The story of a shooting: recommendations for more effective crisis communication

A crisis narrative is used to tell the story of a shooting at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri, United States. The story provides a learning experience for institutions as they seek best practices in handling crises. Although it appears that the university followed procedures correctly in dealing with this situation, questions linger as to whether administrators truly communicated effectively with students. Technology was used to warn students of potential danger, but not enough information was provided so students could deal on a personal level with the crisis. Face-to-face communication is important especially in a crisis to “soften” the blows of the situation

Spreading gossip in social networks

We study a simple model of information propagation in social networks, where two quantities are introduced: the spread factor, which measures the average maximal fraction of neighbors of a given node that interchange information among each other, and the spreading time needed for the information to reach such fraction of nodes. When the information refers to a particular node at which both quantities are measured, the model can be taken as a model for gossip propagation. In this context, we apply the model to real empirical networks of social acquaintances and compare the underlying spreading dynamics with different types of scale-free and small-world networks. We find that the number of friendship connections strongly influences the probability of being gossiped. Finally, we discuss how the spread factor is able to be applied to other situations.Comment: 10 pages, 16 figures, Revtex; Virt.J. of Biol. Phys., Oct.1 200

Map algebra on raster datasets represented by compact data structures

Financiado para publicación en acceso aberto: Universidade da Coruña/CISUG[Abstract]: The increase in the size of data repositories has forced the design of new computing paradigms to be able to process large volumes of data in a reasonable amount of time. One of them is in-memory computing, which advocates storing all the data in main memory to avoid the disk I/O bottleneck. Compression is one of the key technologies for this approach. For raster data, a compact data structure, called (Formula presented.) -raster, have been recently been proposed. It compresses raster maps while still supporting fast retrieval of a given datum or a portion of the data directly from the compressed data. (Formula presented.) -raster's original work introduced several queries in which it was superior to competitors. However, to be used as the basis of an in-memory system for raster data, it is mandatory to demonstrate its efficiency when performing more complex operations such as the map algebra operators. In this work, we present the algorithms to run a set of these operators directly on (Formula presented.) -raster without a decompression procedure.This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31171944, 31640068), Anhui Provincial Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 2019B319), Earmarked Fund for Anhui Science and Technology Major Project (202003b06020016). Information CITIC, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Grant/Award Numbers: PID2020-114635RB-I00; PDC2021-120917-C21; PDC2021-121239-C31; PID2019-105221RB-C41; TED2021-129245-C21; Xunta de Galicia, Grant/Award Numbers: ED431C 2021/53; IN852D 2021/3 (CO3)This work was partially supported by CITIC, CITIC is funded by the Xunta de Galicia through the collaboration agreement between the Department of Culture, Education, Vocational Training and Universities and the Galician universities for the reinforcement of the research centers of the Galician University System (CIGUS). IN852D 2021/3(CO3): partially funded by UE, (ERDF), GAIN, convocatoria Conecta COVID. GRC: ED431C 2021/53: partially funded by GAIN/Xunta de Galicia. TED2021-129245B-C21; PDC2021-121239-C31; PDC2021-120917-C21: partially funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and “NextGenerationEU”/PRTR. PID2020-114635RB-I00; PID2019-105221RB-C41: partially funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. Funding for open access charge: Universidadeda Coruña/CISUG.Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2021/53Xunta de Galicia; IN852D 2021/3 (CO3)National Natural Science Foundation of China; 31171944National Natural Science Foundation of China; 31640068Anhui Provincial Natural Science Foundation; 2019B31

