation, and the order of diplomacy. Furthermore, this article describes the four determinants and relates them to Iran's nuclear development program and the response of the United States. Thus, it appears that Iran is showing a defensive towards the United States offensive.

The importance of the research lies in the application of a modern training method for training handball in order to raise the player’s physiological and skill efficiency throughout the game and maintain a constant level of performance and resistance to fatigue, especially the ability to perform with the presence of lactic acid and benefit from it after converting it to energy. The research aims: To identify the effect of the dynamic lactate method on developing the tolerance for defensive and offensive performance of handball players under 19 years of age. The researchers used the experimental design with two groups of experimental and control, with pre and post- test, for its suitability to the nature of the problem. The researcher identified the research community with handball players in the Karbala Sports Club for the youth category of under 19 years of age for the 2020-2021 training season, whose number is (16) players. By (7) players for each group. As for the most important conclusions, the results of this study demonstrated the effectiveness of the dynamic lactate method in developing endurance of defensive and offensive performance with handball among the players of the research sample, while the recommendations were, the researchers recommended that the dynamic lactate method should be used in the training units.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the modern war conditions, governed by the avant-garde technologies, the military actions of all the forces services acquire new features and dimensions with special implications for the participating forces. Carrying out a campaign involves combat-type actions that only a military force can accomplish, and its objectives are achieved both through a wide range of offensive or defensive operations, and through interaction with other military and non-military entities. At the tactical level, commanders must ensure a balance between the various elements of the functional framework to achieve the objectives set, in accordance with the campaign purpose. In line with current trends in the field of modern armed struggle, the issue of the combat disposition of the forces in order to conduct operations must be addressed, in the context of the development of military technology, increasing force mobility, maneuverability and combat power. reconsidering, at the same time, the role of different categories of armed forces, in the sense of ensuring interoperability with NATO partner forces, spatial extension of the direct engagement of supple and mobile combat disposition. Nowdays, in the Romanian military literature, it is considered that the joint tactical large units combat disposition consists of: the command system, maneuver forces, the reserve and the logistics system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study tasked undergraduates with serving as hypothetical human resource workers to evaluate complaints of offensive and inoffensive humor used by male and female employees in a fictitious company who varied in employment status and age. Offensive humor was deemed more problematic in its usage, particularly among female perceivers. Contrary to hypotheses, its usage was more problematic for male and older employees than for female and younger employees. In addition, participants were more averse to both offensive and inoffensive humor from high-status and older men relative to women with similar characteristics. We frame results with consideration of recent social trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Timisoara Physical Education & Rehabilitation Journal is the property of Sciendo 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.)

In order for the evaluation to be accurate, the researchers found that it is necessary to build the test in order to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the trait that is intended to be measured, and because most tests are applied in cases other than real competition cases, so tests must be something that fits the ability to control and guide the accuracy of placing the ball in its place. The flour. Therefore, tests were designed and built to represent the offensive technical skills in volleyball for the National Center for Talent Care in Iraq. The research community was divided into a survey sample of (15) players, a construction sample of (60) players, and a rationing sample of (55) players. Standard grading extraction The research community must have (130) players, and the research tests have proven its validity in measuring offensive volleyball technical skills generated (2002) by distributing it moderately to the construction sample and its ability to distinguish between the achievement of high and low level sample members in a single test as well as achieving honesty, consistency and high objectivity transactions The levels varied in three tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A The actions of the Romanian Army on the South Front were decisively influenced by the Turtucaia battles. Although there was a secondary front, there were enough forces and means, which through a judicious planning and cooperation could have stopped the German-Bulgarian offensive. Unfortunately, the lack of a realistic strategy and faulty coordination of the units and large units arranged in Dobrogea, Romanian army suffered the most resounding defeat, a situation that had affected the entire campaign in 1916 and at the same time had a negative impact on the morale of Romanian soldiers, but also on public opinion. One of the major consequences was stopping military operations on the main Northern Front and the deployment of seven divisions from this front to the south, allowing the Austro-Hungarian and German armies to recoil in Transylvania, thus being compromised the Romanian offensive, which had been successful on this front. Turtucaia remained a lesson of strategy and military art, which was widely debated in military historiography, with lessons and conclusions for the Romanian army's operative military units.

