be

Free And Cheap Things To Do In London This Week: 11-17 November 2024

By londonist.com
Published On :: Mon, 11 Nov 2024 12:30:06 +0000

Things to do for a fiver or less.


Full Article

  • London
  • Free & Cheap
  • free and cheap events
  • free and cheap
  • LONDON ON A BUDGET
be

Is Nintendo Switch 2 about to be announced? Instagram lowers quality of less popular videos

By www.shinyshiny.tv
Published On :: Mon, 28 Oct 2024 15:42:48 +0000

The internet is still convinced a Nintendo Switch 2 announcement is going to happen this month, as a part of a major third-party open world game is also rumoured. It’ll […]

The post Is Nintendo Switch 2 about to be announced? Instagram lowers quality of less popular videos appeared first on ShinyShiny.


Full Article

be

The Numbers on the Game

By belledejour-uk.blogspot.com
Published On :: Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:22:00 +0000

Perhaps one of the biggest "sex myths" making the rounds these days is to what extent experiences like mine are (or are not, as it is claimed) representative of sex workers in general.

(Of course, I personally make no claim to be an "average" sex worker and certainly not to speak for prostitution as a whole. I would love to see more and more voices claim the title of sex worker publically so we can demonstrate once and for all what a diverse group it is.)

But when it comes to studies and statistics, this is an issue that comes up a lot. Addressing the question of how representative a sample of people is of a population in general is one of the cornerstones of good study design. It's one of those things that, if wrong at the start of a research project, is a devil to try to correct in retrospect. In many cases it's impossible.

The Sex Myth discusses at length how this affects virtually all studies relating to prostitution. A large number of researchers assume street-based sex workers to be the majority of sex workers, which has the tendency to skew (and sometimes fully invalidate) their results. Because they often recruit research subjects via outreach or addiction programs, their sample is necessarily biased towards sex workers whose lives are chaotic.

Streetwalkers may often be the most visible face of sex work but it's far from the whole story.

So how representative is the cliche of the drug-addicted streetwalker leaning into a punter's car anyway? This is in some ways difficult to answer. But I highly suggest if you are interested in the topic to check out Maggie McNeill's excellent summary of what we do know. She makes the case far more succinctly that I ever could here, here and here. Go on and read those then come back when you're done.

In general, the data seem to agree that in most Western countries the percentage of sex workers who are streetwalkers is about 15%.

That's an aggregate estimate from a number of studies in a number of countries, most of which put the streetwalker population at between 5% and 20% of prostitutes. Of the remaining percentage, the splits of incall/managed vs outcall/escort vary by location and factors unique to those places. To see an example of what this looks like, you can check out the New Zealand sex worker breakdown here (scroll down for tables).

What this tells us is that studies recruiting their subjects only from street-based sex workers, and in addition doing so through crisis centre referrals, can never claim to represent sex workers at large. That would be about as ridiculous as reading my previous books and using that "data" to conclude all sex workers love pies and pints. They can at best be said to be a study of those people at that time which makes the results non-generalisable.

Promising studies do exist which try to address the problem of imbalance of numbers in counting sex workers. While it's hard to generalise 'sex work' from what is necessarily a very diverse group, I found this study from Suzanne Jenkins at Keele [pdf] to be a useful example of how we can begin to build a better sex worker survey. Note for example that it includes male and trans sex workers: a lot of studies ignore these groups altogether. While the mainstream heterosexual female sex worker is still in the majority, writing gender and sex diversity out of the story only serves to promote a narrow ideological viewpoint that paints all sex work as abuse of women by men. A viewpoint which is not true.

As you may know a bugbear of mine is the tendency to present scare stats about sex workers in isolation and not to involve a control group. I go on about lack of controls in all kinds of studies, not just sex worker ones, in detail in The Sex Myth if you would like to read more. So say, to take a non-prostitution example, you heard a statistic that claimed the majority of strippers got unwanted attention from clients. Presented without context it sounds impressive, but it is meaningless.

What would be a control group here? People with similar working hours in licensed establishments might be one - barmaids at non-strip clubs for example. Or people of a similar age in service industry professions involving tipping - like waitresses. Have a think: do you know any front-of-house people in food service who haven't had difficult and at times physically aggressive customers? I don't. Any study that doesn't even address the possibility that their results come from the service industry and alcohol rather than sex work per se has not fully examined the evidence in a way that should be taken seriously.

When it comes to population statistics like these getting control groups are hard. I get it. But that is, as we say where I come from, hard cheese. So there's no perfect control like a group of homeless, drug-addicted nuns somewhere we can use to see whether it's the sex that drives people to despair or not. But you still have to make an effort. And you recruit and match your controls up front, not after the fact.

Finally there is the matter of where data originates. As a scientist I know that it is damned difficult, if not impossible, to do work that is totally free of any external conflict of interest or internal hope for a particular outcome. But there are ways we can help sieve the believable from the unbelievable: if a study comes from a source with a strong ideology and a financial interest in promoting this stance it is right to question whether that affects both study design and interpretation of results. These generally fall into the category Laura Agustin has dubbed "the Rescue Industry".

There are a large number of other common problems with these studies flagged up in The Sex Myth. Bad estimation methods, lack of controls, lack of trends, avoiding peer review... and many more.

This is not to say that academic publishing is always right and self-publishing or internal reports always wrong. But there is a significant grain of salt we should take when the people who present themselves as experts on the topic of sex workers are from the same stable of folks better at generating press coverage than at reporting their mistakes.

