Web science

Web science

Web science is an emerging interdisciplinary field concerned with the study of large-scale socio-technical systems, particularly the World Wide Web. It considers the relationship between people and technology, the ways that society and technology co-constitute one another and the impact of this co-constitution on broader society. Web Science combines research from disciplines as diverse as sociology, computer science, economics, and mathematics. The Web Science Institute, founded at the University of Southampton by director Wendy Hall and colleagues, describes Web Science as focusing "the analytical power of researchers from disciplines as diverse as mathematics, sociology, economics, psychology, law and computer science to understand and explain the Web. It is necessarily interdisciplinary – as much about social and organizational behaviour as about the underpinning technology." A central pillar of Web science development is Artificial Intelligence or "AI". The current artificial intelligence that in development at the moment is Human-Centered, with goals to further professional development courses as well as influencing public policy. Artificial intelligence developers are focused on the most impactful uses of this technology, while also hoping to expedite the growth and development of the human race. An early definition was given by American computer scientist Ben Shneiderman: "Web Science" is processing the information available on the web in similar terms to those applied to natural environment. == Areas of activity == === Emergent properties === Philip Tetlow, an IBM-based scientist influential in the emergence of web science as an independent discipline, argued for the concept of web life, which considers the Web not as a connected network of computers, as in common interpretations of the Internet, but rather as a sociotechnical machine capable of fusing together individuals and organisations into larger coordinated groups. It argues that unlike the technologies that have come before it, the Web is different in that its phenomenal growth and complexity are starting to outstrip our capability to control it directly, making it impossible for us to grasp its completeness in one go. Tetlow made use of Fritjof Capra's concept of the 'web of life' as a metaphor. == Research groups == There are numerous academic research groups engaged in Web Science research, many of which are members of WSTNet, the Web Science Trust Network of research labs. Health Web Science emerged as a sub-discipline of Web Science that studies the role of the Web's impact on human's health outcomes and how to further utilize the Web to improve health outcomes. These groups focus on the developmental possibilities, provided through Web Science, in areas such as health care and social welfare. Discussion of web science has been widely adopted as a method in which the internet can have a real world impact in the field of medicine, currently coined Medicine 2.0. The World Wide Web acts as a medium for the spread and circulation of knowledge, though these various research groups consider themselves responsible for maintaining verifiable and testable knowledge. Using their knowledge of the healthcare system as well as web science, researchers are focused on formatting and structuring their knowledge in a way that is easily accessible throughout the internet. The World Wide Web is quickly evolving meaning that the information we provide and its formatting must also. Recognizing the overlap between both aspects, the spread of knowledge and development of the internet, allows us to properly display our knowledge in a manner that evolves as quickly as the internet and everyday medical research. The accessibility of the internet and quick development of knowledge must be companied with efficient formatting to allocate successful dissemination of information, as described by these various researcher groups. == Related major conferences == Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Hypertext Conference (HT) sponsored by SIGWEB ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) The Web Conference (WWW) Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Web Science Conference (WebSci)

