Wake-up Calls Research Articles

Outbursts, Discipline, and Wake-Up Calls: Gendered Emotionalities in Men’s Gambling

Within gambling debates and research, emotions are associated with irrationality, loss of control, and problem gambling. Simultaneously, they have a complex relationship to masculine positions, which are said to be connected to both stoicism and aggressivity. Using interviews with Swedish men gamblers and feminist and critical theorisations of emotions, this article discusses experiences, negotiations, and performances of emotions within men’s gambling. The article demonstrates that emotions and control were entangled themes in the research, but discussed as separate by the interviewees, who used emotion work in order to navigate their own experiences in relation to larger discourses about gender, health, and ‘sovereignty’ in relation to gambling. The article expands feminist research about gender and emotions by providing in-depth, detailed discussions about men’s emotionalities. It also contributes to gambling research by integrating problematising perspectives on emotions and to research about the production of gendered emotionalities under capitalism.

Analysis of Multi-Threading and Cache Memory Latency Masking on Processor Performance Using Thread Synchronization Technique

Multithreading is a process in which a single processor executes multiple threads concurrently. This enables the processor to divide tasks into separate threads and run them simultaneously, thereby increasing the utilization of available system resources and enhancing performance. When multiple threads share an object and one or more of them modify it, unpredictable outcomes may occur. Threads that exhibit poor locality of memory reference, such as database applications, often experience delays while waiting for a response from the memory hierarchy. This observation suggests how to better manage pipeline contention. To assess the impact of memory latency on processor performance, a dual-core MT machine with four thread contexts per core is utilized. These specific benchmarks are chosen to allow the workload to include programs with both favorable and unfavorable cache locality. To eliminate the issue of wasting the wake-up signals, this work proposes an approach that involves storing all the wake-up calls. It asserts the wake-up calls to the consumer and the producer can store the wake-up call in a variable. An assigned value in working system (or kernel) storage that each process can check is a semaphore. Semaphore is a variable that reads, and update operations automatically in bit mode. It cannot be actualized in client mode since a race condition may persistently develop when two or more processors endeavor to induce to the variable at the same time.
 This study includes code to measure the time taken to execute both functions and plot the graph. It should be noted that sending multiple requests to a website simultaneously could trigger a flag, ultimately blocking access to the data. This necessitates some computation on the collected statistics. The execution time is reduced to one third when using threads compared to executing the functions sequentially. This exemplifies the power of multithreading.

An Innovative Clustering Hierarchical Protocol for Data Collection from Remote Wireless Sensor Networks Based Internet of Things Applications

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a viable solution for data collection from remote Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the successful implementation in this regard necessitates the development of a reliable and energy-efficient routing protocol. This paper proposes a reliable and an energy-efficient UAV-assisted clustering hierarchical (EEUCH) protocol designed for remote wireless sensor networks (WSNs) based IoT applications. The proposed EEUCH routing protocol facilitates UAVs to collect data from ground sensor nodes (SNs) that are equipped with wake-up radios (WuRs) and deployed remotely from the base station (BS) in the field of interest (FoI). During each round of the EEUCH protocol, the UAVs arrive at the predefined hovering positions at the FoI, perform clear channel assignment, and broadcast wake-up calls (WuCs) to the SNs. Upon receiving the WuCs by the SNs’ wake-up receivers, the SNs perform carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance before sending joining requests to ensure reliability and cluster-memberships with the particular UAV whose WuC is received. The cluster-member SNs turn on their main radios (MRs) for data packet transmission. The UAV assigns time division multiple access (TDMA) slots to each of its cluster-member SNs whose joining request is received. Each SN must send the data packets in its assigned TDMA slot. When data packets are successfully received by the UAV, it sends acknowledgments to the SNs, after which the SNs turn off their MRs, completing a single round of the protocol. The proposed EEUCH routing protocol with WuR eliminates the issue of cluster overlapping, improves the overall performance, and increases network stability time by a factor of 8.7. It also improves energy efficiency by a factor of 12.55, resulting in a longer network lifespan compared to Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol. Moreover, EEUCH collects 5.05 times more data from the FoI than LEACH. These results are based on simulations in which the EEUCH protocol outperformed the existing six benchmark routing protocols proposed for homogeneous, two-tier, and three-tier heterogeneous WSNs.

How Do Depositors Respond to Bank Dividend Policy? Evidence from Market Discipline, Global Financial Crisis and COVID-19 Pandemic

Our study investigates how depositors respond to the bank dividend policy via the interest rate channel. The results suggests that by paying dividend, banks mitigate the information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders, then enjoying a lower deposit cost than banks that do not pay dividend. Dividend-paying banks that are subject to higher funding costs may enjoy a greater decrease of funding costs than non-payers. Banks that are under greater pressure from regulators, but encounter losses have to pay higher deposit costs when deciding to pay dividend. The study emphasizes the downside of deposit insurance scheme when documenting the indifference of insured but uninsured depositors during the global financial crisis, but the COVID-19 crisis, suggesting the wake-up calls for depositors.

“Together We Are Strong”: Emergency Associations for the Protection of Germany's Cultural Heritage

ABSTRACT This article presents an overview of the creation and development of emergency associations for the protection of archives, libraries, and museums in Germany. This is a response to several wake-up calls, notably the Elbe floods of 2002, the destruction by fire of a significant portion of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar in 2004, and the collapse of the Cologne City Archive building in 2009. The emergency associations have come together on a voluntary basis to offer mutual support in the event of natural and human-made disasters. Drawing on the experience of the Augsburg association founded in 2015, the author explains the role and success of the new networks. Annual meetings have consolidated regional and nationwide collaboration, and deepened experience and preparedness. Training courses and major incident exercises with fire services as well as the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief form the bedrock of the cooperation.

Environmental specimen banks and the European Green Deal

The study highlights the potential of Environmental Specimen Banks (ESBs) for implementing the Zero Pollution Ambition and the Biodiversity Strategy of the European Green Deal. By drawing on recent monitoring studies of European ESBs, we illustrate the role ESBs already play in assessing the state of ecosystems in Europe and how they help to make developments over time visible. The studies reveal the ubiquitous presence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, halogenated flame retardants, chlorinated paraffins, plasticizers, cyclic volatile methyl siloxanes, UV-filters, pharmaceuticals, and microplastics in the European environment. Temporal trends demonstrate the effectiveness of European regulations on perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, pentabrominated diphenylethers and diethylhexyl phthalate, but also point to the rise of substitutes such as non-phthalate plasticizers and short-chain perfluoroalkyl substances. Other studies are wake-up calls indicating the emergence of currently unregulated compounds such as long-chain chlorinated paraffins. Ecological studies show temporal trends in biometric parameters and stable isotope signatures that suggest long-term changes in environmental conditions. Studies on biodiversity of ecosystems using environmental DNA are still in their beginnings, but here too there is evidence of shifts in community composition that can be linked to changing environmental conditions. This review demonstrates the value of ESBs (a) for describing the status of the environment, (b) for monitoring temporal changes in environmental pollution and the ecologic condition of ecosystems and thereby (c) for supporting regulators in prioritizing their actions towards the objectives of the Green Deal.

A Wake-Up Call Theory of Contagion

Abstract We offer a theory of financial contagion based on the information choice of investors after observing a financial crisis elsewhere. We study global coordination games of regime change in two regions linked by an initially unobserved macro shock. A crisis in region 1 is a wake-up call to investors in region 2. It induces them to reassess the regional fundamental and acquire information about the macro shock. Contagion can occur even after investors learn that region 2 has no ex post exposure to region 1. We explore normative and testable implications of the model. In particular, our results rationalize evidence about contagious currency crises and bank runs after wake-up calls and provide some guidance for future empirical work.

A Novel Spherical Fuzzy Rough Aggregation Operators Hybrid with TOPSIS Method and Their Application in Decision Making

Industrial control system (ICS) attacks are usually targeted attacks that use the ICS entry approach to get a foothold within a system and move laterally throughout the organization. In recent decades, powerful attacks such as Stuxnet, Duqu, Flame, and Havex have served as wake-up calls for industrial units. All organizations are faced with the rise of security challenges in technological innovations. This paper aims to develop aggregation operators that can be used to address the decision-making problems based on a spherical fuzzy rough environment. Meanwhile, some interesting properties of idempotence, boundedness, and monotonicity for the proposed operators are analyzed. Moreover, we use this newly constructed framework to select ICS security suppliers and validate its acceptability. Furthermore, a different test has been performed based on a new operator to strengthen the suggested approach. Additionally, comparative analysis based on the novel extended TOPSIS method is presented to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed technique. The results show that the conventional approach has a larger area for information representation, better adaptability to the evaluation environment, and higher reliability of the evaluation results.

