Audience Preferences of News Stories on Social Media ‎

This study aims at understanding the kind of news stories social media users mostly like and comment on by examining 10 Arabic language Facebook pages run by different news organizations that posted over 85,000 news stories, generating over 26.4 million likes and 1.9 million comments. The top 100 most commented on and liked news stories from each news organization are categorized into 22 news topics. The examination of 2,000 news stories shows that there are no significant differences between liking and commenting on Facebook news. Online users mostly prefer to read news topics on local order, politics, human interest, and international politics stories when it comes to liking stories. In relation to commenting on news stories, the results show that online users mostly prefer news topics on local and regional politics, local order, and human interest.

Valley of the Wolves as Representative of Turkish Popular Attitudes toward Iraq

Abstract In 2006, the Turkish film, Valley of the Wolves (Kurtlar Vadisi-Irak) (Serdar Akar, 2006), was released to audiences in Turkey and Europe. Costing $10 million, it was the most costly production in the history of Turkish cinema, breaking all box office records in the country. A fantastical account of a Turkish victory over a fictional US invasion of the country, Valley of the Wolves has been interpreted as a reaction to the ‘Sack Incident’ (‘çuval olayı’) of July 2003, in which eleven Turkish soldiers were hooded and arrested in northern Iraq shortly after the United States invasion. The film’s title hence refers to a dark and dangerous place where howling and vicious ‘wolves’—namely Americans and Kurds—are gathered. This paper argues that Valley of the Wolves confirms a reemergence of 1960s Turkish industry (Yeşilçam) films which emphasized the historical conflict between Western and Islamic values. It discusses the extent to which Valley of the Wolves reflects popular Turkish attitudes toward the US war on Iraq, and it analyzes the film’s projection of Turkish humiliation, anger, and frustration following the Sack Incident. The paper also addresses how Valley of the Wolves engages US–Turkish relations and Turkish concerns over current Iraq-related politics, especially the US–Kurdish alliance, the establishment of an independent Kurdistan, Turkmen and the issue of Kirkuk, US violations of international law in Iraq, and the conflict between Islam and ChristianityValley of the Wolves as Representative of Turkish Popular Attitudes toward Ira

Assessing abdominal aorta narrowing using computational fluid dynamics

This paper investigates the effect of developing arterial blockage at the abdominal aorta on the blood pressure waves at an externally accessible location suitable for invasive measurements such as the brachial and the femoral arteries. Arterial blockages are created surgically within the abdominal aorta of healthy Wistar rats to create narrowing resemblance conditions. Blood pressure is measured using a catheter inserted into the right femoral artery. Measurements are taken at the baseline healthy condition as well as at four different severities (20, 50, 80 and 100 %) of arterial blockage. In vivo and in vitro measurements of the lumen diameter and wall thickness are taken using magnetic resonance imaging and microscopic techniques, respectively. These data are used to validate a 3D computational fluid dynamics model which is developed to generalize the outcomes of this work and to determine the arterial stress and strain under the blockage conditions. This work indicates that an arterial blockage in excess of 20 % of the lumen diameter significantly influences the pressure wave and reduces the systolic blood pressure at the right femoral artery. High wall shear stresses and low circumferential strains are also generated at the blockage site

Biometric identification and recognition for IRIS using Failure Rejection Rate (FRR) / Musab Ahmed Mohammed Ali Al-Rawi

Iris recognition is reckoned as one of the most reliable biometrics for identification purpose in terms of reliability and accuracy. Hence, the objectives of this research are new algorithms development significantly for iris segmentation specifically the proposed Fusion of Profile and Mask Technique (FPM) specifically in getting the actual center of the pupil with high level of accuracy prior to iris localization task, followed by a particular enhancement in iris normalization that is the application of quarter size of an iris image (instead of processing a whole or half size of an iris image) and for better precision and faster recognition with the robust Support Vector Machine (SVM) as classifier. Further aim of this research is the integration of cancelable biometrics feature in the proposed iris recognition technique via non-invertible transformation which determines the feature transformation-based template protection techniques security. Therefore, it is significant to formulate the noninvertibility measure to circumvent the possibility of adversary having the capability in guessing the original biometric providing that the transformed template is obtained. At any process of recognition stage, the biometric data is protected and also whenever there is a compromise to any information in the database it will be on the cancelable biometric template merely without affecting the original biometric information

