Picturing Participation: Catalyzing Conversations About Community Engagement in HIV Community–Based Organizations

Community engagement is considered a cornerstone of health promotion practice. Yet engagement is a fuzzy term signifying a range of practices. Health scholarship has focused primarily on individual effects of engagement. To understand the complexities of engagement, organizations must also consider relational, structural, and/or organizational factors that inform stakeholders’ subjective understandings and experiences. Community engagement processes are not neutral; they can reproduce and/or dismantle power structures, often in contradictory or unexpected ways. This article discusses diverse stakeholders’ subjective experiences and understandings of engagement within the HIV sector in Toronto, Canada. In our study, a team of community members, service providers, and academics partnered with three HIV community–based organizations to do this work. We used photovoice, a participatory and action-oriented photography method, to identify, document, and analyze participants’ understandings at respective sites. Through collaborative analysis, we identified seven themes that may catalyze conversations about engagement within organizations: reflecting on journey; honoring relationships; accessibility and support mechanisms; advocacy, peer leadership, and social justice; diversity and difference; navigating grief and loss; and nonparticipation. Having frank and transparent discussions that are grounded in stakeholders’ subjective experiences, and the sociopolitical and structural conditions of involvement, can help organizations take a more intersectional and nuanced approach to community engagement. Together, our findings can be used as a framework to support organizations in thinking more deeply and complexly about how to meaningfully, ethically, and sustainably engage communities (both individually and collectively) in HIV programming, and organizational policy change. The article concludes with questions for practice.

Towards Making Fuzzy Techniques More Adequate for Combining Knowledge of Several Experts

In medical and other applications, expert often use rules with several conditions, each of which involve a quantity within the domain of expertise of a different expert. In such situations, to estimate the degree of confidence that all these conditions are satisfied, we need to combine opinions of several experts – i.e., in fuzzy techniques, combine membership functions corresponding to different experts. In each area of expertise, different experts may have somewhat different membership functions describing the same natural-language (“fuzzy”) term like small. It is desirable to present the user with all possible conclusions corresponding to all these membership functions. In general, even if, for each area of expertise, we have only a 1-parametric family characterizing different membership function, then for rules with 3 conditions, we already have a difficult-to-interpret 3-parametric family of possible consequences. It is thus desirable to limit ourselves to the cases when the resulting family is still manageable – e.g., is 1-parametric. In this paper, we provide a full description of all such families. Interestingly, it turns out that such families are possible only if we allow non-normalized membership functions, i.e., functions for which the maximum may be smaller than 1. We argue that this is a way to go, since normalization loses some information that we receive from the experts.

Universalism in Social Policies: A Multidimensional Concept, Policy Idea or Process

This issue of Social Inclusion takes the dazzling and fuzzy term ‘universalism’ to scrutiny. The editorial introduces different usages of the term in the academic debate. It first discusses universalism as an idea, then as a process, and finally its dimensions. The articles published in this issue are situated in the debate.

LeukmiR: a database for miRNAs and their targets in acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is one of the most common hematological malignancies in children. Recent studies suggest the involvement of multiple microRNAs in the tumorigenesis of various leukemias. However, until now, no comprehensive database exists for miRNAs and their cognate target genes involved specifically in ALL. Therefore, we developed ‘LeukmiR’ a dynamic database comprising in silico predicted microRNAs, and experimentally validated miRNAs along with the target genes they regulate in mouse and human. LeukmiR is a user-friendly platform with search strings for ALL-associated microRNAs, their sequences, description of target genes, their location on the chromosomes and the corresponding deregulated signaling pathways. For the user query, different search modules exist where either quick search can be carried out using any fuzzy term or by providing exact terms in specific modules. All entries for both human and mouse genomes can be retrieved through multiple options such as miRNA ID, their accession number, sequence, target genes, Ensemble-ID or Entrez-ID. User can also access miRNA: mRNA interaction networks in different signaling pathways, the genomic location of the targeted regions such as 3′UTR, 5′UTR and exons with their gene ontology and disease ontology information in both human and mouse systems. Herein, we also report 51 novel microRNAs which are not described earlier for ALL. Thus, LeukmiR database will be a valuable source of information for researchers to understand and investigate miRNAs and their targets with diagnostic and therapeutic potential in ALL. Database URL: http://tdb.ccmb.res.in/LeukmiR/

Neuro-Fuzzy-Based Smart Irrigation System and Multimodal Image Analysis in Static-Clustered Wireless Sensor Network for Marigold Crops

As a decorative flower, marigolds have become one of the most attractive flowers, especially on the social and religious arena. Thus, this chapter reveals the potential positive resultants in the production of marigold through neuro-fuzzy-based smart irrigation technique in the static-clustered wireless sensor network. The entire system is sectionalized into clustering phase and operational phase. The clustering phase comprises three modules whereas the operational phase also includes three primary modules. The neuro-fuzzy term refers to a system that characterizes the structure of a fuzzy controller where the fuzzy sets and rules are adjusted using neural networks iteratively tuning techniques with input and output system data. The neuro-fuzzy system includes two distinct way of behavior. The vital concern of the system is to prevent unnecessary or unwarranted irrigation. Finally, on the utilization of multimodal image analysis and neuro-fuzzy methods, it is observed that the system reduces the overall utilization of water (~32-34%).