Do I expect saying these things will please everyone? No, not at all. There are a lot of people with a big investment in keeping the myths about what sex work is supposedly "really" like alive. As well, there are people whose opposition to sex work isn't affected by the many well-adjusted people who do it anyway. It's also fair to say my particular bias is to prefer the quantitative over the qualitative: for as "Uncle Joe" Stalin so elegantly put it, quantity has a quality all its own.

But if you are the sort of person to whom the evidence is more important than the anecdote - and if you're a reader of this blog, I assume you are - then take the numbers seriously. The next time someone tries to sell you the poor-addicted-hooker myth, call it for the nonsense it so clearly is.


Full Article

be

Prospects for South Americans pursuing F1 “getting better” – Colapinto | RaceFans Round-up

By www.racefans.net
Published On :: Sun, 10 Nov 2024 00:01:00 +0000

In the round-up: F1 hopes for South Americans "getting better" • Verschoor back to MP for fifth F2 season • Verstappen races in charity event


Full Article

  • RaceFans Round-up
be

A one-line spoiler-free review of everything I watched in the cinema in October 2024

By martinbelam.com
Published On :: Mon, 04 Nov 2024 11:00:47 +0000

I’ve ditched the usual blurb about “not being a movies person, but anyway…” because since I started going to the cinema regularly in 2022 I’ve turned into the kind of guy who downloads the London Film Festival brochure and meticulously...


Full Article

be

A one-line review of every gig I’ve been to in October 2024

By martinbelam.com
Published On :: Tue, 05 Nov 2024 11:00:02 +0000

This monthly series is probably more for my benefit than yours, but maybe your interest will be piqued by one of the reviews. Maybe you’ll scroll straight past. Maybe you’ll unsubscribe thinking what did I see in this blog in...


Full Article

be

I’ve been reading 2000AD again and Thistlebone and Brink are great!

By martinbelam.com
Published On :: Thu, 07 Nov 2024 11:00:53 +0000

Borag Thungg! When things like Woolworths go bust, people who haven’t been to Woolworths for years feel sad and say “Why can’t the old things I liked survive?”. So at the start of the pandemic I worried about things going...


Full Article

be

Michigan Democrats’ top priority has been special business favors

By www.mackinac.org
Published On :: Fri, 08 Nov 2024 05:57:00 -0500

Party platform calls corporate welfare ‘unsustainable,’ but its policies are a different story


Full Article

be

Learn all about Google Trends with our new YouTube tutorials

By developers.google.com
Published On :: Thu, 12 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

This post is about the new Google Trends Tutorials YouTube series. In these videos you'll learn how to use Google Trends to analyze patterns in Google Search and Youtube searches, and use them to create interesting content online.


Full Article

be

Invoicing system for freelancers – beta testers needed

By blog.cinciala.eu
Published On :: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 06:28:54 +0000

I used to keep the records on my clients, projects, invoices, etc. in Excel sheets and to generate my monthly invoices manually. However, with growing client base, invoicing became a time-consuming and annoying work that had to be performed at the … Continue reading →


Full Article

be

Congratulations Dr. Nabeel Mohamed!

By sanjiva.weerawarana.org
Published On :: Sun, 26 Aug 2012 03:17:00 +0000

It gives me great pleasure to post belated congratulations to Dr. Nabeel Mohamed on completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University.

Nabeel was an employee in WSO2 for a short time before he left to pursue Ph.D. work and is the first of many who have worked in WSO2 and gone onto doing Ph.Ds to complete the degree. Nabeel's Ph.D. thesis topic was "Privacy Preserving Access Control for Third-Party Data Management Systems" and his advisor was Prof. Elisa Bertino. The topic is of immense applicability for cloud data protection. Nabeel is staying on in Purdue as a Post-Doctoral Researcher right now.


Full Article

be

Elastic Beanstalk - a PaaS fairytale

By pzf.fremantle.org
Published On :: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:51:00 +0000

A while back, I blogged about what it means to be Cloud Native. One of the key issues is multi-tenancy. As I discussed in that blog, there is a huge cost benefit in resources to multi-tenancy. This is how we can afford to run http://cloud.wso2.com and offer multi-tenant Tomcat currently for free beta use.

Today Amazon announced Elastic Beanstalk. They call it a PaaS. Unfortunately Elastic Beanstalk is only multi-tenant at the VM layer - in other words it is fundamentally IaaS not PaaS. In other words you don't get the true benefit of PaaS: every Beanstalk user has to pay for at least one EC2 instance. Amazon tries to put this in a nice light:

Each of your Elastic Beanstalk applications will be run on one or more EC2 instances that are provisioned just for your application. 
WSO2 Stratos is designed to share the cost of the infrastructure fairly. In other words we will be charging for CPU, Bandwidth and Disk space, not for just having an app sitting waiting for requests.

Effectively Beanstalk is a nice pre-packaged runtime with some good tooling. I have no doubt it is a major improvement over the existing model and from the look of it the tooling is pretty slick. But calling it a PaaS is simply a fairytale.


Full Article

be

Understanding ESB Performance & Benchmarking

By pzf.fremantle.org
Published On :: Tue, 18 Sep 2012 20:51:00 +0000

ESB performance is a hot (and disputed topic). In this post I don't want to talk about different vendors or different benchmarks. I'm simply trying to help people understand some of the general aspects of benchmarking ESBs and what to look out for in the results.