Political Memes and Fake News Discourses on Instagram

Political memes have been previously studied in different contexts, but this study fills a gap in literature by employing a mixed method to provide insight into the discourses of fake news on Instagram. The author collected more than 550,000 Instagram posts sent by over 198,000 unique users from 24 February 2012 to 21 December 2018, using the hashtag #fakenews as a search term. The study uses topic modelling to identify the most recurrent topics that are dominant on the platform, while the most active users are identified to understand the nature of the online communities that discuss fake news. In addition, the study offers an analysis of visual metadata that accompanies Instagram images. The findings indicate that Instagram has become a weaponized toxic platform, and the largest community of active users are supporters of the US President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, mostly trolling liberal mainstream media especially CNN, while often aligning themselves with the far-right. On the other hand, a much smaller online community attempts to troll Trump and the Republicans. Theoretically, the study relies on political memes literature and argues that Instagram has become weaponized through an ongoing ‘Meme War,’ for many members in the two main online communities troll and attack each other to exert power on the platform

Frequency response of lung

Respiratory disorders are common in both developed and developing countries. Many of these disorders are directly connected to the constrictions in the airways of the human respiratory system. Asthma and bronchitis are typical examples that arise from the constriction of airways. Asthma is a respiratory disease that is characterised by chronic inflammation, hypersensitivity, and obstruction of the airways. During an asthma attack contraction of airway smooth muscle and mucous production cause a reduction of the bronchial diameter, significantly changing the airflow resistance in and out of the lungs

Topic modelling of Far-right Canadians’ tweets on COVID-19

In this study, I empirically explore the public discourses around the pandemic by far-fight Canadians. I collected 134,739 tweets in September and October 2021 just a few months before the Truckers’ protest in Ottawa. These tweets were posted by 14 Canadian far-right sympathizers or supporters, representing all the available tweets (Table 1). Then, I used a Python program to search for words like “*virus*”, “covid*”, “corona*”, and extracted 2,555 tweets. Next, I automatedly analyzed the tweets based on topic modelling, which is a machine learning method (Table 2)

Facebook and virtual nationhood: social media and the Arab Canadians community

This article focuses on the study of online communities and introduces an empirical study of social media production involving an online group called “Arab Canadians”. The study builds on Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’ and argues that Facebook provides the platform for an online nation in which users, whether Canadians or prospective immigrants, interact and exchange ideas about a country whose imagined concept varies from one user to another. Facebook here is a virtual nation that offers the community members an imagined sense of identity and belonging which they aspire to get. The results of the study revealed that the majority of comments carry highly positive sentiments towards Canada and its people, yet there is evidence that some comments are moderated. The study concludes that the Facebook administrator functions as a centralized gatekeeper who filters online chatter and leads the discussion to a certain direction. Building on the theory of networked gatekeeping, the study argues that vertical and horizontal flows of communication shape the online debate that takes place in this virtual space. Through a close analysis of these practices, the article sheds light on the role of social media in shaping online identities constructed around virtual nationhood

Bots as Active News Promoters: A Digital Analysis of COVID-19 Tweets

In this study, we examined the activities of automated social media accounts or bots that tweet or retweet referencing #COVID-19 and #COVID19. From a total sample of over 50 million tweets, we used a mixed method to extract more than 185,000 messages posted by 127 bots. Our findings show that the majority of these bots tweet, retweet and mention mainstream media outlets, promote health protection and telemedicine, and disseminate breaking news on the number of casualties and deaths caused by COVID-19. We argue that some of these bots are motivated by financial incentives, while other bots actively support the survivalist movement by emphasizing the need to prepare for the pandemic and learn survival skills. We only found a few bots that showed some suspicious activity probably due to the fact that our dataset was limited to two hashtags often used by official health bodies and academic communities

The gendered dimensions of the anti-mask and anti-lockdown movement on social media

This paper examines the anti-mask and anti-lockdown online movement in connection to the COVID-19 pandemic. To combat the spread of the coronavirus, health officials around the world urged and/or mandated citizens to wear facemasks and adopt physical distancing measures. These health policies and guidelines have become highly politicized in some parts of the world, often discussed in association with freedom of choice and independence. We downloaded references to the anti-mask and anti-lockdown social media posts using 24 search terms. From a total of 4209 social media posts, the researchers manually filtered the explicit visual and textual content that is related to discussions of different genders. We used multimodal discourse analysis (MDM) which analyzes diverse modes of communicative texts and images and focuses on appeals to emotions and reasoning. Using the MDM approach, we analysed posts taken from Facebook and Instagram from active anti-mask and anti-lockdown users, and we identified three main discourses around the gendered discussion of the anti-mask movement including hypermasculine, sexist and pejorative portrayals of “Karen”, and appropriating freedom and feminism discourses. A better understanding of how social media users evoke gendered discourses to spread anti-mask and anti-lockdown messages can help researchers identify differing reactions toward pandemic measures