The importance of the research was evident because the volleyball player does not depend on mastery and mastery of only one skill, but full knowledge of all skills and their knowledge in terms of movement to different playing centers and their work requires him to have special mobility capabilities that qualify him to perform such a role, and here the guidance of the coach plays an important role. The exchange of information between the athlete and the coach (the teacher and the learner), as well as receiving information before the motor performance, “and during it provides an opportunity to fine-tune and organize the behavior commensurate with the situation facing or required despite knowledge of the performance requirements. This in itself is a good measure by which the trainer can know the athlete’s ability to analyze. Correct and solving the kinetic duty intellectually and applying it in practice, that is, standing on a level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article explores the often ambivalent relationship our ancient sources had with the role of women in times of war, from the Homeric to the early Byzantine period. The article takes the view that these roles were not something invariably imposed by men, but were part of a more general societal development, in which women as much as men supported the status quo, and for a variety of reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, we have seen a wide use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in the Internet and everywhere. Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning are important sub-fields of AI that have made Chatbots and Conversational AI applications possible. Those algorithms are built based on historical data in order to create language models, however historical data could be intrinsically discriminatory. This article investigates whether a Conversational AI could identify offensive language and it will show how large language models often produce quite a bit of unethical behavior because of bias in the historical data. Our low-level proof-of-concept will present the challenges to detect offensive language in social media and it will discuss some steps to propitiate strong results in the detection of offensive language and unethical behavior using a Conversational AI.

A characteristic inherent in a democratic State is a guarantee of freedom of opinion and expression by every citizen. However, the space for freedom cannot be misused to express various ideas or views so that it becomes a tool to attack human rights and the freedom of others manifested in the form of hate speech. Acts of hate speech are currently getting more and more attention from various circles, not only for law enforcers and practitioners, politicians, information and communication technology experts. But it is also a very serious concern for the Indonesian government to form and give birth to regulations concerning to handling of hate speech. Moreover, caring for diversity and harmonization in diversity in the era of globalization of information technology is the biggest challenge today. In this study, phenomenology is used as research design whereas purposive sampling from online media is used to collect the data. The aim is to maintain unity in the midst of a multicultural community life such as Batu Bara. On the other hand, the emergence of discussions about hate speech actually gave the object of a new study for linguistics. Based on the linguistic perspective, hate speech is a phenomenon of offensive language that can present linguistic data and can be analyzed linguistically. Therefore, this article conceptually describes the role of linguistics and linguists in understanding and explaining the subject of hate speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in international trade, football clubs can benefit more if they specialize in what they have or can create comparative advantage. In a world of scarce resources, clubs need to identify what makes them successful and invest accordingly. The main objective of this study is to understand what influences the success of football teams in the English Premier League (EPL) championship games. Based on Ricardo's model of comparative advantage and applying Factor analysis as well as Panel data approach, this study investigates the need for specialization and tradeoffs between defensive and offensive patterns of the game in order for EPL clubs to be more successful. The data used in this study covers the period 2010-2017 of the EPL data. The results reveal that, in general, a better defense is slightly more important for success. The outcomes were different for the top- and bottom-ranking clubs. We found that it is more important for bottom-ranking teams to play better defensively than offensively, while for top-performing teams, the probability of success is more affected by offensive style. In addition, there is a tradeoff between these two styles of play; when bottom-ranking teams try to play better defensively, it often comes at the expense of a poor offensive pattern, but almost no one plays offense at the expense of a poor defense. Unlike the bottom-ranking teams, the topranking teams did not face tradeoffs, but they were able to improve both their defensive and offensive patterns. The recommendation put forward by this study argue that bottom-ranking clubs should specialize first in defense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores why the offensive predominates military tactical thinking. With survey results showing an offensive bias among 60 per cent of senior Swedish officers and as many as 80 per cent in the case of the army, it is clear that this is not just a problem of the past but is equally relevant today. The article asks why there is a tendency to perceive and understand offensive tactics as the preferred choice and the way to conduct battle that should be encouraged and preferred. Drawing on existing research and the findings of a pilot study, ten propositions for why the offensive bias exists are tested using a mixed-method approach. Based on the findings, the article develops a model to understand why the offensive dominates military tactical thinking. It is found that the two key constitutive factors behind the offensive bias are military culture and education. These factors most directly and profoundly influence an officer's identity, perceptions, and thinking. Military culture and education, in turn, work as a prism for four other factors: military history, the theory and principles of war, doctrine and TTPs, and psychological factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• AHPs and plastics are the main wastes in the offensive human waste bags sampled. • Recycled AHPs are potential feedstocks for bio-composite and fertilizer industries. • Superabsorbent polymer and pulp recyclate quality play key roles in processing viability. Offensive human waste refers to non-hazardous waste that contains body fluids from non-infectious humans, comprised of post-consumer Absorbent Hygiene Products (AHPs), swabs, dressings, bedding, gloves, and other materials. While this waste category requires more stringent handling, storage and disposal measures than general waste, its non-hazardous nature suggests that there are opportunities for waste valorisation. An inventory of 200 offensive human waste bags collected from various healthcare institutions in South-Eastern England show that about 76% of the waste is comprised of AHPs, most of which are adult incontinence pads and child nappies. Mixed plastics comprised of predominantly HDPE represent 9% of the waste. To evaluate the potentials for offensive human waste valorisation, small-scale separation tests involving artificially-soiled nappies and associated mixed plastic packaging wastes have been performed. Findings suggest that about 50% of the total superabsorbent polymer is recoverable from fluff pulp fractions, recoveries of which are unaffected by the presence of ionic species typically present in human waste. On the other hand, recovery of mixed plastic packaging is more challenging. Overall, however, findings suggest that viable AHP recycling is possible if recyclate materials are targeted towards non-food related markets outlets such as the construction and land remediation sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the folk perception of impoliteness among Ghanaians in view of Watts’ (2003) notion of first order impoliteness. The study showed that impoliteness is not just an opposite of politeness, but the manifestation of non-cooperation, disapproval, and mutual antipathy through certain communicative behaviours that signal disrespect. These communicative behaviours include ‘interrupting others’, the use of ‘invectives’ and the use of ‘offensive non-verbal forms of communication (NVCs)’. The use of these impolite communicative behaviours destabilizes interpersonal relationships and shows that a speaker is communicatively incompetent. The study also proposed the ‘pardonability scale of impoliteness’. This scale showed that among Ghanaians, the use of invectives is the most offensive and least pardonable impolite communicative behaviour while the use of offensive NVCs is the least offensive and most pardonable impolite communicative behaviour. It was also noted that the degree of offensiveness or pardonability in the order of the arrangement displayed on the scale, is not strictly tied to all speech events.

After the encirclement of the German troops and their allies near Stalingrad at the end of November, 1942, the Red army was able to develop large-scale offensive to the west. In January and in the beginning of February of 1943 the forces of the Southern front struck blow on the Rostov direction. This article is devoted to military operations of the 300th infantry division of the 13th Guard infantry corps of the 2nd Guards army at the beginning of 1943. Mentions of them are practically absent in a historiography. Meanwhile, in fights of February – the first decade of March, when the division has suffered huge losses and has been taken away in a reserve, are of great historic importance. In the Soviet historiography in days of the Great Patriotic War not enough attention was paid to destiny of separate fighting connections, the principal value was attached to actions of large expeditions and strategic military associations. It concerns also the 300th infantry division operating to Mius-fronte in February-March, 1943. Meanwhile, the appeal to its fighting way allows to understand better the reasons of failures of the Soviet approach, to find out in what conditions it passed. The approach of this division failed and brought big losses to staff and military equipment. Being guided by the declassified documents of the Central archive of the Ministry of Defence, the author discovers one of the little-known pages of the Mius-front history.

