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The overtaking behavior of individuals under anxious panic is a major causative factor of crowded trampling accidents. In order to simulate the overtaking behavior of individuals experiencing anxiety and panic in a single-exit room within a normal pedestrian flow, an improved social force model is proposed to simulate crowd movement at local medium and high density through introducing the bypass overtaking mechanism, the side overtaking mechanism, and the side avoidance mechanism generated by association. The numerical simulation verifies the model's validity. The effect of the size and number of overtaking individuals on the pedestrian flow are explored. The results show that the new model can simultaneously reproduce a variety of overtaking behaviors and their associated behaviors in line with reality. The larger size of the overtaking individuals are, the easier it is to produce overtaking behaviors and the more difficult it is to overtake. With the increase of the number of overtaking individuals, the evacuation time becomes longer, but there is no linear relationship between them. When the initial pedestrian density is 0. 37 ped / m 2 , with time evolution, the appearance frequency of local density greater than 0. 8 ped / m 2 suddenly increases, and the comfort and safety of pedestrian movement decreases. The results of this paper can enrich the social force simulation model of pedestrian flow and provide a theoretical guidance for the evacuation of pedestrian flow with a few overtaking individuals in the room. • A novel social force model is used to describe individuals' overtaking behavior. • The overtaking mechanism and the side avoidance mechanism are introduced. • The effect of the size and number of overtaking individuals are explored. • The larger size of pedestrians are, the easier it is to produce overtaking behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores community-based methods deployed to lessen the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in densely populated urban settlements, offering an in-depth analysis of the complexities and dynamics influencing the acceptance or rejection of COVID-19 protocols. Through Focus Group Discussions (FGD), comprehensive interviews, and questionnaires tailored to pandemic restrictions, the study explores the distinctive crisis-response experiences that align with their cultural and social norms. The study reveals that the key to the resilience and adaptability of marginalized communities during crises lies in integrating local knowledge and community-driven strategies. This case study enriches the literature on the resilience of marginalized communities in crises. It paves the way for future research into policy support and media literacy, underscoring the need to merge digital and local media approaches. It highlights the significance of community engagement and the validation of shared knowledge in comprehensive crisis management. • The key to the resilience and adaptability of marginalized communities during crises lies in local knowledge and community-driven strategies. • The need for policy support and media literacy that merge digital and local media approaches in marginalized communities. • The significant of community engagement and the validation of shared knowledge in comprehensive crisis management during crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider networks with topologies described by some connected undirected graph G = (V , E) and with some agents (fusion centers) equipped with processing power and local peer-to-peer communication, and optimization problem min x ⁡ { F (x) = ∑ i ∈ V f i (x) } with local objective functions f i depending only on neighboring variables of the vertex i ∈ V. We introduce a divide-and-conquer algorithm to solve the above optimization problem in a distributed and decentralized manner. The proposed divide-and-conquer algorithm has exponential convergence, its computational cost is almost linear with respect to the size of the network, and it can be fully implemented at fusion centers of the network. In addition, our numerical demonstrations indicate that the proposed divide-and-conquer algorithm has superior performance than popular decentralized optimization methods in solving the least squares problem, both with and without the ℓ 1 penalty, and exhibits great performance on networks equipped with asynchronous local peer-to-peer communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wind farm (WF) is gradually required to provide inertial support during frequency events nowadays. Existing WF inertial control methods have exhibited limitations in parameter estimation and optimal control parameter tuning under variable operating conditions. Moreover, traditional model-based methods suffer from computational efficiency problems due to their reliance on repeated iterations or derivative computations in optimization process. Thus, this paper proposes an inertial control method for large-scale WF based on hierarchical distributed hybrid deep-reinforcement learning (HDH-DRL). Firstly, the control objectives for the inertial control are defined, and are decomposed on the basis of wind turbines (WTs) division. Next, this paper presents a HDH-DRL based inertial control framework consisting of two levels. The upper-level control is achieved by the hybrid multi-agent DRL (HMA-DRL) algorithm with hybrid action exploration mechanism and multi-agent coordination. The consensus based lower-level control aims to achieve the consensus convergence of the control through the locally distributed interaction among WTs. Finally, the inertial control processes of the model are exhibited; the influences of DRL algorithms on the control are discussed; the computational speed and solution accuracy of the proposed method are compared with the model-based methods; the multi-scenario applicability and performance in local communication failures of the model are analyzed. The results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the active power response and frequency stability, achieving rapid consensus convergence with a power deviation below 0.3%, surpassing traditional control methods by at least 0.2%; also, it demonstrates superior performance across various scenarios, including transient and steady-state conditions, with frequency enhancements up to 0.30% and exceptional stability under different wind conditions and communication disruptions. • Introduces HDH-DRL for improved WF inertial control and frequency stability. • Develops a bi-level HDH-DRL framework for faster, accurate control actions. • Utilizes HMA-DRL with a novel exploration mechanism for complex WF operations. • Achieves better accuracy and quicker computation than model-based methods. • Ensures control robustness across varied wind conditions and communication breaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Media and communication play a major role in bear-human cohabitation contexts. • Local media covering the bear issue mostly rely on institutional and political sources. • Politicization and environmentalisation conceal the socioeconomic issues of rewilding. • Documentaries give agency to rural communities affected by rewilding policies. • Independent productions renew imaginaries of the rural in rewilding processes. In Trentino and the Pyrenees, the population of bears has grown since the 1990s, when new specimens were released into the wild to recover this endangered species. The reintroduction generated a conflictive cohabitation with village dwellers, the shepherding sector, and rural initiatives in both areas. The aim of this research is to evaluate how local media and two audiovisual documentaries covered the bear issue in both regions. The researchers analysed the content of 86 articles from two newspapers in 2022, conducted a narrative analysis of the documentaries and interviewed their directors. The results reveal that the documentaries created a counter-narrative to politicisation, in the Italian case, and to environmentalisation, in the Catalan. Because both documentaries paid attention to rural communities, they contributed to increasing rural agency, an aspect aligned with the filmmakers' motivations at the inception of both productions. The authors argue that the circulation of these narratives diversely expresses renewed imaginaries of rural societies in both contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The initial reconnaissance of the heliosphere and very local interstellar medium (VLISM) is complete with in situ measurements, observations of energetic neutral atoms (ENAs), neutral VLISM H and He, UV emissions, and interstellar dust. After many COVID related delays, the workshop "The heliosphere in the local interstellar medium" took place at ISSI from 8-12 November 2021. Edited by John D. Richardson, Andrei Bykov, Frederic Effenberger, Klaus Scherer, Veerle Sterken, Rudolf von Steiger and Gary P. Zank The first International Space Science Institute (ISSI) book in the I Space Sciences Series of ISSI i was "The Heliosphere in the Local Interstellar Medium: Proceedings of the First ISSI Workshop 6-10 November 1995, Bern, Switzerland" edited by R. von Steiger, R. Lallement, and M.A. Lee and published in 1996. [Extracted from the article]

