Search

Memes are a form of friendly exchange between one another and can guide one smoothly over a conflict or come to a meaningful conclusion. Detection of offensive and hate speech-related content in social media memes has been investigated in a single modality only, i.e. considering only text or only image. However, memes are content plus images. Consideration of both modalities to identify offensive memes is vital. Thus, we made a model considering this multimodal nature. The training dataset available from the Facebook challenge had pre-extracted text from a meme. However, testing an original meme, the text had to be extracted with the help of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. So if the text on the meme will be not distorted rather straight, the OCR technology will give an accurate extraction of text. The text had separately been passed through a text module where different techniques like Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), and stacked LSTM have been used for detection. The image has also been passed to an image module where a CNN model, i.e. VGG16 has been used for detection. This is followed by the fusion of results from both modules via the basic concatenation technique. All of this procedure had been performed using 2 different word embeddings, i.e. GloVe and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The best accuracy obtained was 0.485 using BiLSTM + VGG16. Comparing the results between BERT and GloVe, GloVe beat BERT with a very minor margin, though with an even larger dataset BERT could overtake GloVe.

Social networking platforms provide a conduit to disseminate our ideas, views, and thoughts and proliferate information. This has led to the amalgamation of English with natively spoken languages. Prevalence of Hindi-English code-mixed data (Hinglish) is on the rise with most of the urban population all over the world. Hate speech detection algorithms deployed by most social networking platforms are unable to filter out offensive and abusive content posted in these code-mixed languages. Thus, the worldwide hate speech detection rate of around 44% drops even more considering the content in Indian colloquial languages and slangs. In this paper, we propose a methodology for efficient detection of unstructured code-mix Hinglish language. Fine-tuning-based approaches for Hindi-English code-mixed language are employed by utilizing contextual-based embeddings such as embeddings for language models (ELMo), FLAIR, and transformer-based bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). Our proposed approach is compared against the pre-existing methods and results are compared for various datasets. Our model outperforms the other methods and frameworks.

The purpose of this study is to analyse how shocking marketing communication is perceived by consumers and how it influences their intention to spread positive and negative word-of-mouth (WOM). Theoretical analysis revealed that in order for consumers to spread WOM they need to form an attitude towards the communication and the attitude is influenced by perceived level of shock and norm violation. Data collected from 322 respondents in Lithuania and Azerbaijan shows that chosen set of factors has a significant impact towards WOM. Moreover, two different appeals were chosen for research in order to analyse the impact of communication content to consumer’s perception: moral offensiveness and impropriety. Research reveals that morally offensive communication is more effective in the case of WOM than communication containing impropriety components. Nevertheless, results show that it is more likely that negative WOM would be shared instead of positive WOM.

After having examined Iran’s international relations in the period from “9/11” to the initial phase of the Iraq War (–2004), this chapter deals with the ensuing period until Iran’s new president Rouhani takes office in 2013. On the one hand, by the mid-2000s, Iran emerged as the region’s indispensable power—as a combined result of the U.S. occupation “quagmires” in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of Iran’s successful regional policies relying on Offensive Realist prescripts—boosted by the political successes of its regional allies and the spike in oil prices leading to record revenues. At a time when Iranian hardliners had assumed supremacy domestically, the IRI turned out to be the victor of the U.S. neo-conservatives’ “regime change” operations. On the other, the “nuclear crisis” that emerged in 2002 put Iran increasingly at odds with Western powers, keeping the threat of war alive and subjected it to unprecedented international sanctions from the mid-2000s onwards.

