Best of both worlds or refusal to comply? The rich kids of Tehran on Instagram

ABSTRACT

This article offers a textual analysis and semiotic reading of the Rich Kids of Tehran's (RKOT’s) Instagram page. Contributing to scholarship on Iranian youth media practices, this article interrogates how the RKOT navigate urban and rural space to engage in everyday processes of resistance against global and local systemic oppression. Grounding their visual representations on Instagram in historical and cultural context, the author questions how and when quotidian actions are transformed into political transgressions when posted on social media. This article emphasizes the RKOT's agency in shaping their brand by analyzing representations of gender performance, intertextuality, and national identity on Instagram.     

Using the Information Structure Model to Compare Profile-Based Information Filtering Systems

In the IR field it is clear that the value of a system depends on the cost and benefit profiles of its users. It would seem obvious that different users would prefer different systems. In the TREC-9 filtering track, systems are evaluated by a utility measure specifying a given cost and benefit. However, in the study of decision systems it is known that, in some cases, one system may be unconditionally better than another. In this paper we employ a decision theoretic approach to find conditions under which an Information Filtering (IF) system is unconditionally superior to another for all users regardless of their cost and benefit profiles.It is well known that if two IF systems have equal precision the system with better recall will be preferred by all users. Similarly, with equal recall, better precision is universally preferred. We confirm these known results and discover an unexpected dominance relation in which a system with lower recall will be universally preferred provided its precision is sufficiently higher.     

Measuring Search Engine Quality

The effectiveness of twenty public search engines is evaluated using TREC-inspired methods and a set of 54 queries taken from real Web search logs. The World Wide Web is taken as the test collection and a combination of crawler and text retrieval system is evaluated. The engines are compared on a range of measures derivable from binary relevance judgments of the first seven live results returned. Statistical testing reveals a significant difference between engines and high intercorrelations between measures. Surprisingly, given the dynamic nature of the Web and the time elapsed, there is also a high correlation between results of this study and a previous study by Gordon and Pathak. For nearly all engines, there is a gradual decline in precision at increasing cutoff after some initial fluctuation. Performance of the engines as a group is found to be inferior to the group of participants in the TREC-8 Large Web task, although the best engines approach the median of those systems. Shortcomings of current Web search evaluation methodology are identified and recommendations are made for future improvements. In particular, the present study and its predecessors deal with queries which are assumed to derive from a need to find a selection of documents relevant to a topic. By contrast, real Web search reflects a range of other information need types which require different judging and different measures.     

Accurate assessment of the brake torque on a rope-braked cycle ergometer

Sports Engineering - A Monark cycle ergometer is a device globally used in physiological studies to measure the work and energy levels of exercising humans. In this paper a rope-braked cycle...