Cinema 4D

Cinema 4D is a 3D software suite developed by the German company Maxon. == Overview == As of R21, only a single version of Cinema 4D is available. It replaces all previous variants, including BodyPaint 3D, and includes all features of the past 'Studio' variant. With R21, all binaries were unified. There is no technical difference between commercial, educational, or demo versions. The difference is now only in licensing. 2014 saw the release of Cinema 4D Lite, which came packaged with Adobe After Effects Creative Cloud 2014. "Lite" acts as an introductory version, with many features withheld. This is part of a partnership between the two companies, where a Maxon-produced plug-in, called Cineware, allows any variant to create a seamless workflow with After Effects. The "Lite" variant is dependent on After Effects CC, needing the latter application running to launch, and is only sold as a package component included with After Effects CC through Adobe. Initially, Cinema 4D was developed for Amiga computers in the early 1990s, and the first three versions of the program were available exclusively for that platform. With v4, however, Maxon began to develop the application for Windows and Macintosh computers as well, citing the wish to reach a wider audience and the growing instability of the Amiga market following Commodore's bankruptcy. It was also released for BeOS. On Linux, Cinema 4D is available as a commandline rendering version. == Modules and older variants == From R12 to R20, Cinema 4D was available in four variants. A core Cinema 4D 'Prime' application, a 'Broadcast' version with additional motion-graphics features, 'Visualize,' which adds functions for architectural design and 'Studio,' which includes all modules. From Release 8 until Release 11.5, Cinema 4D had a modular approach to the application, with the ability to expand upon the core application with various modules. This ended with Release 12, though the functionality of these modules remains in the different flavors of Cinema 4D (Prime, Broadcast, Visualize, Studio) The old modules were: Advanced Render (global illumination/HDRI, caustics, ambient occlusion and sky simulation) BodyPaint 3D (direct painting on UVW meshes; now included in the core. In essence Cinema 4D Core/Prime and the BodyPaint 3D products are identical. The only difference between the two is the splash screen that is shown at startup and the default user interface.) Dynamics (for simulating soft body and rigid body dynamics) Hair (simulates hair, fur, grass, etc.) MOCCA (character animation and cloth simulation) MoGraph (Motion Graphics procedural modelling and animation toolset) NET Render (to render animations over a TCP/IP network in render farms) PyroCluster (simulation of smoke and fire effects) Prime (the core application) Broadcast (adds MoGraph2) Visualize (adds Virtual Walkthrough, Advanced Render, Sky, Sketch and Toon, data exchange, camera matching) Studio (the complete package) == Version history == == Use in industry == A number of films and related works have been modeled and rendered in Cinema 4D, including: == Cinebench == Cinebench is a cross-platform test suite which tests a computer's hardware capabilities. It can be used as a test for Cinema 4D's 3D modeling, animation, motion graphic and rendering performance on multiple CPU cores. The program "target[s] a certain niche and [is] better suited for high-end desktop and workstation platforms". Cinebench is commonly used to demonstrate hardware capabilities at tech shows to show a CPU performance, especially by tech YouTubers and review sites.

Cardiovascular health awareness in Nepal

Cardiovascular health awareness in Nepal has improved in recent times. It has emerged as a cost-effective tool for prevention of heart disease in recent years. == Background == Cardiovascular diseases in Nepal is responsible for maximum number of deaths and rapid urbanization possess extra threat in this situation emphasizing need for widespread awareness campaigns. Efforts to enhance cardiovascular health awareness among the general public, particularly through social media platforms, have proven pivotal in motivating individuals to adopt healthier lifestyle choices and improve heart health in Nepal in recent years. These awareness initiatives, often organized on special occasions such as World Heart Day of World Heart Federation, World Hypertension Day, and World Health Day of World Health Organization, have garnered active participation from the public, reflecting a growing interest in health-related information. Notably, various hospitals, organizations, and health professionals actively contribute to cardiovascular health awareness in Nepal. The prevalence of heart health-related content on social media platforms indicates a substantial dissemination of information. The engagement of a large number of followers underscores the audience's keen interest in health matters, evident in the significant engagement on various social media accounts and pages. During an event of cardiovascular health awareness a Guinness World Record was achieved on World Heart Day 2023. A Facebook live awareness programme on heart health prevention attracted 11,212 viewers during the 30-minute presentation and was awarded the "Most viewers for a cardiovascular health awareness live stream on Facebook" by Guinness World Record signifying depth of public involvement and importance of social media use in health awareness. In 2014, a 11-day heart camp was conducted in Nepal to raise awareness . In 2015, a is a heart health education program " Mission to Save Heart" was conducted to empower health professionals to manage heart attacks and reduce heart disease deaths.

