Confrontational Strategies Research Articles

A many‐objective optimization based intelligent algorithm for virtual machine migration in mobile edge computing

SummaryWith the rapid development of big data, the explosive growth of data promotes the progress of the Internet of Things (IoT). Because it is hard for traditional cloud computing to meet vast computing tasks, scholars propose mobile edge computing (MEC) for the IoT. However, the mobility of users results in the instability of MEC performance. Besides, the conflict of interest between users and service providers needs to be balanced. To solve these problems, this paper constructs a virtual machine migration model based on many‐objective optimization (MaOVMMM). In MaOVMMM, four objectives are considered simultaneously: communication expense, computing expense, delay, and energy consumption. A many‐objective evolutionary algorithm with double population confrontation (MaOEA‐DPC) is suggested to support the MaOVMMM that is proposed. First, the population confrontation strategy is designed to better simulate the relationship between users and service providers. Second, the dynamic probability integration selection strategy is used to ensure the evolution ability of the algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of MaOEA‐DPC when compared with other algorithms. This proposed approach can provide a superior virtual machine migration scheme for decision‐makers.

PID Control Model Based on Back Propagation Neural Network Optimized by Adversarial Learning-Based Grey Wolf Optimization

In processes of industrial production, the online adaptive tuning method of proportional-integral-differential (PID) parameters using a neural network is found to be more appropriate than a conventional controller with PID for controlling different industrial processes with varying characteristics. However, real-time implementation and high reliability require the adjustment of specific model parameters. Therefore, this paper proposes a PID controller that combines a back-propagation neural network (BPNN) and adversarial learning-based grey wolf optimization (ALGWO). To enhance the unpredictable behavior and capacity for exploration of the grey wolf, this study develops a new parameter-learning technique. Alpha gray wolves use the random walk of levy flight as their hunting method. In beta and delta gray wolves, a search strategy centering on the top gray wolf is employed, and in omega gray wolves, the decision wolves handle the confrontation strategy. A fair balance between exploration and exploitation can be achieved, as evidenced by the success of the adversarial learning-based grey wolf optimization technique in ten widely used benchmark functions. The effectiveness of different activation functions in conjunction with ALGWO were evaluated in resolving the parameter adjustment issue of the BPNN model. The results demonstrate that no unique activation function outperforms others in different controlled systems, but their fitnesses are significantly inferior to those of the conventional PID controller.

Emotionally Coping with Terrorism

AbstractIndividuals often experience anger after exposure to news about a terrorist attack. Are the coping strategies available to them effective in reducing anger, and with what consequences for policy attitudes? We argue that because terrorism is a complex problem, people should feel better distancing themselves from the threat than engaging in confrontive strategies against it, and this should lead to less extreme attitudes. Across three experimental studies, we induced anger about terrorism and then randomly assigned participants to different opportunities to cope with their anger. The findings show that an emotion-focused coping strategy of distancing oneself from the threat is more effective at reducing anger than a problem-focused coping strategy involving support for confrontational strategies to address it. Furthermore, only distancing strategies reduced extreme stances on terrorism policy. These findings help us understand why some people may disengage from politics, even when angered by it.

Russian military perspectives on the Ottoman Empire during the Greek War of Independence

Abstract The refusal of Alexander I to declare war on the Ottoman Empire in support of the Greek Uprising in 1821 provided Russian military men with a possibility to reflect on the past Russian–Ottoman wars and prepare the best strategy for future confrontation. One of the aspects of this reflection was the growing interest of Russian military planners in the ethno-confessional composition and political attitudes of the local population in the territory of the prospective war theater. This article argues that increased attention to the population reflected the desire of the tsarist planners to avoid excesses of a “people’s war” rather than to unleash its destructive potential. Despite a strong emotional response that the Greek War of Independence provoked among the Russian military, their perspectives on the Ottoman Empire during the 1820s were for the most part quite restrained and conservative.

Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) Agitation for Autonomy: The Implications for Nigeria’s Unity and the Survival of the Igbo Nation

This article is set to discuss the continual agitation of IPOB for autonomy from the Nigerian state. The study uses data from a secondary source with content analysis as a methodology. Among other things, the paper examines reasons predisposing the agitation and implications of such an agitation on the unity of Nigeria and the survival of the Igbo nation. The study engages theories of secession to illustrate IPOB’s agitation and presents strategies which could be used to actualize IPOB’s ambition. In its concluding remarks, the study argued in favour of IPOB’s position for self-government through a strong adherence to wisdom wisdom and strategies discussed, as against the open confrontation strategy, due to the posture of the Nigerian government which is not favourable towards the agitation.
 