The general ESB model is that you have some service consumer, an ESB in the middle and a service provider (target service) that the ESB is calling. To benchmark this, you usually have a load driver client, an ESB, and a dummy service.

+-------------+      +---------+      +---------------+
| Load Driver |------|   ESB   |------| Dummy Service |
+-------------+      +---------+      +---------------+

 Firstly, we want the Load Driver (LD), the ESB and the Dummy Service (DS) to be on different hardware. Why? Because we want to understand the ESB performance, not the performance of the DS or LD.

 The second thing to be aware of is that the performance results are completely dependent on the hardware, memory, network, etc used. So never compare different results from different hardware.

 Now there are three things we could look at:
A) Same LD, same DS, different vendors ESBs doing the same thing (e.g. content-based routing)
B) Same LD, same DS, different ESB configs for the same ESB, doing different things (e.g. static routing vs content-based routing)
C) Going via ESB compared to going Direct (e.g. LD--->DS without ESB)

Each of these provides useful data but each also needs to be understood.

 Metrics
Before looking at the scenarios, lets look at how to measure the performance. The two metrics that are always a starting point in any benchmark of an ESB here are the throughput (requests/second) and the latency (how long each request takes). With latency we can consider overall latency - the time taken for a completed request observed at the LD, and the ESB latency, which is the time taken by the message in the ESB. The ESB latency can be hard to work out. A well designed ESB will already be sending bytes to the DS before its finished reading the bytes the LD has sent it. This is called pipelining. Some ESBs attempt to measure the ESB latency inside the ESB using clever calculations. Alternatively scenario C (comparing via ESB vs Direct) can give an idea of ESB Latency. 

 But before we look at the metrics we need to understand the load driver.

 There are two different models to doing Load Driving:
1) Do a realistic load test based on your requirements. For example if you know you want to support up to 50 concurrent clients each making a call every 5 seconds on average, you can simulate this.
2) Saturation! Have a large number of clients, each making a call as soon as the last one finishes.

The first one is aimed at testing what the ESB does before its fully CPU loaded. In other words, if you are looking to see the effect of adding an ESB, or the comparison of one ESB to another under realistic load, then #1 is the right approach. In this approach, looking at throughput may not be useful, because all the different approaches have similar results. If I'm only putting in 300 requests a sec on a modern system, I'm likely to see 300 request a sec. Nothing exciting. But the latency is revealing here. If one ESB responds in less time than another ESB thats a very good sign, because with the same DS the average time per request is very telling.

On the other hand the saturation test is where the throughput is interesting. Before you look at the throughput though, check three things:
1) Is the LD CPU running close to 100%?
2) Is the DS CPU running close to 100%?
3) Is the network bandwidth running close to 100%?

If any of these are true, you aren't doing a good test of the ESB throughput. Because if you are looking at throughput then you want the ESB to be the bottleneck. If something else is the bottleneck then the ESB is not providing its max throughput and you aren't giving it a fair chance. For this reason, most benchmarks use a very very lightweight LD or a clustered LD, and similarly use a DS that is superfast and not a realistic DS. Sometimes the DS is coded to do some real work or sleep the thread while its executing to provide a more realistic load test. In this case you probably want to look at latency more than throughput.

Finally you are looking to see a particular behaviour for throughput testing as you increase load.
Throughput vs Load
The shape of this graph shows an ideal scenario. As the LD puts more work through the ESB it responds linearly. At some point the CPU of the ESB hits maximum, and then the throughput stabilizes.  What we don't want to see is the line drooping at the far right. That would mean that the ESB is crumpling under the extra load, and its failing to manage the extra load effectively. This is like the office worker whose efficiency increases as you give them more work but eventually they start spending all their time re-organizing their todo lists and less work overall gets done.

Under the saturation test you really want to see the CPU of the ESB close to 100% utilised. Why? This is a sign that its doing as much as possible. Why would it not be 100%? Two reasons: I/O, multi-processing and thread locks: either the network card or disk or other I/O is holding it up, the code is not efficiently using the available cores, or there are thread contention issues.

Finally its worth noting that you expect the latency to increase a lot under the saturation test. A classic result is this: I do static routing for different size messages with 100 clients LD. For message sizes up to 100k maybe I see a constant 2ms overhead for using the ESB. Suddenly as the message size grows from 100k to 200k I see the overhead growing in proportion to the message size.


Is this such a bad thing? No, in fact this is what you would expect. Before 100K message size, the ESB is underloaded. The straight line up to this point is a great sign that the ESB is pipelining properly. Once the CPU becomes loaded, each request is taking longer because its being made to wait its turn at the ESB while the ESB deals with the increased load.

A big hint here: When you look at this graph, the most interesting latency numbers occur before the CPU is fully loaded. The latency after the CPU is fully loaded is not that interesting, because its simply a function of the number of queued requests.

Now we understand the metrics, lets look at the actual scenarios.

 A. Different Vendors, Same Workload
For the first comparison (different vendors) the first thing to be careful of is that the scenario is implemented in the best way possible in each ESB. There are usually a number of ways of implementing the same scenario. For example the same ESB may offer two different HTTP transports (or more!). For example blocking vs non-blocking, servlet vs library, etc. There may be an optimum approach and its worth reading the docs and talking to the vendor to understand the performance tradeoffs of each approach.