Understanding the physical fitness of table tennis (TT) players could be interesting in improving the training process and evaluating talent. This study aimed to assess the physical fitness of U14 TT players and differentiate between sex, age and playing style. A total of 352 players (203 males and 149 females) aged between 9 and 13 years participated in the present study. Furthermore, the sample was divided according to playing style: offensive (OFF) and mixed + defensive (M + D). A battery of tests was carried out to assess cardiorespiratory capacity, speed, strength, flexibility and power. Both sexes reported significant differences in cardiorespiratory capacity and speed ( p  < 0.05). Concerning age, there were substantial differences in cardiorespiratory capacity, speed, strength and power, with older players obtaining better results ( p  < 0.05). Finally, concerning playing style, differences were reported in cardiorespiratory capacity, higher in OFF style group, and flexibility, higher in the M + D style group. Finally, there were relationships between playing style and cardiorespiratory fitness and flexibility. Physical fitness evolves with increasing age as a function of sex. This is the first study to assess fitness in a large sample of TT players as a function of playing style., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (© 2023 Pradas de la Fuente, Toro-Román, Ortega-Zayas and Moreno-Azze.)

The defensive-offensive associations between algae and herbivores determine marine ecology. Brown algae utilize phlorotannin as their chemical defense against the predator Aplysia kurodai , which uses β-glucosidase ( aku BGL) to digest the laminarin in algae into glucose. Moreover, A. kurodai employs Eisenia hydrolysis-enhancing protein (EHEP) as an offense to protect aku BGL activity from phlorotannin inhibition by precipitating phlorotannin. To underpin the molecular mechanism of this digestive-defensive-offensive system, we determined the structures of the apo and tannic acid (TNA, a phlorotannin analog) bound forms of EHEP, as well as the apo aku BGL. EHEP consisted of three peritrophin-A domains arranged in a triangular shape and bound TNA in the center without significant conformational changes. Structural comparison between EHEP and EHEP-TNA led us to find that EHEP can be resolubilized from phlorotannin precipitation at an alkaline pH, which reflects a requirement in the digestive tract. aku BGL contained two GH1 domains, only one of which conserved the active site. Combining docking analysis, we propose the mechanisms by which phlorotannin inhibits aku BGL by occupying the substrate-binding pocket, and EHEP protects aku BGL against this inhibition by binding with phlorotannin to free the aku BGL pocket., Competing Interests: XS, YY, NS, HW, KK, JY, KY, AT, MY No competing interests declared, (© 2023, Sun, Ye et al.)

The First World War brought many changes to everyday life and came as a surprise to many contemporaries. The territory of today's Slovenia mostly belonged to the 3rd Austro-Hungarian Army Corps. More than 160,000 soldiers were mobilized in these recruiting districts. The fact that the labor of at least five people was needed to provide for just one soldier on the frontline sums up how the hinterland was connected with the front. The fatalities among the soldiers were extremely high. During the first five offensives, the positions of the front were basically unchanged despite a large number of casualties. The Italian conquest of Gorica/Gorizia in August 1916 was followed by a new wave of refugees and the retreat of the Austro-Hungarian Army from the Doberdob/ Doberdo Plateau to the new defense line in the Karst region. The atmosphere in the hinterland was affected by a feeling of scarcity and growing discontent. With the successful breakthrough in 1917 (the battle of Caporetto), which shifted the front to the Piave River, the Isonzo Front drew the attention of military strategists and became known internationally. At the end of October 1918, Austria-Hungary collapsed and new states emerged on its territory, among them the State of the Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs. Thus the stories of the soldiers and the memory of the fallen remained within the family circle and local cemeteries, far from national celebrations, out of the collective memory of the new state. Later, the memory of the Second World War and the postwar revolution also completely obscured the memory of the years 1914-1918. A characteristic feature of Slovenia in the period after the Second World War was that the first museum collections were created by private collectors, who collected material remains of the war on the trackless Soča landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A compelling case can be made to develop a NATO's missile defence system in response to the advancement of missile technology and the danger of nuclear weapons. However, this development also undermines Russia's retaliatory capacity, and consequently heightens the offensive potential of nuclear weapons. This article explores the offence/defence posture of NATO's missile defence plans in terms of both capabilities and strategy. It is argued that NATO is incrementally increasing the strength and reach of its missile defence components, while rejecting any international treaty to regulate and limit their future expansion. This corresponds with a strategy of achieving invulnerability through counterforce and utilising NATO as an ‘insurance policy’ against Russia, to be activated when conflicts arise. We conclude that NATO has the capacity to distinguish