26,834 research outputs found
Anxiety: An Epidemic Through the Lens of Social Media
Anxiety: An Epidemic was originally inspired by the mental health crisis in my hometown, Palo Alto, California, and evolved to specifically focus on social media-related anxiety. I examined the question: How has social media evolved over the last decade and what effect does the proliferation of social media have on the young adult population? I hypothesized that social media would have a predominately negative effect, especially on young women, and set out to create a theatrical piece inspired by my research. In my meta-analysis of studies conducted, I found that more data needs to be collected on the relatively new phenomena surrounding social media usage both as positive and negative forces. The research I conducted inspired two new artistic works: a physical theatre piece entitled MASKS: An Ode to Young Women, and a childrenâs story entitled âThe King Who Lost His Smileâ (both artistic works can be found in full in appendix A). I discovered that while more research needs to be conducted to definitively find if social media usage has a predominantly positive or negative effect, the artistic works I created can serve as a forum to start important conversations between young adults and their communities at large about their experiences with anxiety, stress, and depressive symptoms
ECOWAS's infrastructure : a regional perspective
Infrastructure improvements boosted growth in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) by one percentage point per capita per year during 1995-2005, primarily thanks to growth in information and communication technology. Deficient power infrastructure held growth back by 0.1 percent. Raising the region's infrastructure to the level of Mauritius could boost growth by 5 percentage points. Overall, infrastructure in the 15 ECOWAS countries ranks consistently behind southern Africa across many indicators. However, there is parity in access to household services -- water, sanitation, and power. ECOWAS has a well-developed regional road network, though sea corridors and ports need attention. Surface transport is expensive and slow, owing to cartelization, restrictive regulations, and delays. There is no regional rail network. Air transport has improved despite the lack of a strong hub-and-spoke structure. Safety remains a concern. Electrical power, the most expensive and least reliable in Africa, reaches 50 percent of the population but meets just 30 percent of demand. Regional power trading would bring substantial benefits if Guinea could become a hydropower exporter. Prices for critical ICT services are relatively high. Recent panregional initiatives have improved roaming. New projects are underway to provide access and improved services to unconnected countries. Completing and maintaining ECOWAS's infrastructure will require sustained spending of $1.5 billion annually for a decade, with one-third going to power. Although the necessary spending is only 1 percent of regional GDP, some countries'share is between 5 and 25 percent of national GDP. Clearly, external assistance will be needed.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Airports and Air Services,Infrastructure Economics,Transport and Trade Logistics,Roads&Highways
Speeding-up Dynamic Programming with Representative Sets - An Experimental Evaluation of Algorithms for Steiner Tree on Tree Decompositions
Dynamic programming on tree decompositions is a frequently used approach to
solve otherwise intractable problems on instances of small treewidth. In recent
work by Bodlaender et al., it was shown that for many connectivity problems,
there exist algorithms that use time, linear in the number of vertices, and
single exponential in the width of the tree decomposition that is used. The
central idea is that it suffices to compute representative sets, and these can
be computed efficiently with help of Gaussian elimination.
In this paper, we give an experimental evaluation of this technique for the
Steiner Tree problem. A comparison of the classic dynamic programming algorithm
and the improved dynamic programming algorithm that employs the table reduction
shows that the new approach gives significant improvements on the running time
of the algorithm and the size of the tables computed by the dynamic programming
algorithm, and thus that the rank based approach from Bodlaender et al. does
not only give significant theoretical improvements but also is a viable
approach in a practical setting, and showcases the potential of exploiting the
idea of representative sets for speeding up dynamic programming algorithms
Inertial Load Compensation by a Model Spinal Circuit During Single Joint Movement
Office of Naval Research (N00014-92-J-1309); CONACYT (Mexico) (63462
Revitalizing African Libraries: The Challenge of a Quiet Crisis
Explores issues of literacy, information technology, and access to global knowledge as they relate to African public and university libraries. Highlights the need to develop partnerships between donors and African leaders
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