UAVs are widely employed in military and civilian fields because of their inherent advantages. The cooperative task allocation of multi-UAV is more in conformity with the requirements of UAV application scenarios, which has become a hot research topic. However, resource consumption allocation and the application scenarios of communication constraints are often ignored. This paper proposes a distributed multi-UAV task allocation method based on improved CNP to solve the local cooperative task allocation problem of heterogeneous multi-UAV in the communication-constrained environment. The improved CNP-based method can be divided into four stages: task release, bid application, coalition formation, and signing contracts. In the task release stage, we proposed the adaptive maximum number setting method of information transfer times and the information consistency method to solve conflicts in the local communication network. In the process of coalition formation, the resource consumption allocation algorithm based on the Gini coefficient is proposed to keep the resource difference between UAVs in the coalition within a reasonable range. The simulation results demonstrate that improved CNP-method-based cooperative task allocation can handle the local real-time task allocation problem of heterogeneous multi-UAV under communication constraints; it obtains greater task rewards and spends less time on task completion than the resource-welfare-based method, PTCFA. Simultaneously, the resource consumption algorithm makes the UAV swarm maintain a more reasonable resource difference to maximize the number of missions completed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National image building (NIB) has become a critical strategy in public diplomacy. Extending the existing sender-focused literature on NIB, this study takes the receiver side into account. Our focus on the Confucius Institute (CI), China's critical NIB effort in the USA, examines how a powerful receiver's resistance affects the sender's image locally. Based on an extensive data set of American CIs, we also pinpoint exactly who in the receiver country motivates the resistance to China's NIB endeavours. The analytic results show that CI closures may indeed have diminished local US media attention to China, but empirical evidence nevertheless proves the resilience of China's NIB—one whose ethos lingers even in places where institutes have been closed down. As to the motivators of NIB resistance, American colleges have called for a certain level of autonomy in regard to deciding the fate of CIs, and the government undoubtedly has influence on the issue, largely through public school decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the heliosphere moves through the surrounding interstellar medium, a fraction of the interstellar neutral helium, hydrogen, and heavier species crossing the heliopause make it to the inner heliosphere as neutral atoms with energies ranging from few eV to several hundred eV. In addition, energetic neutral hydrogen atoms originating from solar wind protons and from pick-up ions are created through charge-exchange with interstellar atoms. This review summarizes all observations of heliospheric energetic neutral atoms and interstellar neutrals at energies below 10 keV. Most of these data were acquired with the Interstellar Boundary Explorer launched in 2008. Among many other IBEX breakthroughs, it provided the first ever all-sky maps of energetic neutral atoms from the heliosphere and enabled the science community to measure in-situ interstellar neutral hydrogen, oxygen, and neon for the first time. These observations have revolutionized and keep challenging our understanding of the heliosphere shaped by the combined forces of the local interstellar flow, the local interstellar magnetic field, and the time-dependent solar wind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale disturbances generated by the Sun's dynamics first propagate through the heliosphere, influence the heliosphere's outer boundaries, and then traverse and modify the very local interstellar medium (VLISM). The existence of shocks in the VLISM was initially suggested by Voyager observations of the 2-3 kHz radio emissions in the heliosphere. A couple of decades later, both Voyagers crossed the definitive edge of our heliosphere and became the first ever spacecraft to sample interstellar space. Since Voyager 1's entrance into the VLISM, it sampled electron plasma oscillation events that indirectly measure the medium's density, increasing as it moves further away from the heliopause. Some of the observed electron oscillation events in the VLISM were associated with the local heliospheric shock waves. The observed VLISM shocks were very different than heliospheric shocks. They were very weak and broad, and the usual dissipation via wave-particle interactions could not explain their structure. Estimates of the dissipation associated with the collisionality show that collisions can determine the VLISM shock structure. According to theory and models, the existence of a bow shock or wave in front of our heliosphere is still an open question as there are no direct observations yet. This paper reviews the outstanding observations recently made by the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, and our current understanding of the properties of shocks/waves in the VLISM. We present some of the most exciting open questions related to the VLISM and shock waves that should be addressed in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of the relevant literature, especially earlier empirical research of serious pandemics (not including the forces of nature and the processes they create), refers to the assumption that man is (directly or indirectly) guilty of them. Given that the media transmits information related to the intensity of the spread of the pandemic, the death rate of the sick, etc., a survey of citizens' trust in the local media and the information they convey was conducted in order to find out how much the media contribute to the intensity of the spread of the negative effects of the Covid 19 pandemic. Four assumptions were defined as questions to which respondents' answers were requested: frequency of information through different types of media; assessment of the extent to which different types of media offer the possibility of objective information; the existence of free, independent and impartial media in Serbia, and finding the truth in the media. The research is of a quantitative type, conducted on a sample of 600 respondents in the city of Belgrade. For the collection and processing of data used the desk method, using interviews and via electronic questionnaires, in which the questions in the first part related to the socio-demographic variables of the respondents, while in the second part the group of dependent variables was operationalized through the statements, which were evaluated on a Likert scale. More sub-questions are offered within the four main questions. Descriptive statistical analysis (percentages, arithmetic mean), T-test, One-factor analysis of variance, Standard deviation, Multiple regression analysis and Pearson's correlation coefficient were used for data analysis. The level of statistical significance was set at p<0.05, and all obtained data were processed in the SPSS program, version 23. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of social media use on youth subcultures, such as graffiti writers, has been rapid and dramatic, bringing with it a number of significant transformations that present both opportunities and challenges. This paper explores the impact of the Internet and social media on a community of graffiti practitioners. I argue that the rise and uptake of online social networking platforms such as Instagram and You Tube have offered a range of affordances to the practice of graffiti writing. These affordances include: greater accessibility to graffiti culture; learning opportunities; and opportunities for wider distribution and curation of graffiti pieces. Simultaneously, social media challenges the significance of 'community', that is, the physical social interaction afforded by participation in real world graffiti crews. The findings suggest that while there are tangible benefits from the use of the Internet and uptake of social media by the graffiti writing community, it is the physical communal bonds experienced within a graffiti crew that are vital to the wellbeing and continuity of the culture. This paper contributes to our understanding of how social media affects youth more broadly and specifically how social media platforms are transforming the experience of youth subcultural practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to map the studies that address the concept of news deserts in Brazil, developed in 2016 by researcher Penelope Abernathy in the Center for Innovation and Sustainability of Local Media at the School of Media and Journalism (University of North Carolina, USA). The documentary survey was carried out in the annual reports of the Innovation Center and also in the annals from 2017 to 2020 of the scientific associations Compós, Intercom, and SBPJor, in order to reflect on the application of the concept in academic productions. Preliminary results points out to the relevance of the concept and the necessary adaptations for its study considering the Brazilian media context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within journalism, social media has become a vehicle of communication that keeps the audience up to date regarding the content they publish. To manage this relationship, the figure of the community manager, a professional directly linked to studies of Information Sciences, is indispensable, especially in Journalism and Advertising. A qualitative methodology is used on the basis of Grounded Theory in 13 telephone interviews with Spanish media community managers. The data were later treated and coded with the analysis tool Atlas.ti version 8.4.3. Journalistic community managers have quite varied functions and are in constant evolution. The perception that the quality of content published on social media has more weight than results (in the form of clicks and interactions) prevails in an environment where information is consumed at high speed, and where competence is more difficult to discern. Journalism does not have to turn to social media only as simple intermediaries for official websites; it must build up a community of users interested in the media and the current topics being disseminated. Despite communicative noise, digital platforms are perceived as positive and as an effective tool for the medium, keeping the audience informed through the community manager's daily management as the voice of the medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Far-right extremist communities actively promote their ideological preferences on social media. This provides researchers with opportunities to study these communities online. However, to explore these opportunities one requires a way to identify the far-right extremists' communities in an automated way. Having analyzed the subject area of far-right extremist communities, we identified three groups of factors that influence the effectiveness of the research work. These are a group of theoretical, methodological, and instrumental factors. We developed and implemented a unique algorithm of calendar-correlation analysis (CCA) to search for specific online communities. We based CCA on a hybrid calendar correlation approach identifying potential far-right communities by characteristic changes in group activity around key dates of events that are historically crucial to those communities. The developed software module includes several functions designed to automatically search, process, and analyze social media data. In the current paper we present a process diagram showing CCA's mechanism of operation and its relationship to elements of automated search software. Furthermore, we outline the limiting factors of the developed algorithm. The algorithm was tested on data from the Russian social network VKontakte. Two experimental data sets were formed: 259 far-right communities and the 49 most popular (not far-right) communities. In both cases, we calculated the type II error for two mutually exclusive hypotheses—far-right affiliation and no affiliation. Accordingly, for the first sample, β = 0.81. For the second sample, β = 0.02. The presented CCA algorithm was more effective at identifying far-right communities belonging to the alt-right and Nazi ideologies compared to the neo-pagan or manosphere communities. We expect that the CCA algorithm can be effectively used to identify other movements within far-right extremist communities when an appropriate foundation of expert knowledge is provided to the algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, religious services worldwide were forced to migrate online. This phenomenon is still yet to be properly investigated, especially in the context of religious and ethnic minorities: a research gap that this paper aims to address. Herein, 18 semi-structured in-depth interviews with members of the Russian community in South Tyrol served as methodological tool to explore: (1) the role of the Orthodox religion and (2) of digital media for the community and, finally, (3) how its members enacted religion during the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirical results show how community members, despite being highly familiar with digital tools and technology-based solutions, deliberately chose not to use digital media to search for religious content or to attend religious services. Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and an increasingly digitised world, the specific example of the Russian community in South Tyrol helps to better understand how migrant communities live and enact religion. The present study aims at contributing to the emerging field of the study of (digital) religion and embodiment of religion from a minority perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 02.06.2020, the social media team of the Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company, announced on Twitter that for a three-month launching phase, they would use the singular T-form du to address their customers. On the basis of a corpus of public tweets analyzed as metapragmatic comments, I examine which stances users adopt and what these stances tell us about how the German-speaking Twittersphere metapragmatically assesses the appropriateness of pronouns of address in social networks. I show how the shift to the T-form is well accepted only if restricted to Twitter, while being strongly disfavored and deemed inappropriate if understood against the background of a customer-client's relation. While the users in favor of the V-form present their arguments in a direct way, most users who plead for the T-form resort to irony and banter, thus