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An Ensemble Model for Consumer Emotion Prediction Using EEG Signals for Neuromarketing Applications
No full textTraditional advertising techniques seek to govern the consumer’s opinion toward a product, which may not reflect their actual behavior at the time of purchase. It is probable that advertisers misjudge consumer behavior because predicted opinions do not always correspond to consumers’ actual purchase behaviors. Neuromarketing is the new paradigm of understanding customer buyer behavior and decision making, as well as the prediction of their gestures for product utilization through an unconscious process. Existing methods do not focus on effective preprocessing and classification techniques of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, so in this study, an effective method for preprocessing and classification of EEG signals is proposed. The proposed method involves effective preprocessing of EEG signals by removing noise and a synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) to deal with the class imbalance problem. The dataset employed in this study is a publicly available neuromarketing dataset. Automated features were extracted by using a long short-term memory network (LSTM) and then concatenated with handcrafted features like power spectral density (PSD) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to create a complete feature set. The classification was done by using the proposed hybrid classifier that optimizes the weights of two machine learning classifiers and one deep learning classifier and classifies the data between like and dislike. The machine learning classifiers include the support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and deep learning classifier (DNN). The proposed hybrid model outperforms other classifiers like RF, SVM, and DNN and achieves an accuracy of 96.89%. In the proposed method, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and F1 score were computed to evaluate and compare the proposed method with recent state-of-the-art methods
Evaluation of differentiated services policies in multihomed networks based on an interface-selection mechanism
Get PDFQuality of service metrics and differentiated service mechanism policies are the most important criteria to deliver essential Internet requirements, especially during user handover, due to the rapid growth of users, multimedia applications, and traffic. DiffServ routers provide per-hop behaviors to manage traffic for services, whereas their policies have been applied to several types of Internet traffic, such as hypertext transfer protocol, file transfer protocol, and content-based routing. Multihoming aims to improve the reliability, scalability, and performance of data communications networks. This paper evaluated DiffServ various policies compared in a systematic manner (in two stages) over the multihomed networks to utilize and adopt the best policy for communicating packets, and enhanced the overall performance in terms of throughput, end-to-end latency, and processing time. Moreover, the paper introduced an interface-selection technique for multihomed nodes to select a proper interface, which provides the best services and links the behaviors that this interface yields. The overall results showed how the introduced multihoming-based interface-selection mechanism managed to maintain communication with the multihomed node. Furthermore, our results showed that the DiffServ time-sliding window with a three-color marking policy achieved the best system performance compared with the remaining policies
Urban Tourism Challenges.
Get PDFTown and cities have always attracted visitors interested in experiencing dynamic and cosmopolitan places that offer a variety of activities and entertainment facilities. They provide an excellent infrastructure for tourism activities, benefiting from good transportation and accommodation facilities. Yet, it has been only a few decades since urban environments started to be recognised as an important setting for tourism and to attract more attention from researchers (Maxim, 2019). In a seminal work that ignited interest in urban tourism, Ashworth (1989) pointed out a double neglect – tourism scholars tended to overlook urban environments, although cities accommodate many tourism activities, while urbanists neglected tourism despite the large number of visitors attracted by these environments. Since then, more progress has been made towards better understanding this complex phenomenon.