Crisis and non-crisis short selling and bank enforcement actions

Employing standard informed trading intuition, we develop testable hypotheses regarding short selling before and after bank enforcement action (EA) initiations. For U.S.-listed bank firm data for 2007 to 2012, we find strong support for differentiated short seller activity and skill in crisis versus non-crisis periods. In financial crises, short sellers predominantly position prior to EAs. The EA initiations then act as information-homogenizing and profit-taking events reducing incentives to remain positioned. In contrast, EAs in non-crisis periods appear to serve as wake-up calls that attract additional short selling. Our findings offer potentially important insights for regulators considering short sellers’ reactions to EA announcements in general, during financial crises, and when not experiencing a broad financial crisis.

Wake-Up Calls for Reluctant C-Suite Executives

It is easy to get caught up in the day to day, even the month to month. CFOs live and die by the quarter. But there are major business technology trends that C-Suite executives—regardless of their day-to-day function—need to understand and respect. Why? Because these trends will inevitably and profoundly impact their companies and likely forever change the industries they occupy. In fact, their business processes and entire business models will be turned upside down by the trends. How inevitably? When? There is no question about the inevitability of the trends, though there are legitimate debates about timing. The strategic dilemma of course is “flatfootedness.” If a company’s timing is off it will lose competitive positioning. If it is way off, it may not survive.

A PUF-based secure wake-up scheme for Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) are typically powered by limited-capacity batteries. Thus, reducing energy consumption is a critical issue for the success of IoT. Recently, Wake-up Radios (WuRs) play a key role in minimizing the energy consumption by providing wake-up calls to IoT devices which are currently in a low-power sleep mode to conserve energy. On receiving a pre-defined pattern called a Wake-up Token (WuT) over the WuR, the IoT device wakes up in order to process information and/or conduct communications. However, WuR-based IoT devices are susceptible to malicious attacks, such as Denial-of-Sleep attacks designed to drain the device of its energy, or cloning attacks designed to impersonate a legitimate IoT device and perform various nefarious activities. To address these problems, the present study proposes a novel one-time wake-up token using the Physical Unclonable Function (PUF). In addition, to prevent the WuT from becoming desynchronized thereby resulting in a connection loss, a WuT resynchronization scheme is designed to maintain a constant state of synchronization between the WuTs of the gateway and the IoT devices, respectively. Finally, the proposed schemes are extended to support group wake-up and resynchronization procedures, respectively, in order to enhance the communication efficiency and improve the energy conservation. The correctness of the proposed schemes is verified through AUTLOG analysis. It has been shown that the proposed schemes are secure against various types of attacks and consume significantly less energy than existing mechanisms in waking up an IoT device.

Identification of care tasks for the use of wearable transfer support robots \u2013 an observational study at nursing facilities using robots on a daily basis

BackgroundTo reduce the physical burden of caregivers, wearable transfer support robots are highly desirable. Although these robots are reportedly effective for specific tasks in experimental environments, there is little information about their effectiveness at nursing care facilities. The aim of this study was to identify care tasks and operations suitable for the use of these robots among caregivers in nursing facilities where these robots have been in use on a daily basis.MethodsA 1-min observational time-motion analysis was conducted to examine care tasks and operations in two nursing facilities where wearable transfer support robots, namely Muscle Suit or HAL® Lumbar Type for Care Support, have been used routinely on a daily basis for more than 24 months.ResultsAnalysis of the care tasks and their time ratio while wearing the equipment revealed that both robots were used conspicuously for direct care in over 70% of transits, especially during transfer assistance and toileting care. Furthermore, these robots were used intensively in the morning along with wake-up calls to care recipients, where pre-assigned wearers used them as part of their “routine work.”ConclusionsWe found that these wearable transfer support robots enabled effective performance of care tasks and operations in nursing facilities where these robots have been used on a daily basis for an extended period of time. These results may lead to the effective implementation and sustained operation of other types of care robots in the future.Trial registrationUMIN Clinical Trials Registry no. UMIN000039204. Trial registration date: January 21, 2020. Interventional study. Parallel, non-randomized, single blinded.