 Received: 28 June 2022 / Accepted: 18 October 2022 / Published: 5 November 2022

A gendered analysis of trends in the faith‐based provision of social services: Evidence from Egypt and Turkey

A gendered analysis of trends in the faith‐based provision of social services: Evidence from Egypt and Turkey

Responding to the spread of conspiracy theories

ABSTRACT Conspiracy theories are spreading faster than ever and pose a real danger to our societies. It is natural to accuse the consumers of conspiracy theories of irrationality – that they are either not looking at or appropriately sensitive to all the available evidence. In this paper, I attempt to determine if we can make sense of this general idea. I argue that we cannot: conspiracy theories do not spread because the people who believe them are irrational – at least, not necessarily so. In addition, I explore some alternative strategies for responding to the problem of the spread of conspiracy theories. I argue that in addition to confrontational strategies such as social shaming, we need more constructive programs of community activism to battle the spread of conspiracy theories.

Chronic pain and welfare in pets

This revision has as its objective to bring attention to the importance of collaborative studies of the biological foundations of pain and its relationship with psychiatric veterinary clinic practices. During the entire period of their lives animals come across challenging and stressful situations that are capable to unleash complex neuroendocrinal responses, resulting in adaptations on behavior and physiology, in order to maximize the probability of survival. The pain can alter the normal brain functions, altering the individual’s confrontation strategies as well as affect their quality of life. The knowledge around neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and the standard concept of animal well-being can renew the attention given to this complex system and promote a possible strategy for the treatment of painful conditions.

Cooperative line-of-sight guidance with optimal evasion strategy for three-body confrontation

This paper focuses on the three-body confrontation problem of a Target–Defender team against an Attacker possessing greater maneuverability. Based on the input-to-state stability approach, a cooperative robust line-of-sight guidance law is proposed for the Target–Defender team to ensure that the Attacker has a certain tolerance range on the unavailable guidance information. In addition, the optimal evasion strategy is developed for the Target to maximize the terminal distance between the Target and Attacker. A key feature of the proposed guidance law is that the interception of the Attacker can be guaranteed as long as the uncertainty generated by the Attacker’s maneuver is bounded. Furthermore, by using the optimal control technique, the control input of the Target–Defender team is minimized. Simulation examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed guidance law.

Multisource Data Fusion and Adversarial Nets for Landslide Extraction from UAV-Photogrammetry-Derived Data

Most traditional methods have difficulty detecting landslide boundary accurately, and the existing methods based on deep learning often lead to insufficient training or overfitting due to insufficient samples. An end-to-end, semi-supervised adversarial network, which fully considers spectral and topographic features derived using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry, is proposed to extract landslides by semantic segmentation to address the abovementioned problem. In the generative network, a generator similar to pix2pix is introduced into the proposed adversarial nets to learn semantic features from UAV-photogrammetry-derived data by semi-supervised operation and a confrontational strategy to reduce the requirement of the number of labeled samples. In the discriminative network, DeepLabv3+ is improved by inserting multilevel skip connection architecture with upsampling operation to obtain the contextual information and retain the boundary information of landslides at all levels, and a topographic convolutional neural network is proposed to be inserted into the encoder to concatenate topographic features together with spectral features. Then, transfer learning with the pre-trained parameters and weights, shared with pix2pix and DeepLabv3+, is used to perform landslide extraction training and validation. In our experiments, the UAV-photogrammetry-derived data of a typical landslide located at Meilong gully in China are collected to test the proposed method. The experimental results show that our method can accurately detect the area of a landslide and achieve satisfactiory results based on several indicators including the Precision, Recall, F1 score, and mIoU, which are 13.07%, 15.65%, 16.96%, and 18.23% higher than those of the DeepLabV3+. Compared with state-of-the-art methods such as U-Net, PSPNet, and pix2pix, the proposed adversarial nets considering multidimensional information such as topographic factors can perform better and significantly improve the accuracy of landslide extraction.

