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We are living in an extremely globalized and digitalized world where social media represent the core of our existence whether for personal or professional reasons. Social media impact on business in general caught the attention of researchers (Grizane & Jurgelane, 2017) during the last years, especially to measure the impact of their use in business growth, increasing sales and/or customer loyalty. There are more and more studies that focus on the harmful effect of fake news on specific markets, news that may appear easily and are difficult to control. Fake news can affect both the customers and/ or the business depending on the context. The purpose of this study is to identify how are the fake news appearing in a world where access to information is so simple and everybody can check the truthfulness of information and what kind of barriers are used to protect the business from being affected and the customers from being misinformed. Data for this paper are gathered using in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs from real estate businesses. The results show that the level of increasing fake news is affecting the trust building process. Recommendations are put forward for organizations to analyze more user behavior and use it for the decision-making process in order to limit the negative effects of fake news. Also, customers need to learn to identify quality brand communication, pay attention to details and be very precautions while taking decisions based on news that may be fake.

Leiomyosarcoma (LMS) of the inferior vena cava (IVC) is a rare malignant tumor, accounting for 2% of all LMSs. Less than 400 cases have been reported in literature. Computed tomography (CT) is the most accurate imaging method in assessing the location of the tumor within the IVC and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) accurately identifies its extent and the potential for surgical resection. We present the case of a patient with inferior vena cava leiomyosarcoma (IVCL), for whom the pathological diagnosis was different from the initially expected one, the tumor appearance on pre-operative imaging mimicking renal cell carcinoma. The intraoperative difficulty of approaching renal hilum and IVC was a factor suggesting the vascular origin of the tumor, which was confirmed at pathological analysis. The extensive defect in the IVC after tumor excision led to the decision of complete transverse suturing of IVC, as significant collateral venous circulation was already present. Because IVCL is a rare disease, there is scarce data regarding the prognosis and treatment options. Long-term survival depends on the extent of the surgery. The need of vascular reconstruction is not always mandatory. Despite high recurrence rates, no consensus regarding adjuvant treatment exists yet. A multidisciplinary approach including surgical oncologists and vascular surgeons is mandatory to achieve the best patient outcomes. Perioperative planning, coordination and adherence to oncological techniques are critical.

En este trabajo se ha desarrollado un reporte técnico (RT) con toda la documentación necesaria para la creación de una plataforma software (ClinGenNBL) para la gestión de datos clínicos y genómicos sobre pacientes de neuroblastoma, el cual permita la centralización de los datos y facilidad de diagnóstico y control de este tipo de pacientes. Esta memoria detalla las fases de análisis, especificación y diseño que verifican el correcto funcionamiento de la plataforma, además de las tecnologías adoptadas.

[ES] La gestión deportiva hoy en día es más fácil gracias a la utilización de la tecnología. Este proyecto intenta dotar a dicho problema de una solución rápida, eficiente y sin grandes costes. Dicha solución se basa en la utilización de técnicas modernas aplicadas al diseño de las bases de datos, utilizando a la vez una comunicación asíncrona entre la parte servidor y la parte del cliente, mediante API REST. Para ello se usa el framework Ionic basado en Angular para proporcionar una aplicación Android como iOS para todo tipo de usuarios., [EN] Sports management today is easier thanks to the use of technology. This project tries to provide this problem with a quick, efficient and cost-free solution. This solution is based on the use of modern techniques applied to the design of the databases, using at the same time an asynchronous communication between the server part and the client part, through REST API. For this, the Ionic framework based on Angular is used to provide an Android application such as iOS for all types of users.

Our paper tackles the development of media reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the January - November 2020 time span, in France, Germany, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. We aim to make media reporting transparent on two dimensions: the coverage of COVID-19-related topics and the negativity of the COVID-19 media reporting. To achieve this goal, we analysed a large news dataset with 841,415 pieces of news—including 202,608 COVID-19 media reports—on an LSTM neural network. The news sentiment data and the corresponding coverage are set in relation to the WHO data on COVID-19 and to Google Trends. This compares the reality, that is WHO data, the perceived and reported reality, that is news data, and the actions based on the perceived and the actual reality, that is Google Trends. The results show that media reporting on COVID-19 is unprecedented in terms of coverage and negativity. Furthermore, the study quantifies how far media reporting detached from the facts after the first wave of COVID-19 and how an Infodemic spread across Europe.

