Group privacy management strategies and challenges in Facebook : a focus group study among Flemish youth organizations

A large body of research has studied young people’s privacy practices and needs in Facebook. Less is known about group privacy. In this study 12 focus groups were organized with a total of 78 adolescents and young adults of local Flemish youth organizations to discuss their privacy practices. Findings describe how different strategies are used to coordinate the group information flow. The study also shows how online group privacy management can be challenging because ‘implicit’ privacy rules need to be made ‘explicit’, personal boundaries may conflict with those of the group one belongs to and privacy turbulence is difficult to define

Control responsibility : the discursive construction of privacy, teens, and Facebook in Flemish newspapers

This study explores the discursive construction of online privacy through a critical discourse analysis of Flemish newspapers' coverage of privacy, teens, and Facebook between 2007 and 2018 to determine what representation of (young) users the papers articulate. A privacy-as-control discourse is dominant and complemented by two other discourses: that of the unconcerned and reckless teenager and that of the promise of media literacy. Combined, these discourses form an authoritative language on privacy that we call "control responsibility." Control responsibility presents privacy as an individual responsibility that can be controlled and needs to be learned by young users. We argue that the discourses contribute to a neoliberal rationality and have a disciplinary effect that strengthens various forms of responsibilization

From persuasive messages to tactics : exploring children’s knowledge and judgment of new advertising formats

Despite that contemporary advertising is decreasingly about persuading children through persuasive messages and increasingly about influencing them through implicit tactics, little attention has been given to how children may cope with advertising by understanding and evaluating the new advertising tactics. Drawing on 12 focus groups entailing 60 European children of ages 9-11, this article investigates children’s advertising literacy by exploring their knowledge and judgments (and according reasoning strategies) of the new advertising formats. In particular, insight is provided into children’s critical reflection on the tactics of brand integration, interactivity and personalization in the advertising formats brand placement, advergames and retargeted pre-roll video ads on social media. It is shown that while children not spontaneously do so, they appear to have the ability to understand these tactics and form judgments about their (moral) appropriateness, thereby considering a wide range of societal actors

A Variational Approach to Particles in Lipid Membranes

A variety of models for the membrane-mediated interaction of particles in lipid membranes, mostly well-established in theoretical physics, is reviewed from a mathematical perspective. We provide mathematically consistent formulations in a variational framework, relate apparently different modelling approaches in terms of successive approximation, and investigate existence and uniqueness. Numerical computations illustrate that the new variational formulations are directly accessible to effective numerical methods

Measuring the cost and impact of cybercrime in Belgium (BCC): D3.1.2 Risk perception monitor report (2 nd wave, 2017)