Systematic Review of Conflict of Interest Studies in Public Administration

A conflict of interest is one of the most important issues in Public Administration. This occurs at a time when the finger of corruption always points to officials, and a conflict of interest can be the underlying cause of corruption among officials. The objective of this study is to propose rather comprehensive actions to manage conflict of interest in the public sector in terms of reviewing the existing studies and sources in this field. By investigating valid databases, 106 studies were found as such. In the analyzed studies of this research, prevention, confrontation, and punishment strategies in cultural, legal, and structural approaches with 21 effective actions for handling this phenomenon are delineated. The study finds that the conflict of interest phenomenon is subject to more critical attention as neo-liberalism is spreading in the world. A person drawn into a conflict of interest presumably overlooks public interest, hence it is advisable to avoid conflict of interest situations. While most of the reviewed studies focus on disclosure of conflict of interest situations, there are other effective actions to prevent this phenomenon. Researches are expected to propose a variety of penalties for officials and staff who decide while drawn into the conflict of interest situations.

The Alternative Question in YouTube-Interview: Linguistic, Pragmatic and Cognitive Aspects

Within the framework of the culture of questioning we have explored alternative questions that occupy an intermediate position between the well-known open and closed questions. In terms of language, this is a situational or contextually incomplete sentence. Based on the regular incomplete implementation of the language model, we can speak about the formation of an independent interrogative syntactic structure “N1 or N1?”, in which the idea of choice is realized through grammatical rather than lexical means. In this case, the semantics of the construction actualizes the meaning of the disjunctive conjunction or. In terms of media communication, it is important that this type of question is widely used in interviews on the popular video hosting platform YouTube (in particular, on the channels “Wdud” (recognized as a foreign agent), “Caution: Sobchak”, “Tell Gordeeva”, RTVI: “Special Guest”). The alternative question is the element of play, agonality, competition. It is usually included in a series of short questions of the “Blitz” section and allows the interviewer to realize different intentions: to update important topics of the conversation or to touch on new areas. In this case, a binary opposition is created based on contextual homonymy, which allows assessment according to the principle: “friend or foe”. Various scenarios of the interviewee's speech behavior have been identified. The cooperation strategy is implemented in different versions of the answer to an alternative question; the strategy of confrontation is the refusal to answer (direct or indirect). Alternative questions emphasize the binary nature of thinking, embody the strategy of polarization.

Linguistic Methods of Implementing a Communicative Strategy of Self-Defense in American Political Discourse

This paper aims to study linguistic techniques of the communicative strategy of self-defense as one of the confrontational communicative strategies of American political discourse. The relevance of the study is revealed in the transformation of modern American political rhetoric, the consequence of which is the intensification of conventionally destructive elements in American political rhetoric and the predominance of subjective-negative modality units in political speech. The communicative strategy of self-defense allows the communicant to divert negative information from themselves and move from a defensive position to an attack. The author analyzes various tactical ways of implementing a communicative strategy of self-defense, which include justification, challenging, retaliatory criticism (counter-accusation), indignation, and opposition. They include several linguistic means (lexical units with a negative evaluation, deictic constructions, spoken words, lexical repetitions, personal pronouns, gradation, etc.). This article examines the roles of participants in the speech act of confrontation. The following models of speech behavior can be distinguished: offensive (attack, provocation), defense (self-defense, reaction to provocation), and evaluation (based on observation of the conflict). Thanks to the implementation of the communicative strategy of self-defense, the transition of the communicant from defense to offensive is possible.

No UV vision for trend-bucking blue-tongued skinks

Squaring up to an adversary is always risky; you could break a limb, suffer damaged skin, or lose scales if you're a lizard. However, blue-tongued skinks may have a less confrontational strategy for diffusing conflict: they waggle their tongues at each other. But these are no ordinary tongues. As the lizard's name suggests, they are blue. But what exactly does a blue-tongued skink opponent see when a rival flashes its tongue? Well, that depends on the light-sensing photoreceptors at the back of the lizard's eye and which shades the receptors are tuned to, yet no one had taken a close look at blue tongued skinks’ eyes to find out how the reptiles see colour. So, Nicolas Nagloo and Jan Hemmi from the University of Western Australia and colleagues decided to take a close look at the back of one blue-tongued skink's eyes – the sleepy lizard, Tiliqua rugosa – to begin to understand what the animals see when a threatening rival waggles its tongue.It turns out that the reptile's eyes are more sensitive to shades of blue than other lizards and when the team checked for the essential light-sensitive proteins (photopigments) that specifically tune light-sensitive photoreceptors to certain shades of colour (wavelengths of light), they discovered that the sleepy lizard's eye has five types of photopigment: two tuned to shades of blue, two to shades of green and a fifth that picks up yellowy shades of green. Yet, when the team measured the electrical signals produced by the sleepy lizards’ retina, the blue-tongued skinks were barely able to see ultraviolet wavelengths, which are clearly sensed by other lizards that see ultraviolet light beyond the rainbow we know.However, the team is still a long way from understanding what the lizards truly see when another sleepy lizard shoots out its tongue. It is not clear which shades the blue-sensitive photopigments in the eye are precisely tuned to and how natural light filters formed by oil drops in the retina might modify the lizard's colour vision. But it is clear that the blue-tongued skinks see colours in a very different way from other lizards, which have a visual pallet that extends into the ultraviolet. Whether the sleepy lizard's lurid tongue or restricted colour vision range came first is also not apparent, but it is clear that various factors have moulded the blue-tongued skink's vision to be distinctly different from that of other lizards.