Since last two decades the term masculinity has become a catchword all over the world. It may be seen with reference to social political, economic, and cultural as well. This has been expressed with reference to the manhood and gender equality most of the times. Inherent misogyny is an idea which defines social relationship of patriarchal society. Some of the prominent and progressive criminologists contradict the statement. Indeed, the term is coined with the social media as the platform has changed observing application and existence of virtual world. Deep rooted gender inequalities thinking has been shown on Social media platforms like Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram etc. Nowadays people have started using these platforms for destructive purposes. The example is “Bois locker room” a group created by some teenagers and later disclosed using nude pictures, offensive comments, sexual violence against women (Bose in BOIS locker room, Khan, Nakshab. BOIS locker room.). Author referred to the term toxic as bullying and sexual harassment that has reflected through different platform on social media. Indian judiciary during 1980s has given a judgment indicating the approach of gender equality and manhood (1997). Later on Indian legislature came with legislation and one of the major legislation which may be like a prevention, i.e., Information Technology Act, India (The Information Technology Act (2000). The Indian judiciary has proactively dealt with such emerging problems in the virtual world. In this chapter, authors try to analyze the developing approaches of toxic masculinity, inherent misogyny on social media and preventive laws and judicial approaches in India.

Social media is an interactive platform for communication that facilitates the creation or sharing of information, ideas, or other forms of expression among people. With the increased usage of such platforms, automatic detection of multimodal content should be mandatory and so the main focus should be on memes. A meme can be briefly described as an image or video depicting thoughts or ideas of people as well as to express culturally-relevant ideas. Although, memes mostly are captioned photos intended to elicit humor. Since memes are multimodal in nature, posting of irrelevant memes that spread hatred, trolling, cyberbullying is increasing day by day. Awful speech, aggression is explored as single modalities such as text or image. However, combining both the modalities text and image to detect whether it is offensive content or not is a difficult task. Though with the use of a multimodal approach this issue can be dealt with up-to a certain extent.

This review of reputational crisis literature and practice finds that the challenges in contemporary crisis communication and strategy are predominantly borne out a company centric stakeholder model. Reputational crises require stakeholders to exist, for without stakeholders no action would be considered offensive and thus not develop into a reputational crisis. Yet most literature fails to acknowledge that stakeholders are salient to crises. Although for the purpose of the company’s survival, the crisis must be brought to an end and avoided in future, the method of successfully accomplishing this must at least in part be through the crisis stakeholders’ viewpoints. To accomplish this more holistic solution to solving reputational crises, the focus should be removed from the company and given to the crisis instead. This change of focus fits within the more recent revisions of stakeholder theory and through providing a more egalitarian approach to the company and its stakeholders, makes room not only for apologia to be more effective and genuine, but also allows us to see crisis stakeholders as salient to the crisis as the company is salient to the crisis. This strategy may also be more conducive to preventing future reputational crises.

IoT security is very crucial to IoT applications, and security situational awareness can assess the overall security status of the IoT. Traditional situational awareness methods only consider the unilateral impact of attack or defense, but lackconsideration of joint actions by both parties. Applying game theory to security situational awareness can measure the impact of the opposition and interdependence of the offensive and defensive parties. This paper proposes an IoT security situational awareness method based on Q-Learning and Bayesian game. Through Q-Learning update, the long-term benefits of action strategies in specific states were obtained, and static Bayesian game methods were used to solve the Bayesian Nash Equilibrium of participants of different types. The proposed method comprehensively considers offensive and defensive actions, obtains optimal defense decisions in multi-state and multi-type situations, and evaluates security situation. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of this method.

With the increasing availability of affordable data services and social media presence, our life is not untouched with ‘cyber,’ i.e., electronic technology. With it, various challenges and issues are faced, and the most sensitive among them is Cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is the form of ‘abusive,’ ‘offensive,’ ‘inappropriate,’ and ‘toxic’ comments that are present on the platforms. With the fear of online abuse and bullying, many people give-up on perceiving different opinions and stop expressing themselves. Nowadays, various online platforms like Quora, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Facebook have become part and parcel of everybody’s life. These stages battle to viably encourage discussions, driving numerous networks to restrict or shutdown client remarks. Unfortunately, online comments with toxicity cause online badgering, bullying, and personal attacks. Therefore, toxic comment classification problem has attracted the attention of many organizations from the past few years. Hence, in this paper, we present a hybrid Deep Learning model that will detect such toxic comments and classify them according to the type of toxicity. As an outcome, we achieved the best results with an accuracy of 98.39% and an f1 score of 79.91%.

