Different Lenses: Women's Feminist and Postfeminist Perspectives in Public Relations

Gender inequalities in public relations (PR) persist. Industry research within the UK reveals a gender pay-gap, which shows significant disparities in pay between men and women (CIPR, 2015; PRCA, 2016). Feminist research, mostly undertaken in the US over the past twenty years and adopting a liberal feminist perspective, has identified some of the factors that influence inequality for women, such as balancing career and family; while other studies examine the social processes that perpetuate inequalities, such as gender stereotyping, the ‘glass ceiling’ effect and the ‘friendliness trap’. Liberal feminism is critiqued for not recognizing gender regimes. This has led to calls for critical research to examine the underlying social processes in the PR field that influence position opportunities, roles, the pay-gap and discrimination. Three theoretical positions – liberal feminist, radical feminist and postfeminist - were selected to address the following research questions, ‘How does gender influence everyday practice in public relations?’ ‘Which feminist perspective(s) are suggested by practitioner narratives?’ Postfeminism, used as a critical lens, potentially enables ‘multiple feminisms and femininities’ (Lewis, 2014) to be expressed. For this paper, an exploratory, qualitative pilot study involved semi-structured interviews with four female PR practitioners in northern England. Transcripts were analyzed using narrative analysis and reflexivity. The narratives revealed complex and sometimes contradictory interpretations. Therefore while three out of the four narratives showed strong liberal feminist inclinations, including a belief that women are able to compete alongside men, two also expressed radical feminist orientations;although in line with previous research, not a desire to change the system, except on an individual level. A fourth narrative expressed ideas consistent with postfeminism, demonstrating an apparent acceptance of gender role segregation in PR, and therefore no inclination to change the status quo. Finally, we offer further ways of advancing critical feminist studies in public relations, through research and education

Pairing-based authentication protocol for V2G networks in smart grid

[EN] Vehicle to Grid (V2G) network is a very important component for Smart Grid (SG), as it offers new services that help the optimization of both supply and demand of energy in the SG network and provide mobile distributed capacity of battery storage for minimizing the dependency of non-renewable energy sources. However, the privacy and anonymity of users¿ identity, confidentiality of the transmitted data and location of the Electric Vehicle (EV) must be guaranteed. This article proposes a pairing-based authentication protocol that guarantees confidentiality of communications, protects the identities of EV users and prevents attackers from tracking the vehicle. Results from computing and communications performance analyses were better in comparison to other protocols, thus overcoming signaling congestion and reducing bandwidth consumption. The protocol protects EVs from various known attacks and its formal security analysis revealed it achieves the security goals.Roman, LFA.; Gondim, PRL.; Lloret, J. (2019). Pairing-based authentication protocol for V2G networks in smart grid. Ad Hoc Networks. 90:1-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2018.08.0151169

SDN-DMM for intelligent mobility management in heterogeneous mobile IP networks

[EN] Mobility management applied to the traditional architecture of the Internet has become a great challenge because of the exponential growth in the number of devices that can connect to the network. This article proposes a Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based architecture, called SDN-DMM (SDN-Distributed Mobility Management), that deals with the distributed mode of mobility management in heterogeneous access networks in a simplified and efficient way, ensuring mainly the continuity of IP sessions. Intent-based mobility management with an IP mapping schema for mobile node identification offers optimized routing without tunneling techniques, hence, an efficient use of the network infrastructure. The simplified mobility control API reduces both signaling and handover latency costs and provides a better scalability and performance in comparison with traditional and SDN-based DMM approaches. An analytical evaluation of such costs demonstrated the better performance of SDN-DMM, and a proof of concept of the proposal was implemented in a real environment.CAPES (Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior) - Brasil; Secretaria de Estado de Investigacion, Desarrollo e Innovacion, Grant/Award Number: TIN2017-84802-C2-1-P; "Convocatoria 2017 - Proyectos I+D+I Programa Estatal de Investigacion, Desarrollo e Innovacion, convocatoria excelencia", Grant/Award Number: TIN2017-84802-C2-1-P; FAP-DF ("Fundacao de Apoio a Pesquisa do Distrito Federal")-BrazilTorres Cordova, R.; Gondim, PRL.; Llerena, YP.; Lloret, J. (2019). SDN-DMM for intelligent mobility management in heterogeneous mobile IP networks. International Journal of Communication Systems. 32(17):1-31. https://doi.org/10.1002/dac.4140131321

