Specific Physical Locations Research Articles

Return Policies and Everyday Resistance: An Exploration of Nigerian Migrants’ Experiences in Austria

This article delves into the nuances of resistance among Nigerian migrants in Austria, situated within the larger framework of European migration. Against the backdrop of the stringent migration regulations implemented in Austria during the 2015 long summer of migration and amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study aims to provide a deeper exploration of the political sociology of return. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 Nigerian migrants, I examine the perspectives of migrants and their interpretations of voluntary and forced return policies and implementation, shedding light on their motivations, strategies, and decision-making processes. Additionally, the paper incorporates 15 interviews with government officials, non-governmental organisations, and activists to explore the implementation of return policy. Using the framework of everyday resistance by Johansson and Vinthagen (2019), this study uncovers the nuanced ways in which Nigerian migrants in Austria navigate the pressures of returning to their home countries. This analysis is especially significant because of Nigeria’s prominence as a major origin country for migrants in Europe. It provides valuable insights into the broader European migration context and contributes to a better understanding of resistance within return migration processes. These acts manifest in various forms in everyday life, challenging the execution of asylum and return policies in specific physical locations, such as workplaces, cities, and streets, highlighting the complex subtleties of resistance in the context of return migration management.

Localized globalization through structures of common difference and the in-store curation of a glocal retailscape

In global markets, branded material and symbolic artifacts are curated in patterned ways to replicate and scale retail experience. We apply a structures of common difference framework to show how global brands can be strategically localized through in-store curations within specific physical locations. This localized globalization deploys familiar global brands in ways that feel authentically local and idiosyncratically intimately connected with many and varied retail instantiations (glocal). We underscore that global-local reciprocity is critical and the SCD work for global and local brands. We affirm that global brands give local retailers a steady stream of compelling merchandise connecting the local to global markets, and conversely, local content stabilizes global brands’ connections to communities and physical stores. This recursive relationship feeds into an overarching global common form that celebrates local diversity and supports the interlocking identities of brands and customers.

Educational trajectories of forming digital competences

In the context of the development of a digital society, digital competencies are becoming increasingly important. The educational trajectories that help to form these competencies are investigated in the article. The purpose of the study is to substantiate the theoretical and methodological foundations for the development of digital competencies in higher education students through the implementation of an individual educational trajectory. Key documents in the field of education in Europe and Ukraine that contain provisions on digital competencies are analyzed in the article. In addition, the relevance and topicality of the available documents to the challenges of today is stated. Based on the generalization of approaches to interpretation was substantiated that the concept of «digital competencies» mainly reflects the ability of a person to use digital technologies to achieve goals in professional activities and to meet their own needs. Legislative and regulatory acts of Ukraine are studied for the presence of provisions that ensure the development of digital competencies of students. It was found that each level of education provides for the acquisition of these competencies. The authors note that the development of digital competencies should be ensured in stages at each level of education, as well as throughout life. The analysis of higher education standards for specialties in two fields of higher education (05; 07) revealed that at the second level of higher education, not all specialties provide for the acquisition of digital competencies by higher education students, which may lead to a decrease in their competitiveness in the labor market. At the same time, the main motives that motivate a person to master digital competencies (personal desire to improve their level of education for professional growth; rapid «aging» of digital competencies) are identified in the article. The influence and importance of digital competencies, as well as opportunities for acquiring soft skills and hard skills, are argued. Finally, the features of the development of digital competencies are substantiated (dependence on support, no binding to a specific physical location, dynamism, fundamentality, high degree of inclusiveness).

Remote Laboratory as an Educational Tool in Robotics Experimental Course

A remote lab is a technology that allows participants to efficiently conduct experimental teaching where users can connect to lab equipment from anywhere without being in a specific physical location. The COVID-19 pandemic affects all areas of human activity. ​As a result, students did not receive face-to-face instruction, and access to the laboratory was limited or practically impossible, and access to laboratory facilities has been limited or nearly impossible. Especially in engineering education, students’ practical abilities cannot be developed comprehensively. In this paper, this paper built an online remote robotics experiment system using digital twin (DT) technology and IoT technology and adopted ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation) teaching method. With these measures, students can design and debug robot programs at home, just like in the laboratory. This study sent questionnaires to 64 students, and 58 were returned. The results show that more than 80% of students believe that the remote labs for industrial robotics courses have improved the efficiency and quality of students' skills training as opposed to virtual simulation and watching videos on the computer.

