Analysis of Neighbourhoods in Multi-layered Dynamic Social Networks

Social networks existing among employees, customers or users of various IT systems have become one of the research areas of growing importance. A social network consists of nodes - social entities and edges linking pairs of nodes. In regular, one-layered social networks, two nodes - i.e. people are connected with a single edge whereas in the multi-layered social networks, there may be many links of different types for a pair of nodes. Nowadays data about people and their interactions, which exists in all social media, provides information about many different types of relationships within one network. Analysing this data one can obtain knowledge not only about the structure and characteristics of the network but also gain understanding about semantic of human relations. Are they direct or not? Do people tend to sustain single or multiple relations with a given person? What types of communication is the most important for them? Answers to these and more questions enable us to draw conclusions about semantic of human interactions. Unfortunately, most of the methods used for social network analysis (SNA) may be applied only to one-layered social networks. Thus, some new structural measures for multi-layered social networks are proposed in the paper, in particular: cross-layer clustering coefficient, cross-layer degree centrality and various versions of multi-layered degree centralities. Authors also investigated the dynamics of multi-layered neighbourhood for five different layers within the social network. The evaluation of the presented concepts on the real-world dataset is presented. The measures proposed in the paper may directly be used to various methods for collective classification, in which nodes are assigned to labels according to their structural input features.Comment: 16 pages, International Journal of Computational Intelligence System

Safe Routes to School: A Catalyst for Building Partnerships and Leveraging Resources

This report showcases how SRTS programs are resulting in the implementation of infrastructure improvements that close gaps in the non-motorized transportation network. Four communities are showcased -- Avondale, AZ; Bozeman, MT; Knoxville, TN; and Miami, FL

Polynomial Time Algorithm for Min-Ranks of Graphs with Simple Tree Structures

The min-rank of a graph was introduced by Haemers (1978) to bound the Shannon capacity of a graph. This parameter of a graph has recently gained much more attention from the research community after the work of Bar-Yossef et al. (2006). In their paper, it was shown that the min-rank of a graph G characterizes the optimal scalar linear solution of an instance of the Index Coding with Side Information (ICSI) problem described by the graph G. It was shown by Peeters (1996) that computing the min-rank of a general graph is an NP-hard problem. There are very few known families of graphs whose min-ranks can be found in polynomial time. In this work, we introduce a new family of graphs with efficiently computed min-ranks. Specifically, we establish a polynomial time dynamic programming algorithm to compute the min-ranks of graphs having simple tree structures. Intuitively, such graphs are obtained by gluing together, in a tree-like structure, any set of graphs for which the min-ranks can be determined in polynomial time. A polynomial time algorithm to recognize such graphs is also proposed.Comment: Accepted by Algorithmica, 30 page

Antibiotic Prescribing Practices of Filipino Dentists

There are reports that dentists overprescribe antibiotics which may contribute to antibiotic resistance. This is an exploratory study on antibiotic prescribing practices of Filipino dentists using an online platform to form a basis for antimicrobial stewardship policy for dentists. A link to an online questionnaire using Survey Monkey was posted in a Closed Group Facebook account of Filipino dentists. Two hundred thirty (230) dentists participated. Data was analyzed by Survey Monkey. Amoxicillin is the first choice of antibiotics(71.18%), andclindamycin is the second (57.27%). Most respondents follow the indications for antibiotic therapy, however, some will prescribe antibiotics for conditions without indications. For dental procedures, 88.99% will prescribe for periodontal surgery, 75.45% for endodontic surgery, 68.3% for extraction of a tooth with chronic infection, 87.17% for third molar surgery, 26.7% for routine endodontics, and 23.56% for periodontal treatment without surgery. Not all of the respondents would prescribe for medical conditions that require antibiotic prophylaxis, while 60.36% will prescribe when in doubt in diagnosis, under time pressure (25.68%), and 48.67% considers patient preference. Only 10.48% of the respondents are very familiar with antimicrobial stewardship, while majority (69.74%) have not attended a lecture for antimicrobial stewardship for dentists.There is inappropriate antibiotic prescribing of participants on certain dental diseases, procedures, and medical conditions. Most respondents are not very familiar and have not attended a lecture on antimicrobial stewardship for specifically for dentists

Technical Assistance: Coach and Data Facilitator Support Among Texas Colleges

The goal of this research brief is to provide an assessment of the relationship among Achieving the Dream colleges, coaches and data facilitators. This brief places emphasis on the coach and data facilitator relationship to the college and how it affects the work being done related to Achieving the Dream initiative

