Passive Entities Research Articles

Preservation as a Shared Responsibility: Collaboration for the Sustainable Preservation of Ambon Manuscripts

Abstract The study supplements manuscript digitization, which often overlooks owners’ role in manuscript literacy, highlighting their integral connection to preservation efforts. This is particularly relevant concerning Ambon manuscripts in the former Hitu kingdom. The study’s primary objective is to discern optimal practices for sustainable preservation, emphasizing the community owners not as passive entities but as individuals possessing significant knowledge and skills, competencies which can be effectively employed to safeguard and uphold manuscripts. The data collection process encompassed comprehensive literature reviews on digital manuscript collections, interviews with owners, focus group discussions (FGD) involving the younger generation of heirs, FGD with Ambon manuscript researchers at IAIN Ambon, and observations on manuscripts and cultural practices within the community. The findings reveal notable aspects such as: 1) degradation occurs in Ambon manuscripts, both in their physical state and the transmission of knowledge post-digitization, which underscores a deficiency in knowledge transfer between manuscript users and owners, representing an ethical responsibility; 2) within Ambon society, old houses function as literacy centers for the community. Given the substantial quantity of manuscripts, these houses should be recognized as scriptoria and serve as foundational points for manuscript-based literacy development; and 3) traditional practices within owner communities indicate that manuscript knowledge/literacy extends beyond basic reading and writing skills. It encompasses a holistic and comprehensive understanding of knowledge, including its relevance to daily life, categorization, origins, literacy, preservation skills (particularly caring and copying), and utilization (for legitimacy, anticipation/conflict resolution, and even economic purposes).

Investigating the impact of initial parameters on autonomous robot swarm movement strategies for enhanced exploration efficiency: a comprehensive study

Swarm robots are frequently preferred for the exploration of harsh environments and search and rescue operations. This study explores the factors that influence the movement strategies of autonomous robot swarms and their impact on swarm distribution in the field, employing simulation-based analysis. The research consists of two parts: initially, robots undergo free-fall as passive entities, followed by a phase where they employ predefined movement strategies from their fall positions. The study aims to investigate how the initial position and related parameters affect movement characteristics and the ultimate swarm distribution. To achieve this objective, four parameters-radius, height, mass, and the Coefficient of Restitution-were identified, each assigned three different values. The study observes the effects of these parameters on robot motion, considering motion strategies such as Random Walk, Levy Walk, Markov Process, and Brownian Motion. Results indicate that increasing parameter values induce changes in the position values of the free-falling swarm in the first part, which is the initial position for the second part, influencing movement strategies in diverse ways. The outcomes are analyzed concerning the radial and angular spread of the robots. Radial spread measures how far swarm elements spread from their initial positions, while angular spread indicates how homogeneously the robots are distributed according to the polar angle. The study comprehensively investigates how the movement strategies of autonomous robot swarms are impacted by parameters and how these effects manifest in the results. The findings are anticipated to enhance the effective utilization of autonomous robot swarms in exploration missions.

Delay model for the dynamics of information units in the digital environment

The digital revolution has transformed the exchange of information between people, blurring the traditional roles of sources and recipients as active and passive entities. To study this, we build on a publicly available database of quotes, organized as units of information flowing through media and blogs with minimal distortion. Building on this, we offer an innovative interpretation of the observed temporal patterns through a minimal model with two ingredients: a two-way feedback between sources and recipients, and a delay in the media’s response to activity on blogs. Our model successfully fits the variety of observed patterns, revealing different attention decays in media and blogs, with rebounds of information typically occurring between 1 and 4 days after the initial dissemination. More important perhaps, the model uncovers a functional relationship between the rate of information flow from media to blogs and the decay of public attention, suggesting a simplification in the mechanisms of information exchange in digital media. Although further research is required to generalize these findings fully, our results demonstrate that even a bare-bones model can capture essential mechanisms of information dynamics in the digital environment.

‘What have you done, brother Putin?’: Everyday geopolitics and Central Asian labour migration to Russia

ABSTRACT The geopolitical positioning of Central Asia as the centre of the ‘Eurasian Heartland’ has been the subject of extensive debates in academic and policy circles over the last three decades. However, the mainstream geopolitical narratives on Central Asia tend to focus on grand-level geopolitical players and discourses, thereby reducing the region and its populations to passive entities without any agency. Not much has been said about how these grand-level narratives are reflected and operate within the micro-level, everyday spaces, relationships and experiences of ordinary people. This paper addresses this lacuna by examining the everyday, micro-level discourses and experiences of geopolitics amongst Uzbek migrant workers in Russia and their left-behind families in Uzbekistan – a form of ‘everyday geopolitics’. The paper is based on a transnational ethnography of Uzbek migrant workers in Russia and in their home village in Uzbekistan, conducted between January 2014 and November 2019.

Learning-Based Matched Representation System for Job Recommendation

Job recommender systems (JRS) are a subclass of information filtering systems that aims to help job seekers identify what might match their skills and experiences and prevent them from being lost in the vast amount of information available on job boards that aggregates postings from many sources such as LinkedIn or Indeed. A variety of strategies used as part of JRS have been implemented, most of them failed to recommend job vacancies that fit properly to the job seekers profiles when dealing with more than one job offer. They consider skills as passive entities associated with the job description, which need to be matched for finding the best job recommendation. This paper provides a recommender system to assist job seekers in finding suitable jobs based on their resumes. The proposed system recommends the top-n jobs to the job seekers by analyzing and measuring similarity between the job seeker’s skills and explicit features of job listing using content-based filtering. First-hand information was gathered by scraping jobs description from Indeed from major cities in Saudi Arabia (Dammam, Jeddah, and Riyadh). Then, the top skills required in job offers were analyzed and job recommendation was made by matching skills from resumes to posted jobs. To quantify recommendation success and error rates, we sought to compare the results of our system to reality using decision support measures.

When Attackers Meet AI: Learning-Empowered Attacks in Cooperative Spectrum Sensing

Defense strategies have been well studied to combat Byzantine attacks that aim to disrupt cooperative spectrum sensing by sending falsified versions of spectrum sensing data to a fusion center. However, existing studies usually assume network or attackers as passive entities, e.g., assuming the prior knowledge of attacks is known or fixed. In practice, attackers can actively adopt arbitrary behaviors and avoid pre-assumed patterns or assumptions used by defense strategies. In this paper, we revisit this security vulnerability as an adversarial machine learning problem and propose a novel learning-empowered attack framework named Learning-Evaluation-Beating (LEB) to mislead the fusion center. Based on the black-box nature of the fusion center in cooperative spectrum sensing, our new perspective is to make the adversarial use of machine learning to construct a surrogate model of the fusion center's decision model. We propose a generic algorithm to create malicious sensing data using this surrogate model. Our real-world experiments show that the LEB attack is effective to beat a wide range of existing defense strategies with an up to 82 percent of success ratio. Given the gap between the proposed LEB attack and existing defenses, we introduce a non-invasive method named as influence-limiting defense, which can coexist with existing defenses to defend against LEB attack or other similar attacks. We show that this defense is highly effective and reduces the overall disruption ratio of LEB attack by up to 80 percent.

Identifying the States of Matter Involved in an Acoustic Event

ABSTRACT In the real world, we use sound to detect events occurring in our vicinity. Often, an acoustic event is created by one entity (the active entity) acting on another entity (the passive entity). The active and passive entities may possess the same state or different states of matter. The purpose of the present study was to determine the extent to which individuals can accurately identify the states of matter of the two interacting entities and accurately identify the state of matter of the active and passive entities. The results revealed participants were highly accurate at determining the states of matter involved in a particular acoustic event, but only moderately accurate at determining the state of matter of the active and passive entity. Accuracy was greater when the entities involved the same rather than different states of matter, highest when an event involved at least one solid, and lowest when it involved a gas. Unlike accuracy, participant confidence was less affected by event variations. The findings suggest individuals are largely capable of determining the states of matter involved in an acoustic event. The findings are discussed with the idea of using what is heard to visually identify the entities involved in an event.

Antecedents and outcomes of Follower Moqi: Leader Humility, Follower Humility, and Knowledge Hiding

Contrasted to most leadership research which treated followers either as non-existent or as passive entities, follower moqi enriches followership literature by stressing followers’ active role in co-creating leadership and outcomes with leaders. Given the effectiveness of follower moqi in the leadership process, we integrated social information processing theory to explore its antecedents and outcomes. Specifically, we hypothesized that leader humility is positively related to follower moqi; follower moqi, in turn, decreases knowledge hiding; this mechanism of follower moqi is moderated by follower humility so that leader humility increases more follower moqi with higher follower humility. Our results supported our hypotheses in a muti-wave time-lagged study of 315 leader-follower dyads. Overall, our research highlights that leader humility has a stronger effect on follower moqi under the context of higher follower humility. In addition, follower moqi in turn decreases knowledge hiding. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are presented and discussed.

Looking beyond the smokescreen: can the oral microbiome be a tool or target in the management of tobacco-associated oral cancer?

A wide range of microbes inhabit the oral cavity, and bacterial and fungal communities most often exist as structured communities or biofilms. The use of tobacco alters the structure of the oral microbiome, including that of potentially malignant lesions, and the altered oral microbiome influences key microenvironmental changes such as chronic inflammation, secretion of carcinogenic toxins, cellular and tissue remodelling and suppression of apoptosis. Given this, it is clear that the bacterial and fungal biofilms in potentially malignant states are likely not passive entities, but could play a critical role in shaping potential malignant and carcinogenic conditions. This holds potential towards leveraging the oral microbiome for the management of tobacco-associated potentially malignant lesions and oral cancer. Here, we explore this line of investigation by reviewing the effects of tobacco in shaping the oral microbiome, and analyse the available evidence in the light of the microbiome of oral potentially malignant and cancerous lesions, and the role of dysbiosis in carcinogenesis. Finally, we discuss possible interventions and approaches using which the oral microbiome could be leveraged towards precision-based oral cancer therapeutics.

Rethinking Under-represented Ethnicities in ELT Materials through a Critical Discourse Analysis-oriented Model

English Language Teaching (ELT) materials are not only pedagogical sources, but they also actively build a vision of reality, often reproducing, legitimizing and perpetuating certain hegemonic discourses. Even if injustice and inequalities are denounced in some materials, global issues are just mentioned rather than problematized and discriminated ethnicities are commonly represented as passive entities with no voice or agency on their own issues. In this article, a model and its operationalization are proposed in order to depict how language teachers can write materials to fight back passive constructions embedded in ELT textbooks and build, through activities based on critical discourse analysis techniques, strong and combative representations of discriminated minorities. The model seeks to critically engage learners in discussing social inequalities and encourage further analysis on how, through language, underrepresented minorities resist and debunk power. First, some examples are given of how weak representations of minorities are portrayed in ELT materials. Secondly, the model, based on Gee's (2011) three-level definition and Macgilchrist's (2016) generative perspective of discourse analysis, is explained. Finally, two examples of the model are presented in order to show how passive constructions could be dismantled by giving a voice to silenced ethnicities that are either challenging power or fighting for recognition through text or talk.

Negotiating Violence: Everyday Queer Experiences of the Law

This article seeks to comprehend the individual and structural dynamics that govern the relationship between the agents of the state and marginalized individuals and groups, specifically transgender and gender-diverse persons. Through interviews conducted with self-identified Hijra and trans women in Delhi, the article finds that most police violence and harassment happens on the streets, and not in prisons as is the dominant narrative. The interviews also demonstrate that violence directed at transgender persons by the state is largely not dependent on legal provisions, and that law enforcement officials are allowed to act with impunity. Finally, the article also critically examines the interactions between transgender persons and the police. Using the “everyday” framework from queer theory, the article draws on the relationality of power and queer persons' resistance to, and negotiation with, various dimensions of power in their daily lives. The article recognizes that Hijra and trans women are not passive entities without agency upon whom violence is enacted; they are able to reclaim the same public spaces that seek to govern their nonheteronormative behaviors and lifestyles. Through their negotiations with police officials, they continue to challenge the hegemonic and heteronormative regulations of the state.

The Bio-Engineering Approach for Plant Investigations and Growing Robots. A Mini-Review.

It has been 10 years since the publication of the first article looking at plants as a biomechatronic system and as model for robotics. Now, roboticists have started to look at plants differently and consider them as a model in the field of bioinspired robotics. Despite plants have been seen traditionally as passive entities, in reality they are able to grow, move, sense, and communicate. These features make plants an exceptional example of morphological computation - with probably the highest level of adaptability among all living beings. They are a unique model to design robots that can act in- and adapt to- unstructured, extreme, and dynamically changing environments exposed to sudden or long-term events. Although plant-inspired robotics is still a relatively new field, it has triggered the concept of growing robotics: an emerging area in which systems are designed to create their own body, adapt their morphology, and explore different environments. There is a reciprocal interest between biology and robotics: plants represent an excellent source of inspiration for achieving new robotic abilities, and engineering tools can be used to reveal new biological information. This way, a bidirectional biology-robotics strategy provides mutual benefits for both disciplines. This mini-review offers a brief overview of the fundamental aspects related to a bioengineering approach in plant-inspired robotics. It analyses the works in which both biological and engineering aspects have been investigated, and highlights the key elements of plants that have been milestones in the pioneering field of growing robots.

Archaeology, Heritage and Performance in the Perth Popular Music Scene

The city of Perth, Western Australia, has a long-running local popular music scene. Music is performed live in pubs and clubs, but it is often only a secondary reason for the running of these venues – consequently, the physical heritage of this music scene is often forgotten, with little memorialisation of the places and people involved in it. Archaeological investigation of one of these longer-running venues – the Fly By Night Club, a music venue from 1986 to 2015 – recovered a range of material culture that largely provides evidence of social encounters within the audience rather than of the many performers who have played at the Fly. The material evidence challenges the notion of modern music as capitalist commodity, including the idea of audiences as passive entities that exist in a subordinate position to performers, who occupy a privileged position within the paradigm of live music. Instead, the audience is shown to have considerable agency in the way it enhances its own enjoyment of live music, and to be an active participant in the social process of live musical performance.

Ontological approach of designing a multi-agent behaviour model in the internet environment

The paper deals with design of the model of the subsystem of environment assessment (SEA). The authors develop the ontological approach of building of the model of the subsystem, which is considered as one of the main subsystems of community organization of intelligent agents working in the integrated information environments. The approach is based on distribution of invariant aspects of building of the SEA as a multi-level architecture of semantic relations between actors, passive entities (objects) and knowledge which depends on the subject area and describes the intelligent agents’ operational environment and target use.

Unruly Gestures: Seven Cine-Paragraphs on Reading/Writing Practices in our Post-Digital Condition

Unruly gestures presents a hybrid performative intervention by means of video, text, and still images. With this experimental essay we aspire to break down various preconceptions about reading/writing gestures. Breaking away from a narrative that sees these gestures foremost as passive entities – as either embodiments of pure subjective intentionality, or as bodily movements shaped and controlled by media technologies (enabling specific sensory engagements with texts) – we aim to reappraise them. Indeed, in this essay we identify numerous dominant narratives that relate to gestural agency, to the media-specificity of gestures, and to their (linear) historicity, naturalness and humanism. This essay disrupts these preconceptions, and by doing so, it unfolds an alternative genealogy of ‘unruly gestures.’ These are gestures that challenge gestural conditioning through particular media technologies, cultural power structures, hegemonic discourses, and the biopolitical self. We focus on reading/writing gestures that have disrupted gestural hegemonies and material-discursive forms of gestural control through time and across media. Informed by Tristan Tzara’s cut-up techniques, where through the gesture of cutting the Dadaists subverted established traditions of authorship, intentionality, and linearity, this essay has been cut-up into seven semi-autonomous cine-paragraphs (accessible in video and print). Each of these cine-paragraphs confronts specific gestural preconceptions while simultaneously showcasing various unruly gestures.

Your order, their labor: An exploration of algorithms and laboring on food delivery platforms in China

This study examines the use of “algorithms in everyday labor” to explore the labor conditions of three Chinese food delivery platforms: Baidu Deliveries, Eleme, and Meituan. In particular, it examines how delivery workers make sense of these algorithms through the parameters of temporality, affect, and gamification. The study also demonstrates that in working for food delivery platforms, couriers are not simply passive entities that are subjected to a digital “panopticon.” Instead, they create their own “organic algorithms” to manage and, in some cases, even subvert the system. The results of the approach used in this study demonstrate that digital labor has become both more accessible and more precarious in contemporary China. Based on these results, the notion of “algorithmic making and remaking” is suggested as a topic in future research on technology and digital labor.

Key management in tree shaped hierarchies

ABSTRACTWe refer to an access control system based on subjects and objects. Subjects are active entities, e.g. processes, while objects are passive entities, e.g. messages exchanged between the nodes of a distributed computing environment. The system is partitioned into security classes organized into a tree shaped hierarchy. A subject assigned to a given class can access the objects in this class and in all the classes that descend from this class in the class hierarchy. To this aim, a key is associated with each class. A mechanism of the protection system, called key derivation, allows a subject that holds the key of a given class to transform this key into the keys of the descendant classes. This mechanism is based on a single, publicly known one-way function. If the class hierarchy is modified, by adding a new class or deleting an existing class, the necessary form of key redistribution is partial, and is limited to the classes in the subtree of the root that is involved in the change.

Panta rhei? Space of flows in the era of anthropocene and outlooks into a multi-coloured future

The modern social, economic and communication flows change profoundly the development of spaces, their borders and boundaries, and affect the channels of flow between regions and the national, transnational and global society. The paper offers a reflection about the developments at the top of geographic and social scientific research as well as a reference to the agenda of spatial planning and politics. Therefore this article focuses on theoretical aspects of the “fluid society” but emphasizes also the need to learn from empirical insights and practical issues in the context of Polish-Swiss cooperation projects. It concludes however, that regional spaces under the auspices of modern flows are not unicoloured. That wants to say: they are not passive entities of modernisation, but keep their manifold, multicoloured characteristics – and these characteristics interact in the form of identities, cohesion and the natural backdrop with significant effects on those flows, enabling and steering modernisation strategies, and deciding about successes or failures of investments into traffic, tourism and economies. By that they shape the flows from and into peripheral regions.

Women's War: Media Representations of Female Civil Labour during World War I

This paper looks at the coverage of women’s civil labour during WWI in two magazines, Maclean’s in Canada and L’Illustration in France, supplemented with material from war museums and academic works. Our concern is media representations of the indispensible participation of these women, not as victims and passive entities in the conflict, but as individuals who have significantly contributed to the war effort. We contend that the magazines’ content did not reflect the magnitude of women’s civil labour during WWI and the importance they had not only in sustaining the war effort, maintaining a general level of production that would allow their countries to remain significantly involved in the war, but also in their contribution to the modernisation of society.

Symmetry breaking in cyclic competition by niche construction

Niche construction theory, which portrays organisms as active agents that modify their environment rather than mere passive entities selected by their environment, has received increasing attention in ecology and evolutionary biology. Here, we investigate the ecological consequences of niche construction in the system of three cyclically competing metapopulations, engaging a rock–scissors–paper game. Using cellular automata, we detected a variety of dynamic behaviors, including damped oscillation, periodical fluctuation and stage equilibrium, and the system transformed from disorder to order with gradually increasing niche-constructing intensity. Increasing niche-constructing intensity of a species, counterintuitively, reduced its own occupancy, but increased that of its inferior competitor. These species displayed interesting ripples in the two-dimension lattice space, with the pattern sensitive to the symmetry of competition intensity and other vital rates. Spatial heterogeneity induced by niche construction, together with the competition hierarchy, formed a stable and fixed range for each species with clear boundaries. Our results highlighted the necessity of investigating the adaptive dynamics of niche constructing traits to better understand the eco-evolutionary consequence of niche construction.