constructing the online persona of 'cool' people aware of appropriateness norms on social media. I conclude by showing how the clash between antagonistic — and possibly irreconcilable — positions can then be framed as a conflict between globalized norms fostering the use of T-forms as a conventionalized practice on social media and local norms of politeness, as the V-form remains the unmarked way of addressing an unknown adult in Germany. • The paper is an empirical paper on the metapragmatics of address forms in German based on Twitter data. • The paper explores how people react to the switch to the T-form to address customers. • The paper is of interest to anyone dealing with politeness, appropriateness norms, or pronoun choice in online communities. • The paper opens new avenues on the research on colloquialization and globalization in online communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As traditional capture fisheries run into sustainability issues, including those brought on by climate change and overfishing, and the demand for seafood continues to increase, aquaculture operations and policymakers in the United States are looking toward the potentially lucrative frontier that is offshore aquaculture. Aquaculture operations do not currently operate in federal waters off the coast of the United States due to insurmountable permitting obstacles, including a slew of statutes to abide by and no central agency to point the way. Many policymakers agree that legislation is required to clarify the permitting structure in order to allow operations to enter the offshore arena. However, the creation of what is essentially a new food industry in the United States deserves a more in-depth analysis of the impacts the industry will have on local communities, public health, workers, and the environment. Recent proposals have not given much more than a cursory glance to these impacts. In particular, offshore aquaculture should look to the industry from which Americans currently receive a large amount of their protein: large-scale animal agriculture, or "factory farming." Factory farming contributes to a myriad of problems, including human health issues associated with eating meat, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, and exposure to pathogens and antibiotic resistance; animal welfare issues, including physical and psychological distress; worker safety issues, which have been exacerbated by COVID-19; environmental issues, including pollution and the industry's contribution to climate change; and environmental justice issues around the disproportional effects of air and water pollution on rural communities. This Note focuses on environmental issues around water pollution, antibiotic use, the externalization of costs, federal subsidization, and the lobbying power of large companies. The failure of factory farming in these areas serves as a giant warning to offshore aquaculture, an industry vulnerable to many of the same problems. A new offshore aquaculture industry must consider its place in the overall U.S. food system. It must learn from the things that have failed in that system, and it must implement solutions based on research. Only then can offshore aquaculture be not only a profitable but also a truly sustainable part of the domestic food supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: on July 31, 2020, it was sixty years since the inauguration, by the then Minister of Public Health of Cuba, Dr. José Ramón Machado Ventura, of the Provincial Pediatric Hospital "José Luis Miranda". Objective: to summarize aspects related to the history of the hospital. Method: a bibliographic review was carried out including articles published in local media, original documents from the hospital and personal interviews. Development: the hospital started with only 120 beds and 28 doctors and its first director was Dr. Carlos Martínez Reyes, an outstanding revolutionary doctor and combatant of the 26th of July Movement. In the following years it gradually increased its services and assistance tasks. Conclusions: it is necessary to increase the interrelation between the institution and the community organizations and to prosper in the adequate treatment of admitted children and their relatives. The younger ones are nurtured by the experience accumulated by those with more years of work, but all with the same goal: to maintain the emblem of Cuban Pediatrics: "nothing is more important than a child". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media misinformation is widely recognized as a significant and growing global problem. Yet, little is known about how misinformation spreads across broader media ecosystems, particularly in areas with varying internet access and connectivity. Drawing on research in northern Ghana, we seek to address this gap. We argue that 'pavement media'—the everyday communication of current affairs through discussions in marketplaces, places of worship, bars, and the like and through a range of non-conversational and visual practices such as songs, sermons, and graffiti—is a key link in a broader media ecosystem. Vibrant pavement and traditional media allow for information from social media to quickly cross into offline spaces, creating a distinction not of the connected and disconnected but of first-hand and indirect social media users. This paper sets out how social, traditional, and pavement media form a complex and deeply gendered and socio-economically stratified media ecosystem and investigates its implications for how citizens differentially encounter, process, and respond to misinformation. Based on the findings, we argue that efforts intended to combat the spread of misinformation need to move beyond the Western-centred conception of what constitutes media and take different local modalities of media access and fact-checking into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, Johnston argues that the Great River Tug Festival embodies elements of both party and sports tourism, which allows for a wider audience. Throughout Chapter 3, Johnston outlines the impact of various forms of tourism and tourists on local economies and in transforming local culture. I Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest i by Michael O. Johnston provides a historical overview of the myriad ways people have used the Mississippi River for industry and tourism. [Extracted from the article]

This system uses Freescale i.MX283 chip as the main control core of the control panel and LPC824 as the main control core of the light control point. ZigBee communication local area network is built. The ZigBee network is used to search all the nodes and display them on the control interface stably. The controller can selectively control the node and communicate with ZigBee. It supports simple and convenient human-computer interaction interface. The control panel can control RGB lamps of lamp control nodes as follows: control the light on and off, adjust the brightness of the light, toggle the color of the light, control the gradient of the light, control the flashing of RGB lamp, control timing switch of RGB lamp, realize the scene effect of the light, etc. After testing, the system is stable and applied to many lighting control occasions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work considers the problem of distributed event-triggered consensus tracking control of multiple high-order uncertain nonlinear systems on a connected graph where the leader's reference information is sent to only a portion of the followers. The communication among the agents and the local control update are performed based on different event-triggering mechanisms which possess different triggering conditions and work independently. To facilitate consensus tracking control design, in each follower agent of the network, a group of distributed and cascaded estimators is constructed for estimating the reference trajectory and its high-order derivatives by event-triggered information exchange among the local neighbors on the communication graph. Theoretical analysis shows that the estimation