between an offensive and defensive posture by discriminating between potential targets, but it has displayed no intention to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the change in the tactics of the second wave of aggression of Soviet Russia towards Ukraine from the end of 1918 - early 1919. The first wave of aggression of Soviet Russia against Ukraine from the end of 1917 - early 1918 left Ukraine in the memory of heavy impressions: a three–day shelling of heavy artillery by Kyiv, a terrible massacre by drunken Russian soldiers and sailors of the civilian population of the capital of Ukraine, the monks of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, - did not give confidence to the Kremlin strategists about the success in planning the second wave of an offensive against Ukraine. Therefore, a new campaign of troops of the north-eastern neighbor to Ukraine was radically different from the first one. The purpose of the study is to find out the specifics of the construction and development of a new strategy and tactics of the second wave of aggression of Soviet Russia in Ukraine. The methods used when writing the article are: problem-chronological and historical-comparative, structural-system method, as well as the method of analysis and synthesis of facts and sources. It should be noted that the second wave of aggression of Soviet Russia in Ukraine was managed and directly controlled by the head of the People’s Commissars of Russia V. Lenin. The sad experience of the first offensive operation did not allow him to hand over the wheel of a Russian military machine to someone else’s hands, as it happened with the inadequate left-wing Socialist Rev. Muravev on the verge of 1917-1918years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Dark man" or bureaucrat in uniform? Walter Nicolai and the intelligence service in the First World War and Flitsch-Tolmein 1917. Preparation of the Isonzo front breakthrough The works of the two authors highlight the role played by the German intelligence service during the First World War, through a brief presentation of the head of this component structure of the Army General Staff and respectively the preparation of the offensive operation "Loyalty of Weapons" carried out by the forces German and Austro-Hungarian during the First World War, for the breakthrough of the Isonzo front, against the Italian forces. Starting from the question: "Who was actually Walter Nicolai - a dark man or a bureaucrat in uniform?", the author presents the evolution and activity of the German intelligence service, which has supplemented both staff and attributions, through the takeover of the field of press and propaganda work, from the assumption of his leadership by Colonel Walter Nicolai in the spring of 1913 and until 1918 when he was fired for political reasons and removed from the process of active reconstruction of the service. The analysis of the German officer's behavior concluded that a obtuse Prussian bureaucrat was at the head of the intelligence service. The German-Austro-Hungarian offensive "Weapon Loyalty" has demonstrated that, despite an initial only partially favorable situation and very difficult field conditions, through an efficient preparation of the actions, the setting of clear and precise objectives and the application of insurance measures well-planned combat, important field gains could be achieved, leading to a one-third cut in front of the Alps, and causing serious loss of people and materials to Italian forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are various verses in the Qur'an which apparently lead to the meaning of war. With regard to its intepretation of its related verses, there are mainly two different views. The first view argues that war in Islam will not happen but in a defensive manner. In other words, a war among Muslims would not happen unless they have been attacked and their reaction is in the form of counter attack in order to protect their dignity and life. The second view sees war in offensive manner. It is considered as a holy war (jihād) which is under the category of striving in the cause of Allah, and recommended to gain the status of martyrdom (syahīd). These different views create variant intepretations of the word jihād and war. The existance of certain groups related to terrorism such as Islamic State of Iraq and al-Syam (ISIS), al-Qaeda, Abu Sayyaf, Jemaah Islamiyyah and others, abusing the name of Islam and using hostile approaches in order to achieve their aims, have clearly a negative impact on Islam. This article reviews the meaning of jihād and war in accordance to the Qur'anic perspective in order to address this issue fairly. Relevant data have been taken from selected authoritative Qur'anic exegesis pertaining to verses of jihād and war. It uses content analysis to analyse those related data.The article concludes that jihad in Islam is subject to sincere intention and a clear objective: it does not simply mean fighting. A war should be viewed from different aspects whether defensive or offensive because different backgounds will lead to the both. Both jihad and war are clearly different from terrorism, and both of them are associated with the meaning of fī sabīllah as commonly understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German historiography between wars was very reticent about the campaign in Moldavia in 1917. In the largest work of the period, the battles from Mărăști, Mărășești and Oituz are scarcely described and did not recognize the real scale of the confrontations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]