A look at what stories are trending across the West of England on 13 November 2024.

The Santa Stair Climb returns to One Canada Square.

Things to do for a fiver or less.

Things to do for a fiver or less.

The UK new car market fell for the second time this year, down by -6.0% in October to 144,288 new registrations, according to the latest figures from the Society of […]

The post UK’s EV sales up thanks to discounting, Elon Musk wealth leaps $15 billion following Trump win appeared first on ShinyShiny.

Via Lori Smith, I was alerted to this claim last week by police in Cornwall that a lap dance venue license application should be rejected because such clubs 'might' cause sexual violence. As Lori points out over on BitchBuzz, this is territory I've covered before: the widely-publicised claims that lap dance clubs in Camden caused more rape turned out to be false.

Of course the statistics for a specific area of London over a certain number of years are only that: specific to London and those years. It's dangerous to take a trend for one area, at one point in time, and generalise it to all places at all times. In order to claim that "Factor X causes Outcome Y" you need a lot more data. In the book I set out some comparisons, then, with London and other locations summarising what we know from the scientific literature, national statistics, and so on.

So what's interesting is that The Sex Myth discusses not only the situation in cities like London but also specifically, as coincidence would have it, Newquay.

Guess what? The link between lap dance and sexual violence that the police claim 'might' exist? Not only does it not exist, local media in the Southwest have already reported on this.

In 2010, the Newquay Voice obtained Devon and Cornwall Constabulary’s figures of sexual assaults. They found that the total number of recorded sexual assaults (including rapes) in and around Newquay peaked at 71 in 2005, the year before Newquay's first lap dance club opened. In 2006 however,  following its opening, the number fell to 51.

In 2007, when the town’s second lap dancing venue opened, the total number of recorded sexual assaults fell again to 41, then dropped to 27 in 2008 when a third lap dancing club opened. In 2009 the number rose slightly, but with a total of 33 offences, it is still less than half the total than before the clubs appeared.

Using publically available population data, I took these figures and calculated the incidence rate (since population varies from year to year as crime stats do, if you don't calculate a rate, the numbers are not very informative). Here are the incidence rate calculations using midyear population levels for the council of Restormel where Newquay is located:

I went to Australia last month as a guest of the Opera House for the All About Women symposium.  As part of the event, I agreed to do some media appearances on ABC, including the Drum and Q&A.

All About Women was a fantastic day and I feel privileged to have met so many interesting and talented people there, including people I would put in the category of genuine modern heroes. 

As for Q&A… this is the Australian equivalent of Question Time, so I went anticipating a varied panel with a wide variety of opinions jostling to be heard. I was told Tony Jones was a strong moderator, so I went expecting him to rein in the conversation if things went off-piste. This was to be Q & A's first all-woman panel and expectations were high. The topics they circulated beforehand indicated I was in for a grilling while everyone else got softball. I went, not to put too fine a point on it, loaded for bear.

I thought it went pretty well. Opinions differed. Points of view were exchanged. Margaret Thatcher died. All in all, a good night. The producers seemed very pleased with the outcome.

So imagine my surprise, weeks later, that fellow guest Mia Freedman is still flogging her commentary about the appearance as content on her site MamaMia. The topic: should she apologise for continually insulting sex workers?

During the show Mia kept falling back on sloppy, ill-thought, and pat little lines that were easily countered. I found to my surprise a lot of common ground with Germaine Greer, hardly known as a fan of sexual entertainment, on the fact that conditions of labour and not sex per se are the most pressing issue for sex workers worldwide right now. Then in comes Mia with her assumptions about the people who do sex work (men AND women) and the people who hire them (men AND women). With Tony backing her up. So much for the disinterested moderator, eh? Maybe he felt bad for her. I don't know.

Here's the thing. I agree with Mia on this: I don't think she should apologise.

Why not? Because if she did it would be insincere. My first impression when we met backstage was that she was insincere, and damn it, a successful lady editor like her should have the guts to be true to herself and stand by her opinions no matter what they are.

Because the general public needs to see what kinds of uninformed nonsense that sex workers who stick their heads above the parapet get every single day.

Because for every 100 people who visit her site, there is one who is both a parent AND a sex worker, who knows what she is saying is nonsense. Yes, that's right Mia: sex workers raise families too. It's almost as if we're people.

Because she is a magazine editor who cares deeply about hits and attention, and clearly this is delivering on every level.

Because the sort of people who think sex workers should be topics of discussion rather than active participants are fighting a losing battle.

Keep digging, Mia. I ain't gonna stop you. Keep writing off other people simply because they didn't have the privileges you did or didn't make the same choices you did, and you can't accept that. Get it off your chest, lock up your children, whatever you think you need to do. Perhaps you have some issues about sex you want to work out in public, or this wouldn't be the biggest issue on your agenda weeks after the show went to air?

Mia, you have my express permission not to apologise. No, don't thank me… I insist.

Listen to this week's podcast (September 9, 2011) Patterns For Large-Scale JavaScript Application Architecture Patterns For Large-Scale JavaScript Application Architecture is a lengthy article by Addy Osmani detailing some basic principles of writing a large-scale JavaScript application. It's inspired by a classic Nicholas Zakas talk outlining some of the same principles ...

From pre-race confusion to post-race joy, from 17th on the grid to a stunning win, here's how Max Verstappen's Brazilian Grand Prix unfolded on his radio.

What was this Aston Martin mechanic thinking during the Brazilian Grand Prix weekend? Can you come up with the best caption for this picture?

In the round-up: F1 hopes for South Americans "getting better" • Verschoor back to MP for fifth F2 season • Verstappen races in charity event

Max Verstappen is poised to clinch the 2024 drivers' championship if he finishes ahead of Lando Norris one more time. Here's how he can seal a fourth title at the next race.

Search Central Live is coming back to the Asia Pacific region, bringing you insights from Google Search, fun networking opportunity, and more! This year we're aiming to visit Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Thailand.

Our first two Search Central Live events in Asia this year have been wrapped up and we finished looking back at what we've learned and what we can do better.

¡La APTIJ está de cumpleaños y celebra su X Aniversario! Para la ocasión se ha organizado un programa de dos días que incluye una jornada con conferencias y mesas redondas en la sede de la Comisión Europea de Madrid y un taller que estará a cargo de Esther M. Navarro-Hall: Viernes 3 de noviembre 9.00-17.30: Jornada […]

En la entrada de hoy quiero hacerme eco de un artículo de Takahata Sachi que se titula «Las malas condiciones desincentivan a los intérpretes judiciales», publicado en Nippon.com y que versa acerca de la situación de los intérpretes judiciales en Japón. El artículo se puede leer en español, por lo que no hay motivo para tormento […]

If you read my articles regularly, you are already know that I dislike Across. Across is difficult to use, does not offer feature that are readily available in other CAT tools, and rather slows me down during my work instead of … Continue reading →

As some of you already know, the TR?ICTIO Invoicing System is a simple invoicing platform focusing on freelance translators. I have been developing the system for about 12 months and after extensive personal testing and actual use in my business, as … Continue reading →

Nearly 2 years ago I tweeted:



Well, unfortunately, I had it a bit wrong.

APIs and service do have a very direct and 1-1 relationship: an API is the interface of a service. However, what is different is that one's about the implementation and is focused on the provider, and the other is about using the functionality and is focused on the consumer. The service of course is what matters to the provider and API is what matters to the consumer.

So its clearly more than just a new name.

Services: If you build it will they come?

API Management

API Management & SOA are married at the hip

WSO2 API Manager

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 :-).)

El 16 de septiembre comienza el mayor reto de marketing (en español) para traductores e intérpretes, el September Spanish Marketing Challenge. ¿Te lo vas a perder? Aquí te contamos en qué consiste. Este es el segundo año que celebramos el reto. Dos semana de trabajo...

La entrada ¿Te apuntas al reto? aparece primero en Traducción Jurídica.

Selon l'economiste Bertrand Martinot, il faut introduire une dose de capitalisation pour des raisons d'equite entre generations et d'efficience economique.

This paper proposes a new approach to water flow algorithm for the text line segmentation. Original method assumes hypothetical water flows under a few specified angles to the document image frame from left to right and vice versa. As a result, unwetted image frames are extracted. These areas are of major importance for text line segmentation. Method modifications mean extension values of water flow angle and unwetted image frames function enlargement. Results are encouraging due to text line segmentation improvement which is the most challenging process stage in document image processing.

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.

