Alex Salmond, who has died at the age of 69, led the SNP into power and through the 2014 referendum.

Russell Findlay set out his stall in his first major speech since becoming party leader

Health Minister Mike Nesbitt said he would not be able to match pay deals for healthcare staff in other parts of UK.

Sir Chris Hoy shares how he wants to bring hope to others with stage four cancer.

Father-of-four David McGuinness, 30, died in hospital after an incident last year.

Two Scots who own the biggest brick collection in the UK are looking for a museum to house all 6,000 of them.

Proposals for renewable energy schemes in Wales could be sped up under new plans.

A council delays a decision on the Saunton Sands beach proposal for additional survey work.

A crash that killed four Shrewsbury boys could have been avoided, an inquest has heard.

A letter to Newport Town Council claims the animals face distress, fear and mental fatigue.

Meet some of the team behind Ben Ainslie's mission to win the America's Cup.

Brummie painter tells Radio WM how Stephen knight came to commission his artwork

Indoor markets are having to reinvent themselves to survive the rise of online shopping.

A draft document with "ambitions" for Swindon town centre is being put to the council.

The cladding is on a building which will house SEND students, Warwickshire County Council says.

Since Microsoft first introduced Office for the iPad last March, it’s been downloaded some 40 million times, even with the restrictions of needing an Office 365 subscription to use it. Today, Microsoft announced that Office will soon be coming to …

Microsoft is set to announce at least one, and possibly two new phones this week, a successor to the most popular Windows Phone ever made, the Lumia 520, and if rumors are correct, a successor to the 1320, …

Maybe that forced change from SkyDrive to OneDrive got things rolling, or perhaps new CEO Satya Nadella really is shaking things up at Microsoft, but there seems to be a newfound interest in beginning anew. That apparently includes name changes, …

Elon Musk’s Twitter in the name of ‘Free Speech’ has just banned anyone mentioning that they have accounts on other platforms – whether that be Truth Social, Facebook, Mastodon or anywhere.  This is an unconscionable move clearly designed to disincentivize people from leaving the platform, locking them into his ecosystem. It is petulant, childish, selfish […]

The new series is produced by the BBC’s Natural History Unit in Bristol.

In the cutthroat world of filmmaking it must be hard to get noticed. Some make their names by honing their craft over years or even decades, learning the business from the ground up, and keeping their egos in check. Others sleep their way to the top. But that's kind of lame. Why make good films or suck off a decent producer when you can hop on the concern-porn cause of the week and gain tasty, tasty attention that way?

Enter 'Balkans the Movie', a yet-to-be-made film that aims to expose the seedy underside of human trafficking by, er, cobbling together a lot of ethnic stereotypes and asking NGOs for funding. Nice work if you can get it. Certainly seems to have worked out for Nefarious: Merchant of Souls (which, incidentally, is so my next character if I ever take up RPGs again. Or alternatively my thrash metal band's debut album).

"Joe is one of the remaining few journalists committed to the ethos of investigative journalism – to uncover the truth using all methods in spite of the risks."

"I'm onto a new story with the break-in thing--absolute page one stuff-- ... It's gonna be bigger than Watergate!"

"Guys get into arguments over nothing and before you know it, one of them is dead. They're shooting each other all the time."

"Fats had killed a made man, elite Mafioso."

"Natasha left her country in Eastern Europe to find a rich man in the West. Unfortunately she was conned and is now serving as a prostitute."

"When I was 15, my parents married me, against my will, to a man aged 35, whom I did not love. So started my miseries."

"Smart Nick is Downtown Joey's son and a possible successor to him but first he must learn the business. "

"He has developed an upper class Oxford accent..."

"Leo was born into music, although his family were not in the industry he managed to make the right connections,  is in his early forties and is American. His break came when he graduated from Harvard in Art History and dated the daughter of the Chairman of Warner Music. He has managed huge acts, is a millionaire, loves young women (18+) and sometimes dabbles in cocaine."

This story is fictional and is not intended to be racist or to offend anyone. 

All characters are fictional and any resemblance to any person/event or situation whether present or in the past is coincidental.

Mercedes have put the car from Lewis Hamilton's controversial 2021 championship defeat on display in the lobby at their factory.

