Platform as a service gateway for the Fog of Things

Internet of Things (IoT), one of the key research topics in recent years, together with concepts from Fog Computing, brings rapid advancements in Smart City, Monitoring Systems, industrial control, transportation and other fields. These applications require a reconfigurable sensor architecture that can span multiple scenarios, devices and use cases that allow storage, networking and computational resources to be efficiently used on the edge of the network. There are a number of platforms and gateway architectures that have been proposed to manage these components and enable application deployment. These approaches lack horizontal integration between multiple providers as well as higher order functionalities like load balancing and clustering. This is partly due to the strongly coupled nature of the deployed applications, a lack of abstraction of device communication layers as well as a lock-in for communication protocols. This is a major obstacle for the development of a protocol agnostic application environment that allows for single application to be migrated and to work with multiple peripheral devices with varying protocols from different local gateways. This research looks at existing platforms and their shortcomings as well as proposes a messaging based modular gateway platform that enables clustering of gateways and the abstraction of peripheral communication protocols. This allows applications to send and receive messages regardless of their location and destination device protocol, creating a more uniform development environment. Furthermore, it results in a more streamlined application development and testing while providing more efficient use of the gateways resources. Our evaluation of a prototype for the system shows the need for the migration of resources and the QoS advantages of such a system. The presented use-case scenarios show that clustering can prove to be an advantage in certain use-cases as well as the deployment of a larger testing and control environment through the platform

Using the ‘Think Aloud’ Method to Inform Skinfold Instruction in Exercise Science

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Extending political participation in China: new opportunities for citizens in the policy process

Authoritarian political systems are portrayed as offering few opportunities for citizens to participate in politics – particularly in the policy process. This paper’s contribution is to set out new mechanisms that enable Authoritarian political systems are portrayed as offering few opportunities for citizens to participate in politics – particularly in the policy process. This paper’s contribution is to set out new mechanisms that enable Chinese citizens to evaluate government performance, contribute to decision-making, shape policy agendas and feed back on implementation. Based on fieldwork in the city of Hangzhou, we argue that the local party-state orchestrates citizen participation in the policy process, but members of the public nevertheless do have influence. Political participation is widening in China, but it is still controlled. It is not yet clearly part of a process of democratization, but it does establish the principle of citizen rights to oversee the government

Collective Power to Create Political Change: Increasing the Political Efficacy and Engagement of Social Workers

Because social workers are called to challenge social injustices and create systemic change to support the well-being of individuals and communities, it is essential that social workers develop political efficacy: belief that the political system can work and they can influence the system. This study explored the impact of an intensive political social work curriculum on political efficacy and planned political engagement among social work students and practitioners. The findings suggest this model of delivering a political social work curriculum effectively increases internal, external, and overall political efficacy, and that increasing political efficacy has promise for increasing future political engagement

Uninterested youth? Young people's attitudes towards party politics in Britain

Following the outcome of the 2001 and 2005 General Elections, when the numbers of abstainers outweighed the numbers of Labour voters on both occasions, much attention has focused upon the state of British democracy and how to enthuse the electorate, especially young people. While the government is exploring ways to make the whole process of voting easier, it may be failing to tackle the real problem - that youth appear to find the business of politics uninviting and irrelevant. This paper examines data derived from a nationwide survey of over 700 young people in order to shed light on what lies at the heart of young people's apparent disengagement from formal politics in Britain - political apathy or a sense of political alienation. The findings reveal that they support the democratic process, but are sceptical of the way the British political system is organised and led, and are turned off by politicians and the political parties. However, there is no uniform youth orientation to politics, and the data indicate that views differ according to social class, educational history, and also gender. However both ethnicity and region of the country in which young people live seem to have little influence in structuring political attitudes and behaviour

Satisfaction with democracy and voter turnout

Numerous studies conclude that countries in which citizens express higher levels of satisfaction with democracy also tend to display higher levels of voter turnout in national elections. Yet it is difficult to draw causal inferences from this positive cross-sectional relationship, because democracies feature many historical, cultural, and institutional differences that are not easily controlled for in cross-sectional comparisons. We apply an alternative, temporal approach to this issue by asking the question: Are over-time declines (increases) in aggregate levels of satisfaction within democracies associated with increases (declines) in levels of voter turnout within these democracies? Our temporal analysis of this relationship in 12 democracies over the period 1976–2011 reveals a pattern that is the opposite of that suggested by previous cross-sectional studies: namely, we find that over-time increases in citizens’ satisfaction with democracy are associated with significant decreases in voter turnout in national elections in these countries. </jats:p

Turnout and voting behaviour in constitutional referendums: a regional analysis of the Italian case

This paper investigates regional disparities of both turnout and voting behaviour in constitutional referendums. The analysis is undertaken at the NUTS-3 level and it considers the three constitutional referendums held in Italy in the period 2001–2016. It finds that turnout was lower in provinces with higher unemployment rates and where citizens had a stronger affiliation to opposition parties. These factors, along with level of government popularity, were important drivers of referendum results, especially in 2006 and 2016 when the referendums were rejected. In addition, while the three referendums implied different effects for rich and poor regions, mainly due to decentralization of powers, the local voting patterns did not reflect this. Overall, these findings suggest that the merit of the constitutional reforms played little part in explaining the outcome of the referendums

Synthesis and study of the properties of derivatives 4-phenyl-5-(1H-pyrrol-2-yl)-4H-1,2,4-triazole-3-thiols

The successful use of drugs, derivatives of 1,2,4-triazole, creates the conditionsfor the production and investigation of properties of new derivatives of this heterocyclic system. The aim of this work was synthesis and study of physical and chemical properties of new derivatives of 1,2,4-triazole-3-thiol containing synthon of pyrrole. The object of the study was a 4-phenyl-5-(pyrrol-2-yl)-1,2,4-triazole-3-ylthio-R-carbothioamides. To achieve this goal it was necessary to solve following tasks: to conduct the selection of the optimum base structure to determine the most efficient way of chemical modification of the precursor of targeted synthesis, to carry out selection of necessary methods of synthesis, to investigate the physico-chemical properties and to set the structure of the obtained compounds. The synthesis of target products of the reaction was carried out using as starting material pyrrole, which with using the form non-catalytic form of reaction of the Fridel-Crafts was transformed into 2,2,2-trichloro-1-(pyrrol-2-yl), ethanol. The resulting material in the result of reaction of hydrazinolysis was converted into the pyrrol-2-carbohydrazide. The obtained intermediate product was used in the reaction of nucleophilic joining of phenylisothiocyanate with subsequent intramolecular alkaline heterocyclization. Synthesized thiol was used in the reaction of alkylation. The structure of the obtained substances are confirmed by using elemental analysis, 1H-NMR-spectroscopy, and their individuality – chromatographic methods of analysis. The resulting substances are an interesting object for further studies, especially biological activity