Edward Snowden’s testimony about the PRISM program has clarified the intense and widespread practice of surveillance on the Internet and social media by governments. The leaked documents provided by Snowden indicated how the PRISM program had access to users’ data from various ICT companies, such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. According to the whistleblower, the NSA further “impersonated Facebook in an attempt to trick users into downloading malicious code in its attempt to install malware on millions of computers which gives NSA control over users’ computers” (“NSA posed as Facebook,” 2014). The recent attack of the ransomware dubbed Wanna cry had victimisation rates of more than 200.000 computers in more than 150 computers and 10.000 organizations, it affected several hospitals, governmental agencies and private companies (Liptak, 2017). It took Equifax five months to report a hack into their servers that compromised 143.000.000 social security numbers that allowed hackers to pretend to be any of the victims in any given circumstance, such as the request of a new visa card (Lynley, 2017). These are just some examples to show that citizens, businesses and governments are often targeted and impacted by what has been labelled as cybercrime. The booming of Internet technology (IT) creates many opportunities and permeates almost all aspects of our daily life (World Economic Forum, 2015). Today we live in a networked society with cloud computing, online transactions and other new interactions made possible by internet technology (Bendovschi, 2015). Unfortunately, IT also facilitates existing and new threats such as cybercrime (Tsakalidis & Vergidis, 2017). Cybercrime is an umbrella term for different online threats such as malware, scams, hacking and surveillance It can come as no surprise that cybercrime is growing globally (Interpol, 2017) given that estimated internet penetration of 2016 is up to more than 40% globally, for Belgium that is 88,5% (Internet live stats, 2017). This internet-penetration implies that more and more people are exposed to all the risks and threats that are inherent to the online world, cybercrime is one of them (Verdegem, Teerlinck & Vermote, 2015). This study is part of a systematical investigation in Belgium about the costs and impact of cybercrime. The overall goal of this project is to assess the harms and costs of cybercrime on the government, industry and citizens. The latter insights substantiate and guarantee an evidence-based and effective cybersecurity policy, which, in turn, helps to defend all the involved parties. Different research departments from the KU Leuven and the Ugent are involved in this project: the KU Leuven Centre for IT and IP Law (CiTiP) and the KU Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC) as coordinator of the project, the KU Leuven imec-Distrinet Research Group, the KU Leuven imec-COSIC Research Group and the UGent imec-MICT. The current study focusses on Belgian citizens and their online practices in order to describe the cost and impact of cybercrime. Specifically, we aim to demystify the process to protection and identify core target groups for risk communication by means of quantitative research. Our research consists of two separate but consecutive survey waves (as described in Work Package 3). The first wave of WP3 has been undertaken by imec-MICT as is the second and last wave. The first wave consisted of a large-scale quantitative survey (n=1033) which was conducted in the first quarter of 2015. The current wave consists of a follow-up survey in the last quarter of 2017 (n=1258). These two waves give us the possibility to compare results of the 2015 survey with the 2017 survey and thus compare the online practices of the average Belgian citizen over time. The research leading to these results has received funding from the BRAIN-be research program of the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO) under grant agreement number BR/132/A4/BCC. In addition, we would like to thank the different partners in the BCC-project for their input and support. Lastly, we want to thank the respondents who filled in our surveys

Social influencers, Instapods en het nieuwsoverzicht-algoritme van Instagram.

This study amplifies the voice of social influencers and the challenges they face. We specifically look into the facilitating role of the newsfeed algorithm in Instagram. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted with women social influencers between the age of 18 and 29. The results show how these influencers experience many negative side effects that are caused by the news-feed algorithm. In line with Bucher (2012) we argue trough algorithmic restructuring of information flows, visibility has become a privilege on social media which imposes a 'threat of invisiblity' on the part of social influencers. Our conversations with influencers show how the growth of their profile does not reflect the energy and time they have invested. To cope with the latter they participate in so-called 'Instapods'. In the discussion we further outline how algorithmic obscurity and the practices in Instapods are at odds with the authentic role social influencers attribute themselves

Sperm preparation for ART

The onset of clinical assisted reproduction, a quarter of a century ago, required the isolation of motile spermatozoa. As the indication of assisted reproduction shifted from mere gynaecological indications to andrological indications during the years, this urged andrological research to understand the physiology of male germ cell better and develop more sophisticated techniques to separate functional spermatozoa from those that are immotile, have poor morphology or are not capable to fertilize oocytes. Initially, starting from simple washing of spermatozoa, separation techniques, based on different principles like migration, filtration or density gradient centrifugation evolved. The most simple and cheapest is the conventional swim-up procedure. A more sophisticated and most gentle migration method is migration-sedimentation. However, its yield is relatively small and the technique is therefore normally only limited to ejaculates with a high number of motile spermatozoa. Recently, however, the method was also successfully used to isolate spermatozoa for intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). Sperm separation methods that yield a higher number of motile spermatozoa are glass wool filtration or density gradient centrifugation with different media. Since Percoll(®) as a density medium was removed from the market in 1996 for clinical use in the human because of its risk of contamination with endotoxins, other media like IxaPrep(®), Nycodenz, SilSelect(®), PureSperm(®) or Isolate(®) were developed in order to replace Percoll(®). Today, an array of different methods is available and the selection depends on the quality of the ejaculates, which also includes production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) by spermatozoa and leukocytes. Ejaculates with ROS production should not be separated by means of conventional swim-up, as this can severely damage the spermatozoa. In order to protect the male germ cells from the influence of ROS and to stimulate their motility to increase the yield, a number of substances can be added to the ejaculate or the separation medium. Caffeine, pentoxifylline and 2-deoxyadenosine are substances that were used to stimulate motility. Recent approaches to stimulate spermatozoa include bicarbonate, metal chelators or platelet-activating factor (PAF). While the use of PAF already resulted in pregnancies in intrauterine insemination, the suitability of the other substances for the clinical use still needs to be tested. Finally, the isolation of functional spermatozoa from highly viscous ejaculates is a special challenge and can be performed enzymatically to liquefy the ejaculate. The older method, by which the ejaculate is forcefully aspirated through a narrow-gauge needle, should be abandoned as it can severely damage spermatozoa, thus resulting in immotile sperm

Evolution of Magnetic fields in Bok globules?