The last step of our migration to a mobile-first index will soon be complete: the small set of sites we've still been crawling with desktop Googlebot will be crawled with mobile Googlebot after July 5, 2024. Most websites do not need to do anything!

It gives me great pleasure to post extremely belated (he completed in October last year!) congratulations to Dr. Malinda Kaushalye Kapuruge on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Swinburne University in Australia. Kau's thesis topic was "Orchestration as Organization: Using an organisational paradim to achieve adaptable business process modelling and enactment in service compositions" and was supervised by Prof. Jun Han and Dr. Alan Colman. Kau's going to stay on in Swinburne as a Research Scientist for some time.

Kaushalye worked in WSO2 for 2 years from 2006 to 2008 before going to grad school to pursue his Ph.D. work. Congratulations and good luck!

(I'm going to post a few catch up congratulations so I can be up to date :-).)

These days, commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software are used to build high-end and powerful workstations and servers to be deployed in today's local area networks of private homes and small- to medium-sized business. Typically, these servers are multipurpose and shared - running networking functionalities involving IP packet forwarding in addition to other CPU intensive applications. In this paper we study and investigate the impact of running CPU-bound applications on the performance of IP packet forwarding. We measure and compare the impact and performance for the two operating systems of choice for home and small-business users, namely Linux and Windows XP. The performance is studied in terms of key performance metrics which include throughput, packet loss, round-trip delay, and CPU availability. For our measurements, we consider today's typical home network hosts of modern processors and Gigabit network cards. We also consider different configuration setups and utilize open-source tools to generate relatively high traffic rates. Our empirical results show that Linux exhibits superior performance over Windows XP in terms of IP forwarding performance. Results also show that, unlike Windows XP, the IP forwarding performance of Linux is not significantly impacted by running CPU-bound applications.

Due to both the widespread and multipurpose use of document images and the current availability of a high number of document images repositories, robust information retrieval mechanisms and systems have been increasingly demanded. This paper presents an approach to support the automatic generation of relationships among document images by exploiting Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). We developed the LinkDI (Linking of Document Images) service, which extracts and indexes document images content, computes its latent semantics, and defines relationships among images as hyperlinks. LinkDI was experimented with document images repositories, and its performance was evaluated by comparing the quality of the relationships created among textual documents as well as among their respective document images. Considering those same document images, we ran further experiments in order to compare the performance of LinkDI when it exploits or not the LSI technique. Experimental results showed that LSI can mitigate the effects of usual OCR misrecognition, which reinforces the feasibility of LinkDI relating OCR output with high degradation.

Advances in mobile technologies are opening new possibilities to support collaborative activities through mobile devices. Unfortunately, mobile collaborative systems have been difficult to conceive, design and implement. These difficulties are caused in part by their unclear requirements and developers' lack of experience with this type of systems. However, several requirements involved in the collaborative back-end of these products are recurrent and should be considered in every development. This paper introduces a characterization of mobile collaboration and a framework that specifies a list of general requirements to be considered during the conception and design of a system in order to increase its probability of success. This framework was used in the development of two mobile collaborative systems, providing developers with a base of back-end requirements to aid system design and implementation. The systems were positively evaluated by their users.

This work describes a methodology that supports the design and implementation of software modules, which represent the individual and collaborative three-dimensional interaction process phases. The presented methodology integrates three modeling approaches: Petri Nets, a collaborative manipulation model based on the combination of single user interaction techniques taxonomy, and object-oriented programming concepts. The combination of these elements allows for the description of interaction tasks, the sequence of interaction processes being controlled by Petri Nets with the codes generated automatically. By the integration of these approaches, the present work addresses not only the entire development cycle of both individual and collaborative three-dimensional interaction, but also the reuse of developed interaction blocks in new virtual environment projects.

