The Power and Politics of Media and Information Literacy

We are living in a media-saturated world. Not only we receive information, we have become prosumers and are able to communicate with the ‘world.’ This has been widely reflected in the academic texts. But is there a dark side to this ‘age of information freedom?’ My argument in this paper is that although we have gotten rid of one sort of tyranny and can more freely speak up, a more suppressive and widespread process of control and surveillance is underway. Worse than that, we the users seem to be comfort with that

Reliability-Based Design of Reinforced Concrete Raft Footings Using Finite Element Method

In this study, a FORTRAN-based reliability-based design program was developed for the design of raft footings based on the ultimate and serviceability design requirements of BS8110 (1997). The well-known analysis of plate on elastic foundation using displacement method of analysis was used in conjunction with the design point method. The design point method was adopted for designing to a pre-determined safety level, T. Example of the design of a raft footing is included to demonstrate the simplicity of the procedure. It was found among other findings that there is a saving of about 64% of longitudinal reinforcement applied at the column face using the proposed method as compared with the BS8110 design method. Also, the depth of footing required using the proposed procedure was found to be 47% lower than in the deterministic method using BS8110. Also, considering a target safety index of 3.0 was found to be cheaper than considering a target safety index of 4.0 for the same loading, material and geometrical properties of the footing. It is therefore concluded that the proposed procedure is quite suitable for application

The IceCube Realtime Alert System

Following the detection of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos in 2013, their origin is still unknown. Aiming for the identification of an electromagnetic counterpart of a rapidly fading source, we have implemented a realtime analysis framework for the IceCube neutrino observatory. Several analyses selecting neutrinos of astrophysical origin are now operating in realtime at the detector site in Antarctica and are producing alerts to the community to enable rapid follow-up observations. The goal of these observations is to locate the astrophysical objects responsible for these neutrino signals. This paper highlights the infrastructure in place both at the South Pole detector site and at IceCube facilities in the north that have enabled this fast follow-up program to be developed. Additionally, this paper presents the first realtime analyses to be activated within this framework, highlights their sensitivities to astrophysical neutrinos and background event rates, and presents an outlook for future discoveries.Comment: 33 pages, 9 figures, Published in Astroparticle Physic

Reliability-based assessment procedures for existing concrete structures

A feasibility study of reliability theory as a tool for the assessment of present safety and residual service life of damaged concrete structures has been performed in order to find a transparent methodology for the assessment procedure. It is concluded that the current guidelines are open to interpretation and that the variation in the results obtained regarding the structural safety is too great to be acceptable. Interpretations by the engineer are also included when deterministic methods are used, but probabilistic methods are more sensitive to the assumptions made and the differences in the results will therefore be greater. In a literature survey it is concluded that residual service life predictions should not be expected to be valid for more than 10 to 15 years, due to the large variability of the variables involved in the analysis. Based on these conclusions predictive models that are suitable for the inclusion of new data, and methods for the incorporation of new data are proposed. Information from the field of medical statistics and robotics suggests that linear regression models are well suited for this type of updated monitoring. Two test cases were studied, a concrete dam and a railway bridge. From the dam case, it was concluded that the safety philosophy in the deterministic dam specific assessment guidelines further development. Probabilistic descriptions of important variables, such as ice loads and friction coefficients, are needed if reliability theory is to be used for assessment purposes. During the study of the railway bridge it became clear that model uncertainties for different failure mechanisms used in concrete design are lacking. If Bayesian updating is to be used as a tool for incorporation of test data regarding concrete strength info the reliability analysis, a priori information must be established. A need for a probabilistic description of the hardening process of concrete was identified for the purpose of establishing a priori information. This description can also be used as qualitative assessment of the concrete. If there is a large discrepancy between the predicted value and the measured value, the concrete should be investigated regarding deterioration due to, for example internal frost or alkali silica reactions. Reliability theory is well suited for the assessment process since features of the reliability theory such as sensitivity analysis give good decision support for matters concerning both safety and service life predictions

Reliability-based design optimization of shells with uncertain geometry using adaptive Kriging metamodels

Optimal design under uncertainty has gained much attention in the past ten years due to the ever increasing need for manufacturers to build robust systems at the lowest cost. Reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) allows the analyst to minimize some cost function while ensuring some minimal performances cast as admissible failure probabilities for a set of performance functions. In order to address real-world engineering problems in which the performance is assessed through computational models (e.g., finite element models in structural mechanics) metamodeling techniques have been developed in the past decade. This paper introduces adaptive Kriging surrogate models to solve the RBDO problem. The latter is cast in an augmented space that "sums up" the range of the design space and the aleatory uncertainty in the design parameters and the environmental conditions. The surrogate model is used (i) for evaluating robust estimates of the failure probabilities (and for enhancing the computational experimental design by adaptive sampling) in order to achieve the requested accuracy and (ii) for applying a gradient-based optimization algorithm to get optimal values of the design parameters. The approach is applied to the optimal design of ring-stiffened cylindrical shells used in submarine engineering under uncertain geometric imperfections. For this application the performance of the structure is related to buckling which is addressed here by means of a finite element solution based on the asymptotic numerical method

On the Complexity of Bounded Context Switching

Bounded context switching (BCS) is an under-approximate method for finding violations to safety properties in shared-memory concurrent programs. Technically, BCS is a reachability problem that is known to be NP-complete. Our contribution is a parameterized analysis of BCS. The first result is an algorithm that solves BCS when parameterized by the number of context switches (cs) and the size of the memory (m) in O*(m^(cs)2^(cs)). This is achieved by creating instances of the easier problem Shuff which we solve via fast subset convolution. We also present a lower bound for BCS of the form m^o(cs / log(cs)), based on the exponential time hypothesis. Interestingly, the gap is closely related to a conjecture that has been open since FOCS\u2707. Further, we prove that BCS admits no polynomial kernel. Next, we introduce a measure, called scheduling dimension, that captures the complexity of schedules. We study BCS parameterized by the scheduling dimension (sdim) and show that it can be solved in O*((2m)^(4sdim)4^t), where t is the number of threads. We consider variants of the problem for which we obtain (matching) upper and lower bounds

How about another joke from the Covid-19 Pandemic in Iran

The outbreak of Coronavirus disease, 2019 (COVID-19), started in late 2019 and developed into a pandemic by March 2020 and has become a global problem. Following the global outbreak and coronavirus spreading around the world, the WHO reported a statement on January 11, 2020, announcing the new Coronavirus outbreak as the sixth significant public health emergency in the world. In the stressful situation caused by the coronavirus epidemic, many jokes and Humor about this disease were distributed on social networks. In these circumstances, the question arises: Why do some people continue to make jokes about it, despite the mass perception of the coronavirus epidemic? The present research method was qualitative and Strauss and Corbin's version of the grounded theory was used. Participants were included the Telegram Social Network Comic Channel "https://t.me/s/jokcom" Members, which had more than 2879 members and those on Instagram and Twitter members who liked the corona content to the jokes about the covid-19 pandemic inside Iran. Based on the result, we found the effects and consequences of corona jokes. There was several factors involved in shaping the phenomenon of covids jokes. Joke and Humor are like a double-edged sword; in some situation, can be both harmful and helpful