In exposure therapy and virtual reality exposure therapy, therapists face highly individual patients that have individual conditions. This leads to the challenge of individualized therapy, for which virtual reality systems need to account for. This paper investigates a prototype that allows a flexible therapy of public speaking anxiety using live-interactions from a therapist, which contain transitions from 2D to 3D interactions. Therapists are able to embody an avatar in the patient’s virtual audience on purpose. We oriented our design at continuous interactions in the three dimensions: cognitive, perceptual, and functional continuity. We evaluated whether the design is beneficial for the users. For this evaluation, we conducted a study with eight non-therapist participants to assess the general usability and design aspects of continuous interaction. Our results indicate that using continuous interactions is beneficial for the use in this kind of system. For the design, we need to find ways to balance the cognitive load with the opportunities that arise, especially when these systems are scaling bigger.

Movement plays an increasingly important role in interactive systems design, from users’ physical engagement, to how designed artefacts can move or be moved, and to the concert between users and artefacts. Designers, as well as programmers, have to engage more and more in physical activities when they want to create appealing experiences involving movement. There is a need for articulating emerging dialogues between designers, developers, and their materials. We will explore such dialogues in a 2-half-day workshop, focusing on data and its challenges, on tools and methods, on sensing and actuation when designing or detecting subtle body movements, and on catering for bodily changes over time.

Nowadays, the use of smartphones has become essential for daily activities that have either a personal or professional purpose. A large number of resources is necessary for both the production and the use of these devices, which means that solutions in terms of sustainability are needed. The purpose of this research is to highlight the concept of sustainability when talking about smartphones, as well to underline the possibilities that exist for the consumers. This study examines the habits of young consumers in Romania, the reasons behind a mobile phone replacement, and the factors that influence the purchase decision. The methodology section follows quantitative and qualitative market research. An analysis was performed in order to have a deep understanding of trends in terms of mobile phone ownership and preferred brands. This study also provides a general view on the neglectfulness of the young population of Romania regarding the dangers to which the environment is exposed because of the purchasing habits that go against sustainability. For accomplishing this purpose, important results have been discovered through the analysis of the data obtained from self-administered questionnaires and interviews. The results show that people are usually using only one mobile phone at a time and they change it once every two years for sustainability and financial reasons. The same applies when it comes to choosing a certain brand. The reasons behind the purchase of a new phone and the decisions regarding an old one are based on healthy principles of the circular economy and sustainability. The preferences in terms of technology and design, and the decision process are correlated with incomes.

Wireless backhaul using line-of-sight MIMO (LOS-MIMO) has the potential to support the increased data-rate demands brought by the introduction of the fifth generation of mobile access technology. In this paper, we present results from an outdoor 1.5-km link using eight LOS-MIMO streams in a single channel. The link operated at E-band (70/80 GHz) using commercial radios and unsynchronized oscillators. An aggregated throughput of 139 Gbps was achieved with a 99.965% availability, resulting in a spectrum efficiency of 55.6 bps/Hz. Moreover, the robustness of the link at suboptimal deployments was verified, agreeing well with the theoretically expected results. Such microwave links are of great importance for future generation mobile broadband networks, providing a cost-effective alternative to fiber backhaul.

We report our experience with 23 cases in utilizing ileum to perform totally intracorporeal 3D laparoscopic neobladder reconstruction using two different surgical techniques.Patients candidates for reconstructive surgery were in a good biological status with a body mass index (BMI) in the range of 18.5-25 and presented a muscle-infiltrative bladder tumor with negative nodal frozen sections performed during the operation. Twenty-one modified Studer neobladder and 2 modified Y-shaped neobladder techniques for totally intracorporeal 3D laparoscopic ileal neobladder cases were performed using drawings and intra-operative images. An emphasis was made on different tips and tricks that can be applied when using ileum for the neobladder reconstruction, to avoid surgical complications and obtain optimal functional results.The operations were performed in a mean time of 5 h, with a mean blood loss of 350 ml and grade II postoperative Clavien Dindo complications. The 23 patients were discharged after a mean hospital stay of 21 days and had a functional ileal neobladder after a mean of 30 days. The results were monitored also on the long-term, taking into account functional results and possible complications from utilizing ileum as a urinary reservoir.Resecting a digestive segment and using it as a urinary reservoir may lead to multiple complications. Therefore, laparoscopic technical adaptations and highly skilled surgical teams are required for performing a totally intracorporeal 3D laparoscopic orthotopic ileal neobladder reconstruction.

In contextul trendului ascendent de imbatrânire a populației crește și numarul persoanelor afectate de tulburari neurocognitive (TNC), cea mai cunoscuta fiind demența de tip Alzheimer. Menținerea pentru cât mai mult timp a unei calitați cât mai bune a vieții la acești pacienți depinde foarte mult și de mediul construit, in acest sens vorbim despre medii construite activatoare. Lucrarea are ca obiectiv explicitarea conceptului de mediu construit activator dedicat persoanelor vârstnice cu tulburari neurocognitive (MCAtn) cu aplicație pe centre rezidențiale pentru seniori de tip nursing-home și respiro. Cercetarea de fața investigheaza interdisciplinar conceptul MCAtn, interferând opiniile a cinci specialiști: arhitect, medic, psiholog, biolog și kinetoterapeut. Am analizat critic principiile MCAtn dintr-o perspectiva integrativa, pornind de la expertiza autorilor și folosind ca instrument judecata de valoare. Pentru a structura analiza asupra conceptului MCAtn am folosit setul de 10 principii formulate de Fleming et al in World Alzheimer Report 2020. In explicitarea celor 10 principii am utilizat metoda studiului de caz, analizând centre pentru seniori care ofera asistența de lunga durata. Un mediu construit activator dedicat persoanelor vârstnice cu TNC se bazeaza pe o serie de principii: reducerea discreta a riscurilor, scara redusa (camine / centre de zi), facilitarea accesului vizual, managementul nivelelor de stimulare, incurajarea exercițiului fizic și a implicarii in activitați, menținerea / crearea unui spațiu familiar, conturarea unor ipostaze spațiale pentru interacțiune / retragere (acasa / camin / comunitate) și nu in ultimul rând, design in concordanța cu viziunea asupra vieții. Conturarea MCAtn este rezultatul unei munci de echipa, interdisciplinare. Un design pe principii dementia-friendly este un cumul atent gestionat care creeaza un echilibru optim de stimulare a persoanei vârstnice cu TNC. Un spaţiu activator pentru o persoana vârstnica cu TNC ofera o stimulare multisenzoriala. MCAtn va contribui la menținerea indepedenței pentru cât mai mult timp a persoanelor cu TNC.

In this article, we lever on matters of concern (MoC) as a way to reflect on the articulation of collaborative design processes. We do this by focusing on an international project for the development of an ICT platform for energy management at the household and housing cooperative levels. We analyse retrospectively how the project development process captured and accompanied several MoC in two piloting areas, where all authors were directly involved. Our work contributes to the body of knowledge that builds on Science and Technology Studies scholarship to enrich the understanding of complex design processes. In particular, the paper goes beyond a descriptive take on MoC and provides ontological and methodological considerations on the use of user stories. Ultimately, the paper argues that scaffolding tools, such as user stories, can capture and convey MoC, and they can facilitate a transparent process of actor-networks alignment and emergence.

Telocytes (TCs) are a controversial cell type characterized by the presence of a particular kind of prolongations, known as telopodes, which are long, thin, and moniliform. A number of attempts has been made to establish the molecular phenotype of cardiac TCs (i.e., expression of c-kit, CD34, vimentin, PDGRFα, PDGRFβ, etc.). We designed an immunohistochemical study involving cardiac tissue samples obtained from 10 cadavers with the aim of determining whether there are TC-like interstitial cells that populate the interstitial space other than the mural microvascular cells. We applied the markers for CD31, CD34, PDGRFα, CD117/c-kit, and α-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA). We found that, in relation to two-dimensional cuts, the endothelial tubes could be misidentified as TC-like cells, the difference being the positive identification of endothelial lumina. Moreover, we found that cardiac pericytes express PDGRFα, CD117/c-kit, and α-SMA, and that they could also be misidentified as TCs when using light microscopy. We reviewed the respective values of the previously identified markers for achieving a clear-cut identification of cardiac TCs, highlighting the critical lack of specificity.

In today’s era of digitalization of education, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning is becoming increasingly important in higher education. This type of learning has been frequently associated in the recent research literature with student regulation, feedback from peers and a student assessment schema which can incorporate both formative and summative assessment strategies. This work-in-progress paper presents the CLASS system which caters for all these aspects. Furthermore, the system supports mechanisms for the prevention of the free riding phenomenon, which has been reported in the literature as one of the most important disadvantages in group student work. The paper discusses the higher education context in which the CLASS system was developed and used, along with its design affordances and how these affordances can facilitate CSCL. The paper can be useful to designers and developers of CSCL systems as well as to practitioners that are interested in how they can exploit CSCL with their students working in groups.

Digital backpropagation (DBP) is a promising digital-domain technique to mitigate Kerr-induced nonlinear interference. While it successfully removes deterministic signal-signal interactions, the performance of ideal DBP is limited by stochastic effects, such as polarizationmode dispersion (PMD). In this paper, we consider an ideal full-field DBP implementation and modify it to additionally account for PMD; reversing the PMD effects in the backward propagation by passing the reverse propagated signal also through PMD sections, which concatenated equal the inverse of the PMD in the forward propagation. These PMD sections are calculated analytically at the receiver based on the total accumulated PMD of the link estimated from channel equalizers. Numerical simulations show that, accounting for nonlinear polarization-related interactions in the modified DBP algorithm, additional signal-to-noise ratio gains of 1.1 dB are obtained for transmission over 1000 km., Swedish Research Council (VR) (2012-5280); UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) (EP/J017582/1, UNLOC).

This study examines the differences and similarities in the perceptions of popular tourist destinations between the English and German media in an empirical and quantitative way. The perception of a tourist destination country is measured by the sentiment in the media in the tourists' countries of origin—either the UK or Germany. The study measures such perceptions with the help of a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) artificial neural network that analyzes the perceptions in publicly available news streams in the UK and Germany. The results show that the online media indeed generates different perceptions for some of the popular travel destinations. An equally interesting finding is that there is, in general, a broad consensus between the sentiments in the British and German media. Businesses in the tourism and hospitality sectors, news providers, political actors, and policymakers can use the methodology to analyze the source of this information gap and the impact on their operations and policies.

The current generation of dedicated Mixed Reality (MR) devices can be considered as the first generation, which is truly mobile while also being capable of sufficient tracking and rendering. These improvements offer new opportunities for the on-set use of MR devices enabling new ways of using MR. However, these new use cases raise challenges for the design and orchestration of MR applications as well as how these new technologies influence their field of application. In this paper, we present MR On-SeT, a MR occupational health and safety training application, which is based on the experiences of an operational division of a world-wide operating German company. The intended purpose of MR On-SeT is to increase employees’ awareness of potential hazards at industrial workplaces by using it in occupational health and safety training sessions. Since the application is used at various locations throughout the company’s world-wide subsidiaries, we were able to evaluate it through an expert survey with the occupational health and safety managers of seven plants in France, Germany, Japan, and Romania. They reported the condensed experience of around 540 training sessions collected within three months. The purpose of the evaluation was twofold: 1. to understand their perceived attitudes towards the application-in-use, and 2. to collect feedback they received from respondents in training sessions. The results suggest that MR On-SeT can be used to extend current, predominantly theoretical, methods of teaching occupational health and safety at work, which also motivates existing employees to actively engage in the training sessions. Based on the findings, several further design implications are proposed.

This article is investigating the Romanian consumer behavior in the context of the evolution of the online shopping. Given that online stores are a profitable business model in the area of electronic commerce and because the relationship between consumer digital Romania and its decision to purchase products or services on the Internet has not been sufficiently explored, this study aims to identify specific features of the new type of consumer and to examine the level of online shopping in Romania. Therefore a documentary study was carried out with statistic data regarding the volume and the number of transactions of the online shopping in Romania during 2010-2014, the type of products and services that Romanians are searching the Internet for and demographics of these people. In addition, to study more closely the online consumer behavior, and to interpret the detailed secondary data provided, an exploratory research was performed as a structured questionnaire with five closed questions on the distribution of individuals according to the gender category they belong (male or female); decision to purchase products / services in the virtual environment in the past year; the source of the goods / services purchased (Romanian or foreign sites); factors that have determined the consumers to buy products from foreign sites; categories of products purchased through online transactions from foreign merchants. The questionnaire was distributed electronically via Facebook social network users and the data collected was processed directly in the Facebook official app to create and interpret responses to surveys. The results of this research correlated with the official data reveals the following characteristics of the digital consumer in Romania: atypical European consumer, interested more in online purchases from abroad, influenced by the quality and price of the purchase. This paper assumed a careful analysis of the online acquisitions phenomenon and also represents a direction for conducting a future research. The particularities identified in the Romanian digital consumer can help develop an online marketing mix based on behavioral study.

The state of polarization and the carrier phase drift dynamically during transmission in a random fashion in coherent optical fiber communications. The typical digital signal processing solution to mitigate these impairments consists of two separate blocks that track each phenomenon independently. Such algorithms have been developed without taking into account mathematical models describing the impairments. We study a blind, model-based tracking algorithm to compensate for these impairments. The algorithm dynamically recovers the carrier phase and state of polarization jointly for an arbitrary modulation format. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, having a fast convergence rate and an excellent tolerance to phase noise and dynamic drift of the polarization. The computational complexity of the algorithm is lower compared to state-of-the-art algorithms at similar or better performance, which makes it a strong candidate for future optical systems.

This paper examines the potential of describing interactive systems in a declarative manner with concepts familiar to both developers and designers. Such declarative interaction descriptions will enable evolutionary prototyping processes. This new type of design and development processes that can emerge with declarative interaction is described along with benefits for human-centred system design. A few challenges are raised for future research in this area.