1. "Israël is Forever" : "Le sionisme religieux le plus fanatique"… avant France-Israël, un gala organisé par des personnalités franco-israéliennes d’extrême droite fait polémique  L'Indépendant
2. Match France-Israël : Pourquoi le gala « Israël for ever » organisé ce soir à Paris fait polémique ?  20 Minutes
3. Qu’est-ce que le Betar, ce mouvement juif qui organise un rassemblement le 13 novembre à Paris ?  Sud Ouest
4. Qui est Bezalel Smotrich, le ministre d’extrême droite au cœur de la polémique du gala « Israël is forever » organisé à Paris  Le Parisien
5. "La justice a tranché": Bruno Retailleau confirme la tenue d'un gala pro-Israël à Paris  BFMTV

(Belga) Le taux de cellules commerciales vides dans le centre-ville carolo est tendanciellement à la baisse, a indiqué lundi soir lors du conseil communal de la Ville de Charleroi Babette Jandrain, l'échevine carolo du Commerce en réponse à une question qui lui était adressée.

Selon l'élue, qui a indiqué reprendre les chiffres de l'Association de Management du Centre-Ville (AMCV), le taux actuel de cellules commerciales vides dans l'intra-ring carolo est de 29% contre 33,6% en 2020. Et ce malgré le Covid et la crise énergétique qui ont mis en difficulté l'activité commerciale dans les grandes villes. Si le taux de cellules commerciales vides reste élevé à Charleroi, il n'en reste pas moins que la situation a tendance à s'améliorer, a indiqué Babette Jandrain. Les chiffres donnés par l'échevine ont été constatés par la conseillère communale du PTB Sofie Merckx, évoquant une situation de "désolation" concernant le quartier de la Ville Basse et interrogeant par ailleurs la volonté de la Ville de faire de certaines cellules vides des logements. (Belga)

De nouveau, des personnes meurent aux urgences dans des conditions déplorables, après de longues heures d'attente sans soins, malgré les promesses gouvernementales. Où est l'indignité, sinon dans le fait de donner l'illusion de l'action publique et de n'être capable que d'agiter des hochets sociétaux ?

Access to quality healthcare is a fundamental right but unfortunately, India suffers from gender disparities in healthcare access. Telemedicine has the potential to improve access to healthcare services for women by eliminating traditional barriers. Therefore, our research aims to investigate the factors influencing the adoption of telemedicine among Indian women. This study has collected 442 responses and analysed them through structural equation modelling. The result indicates a strong and positive connection between the willingness to adopt telemedicine services and factors like performance expectancy, perceived benefits, e-health literacy, and perceived reliability. Notably, perceived reliability emerges as the most impactful predictor, closely followed by perceived benefits, while factors like effort expectancy and user resistance show no significant influence. This underscores the pivotal role of reliability and perceived benefits in shaping women's inclination toward adopting telemedicine. The study provides practical insights for telemedicine providers and policymakers to customise strategies and policies for effective promotion.

This systematic literature study employed bibliometric analysis to identify workplace mindfulness-related methods and practices in literature published from 2000 to 2020 by leading nations, institutions, journals, authors, and keywords. We also assessed the impact of workplace mindfulness research papers. Scopus analysis tools provided a literature report for 638 Scopus articles used in the study. Using VOSviewer, leading nations, institutions, articles, authors, journals, and keyword co-occurrence network maps were constructed. PRISMA was used to identify 56 publications to recognise workplace mindfulness literature's significant achievements. The research's main contribution is a deep review of neurological mindfulness and psychological measuring tools as workplace mindfulness tool categories. The study is the first to use the PRISMA technique to capture the essential contributions of workplace mindfulness papers from 2000 to 2020.

The performance of a building's internal environment, which includes the air temperature, lighting and acoustics, is what determines the quality of the environment inside the building. We present a thermal model for achieving thermal comfort in buildings that makes use of a multimodal analytic framework as a solution to this challenge. In this study, a multimodal combination is used to evaluate several temperature and humidity sensors as well as an area image. Additionally, a CNN and LSTM combination is used to process the image and sensor data. The results show that heating setback and interior set point temperatures, as well as mechanical ventilation based on real people's presence and CO<SUB align=right>2 levels, are all consistently reduced when ICT-driven intelligent solutions are used. The CNN-LSTM model has a goodness of fit that is 0.7258 on average, which is much higher than both the CNN (0.5291) and LSTM (0.5949) models.

