Consequences Of Lax Media Ownership Regulation On Freedom And Plurality Of The UK\u27s Fourth Estate

The British media landscape faces a ubiquitous threat, one of both lack of regulation and excessive freedom in terms of concentration and ownership. This article examines the potential effects of unregulated media concentration on political relationships between prominent media owners and the UK government as well as its overall effect on UK citizens’ quality and perception of news

TagAlong: Informal Learning from a Remote Companion with Mobile Perspective Sharing

Questions often arise spontaneously in a curious mind, due to an observation about a new or unknown environment. When an expert is right there, prepared to engage in dialog, this curiosity can be harnessed and converted into highly effective, intrinsically motivated learning. This paper investigates how this kind of situated informal learning can be realized in real-world settings with wearable technologies and the support of a remote learning companion. In particular, we seek to understand how the use of different multimedia communication mediums impacts the quality of the interaction with a remote teacher, and how these remote interactions compare with face-to-face, co-present learning. A prototype system called TagAlong was developed with attention to features that facilitate dialog based on the visual environment. It was developed to work robustly in the wild, depending only on widely-available components and infrastructure. A pilot study was performed to learn about what characteristics are most important for successful interactions, as a basis for further system development and a future full-scale study. We conclude that it is critical for system design to be informed by (i) an analysis of the attentional burdens imposed by the system on both wearer and companion and (ii) a knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of co-present learning.Google Inc. Faculty Research Awar

Feasible Stein-Type and Preliminary Test Estimations in the System Regression Model

Publisher Copyright: © 2023 International Academic PressIn a system of regression models, finding a feasible shrinkage is demanding since the covariance structure is unknown and cannot be ignored. On the other hand, specifying sub-space restrictions for adequate shrinkage is vital. This study proposes feasible shrinkage estimation strategies where the sub-space restriction is obtained from LASSO. Therefore, some feasible LASSO-based Stein-type estimators are introduced, and their asymptotic performance is studied.publishersversionpublishe

The Austrian and Keynesian business cycle theory and its effectiveness to combat recession-A case study in construction industry in United Kingdom

Business cycles are the “ups and downs” in economic activity, defined in terms of periods of expansion or recession. This paper attempted to find out empirical evidence of effectiveness of Austrian and Keynesian theory of business cycle when a country is in recession and how to combat the recession. The study investigates UK economic data from 2003-2013 derived from Trading Economics Website and office of the National Statics UK. This study concludes that in the boom period Keynesian theory is effective as interest rate was low and government spending was high to stimulate demand. In recessionary period it is found that government money supply was very high but production of capital goods was very poor which means Keynesian theory has not been applied. But the recent booming period evidenced that interest rate is low and govt spending high

A high-dimensional counterpart for the ridge estimator in multicollinear situations

The ridge regression estimator is a commonly used procedure to deal with multicollinear data. This paper proposes an estimation procedure for high-dimensional multicollinear data that can be alternatively used. This usage gives a continuous estimate, including the ridge estimator as a particular case. We study its asymptotic performance for the growing dimension, i.e., p→∞ when n is fixed. Under some mild regularity conditions, we prove the proposed estimator’s consistency and derive its asymptotic properties. Some Monte Carlo simulation experiments are executed in their performance, and the implementation is considered to analyze a high-dimensional genetic dataset.The visiting professor program, University of Pretoria, the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa and the Iran National Science Foundation (INSF).https://www.mdpi.com/journal/mathematicsam2022Statistic

COVID-19 Mixed Impact on Hospital Antimicrobial Stewardship Activities: A Qualitative Study in UK-Based Hospitals

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a well-known global threat due to the subsequent increase in antimicrobial usage. Several antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) strategies have been implemented to curb irrational prescribing and reduce the AMR burden. However, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has enormously impacted the healthcare system and jeopardized public health, causing millions of deaths globally. Our semi-structured qualitative study aimed to explore the impact of COVID-19 on AMS activities in the UK hospitals. Seventeen interviews were conducted with health care professionals who were part of AMS teams (consultant medical microbiologists, infectious disease consultants, antimicrobial pharmacists). Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. An inductive thematic framework was adopted to analyse and create the themes. After agreement of the hierarchical framework definition, all transcripts were coded accordingly. Four main themes and 15 sub-themes were identified. These main themes were: (1) AMS activities or strategies before and during the pandemic; (2) challenges to implementing AMS activities before and during the pandemic; (3) information from public authorities on AMS during the pandemic; and (4) new AMS activities/strategies adopted during the pandemic. Staff vacancies, redeploying of AMS staff to other duties and meeting the burden related to the COVID-19 and lack of resources were the most frequently identified contributing factors to withheld AMS activities during the pandemic. However, modifications to the hybrid working environment, i.e., remote or flexible working, allowed for resumption of AMS activities including virtual ward rounds, virtual meetings and other activities. Further research needs to assess the impact of the hybrid delivery system on AMS activities

Estimating internationally imported cases during the early COVID-19 pandemic

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, predictions of international outbreaks were largely based on imported cases from Wuhan, China, potentially missing imports from other cities. We provide a method, combining daily COVID-19 prevalence and flight passenger volume, to estimate importations from 18 Chinese cities to 43 international destinations, including 26 in Africa. Global case importations from China in early January came primarily from Wuhan, but the inferred source shifted to other cities in mid-February, especially for importations to African destinations. We estimate that 10.4 (6.2 - 27.1) COVID-19 cases were imported to these African destinations, which exhibited marked variation in their magnitude and main sources of importation. We estimate that 90% of imported cases arrived between 17 January and 7 February, prior to the first case detections. Our results highlight the dynamic role of source locations, which can help focus surveillance and response efforts

Metronome: adaptive and precise intermittent packet retrieval in DPDK

DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) is arguably today's most employed framework for software packet processing. Its impressive performance however comes at the cost of precious CPU resources, dedicated to continuously poll the NICs. To face this issue, this paper presents Metronome, an approach devised to replace the continuous DPDK polling with a sleep&wake intermittent mode. Metronome revolves around two main innovations. First, we design a microseconds time-scale sleep function, named hr_sleep(), which outperforms Linux' nanosleep() of more than one order of magnitude in terms of precision when running threads with common time-sharing priorities. Then, we design, model, and assess an efficient multi-thread operation which guarantees service continuity and improved robustness against preemptive thread executions, like in common CPU-sharing scenarios, meanwhile providing controlled latency and high polling efficiency by dynamically adapting to the measured traffic load