We study the influence and structure of the magnetic field in the early phases of low-mass star formation using polarization maps of Bok globules at a wavelength of 850micron, obtained with the Submillimeter Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). We discuss observations of the following sources: CB26 - a small globule with a nearly dispersed dense core and a young and large circumstellar disk, CB54 - a large globule with a massive dense core and a deeply embedded young stellar cluster, and B335, CB230, and CB244 - three nearby, relatively isolated small globules with low-mass protostellar cores. We find strongly aligned polarization vectors in the case of CB26, B335, and CB230, while the vector orientations in the case of CB54 and CB244 are more or less randomly distributed. The degree of polarization, amounting to several percent, was found to decrease toward the center in each source. Assuming dichroic emission by aligned non-spherical grains as the polarization mechanism, where the magnetic field plays a role in the alignment process, we derive magnetic field strengths and structures from the observed polarization patterns. We compare the magnetic field topology with the morphology and outflow directions of the globules. In the Class 0 sources B335, CB230, and CB244, the magnetic field is oriented almost perpendicular to the ouflow direction. In contrast, the inclination between outflow axis and magnetic field direction is much more moderate (36deg) in the more evolved Class I source CB26.Comment: to be published in Conf. Proc. "Magnetic Fields and Star Formation

Interdisciplinary three-step strategy to treat aortic stenosis and coronary artery disease in a patient with end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Background: Valvular aortic stenosis is a common disease in the elderly, often in multimorbid patients. It is often associated with coronary artery disease and peripheral artery disease. In this situation, the risk of conventional open-heart surgery is too high, and other treatment strategies have to be evaluated. Case report: A 79-year-old female patient with severe aortic stenosis, coronary artery disease and end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease suffering from dyspnea at rest and permanently dependent on oxygen was treated in three steps. Firstly, her pulmonary infection was treated with antibiotics for 7 days. Then, the left anterior descending artery was stented (bare-metal stent). In the same session, valvuloplasty of the aortic valve was performed. She was sent to rehabilitation to improve her pulmonary condition and took clopidogrel for 4 weeks. Finally, she underwent transapical aortic valve replacement. She was released to rehabilitation on postoperative day 12. Conclusion: A combination of modern interventional and minimally invasive surgical techniques to treat aortic stenosis and coronary heart disease can be a viable option for multimorbid patients with extremely high risk in conventional open-heart surgery

Model for the optimal localisation of linear landscape elements based on functional assessment

In the last decades a multitude of assessment methods for landscape functions have been developed (Marks et al. 1989, Bastian and Schreiber 1994). The methods include detailed knowledge from the fields of different sciences and result in maps of landscape risk surfaces. GIS-based models are used to analyse and to asses the landscape functions. New ways are explored by the combination of mathematical methods and spatial data. The assessment of landscape functions is a suitable approach in land uses decision making, especially if a number of different and opposing function assessments are available for the same region. For opposing aims, a method for the integration of land uses in decision making is essential. The authors have developed the framework on multi-criteria landscape assessment and optimisation (MULBO) (Meyer and Grabaum 2003, Meyer 2006, Meyer and Grabaum 2008). MULBO offers a powerful alternative to the common structured aggregation procedures used in landscape planning. The assessment methods integrated as tools in MULBO are validated (Gruehn 2005). The MULBO-framework focuses on the objectification of the planning process by the integration of multiple assessment results into optimal compromises considering different functions of a landscape and into future land use pattern mosaics or distributions. So far the scenario approach of MULBO for local greenway planning has calculated new spatial distributed land uses. The integration of linear landscape elements into MULBO is now realised. Linear landscape elements are of high impact on cultural landscapes e.g. for water river catchment problems, wind erosion, biodiversity and recreation purposes