Physiological indicators are an important basis for reflecting the physiological health status of the human body and play an important role in medical practice. Association rules have also been one of the important research hotspots in recent years. This study aims to create a data mining system of association rules and artificial intelligence in biochemical indicators of sports training. This article uses Markov logic for network creation and system training, and tests whether the Markov logic network can be associated with the training system. The results show that the accuracy and recall rate obtained are about 90%, which shows that it is feasible to establish biochemical indicators of sports training based on Markov logic network, and the system has universal, guiding and constructive significance, ensuring that the construction of training system indicators will not go in the wrong direction.

This study investigates the well-being of healthcare professionals in India, with a specific focus on the detrimental effects of the pandemic on their mental and physical health, including stress, burnout, and fatigue. This research examines the roles played by calling, mindfulness, and compassionate love as essential resources in promoting the well-being of healthcare professionals. Utilising structural equation modelling (SEM), the results reveal a significant cause and effect relationship between calling, mindfulness, and compassionate love and their influence on overall well-being. Furthermore, the study identifies a noteworthy parallel mediation effect, demonstrating that mindfulness and compassionate love serve as mediators in the relationship between calling and well-being. This research offers practitioners invaluable insights into the effective utilisation of mindfulness and compassionate love practices to enhance the overall well-being of healthcare professionals.

This empirical study investigates the mediating role of two components of psychological capital (PsyCap), namely self-efficacy and optimism, in the context of the relationship between transformational leadership (TL), work engagement (WE), and innovative work behaviour (IWB). The study was conducted among IT professionals with a minimum of three years of experience employed in Chennai, India. Data collection was executed using a Google Form, and both measurement and structural models were examined using SPSS 25.0 and AMOS 23.0. The findings of this study reveal several significant relationships. Firstly, transformational leadership (TL) demonstrates a robust positive association with work engagement (WE). Furthermore, work engagement (WE) positively correlates substantially with innovative work behaviour (IWB). Notably, the study underscores that two crucial components of psychological capital, specifically self-efficacy and optimism, mediate the relationship between transformational leadership (TL) and work engagement (WE). These findings carry valuable implications for IT company managers. Recognising that transformational leadership positively influences both work engagement and employees' innovative work behaviour highlights the pivotal role of leaders in fostering a productive and innovative work environment within IT organisations.

The supply chains of the Canadian forest products industry are largely dependent on accurate demand forecasts. The USA is the major export market for the Canadian forest products industry, although some Canadian provinces are also exporting forest products to other global markets. However, it is very difficult for each province to develop accurate demand forecasts, given the number of factors determining the demand of the forest products in the global markets. We develop multi-layer feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN) models for demand forecasting of the Canadian forest products industry. We find that the ANN models have lower prediction errors and higher threshold statistics as compared to that of the traditional models for predicting the demand of the Canadian forest products. Accurate future demand forecasts will not only help in improving the short-term profitability of the Canadian forest products industry, but also their long-term competitiveness in the global markets.

The face of the hospitality sector in India is continuously changing and in times of career transitiveness, it is important to know the factors that support a successful career. The current research aims to explore the relationship between career planning, employee optimism, career adaptability and career satisfaction in the Indian hospitality sector. The study included 283 employees from Indian hospitality sector. Additionally, the study used SEM and bootstrap method to measure the dual mediating relationship between career planning, employee optimism dimensions, career adaptability dimensions, and career satisfaction in Indian setting. The results indicated that optimism dimensions and career adaptability dimensions partially mediate the relationship between career planning and career satisfaction in Indian hospitality sector. The study suggests useful implications for academia and industrial purpose. The limitations and future research avenues have been discussed. The study would contribute to the sparse literature on employee optimism, career planning, career adaptability and subjective career success. It would contribute to the social cognitive career theory (SCCT).

Aim/Purpose: This paper investigates the influence of university student multitasking on their learning success, defined as students’ learning satisfaction and performance. Background: Most research on student multitasking finds student multitasking problematic. However, this research is generally from 2010. Yet, today’s students are known to be digital natives and they have a different, more positive, relationship with mobile technologies. Based on the old findings, most instructors ban mobile technology use during instruction, and design their online courses without regard for the mobile technology use that happens regardless of their ban. This study investigates whether today’s instructors and learning management system interface designers should take into account multitasking with mobile technologies. Methodology: A quasi-experimental design was used in this study. Data were collected from 117 students across two sections of an introductory Management Information Systems class taught by the first author. We took multiple approaches and steps to control for confounding factors and to increase the internal validity of the study. We used a control group as a comparison group, we used a pre-test, we controlled for selection bias, and we tested for demographic differences between groups. Contribution: With this paper, we explicated the relationship between multitasking and learning success. We defined learning success as learning performance and learning satisfaction. Contrary to the literature, we found that multitasking involving IT texting does not decrease students’ learning performance. An explanation of this change is the change in the student population, and the digital nativeness between 2010s and 2020 and beyond. Findings: Our study showed that multitasking involving IT texting does not decrease students’ performance in class compared to not multitasking. Secondly, our study showed that, overall, multitasking reduced the students’ learning satisfaction despite the literature suggesting otherwise. We found that attitude towards multitasking moderated the relationship between multitasking and learning satisfaction as follows. Individuals who had a positive attitude towards multitasking had high learning satisfaction with multitasking. However, individuals who had positive attitude toward multitasking did not necessarily have higher learning performance. Recommendations for Practitioners: We would recommend both instructors and the designers of learning management systems to take mobile multitasking into consideration while designing courses and course interfaces, rather than banning multitasking, and assuming that the students do not do it. Furthermore, we recommend including multitasking into relevant courses such as Management Information Systems courses to make students aware of their own multitasking behavior and their results. Recommendation for Researchers: We recommend that future studies investigate multitasking with different instruction methods, especially studies that make students aware of their multitasking behavior and its outcomes will be useful for next generations. Impact on Society: This paper investigates the role of mobile multitasking on learning performance. Since mobile technologies are ubiquitous and their use in multitasking is common, their use in multitasking affects societal performance. Future Research: Studies that replicate our research with larger and more diverse samples are needed. Future research could explore research-based experiential teaching methods, similar to this study.

Aim/Purpose: This paper proposes a new approach to developing a deep learning-based prototyping wearable model which can assist blind and visually disabled people to recognize their environments and navigate through them. As a result, visually impaired people will be able to manage day-to-day activities and navigate through the world around them more easily. Background: In recent decades, the development of navigational devices has posed challenges for researchers to design smart guidance systems for visually impaired and blind individuals in navigating through known or unknown environments. Efforts need to be made to analyze the existing research from a historical perspective. Early studies of electronic travel aids should be integrated with the use of assistive technology-based artificial vision models for visually impaired persons. Methodology: This paper is an advancement of our previous research work, where we performed a sensor-based navigation system. In this research, the navigation of the visually disabled person is carried out with a vision-based 3D-designed wearable model and a vision-based smart stick. The wearable model used a neural network-based You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithm to detect the course of the navigational path which is augmented by a GPS-based smart Stick. Over 100 images of each of the three classes, namely straight path, left path and right path, are being trained using supervised learning. The model accurately predicts a straight path with 79% mean average precision (mAP), the right path with 83% mAP, and the left path with 85% mAP. The average accuracy of the wearable model is 82.33% and that of the smart stick is 96.14% which combined gives an overall accuracy of 89.24%. Contribution: This research contributes to the design of a low-cost navigational standalone system that will be handy to use and help people to navigate safely in real-time scenarios. The challenging self-built dataset of various paths is generated and transfer learning is performed on the YOLO-v5 model after augmentation and manual annotation. To analyze and evaluate the model, various metrics, such as model losses, recall value, precision, and maP, are used. Findings: These were the main findings of the study: • To detect objects, the deep learning model uses a higher version of YOLO, i.e., a YOLOv5 detector, that may help those with visual im-pairments to improve their quality of navigational mobilities in known or unknown environments. • The developed standalone model has an option to be integrated into any other assistive applications like Electronic Travel Aids (ETAs) • It is the single neural network technology that allows the model to achieve high levels of detection accuracy of around 0.823 mAP with a custom dataset as compared to 0.895 with the COCO dataset. Due to its lightning-speed of 45 FPS object detection technology, it has become popular. Recommendations for Practitioners: Practitioners can help the model’s efficiency by increasing the sample size and classes used in training the model. Recommendation for Researchers: To detect objects in an image or live cam, there are various algorithms, e.g., R-CNN, Retina Net, Single Shot Detector (SSD), YOLO. Researchers can choose to use the YOLO version owing to its superior performance. Moreover, one of the YOLO versions, YOLOv5, outperforms its other versions such as YOLOv3 and YOLOv4 in terms of speed and accuracy. Impact on Society: We discuss new low-cost technologies that enable visually impaired people to navigate effectively in indoor environments. Future Research: The future of deep learning could incorporate recurrent neural networks on a larger set of data with special AI-based processors to avoid latency.

