Enabling Cross-technology Communication from LoRa to ZigBee in the 2.4 GHz Band

IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless sensor-actuator networks have been widely adopted by process industries in recent years because of their significant role in improving industrial efficiency and reducing operating costs. Today, industrial wireless sensor-actuator networks are becoming tremendously larger and more complex than before. However, a large, complex mesh network is hard to manage and inelastic to change once the network is deployed. In addition, flooding-based time synchronization and information dissemination introduce significant communication overhead to the network. More importantly, the deliveries of urgent and critical information such as emergency alarms suffer long delays, because those messages must go through the hop-by-hop transport. A promising solution to overcome those limitations is to enable the direct messaging from a long-range radio to an IEEE 802.15.4 radio. Then messages can be delivered to all field devices in a single-hop fashion. This article presents our study on enabling the cross-technology communication from LoRa to ZigBee using the energy emission of the LoRa radio as the carrier to deliver information. Experimental results show that our cross-technology communication approach provides reliable communication from LoRa to ZigBee with the throughput of up to 576.80 bps and the bit error rate of up to 5.23% in the 2.4 GHz band.

Enriching Conventional Ensemble Learner with Deep Contextual Semantics to Detect Fake News in Urdu

Increased connectivity has contributed greatly in facilitating rapid access to information and reliable communication. However, the uncontrolled information dissemination has also resulted in the spread of fake news. Fake news might be spread by a group of people or organizations to serve ulterior motives such as political or financial gains or to damage a country’s public image. Given the importance of timely detection of fake news, the research area has intrigued researchers from all over the world. Most of the work for detecting fake news focuses on the English language. However, automated detection of fake news is important irrespective of the language used for spreading false information. Recognizing the importance of boosting research on fake news detection for low resource languages, this work proposes a novel semantically enriched technique to effectively detect fake news in Urdu—a low resource language. A model based on deep contextual semantics learned from the convolutional neural network is proposed. The features learned from the convolutional neural network are combined with other n-gram-based features and are fed to a conventional majority voting ensemble classifier fitted with three base learners: Adaptive Boosting, Gradient Boosting, and Multi-Layer Perceptron. Experiments are performed with different models, and results show that enriching the traditional ensemble learner with deep contextual semantics along with other standard features shows the best results and outperforms the state-of-the-art Urdu fake news detection model.

Islamic Religious Authority in Cyberspace: A Qualitative Study of Muslim Religious Actors in Australia

The arrival of new technologies has always presented new challenges and opportunities to religious communities anchored in scriptural and oral traditions. In the modern period, the volume, speed and accessibility of digital technologies has significantly altered the way knowledge is communicated and consumed. This is particularly true for the way religious authority is constructed online. Using in-depth fieldwork interviews and survey findings of Australian Muslims, this article examines the way religious actors, including imams/sheikhs, educators and academics in the field of Islamic studies, perceive and use online platforms to convey their religious knowledge. The findings suggest Muslims value the benefits of accessing knowledge, communicating ideas and facilitating religious pluralism via digital platforms. By the same token, participants warned against the dangers of information anarchy, “Sheikh Google” and the limitations of “do it yourself Islam”. Importantly, the article shows imams, educators and Muslim scholars largely prioritise face-to-face learning as a more reliable and effective method of teaching and establishing rapport among Muslims compared to eclectic internet-based information dissemination. At the same time, religious actors are not averse to Muslims using digital platforms so long as they possess the skills to cross-examine online content and verify the credentials of religious actors. For more complex and circumstantial issues, participants encouraged Muslims to consult a local imam or trusted religious scholar from the community.