The Implications of Closing Civic Space for Sustainable Development in Zimbabwe

This report on Zimbabwe is one of a set of four country case studies designed to study the implications of closing civic space for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The case study was commissioned in response to the wave of legal, administrative, political and informal means to restrict civic space and the activities of civil society actors in countries around the world in the past decade. Based on a literature review and conceptual framework developed for the study (see also Hossain et al 2018), the report documents how changing civic space in Zimbabwe, a country characterized as a predatory authoritarian state, has impacted on development outcomes, with a focus on specific Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) outcomes, including poverty, hunger, economic development, inclusive cities, and inequality. The study found that: The ‘fit’ between civil society and the state has changed over time, from repression to cautious engagement, especially on the Constitution after 2009, but formal civil society has been weakened by years of oppression. With formal avenues for policy engagement closing after 2013, informal protest and other movements have entered the scene, enabled by the growth of digital public space; At the macro level, there are several indications that the restrictions on civic space helped allow the state to become increasingly predatory, with devastating effects on overall economic development (SDG 8), and poverty, hunger and nutrition levels (SDG 1, SDG 2); There is evidence that the Government deliberately prevented civil society from supporting Zimbabweans to address hunger and poverty, by denying or complicating access to specific areas and households within communities considered disloyal to the ruling ZANU-PF party. However, data from these hard-to-reach areas is scarce, and more fine-grained analysis of the role played by civil society in ensuring humanitarian aid delivery is needed; Extreme regional inequalities persist and deepen in part because civil society is unable to challenge corruption and the deliberate exclusion of certain populations; A period of relative openness under a Government of National Unity (GNU) saw an improvement in socio-economic policies through active engagement by civil society. The political stability and confidence in a coalition government led to re-engagement of donors, ensuring the GNU government had funds to promote recovery. At the same time, the introduction of the US dollar helped stabilize the economy and, in combination with political stability, this led to the re-engagement of investors; An indirect effect of the restricted civic space between 2000 and 2008 is that NGO and civil society lack the expertise and capacity to engage the state on macro-economic issues, to hold it accountable over public financial management - a key step towards policies to mitigate regional inequalities (SDG 10) - and so to prevent economic crises; Non-formalised civic movements that have recently emerged have mobilised around economic issues, which may have prompted the new ZANU-PF leadership to prioritise economic recovery to a certain extent. These new movements mobilise online and on the streets, and directly confronted the Government over malfunctioning and corruption. It is too early to establish how the post-2018 Zimbabwean Government is likely to address the issues of civil society and civic space. The present study offers important, albeit limited, insights into the impacts of restricted and repressed civil society on key development outcomes, and highlights the need for further analysis of the roles of civil society in priority areas such as poverty, food security, and hunger

Lawyering from Below: Activist Legal Support in Contemporary Canada and the US

A vast literature has considered the proactive use of law as a tool by progressive social movements, but far less attention has been paid to the way activists respond to involuntary engagement with law as a result of repression and criminalization. This dissertation explores the legal support infrastructure of grassroots protest movements in Canada and the US by tracing the evolution of contemporary activist legal support through two periods. The tactic of jail solidarity and an emerging legal collective model are highlighted as the key features of the global justice organizing era (1999-2005) while in the second age of austerity era (2008-2018), I discuss evolving approaches to law collective work in various protest movements and highlight a renewed focus on anti-repression as a framing praxis of both organizing and legal support. Grounded in my own activist legal support work over more than two decades, this research rests on data arising from detailed interviews and analysis of more than 125 archival documents. I develop two areas of inquiry. First, I trace critiques of movement lawyering in the legal literature to demonstrate that those critiques are often shared by legal support organizers. Divergent opinions on the appropriate role of lawyers and norms of professional ethics in law collective practice reflect long-standing contradictions in progressive lawyering practice. Accordingly, I argue that the legal work of non-lawyer activists ought to be understood as a complementary if also sometimes disruptive model of movement lawyering. Second, I demonstrate that an analysis of radical legal support speaks to the post-arrest experiences of protesters and the impact of such repression on mobilization phenomena largely absent from the literature on state repression of social movements. I consider this dynamic through the lens of legal mobilization, arguing that the pedagogical work of law collectives, understood as a site of social movement knowledge production, plays a significant role in mediating the complex relationship between repression and mobilization. I conclude by exploring the legal consciousness of activist legal support organizers and argue that the education and organizing praxes of law collectives are evidence of a form of prefigurative, counter-hegemonic legality

Multiple description image and video coding for P2P transmissions

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) media streaming is, nowadays, a very attractive topic due to the bandwidth available to serve demanding content scales. A key challenge, however, is making content distribution robust to peer transience. Multiple description coding (MDC) has, indeed, proven to be very effective with problems concerning the packets’ losses, since it generates several descriptions and may reconstruct the original information with any number of descriptions that may reach the decoder. Therefore multiple descriptions may be effective for robust peer-to-peer media streaming. In this dissertation, it will not only be showed that, but also that varying the redundancy level of description on the fly may lead to a better performance than the one obtained without varying this parameter. Besides that, it is shown, as well, that varying the Bitrate on the fly outperforms the redundancy on it. Furthermore, the redundancy and the Bitrate were varied simultaneously. Thus, it is shown that this variation is more efficient when the packet loss is high. The experiments reported above were done using an experimental test bed developed for this purpose at the NMCG lab of the University of Beira Interior. It was also used the REGPROT, a video encoder developed by our research team, to splitted the video into multiple descriptions, which were, later, distributed among the peers in the test bed. After the request of the client, the referred encoder decoded the descriptions as they were being received.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT