« T’es un vrai … si … » : aimer sa ville sur une page intergénérationnelle de Facebook

In 2014, French and Belgian Facebook members witnessed the flourishing of numerous Facebook groups dedicated to their town or village that shared the same rallying cry, “You’re a real … if …” This trend spread like wildfire, to the extent that more than 160 towns/villages now have an active page on the social network. Seniors are among the most active members of these groups. In this context, the general objective of our study consisted of identifying the mechanisms through which these pages participate in building a real geo-cultural community in which the oldest Facebook members play a central role. To do so, we performed a content analysis of the 842 posts and 5,314 comments written between December 5, 2014 and January 5, 2015 in the groups representing the cities of Hannut and Jodoigne (Belgium) as well as Fourmies and Harnes (France). Our study concerns the topics of the posts, the types of actions performed by the members and the interactions among them. Our research shows that such groups create intergenerational “affinity spaces,” which debunks common misconceptions about how seniors approach the digital world.Apparus en 2014, les groupes Facebook intitulés « T’es un vrai … si … », qui rassemblent les « vrais » habitants d’une ville, se sont développés comme une traînée de poudre. Aujourd’hui, plus de 160 groupes de ce type existent sur le réseau social. Les seniors font partie des membres les plus actifs de ces groupes. Dès lors, afin d’identifier dans quelle mesure de tels groupes créent une dynamique intergénérationnelle, nous avons procédé à une analyse de contenu des 842 billets et 5 314 commentaires rédigés entre le 5 décembre 2014 et le 5 janvier 2015 au sein des groupes dédiés aux villes de Hannut et Jodoigne (Belgique) ainsi que Fourmies et Harnes (France). Notre analyse porte sur les types de sujets traités, sur les types d’actions réalisées et sur les modes d’interaction. Il en ressort que ces groupes construisent des « espaces d’affinités » intergénérationnels, qui viennent tordre le cou aux représentations souvent négatives du rapport entre le numérique et la « personne âgée ».

Health Risk Information Engagement and Amplification on Social Media

Emerging pandemics call for unique health communication and education strategies in which public health agencies need to satisfy the public’s information needs about possible risks while preventing risk exaggeration and dramatization. As a route to providing a framework for understanding public information behaviors in response to an emerging pandemic, this study examined the characteristics of communicative behaviors of social media audiences in response to Ebola outbreak news. Grounded in the social amplification of risks framework, this study adds to an understanding of information behaviors of online audiences by showing empirical differences in audience engagement with online health information. The data were collected from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Facebook channel. The final data set included 809 CDC posts and 35,916 audience comments. The analysis identified the differences in audience information behaviors in response to an emerging pandemic, Ebola, and health promotion posts. While the CDC had fewer posts on Ebola than health promotion topics, the former received more attention from active page users. Furthermore, audience members who actively engaged with Ebola news had a small overlap with those who engaged with non-Ebola information during the same period. Overall, this study demonstrated that information behavior and audience engagement is topic dependent. Furthermore, audiences who commented on news about an emerging pandemic were homogenous and varied in their degree of information amplification.

Swap Token

Most computer systems use the global page replacement policy based on the LRU principle to reduce page faults. The LRU principle for the global page replacement dictates that a Least Recently Used (LRU) page, or the least active page in a general sense, should be selected for replacement in the entire user memory space. However, in a multiprogramming environment under high memory load, an indiscriminate use of the principle can lead to system thrashing, in which all processes spend most of their time waiting for the disk service instead of making progress. In this chapter, we will rethink the application of the LRU principle on global paging to identify one of root causes for thrashing, and describe a mechanism, named as swap token, to solve the issue. The mechnism is simple in its design and implementation but highly effective in alleviating or removing thrashing. A key feature of the swap token mechanism is that it can distinguish the conditions for an LRU page, or a page that has not been used for relatively long period of time, to be generated and accordingly categorize LRU pages into two types: true and false LRU pages. The mechanism identifies false LRU pages to avoid use of the LRU principle on these pages, in order to remove thrashing. A prototype implementation of the swap token mechanism in the Linux kernel as well as some experiment measurements are presented. The experiment results show that the mechanism can consistently reduce the program execution slowdown in a multiprogramming environment including SPEC2000 programs and other memory-intensive applications by up to 67%. The slowdown reductions mainly come from reductions of up to 95% of total page faults during program interactions. This chapter also shows that the mechanism introduces little overhead to program executions, and its implementations on Linux (and Unix) systems are straightforward.

OPERATING SYSTEMS TECHNIQUES FOR PARALLEL COMPUTATION IN INTELLIGENT MEMORY

Advances in DRAM density have led to several proposals to perform computation in memory [1] [2] [3]. Active Pages is a page-based model of intelligent memory that can exploit large amounts of parallel computation in data-intensive applications. With a simple VLIW processor embedded near each page on DRAM, Active Page memory systems achieve up to 1000X speedups over conventional memory systems [4]. Active Pages are specifically designed to support virtualized hardware resources. In this study, we examine operating system techniques that allow Active Page memories to share, or multiplex, embedded VLIW processors across multiple physical Active Pages. We explore the trade-off between individual page-processor performance and page-level multiplexing. We find that hardware costs of computational logic can be reduced from 31% of DRAM chip area to 12%, through multiplexing, without significant loss in performance. Furthermore, manufacturing defects that disable up to 50% of the page processors can be tolerated through efficient resource allocation and associative multiplexing.