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.     

Invisible children? The need for support groups for siblings of disabled children

Previous research and first-hand experience suggest that a child with a disability can have a profound effect on family life. Although the need for sibling support has been acknowledged in legislation, the implications for non-disabled siblings remain unclear. In this article, Angie Naylor, lecturer in psychology, and Phil Prescott, senior lecturer in childhood and youth studies, both based at Edge Hill, review a number of key themes emerging from the literature on sibling support. They go on to report the findings from an in-depth study of one sibling support group. The work was carried out in partnership with Barnardo's in the north-west of England and involved setting up a sibling support group, in response to an analysis of local need, and evaluating its impact. This research indicates a clear need for further service provision to meet the needs of the siblings of disabled children who attended the scheme. Angie Naylor and Phil Prescott argue for a reinvigorated debate about the needs of such children and champion the importance of listening to children and valuing what they have to say. The results of this small-scale evaluation project have clear implications for future research and, potentially, for policy and practice.     

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...