In Germany, the arts educational structure has grown in many different ways. Recently, Germany has launched an education offensive for education for sustainable development, because it is seen as essential in realizing the so-called Sustainable Development Goals which the United Nations voted to adopt in 2015. In the first step, this article describes the cooperation and positions of both education sectors. In the second step, educational goals and quality criteria of arts education and ESD in Germany are compared under the following questions: Are there common intersections and where are the significant differences? What potential do the differences have for the respective other educational sectors? How can arts education benefit from ESD? And vice versa? And where are the boundaries for cooperation between arts education and ESD due to different goals and quality criteria? The article shows that arts education and ESD in Germany can achieve synergy effects if the special differences between the two areas of education are maintained.

The ever rising Internet of Things, rapid globalization and technology advancement have created a valuable seamless platform for folks to interact, publish and share contents online over high-speed connections regardless of location and distance. Nonetheless, several benefits, proliferation of vigor and anonymity of the Internet create a permanent breeding ground for all forms of cyber threats globally and the UAE in particular including all sorts of online crime like sexual harassment, deception, cyborgs, compromised safety and fraudulent engagements among others leading to manipulation of user credentials, perceptions, exposure to offensive content, financial losses, psychological and physical harm. In this paper, we examine a variety of Cyberbullying offensive and preventive strategies available globally giving particular attention to the UAE, examine the phenomena of risky Internet use of ICT tools and its relationship to Cyberbullying and assess the effectiveness of existing anti-Cyberbullying strategies used in the UAE. The findings and recommendations of the paper can be useful to government policy-maker and online crime regulators who intend to effectively curb Cyberbullying in the region.

Companies in the twenty-first century tend to improvise strategically instead of adopting traditional design-precede-execution strategy due to the dynamic, turbulent and ever-changing business environment. Along with the growing body of works on strategic improvisation (SI), this paper tries to propose a synthesized process model of SI that aiming at better understanding the mechanism between SI and competitive advantage. First, this paper introduced the origin of SI study. Then, it mapped out the research scope by reviewing theoretical works, qualitative and quantitative research on this agenda. Then, from a learning perspective, this paper categorizes SI into defensive SI and offensive SI based on the level of exploration and exploitation. By preceding SI as a real-time learning process, this paper presents a three-phase process model to unveil how SI brings competitive advantage to companies. At last, two directions for future studies are offered.

In June 2018, a cyber espionage campaign by Chinese group of hackers targeting two United States-based satellite firms was exposed, whose fundamental motive was to seize military and civilian communications of the victim nations. The hackers intentionally infected the systems, along with regulating the satellite to change the positions of the orbiting devices and disrupt data traffic. This case study may directly be pointing to instantiations of cyber-crime or unethical practices performed by misuse of technology in the ambit of cyber space, but the vital question which arises in this context is, ‘can such practices be justified on moral or socio-political grounds by any means?’ The implication of this case study is highly convoluted. On one hand, hacking is considered offensive as one try to intrude in other’s personal space without taking a legitimate moral consent, whereas on the other hand, an agent might be doing the same in order to ensure national security. Hence, the intention behind committing such a crime is dubious. The motive behind taking such a measure might be threat instead of intention to harm, which in turn, gives rise to few dilemmas, to ascertain whether such unethical acts can be justified for attaining an ethical end. This research work is an attempt to reconcile two disciplines. Skimming by the arguments of moral philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, J. S Mill, Aristotle a rigorous study is done, and logico-ethical arguments are presented to seek a solution for these complex yet extremely relevant issues.

In the Astana process, the world witnessed the emergence of a new alliance between three countries: Russia, Turkey and Iran. This chapter uses theories of alliance formation to explain the impetus for forming an alliance between Russia, Turkey and Iran: three countries having competing interests. The paper starts by examining Russia, Turkey and Iran’s interests in Syria and then the threats they face along the dimensions of aggregate power, proximity, offensive capability and offensive intentions. The paper suggests that the three countries aligned in Syria to balance against what they perceive as the most threatening state: the US. On the other side, the US, Europe and Gulf countries have seen their influence marginalized in Syria. By employing the theories of alliance formation the paper argues that the US, Europe and Gulf countries have failed to form an alliance due to their diverging threats’ perceptions (that is, the Saudi perception of Iran as a threat is not shared by Qatar and Europe’s interest in stability because of refugees’ concerns are not shared by the United States’). The chapter concludes with discussing the implications of the Astana process for the US, Europe and the Gulf states States due to the rise of a new alliance between Russia and Iran and resultant competition of Astana with Geneva talks.