 Another thing to be careful of in this scenario is the tuning parameters. Each ESB has various tuning aspects that may affect the performance depending on the available hardware. For example, setting the number of threads and memory based on the number of cores and physical memory may make a big difference.

 Once you have your results, assuming everything we've already looked at is tickety-boo, then both latency and throughput are interesting and valid comparisons here. 

B. Different Workloads, Same Vendor
What this is measuring is what it costs you to do different activities with the same ESB. For example, doing a static routing is likely to be faster than a content-based routing, which in turn is faster than a transformation. The data from this tells you the cost of doing different functions with the ESB. For example you might want to do a security authentication/authorization check. You should see a constant bump in latency for the security check, irrespective of message size. But if you were doing complex transformation, you would expect to see higher latency for larger messages, because they take more time to transform. 

 C. Direct vs ESB
This is an interesting one. Usually this is done for a simple static routing/passthrough scenario. In other words, we are testing the ESB doing its minimum possible. Why bother? Well there are two different reasons. Firstly ESB vendors usually do this for their own benefit as a baseline test. In other words, once you understand the passthrough performance you can then see the cost of doing more work (e.g. logging a header, validating security, transforming the message). 

 Remember the two testing methodologies (realistic load vs saturation)? You will see very very different results in each for this, and the data may seem surprising. For the realistic test, remember we want to look at latency. This is a good comparison for the ESB. How much extra time is spent going through the ESB per request under normal conditions. For example, if the average request to the backend takes 18ms and the average request via the ESB takes 19ms, we have an average ESB latency of 1ms. This is a good result - the client is not going to notice much difference - less than 5% extra. 

 The saturation test here is a good test to compare different ESBs. For example, suppose I can get 5000 reqs/sec direct. Via ESB_A the number is 3000 reqs/sec and via ESB_B the number is 2000 reqs/sec, I can say that ESB_A is providing better throughput than ESB_B. 

What is not  a good metric here is comparing throughput in saturation mode for direct vs ESB. 

 Why not? The reason here is a little complex to explain. Remember how we coded DS to be as fast as possible so as not to be a bottleneck? So what is DS doing? Its really just reading bytes and sending bytes as fast as it can. Assuming the DS code is written efficiently using something really fast (e.g. just a servlet), what this is testing is how fast the hardware (CPU plus Network Card) can read and write through user space in the operating system. On a modern server hardware box you might get a very high number of transactions/sec. Maybe 5000req/s with each message in and out being 1k in size.

 So we have 1k in and 1k out = 2k IO.
2k IO x 5000 reqs/sec x 8bits gives us the total network bandwidth of 80Mbits/sec (excluding ethernet headers and overhead).

 Now lets look at the ESB. Imagine it can handle 100% of the direct load. There is no slowdown in throughput for the ESB. For each request it has to read the message in from LD and send it out to DS. Even if its doing this in pipelining mode, there is still a CPU cost and an IO cost for this. So the ESB latency of the ESB maybe 1ms, but the CPU and IO cost is much higher. Now, for each response it also has to read it in from DS and write it out to LD. So if the DS is doing 80Mbits/second, the ESB must be doing 160Mbits/second. 

 Here is a picture.

 Now if the LD is good enough, it will have loaded the DS to the max. CPU or IO capacity or both will be maxed out. Suppose the ESB is running on the same hardware platform as the DS. If the DS machine can do 80Mbit/s flat out, there is no way that the same hardware running as an ESB can do 160Mbit/s! In fact, if the ESB and DS code are both as efficient as possible, then the throughput via ESB will always be 50% of the throughput direct to the DS. Now there is a possible way for the ESB to do better: it can be better coded than the DS. For example, if the ESB did transfers in kernel space instead of user space then it might make a difference. The real answer here is to look at the latency. What is the overhead of adding the ESB to each request. If the ESB latency is small, then we can solve this problem by clustering the ESB. In this case we would put two ESBs in and then get back to full throughput.

 The real point of this discussion is that this is not a useful comparison. In reality backend target services are usually pretty slow. If the same dual core server is actually doing some real work - e.g. database lookups, calculations, business logic - then its much more likely to be doing 500 requests a second or even less. 

 The following chart shows real data to demonstrate this. The X-Axis shows increasing complexity of work at the backend (DS). As the effort taken by the backend becomes more realistic, the loss in throughput of having an ESB in the way reduces. So with a blindingly fast backend, we see the ESB struggling to provide just 55% of the throughput of the direct case. But as the backend becomes more realistic, we see much better numbers. So at 2000 requests a second there is barely a difference (around 10% reduction in throughput). 
In real life, what we actually see is that often you have many fewer ESBs than backend servers. For example, if we took the scenario of a backend server that can handle 500 reqs/sec, then we might end up with a cluster of two ESBs handling a cluster of 8 backends. 

 Conclusion
I hope this blog has given a good overview of ESB performance and benchmarking. In particular, when is a good idea to look at latency and when to use throughput. 


Full Article

be

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but with no name, maybe not

By pzf.fremantle.org
Published On :: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 14:17:00 +0000

The famous quotation from Shakespeare is that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet". But what if the rose had no name. What if every time you talked about it, you had to come up with a description, you know that thing with the pretty pink petals, except sometimes they are red, and sometimes white, but it smells really nice, except some don't really smell and others do. You know the thing with multiple layers of petals except for the wild ones that only have one layer of petals.