Aim/Purpose: The complexity of today’s organizational databases highlights the importance of hard technical skills as well as soft skills including teamwork, communication, and problem-solving. Therefore, when teaching students about databases it follows that using a team approach would be useful. Background: Team-based learning (TBL) has been developed and tested as an instructional strategy that leverages learning in small groups in order to achieve increased overall effectiveness. This research studies the impact of utilizing team-based learning strategies in an undergraduate Database Management course in order to determine if the methodology is effective for student learning related to database technology concepts in addition to student preparation for working in database teams. Methodology: In this study, a team-based learning strategy is implemented in an undergraduate Database Management course over the course of two semesters. Students were assessed both individually and in teams in order to see if students were able to effectively learn and apply course concepts on their own and in collaboration with their team. Quantitative and qualitative data was collected and analyzed in order to determine if the team approach improved learning effectiveness and allowed for soft skills development. The results from this study are compared to previous semesters when team-based learning was not adopted. Additionally, student perceptions and feedback are captured. Contribution: This research contributes to the literature on database education and team-based learning and presents a team-based learning process for faculty looking to adopt this methodology in their database courses. This research contributes by showing how the collaborative assessment aspect of team-based learning can provide a solution for the conceptual and collaborative needs of database education. Findings: Findings related to student learning and perceptions are presented illustrating that team-based learning can lead to improvements in performance and provides a solution for the conceptual and collaborative needs of database education. Specifically, the findings do show that team scores were significantly higher than individual scores when completing class assessments. Student perceptions of both their team members and the team-based learning process were overall positive with a notable difference related to the perception of team preparedness based on gender. Recommendations for Practitioners: Educational implications highlight the challenges of team-based learning for assessment (e.g., gender differences in perceptions of team preparedness), as well as the benefits (e.g., development of soft skills including teamwork and communication). Recommendation for Researchers: This study provides research implications supporting the study of team assessment techniques for learning and engagement in the context of database education. Impact on Society: Faculty looking to develop student skills in relation to database concepts and application as well as in relation to teamwork and communication may find value in this approach, ultimately benefiting students, employers, and society. Future Research: Future research may examine the methodology from this study in different contexts as well as explore different strategies for group assignments, room layout, and the impact of an online environment.

The present study attempts to find out the determinants of FinTech adoption for financial inclusion by a microfinance institution in India. The factors such as efficiency, consistency, convenience, reliability are taken as predictors of organisational attitude. Similarly, organisational attitude, ease of use, and perceived benefits are considered as antecedents of organisational adoption intention of FinTech in microfinance institutions of India. The purposive sampling technique was used to get a filled survey instrument by target samples. The results indicate that convenience and consistency in the use of FinTech applications build a favourable attitude to adopt it. Furthermore, perceived benefits are the most important antecedents of the adoption intention of FinTech in the microfinance institution in India. Additionally, the reliability of the application has a positive but insignificant impact on organisational attitude to adopt FinTech. The implications of the present study are discussed.

Numerous scandals due to unethical decisions occur despite the growing use of decision support systems (DSS). Several scholars recommend incorporating ethical attributes along with business requirements in DSS design. However, little guidance exists to indicate which ethical attributes to include and the importance ethical attributes should be given in comparison to business requirements. This study addresses this deficiency by identifying ethical requirements to integrate in DSS design drawn from the business ethics literature. This study conducted a large-scale empirical survey with information technology decision-makers to examine the relative importance of DSS fit with ethical and business requirements as well as the appropriate balance of those requirements on perceived DSS performance. The results show that decision makers perceive better DSS performance when the ethical and business requirements align with its organisation's beliefs than from ethical or business requirements alone.