All the content posted on Facebook may or may not be appropriate for the viewers. A part of this content, which is inappropriate, can have a negative effect on viewer’s psychology, especially if the content is meant for the viewer. Facebook’s existing process of manual filtering is quite time-consuming and may require a huge workforce to check every content posted by millions of Facebook users. In addition, the current manual filtering process carried out looks only for the presence of any abusive word. This process does not filter out sentences, which do not contain any abusive word but can be perceived as offensive by the viewer. This project aims to address the said issues in manual filtering by automating the process of offensive and profane text content filtering. A combination of lexical and semantic models is used for filtering Facebook textual content with the help of machine learning and natural language processing. The lexical approach uses a dictionary-based method to identify the presence of any profane and offensive words in a comment or post data, whereas semantic approach analyzes the context, i.e., the meaning of the sentence. After determining the presence of any inappropriate content with respect to word or context, the manual system hides the corresponding sentence, thereby restricting the viewer from being exposed to offensive content. The proposed method exhibits good accuracy for classifier considering that it is not designed to detect offensive content on the ground racism and nationalism.

The future warfare is a kind of war based on the information technology, which is full-depth, three-dimensional, and conducts air strike and anti-air strike in multidimensional space. This paper discusses the development trend of modern air strike operations on four aspects: informatization, stealth, precision and integration, and puts forward three core capabilities for winning future air defense anti-missile operations, such as improving all-dimensional resisting capability with both offensive and defensive measures, improving anti-jamming capability with the combination of soft-kill and hard-kill, and enhancing anti-saturation attack capability in long-range and short-range. This paper analyzes the future development direction of air defense anti-missile weapon system such as low-altitude and short-range, integration and special-purpose, generality and modularization, as well as joint operations, and emphasizes four key technologies which should be mastered, including data acquisition, data fusion, precision guidance and system simulation.

Offensive language, hate speech, and bullying behavior is prevalent during textual communication happening online. Users usually misuse the anonymity available online social media, use this as an advantage, and engage in behavior that is not acceptable socially in actual world. Social media platforms, analytics companies, and online communities had shown much interest and involvement in this field to cope up with this problem by stopping its propagation in social media and its usage. In this paper, we will propose the work done by researchers to form effective strategies for tackling this problem of identifying offense, aggression, and hate speech in user’s textual posts, comments, microblogs, etc.

Aggression takes several forms and can be offensive or defensive. Aggression between animals of the same species or society aims to inflict harm upon another for the purpose of protecting a resource such as food, reproductive partners, territory, or status. This chapter explores the neurobiology of aggression. We summarize the behavior of aggression, rodent models of aggression, and the correlates of aggressive behavior in the context of neuroendocrinology, neurotransmitter systems, and neurocircuitry. Translational implications of rodent studies are briefly discussed, applying basic research to brain imaging data and therapeutic approaches to conditions where aggression is problematic.

Hate speech is a type of written or a spoken statement that is used to demean or humiliate a person or a community. In this era of new age socialism, this type of speech is prevalent on social media platforms, where certain groups of people display offensive behaviour towards some people that may be distributed over gender, religion, nationality, etc. These kinds of activities must be avoided or suspended on social media platforms. Therefore, it is necessary to automate the detection of hateful content that gets circulated on the social media. The research work provides an enhanced technique as compared to the existing techniques with improved performance. The proposed model of IN-Gram compares the performance of detection of hateful content on social media with the traditional TF-IDF, N-Gram and PMI techniques. The proposed approach improves the hate speech detection rate by 10–12% for larger datasets as compared to existing approaches.

