Captive But Mobile: Privacy Concerns and Remedies for the Mobile Environment

We use the legal framework of captive audience to examine the Federal Trade Commission 2012 privacy guidelines as applied to mobile marketing. We define captive audiences as audiences without functional opt-out mechanisms to avoid situations of coercive communication. By analyzing the current mobile marketing ecosystem, we show that the Federal Trade Commission's privacy guidelines inspired by the Canadian “privacy by design” paradigm fall short of protecting consumers against invasive mobile marketing in at least three respects: (a) The guidelines overlook how, in the context of data monopolies, the combination of location and personal history data threatens autonomy of choice; (b) the guidelines focus exclusively on user control over data sharing, while ignoring control over communicative interaction; and (c) the reliance on market mechanisms to produce improved privacy policies may actually increase opt-out costs for consumers. We conclude by discussing two concrete proposals for improvement: a “home mode” for mobile privacy and target-specific privacy contract negotiation.     

Cross-cultural comparisons of child-reported emotional and physical abuse: rates, risk factors and psychosocial symptoms

OBJECTIVES: This study was designed to assess the incidence of child emotional and physical abuse, associated risk factors and psychosocial symptoms in a cross-cultural comparison between post-communist bloc countries. Method: One-thousand one-hundred forty-five children ages 10-14 from Latvia (N = 297), Lithuania ( N = 300), Macedonia (N = 302), and Moldova (N = 246) participated in the study. They completed questionnaires assessing their experience of emotional or physical abuse, and provided information about family risk-factors and psychosocial symptoms, including PTSD-related symptoms. RESULTS: Incidence rates of maltreatment differed by country, as did levels of reported psychosocial symptoms. Incidence of emotional and physical abuse differed by region, with higher levels of abuse reported in the rural regions. In all four countries, a similar association between emotional/physical abuse and psychosocial symptoms was found, with the uniformly largest correlation between emotional abuse and anger. When examining the combined scores of emotional and physcial abuse, even higher correlation's were found, particularly in relation to anger and depression. In all four countries, parental overuse of alcohol was associated with emotional and/or physical abuse. CONCLUSIONS: Findings show differences by country in child-reported levels of emotional and physical abuse, but similar patterns of correlation with psychosocial symptoms and the risk factors of parental alcohol overuse and living in a rural area.     

Building a Trauma-Informed Workforce Capacity and Legacy

Social workers encounter trauma in a majority of the populations they serve. It is therefore essential to train social work students to understand the impact of trauma, to assess trauma history and symptoms, and to effectively intervene with children and families. This article presents 3 qualitative research narratives that provide an in-depth analysis of factors contributing to successful implementation of an innovative trauma-informed educational model. The narratives identify common themes related to student knowledge and field readiness; personal and system context; organizational leadership; and vision, training, and partnerships/collaborations.     

Word sense discrimination in information retrieval: A spectral clustering-based approach

Word sense ambiguity has been identified as a cause of poor precision in information retrieval (IR) systems. Word sense disambiguation and discrimination methods have been defined to help systems choose which documents should be retrieved in relation to an ambiguous query. However, the only approaches that show a genuine benefit for word sense discrimination or disambiguation in IR are generally supervised ones. In this paper we propose a new unsupervised method that uses word sense discrimination in IR. The method we develop is based on spectral clustering and reorders an initially retrieved document list by boosting documents that are semantically similar to the target query. For several TREC ad hoc collections we show that our method is useful in the case of queries which contain ambiguous terms. We are interested in improving the level of precision after 5, 10 and 30 retrieved documents (P@5, P@10, P@30) respectively. We show that precision can be improved by 8% above current state-of-the-art baselines. We also focus on poor performing queries.     

Backstepping design for controlling electrohydraulic servos

The backstepping technique is one of the tools which provides control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) and, therefore, control laws for automatic systems. In this paper, the backstepping design for position and force nonlinear electrohydraulic servos is investigated. Three control laws ensuring the asymptotic stability of references tracking are obtained by constructing CLFs on the errors concerning the state variables and theirs desired values. The possibility of converting a position servo into a force servo, with only minimal hard modification, is proved. An approach based on partitioning the state system into two subsystems—a first one stable, and a second one taken as framework of control synthesis by backstepping technique—was developed and used. Using as reference point a flight controls hydromechanical servo, numerical simulations were reported from viewpoint of servo time constant performance. Certain conjectures, concerning the behaviour of systems mathematical models, in connection with mathematical methodologies of control synthesis operating on them, are finally stressed.     

Surface changes upon high-frequency plasma treatment of heritage photographs

Recent research, concerning the application of high-frequency cold plasma in restoration and preservation of the cultural heritage, has included the objects derived from organic materials, which are highly sensitive to microclimate factors. Historical photographs made on paper base and covered with various emulsions belong to this category of heritage objects, and make the purpose of the present study. Plasma treatment was used to enhance the aesthetic aspect of the photographs by a cleaning treatment involving either physical and/or chemical etching, which did not cause major physicochemical changes on the plasma-treated surface. The photographs before and after plasma treatments were analysed by optical and atomic force microscopy, scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray microanalysis, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, colour, gloss and contact angle measurements.     

The decentralisation of the school system in post‐communist Romania

Following the fall of the Iron Curtain in December 1989, the Romanian system of education has started a deep process of reconstruction that asked for a comprehensive package of reforms among which decentralisation. Broadly the paper aims to make a contribution to the emerging knowledge base about the realities of restructuring of post‐communist education systems and the impact that governance through markets is having on public services. The paper focuses on presenting and discussing the attempts to decentralise pre‐higher education in Romania in considering the role of the state and governance in the provision of public services and the introduction of market mechanisms in education. The decentralisation of education has been proposed by the then Minister of Education Andrei Marga. Although decentralisation in pre‐higher education has been piloted for three academic years and the policy documents that introduced it have been permanently amended and updated, more than a decade later, this reform has not reached its aims mainly due to the various changes on the political scene. However, provided that no major amendments will be made to the Laws of National Education (2009), decentralisation in pre‐higher education will be a reality from 2010–11.