1,366 research outputs found
Taser and Social, Ethnic and Racial Disparities research programme
Report from the 'Taser use and its association with social, ethnic and racial disparities in policing (TASERD)' research project. The research project was initiated by the National Police Chiefsā Council and commissioned by the College of Policing, after their Officer and Staff Safety Review (OSSR) in 2019 found there was growing evidence to suggest that Tasers were being used disproportionately in society. It was carried out by researchers from Keele University, UCL, The University of Exeter and Staffordshire University.National Police Chiefsā CouncilLondonās Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC
An examination of the verbal behaviour of intergroup discrimination
This thesis examined relationships between psychological flexibility, psychological inflexibility, prejudicial attitudes, and dehumanization across three cross-sectional studies with an additional proposed experimental study. Psychological flexibility refers to mindful attention to the present moment, willing acceptance of private experiences, and engaging in behaviours congruent with oneās freely chosen values. Inflexibility, on the other hand, indicates a tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts and emotions, entanglement with oneās thoughts, and rigid behavioural patterns. Study 1 found limited correlations between inflexibility and sexism, racism, homonegativity, and dehumanization. Study 2 demonstrated more consistent positive associations between inflexibility and prejudice. And Study 3 controlled for right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, finding inflexibility predicted hostile sexism and racism beyond these factors. While showing some relationships, particularly with sexism and racism, psychological inflexibility did not consistently correlate with varied prejudices across studies.
The proposed randomized controlled trial aims to evaluate an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy intervention to reduce sexism through enhanced psychological flexibility. Overall, findings provide mixed support for the utility of flexibility-based skills in addressing complex societal prejudices. Research should continue examining flexibility integrated with socio-cultural approaches to promote equity
Measuring the Impact of Chinaās Digital Heritage: Developing Multidimensional Impact Indicators for Digital Museum Resources
This research investigates how to best assess the impact of Chinaās digital heritage and focuses on digital museum resources. It is motivated by the need for tools to help governing bodies and heritage organisations assess the impact of digital heritage resources. The research sits at the intersection of Chinese cultural heritage, digital heritage, and impact assessment (IA) studies, which forms the theoretical framework of the thesis. Informed by the Balanced Value Impact (BVI) Model, this thesis addresses the following questions: 1. How do Western heritage discourses and Chinese culture shape ācultural heritageā and the museum digital ecosystem in modern China? 2. Which indicators demonstrate the multidimensional impacts of digital museum resources in China? How should the BVI Model be adapted to fit the Chinese cultural landscape? 3. How do different stakeholders perceive these impact indicators? What are the implications for impact indicator development and application? This research applies a mixed-method approach, combining desk research, survey, and interview with both public audiences and museum professionals. The research findings identify 18 impact indicators, covering economic, social, innovation and operational dimensions. Notably, the perceived usefulness and importance of different impact indicators vary among and between public participants and museum professionals. The study finds the BVI Model helpful in guiding the indicator development process, particularly in laying a solid foundation to inform decision-making. The Strategic Perspectives and Value Lenses provide a structure to organise various indicators and keep them focused on the impact objectives. However, the findings also suggest that the Value Lenses are merely signifiers; their signified meanings change with cultural contexts and should be examined when the Model is applied in a different cultural setting. This research addresses the absence of digital resource IA in Chinaās heritage sector. It contributes to the field of IA for digital heritage within and beyond the Chinese context by challenging the current target-setting culture in performance evaluation. Moreover, the research ratifies the utility of the BVI Model while modifying it to fit Chinaās unique cultural setting. This thesis as a whole demonstrates the value of using multidimensional impact indicators for evidence-based decision-making and better museum practices in the digital domain
Relationship Between Country Culture, Country Demographics, and Restaurant Electronic Word-of-Mouth Valence Ratings
Researchers have documented that country culture and country demographics influence electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) within various industries. Although past research has shown the importance of eWOM to restaurants as a measure of consumer satisfaction, researchers have not established the effect of country culture and country demographics on eWOM within the restaurant industry. Thus, the specific management problem addressed in this quantitative correlational study was the lack of knowledge and understanding regarding the relationship between country culture, country demographics, and restaurant eWOM valence ratings. Grounded in Hofstedeās cultural dimensions theory, the research questions addressed six measures of country culture, 12 measures of country demographics, and their relationship with restaurant eWOM valence ratings. With a purposive sample from the Yelp social media platform, eWOM ratings from 3,659 restaurants in 21 countries were analyzed with correlation analyses and multiple linear regression. Results indicated that a model of five variables and eight two-factor interactions statistically and significantly explained 14.4% of the variance in restaurant eWOM valence ratings. This study may promote positive social change by informing restaurant managers about which aspects of country culture and country demographics relate to restaurant eWOM valence ratings. Restaurant leaders may improve their eWOM response strategies by focusing on the most relevant country culture and country demographic constructs when developing eWOM communication
SCALING UP TASK EXECUTION ON RESOURCE-CONSTRAINED SYSTEMS
