Converging Horror: analyzing the importance of Convergence Culture on a digital audience through an examination of the conventions and politics of the horror genre

This thesis draws attention to the genre of horror in new media through a close examination of various digital texts, arguing that these new texts, while built on traditional horror narratives used in cinema, are also examples of Convergence Culture, a mobile, multiplatform, participatory medium that engages professionals and amateur content creators. The thesis begins with a review of scholarly work about horror as a genre, continues with a close analysis of several digital horror texts and their online communities, and ends with the argument that these new texts are good examples of how horror has accommodated Convergence culture, morphing into a post-national space characterized by mobility, transnationalism and participation. And most importantly, this new iteration of horror continues the classical horror film tradition of mirroring inter-personal and cultural anxieties

Mining social media data for biomedical signals and health-related behavior

Social media data has been increasingly used to study biomedical and health-related phenomena. From cohort level discussions of a condition to planetary level analyses of sentiment, social media has provided scientists with unprecedented amounts of data to study human behavior and response associated with a variety of health conditions and medical treatments. Here we review recent work in mining social media for biomedical, epidemiological, and social phenomena information relevant to the multilevel complexity of human health. We pay particular attention to topics where social media data analysis has shown the most progress, including pharmacovigilance, sentiment analysis especially for mental health, and other areas. We also discuss a variety of innovative uses of social media data for health-related applications and important limitations in social media data access and use.Comment: To appear in the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Scienc

Exploring the Impact of Evolutionary Computing based Feature Selection in Suicidal Ideation Detection

© 2019 IEEE. The ubiquitous availability of smartphones and the increasing popularity of social media provide a platform for users to express their feelings, including suicidal ideation. Suicide prevention by suicidal ideation detection on social media lights the path to controlling the rapidly increasing suicide rates amongst youth. This paper proposes a diverse set of features and investigates into feature selection using the Firefly algorithm to build an efficient and robust supervised approach to classifying tweets with suicidal ideation. The development of a suicidal language to create three diverse, manually annotated datasets leads to the validation of the proposed model. An in-depth result and error analysis lead to an accurate system for monitoring suicidal ideation on social media along with the discovery of optimal feature subsets and selection methods using a penalty based Firefly algorithm

Public Good Theory and the 'Added Value' of the EU's Counterterrorism Policy

This paper develops a deductive theoretical framework for assessing the EU's added value in the fight against terrorism. The first part argues that public good theory helps to conceptualize objectives of international counterterrorism cooperation and the respective role of international organizations. It critically evaluates existing discussions of security cooperation from this theoretical perspective and sets out a typology of policies according to three aggregation technologies (weaker links, summation, better shot), each of which is linked to a specific set of governance challenges. The second part surveys the EU's counterterrorism efforts on this basis. Weaker link issues - such as the protection of the movement of people, goods and capital - and the related problem of mutual assurance have been quite successfully addressed, even if there is increasing uncertainty over the boundaries of cooperation. In contrast, the EU fell short with regard to joint efforts in the fight against terrorism due to the non-excludable nature of benefits, as in the case of foreign policy, or (partial) rivalry of consumption, as in the case of intelligence sharing or disaster response capacities. Finally, the EU increasingly supports better shot initiatives to develop new instruments and technologies to combat terrorism, but is often overtaken by mini-lateral forms of cooperation.counterterrorism, public good theory, international organisations, European Union

Internet and communications as elements for CIDT and Torture. Initial reflections in an unexplored field

The internet was once seen as a new and definitive window to freedom and a world without torture. There is however, another less obvious but perhaps more notorious side: torturous environments can also be created through the internet; a place where individu- als may be targeted for discrimination, coer- cion or control.There is a dearth of academic research and theoretical developments in this very new area of knowledge and this Edito- rial will review and reflect on various aspects, thereby suggesting possible lines of research

On terrorist attacks in Nigeria: Stance and engagement in conversations on Nairaland

Terrorist attacks in Nigeria have generated a huge body of conversations and debates on the Internet. This study investigates the contents of these online conversations on Nairaland and how such conversations exhibit stance and civic engagement in response to the attacks. Nairaland is an online community and public space that serves as a meeting place for Nigerians at home and in the Diaspora, who constantly follow-up on the events in Nigeria and participate in political debates about the country. This study argues that the frequent negative evaluations of Boko Haram and the attribution of the activities to Islam and the consistent constructions of northern Nigeria as ‘violent people’ and Islam as an ‘evil’ religion in Nairaland are potential to further worsen religious and ethnic relations in Nigeri

Conceptualisation and Annotation of Drug Nonadherence Information for Knowledge Extraction from Patient-Generated Texts

Approaches to knowledge extraction (KE) in the health domain often start by annotating text to indicate the knowledge to be extracted, and then use the annotated text to train systems to perform the KE. This may work for annotating named entities or other contiguous noun phrases (drugs, some drug effects), but be- comes increasingly difficult when items tend to be expressed across multiple, possibly non- contiguous, syntactic constituents (e.g. most descriptions of drug effects in user-generated text). Other issues include that it is not al- ways clear how annotations map to actionable insights, or how they scale up to, or can form part of, more complex KE tasks. This paper reports our efforts in developing an approach to extracting knowledge about drug nonadherence from health forums which led us to conclude that development cannot proceed in separate steps but that all aspects—from conceptualisation to annotation scheme development, annotation, KE system training and knowledge graph instantiation—are interdependent and need to be co-developed. Our aim in this paper is two-fold: we describe a generally applicable framework for developing a KE approach, and present a specific KE approach, developed with the framework, for the task of gathering information about antidepressant drug nonadherence. We report the conceptualisation, the annotation scheme, the annotated corpus, and an analysis of annotated texts

Is There a Nexus Between Terrorist Involvement and Mental Health in the Age of the Islamic State?

The wave of Islamic State-linked terrorism experienced in the West over the past couple of years has rekindled debates surrounding mental disorders and terrorist engagement. A very preliminary survey by the authors found that out of 55 attacks in the West where the 76 individuals involved were possibly influenced by the Islamic State, according to media reports, 27.6% had a history of apparent psychological instability, a percentage comparable to that found in the general population. This figure is driven largely by individuals inspired by the Islamic State, as opposed to those directed by it, however. The percentage is likely overinflated for several noteworthy reasons, including poor reporting, low benchmarks, and the tendency to overuse mental health problems as a ‘silver-bullet’ explanation for terrorist involvement. The relationship is, in fact, far more complex than typically presented

World Wide Warriors

The contributions of this volume aim at a new, evidence based approach to Jihadism studies. What is the structure of Jihadi online communication and the dissemination of operational material online? Which errors were made by conventional Jihadism research? Which programs, apps, etc. use Jihadis to further their online communication? Next to these questions the contributors discuss the evident inability to understand basic mathematical principles in conventional Jihadism research and consider a very important video as a case study of Jihadi online communication, stressing the linguistic and theological shortcomings of conventional research. The volume is based on the understanding of theological elements as a vital part of Jihadi communication