Deconstructing “Decentralization”

This chapter first describes the current use of the term “decentralized” as applied to permissionless blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Then, it analyzes the complex, contested nature of the term, delving into issues such as the different domains where power is exercised in blockchain systems and the fluid nature of power concentration and diffusion in these systems. Next, it provides examples of events that reveal sites of concentrated power in permissionless blockchain systems, focusing on the activities of software developers and miners. Finally, it explores the significant implications for law of using a fuzzy term like “decentralized” to make legal decisions, as misunderstandings about power hidden in the term can lead to flawed decisions across a wide swath of legal fields.

Development of Document Clustering Technique for Gurmukhi Script using Fuzzy Term Weight

Document clustering is an unsupervised machine learning technique which designates the creation of classes of a certain number of similar objects without prior knowledge of data-sets. These classes of similar objects are known as clusters; each cluster consists unlabeled data objects in such a way that data objects within the same cluster have maximum similarity and have dissimilarity to the data objects of other groups. The purpose of this research work is to develop domain independent Gurmukhi script clustering technique. It is the first ever effort as no prior work has been done to develop domain independent clustering technique for Gurmukhi script. In this paper, a hybrid algorithm for the development of document clustering technique for Gurmukhi script has been developed. The experimental results of proposed document clustering technique reveal that the proposed hybrid technique performs better in terms of defining number of clusters, creation of meaningful cluster titles, and in terms of performance regarding assignment of real time unlabeled data sets to the relevant cluster as a result of various pre-processing steps like segmentation, stemming, normalization as well as extraction of named/noun entities, creation of cluster titles and placing text documents into relevant clusters using fuzzy term weight.

Digital activism: After the hype

Research on digital activism has gained traction in recent years. At the same time, it remains a diverse and open field that lacks a coherent mode of inquiry. For the better or worse, digital activism remains a fuzzy term. In this introduction to a special issue on digital activism, we review current attempts to periodize and historicize digital activism. Although there is growing body of research on digitial activism, many contributions remain limited through their ahistorical approach and the digital universalism that they imply. Based on the contributions to the special issue, we argue for studying digital activisms in a way that traverses a two-dimensional axis of digital technologies and activist practices, striking the balance between context and media-specificity.

Building and Management of Trust in Networked Information Systems

Thanks to rapidly developing information and communication technologies, the complexity of networked organizations has become very high, so the representation of their structure and the description of their operation and their control need new technologies, new approaches. The availability of individuals independently from location and time means mobility, and that is an important attribute of today’s society. This mobility can be achieved by using different types of mobile wireless networks as wireless wide area networks (WWANs, e.g., GSM, GPRS, and UMTS), wireless local area networks (WLANs, e.g., WiFi 802.11a-g), and wireless personal area (or pico) network (WPAN, e.g., Bluetooth, IrDA2). In spite of the application of high-tech approaches, tools, and methodologies, there is a common point in all of the organizations: human beings make most of the important decisions, and they operate and use systems. Experience shows that improper application of this human factor can make operation very inefficient even in the case of the technically most advanced systems. The lowest level of connection among systems is made through protocols; the highest contact level is among decision makers, users namely among human beings. A very important element of this human contact is trust. In a networked organization, trust is the atmosphere, the medium in which actors are moving (Castelfranchi & Tan, 2001). Only trust can bridge cultural, geographical, and organizational distances of team members (and even of firms) from turning to unmanageable psychological distances. Trust is the base of cooperation, the normal behavior of the human being in the society. The ability of enterprises to form networked systems depends on the existing level of trust in the society and on the capital of society (Fukuyama, 1995). As the rate of cooperation is increasing in all fields of life, the importance of trust is evolving even faster. Lack of trustworthy security services is a major obstacle to the use of information systems in private, in business (B2B), as well as in public services. Trust is intimately linked to consumers’ rights, like security, identification, authentication, privacy, and confidentiality. Secure identification, authentication of the users, and communication security are main problems in networked systems. Information management (IM) is a fuzzy term covering the various stages of information processing from production to storage and retrieval to dissemination towards the better working of an organization, where information can be from internal and external sources and in any format. The role of trust in these processes is definitive as human-to-human and human-to-system communication forms the base of information management.