EXPLORING THE RECYCLING OF MANURE FROM URBAN LIVESTOCK FARMS: A CASE STUDY IN ETHIOPIA

Urban population growth is driving the expansion of urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) in developing countries. UPA is providing nutritious food to residents but the manures produced by UPA livestock farms and other wastes are not properly recycled. This paper explores the effects of four scenarios: (1) a reference scenario (business as usual), (2) increased urbanization, (3) UPA intensification, and (4) improved technology, on food-protein self-sufficiency, manure nitrogen (N) recycling and balances for four different zones in a small city (Jimma) in Ethiopia during the period 2015-2050. An N mass flow model with data from farm surveys, field experiments and literature was used. A field experiment was conducted and N use efficiency and N fertilizer replacement values differed among the five types of composts derived from urban livestock manures and kitchen wastes. The N use efficiency and N fertilizer replacement values were used in the N mass flow model. Livestock manures were the main organic wastes in urban areas, although only 20% to 40% of animal-sourced food consumed was produced in UPA, and only 14% to 19% of protein intake by residents was animal-based. Scenarios indicate that manure production in UPA will increase 3 to 10 times between 2015 and 2050, depending on urbanization and UPA intensification. Only 13% to 38% of manure N will be recycled in croplands. Farm-gate N balances of UPA livestock farms will increase to > 1 t-ha-1 in 2050. Doubling livestock productivity and feed protein conversion to animal-sourced food will roughly halve manure N production.Costs of waste recycling were high and indicate the need for government incentives. Results of these senarios are wake-up calls for all stakeholders and indicate alternative pathways.

Risk perceptions and mitigation behaviors of residents following a near-miss wildfire

Wildfires pose significant risks to populations living in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI). We examine the influence of WUI residents’ risk perceptions as well as other cognitive constructs (guided by Protection Motivation Theory) likely to influence their decisions to take wildfire mitigation actions before and shortly after a near-miss wildfire. We used a drop-off/pick up survey to compare pre- and post-fire risk perceptions and mitigation actions of residents living in close proximity to the 416 Fire in southwestern Colorado, USA. Our research was guided by the general question, does a near-miss wildfire influence residents’ perceptions and self-reported fire risk mitigation behaviors? Specifically, we examined the cognitive appraisals and physical risk factors influencing residents’ previous and planned mitigation actions both before and after the fire. Our findings show risk perceptions declined significantly after the fire while residents’ intentions to take nine different fire risk mitigation actions increased. These results suggest near-miss fire events result in simultaneous “let-downs” and “wake-up calls” among affected residents. Near-miss wildfires present a unique opportunity for wildfire community preparedness, outreach, and engagement programs to capitalize on an increased willingness to take risk mitigation actions. However, these programs may face difficulties in communicating the continued threat of subsequent fire events.

Grexit and Brexit: Incidents, accidents and wake-up calls on the bumpy road of European (dis)integration

Almost 30 years since the Maastricht Treaty and 20 years since the introduction of the euro, it is clear that the European Union (EU) has lost its appeal to wider constituencies and citizen groups that realize that the promises for convergence and prosperity have not been delivered. Rising dissatisfaction and Euroscepticism (expressed both in the ballot box and in Eurobarometer reports) is evident even in traditional pro-EU countries of the European core. As this long decade comes to an end, incidents (or accidents) like these ones, either in the form of open discontent, or in the form of rising populism, will exert pressure on the EU policy agenda that will either increase the frequency of deadlocks and inefficiency in policy making or will eventually lead to an honest effort to address the roots of these phenomena. This paper examines the drivers behind these two incidents (and the ones that may follow) and the limits of the current market and policy integration arrangements in the EU, arguing that a new policy agenda addressing the real weaknesses of the Union is inevitable if disintegration is to be avoided. Luckily enough, some elements of this new policy agenda may already be here.

End the Lockdown for Animals – Reflecting and Campaigning on Three Key Arenas of Human-Animal Interaction Linked to Zoonotic Diseases.

Covid-19, SARS, MERS, Ebola, avian influenza: Wake-up calls for humanity to reassess our relationship with animals and the natural world. 73% of emerging infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic, originating in animals. Together, zoonoses account for billions of illnesses and millions of deaths across the globe. Their spread has direct connections to our use and misuse of animals, trapped, traded, bred, raised, confined, transported in ways that pose a serious risk for the development of zoonotic pathogens with the potential to infect human populations. In order to prevent future pandemics, three key animal protection issues must be tackled: the trade of live wild animals; the intensive confinement of animals farmed for food; fur farming and the fur trade.