Errored second

In telecommunications and data communication systems, an errored second is an interval of a second during which any error whatsoever has occurred, regardless of whether that error was a single bit error or a complete loss of communication for that entire second. The type of error is not important for the purpose of counting errored seconds. In communication systems with very low uncorrected bit error rates, such as modern fiber-optic transmission systems, or systems with higher low-level error rates that are corrected using large amounts of forward error correction, errored seconds are often a better measure of the effective user-visible error rate than the raw bit error rate. For many modern packet-switched communication systems, even a single uncorrected bit error is enough to cause the loss of a data packet by causing its CRC check to fail; whether that packet loss was caused by a single bit error or a hundred-bit-long error burst is irrelevant. For systems using large amounts of forward error correction, the reverse applies; a single low-level bit error will almost never occur, since any small errors will almost always be corrected, but any error sufficiently large to cause the forward error correction to fail will almost always result in a large burst error. More specialist and precise definitions of errored seconds exist in standards such as the T1 and DS1 transport systems.

CloudLibrary

CloudLibrary (stylized as "cloudLibrary") is a cloud-based software system through which libraries lend electronic books; it is also the name of the app that users download to access the e-books. CloudLibrary was created in 2011 by 3M as part of its library systems unit as a competitor to OverDrive, Inc.; in 2015 3M sold the North American part of that unit to Bibliotheca Group GmbH, a company founded in 2011 that was funded by One Equity Partners Capital Advisors, a division of JP Morgan Chase. By 2019, Bibliotecha had tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate with Amazon to add Kindle-ebook compatibility to cloudLibrary - something that, as of then, Amazon had only made available to Overdrive. In that year, cloudLibrary, along with hoopla offered by Midwest Tape, ODILO, and Baker & Taylor’s Axis 360, were the main competitors to the Overdrive and Libby apps offered by OverDrive, Inc. in the library e-book market. In April 2024, Bibliotheca sold cloudLibrary to the nonprofit cooperative OCLC. By that time, cloudLibrary was used by around 500 libraries in around 20 countries in around 50 languages, and was used to lend audiobooks, digital magazines, newspapers, and comics, and streaming media, along with e-books.

EfficientNet

EfficientNet is a family of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for computer vision published by researchers at Google AI in 2019. Its key innovation is compound scaling, which uniformly scales all dimensions of depth, width, and resolution using a single parameter. EfficientNet models have been adopted in various computer vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, and segmentation. == Compound scaling == EfficientNet introduces compound scaling, which, instead of scaling one dimension of the network at a time, such as depth (number of layers), width (number of channels), or resolution (input image size), uses a compound coefficient ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } to scale all three dimensions simultaneously. Specifically, given a baseline network, the depth, width, and resolution are scaled according to the following equations: depth multiplier: d = α ϕ width multiplier: w = β ϕ resolution multiplier: r = γ ϕ {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}{\text{depth multiplier: }}d&=\alpha ^{\phi }\\{\text{width multiplier: }}w&=\beta ^{\phi }\\{\text{resolution multiplier: }}r&=\gamma ^{\phi }\end{aligned}}} subject to α ⋅ β 2 ⋅ γ 2 ≈ 2 {\displaystyle \alpha \cdot \beta ^{2}\cdot \gamma ^{2}\approx 2} and α ≥ 1 , β ≥ 1 , γ ≥ 1 {\displaystyle \alpha \geq 1,\beta \geq 1,\gamma \geq 1} . The α ⋅ β 2 ⋅ γ 2 ≈ 2 {\displaystyle \alpha \cdot \beta ^{2}\cdot \gamma ^{2}\approx 2} condition is such that increasing ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } by a factor of ϕ 0 {\displaystyle \phi _{0}} would increase the total FLOPs of running the network on an image approximately 2 ϕ 0 {\displaystyle 2^{\phi _{0}}} times. The hyperparameters α {\displaystyle \alpha } , β {\displaystyle \beta } , and γ {\displaystyle \gamma } are determined by a small grid search. The original paper suggested 1.2, 1.1, and 1.15, respectively. Architecturally, they optimized the choice of modules by neural architecture search (NAS), and found that the inverted bottleneck convolution (which they called MBConv) used in MobileNet worked well. The EfficientNet family is a stack of MBConv layers, with shapes determined by the compound scaling. The original publication consisted of 8 models, from EfficientNet-B0 to EfficientNet-B7, with increasing model size and accuracy. EfficientNet-B0 is the baseline network, and subsequent models are obtained by scaling the baseline network by increasing ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } . == Variants == EfficientNet has been adapted for fast inference on edge TPUs and centralized TPU or GPU clusters by NAS. EfficientNet V2 was published in June 2021. The architecture was improved by further NAS search with more types of convolutional layers. It also introduced a training method, which progressively increases image size during training, and uses regularization techniques like dropout, RandAugment, and Mixup. The authors claim this approach mitigates accuracy drops often associated with progressive resizing.