errors of the reference states decay within a very short time to the neighborhood of the origin and that the Zeno behavior is excluded. Then by utilizing the estimated reference states, in each agent, a local event-triggered robust controller including a nonlinear robustifying term with a state signal dependent gain is proposed. The triggering condition is derived by taking the time-varying control gain into account, and the tracking performance of the local controller is rigorously analyzed. Furthermore, it is shown that the Zeno behavior is also excluded. Finally, simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the performance of the reference estimators and that of the consensus tracking controllers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present a novel system architecture for teleoperation of the networked robotic system (NRS), involving several slave robots (i.e., followers) interconnected through event-triggered local communication, based on one/several long-distance communication links between a human-operated master robot (i.e., leader) and one/multiple followers. The control objective of such human-aided teleoperation problem is to force the master robot to track the slave ones in a fixed time under the human supervision, and meanwhile to drive all the slave ones to track the master in a fixed time, thus allowing the human operator to flexibly and remotely control the NRS. Another important concern in this article is to improve the telepresence of such system, i.e., to reconstruct the interaction force between followers and the task environment in the side of the human operator. To this end, a novel force-reflecting hierarchical control framework, involving the (local) dissipativity layer, (estimate) event-triggered layer, fixed-time force observer and neuroadaptive observer, is proposed. Based on the tools of hierarchical control analysis and Lyapunov stability, we derive several sufficient conditions for guaranteeing the fixed-time stability of the closed-loop dynamics. Finally, several experiments are performed to illustrate the performance of the proposed results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives: Legalization of recreational cannabis is occurring across the United States, with some controversy. To understand the range of issues that can arise when such a policy change is enacted, we examined portrayal of legalization at the local level by studying newspaper articles in Calgary, Alberta, shortly before and after cannabis legalization in Canada. Method: We searched the largest‐circulation newspaper for cannabis‐related items and analyzed for content and slant toward cannabis legalization. Results: Among 165 items, business/economics (70.9% of items) and legalization (69.7%) were most frequent, with health only 29.7%. Across all items, the slant was more approval (44.2%) than disapproval (23.0%). Discussion and Conclusions: When cannabis was legalized, the local newspaper focused more on economic aspects of legalization rather than about health issues. Further research can determine the generalizability of the findings to other locales and provide comparison as other similar policy changes roll out. Scientific Significance: The study provides new information on what happens when drug policies are enacted. Documenting the media portrayal of substance use policies is a promising tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each year, so many devastating landslides occur all around the world causing a lot of life and economical losses. Many of these landslides take place in large populated cities where inappropriate land use and rapid unplanned urbanization highly increase the hazard risk. On July 15, 2020, a landslide occurred on the hillsides near a road construction site in Shiraz city at southwest of Iran. The area of the landslide is estimated to be around 80,000 m2. Based on the reports of local media, 40 homes located adjacent to the toe of the landslide were evacuated. The aim of this study is to carry out a comprehensive study on the aforementioned landslide and to evaluate the factors that had significant effect on occurrence of this landslide. The results of the present study can be used to prevent eventual landslides in the future in Shiraz or at least, to mitigate the dangerous consequences. The sliding materials mainly consist of limestone and highly weathered marl. In the present study, the results of several in situ and laboratory tests on regional rocks are used to analyze the aforementioned landslide in a probabilistic manner. Moreover, a back analysis is carried out to estimate the shear strength of weathered marly clay layers. Identification of the physical and mechanical characteristics of Asmari formation seems crucial, because this formation has various outcrops in the Zagros region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the swarming behavior of various bacteria in nature, light-driven micromotor with collective behavior has attracted a great deal of attention, which will be a valuable tool to understand the cooperation and communication between bacterial populations and will contribute to the creation of reconfigurable microrobots and the cooperative transportation of large cargoes. However, it is still challenging to modulate the micromotors' collective behavior based on local interaction and communication. Herein, we develop a light-powered BiVO4-based micromotor with self-propulsion and dynamic 'predator-bait' collective behavior, which is based on the photocatalytic reaction of BiVO4. The BiVO4-based micromotor has great potential in the field of organic pollutant degradation with enhanced apparent rate constant (0.076 min−1) which originates from the dynamic 'predator-bait' behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I show in this article how changes in the information environment have contributed to the nationalization of legislative behavior. Access to technologies like broadband have eroded local news media resources and led to a more partisan electorate. As such, increased connectivity causes legislators to prioritize national interests over the interests of their constituencies, behavior that is traditionally seen as an electoral liability. I use data on the rollout of broadband to relate changes in the information environment faced by legislators due to the 2002 redistricting to their behavior. I find that legislators who faced more informationally connected environments post‐redistricting voted more in line with their parties, the president, and aligned interest groups. The results are robust to a specification examining within‐member changes in the 108th–111th Congresses. Taken together, these results provide strong evidence that a major contributor to the increasing nationalization of politics is the expansion of access to information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Caregivers often use the internet to access information related to stroke care to improve preparedness, thereby reducing uncertainty and enhancing the quality of care. Method: Social media communities used by caregivers of people affected by stroke were identified using popular keywords searched for using Google. Communities were filtered based on their ability to provide support to caregivers. Data from the included communities were extracted and analysed to determine the content and level of interaction. Results: There was a significant rise in the use of social media by caregivers of people affected by stroke. The most popular social media communities were charitable and governmental organizations with the highest user interaction–this was for topics related to stroke prevention, signs and symptoms, and caregiver self-care delivered through video-based resources. Conclusion: Findings show the ability of social media to support stroke caregiver needs and practices that should be considered to increase their interaction and support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient uptake of nutrients in both animal and plant cells requires tissue-spanning diffusion barriers separating inner