Tourism is now recognised as an integral part of the life of many cities, with more studies looking into different challenges and issues faced by urban destinations (Maxim, 2021; Morrison and Coca-Stefaniak, 2021). These challenges relate to either the complex nature of the urban tourism phenomenon and its limited understanding, the negative impacts of urban tourism and the management and planning around these, the sustainability debates, or the external factors that threaten to affect these popular destinations
Development of novel isatin thiazolyl-pyrazoline hybrids as promising antimicrobials in MDR pathogens
Get PDFMicrobial Multidrug Resistance (MDR) is an emerging global crisis. Derivatization of natural or synthetic
scaffolds is among the most reliable strategies to search for and obtain novel antimicrobial agents for
the treatment of MDR infections. Here, we successfully manipulated the synthetically flexible isatin
moieties to synthesize 22 thiazolyl-pyrazolines hybrids, and assessed their potential antimicrobial
activities in vitro against various MDR pathogens, using the broth microdilution calorimetric XTT
reduction method. We chose 5 strains to represent the major MDR microorganisms, viz: Methicillin
resistant S. aureus (MRSA), and Vancomycin-resistant E. faecalis (VRE) as Gram-positive bacteria;
Carbapenem-resistant K. pneumonia (CRKP), and Extended-spectrum beta-lactamase E. coli (ESBL-E), as
Gram-negative bacteria; and Fluconazole-resistant C. albicans (FRCA), as a yeast-like unicellular fungus.The cytotoxicity of compounds 9f and 10h towards mammalian lung fibroblast (MRC-5) cells demonstrated their potential satisfactory safety margin as represented by their relatively high IC50 values. The target compounds showed promising anti-MDR activities, suggesting they are potential leads for further development and in vivo studies
The clash between human rights and morality: A critical role for the judiciary towards decriminalization of same-sex relationships
No full textIn countries where same-sex relationships are criminalised, the rights of LGBT persons are not considered human rights. This clash between human rights and criminal law on the one hand, and the clash between morality (and/or culture) and human rights, on the other hand, has been the subject of debates in the last 10 years. Given the argument to consider sexual minority rights as not human rights in several commonwealth states, this chapter adopts the doctrinal method of legal research to examine the rationale put forward for continued criminalisation and politicisation of sex or love amongst persons of the same gender in certain jurisdictions. The argument here is that without an understanding of why society attaches moral values to certain laws, change is difficult to implement
Understanding approaches to continence care for people living with dementia in acute hospital settings: an ethnographic study
Get PDFBackground: The acute hospital setting has become a key site of care for people living with dementia. People living with dementia are one of the largest populations in our hospitals, with the Department of Health and Social Care recognising that 25–50% of all acute hospital admissions are people who are also living with dementia. However, people living with dementia are a highly vulnerable group in the hospital setting and following an acute admission their functional abilities can deteriorate quickly and significantly. Detailed research is required to explore what constitutes ‘good care’.
Objectives: This study’s focus was a common but poorly understood aspect of everyday care for people living with dementia during an acute admission, that is continence care. We asked the following questions: what caring practices are observable when interacting with this patient group? How do ward teams respond to and manage continence needs? What informs these approaches? What are staff doing and why?
Design: This ethnography was informed by the symbolic interactionist research tradition, focusing on understanding how action and meaning are constructed within a setting. In-depth evidence-based analysis of everyday care enabled us to examine how ward staff responded to the continence care needs of people living with dementia and to follow the consequences of their actions. We carried out a mixed-methods systematic narrative review to refine our approach to fieldwork and analysis.
Setting: This ethnography was carried out for 180 days, across 12 months, in six wards in three hospitals across England and Wales that were purposefully selected to represent a range of hospital types, geographies and socioeconomic catchments.
Participants: In addition to general observations, 108 individuals participated directly in this study, contributing to 562 ethnographic interviews. Ten detailed case studies were also undertaken with people living with dementia.
Results: This study identified ‘pad cultures’ as an embedded practice on these acute wards. The routine use of continence pads among people living with dementia (regardless of continence and independence) was widespread. The use of continence pads was viewed as a precautionary strategy, the rationale being to provide safeguards, ensure containment and prevent ‘accidents’ or incontinence episodes, with an expectation that patients living with dementia not only will wear pads, but will use them.
Conclusions: These ‘pad cultures’ enabled the number of unscheduled interruptions to the institutionally mandated timetabled work of these wards to be reduced, but had significant impacts on people living Q2 with dementia and, in turn, wider impacts on the individuals and their identities. Ward staff described
feeling abandoned with the responsibility of caring for large numbers of people living with dementia, believing that it was impossible to work in other ways to support their patient’s continence.
Limitations: Limitations identified included the potential for the Hawthorne effect to influence data collection.
Future work: In collaboration with a specialist dementia care and continence teams, the findings are informing the development of education and training at an interactional and organisational level.