An automated model for the assessment of QoE of adaptive video streaming over wireless networks

[EN] Nowadays, heterogeneous devices are widely utilizing Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to transfer the data. Furthermore, HTTP adaptive video streaming (HAS) technology transmits the video data over wired and wireless networks. In adaptive technology services, a client's application receives a streaming video through the adaptation of its quality to the network condition. However, such a technology has increased the demand for Quality of Experience (QoE) in terms of prediction and assessment. It can also cause a challenging behavior regarding subjective and objective QoE evaluations of HTTP adaptive video over time since each Quality of Service (QoS) parameter affects the QoE of end-users separately. This paper introduces a methodology design for the evaluation of subjective QoE in adaptive video streaming over wireless networks. Besides, some parameters are considered such as video characteristics, segment length, initial delay, switch strategy, stalls, as well as QoS parameters. The experiment's evaluation demonstrated that objective metrics can be mapped to the most significant subjective parameters for user's experience. The automated model could function to demonstrate the importance of correlation for network behaviors' parameters. Consequently, it directly influences the satisfaction of the end-user's perceptual quality. In comparison with other recent related works, the model provided a positive Pearson Correlation value. Simulated results give a better performance between objective Structural Similarity (SSIM) and subjective Mean Opinion Score (MOS) evaluation metrics for all video test samples.This work has been partially supported by the "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad" in the "Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnica de Excelencia, Subprograma Estatal de Generacion de Conocimiento" within the Project under Grant TIN2017-84802-C2-1-P. This study has been partially done in the computer science departments at the (University of Sulaimani and Halabja).Taha, M.; Ali, A.; Lloret, J.; Gondim, PRL.; Canovas, A. (2021). An automated model for the assessment of QoE of adaptive video streaming over wireless networks. Multimedia Tools and Applications. 80(17):26833-26854. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-10934-92683326854801

Secret sharing-based authentication and key agreement protocol for machine-type communications

[EN] One of the main challenges for the development of the Internet of Things is the authentication of large numbers of devices/sensors, commonly served by massive machine-type communications, which jointly with long-term evolution has been considered one of the main foundations for the continued growth of Internet of Things connectivity and an important issue to be treated in the development of 5G networks. This article describes some protocols for the group-based authentication of devices/sensors in Internet of Things and presents a new group authentication protocol based on Shamir's secret and Lagrange interpolation formula. The new protocol protects privacy, avoids unauthorized access to information, and assists in the prevention of attacks, as replay, distributed denial of service, and man-in-the-middle. A security analysis and comparisons among the 3GPP evolved packet system authentication and key agreement standard protocol and other recent group authentication protocols were performed toward proving the efficiency of the proposed protocol. The comparisons regard security properties and computational and communication costs. The safety of the protocol was formally verified through simulations conducted by automated validation of internet security protocols and applications.Lopes, APG.; Hilgert, LO.; Gondim, PRL.; Lloret, J. (2019). Secret sharing-based authentication and key agreement protocol for machine-type communications. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks (Online). 15(4):1-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1550147719841003S12115

El agronegocio del cultivo de tartago em el mundo.

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Explaining the water: holding capacity of biochar by scanning electron microscope images.

O objetivo deste estudo foi identificar biocarvão com melhor desempenho de promover o aumento da capacidade de retenção de água no solo, com base em evidências de laboratório e avaliação de porosidade microestructural

Explaining the water-holding capacity of biochar by scanning electron microscope images.

O objetivo deste estudo foi identificar biocarvão com melhor desempenho de promover o aumento da capacidade de retenção de água no solo, com base em evidências de laboratório e avaliação de porosidade microestructural.Made available in DSpace on 2018-11-13T23:53:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Artigopublicado1.pdf: 1077019 bytes, checksum: dbd19a558cc6c685cc81ffab7a9ae57b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-10-23bitstream/item/185864/1/Artigo-publicado1.pd