3,053 research outputs found

    Epidemiological methods to evaluate the early impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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    The early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic represented a major challenge for health systems and local Governments, with no drugs or vaccines available to provide a pharmaceutical response. In the absence of formal reporting, data gaps and repression by authorities, real-time open-source data can be mined for risk assessment and response early on. In this thesis, open-source and survey generated data was synthesized in novel ways to develop new epidemiological insights into the COVID-19 pandemic and advise public health policy. There were also controversies in areas where no data on risks associated with cruise ship travel, healthcare workers, aged-care, and mass gatherings was available. This thesis analyzed a range of these issues in the first year of the pandemic. In chapter 1, I summarized the literature on the COVID-19 pandemic and identified gaps in using open-source data for early responses to pandemics. In chapter 2, I assessed the impact of cruise ship travel on the transmission of COVID-19 both globally and in Australia. In chapter 3, in the absence of any reported data on healthcare workers, I estimated the burden of COVID-19 on Australian healthcare workers and the health system, by analyzing national healthcare worker infections and their occupational risk of COVID-19. Similarly, with no formal reporting on Australian COVID-19 aged-care infections and outbreaks, I estimated the burden of COVID-19 on Australian aged-care and aged-care workers in 2020, in chapter 4. With the controversy surrounding the May-June 2020, Black Lives Matter protests and COVID-19 associated risks, I estimated mask use and COVID-19 associated risks of these protests. In chapter 6, with the controversial mask mandates in Australia, I evaluated mask attitude and government and state sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sydney and Melbourne. This thesis highlights the value of open-source, and survey data, which provides good insights into population attitudes around public health issues and practice and can enhance routine surveillance, early warning, and response. With many countries now minimizing COVID-19, the use of this data is even more important as prevention and control of the COVID-19 pandemic requires both long-term public health and epidemiology measures

    Automated UAV and Satellite Image Analysis For Wildlife Monitoring.

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    Very high resolution satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are revolutionising our ability to monitor wildlife, especially species in remote and inaccessible regions. However, given the rapid increase in data acquisition, computer-automated approaches are urgently needed to count wildlife in the resultant imagery. In this thesis, we investigate the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to the task of detecting vulnerable seabird populations in satellite and UAV imagery. In our first application we train a U-Net CNN to detect wandering albatrosses in 31-cm resolution WorldView-3 satellite imagery. We compare results across four different island colonies using a leave-one-island-out cross validation, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) score of 0.669. By collecting new data on inter-observer variation in albatross counts, we show that our U-Net results fall within the range of human accuracy for two islands, with misclassifications at other sites being simple to filter manually. In our second application we detect Abbott’s boobies nesting in forest canopy, using UAV Structure from Motion (SfM) imagery. We focus on overcoming occlusion from branches by implementing a multi-view detection method. We first train a Faster R-CNN model to detect Abbott’s booby nest sites (mAP=0.518) and guano (mAP=0.472) in the 2D UAV images. We then project Faster R-CNN detections onto the 3D SfM model, cluster multi-view detections of the same objects using DBSCAN, and use cluster features to classify proposals into true and false positives (comparing logistic regression, support vector machine, and multilayer perceptron models). Our best-performing multi-view model successfully detects nest sites (mAP=0.604) and guano (mAP=0.574), and can be incorporated with expert review to greatly expedite analysis time. Both methods have immediate real-world application for future surveys of the target species, allowing for more frequent, expansive, and lower-cost monitoring, vital for safeguarding populations in the long-term

    Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long ’68

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    Traditionally, the definition of political cinema assumes a relationship between cinema and politics. In contrast to this view, author Mauro Resmini sees this relationship as an impasse. To illustrate this theory, Resmini turns to Italian cinema to explore how films have reinvented the link between popular art and radical politics in Italy from 1968 to the early 1980s, a period of intense political and cultural struggles also known as the long ’68. Italian Political Cinema conjures a multifaceted, complex portrayal of Italian society. Centered on emblematic figures in Italian cinema, it maps the currents of antagonism and repression that defined this period in the country’s history. Resmini explores how film imagined the possibilities, obstacles, and pitfalls that characterized the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition. From workerism to autonomist Marxism to feminism, this book further expands the debate on political cinema with a critical interpretation of influential texts, some of which are currently only available in Italian. A comprehensive and novel redefinition of political film, Italian Political Cinema introduces its audience to lesser-known directors alongside greats such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, and Bellocchio. Resmini offers access to untranslated work in Italian philosophy, political theory, and film theory, and forcefully advocates for the continued artistic and political relevance of these films in our time.https://doi.org/10.5749/978145297015

    Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe

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    Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe presents a collection of six- teen chapters that explore the themes of how migrants, refugees and citizens express and share their political and social causes and experiences through art and media. These expressions, which we term ‘citizen media’, arguably become a platform for postcolonial intellectuals as the studies pursued in this volume investigate the different ways in which previously excluded social groups regain public voice. The volume strives to understand the different articulations of mi- grants’, refugees’, and citizens’ struggle against increasingly harsh European pol- itics that allow them to achieve and empower political subjectivity in a mediated and creative space. In this way, the contributions in this volume present case studies of citizen media in the form of ‘activistic art’ or ‘artivism’ (Trandafoiu, Ruffini, Cazzato & Taronna, Koobak & Tali, Negrón-Muntaner), activism through different kinds of technological media (Chouliaraki and Al-Ghazzi, Jedlowski), such as documentaries and film (Denić), podcasts, music and soundscapes (Ro- meo and Fabbri, Western, Lazzari, Huggan), and activisms through writings from journalism to fiction (Longhi, Concilio, Festa, De Capitani). The volume argues that citizen media go hand in hand with postcolonial critique because of their shared focus on the deconstruction and decolonisation of Western logics and narratives. Moreover, both question the concept of citizen and of citizenship as they relate to the nation-state and explores the power of media as a tool for participation as well as an instrument of political strength. The book forwards postcolonial artivism and citizen media as a critical framework to understand the refugee and migrant situations in contemporary Europe

    Cultural Mobilities Between Africa and the Caribbean

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    This book investigates the cultural connections between Africa and the Caribbean, using the lens of Mobility Studies to tease out the shared experiences between these highly diverse parts of the world. Despite their heterogeneity in terms of cultures, languages, and political and economic histories, the connections between the African continent and the Caribbean are manifold, stretching back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The authors in this book look to the past as well as to the present, focusing on the manifold mobile connections between the regions’ subjects, objects, ideas, texts, images, sounds, and beliefs. In doing so, the book demonstrates that mobility extends beyond just the movement of people, and that we can also see mobility in objects and ideas, travelling either in a material sense or in imaginary terms, in physical as well as in virtual spaces. Bringing the transdisciplinary fields of African Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Mobility Studies into dialogue, this book will be of interest to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC) 4.0 license. Funded by Universität Wien

    A Sociology of Gab: A Computational Analysis of a Far-Right Social Network

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    This dissertation examines the racial discourse circulated on Gab, a microblogging and social networking platform, by the far right to proliferate hate speech, and how the far-right discourse has evolved on the platform. Gab was created 2016 in response to mainstream social media’s increase of content moderation and deplatforming of extremist users to curtail hate speech and harassment. The platform gained a substantial number of new users after the Charlotteville incident of 2017. In this thesis, I examine the creation of Gab, as an alternative social media platform, as a strategic site of socio-technical innovation, as well as the important part far-right discourse on Gab plays in the asymmetric polarization phenomenon of the media ecosystem. This project asks: How has Gab developed and what discourses about race circulate on Gab? To answer these questions, I draw on a large dataset of digital trace data of the entire Gab platform of approximately 10 million posts on Gab from 2016 to 2019. This constitutes an archive of the far-right activities on an important alternative social media platform. I use computational methodologies including structural topic modeling, word embeddings and qualitative analysis to examine the materials, and form conclusions about the impacts of asymmetric polarization of the far right on social media. I argue that Gab occupies an important position in the social media ecosystem in the context of mainstream social media platforms’ deplatforming post- Charlottesville, and the absence of legislation that regulates hate speech. Gab, as an opportunistic innovation, is emblematic of an alternative social media ecosystem that flourishes online, drawing in users who are rejecting, and rejected by, mainstream social media platforms and searching for platforms with looser content moderation that reflect their absolutist freedom-of-speech stance. This environment is conducive to asymmetric polarization, spreading anti-liberal, anti-mainstream media, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigration discourses. These ideological strings are not new but consistent with earlier articulations of the ideology of white supremacy ideology, just taking place on a newer platform that itself may enable new variations of the same theme

    Modern Folk Devils

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    The devilish has long been integral to myths, legends, and folklore, firmly located in the relationships between good and evil, and selves and others. But how are ideas of evil constructed in current times and framed by contemporary social discourses? Modern Folk Devils builds on and works with Stanley Cohen’s theory on folk devils and moral panics to discuss the constructions of evil. The authors present an array of case-studies that illustrate how the notion of folk devils nowadays comes into play and animates ideas of otherness and evil throughout the world. Examining current fears and perceived threats, this volume investigates and analyzes how and why these devils are constructed. The chapters discuss how the devilish may take on many different forms: sometimes they exist only as a potential threat, other times they are a single individual or phenomenon or a visible group, such as refugees, technocrats, Roma, hipsters, LGBT groups, and rightwing politicians. Folk devils themselves are also given a voice to offer an essential complementary perspective on how panics become exaggerated, facts distorted, and problems acutely angled.;Bringing together researchers from anthropology, sociology, political studies, ethnology, and criminology, the contributions examine cases from across the world spanning from Europe to Asia and Oceania
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