A Trustworthiness-Aware Spatial Task Allocation using a Fuzzy-based Trust and Reputation System Approach

Unlike crowdsourcing, Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) requires workers to travel to a specific physical location to accomplish a task. Due to its open concept, the platform accepts any interested individual as workers or task requesters, including those who may be unreliable and untrustworthy. Deploying untrustworthy workers in spatial tasks can negatively impact the quality of the completed tasks, thus threatening the sustainability of the SC platform. Recent research has been carried out to evaluate workers’ trustworthiness based on the Trust and Reputation (TR) system. Current TR system approaches for evaluating workers’ trustworthiness are mostly relying on a single trust or reputation factor, and the decisions are mainly binary. This binary representation of trustworthiness is considerably rigid and may cause severe repercussions like, an untrustworthy worker who could be the victim of partial ratings may end up not getting any kind of spatial tasks from the system, or a trustworthy worker who may have malicious intention may be allocated a spatial task. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that allocates every spatial task according to a workers’ degree of perceived trustworthiness computed based on multi-criteria trust and reputation factors using a Mamdani fuzzy inference system. Our work considers historical ratings to calculate reputation value, applies sentiment analysis to infer trust value, implements Mamdani fuzzy inference to determine trustworthiness degree, and introduces the concept of referral to mitigate worker cold-start problems in spatial crowdsourcing. Our experimental findings on the Yelp real-world datasets demonstrate the reliability of the proposed framework to allocate every spatial task of various types to the most trustworthy workers from huge crowds of available workers. When evaluated against other baseline approaches, our approach achieves greater accuracy in allocating the right tasks to the most trustworthy workers.

Narrative Activism: Writing Desire For Injury-Bound Individuals

Narrative Activism: Writing Desire For Injury-Bound Individuals

A Unified Framework for User Identification Across Online and Offline Data

User identification across multiple datasets has a wide range of applications and there has been an increasing set of research works on this topic during recent years. However, most of existing works focus on user identification with a single input data type, e.g., (I) identifying a user across multiple social networks with online data and (II) detecting a single user from heterogeneous trajectory datasets with offline data. Different from previous works, in this paper, we propose a framework on user identification between online and offline datasets. We build connections between these two types of data by a mapping from IP addresses to physical locations. To solve this problem, we propose a novel framework consisting of three steps. First, we use a clustering method based on locations of IP addresses to map IP addresses into specific physical location distributions. Second, we propose a novel pairwise index to reduce space cost and running time for computing the co-occurrence. Lastly, we apply a learning-to-rank method to merge the effect of multiple features we get in the first two steps. Based on our framework, we design experiments to demonstrate the efficiency (in time and space) of our framework, together with the precision and recall of our approach compared to other methods.

New transmedia design for traditional film festivals

The disruptive process of transformation in the audiovisual sector were unexpectedly accelerated after the covid-19 pandemic. This caused a rearrangement in the chain of the distribution, exhibition and circulation, restructuring the whole design of film festivals, once considered the launching point of this entire industry and strongly based on specific physical locations. The platformization process permanently changed the traditional model of audiovisual distribution, staffing and curation of festivals - which undergo a hybridization operation that allows the potential use of interactive resources and online delivery of movies, plays and performances to audiences all around the globe. Different narrative strategies in contemporary production using multiple platforms in creative processes are innovating storytelling model and influencing film festival programming and production. The current format of online film festivals restricts access to user data, as the exhibition is limited by parameters established by exhibition licensing agrements and limited tickets per screening. The process of festivals platformization implies new online functionalities integrated at economic and infrastructure levels which fully affects their organization and strategies. MixBrasil Festival is proposing new ways to merge different formats and languages into its programming.

Efficient Region-Based Skyline Computation for a Group of Users

Recently, with the advancement of technology, ad-hoc meetings or impromptu gathering are becoming more and more common. The meetings/gatherings which involve at least two people will require a specific physical point location that is useful or interesting to them, called <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">point of interest (PoI)</i> . These people might be residing at different locations; each with their own preferences which most likely to be different. Undoubtedly, given <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</i> people in a group, there will be <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</i> user’f preferences. Finding a suitable <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PoI</i> that meets these <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</i> user’f preferences is not a straightforward task. Existing solutions that utilise skyline processing in discovering the best, most preferred objects in satisfying the preferences of a group of users within a predetermined area have shown acceptable results. However, these solutions have to be executed repeatedly for each group of user’s queries since they do not exploit the possibilities that an area that has been visited by a group of users might be the area of interest of another group of users in the future. Inherently, they require rescanning the objects and recomputing the skylines of a previously visited region which is undoubtedly unwise and costly. This paper proposes the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Region-based Skyline for a Group of Users (RSGU)</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Extended Region-based Skyline for a Group of Users (ERSGU)</i> frameworks which attempt to resolve the limitations of existing solutions. In this work, skylines objects are point of interests ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PoIs</i> ) that are recommended to a group of users that are derived by analysing both the locations of the users, i.e. spatial attributes, as well as the spatial and non-spatial attributes of objects that are within a predetermined region of the group of users. Here, each region is partitioned into smaller units called fragments in such a way that overlapping areas between the currently and previously visited regions can be easily determined; while the results of computing the skylines of each fragment, known as fragment skylines, are saved to be utilised by the subsequent requests. Meanwhile, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ERSGU</i> has an additional feature in which the skylines derived for a group of users are not only based on the evaluation of the spatial and non-spatial attributes of the objects, but also the closeness of the objects to the desirable facilities or other interesting objects in the region. Undeniably, a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PoI</i> that is nearby to other attractions is appealing and worth the journey. Several experiments have been conducted and the results show that our proposed frameworks outperform the previous work with respect to CPU time.

Local Crowdsourcing for Annotating Audio: the Elevator Annotator platform

Crowdsourcing and other human computation techniques have proven useful in collecting large numbers of annotations for various datasets. In the majority of cases, online platforms are used when running crowdsourcing campaigns. Local crowdsourcing is a variant where annotation is done on specific physical locations. This paper describes a local crowdsourcing concept, platform and experiment. The case setting concerns eliciting annotations for an audio archive. For the experiment, we developed a hardware platform designed to be deployed in building elevators. To evaluate the effectiveness of the platform and to test the influence of location on the annotation results, an experiment was set up in two different locations. In each location two different user interaction modalities are used. The results show that our simple local crowdsourcing setup is able to achieve acceptable accuracy levels with up to 4 annotations per hour, and that the location has a significant effect on accuracy.

Local Crowdsourcing for Annotating Audio: the Elevator Annotator platform

Crowdsourcing and other human computation techniques have proven useful in collecting large numbers of annotations for various datasets. In the majority of cases, online platforms are used when running crowdsourcing campaigns. Local crowdsourcing is a variant where annotation is done on specific physical locations. This paper describes a local crowdsourcing concept, platform and experiment. The case setting concerns eliciting annotations for an audio archive. For the experiment, we developed a hardware platform designed to be deployed in building elevators. To evaluate the effectiveness of the platform and to test the influence of location on the annotation results, an experiment was set up in two different locations. In each location two different user interaction modalities are used. The results show that our simple local crowdsourcing setup is able to achieve acceptable accuracy levels with up to 4 annotations per hour, and that the location has a significant effect on accuracy.

Making sense of complexity in context and implementation: the Context and Implementation of Complex Interventions (CICI) framework

BackgroundThe effectiveness of complex interventions, as well as their success in reaching relevant populations, is critically influenced by their implementation in a given context. Current conceptual frameworks often fail to address context and implementation in an integrated way and, where addressed, they tend to focus on organisational context and are mostly concerned with specific health fields. Our objective was to develop a framework to facilitate the structured and comprehensive conceptualisation and assessment of context and implementation of complex interventions.MethodsThe Context and Implementation of Complex Interventions (CICI) framework was developed in an iterative manner and underwent extensive application. An initial framework based on a scoping review was tested in rapid assessments, revealing inconsistencies with respect to the underlying concepts. Thus, pragmatic utility concept analysis was undertaken to advance the concepts of context and implementation. Based on these findings, the framework was revised and applied in several systematic reviews, one health technology assessment (HTA) and one applicability assessment of very different complex interventions. Lessons learnt from these applications and from peer review were incorporated, resulting in the CICI framework.ResultsThe CICI framework comprises three dimensions—context, implementation and setting—which interact with one another and with the intervention dimension. Context comprises seven domains (i.e., geographical, epidemiological, socio-cultural, socio-economic, ethical, legal, political); implementation consists of five domains (i.e., implementation theory, process, strategies, agents and outcomes); setting refers to the specific physical location, in which the intervention is put into practise. The intervention and the way it is implemented in a given setting and context can occur on a micro, meso and macro level. Tools to operationalise the framework comprise a checklist, data extraction tools for qualitative and quantitative reviews and a consultation guide for applicability assessments.ConclusionsThe CICI framework addresses and graphically presents context, implementation and setting in an integrated way. It aims at simplifying and structuring complexity in order to advance our understanding of whether and how interventions work. The framework can be applied in systematic reviews and HTA as well as primary research and facilitate communication among teams of researchers and with various stakeholders.