Maybe not so sweet.

What about the other way round? You build a really cool system that works effectively and then it turns out that someone has named it? Now that is nice, and yes, your thing suddenly smells sweeter.

I've had this happen a lot. When we first started WSO2 we applied a lot of cool approaches that we learnt from Apache. But they weren't about Open Source, they were about Open Source Development. And when they got names it became easier to explain. One aspect of that is Agile. We all know what Agile means and why its good. Another aspect is Meritocracy. So now I talk about a meritocratic, agile development team and people get me. It helps them to understand why WSO2 is a good thing.

When Sanjiva and I started WSO2 we wanted to get rid of EJBs: we wanted to remove the onion-layers of technology that had built up in middleware and create a simpler, smaller, more effective stack. It turns out we created lean software, and that is what we call it today. We also create orthogonal (or maybe even orthonormal) software. That term isn't so well understood, but if you are a mathematician you will get what we mean.

Why am I suddenly talking about this? Because today, Srinath posted a note letting me know that something else we have been doing for a while has a nice name.

It turns out that the architecture we promote for Big Data analysis, you know, the one where we pipe the data through an event bus, into both real-time complex event processing and also into Cassandra where we apply Hive running on Hadoop to crunch it up and batch analyse it, and then store it either in a traditional SQL database for reports to be generated, or occasionally in different Cassandra NoSQL tables, you know that architecture?

Aha! Its the Lambda Architecture. And yes, its so much easier to explain now its got a nice name. Read more here: http://srinathsview.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/implementing-bigdata-lambda.html


Full Article

be

Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford y Yale en Academic Earth

By novicetranslators.blogspot.com
Published On :: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:57:00 +0000

Si utilizás el buscador Google Chrome podés encontrar herramientas de mucho provecho. Acabo de toparme con la extensión en línea de Academic Earth, que ofrece el acceso gratuito a videos de los cursos y conferencias de las universidades más destacadas de Estados Unidos y en las materias más diversas. ENJOY KNOWLEDGE!

 
Podrás presenciar conferencias como, por ejemplo,
Language in the Brain, Mouth and the Hands
By Paul Bloom - Yale



Watch it on Academic Earth



Full Article

be

L’Argentine sur le chemin de la liberté derrière le « professeur Milei »

By www.lepoint.fr
Published On :: Wed, 13 Nov 2024 06:30:00 +0100

JAVIER MILEI, UN AN APRES (1/7). Depuis l'arrivee de l'economiste a la presidence, le pays a enregistre son premier excedent budgetaire et l'inflation, qui atteignait 25 % par mois, est tombee a 2,7 %.


Full Article

be

Teresa Ribera fait tanguer la Commission von der Leyen

By www.lepoint.fr
Published On :: Wed, 13 Nov 2024 12:41:00 +0100

<< Incompetence >>, << radicalisme environnemental >>... L'Espagnole, proposee au poste de vice-presidente de la Commission en charge de la Transition ecologique, est bousculee par les deputes europeens.


Full Article

be

¿Por dónde empiezo? Escribir un libro sin haber estudiado literatura

By blog.lengua-e.com
Published On :: Mon, 08 Jul 2024 14:43:00 +0000

Publico este artículo para contestar a un comentario que he recibido y que me ha hecho reflexionar. El comentario de esta persona toca varios puntos […]

Origen


Full Article

be

The Iceberg Effect: Behind the User Interface of Mobile Collaborative Systems

By www.jucs.org
Published On :: 2011-07-08T12:29:59+02:00

Advances in mobile technologies are opening new possibilities to support collaborative activities through mobile devices. Unfortunately, mobile collaborative systems have been difficult to conceive, design and implement. These difficulties are caused in part by their unclear requirements and developers' lack of experience with this type of systems. However, several requirements involved in the collaborative back-end of these products are recurrent and should be considered in every development. This paper introduces a characterization of mobile collaboration and a framework that specifies a list of general requirements to be considered during the conception and design of a system in order to increase its probability of success. This framework was used in the development of two mobile collaborative systems, providing developers with a base of back-end requirements to aid system design and implementation. The systems were positively evaluated by their users.


Full Article

be

Insécurité et Gilets Jaunes… tombeau des désillusions.

By marc-vasseur.over-blog.com
Published On :: Tue, 20 Nov 2018 13:00:00 +0100

Il y a quelques jours, je parlais d’émergence d’un nouveau monde bipolaire. Le hasard des écrits faisant parfois bien les choses, depuis quelques jours est apparu dans notre vocabulaire, les Gilets Jaunes. Il ne se passe plus un jour, sans qu’on essaye...


Full Article

be

Houellebecq, Génie ou Faussaire ?

By marc-vasseur.over-blog.com
Published On :: Fri, 04 Jan 2019 18:15:00 +0100

L'évènement est là, l'écrivain maudit et adulé - qu'on mérite - sort son dernier ouvrage, son nouveau chef d'oeuvre. Houellebecq a ça de bien, c'est qu'il permettra une nouvelle hystérisation du débat littéraire. Génie pour les uns, faussaire pour les...