tissues from the outer lumen/soil. However, we poorly understand how such contiguous three-dimensional superstructures are formed in plants. Here, we show that correct establishment of the plant Casparian Strip (CS) network relies on local neighbor communication. We show that positioning of Casparian Strip membrane domains (CSDs) is tightly coordinated between neighbors in wild-type and that restriction of domain formation involves the putative extracellular protease LOTR1. Impaired domain restriction in lotr1 leads to fully functional CSDs at ectopic positions, forming 'half strips'. LOTR1 action in the endodermis requires its expression in the stele. LOTR1 endodermal expression cannot complement, while cortex expression causes a dominant-negative phenotype. Our findings establish LOTR1 as a crucial player in CSD positioning acting in a directional, non-cell-autonomous manner to restrict and coordinate CS positioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the visual analysis of local customs and cultures by using digital technology, the total index of digital artificial intelligence, the environmental support of artificial intelligence (AI), and the competitiveness of AI industry have developed well, while the creativity of AI knowledge has developed steadily. According to the survey of digital technology audience education, it can be seen that the respondents with high school to undergraduate education have a higher audience rate of digital technology, while those with other academic qualifications have a lower audience rate, so digital technology can be popularized through education. Through the investigation of audience jobs, it is known that most of the audience of digital technology are engaged in enterprise staff, but they are less exposed to digital technology in political party organs. It can be seen that the loading time of visual images after clustering processing will be reduced by about 200 compared with that without clustering processing, which greatly improves the efficiency of visual graphics loading. As well as the analysis of the development of visualization, we can see that from the sixteenth century to the present, the visualization efficiency has increased from about 50% to 98%, which greatly improves the efficiency. According to the survey of local folk customs, from 2013 to 2019, local residents' awareness of local folk customs has been continuously improved, from 30% to about 48%, while the awareness of completely unclear folk customs has dropped from 10% to about 1%. Through the investigation of local folk culture, it can be seen that in the promotion of local folk culture, the governance system and measures are insufficient, and the governance effect cannot be effectively fed back. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mayotte's seismo-volcanic crisis gave rise to extensive media coverage in the local, regional and national daily press. Analyzing the news narratives allows us to bring to light the representations that readers are confronted with when they try to inform themselves about the situation. This article brings together the sciences of risk, language and communication in order to analyse these plurivocal narratives, in which the scientific community is given pride of place. It shows how the voices of the main actors (the inhabitants, the administrative and scientific authorities) are put on the stage, conveying differing representations, differing forms of explanation and contributing to an effect of "enunciatory muddling". It aims to provide food for thought for people called upon to intervene in the media, in Mayotte or elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the study of the representation of historical memory in social networking communities. The purpose of this investigation is to identify current trends in some aspects of historical memory on social media. The study was conducted on the three most popular networks in Ukraine - Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. A comprehensive approach with the use of specialized software was used for data collection. 468 communities from three social networks were studied, the topics of which correspond to the search queries "History of Ukraine", "History of Ukraine", "History of Ukraine", "History of the village", "USSR". The analysis of the obtained data revealed that some groups formed a new category - educational groups. Further processing of the data showed that groups often aim to break myths and promote "correct" history. Another category of groups focuses on the problem of preserving historical memory at the local level or the history of a particular industry. These trends demonstrate that social media communities are an indirect state of historical memory at the societal level, which in turn confirms Jamison's thesis of a "new historicism" of mounting "historical attractions" and resisting theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students who receive literacy training tied to real-life assignments show greater improvement in literacy scores. The significance of this study revolves around the prominent role accorded social media in academic community for research, teaching and learning. Despite the benefits associated with the use of social media for academic purposes, it is observed that many students, teachers/lecturers have not been fully exploring these advantages to improve the academic performance. The study investigated the awareness, access and social media challenges encountered by postgraduate students of Information Studies, UKZN during the lockdown caused by COVID-19 pandemics. The study employed a quantitative research design in form of an online questionnaire, using Google Forms. Fifty-five post-graduate students were sampled, of which 51 participated, giving a response rate of 93%. The findings revealed (Facebook, Instagram, Zoom, Twitter and WhatsApp) as major (100%) types of social media available for post graduate students for their academic purpose. The findings further revealed smartphone as a major tool for accessing social media by the respondents (96%), and the major challenges restraining students from effectively utilising social media for academic activities. The study underscores the importance of social media in academic environment and offers some recommendations that could lead to more informed and effective use of social media for academic purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julian Ochorowicz (1850–1917) belonged to the first generation of psychologists who regarded this discipline as a scientific, positive endeavor. At the same time, he was a representative of psychic sciences, following a strictly positivist attitude to researching psychic phenomena. This article discusses the key event of his career, experiments with the famous medium Eusapia Palladino, in Warsaw, between late 1893 and early 1894. Ochorowicz's séances with Palladino attracted wide local and international attention and improved his standing as an internationally leading psychic researcher. In Warsaw, however, these experiments were fiercely controversial and, as a result, Ochorowicz was discredited and left the city. As I argue, this dissociation of credibilities was the outcome of a changing media landscape in the late nineteenth century. While Ochorowicz's strategy of boundary‐work and asserting his credibility aimed at scholarly media, it proved fatal when facing intensive, daily coverage in the popular press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study analyzes the journalistic coverage of the accelerated growth of Covid-19 cases in Chapecó and Concórdia (SC, Brazil) meatpackers at the first peak of the disease, between May and June 2020. In the face of inspections that pointed out negligence and contamination of workers and the economic relevance credited to the sector companies, this article sought to understand how two communication groups from the cities approached the theme in their journalistic pages on the internet. The Journalistic Coverage Analysis proposal (SILVA; MAIA, 2011), adapted to the digital environment, guided