Car speed estimation based on cross-ratio using video data of car-mounted camera (black box)

This paper proposes several methods for using footages of car-mounted camera (car black box) to estimate the speed of the car with the camera, or the speed of other cars. This enables estimating car velocities directly from recorded footages without the need of specific physical locations of cars shown in the recorded material. To achieve this, this study collected 96 cases of black box footages and classified them for analysis based on various factors such as travel circumstances and directions. With these data, several case studies relating to speed estimation of camera-mounted car and other cars in recorded footage while the camera-mounted car is stationary, or moving, have been conducted. Additionally, a rough method for estimating the speed of other cars moving through a curvilinear path and its analysis results are described, for practical uses. Speed estimations made using cross-ratio were compared with the results of the traditional footage-analysis method and GPS calculation results for camera-mounted cars, proving its applicability.

Situated-‘instant’ metaphors

This paper studies the metaphorical expressions created as slogans by the Spanish protesters who gathered spontaneously in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Square on May 15th 2011 to demand economic equality and democracy. The metaphors analysed aresituatedandcontext-induced, as well as ‘instant’, as they were produced in a very short, concrete period of time; in a specific physical location — the Puerta del Sol Square, Madrid; and within an equally specific socio-cultural situation — a political and economic crisis. In addition, the metaphors were created within a more general Spanish socio-cultural context, clearly shown in the slogans. The analysis reveals a variety of linguistic and multimodal mechanisms that interact with contextual factors resulting in a series of creative multimodal metaphors. This creativity actually fulfils a number of significant discourse-pragmatic functions, from attracting attention to etching in memory, but most of all, they are conceived as powerful rhetorical tools that help others to perceive reality in a new perspective and try to persuade people to join the movement and influence politicians and decision makers.

Life in the Cafe: On Diasporism in Aharon Appelfeld’s All Whom I Have Loved and A Table for One

Life in the Cafe:On Diasporism in Aharon Appelfeld’s All Whom I Have Loved and A Table for One Iris Milner In 1908, a short time after his departure from London and his return to Eastern Europe, Yosef Hayim Brenner published “El ha-matarah” (Toward the target)1 which features the character Shlomo Mittleman, an activist and self-appointed delegate to the Zionist congresses who lives in London and constantly defers his dream to emigrate to the land of Israel. “El ha-matarah” is a political story; Brenner lends it an amused and ironic overtone, through which he mocks the verbose nature of practical Zionism (tsiyonut ma‘asit). In it he also poses profound questions concerning fundamental aspects of Jewish existence, mediated through the grotesque character of Simcha, Mittleman’s simpleminded brother-in-law. Simcha’s strange habit of repeating the last words of every sentence he hears echoes and ridicules the empty ideological chatter of the anglophile Mittleman. At the same time, through his peculiar character and its resulting estrangement, the story provides a provocative insight into the character’s strong preference to observe the Zionist project from afar while adhering to a diasporic life of permanent exile. Indeed, “El ha-matarah,” together with Brenner’s other literary works that are set in early twentieth-century Palestine, was a tool for mediating the diasporic aspect of Jewish existence within the newly established Hebrew cultural arena. At the dawn of an age when Hebrew literature enthusiastically propagated the project of transforming Erets Israel from a mythological site into a concrete, homey space,2 the main characters in [End Page 459] Brenner’s work refused to settle down and experience physical and spiritual redemption. Brenner’s oeuvre thus explored the extent to which an urge for a nomadic, rootless existence, rather than a desire for permanent settlement in the Land of Israel, determined the essence of Jewish identity. Some fifty years later, when the myth of the autochthonic birth of the “new Jew” from the soil of his or her renewed homeland had become firmly entrenched in Israeli culture, and reflections about the fragility of ties with the Israeli place were carefully veiled, Aharon Appelfeld inherited the nomadic urge from Yosef Hayim Brenner—a writer he conceives of as his kindred spirit3—and similarly took upon himself the mission of problematizing this ideology. Almost all of his novels and short stories, published from the beginning of the 1960s onward, express a sense of detachment, whether chosen or forced, from a permanent home, and raise serious doubts regarding the possibility of dropping anchor in any specific physical location in a final and redemptive manner. Appelfeld thus reanimates the diasporic orientation in Hebrew literature that originated in Brenner’s works; his entire oeuvre, though written in Jerusalem, is a striking testament to the eternal Jewish nomad. The endless journeys of his protagonists in convoys, trains, wagons, and on foot,4 the recurring difficult attempts to settle down, and the morbid qualities often associated with home in his stories, all highlight the hopes and expectations as well as the moral conflicts of such nomadism. Consequently, they also shed light on unresolved questions regarding choice, fate, catastrophe, and redemption in Jewish history. Moreover, it is through the endless motion of Appelfeld’s protagonists that the various dramas with which his works deal intersect: the disorientation of European Jewry prior to World War II, the cataclysm of the Holocaust, the displaced condition of Jewish refugees after the war, and, intertwined into all these, the autobiographical turmoil of a persecuted child who searches in vain for shelter and protection. Accordingly, movement is motivated by a sense of lack:5 journeys are triggered by a passion [End Page 460] for a religious experience and an insatiable desire for an origin, a lost mother, a starting point, a primal, preverbal, constitutive experience. Although they sometimes reach specific locations where redemption is temporarily gained (such as the home of the righteous man in the Carpathians in At One and the Same Time)6, these journeys ultimately lead the nomads toward utter detachment and displacement.7 This essay discusses the unique version of the theme of diasporism in two...