True feelings but False meanings: Emotional Performance and Individual Confrontation in the Dissemination of Misinformation

In the process of spreading rumors, emotion is regarded as a social resource that can be mobilized. Existing studies have described the characteristics and influence mechanism of the spread of misinformation based on the text, but this process ignores the important role of emotion in the spread of misinformation. This study uses the grounded theory research method to conduct in-depth interviews with users who have participated in emotional dissemination of misinformation on social media platforms, and explores how user emotions play a role in the dissemination of misinformation combined with the coding results. It is found that emotion sets up a unique alternative application strategy of confrontation and compliance when users deal with misinformation through three forms of driving attention, gaining recognition and achieving goals.

ЕПІСТЕМІЧНІ СЛОВА ТА КОМУНІКАТИВНІ СТРАТЕГІЇ КООПЕРАЦІЇ

The article examines epistemic words in discourse in order to determine their significance for the formation of communicative strategies of cooperation. Epistemic words (e.g. know, think, perhaps) convey the speaker’s attitude to what is said, express the level of knowledge about what is said, which can vary from confidence to uncertainty. The pragmatics of epistemic words is superimposed on the functioning of dialogic discourse. The main task of pragmatics is to show what the speaker or character wants to convey with his statements, while the communicative-functional direction of speech research aims to plan the speech process depending on the circumstances and conditions of communication and personalities of communicators to achieve communication goals. Communicative strategies and tactics are a method of expressing the intentions of the speaker and influence on the interlocutor. It is common to divide strategies into strategies of cooperation and confrontation. Cooperation strategies are based on the concept of “balance of relations” between communicators, the positive mood between them and their desire to achieve the communicative goal. It is the communicative strategies of cooperation and tactics of cooperative communication that are the subject of research, and the object of research are fragments of dialogic discourse that contain epistemic words. The material for the study were works of modern English literature. In the article for the global strategy of cooperation we single out local strategies for ensuring stable and harmonious communication, prompting, presentation of information, empathy, positive evaluation. It was found that the strategy of stable and harmonious communication is manifested through tactics of seeking consent, confirmation, assurance, promise, justification; prompting strategy includes tactics of instructions, advice, requests; presentation strategy includes the tactics of statement, argumentation, summarizing, assuming, predicting, explaining, clarifying; the strategy of empathy is realized through tactics of encouragement and consolation; the strategy of positive evaluation is implemented through tactics of compliment and praise.

Indonesia's response to the Belt and Road Initiative and the Indo‐Pacific: A pivotal state's hedging strategy

AbstractRegional politics surrounding Southeast Asia has exhibited significant developments with China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and counter initiatives through the Indo‐Pacific concept. This article seeks to examine Indonesia's strategic reactions to such regional developments. It argues that Indonesia has exhibited policy responses to the BRI and the Indo‐Pacific concept by hedging against uncertainties created by China's economic prowess through the adoption of mutually contradictory policy options. Such a hedging strategy was present in various dimensions: adopting economic accommodation and economic diversification regarding the BRI; taking confrontational strategies in maritime security tensions with China while pursuing economic pragmatism for attracting BRI funds; and restraining reliance on China and its BRI by pushing forwards Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN) regional initiative that uses the Indo‐Pacific term. The findings indicate that Indonesia's position is crucial for bolstering ASEAN's status as the main regional organization under evolving regional politics.