Full Article

be

Vendée Globe. Coup dur pour Clarisse Crémer : elle a perdu son grand gennaker - Voiles et Voiliers

By news.google.com
Published On :: Wed, 13 Nov 2024 11:25:11 GMT

  1. Vendée Globe. Coup dur pour Clarisse Crémer : elle a perdu son grand gennaker  Voiles et Voiliers
  2. Vendée Globe : «J’ai un peu honte», la tuile pour Clarisse Crémer qui perd sa voile principale dans l’océan  Le Figaro
  3. Vendée Globe : Crémer a perdu sa grande voile  Toute l'actualité sportive sur Orange
  4. VIDÉO. Vendée Globe : « Les gestes techniques de Clacla », Crémer se console après son avarie  Ouest-France
  5. Vendée Globe 2024 : Clarisse Crémer perd sa plus grande voile au large du Portugal  Le Journal des Sables


Full Article

be

‘Been a long time since I felt that way’: Sexually transmitted infection numbers provide new hope - POLITICO

By news.google.com
Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 16:36:55 GMT

  1. ‘Been a long time since I felt that way’: Sexually transmitted infection numbers provide new hope  POLITICO
  2. There are millions of sexually transmitted infections in the US every year, but new data shows the epidemic may be slowing  CNN
  3. America's STD explosion laid bare and the shocking number of people catching one every minute  Daily Mail
  4. At Long Last, the Surge in S.T.I.s May Be Leveling Off  The New York Times


Full Article

be

What is walking pneumonia? As cases rise in Canada, the symptoms to look out for - The Globe and Mail

By news.google.com
Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 21:32:37 GMT

  1. What is walking pneumonia? As cases rise in Canada, the symptoms to look out for  The Globe and Mail
  2. Walking pneumonia on the rise in Kingston, but treatable  The Kingston Whig-Standard
  3. What parents need to know about walking pneumonia in kids  FingerLakes1.com
  4. Pediatric pneumonia is surging in Central Ohio  MSN
  5. Walking Pneumonia is spiking right now. How do you know you have it?  CBS 6 News Richmond WTVR


Full Article

be

Hiking with a backpack is the workout of 2024. An exercise scientist says it’s worth the extra effort - The Globe and Mail

By news.google.com
Published On :: Wed, 13 Nov 2024 12:00:00 GMT

  1. Hiking with a backpack is the workout of 2024. An exercise scientist says it’s worth the extra effort  The Globe and Mail
  2. Military-Inspired Workout Has 'Huge Wins' for Women, Says Personal Trainer  MSN
  3. How Rucking Can Turn Your Walks into a Full-Body Workout  Verywell Health
  4. What Is Rucking and Is It Better Than Regular Walking? Here's What Personal Trainers Say  EatingWell
  5. Rucking: Why It’s a Great Workout & How to Get Started  Athletech News


Full Article

be

Last supermoon of 2024 to shine over Central Alberta this week - Central Alberta Online

By news.google.com
Published On :: Wed, 13 Nov 2024 13:08:14 GMT

  1. Last supermoon of 2024 to shine over Central Alberta this week  Central Alberta Online
  2. 4 of 4: Last supermoon of the year to light up Canadian skies  Global News Toronto
  3. Beaver Moon 2024: See the final 'supermoon' of the year rise next to the 'Seven Sisters'  Livescience.com
  4. See 2024’s Final ‘Supermoon’ And ‘Fireballs’: The Night Sky This Week  Forbes
  5. How and when to catch the last supermoon of 2024  National Post


Full Article

be

Bev Priestman out at Canada Soccer in wake of Olympic drone-spying scandal - CTV News

By news.google.com
Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:16:51 GMT

  1. Bev Priestman out at Canada Soccer in wake of Olympic drone-spying scandal  CTV News
  2. Canada Soccer’s drone-spying redactions tell us a whole lot of nothing while it waits out the rage clock  The Globe and Mail
  3. Key findings from Sonia Regenbogen's independent review into Olympic drone-spying  CP24
  4. What comes next in Canada Soccer drone-scandal investigation?  Sportsnet.ca


Full Article

be

Senators make short work of listless Leafs in a flat Battle of Ontario - The Globe and Mail

By news.google.com
Published On :: Wed, 13 Nov 2024 03:16:06 GMT

  1. Senators make short work of listless Leafs in a flat Battle of Ontario  The Globe and Mail
  2. Tavares on Maple Leafs’ lifeless loss to Senators: ‘We should be disappointed’  Sportsnet.ca
  3. Ullmark records first shutout of season as Senators smother Maple Leafs  TSN
  4. TAKEAWAYS: Ottawa Senators draw first blood in Battle of Ontario  Ottawa Citizen
  5. Wednesday FTB: Lose to the Sens, why not?  Pension Plan Puppets


Full Article

be

Stop Using Chrome On Your iPhone, Warns Apple—Millions Of Users Must Now Decide - Forbes

By news.google.com
Published On :: Wed, 13 Nov 2024 05:01:37 GMT

  1. Stop Using Chrome On Your iPhone, Warns Apple—Millions Of Users Must Now Decide  Forbes
  2. 4 new Chrome improvements for iOS  The Keyword
  3. Chrome on your iPhone can search using pictures and words at the same time  The Verge
  4. Google Rolls Out Four New Chrome Features for iOS  iPhone in Canada
  5. Chrome 131 for iOS adding new Google Drive, Maps integrations  9to5Google


Full Article

be

Ottawa businesses brace for possible Canada Post strike before the holiday season - CTV News Ottawa

By news.google.com
Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 19:40:58 GMT