Collaborative Filtering(CF) is a well-known technique in recommender systems. CF exploits relationships between users and recommends items to the active user according to the ratings of his/her neighbors. CF suffers from the data sparsity problem, where users only rate a small set of items. That makes the computation of similarity between users imprecise and consequently reduces the accuracy of CF algorithms. In this article, we propose a clustering approach based on the social information of users to derive the recommendations. We study the application of this approach in two application scenarios: academic venue recommendation based on collaboration information and trust-based recommendation. Using the data from DBLP digital library and Epinion, the evaluation shows that our clustering technique based CF performs better than traditional CF algorithms.

Web Services have become a standard for integration of systems in distributed environments. By using a set of open interoperability standards, they allow computer-computer interaction, regardless the programming languages and operating systems used. The Semantic Web Services, by its turn, make use of ontologies to describe their functionality in a more structural manner, allowing computers to reason about the information required and provided by them. Such a description also allows dynamic composition of several Web Services, when only one is not able to provide the desired functionality. There are scenarios, however, in which only the functional correctness is not enough to fulfill the user requirements, and a minimum level of quality should be guaranteed by their providers. In this context, this work presents an approach for dynamic Web Service composition that takes into account the composition overall quality. The proposed approach relies on a heuristics to efficiently perform the composition. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed approach, a Web Service composition application prototype was developed and experimented with public test sets, along with another approach that does not consider quality in the composition process. The results have shown that the proposed approach in general finds compositions with more quality, within a reasonable processing time.

Using pre-existing software components (COTS) to develop software systems requires the composition and adaptation of the component interfaces to solve mismatch problems. These mismatches may appear at different interoperability levels (signature, behavioural, quality of service and semantic). In this article, we define an approach which supports composition and adaptation of software components based on model transformation by taking into account the four levels. Signature and behavioural levels are addressed by means of transition systems. Context-awareness and semanticbased techniques are used to tackle quality of service and semantic, respectively, but also both consider the signature level. We have implemented and validated our proposal for the design and application of realistic and complex systems. Here, we illustrate the need to support the variability of the adaptation process in a context-aware pervasive system through a real-world case study, where software components are implemented using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). We apply our model transformation process to extract transition systems (CA-STS specifications) from WF components. These CA-STSs are used to tackle the composition and adaptation. Then, we generate a CASTS adaptor specification, which is transformed into its corresponding WF adaptor component with the purpose of interacting with all the WF components of the system, thereby avoiding mismatch problems.

Feature modeling is an approach to represent commonalities and variabilities among products of a product line. Context-aware applications use context information to provide relevant services and information for their users. One of the challenges to build a context-aware product line is to develop mechanisms to incorporate context information and adaptation knowledge in a feature model. This paper presents UbiFEX, an approach to support feature analysis for context-aware software product lines, which incorporates a modeling notation and a mechanism to verify the consistency of product configuration regarding context variations. Moreover, an experimental study was performed as a preliminary evaluation, and a prototype was developed to enable the application of the proposed approach.

One important subject associated with personal authentication capabilities is the analysis of handwritten signatures. Among the many known techniques, algorithms based on linguistic formalisms are also possible. However, such techniques require a number of algorithms for intelligent image analysis to be applied, allowing the development of new solutions in the field of personal authentication and building modern security systems based on the advanced recognition of such patterns. The article presents the approach based on the usage of syntactic methods for the static analysis of handwritten signatures. The graph linguistic formalisms applied, such as the IE graph and ETPL(k) grammar, are characterised by considerable descriptive strength and a polynomial membership problem of the syntactic analysis. For the purposes of representing the analysed handwritten signatures, new hierarchical (two-layer) HIE graph structures based on IE graphs have been defined. The two-layer graph description makes it possible to take into consideration both local and global features of the signature. The usage of attributed graphs enables the storage of additional semantic information describing the properties of individual signature strokes. The verification and recognition of a signature consists in analysing the affiliation of its graph description to the language describing the specimen database. Initial assessments display a precision of the method at a average level of under 75%.

Ontology evaluation is an integral and important part of the ontology development process. Errors in ontologies could be catastrophic for the information system based on those ontologies. As per our experiments, the existing ontology evaluation systems were unable to detect many errors (like, circulatory error in class and property hierarchy, common class and property in disjoint decomposition, redundancy of sub class and sub property, redundancy of disjoint relation and disjoint knowledge omission) as defined in the error taxonomy. We have formulated efficient algorithms for the evaluation of these and other errors as per the extended error taxonomy. These algorithms are implemented (named as OntEval) and the implementations are used to evaluate well-known ontologies including Gene Ontology (GO), WordNet Ontology and OntoSem. The ontologies are indexed using a variant of already proposed scheme Ontrel. A number of errors and warnings in these ontologies have been discovered using the OntEval. We have also reported the performance of our implementation, OntEval.