Medical Instructed Real-Time Assistant for Patient with Glaucoma and Diabetic Conditions

Virtual assistants are involved in the daily activities of humans such as managing calendars, making appointments, and providing wake-up calls. They provide a conversational service to customers around-the-clock and make their daily life manageable. With this emerging trend, many well-known companies launched their own virtual assistants that manage the daily routine activities of customers. In the healthcare sector, virtual medical assistants also provide a list of relevant diseases linked to a specific symptom. Due to low accuracy and uncertainty, these generated recommendations are untrusted and may lead to hypochondriasis. In this study, we proposed a Medical Instructed Real-time Assistant (MIRA) that listens to the user’s chief complaint and predicts a specific disease. Instead of informing about the medical condition, the user is referred to a nearby appropriate medical specialist. We designed an architecture for MIRA that considers the limitations of existing virtual medical assistants such as weak authentication, lack of understanding multiple intent statements about a specific medical condition, and uncertain diagnosis recommendations. To implement the designed architecture, we collected the chief complaints along with the dialogue corpora of real patients. Then, we manually validated these data under the supervision of medical specialists. We then used these data for natural language understanding, disease identification, and appropriate response generation. For the prototype version of MIRA, we considered the cases of glaucoma (eye disease) and diabetes (an autoimmune disease) only. The performance measure of MIRA was evaluated in terms of accuracy (89%), precision (90%), sensitivity (89.8%), specificity (94.9%), and F-measure (89.8%). The task completion was calculated using Cohen’s Kappa ( k = 0.848 ) that categorizes MIRA as ‘Almost Perfect’. Furthermore, the voice-based authentication identifies the user effectively and prevent against masquerading attack. Simultaneously, the user experience shows relatively good results in all aspects based on the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) benchmark data. The experimental results show that MIRA efficiently predicts a disease based on chief complaints and supports the user in decision making.

On wake-up calls and metaphors: comment on Braithwaite “crime as a cascade phenomenon”

ABSTRACT Braithwaite’s provocation to see crime (and its prevention) through a “cascade lens” is certainly a wake-up call for macrocriminologists. As a metaphor it has the capability to motivate new directions in criminological research, however this also limits its potential as organising structure for testing important propositions. I argue that two strategies are required to move the cascade concept from a metaphor to an analytical tool. First, it needs to be made operational and testable, and in order to do so it has to be dissected and taken apart. Second, rather than losing sight of exogenous factors aka macro-level structural conditions (like poverty and concentrated disadvantage) we have to identify the relation between deeply rooted structures and micro-level decision making, and separate dynamic processes from their exogenous conditions. The comment starts with a number of questions for a fierce critic of our trade.

A Wake-Up Radio-Based MAC Protocol for Autonomous Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with energy harvesting capabilities have drawn increasing attention in the last few years, as they enable long-term monitoring applications. However, the level of power harvested is usually limited to few mW. To improve the energy efficiency of WSNs, many power management techniques have been proposed to adjust the quality of service according to the harvested energy fluctuations. As wireless communications consume a major fraction of the available energy, numerous medium access control (MAC) protocols have been proposed to minimize energy consumption, latency, and data collisions. In this paper, we present an innovative MAC protocol for energy-harvesting based WSNs exploiting ultralow-power wake-up radios. To overcome the limited range typical of wake-up radios, a multi-hop wake-up scheme based on a dual radio system is proposed enabling asynchronous communications between a base station and any node of the network while maintaining a low latency and a high energy efficiency. To reduce energy consumption, wake-up calls and data packets are transmitted using two distinct data rates. Combined with destination address decoding, using a higher data rate for data transmission also minimizes the risk of collisions. Our approach has been applied to monitoring applications composed of autonomous sensor nodes powered by indoor light energy. OMNeT++ simulation results demonstrate the benefits of our wake-up radio-based approach in terms of energy, latency, and collisions when compared with the state-of-the-art duty-cycled MAC protocols. Experiments performed with real WSN platforms equipped with a wake-up radio prototype confirm the efficiency of our approach.

When Do We Repair the Roof? Insights from Responses to Fiscal Crisis Early Warning Signals

Should policymakers wait for fiscal crisis early warning signals before repairing the roof? We give an answer to this question by investigating the interlinkages between early warning signals for fiscal crisis, policy responses, and policy outcomes, using a broad panel of 119 countries. We find that fiscal adjsutment is a good remedy for countries that act proactively, reducing their likelihood of facing fiscal crisis by up to about 60 percent. For those waiting for wake-up calls from early-detection tools, however, fiscal adjustment may not fully prevent fiscal crisis occurrence, with the chance of fiscal crisis prevention not only smaller (about 30 percent) but also statistically not significant. These findings highlight the prominence of repairing the roof when the sun is shining, particularly in countries with weak institutions.