This chapter is an empirical reading of the impact of Israeli policies on each sector of the West Bank’s economy, especially its bearing upon the labour market. Before addressing colonialism as the cause of migration, this sector by sector survey historicises the practice of the occupation and puts into relief its repressive measures that curtail Palestinian development. Its findings are relevant as they lay bare the degradation to which the local economy has been subjected and show that the dismantlement of the social formation infuses insecurity and serves as part of the regional imperialist offensive.

As part of everyday life, mobile phones allow gamers to play online games wherever and whenever they wish. Since the first generation of smartphones, many of the most popular applications have been mobile games, with base defence games among the favourites, particularly with the implementation of real-time Player vs. Player (PvP) features. To protect their bases, gamers must not only strategically place their defence weapons in the base to guard against unpredictable attack and looting, but also launch attacks to loot others’ bases for upgrades. Each base houses necessities collected from lootings and upgrades, and also provides a personal space for the individual gamer’s creative expression and visual statement. Although strategic base creation is part of the core gameplay, the creative design of the base is not. Between 2013 and 2018, the game Clash of Clans (COC) has inspired many creative designs shared on social media by creators and fans, on both official and unofficial game forums. This mobile game has not only stood the test of time commercially as one of the most popular mobile games in the global market, but has also created an unprecedented participatory phenomenon of personal digital art, including designs specifically meant to celebrate Chinese culture, in mobile gaming and social media. This chapter examines this participatory phenomenon, focusing on the visual styles and content of these creative, and sometimes even offensive or obscene, visual expressions in social media. It also discusses the role of social media in facilitating this unique gamer-created phenomenon.

The chapter discusses the evolution of China’s political economy and foreign policy throughout the post-World War II period, beginning with the revolutionary policies of the Mao Zedong regime to economic opening under Deng Xiaoping, followed by liberalization under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao administrations and, finally, the global assertiveness of Xi Jinping, who has adopted a more strident foreign policy, which has sent shockwaves across the world. In many ways, Xi is combining the confrontational elements of Mao era with the economic charm offensive of his two predecessors. The chapter places the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) within this broader historical background, providing a prognosis of the future of Chinese foreign policy in the twenty-first century.

The possibility of using computerized means in offensive action against civilian or military installations from enemy countries is a real. Given the potential of this type of action, they can be seen by many countries as interesting, and as an alternative to conventional kinetic warfare. Despite its many theoretical advantages, obtaining the cyber capabilities needed to implement cyber military units is not easy and may not be within reach of any country. The necessary financial means may not be a major obstacle to this achievement because they are relatively low, when compared to those necessary to obtain conventional means. Similarly, obtaining a support infrastructure is also not theoretically difficult. However, obtaining both human and technological resources, other than those related to the support infrastructure, may not be available to any country, namely the designated zero-day exploits, ZDE, that are needed to explore computer vulnerabilities in informatics systems of the other countries. There are other types of constraints, time needed to prepare the means and the planning and development of cyber actions, type of targets to be attained, specificity of computer systems and even the possible need for cyber media complementarity with conventional means that can be limiting and impede their widespread use. Thus, cyber warfare is a very interesting alternative, but given these constraints and limitations, it may not be a real viable alternative to be used in all situations and by all countries.

Inequality can be morally offensive both because it is objectionable in itself and because it has harmful consequences. Chapter 2 explored the first idea, and this chapter here explores the second idea. It is noted, in the present chapter, that inequality can be instrumental in causing damage to a number of desired social and economic outcomes, including income growth, efficiency, societal harmony, and a population’s good health.

China shocked the world when it launched the first of its five offensive campaigns south of the Yalu in October 1950. Between late November and mid-December, the CPVF’s second offensive pushed UNF to the 38th Parallel and recaptured Pyongyang. By early January 1951, the CPVF’s third offensive crossed the 38th Parallel into South Korea, captured Seoul, and pushed the UNF to the 37th Parallel. By the end of their fourth offensive campaign, nearly 950,000 Chinese troops were in Korea, including forty-two infantry divisions. Nevertheless, Chinese forces lost their fifth offensive campaign in May. Realizing China was incapable of ousting the UNF from the Korean Peninsula, Chinese leadership accepted a settlement without total victory, and truce negotiations began at Kaesong on July 10.