the methodological procedures. The results pointed to the lack of investigation carried out by the local media which favored agents with the capacity to produce content and made citizen sources invisible. From a theoretical point of view, a paradox is pointed out: even in critical situations for the community, such as the pandemic, proximity journalism can move away from the local daily life that, in theory, characterize it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study aims at identifying the role of the Arab media as educational institutions in showing the mental image of Islam among young people in Jordan. The descriptive approach was used for its relevance to the purposes of the study. The study sample was chosen by a simple random method, which numbered (304) individuals from the Jordanian youth category. The results of the study showed that the Arab media, as educational institutions, played a medium-level role in showing the mental image of Islam among young people in Jordan. The results showed that there were statistically significant differences at the significance level (0.05) in the role of Arab media as educational institutions in showing the mental image of Islam among young people in Jordan due to the age variable. The study highlights the necessity of activating the role of both local and Arab media to show the mental image of Islam higher and better than it is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the online communities that emerged as a result of the 2015 Nepal earthquake. Most research around social media for emergency management focuses on its use in developed countries, overlooking underdeveloped countries with skewed Internet geographies.To address this gap, this study explores the communication dynamics of online communities formed in response to the Nepal disaster. Through a combination of virtual ethnography and offline interviews, the study identifies online participation patterns, and humanitarian actions undertaken. Traditionally, there have been two major actors involved in disaster intervention in Nepal, the Government and the affected citizens. While they still hold a primary position in disaster response, online communities have emerged as new actors, supporting citizens and intervention agencies in humanitarian aid distribution. Using frameworks of crisis communication, this study finds that despite its limited use, social media created new dynamics within (a) citizen participation; and (b) actors, networks and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The base station-mobile device communication traffic has dramatically increased recently due to mobile data, which in turn heavily overloaded the underlying infrastructure. To decrease Base Station (BS) interaction, intra-cell communication between local devices, known as Device-to-Device, is utilized for distributed data caching. Nevertheless, due to the continuous departure of existing nodes and the arrival of newcomers, the missing cached data may lead to permanent data loss. In this study, we propose and analyze a class of Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes for distributed data caching in cellular networks. Contrary to traditional distributed storage, a novel repair algorithm for LDPC codes is proposed which is designed to exploit the minimal direct BS communication. To assess the versatility of LDPC codes and establish performance comparisons to classic coding techniques, novel theoretical and experimental evaluations are derived. Essentially, the theoretical/numerical results for repair bandwidth cost in presence of BS are presented in a distributed caching setting. Accordingly, when the gap between the cost of downloading a symbol from BS and from other local network nodes is not dramatically high, we demonstrate that LDPC codes can be considered as a viable fault-tolerance alternative in cellular systems with caching capabilities for both low and high code rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the role of interactivity in distributed statistical inference under information constraints, e.g., communication constraints and local differential privacy. We focus on the tasks of goodness-of-fit testing and estimation of discrete distributions. From prior work, these tasks are well understood under noninteractive protocols. Extending these approaches directly for interactive protocols is difficult due to correlations that can build due to interactivity; in fact, gaps can be found in prior claims of tight bounds of distribution estimation using interactive protocols. We propose a new approach to handle this correlation and establish a unified method to establish lower bounds for both tasks. As an application, we obtain optimal bounds for both estimation and testing under local differential privacy and communication constraints. We also provide an example of a natural testing problem where interactivity helps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural life of Olympos, a village on the island of Karpathos in Greece, is organized around sung poetic improvisation. From the time when a majority of the villagers were illiterate to the present, this ritual performance has shifted without changing its nature from "primary orality" to "mixed orality," which coexists today with "mediated orality," and is characterized by three main types of transmission. First, this performance is still being transmitted via oral memory since men are able to remember improvised couplets, in particular so as to avoid singing and hearing the same couplet twice. However, it is mainly the women attending the performances who memorize verses, which they can later play back, thus acting like an oral archive. Next, a written memory has developed in addition to this oral memory because some of the women have recorded the memorized verses in notebooks. Further, the emergence of local newspapers has led women to publish couplets in the community life sections. Under their influence, men also began to publish verses in these newspapers, but especially via the new media. Finally, recording technologies have made it possible to broadcast performances without losing their oral dimension. As a result, many recordings made by the villagers are exchanged via social media or broadcast on local digital radios to make them available to Greek emigrants, and in the process become archived. Despite the discrete presence of writing, Olympos oral poetry therefore remains rooted in Olympos's social life as the community continues to perceive it as a functional form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Places around the world already experience significant damage from climate change–related weather events, economic disruption, and health impacts, exacerbated by poverty, segregation, and inequitable infrastructure. Unfortunately, Texas provides a perfect illustration of these forces, with impacts made even more severe by a lack of climate planning. How can planners minimize harm and reduce risk, given the state leadership's unwillingness to undertake climate planning? One place to start is to investigate residents' climate change beliefs to understand whether they share the state's climate antagonism and then use this information to shape a planning response. In this study, I analyzed a survey (n = 1,053) to ask: What are Texans' perceptions of climate change, and how can planners use this knowledge to create strategies to catalyze climate planning? Respondents expressed strong agreement about negative effects of climate change and increased frequency of extreme weather. They believed that climate change is due at least in part to human activity, and they expressed robust support for climate-related planning activities. These responses sharply differ from the state's approach. However, despite agreement about climate issues, respondents did not identify climate change as a major concern about the future. This contrast suggests an opportunity for new climate-related communication frames to bridge the gap between climate perceptions and planning action. These findings inform three