The ubiquity of executing machine learning tasks on embedded systems with constrained resources has made efficient execution of neural networks on these systems under the CPU, memory, and energy constraints increasingly important. Different from high-end computing systems where resources are abundant and reliable, resource-constrained systems only have limited computational capability, limited memory, and limited energy supply. This dissertation focuses on how to take full advantage of the limited resources of these systems in order to improve task execution efficiency from different aspects of the execution pipeline. While the existing literature primarily aims at solving the problem by shrinking the model size according to the resource constraints, this dissertation aims to improve the execution efficiency for a given set of tasks from the following two aspects. Firstly, we propose SmartON, which is the first batteryless active event detection system that considers both the event arrival pattern as well as the harvested energy to determine when the system should wake up and what the duty cycle should be. Secondly, we propose Antler, which exploits the affinity between all pairs of tasks in a multitask inference system to construct a compact graph representation of the task set for a given overall size budget. To achieve the aforementioned algorithmic proposals, we propose the following hardware solutions. One is a controllable capacitor array that can expand the systemās energy storage on-the-fly. The other is a FRAM array that can accommodate multiple neural networks running on one system.Doctor of Philosoph
A Theistic Critique of Secular Moral Nonnaturalism
This dissertation is an exercise in Theistic moral apologetics. It will be developing both a critique of secular nonnaturalist moral theory (moral Platonism) at the level of metaethics, as well as a positive form of the moral argument for the existence of God that follows from this critique. The critique will focus on the work of five prominent metaethical theorists of secular moral non-naturalism: David Enoch, Eric Wielenberg, Russ Shafer-Landau, Michael Huemer, and Christopher Kulp. Each of these thinkers will be critically examined. Following this critique, the positive moral argument for the existence of God will be developed, combining a cumulative, abductive argument that follows from filling in the content of a succinct apagogic argument. The cumulative abductive argument and the apagogic argument together, with a transcendental and modal component, will be presented to make the case that Theism is the best explanation for the kind of moral, rational beings we are and the kind of universe in which we live, a rational intelligible universe
Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion. Collected Works, Volume 5
This ļ¬fth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different ļ¬elds of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered.
First Part of this book presents some theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modiļ¬ed Proportional Conļ¬ict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classiļ¬ers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes.
Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identiļ¬cation of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classiļ¬cation.
Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classiļ¬cation, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well
The Influencer Effect: Exploring the Persuasive Communication Tactics of Social Media Influencers in the Health and Wellness Industry
With the emergence of social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, social media influencers (SMIs) have been a growing source of information in the health and wellness industry. Through their creative, informative, and appealing content, SMIs have the innate ability to reach and attain a large following on social media platforms. The purpose of this study is to ascertain an understanding of the persuasive tactics employed by SMIs in the creation and dissemination of information in the health and wellness industry. Using the theoretical framework of Aristotleās Rhetorical Appeals and Fisherās Narrative Paradigm, this qualitative study seeks to examine the key persuasive tactics used by SMIs in the health and wellness industry. Using content analysis, the social media content of SMIs was collected and analyzed to find emerging themes related to the rhetorical appeals and narration. In addition, a comparative analysis of the persuasive tactics used by SMIs and subject-matter experts (SMEs) was conducted. Findings showed that SMIs rely heavily on the appeals that allowed them to present themselves as credible, relatable, and similar to their followers; SMEs rely strongly on the logos appeal using technical language, memes, and textual graphics to educate the audience. Through this study, using the findings of the content and comparative analysis, a list of best practices of key persuasive tactics has been established to enable SMEs to be more effective in encouraging online users to adopt health information
Facilitating prosociality through technology: Design to promote digital volunteerism
Volunteerism covers many activities involving no financial rewards for volunteers but which contribute
to the common good. There is existing work in designing technology for volunteerism in HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) and related disciplines that focuses on motivation to improve
performance, but it does not account for volunteer wellbeing. Here, I investigate digital volunteerism
in three case studies with a focus on volunteer motivation, engagement, and wellbeing. My research
involved volunteers and others in the volunteering context to generate recommendations for a
volunteer-centric design for digital volunteerism. The thesis has three aims:
1. To investigate motivational aspects critical for enhancing digital volunteersā experiences
2. To identify digital platform attributes linked to volunteer wellbeing
3. To create guidelines for effectively supporting volunteer engagement in digital volunteering
platforms
In the first case study I investigate the design of a chat widget for volunteers working in an
organisation with a view to develop a design that improves their workflow and wellbeing. The second
case study investigates the needs, motivations, and wellbeing of volunteers who help medical
students improve their medical communication skills. An initial mixed-methods study was followed by
an experiment comparing two design strategies to improve volunteer relatedness; an important
indicator of wellbeing. The third case study looks into volunteer needs, experiences, motivations, and
wellbeing with a focus on volunteer identity and meaning-making on a science-based research
platform. I then analyse my findings from these case studies using the lens of care ethics to derive
critical insights for design.
The key contributions of this thesis are design strategies and critical insights, and a volunteer-centric
design framework to enhance the motivation, wellbeing and engagement of digital volunteers
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