Mobile, Collaborative Situated Knowledge Creation for Urban Planning

Geo-collaboration is an emerging research area in computer sciences studying the way spatial, geographically referenced information and communication technologies can support collaborative activities. Scenarios in which information associated to its physical location are of paramount importance are often referred as Situated Knowledge Creation scenarios. To date there are few computer systems supporting knowledge creation that explicitly incorporate physical context as part of the knowledge being managed in mobile face-to-face scenarios. This work presents a collaborative software application supporting visually-geo-referenced knowledge creation in mobile working scenarios while the users are interacting face-to-face. The system allows to manage data information associated to specific physical locations for knowledge creation processes in the field, such as urban planning, identifying specific physical locations, territorial management, etc.; using Tablet-PCs and GPS in order to geo-reference data and information. It presents a model for developing mobile applications supporting situated knowledge creation in the field, introducing the requirements for such an application and the functionalities it should have in order to fulfill them. The paper also presents the results of utility and usability evaluations.

The anxious vole: the impact of group and gender on collective behavior under life-threat

Social animals behave collectively in order to maintain a cohesive group. This collective behavior is often led by a few individuals of specific gender, social rank, or spatial physical location in the group (i.e., perimeter or front). We examined how individual social voles (Microtus socialis) in same-gender compared with mixed-gender groups respond to an owl attack. We found that anxiety level, as measured by the time that each individual spent in less-sheltered sectors (open arms of elevated plus-maze and center of open arena), was affected by both the social context and the gender of the tested individuals. While both female and male voles generally reduced their activity in the open following owl attack, males in mixed-gender groups were exceptional in dichotomizing into those that spent a short period and those that spent a long period in the open arms of the plus-maze. Based on the similar responses of the same-gender groups, we suggest that anxiety is contagious, and based on the lower anxiety level of the mixed-gender groups, we suggest that natural groups that comprise both males and females are better able to cope with life-threat compared with same-gender groups. Finally, we suggest that the differential responses of males in the mixed-gender groups were due to a few males that displayed a low level of anxiety. These males were probably individuals of high social rank, and their response reflects their natural protective role, as previously described in social voles.

Lessons learned from analyzing library database usage data

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe a project undertaken at SUNY Cortland to develop a system that would collect electronic resource usage data in a consistent manner and allow SUNY Cortland to assess this data over several years.Design/methodology/approachThe project used data gathered from EZProxy server log files to examine usage of the library's electronic resources.FindingsThrough examining the usage data the library discovered that users were utilizing particular types of resources, from specific physical locations, and accessing those resources from specific pages in the library's web site.Originality/valueBy examining usage data for electronic resources, libraries can learn more than which resources are being used. Usage data can give libraries insight into where, when, how, and possibly why their users are accessing electronic resources.

Women's Danger Management Strategies in an Inner‐City Housing Project*

The danger management strategies of low‐income African American women who live in a public housing community characterized by chronic violence are examined. Based on qualitative interviews with 18 single mothers, we explored the violent community dangers with which women contend, the nature of this violence, the strategies used to deal with community violence, and their benefits and costs to family and community life. Findings show that multiple types of violence characterized life in the community and that this violence has specific physical locations, a particular set of actors, and a temporal rhythm. Women's responses to violence were nonconfrontational and family focused in nature. These efforts were effective in keeping women and their children safe, but did not reduce the prevalence of violence.

Personal Wearable Computer Systems

While the development of advanced digital communication technologies may tie future workers more and more closely to their computers, these and other emerging technologies can also free future workers from being anchored to a specific physical location. High bandwidth wireless communications, ultraminiaturized computational devices with low energy demands and long battery life, and personalized interface technology will be integrated into low profile wearable computers that allow workers full mobility. When populated with personalized intelligent cognitive agents, the wearable system will also support lifelong learning needs and job performance support needs customized to the individual wearer.