Social interactions and mutual fund portfolios: the role of alumni networks in China

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the influence of social interactions on mutual fund portfolios from the perspective of alumni network in China.Design/methodology/approachBased on a data set that consists of 162 actively managed equity funds in China during the time period of 2003–2014, this study employs multiple linear regression model to control for organization- and location-based interpersonal connections as well as other confounding factors and clarify the causality relationship between alumni networks of mutual fund managers and their portfolios.FindingsAfter controlling for organization- and location-based interpersonal connections, we find that mutual fund managers who graduated from the same college/university have more similar stock holdings and are more likely to buy or sell the same stocks contemporaneously. As a result, alumni managers exhibit a higher correlation of fund returns. Moreover, the effect of alumni relationship on mutual fund investments becomes weaker when more managers are connected within the network. We also find that valuable information is shared among alumni managers: (1) the average returns for the alumni common holdings portfolios is significantly higher than those for non-alumni holdings portfolios and (2) a long-short strategy composed of stocks purchased minus sold by alumni managers yields positive and significant risk-adjusted returns.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest that information dissemination among connected fund managers could be one of the driving forces for mutual fund herding behavior, and that a portfolio of funds whose managers are educationally connected could be highly exposed to certain stocks and risks.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the growing finance literature addressing the influence of personal connections on information dissemination that specifically contributes to price formation. It corresponds more closely to Cohen et al. (2008), who investigate college alumni connections between fund managers and corporate board members. Since the authors simultaneously examine three potentially overlapped social networks, which are based on education, locality and fund family, the authors are able to disentangle their effects on fund managers' investment decisions. Moreover, the findings suggest that institutional investors make investment decisions based on share private information, and therefore, it also contributes to the literature on fund herding behaviors (Grinblatt et al., 1995; Wermers, 1999).

Senior Citizen Information System

This developmental-descriptive research sought to design and developed a computer-based system, to be known as the Senior Citizens Information System, to provide real-time information dissemination among senior citizen members in the Municipality of Batad, Iloilo pertaining to their membership status and monetary assistance monitoring. The Rapid Application Development model was employed as the SDLC in the development of the system product. More so, the three-tier architecture was used as the architectural model. There were 120 senior citizens as user-respondents and five IT experts for evaluation. The system product was evaluated using a researchers-made survey instrument to determine if level of usability and performance. Results of the investigation shows that the system product was perceived as very good with its level of usability as well as its performance.

Awareness and product knowledge of service stakeholders involved in the importation and distribution of HCFC-22 in Botswana

Environmental problems such as global warming, ozone depletion and climate change remain universal subjects of concern, with baneful effects on both the environment and human health. The consumption and venting of ozone depleting substances (ODS) into the atmosphere are the chief anthropogenic cause of ozone depletion. One such manmade ODS with high global warming potential Chlorodifluoromethane (HCFC-22). The MP targeted to phase-out HCFC-22 with obligatory cut-off timelines for its use by 2040 for developing nations. To comply with the HCFC-22 phase-out timelines, meant at embarking on national communications to disseminate information on HCFC-22 phase-out through key stakeholders’ involvement. The achievement of HCFC-22 phase-out strategy depends on participation of key stakeholders in the implementation process. the level of awareness and product knowledge of service stakeholders in the importation and distribution of HCFC-22 in Botswana. customs officers, officers and industrial consumers. Questionnaires and interviews were used to solicit key stakeholders’ views, opinions and perceptions on HCFC-22 phase-out awareness and product knowledge. Results revealed that 87% of the stakeholders are learned and knowledgeable in ODS related service provision. The level of HCFC-22 knowledge and awareness among stakeholders is moderate with distinguished inter-group differences. In particular, industrial consumers had the highest median level of HCFC-22 awareness than other stakeholders, indicating gaps in HCFC-22 phase-out awareness raising and training. About 67% of respondents had low levels of awareness of the HPMP and alternative technologies to HCFC-22. This proposes gaps in information dissemination to key stakeholders and this remains a crucial disparity between the country’s HPMP success lead and lag indicators. There is need to carefully select communication media used in line with the media consumption habits of target markets. Use of popular and commonly accessed social-media platforms would ensure that the HCFC-22 phase-out messages have high chance of reaching targeted stakeholders and the general population.