  1. Ottawa businesses brace for possible Canada Post strike before the holiday season  CTV News Ottawa
  2. Tougher work conditions for postal workers at the heart of labour dispute, union says  The Globe and Mail
  3. Ottawa businesses worry about potential postal disruption  CBC.ca
  4. Calgary workers 'ready to go' if Canada Post, CUPW unable to reach agreement by Friday: union president  Calgary Herald
  5. ‘Feeling the pinch’: Potential postal strike may be first of many, Manitoba prof says  Global News Toronto


Full Article

be

Food bank usage in Toronto is higher than its ever been, says new report - CP24

By news.google.com
Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 21:19:31 GMT

  1. Food bank usage in Toronto is higher than its ever been, says new report  CP24
  2. More than 1 in 10 Torontonians now rely on food banks, 2024 saw highest number of visits ever recorded: report  NOW Toronto
  3. 4 in 5 newcomers to Canada relying on food banks, Toronto report finds  National Post
  4. One in 10 Toronto residents now relies on food banks: Report  Toronto Sun
  5. Food bank use in Toronto breaks records — again  CBC.ca


Full Article

be

UN chief warns COP29 summit to pay up or face climate-led disaster for humanity - The Globe and Mail

By news.google.com
Published On :: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 11:51:31 GMT

  1. UN chief warns COP29 summit to pay up or face climate-led disaster for humanity  The Globe and Mail
  2. Climate Summit, in Early Days, Is Already on a ‘Knife Edge’  The New York Times
  3. At COP29 summit, nations big and small get chance to bear witness to climate change  The Globe and Mail
  4. Terence Corcoran: COP29 hit by political ‘dunkelflaute’  Financial Post
  5. COP29: Albania PM goes off script to ask 'What on Earth are we doing?'  Euronews


Full Article

be

Trump says Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency - The Globe and Mail

By news.google.com
Published On :: Wed, 13 Nov 2024 00:53:45 GMT

  1. Trump says Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency  The Globe and Mail
  2. Why is Elon Musk becoming Donald Trump's efficiency adviser?  BBC.com
  3. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead new 'Department of Government Efficiency' in Trump administration  CTV News
  4. George Conway: Musk, Ramaswamy to lead ‘nonexistent department’  The Hill


Full Article

be

Trump Taps Fox News Pundit to Be Secretary of Defense - Rolling Stone

By news.google.com
Published On :: Wed, 13 Nov 2024 01:07:03 GMT

  1. Trump Taps Fox News Pundit to Be Secretary of Defense  Rolling Stone
  2. Trump's defence choice stuns the Pentagon and raises questions about the Fox News host's experience  CTV News
  3. How Pete Hegseth went from Fox News host to Trump’s Defense Secretary pick  CNN
  4. Trump Puts Allies on Alert by Handing Pentagon to Fox News Host Hegseth  Bloomberg
  5. House Democrat ‘very disturbed’ by Hegseth pick as Trump Defense secretary  The Hill


Full Article

be

La reine Mathilde et la princesse Élisabeth en voyage en Égypte du 14 au 16 mars

By www.rtl.be
Published On :: Mon, 23 Jan 2023 23:58:40 +0100

(Belga) La reine Mathilde et la princesse Élisabeth effectueront une visite de travail en Égypte du 14 au 16 mars, a indiqué le Palais royal dans un communiqué lundi soir.

"Cette visite marquera l'intérêt historique de la famille royale pour l'Égypte antique et rendra hommage à la reine Élisabeth, dont l'intérêt et la passion sont à l'origine de l'épanouissement de l'égyptologie en Belgique. La Reine et la Princesse visiteront plusieurs sites que la reine Élisabeth a elle-même visités lors de ses voyages en Égypte, notamment le tombeau de Toutankhamon. Au Caire, elles assisteront également au vernissage d'une exposition consacrée à la reine Élisabeth et à l'égyptologie belge", peut-on lire dans le communiqué. La Reine et la Princesse visiteront aussi différents sites archéologiques à Louxor et ses environs, où des institutions et des universités belges effectuent des fouilles. Cette visite de travail commémore par ailleurs plusieurs anniversaires célébrés en 2022 et 2023: le 200e anniversaire du déchiffrement des hiéroglyphes par Jean-François Champollion, les centenaires de la découverte du tombeau de Toutankhamon et de sa visite par la reine Élisabeth, le 125e anniversaire de l'émergence de l'égyptologie belge et le 75e anniversaire de la mort de l'égyptologue belge Jean Capart. (Belga)


Full Article

be

Machine learning and deep learning techniques for detecting and mitigating cyber threats in IoT-enabled smart grids: a comprehensive review

By www.inderscience.com
Published On :: 2024-09-26T23:20:50-05:00

The confluence of the internet of things (IoT) with smart grids has ushered in a paradigm shift in energy management, promising unparalleled efficiency, economic robustness and unwavering reliability. However, this integrative evolution has concurrently amplified the grid's susceptibility to cyber intrusions, casting shadows on its foundational security and structural integrity. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) emerge as beacons in this landscape, offering robust methodologies to navigate the intricate cybersecurity labyrinth of IoT-infused smart grids. While ML excels at sifting through voluminous data to identify and classify looming threats, DL delves deeper, crafting sophisticated models equipped to counteract avant-garde cyber offensives. Both of these techniques are united in their objective of leveraging intricate data patterns to provide real-time, actionable security intelligence. Yet, despite the revolutionary potential of ML and DL, the battle against the ceaselessly morphing cyber threat landscape is relentless. The pursuit of an impervious smart grid continues to be a collective odyssey. In this review, we embark on a scholarly exploration of ML and DL's indispensable contributions to enhancing cybersecurity in IoT-centric smart grids. We meticulously dissect predominant cyber threats, critically assess extant security paradigms, and spotlight research frontiers yearning for deeper inquiry and innovation.


