Circling COVID: Making in the Time of a Pandemic

The following is an account of some current Indigenous artistic trends and responses during the COVID‑19 pandemic. The pandemic has resulted in Indigenous artists adapting social media to maintain COVIDdisrupted knowledge networks about traditional making. In so doing, they have reimagined how to continue links within and beyond their own cultural communities. Art has become both an outlet and a connection to neighbours, friends, and strangers across geographic boundaries. Indigenous textile artists are refashioning their art and materials to maintain and reflect contemporary Indigenous issues and values that emphasize their community and reflect survivance, all while safely at a distance. The artists highlighted and discussed in this article include Dene, Métis, and Inuvialuit women with whom I have worked and who have contributed to my research in the Northwest Territories (NWT), as well as other Indigenous artists from across North America well known for their creative work. Because the coronavirus has all but eliminated non-essential travel to the NWT, the information that is presented has been developed through online exchanges with these women and by observing the artists’ public social media accounts over the course of six months.

An Algorithm for Concurrency control in Transactions for E-Wallet

It is a period of online exchanges, managing daily installments through e-wallet for shopping, paying to merchant, also to fulfill all the liquid cash requirement through wallet money with no physical notes or currency involved for transaction, wallet exchange help to web advancements. The cash move and gross repayment is conceivable in only hardly any seconds. The web innovations have been utilizing and still new idea dependent on past encounters are currently coming into exploration and confab. A lot of research papers for wallet creation and inner cycle are accessible. Uncommonly, wallet measure through various methodologies like BC (Bank Channel) Wallet, RBI Wallet, Domestic Pay Service Wallet are principle thought in this exploration work. The exchange cycle faces numerous issues, these issues influence the backer, bank, client regarding misfortune in business. Whereas the client is additionally unsatisfied and unable to do finish wallet procedures. This paper presents a recreation examination of the versatility on simultaneous exchange handling over a combination of portable and fixed exchanges, because of moderate organization availability and down worker might be a similar exchange prepared twofold because of which RBI rules infringement happen and backer, client, bank, specialist all is grieved and misfortune the real business. This paper execution normally utilizes conflict location dependent on the Hidden label bases exchange accommodation through which copying any exchange is preposterous, it ensures that every exchange has prepared just a solitary path under RBI rules or wallet terms.

Grammar instruction through multinational telecollaboration for pre-service teachers

Recognizing the importance of multinational telecollaboration and form-focused instruction in computer-assisted language learning teacher education, this article investigates teaching English grammar through a seven-week-long telecollaborative project with 41 pre-service language teachers from the United States (US), Poland, and China. The telecollaboration was a pedagogical intervention in which the US participants taught grammar to their non-native-speaker peers. Specifically, the study aimed to trace pre-service teachers’ grammar instruction techniques applied in the communication-oriented context of online exchanges and responses to this instruction, the grammar forms attended to in the exchanges, and the participants’ evaluations of the usefulness of telecollaboration for teaching and learning grammar. Utilizing data from the participants’ emails and results of a post-project survey, this mixed methods study reveals that (1) the implicit technique of modeling was the most frequently applied; (2) the grammatical forms used in both implicit and explicit teaching reflected the communicative orientation of the exchanges; (3) the levels of uptake (i.e. attempts to follow the models provided in the input), and the forms attended to by the learners, reflected their proficiency levels and linguistic background; and (4) participants reported positive opinions about the value of telecollaboration in grammar instruction and in teacher training. The data thus underscore the benefits of online exchanges in giving prospective teachers hands-on experience with communicative grammar teaching.