Study registration: This study is registered as PROSPERO CRD42018119495
A study to evaluate students’ performance, engagement, and progression in higher education based on feedforward teaching approach
Get PDFLearners who enter higher education (HE) at foundation entry level are susceptible to many chal-lenges that have an impact on their performance, engagement, and progression. Not all students who enter HE at foundation level will progress and attain their course qualification. In addition to this, many university lecturers are struggling to give the effective support to their students. The study in this paper focuses on feedforward teaching approaches which defines ways to enhance learning by using advanced organised strategies to offer relevant supporting concepts and mean-ingful verbal material. To date there are insufficient literature reviews on the feedforward ap-proaches to facilitate students' subsequent learning. To provide better academic support for students and a strong foundation to become independent in their study is something this paper focuses on. Therefore, the main contribution of this paper is the: identification of the key feedforward features and suggestion of effective feedforward approaches. A study was undertaken to rigorously im-plement feedforward approaches that would support groups of students on modules at foundation entry level. At the end of module delivery, different students’ data sets were analysed related to the progression rates, standard deviation, and mean. In addition, the students’ satisfaction question-naire (module evaluation survey) and their feedback survey were also considered for engagement, and retention purposes. The outcomes from this exercise suggested that feedforward approaches allowed students to increase their overall effort at attempting the summative assessment and thus, improving their performance, engagement, and retention
Roles of domain-general auditory processing in spoken second language vocabulary attainment in adulthood
Get PDFRecently, scholars have begun to explore the hypothesis that individual differences in domain-general auditory perception, which has been identified as an anchor of L1 acquisition, could explain some variance in post-pubertal L2 learners’ segmental and suprasegmental learning in immersive settings. The current study set out to examine the generalizability of the topic to the acquisition of higher-level linguistic production skills—i.e., the appropriate use of diverse, rich, and abstract vocabulary. The speech of 100 Polish-English bilinguals was elicited using an interview task, submitted to corpus-/rater-based linguistic analyses, and linked to their ability to discriminate sounds based on individual acoustic dimensions (pitch, duration, amplitude). According to the results, those who attained more advanced L2 lexical proficiency demonstrated not only more relevant experience (extensive immersion, earlier age of arrival), but also more precise auditory perception ability
Delivering safe, effective nutrition and hydration care to residents with dysphagia: a theory-based approach to developing a link dysphagia practitioner
Get PDFThis report is independent research funded by the National Institute for Health Research (Research for Patient Benefit programme, NIHR200091). The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care. No Abstract available
InSAR analysis of C-band data for transport infrastructure monitoring
Get PDFIn recent years, successful applications of the Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) have been reported for the monitoring of subsidence and deformation in transport infrastructures. Compared to other non-destructive surveying methodologies, this technique can perform network-level analyses more rapidly and it can provide time-series of ground displacements by multi-temporal data acquisition. However, processing of satellite images by high-resolution sensors (i.e., X-band radars) is demanding in terms of computational resources and specialist skills. This aspect has contributed to partially hinder this technique to become a strategic infrastructure asset management tool. Parallel to this, it is important to emphasise that the use of middle-range frequency SAR sensors (i.e., C-band) allows for the acquisition of lighter datasets and, hence, more computationally affordable analyses. However, due to a lower system resolution and the challenges in identifying features of scattering objects with size below the resolution cell, the C-band imagery is usually not employed for infrastructure monitoring. This limitation could be compensated in rural environment areas, where transport infrastructures are usually the most stable scatterers.
This study aims to demonstrate the viability of the medium-range resolution SAR imagery in transport asset monitoring for the preliminary identification of sections affected by subsidence in rural areas. InSAR analyses of high (COSMO-SkyMed) and medium-resolution (Sentinel-1A) datasets are performed on a dual-carriageway rural motorway. A comparison between the Persistent Scatterers Interferometry (PSI) outcomes from data processed with the two resolutions demonstrates the viability of using Sentinel-1A images for multi-temporal subsidence monitoring in highway infrastructure