The case study of Setúbal, Portugal

Green infrastructure is a strategically planned network of natural and semi-natural areas that are designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services. It incorporates green and blue spaces and other physical features in terrestrial and marine areas. Despite the increase of green infrastructure planning in several regions of the world, such as Europe and North America, there is still a complexity and diversity associated with the concept of green infrastructure that influences the variance in approaches of green infrastructure planning. This research proposed a multi-criteria method that was organized in four steps for designing a green infrastructure for the municipality of Setúbal (Portugal) that efficiently integrated the ecological and social components in the planning and policymaking processes, as well as green infrastructure planning principles. The results show a green infrastructure that comprised around 91% of the territory of the case study, organized into two systems: the fundamental green infrastructure, which was related to the areas whose ecological interests were more favorable, and the urban green infrastructure, which aimed to enhance and intensify ecological processes in built-up areas. This approach focused on the protection of ecological functions, the preservation of the cultural and natural heritage, and the prevention of risks at a local level; it also followed several green infrastructure planning principles, namely, connectivity, multifunctionality, diversity, integration, and applicability.publishersversionpublishe

Assessment of lot shape in business park design

Planning and developing a business park is a complex task, whichdemands integration across various fields of design and knowledge. The first choice to be made in the design process is relate to the zoning process and the definition of the lot layout and landscape. These first decisions will constrain all subsequent decisions concerning utilities, facilities and amenities. For this reason, the assessment of those issues is crucial for the perception of the overall quality of the business park design. The main goal of this work is to present a simple indicator which can assess the lot shape in order to optimize the building form and costs, the use of its open areas, the layout and the economic spacing of roads and the service routes. The indicator lot shape evaluatesthe performance of the lot design solutions according to the concept of compactness

Scalable processing and autocovariance computation of big functional data

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Brisaboa NR, Cao R, Paramá JR, Silva-Coira F. Scalable processing and autocovariance computation of big functional data. Softw Pract Exper. 2018; 48: 123–140 which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.2524 . This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited.[Abstract]: This paper presents 2 main contributions. The first is a compact representation of huge sets of functional data or trajectories of continuous-time stochastic processes, which allows keeping the data always compressed even during the processing in main memory. It is oriented to facilitate the efficient computation of the sample autocovariance function without a previous decompression of the data set, by using only partial local decoding. The second contribution is a new memory-efficient algorithm to compute the sample autocovariance function. The combination of the compact representation and the new memory-efficient algorithm obtained in our experiments the following benefits. The compressed data occupy in the disk 75% of the space needed by the original data. The computation of the autocovariance function used up to 13 times less main memory, and run 65% faster than the classical method implemented, for example, in the R package.This work was supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (PGE and FEDER) under grants [TIN2016-78011-C4-1-R; MTM2014-52876-R; TIN2013-46238-C4-3-R], Centro para el desarrollo Tecnológico e Industrial MINECO [IDI-20141259; ITC-20151247; ITC-20151305; ITC-20161074]; Xunta de Galicia (cofounded with FEDER) under Grupos de Referencia Competitiva grant ED431C-2016-015; Xunta de Galicia-Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (cofounded with FEDER) under Redes grants R2014/041, ED341D R2016/045; Xunta de Galicia-Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (cofounded with FEDER) under Centro Singular de Investigación de Galicia grant ED431G/01.Xunta de Galicia; D431C-2016-015Xunta de Galicia; R2014/041Xunta de Galicia; ED341D R2016/045Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/0

Observation of Spin Current Hermiticity

The spin Hall effect is one of the most relevant effects in spintronics and the key to conversion from charge current into spin current. We report here a phenomenon, which appears in response to the spin Hall effect and represents the anti-polarization of the spin current due to the coupling between interfacial magnetic anisotropies. Such an effect produces a Hermitian spin current. We realized experiments on permalloy (Py) and Cobalt (Co) bilayers to discuss this phenomenon

Metalloids in origin and evolution of life

Metalloids in origin and evolution of life. Metalloids have characteristics between metals and non-metals which give them, in some cases, specific properties. At least two of this chemical elements, boron and silicon, are essential to a significant number of living organisms and since some years ago it has been observed that the same metalloids may be involved in the synthesis and stabilization of some molecules relevant to the origin of life