When Bots and Users Meet: Automated Manipulation and the New Culture of Online Suspicion

This article examines the growing public awareness of deceptive online campaigns where automated networks of social media bots are deployed to manipulate public opinion, disrupt debates, and stoke intercommunal strife. Drawing on a grounded thematic analysis of discussion threads that appeared on Israeli politicians’ Facebook pages during the lead-up to Israel’s national elections in April 2019, I argue that users’ frequent allusions and reactions to the presence of suspected manipulative agents allow these users to negotiate, challenge, and raise competing claims regarding whether certain prominent voices on social media are reflective of actual public opinion. As such, this article contributes to the emerging body of literature about online manipulation, which in recent years has focused mostly on examining the nature and scope of deceptive bot campaigns around the globe and on devising new techniques for detecting and countering the activities of fake social media accounts. The present investigation, in contrast, seeks to shift attention away from bots themselves and toward their intended targets: ordinary users and their discourse. In so doing, it aims to contribute to and expand the study of how automated manipulation is shaping contemporary social media environments by asking: What do ordinary users have to say about the deployment of political bots? How does users’ growing awareness of deceptive bot campaigns inform their interpretations of their own online experiences? And how do users leverage claims about bot activity in online exchanges with others to advance their political agendas?

Towards Rail-Road Online Exchange Platforms in EU-Freight Transportation Markets: An Analysis of Matching Supply and Demand in Multimodal Services

The European Union (EU) is confronted with too low a share of inland rail freight transport. The implementation of two-sided online exchanges for rail-road freight transport could increase this share. However, such exchanges focusing on the EU market are mainly designed for single modes of transport. Their matching of supply and demand for multimodal services, especially including rail, is still in its infancy. This paper applies a maturity growth framework to speed up the implementation of such multimodal online exchanges. The framework integrates insights from industrial organization theory, platform economy theory, and maturity growth theory. Online exchanges, summarized in a new taxonomy, are compared to study their practices on matching supply with demand on the exchange, especially for multimodal services. Data is collected from case studies, exchange websites and semi-structured interviews. The analysis shows the emergence of new market actors and business models, including digital freight forwarders. These offer a variety of transport mode solutions for EU inland and EU related global freight transport. Maturity in matching supply and demand appears to result from clear objectives to provide benefits to the exchange participants, notably by digitizing the data for transaction completion and providing real time support for operational issues. In this context of rising online exchanges, especially in road and global multimodal transport (air, ocean, and road), the competition to capture a fragmented freight market seems to steadily increase. A similar maturity analysis of exchanges could not be found.

Algorithmic ethnography, during and after COVID-19

Social scientists are increasingly turning to digital interactions as a primary source of qualitative data. Online activities in turn typically take place on algorithmically mediated platforms, which shape what people do and say in crucial ways. Here, I offer a toolkit for what I call algorithmic ethnography, that is, the ethnographic study of how computational systems structure online activities. First, scholars need to follow the data and take into consideration the tracking strategies, monetization systems, and business models of the platforms where online interactions unfold. Second, ethnographers should focus on the details of algorithmic sorting, since platforms typically have more content than they can display and thus rely on algorithmic procedures to personalize their pages. Third, ethnographers should include metrics in their fieldwork and study their effects on interactions, hierarchies, and representations. Together, these angles afford a fine-grained understanding of the computational texture of online exchanges.

Blasphemy and Apostasy in Islam

Is it lawful to shed the blood of a man or a woman who insults the Prophet Muhammad? Does the Qur’an stipulate a worldly punishment for apostates? Beginning with a genealogy of religious freedom in contemporary Islam, this book tells the gripping story of Rafiq Taqi, an Azerbaijani journalist and writer, who was condemned to death by an Iranian cleric for a blasphemous news article in 2006. Delving into the most sacred sources for all Muslims – the Qur’an and Hadith – Mohsen Kadivar explores the subject of blasphemy and apostasy from the perspective of Shi’a jurisprudence to articulate a polarisation between secularism and extremist religious orthodoxy. In a series of online exchanges, he debates the case with Muhammad Jawad Fazel, the son of Grand Ayatollah Fazel Lankarani who issued the fatwa pronouncing death penalty on Taqi. While disapproving of the journalist’s writings, Kadivar takes a defensive stance against vigilante murders and asks whether death for apostasy reflects the true spirit of Islam. This book presents a back-and-forth debate between modern two Shi’a jurists (one conservative, one reformist) that locates the exact points of controversy surrounding apostasy and blasphemy. It engages with the broader subjects of religious freedom and human rights, addressing both secular and religious interests. The author’s extensive new introduction and annotations throughout the text brings the work up-to-date and place it in its academic and public contexts. Finally, the book takes a front-row seat to the debate on blasphemy and apostasy in Islam.