The Chinese Civil War between 1945 and 1949 ended with the defeat of the KMT and its retreat to Taiwan. At first, the KMT refused to accept its political and military failure, formulating offensive policies such as “recovering the mainland” (fan gong da lu) and attempting to regain its power in the whole of China. In the meantime, mainland China also made a tit-for-tat policy known as “Must Liberate Taiwan” (yi ding yao jie fang Taiwan) to wipe out the enemy and achieve national liberation, shelling the Kinmen islands in 1954. This goal of achieving national unification across the Taiwan Strait was remained in all following Taiwan policies made by Beijing. But these coercive military actions caused a strong response from both the US and Taiwan, which made Beijing realize that its specific measures for achieving unification should be adjusted to adapt to the changing political and security environment in the East Asia area.

Extremist YouTube videos are always associated with the ‘Dark side’ and potentially bring negative influence on younger viewers. These videos are deemed inappropriate for containing violent, has since triggered interest of academia and other stakeholders to study on its content. Extensive body of research mostly emphasizes on extremists’ messages, modus operandi, production features and may overlook on emotion perspective of the viewers. Viewing the videos can evoke specific emotional response in the viewers. Emotional response can be described in specific sets of adjective words or sentences which can be referred as emotional descriptors. This paper will report on factor analysis of 62 emotional descriptors rated by 80 university students after having watched 20 extremist YouTube videos during a Kansei evaluation. Significant emotional descriptors are successfully ascertained wherein 27 descriptors are retained in 3 factors; offensive, intrigue and awkward. The remaining 35 descriptors can be ignored as the proportions of variability explained by the remaining factors are close to zero and can be considered insignificant. The finding for ‘offensive’ and ‘awkward’ is expected since majority of the descriptors are of negative affect in nature. Rather interesting is the finding about ‘intrigue’ as a factor since it contains positive affect in circumstance which commonly perceived as negative. That however, adds to novelty for this research. Together the result shall benefit academia and other stakeholders in understanding evoked emotions in extremist YouTube videos and future work on affective video classification.

The Engagement of China and the European Union (EU) in the WTO global trade governance is an important part of the China-EU Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Since China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, China and the EU have promoted the rapid growth of bilateral trade and the healthy development of bilateral trade relations; moreover, they have made contributions to the good functioning of the multilateral trading system by participating in the Doha Round negotiations, using the WTO dispute settlement mechanism, and reviewing respective trade policies and practices. The interaction between China and the EU was obviously asymmetric before 2008, the EU being offensive and China defensive. After that, the overall relations have been aimed towards a more reciprocal status. However, the interaction is far from being mature and China’s capacity needs to be improved. In the present and near future, the interaction between China and the EU in the WTO will face some challenges.

This study aims to investigate taboos and euphemisms in AFEs in Mandarin Chinese. After the analysis of AFEs in the previous chapter, this chapter discusses the self-administered Likert-type five-point scale questionnaire, which was completed by seventy-five subjects, rating the degree of offensiveness of AFE taboos. The subjects were asked to give euphemisms that replace taboos. Finally, linguistic strategies underlying euphemisms are analyzed. The outcome showed that: (1) the most offensive AFEs are sex-related expressions, followed by expressions regarding occupation, appearance, ability, expletives, characteristics, and eating habits; (2) youth’s innovative strategies for creating euphemisms are found, such as eschewing negative comments but stating unrelated compliments, resorting to celebrities’ names to replace undesirable addressing expressions, neologism, loanwords, morphological reduplication, slang, and deixis. With the realization of euphemisms, the underlying strategy for euphemism is understood.

The chapter examines how India proactively participated in WTO dispute settlement by discussing some of the landmark disputes involving India. The discussion highlights how India’s participation in the early years was influenced by its concern to protect small and vulnerable sectors of the economy and, more so, to preserve the status quo. This chapter also discusses how India’s WTO litigation strategies evolved over a period, especially since 2010, in using offensive and defensive strategies in WTO dispute settlement to leverage its economic potential and create policy space for it development needs and strategies. This transformation has emboldened India to pursue a development pathway which is not necessarily shaped and driven by its international commitments.