recommendations: better connect climate change impacts to everyday concerns, including housing, air quality, and health; emphasize common ground about benefits provided by nature, especially related to health; and use community engagement to refine these frames. I propose that planners can accelerate climate planning by following the lead of other disciplines that emphasize human health impacts of the climate crisis. In addition, planners can strengthen climate planning by extending environmental planning's use of local knowledge from environmental health, urban heat planning, and climate-related land use planning to climate planning more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emerging trend in technical research is to use client-generated data composed of community media to survey community opinion and scientific communication on employment and care issues. This study gathered data from the social website questions and answers and the indirect effects of stack to survey the key factors that influence public preferences in technical knowledge and opinions. Using a web search engine, topic modeling, and regression data modeling, this study quantitatively analyzed the effects of the textual and auxiliary functions of the response on the number of votes received with the response. Compared to previous surveys based on open assessments, the model results show that Quora users are more likely to talk only about technology. It may fail when query keywords do not match the text content of large documents containing relevant questions from the existing methods. Furthermore, consumers are generally not experts and provide ambiguous queries (Q&As) that lead to mixed results and face a problem with existing methods. To solve these problems, the researchers attempted to reorganize the primary results and present advanced distributed topic modeling techniques to address technologies and platforms by increasing the attributes and the time and space required to generate the model. This work briefly describes the public question-and-answer structure around the world and follows the development of the main themes of housing and employment opportunities for next-generation technologies worldwide in real-time scrolling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research addresses the challenge of analyzing the interactive practices that young people develop in fan communities through different platforms and social networks. For this purpose, a case study based on the 3rd season of the series SKAM Spain is proposed. The theoretical framework defines the importance of fan communities in the media context, the role of social networks as spaces for youth participation and the interaction models that arise from this fiction consumption. As for the methodology, a qualitative analysis based on digital anthropology is used through various data collection techniques such as virtual ethnography and focus group, which are analyzed and interpreted according to the theory of discourse analysis, using a multimodal approach. The results of the research involve the reconstruction of the contents generated through social networks, taking into account both the intentionality of their creators and the impact achieved among the social audience. The conclusions allow establishing levels of interaction between the fan community and fictional content. Finally, the discussion debates the new models of youth audience and the role of content producers in facilitating the immersion of fans in transmedia fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adampol / Polonezköy is a Polish village located on the Asian side of İstanbul, founded due to the efforts of Prince Adam Czartoryski in the nineteenth century. The village is an extraordinary example of a Catholic minority in a Muslim environment, making the community and its representation in the media particularly interesting. This research-based study focuses on how the Polish minority is represented in the Turkish media in the light of van Dijk's critical discourse analysis. The study evaluates how texts and photographs have been structured in newspapers by examining news stories about Adampol / Polonezköy from the Milliyet newspaper and the haberler.com and adampolpolonezkoy websites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using media representations, this article explores how the media presents Islamic charity in a multi-religious but Christian-dominated context of Zambia. It shows that representations of local Muslim associations' acts of charity ranged from rendering support to the vulnerable (in the form of donations of assorted items to communities, schools, hospitals and prisons), to undertaking community development programmes, to building and renovating infrastructure in selected areas countrywide. This representation signified a shift in media coverage of Islam in the 2000s. While the mediatised acts of charity were centred on Muslim social responsibility, the article advances that the representations of Muslim charity revealed not only the significant place of Muslims in the Zambian society, evidenced by the recognition by both state and non-Muslims as key players in public life, but also their ability to unite as a religious minority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intends to contribute to the growing debate related to tourism in Kazakhstan and to understand future perspectives on tourism development in this country. The aim of the article, which is a desktop research based on previous literature and documents, is to propose a way forward for tourism development in Kazakhstan. Two models will be presented in the article, the first one - proposing the types of tourism development approaches, which the country can focus on, and the second model - illustrating more in details the tourism development working framework. Although these models should certainly not be considered final, they aim at providing a consistent guiding input on future tourism development in Kazakhstan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to reflect on community radio and television in this post-conflict times. To do so, an approximation is made to sustainability as a central category resulting from the balance between economic, political and, particularly, sociocultural aspects. Secondl, two experiences are reviewed: This is how radios sound for the peace in Colombia and the Community Media Conversation. They serve as a pretext to know its reality, its scope and limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study distributed stochastic gradient (D-SG) method and its accelerated variant (DASG) for solving decentralized strongly convex stochastic optimization problems where the objective function is distributed over several computational units, lying on a fixed but arbitrary connected communication graph, subject to local communication constraints where noisy estimates of the gradients are available. We develop a framework which allows to choose the stepsize and the momentum parameters of these algorithms in a way to optimize performance by systematically trading off the bias, variance and dependence to network effects. When gradients do not contain noise, we also prove that D-ASG can achieve acceleration, in the sense that it requires O(p ≤ log(1=")) gradient evaluations and O(p ≤ log(1=")) communications to converge to the same fixed point with the non-accelerated variant where ≤ is the condition number and" is the target accuracy. For quadratic functions, we also provide finer performance bounds that are tight with respect to bias and variance terms. Finally, we study a multistage version of D-ASG with parameters carefully varied over stages to ensure exact convergence to the optimal solution. It achieves optimal and accelerated O(k= p ≤) linear decay in the bias term as well as optimal O(-2=k) in the variance term. We illustrate through numerical experiments that our approach results in accelerated practical algorithms that are robust to gradient noise and that can outperform existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]