Des dizaines de morts dans le sud-ouest du Pakistan après un attentat suicide

Des frappes de Tsahal ont fait plus de 50 morts au Liban et à Gaza, tirs de roquettes sur Israël

La police arrête des dizaines de personnes à Amsterdam après l'interdiction de manifestations

Gaza : au moins trois morts après une frappe israélienne sur le camp de réfugiés de Nouseirat

Serbie : des manifestants demandent la démission du gouvernement après le drame de Novi Sad

No Comment : des heurts et des incendies dans la capitale haïtienne Port-au Prince

Au moins 22 personnes tuées dans des frappes au Liban et à Gaza, et le cessez-le-feu au point mort

Trump va nommer les "faucons" Rubio et Waltz à la tête de la politique étrangère (rapports)

L'aide militaire américaine à Israël va se poursuivre après un ajustement de l'aide à Gaza

This paper presents a sequential edge swap (SQES) mechanism to design a robust network for a healthcare system utilising energy and communication range of nodes. Two operations: sequential degree difference operation (SQDDO) and sequential angle sum operation (SQASO) are performed to enhance the robustness of network. With equivalent degrees of nodes from the network's centre to its periphery, these operations build a robust network structure. Disaster attacks that have a substantial impact on the network are carried out using the network information. To identify a link between the malicious and disaster attacks, the Pearson coefficient is employed. SQES creates a robust network structure as a single objective optimisation solution by changing the connections of nodes based on the positive correlation of these attacks. SQES beats the current methods, according to simulation results. When compared to hill-climbing algorithm, simulated annealing, and ROSE, respectively, the robustness of SQES is improved by roughly 26%, 19% and 12%.

The increased volume of accessible internet data creates an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to improve time series forecasting for many indicators. In our study, we assess the value of web traffic data in forecasting the number of short-term visitors travelling to Australia. We propose a feature-based model selection framework which combines random forest with feature ranking process to select the best performing model using limited and informative number of features extracted from web traffic data. The data was obtained for several tourist attraction and tourism information websites that could be visited by potential tourists to find out more about their destinations. The results of random forest models were evaluated over 3- and 12-month forecasting horizon. Features from web traffic data appears in the final model for short term forecasting. Further, the model with additional data performs better on unseen data post the COVID19 pandemic. Our study shows that web traffic data adds value to tourism forecasting and can assist tourist destination site managers and decision makers in forming timely decisions to prepare for changes in tourism demand.

This research explores vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and their extensive applications, such as enhancing traffic efficiency, infotainment, and passenger safety. Despite significant study, widespread deployment of VANETs has been hindered by security and privacy concerns. Challenges in implementation, including scalability, flexibility, poor connection, and insufficient intelligence, have further complicated VANETs. This study proposes leveraging cloud computing to address these challenges, marking a paradigm shift. Cloud computing, recognised for its cost-efficiency and virtualisation, is integrated with VANETs. The paper details the nomenclature, architecture, models, services, applications, and challenges of VANET-based cloud computing. Three architectures for VANET clouds - vehicular clouds (VCs), vehicles utilising clouds (VuCs), and hybrid vehicular clouds (HVCs) - are discussed in detail. The research provides an overview, delves into related work, and explores VANET cloud computing's architectural frameworks, models, and cloud services. It concludes with insights into future work and a comprehensive conclusion.

Improving website structures is the main task of a website designer. In recent years, numerous web engineering researchers have investigated navigation recommendation systems. Page recommendation systems are critical for mobile website navigation. Accordingly, we propose a smart and adaptive navigation recommendation system based on reinforcement learning. In this system, user navigation history is used as the input for reinforcement learning model. The model calculates a surf value for each page of the website; this value is used to rank the pages. On the basis of this ranking, the website structure is modified to shorten the user navigation path length. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The results revealed that user navigation paths could be decreased by up to 50% with training on 12 months of data, indicating that users could more easily find a target web page with the help of the proposed adaptive navigation recommendation system.