General time- and transfer constant analysis

The general time- and transfer-constants (TTC) analysis is the generalized version of the Cochran-Grabel (CG) method, which itself is the generalized version of zero-value time-constants (ZVT), which in turn is the generalization of the open-circuit time constant method (OCT). While the other methods mentioned provide varying terms of only the denominator of an arbitrary transfer function, TTC can be used to determine every term both in the numerator and the denominator. Its denominator terms are the same as that of Cochran-Grabel method, when stated in terms of time constants (when expressed in Rosenstark notation). however, the numerator terms are determined using a combination of transfer constants and time constants, where the time constants are the same as those in CG method. Transfer constants are low-frequency ratios of the output variable to input variable under different open- and short-circuited active elements. In general, a transfer function (which can characterize gain, admittance, impedance, trans-impedance, etc., based on the choice of the input and output variables) can be written as: H ( s ) = a 0 + a 1 s + a 2 s 2 + … + a m s m 1 + b 1 s + b 2 s 2 + … + b n s n {\displaystyle H(s)={\frac {a_{0}+a_{1}s+a_{2}s^{2}+\ldots +a_{m}s^{m}}{1+b_{1}s+b_{2}s^{2}+\ldots +b_{n}s^{n}}}} == The denominator terms == The first denominator term b 1 {\textstyle b_{1}} can be expressed as the sum of zero value time constants (ZVTs): b 1 = ∑ i = 1 N τ i 0 {\displaystyle b_{1}=\sum _{i=1}^{N}\tau _{i}^{0}} where τ i 0 {\textstyle \tau _{i}^{0}} is the time constant associated with the reactive element i {\textstyle i} when all the other sources are zero-valued (hence the superscript '0'). Setting a capacitor value to zero corresponds to an open circuit, while a zero-valued inductor is a short circuit. So for calculation of the τ i 0 {\textstyle \tau _{i}^{0}} , all other capacitors are open-circuited and all other inductors are short-circuited. This is the essence of the ZVT method, which reduces to OCT when only capacitors are involved. All independent sources are also zero-valued during the time constant calculations (voltage sources short-circuited and current source open-circuited). In this case, if the element in question (element i {\textstyle i} ) is a capacitor, the time constant is given by τ i 0 = R i 0 C i {\displaystyle \tau _{i}^{0}=R_{i}^{0}C_{i}} and when element i {\textstyle i} is an inductor is it given by: τ i 0 = L i / R i 0 {\displaystyle \tau _{i}^{0}=L_{i}/R_{i}^{0}} . where in both cases, the resistance R i 0 {\textstyle R_{i}^{0}} , is the resistance seen by elements i {\textstyle i} (denoted by subscript), when all the other elements are zero-valued (denoted by the zero superscript). The second-order denominator term is equal to: b 2 = ∑ i = 1 N − 1 ∑ j = i + 1 N τ i 0 τ j i = ∑ i 1 ⩽ i ∑ j < j ⩽ N τ i 0 τ j i {\displaystyle b_{2}=\sum _{i=1}^{N-1}\sum _{j=i+1}^{N}\tau _{i}^{0}\tau _{j}^{i}=\sum _{i}^{1\leqslant i}\sum _{j}^{