Designing Effective eHealth Interventions for Underserved Groups: Five Lessons From a Decade of eHealth Intervention Design and Deployment

Despite the proliferation of eHealth interventions, such as web portals, for health information dissemination or the use of mobile apps and wearables for health monitoring, research has shown that underserved groups do not benefit proportionately from these eHealth interventions. This is largely because of usability issues and the lack of attention to the broader structural, physical, and psychosocial barriers to technology adoption and use. The objective of this paper is to draw lessons from a decade of experience in designing different user-centered eHealth interventions (eg, web portals and health apps) to inform future work in leveraging technology to address health disparities. We draw these lessons from a series of interventions from the work we have done over 15 years in the Viswanath laboratory at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, focusing on three projects that used web portals and health apps targeted toward underserved groups. The projects were the following: Click to Connect, which was a community-based eHealth intervention that aimed to improve internet skills and health literacy among underserved groups by providing home access to high-speed internet, computer, and internet training classes, as well as a dedicated health web portal with ongoing technical support; PLANET MassCONECT, which was a knowledge translation project that built capacity among community-based organizations in Boston, Lawrence, and Worcester in Massachusetts to adopt evidence-based health promotion programs; and Smartphone App for Public Health, which was a mobile health research that facilitated both participatory (eg, surveys) and passive data (eg, geolocations and web-browsing behaviors) collection for the purpose of understanding tobacco message exposure in individuals’ built environment. Through our work, we distilled five key principles for researchers aiming to design eHealth interventions for underserved groups. They are as follows: develop a strategic road map to address communication inequalities (ie, a concrete action plan to identify the barriers faced by underserved groups and customize specific solutions to each of them), engage multiple stakeholders from the beginning for the long haul, design with usability—readability and navigability—in mind, build privacy safeguards into eHealth interventions and communicate privacy–utility tradeoffs in simplicity, and strive for an optimal balance between open science aspirations and protection of underserved groups.

Nutrition education incorporation into mainstream primary school curriculum in Ghana: Stakeholders’ sources of nutrition information and perceived barriers

Introduction Nutrition literacy has been cited as a crucial life skill. Nutrition education as a primary school subject has been treated inconsequentially when compared to other subjects. We investigated an aspect of the current state of nutrition education in Ghana by engaging stakeholders about their sources of nutrition information and the perceived barriers in implementing nutrition education in mainstream primary schools. Methods Three hundred and fifty one (351) primary school children, 121 homebased caregivers, six schoolteachers, two headteachers, two Ghana Education Service (GES) officials, and six school cooks were involved in the study. Surveys were used to collect data on nutrition information acquisition behaviors and to record perceived barriers. Key Informant Interviews were conducted among GES officials, headteachers, schoolteachers and school cooks, while Focus Group Discussions were used among homebased caregivers and children to gather qualitative information. Results Only 36.3% of the primary school children had heard about nutrition, and 71% of those got nutrition information from their family members. About 70% of homebased caregivers had heard or seen nutrition messages, and their source of nutrition information was predominantly traditional media. Schoolteachers mostly received their nutrition information from non-governmental organizations and the Internet, while most of the school cooks stated their main source of nutrition information was hospital visits. Perceived barriers included schoolteachers’ knowledge insufficiency, and lack of resources to adequately deliver nutrition education. Lack of a clear policy appeared to be an additional barrier. Conclusion The barriers to the implementation of nutrition education in the mainstream curriculum at the primary school level that were identified in this study can be resolved by: providing schoolteachers with learning opportunities and adequate nutrition education resources for practical delivery, having specific national policy framework, and including family members and school cooks in the nutrition education knowledge and information dissemination process.

Evaluation Algorithm of Ideological and Political Assistant Teaching Effect in Colleges and Universities under Network Information Dissemination

Ideological and political course is a key course to implement the fundamental task of building morality and cultivating people. Teaching evaluation is an important part of the construction of ideological and political courses. Constructing a perfect teaching evaluation index system is an urgent need to further deepen the teaching reform of ideological and political courses and improve the teaching quality of ideological and political courses. In order to improve the practical application effect of mixed teaching mode, an online and offline mixed teaching effect evaluation method based on big data analysis is proposed. Firstly, the big data in the process of mixed teaching are collected by using big data technology, and the evaluation index system is constructed from three dimensions. The required data are extracted according to the index, and then the association rules between the relevant data of the evaluation index are established, the phase space distribution of the data is obtained. Finally, the constraint parameter analysis method is used to fuse the control variables and explanatory variables of the index-related data to realize the online and offline mixed teaching effect evaluation. The application analysis results show that the method in this paper obtains ideal evaluation results of online and offline mixed teaching effects, which is conducive to improving teaching quality.