Inflated 3D ConvNet context analysis for violence detection

According to the Wall Street Journal, one billion surveillance cameras will be deployed around the world by 2021. This amount of information can be hardly managed by humans. Using a Inflated 3D ConvNet as backbone, this paper introduces a novel automatic violence detection approach that outperforms state-of-the-art existing proposals. Most of those proposals consider a pre-processing step to only focus on some regions of interest in the scene, i.e., those actually containing a human subject. In this regard, this paper also reports the results of an extensive analysis on whether and how the context can affect or not the adopted classifier performance. The experiments show that context-free footage yields substantial deterioration of the classifier performance (2% to 5%) on publicly available datasets. However, they also demonstrate that performance stabilizes in context-free settings, no matter the level of context restriction applied. Finally, a cross-dataset experiment investigates the generalizability of results obtained in a single-collection experiment (same dataset used for training and testing) to cross-collection settings (different datasets used for training and testing).

Why companies succeed or fail: corporate cycles and firm function in tandem

Purpose This paper aims to underscore the need for developing a model of corporate cycles, which can explain how corporations rise, decline and fall in the marketplace. Design/methodology/approach This is a conceptual study that draws on prior theoretical and empirical insights of the entrepreneurial, managerial and social functions of the firm to develop a model of corporate cycles. Findings Firms that pass the test of the market and live for a long time, undergo cycles, expansions and contractions, driven by successes and failures in the way they configure and execute their entrepreneurial, managerial and social, functions. Practical implications A model of corporate cycles can explain how momentum rises and falls on Wall Street. It can also help predict revenue growth, a key variable in equity valuation models. Originality/value The originality of this study stems from a constructive synthesis of different concepts and theories of the firm to explain firms’ growth, decline and fall in the marketplace.

Media Broadcast of the Image of Russia in the Dichotomy of “Authorities – Opposition” in American, British and Spanish Media

This article is devoted to the study of the media broadcast of the image of Russia in the dichotomy “authorities – opposition” in the American, British and Spanish media. The work identifies the most frequent thematic dominants in the creation of the image of Russia in the dichotomy “authorities – opposition” in American, British, and Spanish articles. The research is carried out on the material of articles taken from modern American (“The New York Times”, “The Wall Street Journal”, “The Washington Post”), British (“The Guardian”, “The Independent”, “The Times” Financial Times) and Spanish media (El País, La Vanguardia, El Mundo, ABC). The purpose of the work is achieved by applying a comparative method and a complex method of lexical-semantic and stylistic analysis. The relevance of the research under study is determined not only by the huge influence of the American, British, and Spanish media on the mass consciousness, not only by the interest of Western media in positioning Russia in the modern world in political communication, but also by the lack of study of the problem of broadcasting the image of Russia created by journalists in the dichotomy “power – opposition” in modern American, British and Spanish media. We identified the main thematic dominants from 07.2020 to 09.2021: 1) the image of the leader of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) Alexei Navalny; 2) the image of political prisoners; 3) unauthorized rallies. An analysis of the selected 75 articles from the American, British and Spanish media confirmed the hypothesis that since August 2020, since the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, there have been more cases of mentioning the media event aspect of “power and opposition in Russia. Evaluative and emotional connotations prevail, which create an image of authorities and opposition.

Il diritto alla città ribelle di David Harvey

Recensione di Città ribelli: i movimenti urbani dalla Comune di Parigi a Occupy Wall Street