Full Article

be

Nexus between artificial intelligence and marketing: a systematic review and bibliometric analysis

By www.inderscience.com
Published On :: 2024-10-02T23:20:50-05:00

Although artificial intelligence provides a new method to gather, process, analyse data, generate insights, and offer customised solutions, such methods could change how marketers deal with customers, and there is a lack of literature to portray the application of artificial intelligence in marketing. This study aims to recognise and portray the use of artificial intelligence from a marketing standpoint, as well as to provide a conceptual framework for the application of artificial intelligence in marketing. This study uses a systematic literature review analysis as a research method to achieve the aims. Data from 142 articles were extracted from the Scopus database using relevant search terms for artificial intelligence and marketing. The systematic review identified significant usage of artificial intelligence in conversational artificial intelligence, content creation, audience segmentation, predictive analytics, personalisation, paid ads, sales forecasting, dynamic pricing, and recommendation engines and the bibliometric analysis produced the trend in co-authorship, citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-citation analysis. Practitioners and academics may use this study to decide on the marketing area in which artificial intelligence can be invested and used.


Full Article

be

Does brand association, brand attachment, and brand identification mediate the relationship between consumers' willingness to pay premium prices and social media marketing efforts?

By www.inderscience.com
Published On :: 2024-10-02T23:20:50-05:00

This study investigates the effects of social media marketing efforts (SMME) on smartphone brand identification, attachment, association, and willingness to pay premium prices. A survey of 320 smartphone users who followed official social media handles managed by smartphone companies was conducted for this purpose. PLS-SEM was used to analyse the collected data. The findings demonstrated importance of SMME dimensions. According to the study's findings, the smartphone brand's SMMEs had significant impact on brand identification, brand association, and brand attachment. The results revealed that SMMEs had significant impact on willingness to pay the premium price. The findings also show that brand identification, attachment, and association mediated the relationship between SMMEs and willingness to pay a premium price. The findings of this study will be useful in developing social media marketing strategies for smartphones. This study demonstrates the use of social media marketing to promote mobile phones, particularly in emerging markets.


Full Article

be

BEFA: bald eagle firefly algorithm enabled deep recurrent neural network-based food quality prediction using dairy products

By www.inderscience.com
Published On :: 2024-10-07T23:20:50-05:00

Food quality is defined as a collection of properties that differentiate each unit and influences acceptability degree of food by users or consumers. Owing to the nature of food, food quality prediction is highly significant after specific periods of storage or before use by consumers. However, the accuracy is the major problem in the existing methods. Hence, this paper presents a BEFA_DRNN approach for accurate food quality prediction using dairy products. Firstly, input data is fed to data normalisation phase, which is performed by min-max normalisation. Thereafter, normalised data is given to feature fusion phase that is conducted employing DNN with Canberra distance. Then, fused data is subjected to data augmentation stage, which is carried out utilising oversampling technique. Finally, food quality prediction is done wherein milk is graded employing DRNN. The training of DRNN is executed by proposed BEFA that is a combination of BES and FA. Additionally, BEFA_DRNN obtained maximum accuracy, TPR and TNR values of 93.6%, 92.5% and 90.7%.


Full Article

be

Evaluation on stock market forecasting framework for AI and embedded real-time system

By www.inderscience.com
Published On :: 2024-07-02T23:20:50-05:00

Since its birth, the stock market has received widespread attention from many scholars and investors. However, there are many factors that affect stock prices, including the company's own internal factors and the impact of external policies. The extent and manner of fundamental impacts also vary, making stock price predictions very difficult. Based on this, this article first introduces the research significance of the stock market prediction framework, and then conducts academic research and analysis on two key sentences of stock market prediction and artificial intelligence in stock market prediction. Then this article proposes a constructive algorithm theory, and finally conducts a simulation comparison experiment and summarises and discusses the experiment. Research results show that the neural network prediction method is more effective in stock market prediction; the minimum training rate is generally 0.9; the agency's expected dilution rate and the published stock market dilution rate are both around 6%.


Full Article

be

Beyond utility: unpacking the enjoyment gap in e-government service use

By www.inderscience.com
Published On :: 2024-10-29T23:20:50-05:00

E-government serves as a vital channel for citizen interactions with the public sector, where user enjoyment is of paramount importance. To date, few studies have comprehensively examined the determinants of citizen enjoyment in e-government. To address this research gap, we administered a survey and gathered data from 363 Australian residents using myGov for tax filing. Our analysis revealed a pronounced discrepancy between reported enjoyment and the intention to continue using the services. Although users demonstrated a strong intent to use e-government services, this intent did not uniformly align with enjoyment. Additionally, informed by self-determination theory, we developed and tested an e-government service enjoyment model to study the impacts of effort expectancy, technophilia, technology humanness, and engagement in fostering user enjoyment. Unexpectedly, the results showed that information privacy concerns, commonly seen as a deterrent in e-government adoption, did not significantly affect enjoyment. Our findings advance the discourse on e-government service improvement.


Full Article