Educational violence: a systematic review

This article aims to map the main educational violence in the period from 2015 to 2020, in the scientific database of the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology - IBICT. It is the result of a systematic review. The main authors identified in the research works, in order of recurrence, were: Abramovay (2002), Fante (2005), Lopes Neto (2005), Debarbieux (2001, 2002), Charlot (2002), Antunes (2010), Silva (2010), Bourdieu (2014), Franco (2014), Beane (2010), Priotto (2006), Michaud (2001), Sardenberg (2007), Rossato and Rossato (2013), Tudisco (2011), Laterman (2000), Sposito (2001). Also, it was verified the most recurrent types of educational violence, the institutions by State that produced the most research on the subject, the prevention and confrontation strategies of educational violence in the 24 scientific works (18 dissertations and six theses). Abramovay is the author with more recurrence in productions, quoted in 16 of the 24 studies studied. In summary, it was possible to perceive the contributions of the authors mentioned above in understanding the complex phenomenon of violence, the plurality of terms on school violence and its causes and consequences of violence in the lives of children and adolescents.

Neural network model for recognition and classification of types of interactions in road traffic

The article presents neural network for recognition of driving strategies based on interactions between drivers in road traffic. It analyzes the architecture of the model implemented as a self-organizing map (SOM), consisting of a group of neural networks based on radial basis functions (RBF). It is a training model grounded in the biological foundations of artificial neural networks, in which the training set should consist exclusively of input vectors; wherein the network training algorithm adjusts itself the network's weights to obtain consistent output vectors (i.e. to make presenting sufficiently close input vectors result into the same outputs). The article presents the results of using a new generation of the neural network developed by us, which includes an adaptive learning algorithm to reduce the effect of re-training (overfitting) and false recognition, as well as to improve the determination of the boundaries between clusters. The aim of the research is to outline architecture and structure of the neural network model that allows recognizing strategical characteristics of driving and can identify strategies of interactions between vehicles (their drivers) in road traffic as well as identify behavioral patterns This paper considers driving strategies that characterize the interaction of dyads of vehicles (drivers) moving in road traffic. The research results show that the SOM RBF neural networks can recognize and classify types of interactions in road traffic based on modelling of the analysis of vehicle movement trajectories. Experimental results demonstrate the neural networks architecture and networks learning involving 400 iterations of streaming the training data representing 500 possible simulated interaction situations. This paper presents a novel neural network model for recognition of drivers' behaviour patterns and for classification of driving strategies into five general classes: (1) competition strategy, (2) contest strategy, (3) evasion strategy, (4) compromise strategy, and (5) active confrontation strategy. This neural network has demonstrated a high rate of recognition and concise clusterization of similar driving strategies. The key contribution of this paper: it proposes a neural network model based on Kohonen's Self-Organizing Map (SOM) for detecting drivers' behaviours from vehicle movement patterns - driving strategies - instead of monitoring driver's specific activities.

RDEU hawk-dove game analysis of the China-Australia iron ore trade conflict

By combining rank dependent expected utility (RDEU) theory model with asymmetric hawk-dove game model, this paper builds the RDEU hawk-dove game model to resolve the iron ore trade conflict between Chinese steel companies and Australian iron ore companies. Moreover, the impact of corporate benefits, conflict costs, “emotional factors” and “asymmetric factors” on corporate strategic choices are considered comprehensively. The study finds that:(1) When the benefits of Chinese and Australian companies are less than the conflict costs, there are the following conclusions. First, concerning the “emotional factors”, compared with optimism, pessimism has greater impact on the strategic choices of Chinese and Australian companies. Second, the greater the degree of asymmetry in the pricing power of Chinese and Australian companies, more Australian iron ore companies tend to choose the extreme confrontation strategy, and more Chinese steel companies tend to choose the peaceful settlement strategy. Finally, when the emotional factors and asymmetric factors are equal, compared with Chinese companies, the probability of Australian companies adopting the extreme confrontation strategy is higher, which is mainly due to the higher incomes of Australian companies. (2) When the benefits of Chinese companies are less than the conflict costs and the benefits of Australian companies are greater than the conflict costs, regardless of the emotions of both parties in the game, Australian companies tend to choose the extreme confrontation strategy, and Chinese companies tend to choose the peaceful settlement strategy. (3) When the benefits of Chinese and Australian companies are greater than the conflict costs, regardless of the emotions of both parties in the game, Chinese and Australian companies tend to choose extreme confrontation strategy. The research results can provide a reference for Chinese and Australian companies to resolve iron ore trade conflicts.