The role of online social networks for divorced Saudi women in the face of social,psychological, economic,and legal challenges

This research examines the supporting role social networks provide to divorced Saudi women in the face of social, economic, psychological, and legal challenges. An online survey with open and closed ended questions was created to address the following research question: What support do online social networks provide to divorced Saudi women in contemporary Saudi Arabian society in the face of social, economic, psychological, and legal challenges?” The survey was completed online by 248 divorced Saudi women. Quantitative analysis of closed-ended survey responses was applied to the dataset followed by a qualitative thematic analysis of respondents' responses to open-ended questions. Survey findings identified the following areas of medium to high social network support experienced by divorced Saudi women: social outcast avoidance, relationship management with former husband, income assistance, emotional support, confidence building, and depression management. Findings also revealed areas where social networks provided only low levels of support with respect to social, economic, psychological, and legal challenges. The research contributes new insights into the supporting role of social networks for divorced Saudi women and their potential to leverage personal life and identity development in the face of social stigmatization and societal marginalization. This work advances research relevant to media studies, woman's studies, and cultural studies.     

The emergence of social science research on nanotechnology

This article examines the development of social science literature focused on the emerging area of nanotechnology. It is guided by the exploratory proposition that early social science work on emerging technologies will draw on science and engineering literature on the technology in question to frame its investigative activities, but as the technologies and societal investments in them progress, social scientists will increasingly develop and draw on their own body of literature. To address this proposition the authors create a database of nanotechnology-social science literature by merging articles from the Web of Science’s Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index with articles from Scopus. The resulting database comprises 308 records. The findings suggest that there are multiple dimensions of cited literature and that social science citations of other social scientists’ works have increased since 2005.     

Perspectives on the Role of Educational Technologies

Educational technologies and software hold tremendous potential for improving the process of teaching and learning through, for example, delivering information, facilitating communication, and promoting certain aspects of cognition. While this paper discusses these, its overall aim is to view the larger picture of what educational technologies can and cannot do. It begins by noting the overall aims of higher education and posing the question: What part can educational technologies play in achieving these goals? The paper summarizes Perkins' five facets of any learning environment in order to provide a framework for evaluating educational technologies and to reveal that most technologies provide only part of the total learning environment. Specifically, the “task manager” facet plays the most important role in achieving the aims of education, but it is difficult to create software with meaningful task management capability.     

On line and under veil: Technology-facilitated communication and Saudi female experience within academia

The Saudi female population, which is characterised as sheltered, hard-to-reach and conservative, is arousing good interest globally (and nationally). Therefore, a review of literature on emerging issues surrounding Saudi female experience is timely. This article, in the form of a literature review, provides a background to and justification for a forthcoming study, which will examine how technology-facilitated communication has shaped the social–cultural pattern of Saudi female experience within academia.     

Underdog or bulldog: introducing biogas technologies in Estonia

The production and use of biogas, along with corresponding sector-specific activities and technologies, is a relatively new subject in Estonia. This paper gives an instructive overview of main barriers behind the development incentives, policy support and technological innovation in terms of emerging market for biogas. The article examines the complexity of market-related, political, technological and social obstacles for introduction biogas technologies. There is a major gap between resource potential, technological capacity and practice in Estonia. About 2?% of the theoretical potential of biogas is being used, totalling around 11?million?Nm³, based primarily on landfill biogas. First, political setting for biogas innovation is still vague, however, consolidated and enhanced since 2010 to compete with other renewables and mainstream energy technologies. The article underlines the statement that the reason why Estonian biogas production has not followed the path of growth and technology transfer is the low renewable electricity feed-in tariff. However, there are many other legal and engineering factors that have held back biogas applications and sector development in general. Stakeholders have established the Estonian Biogas Association, increasing sector’s visibility, targeted lobby to support policy-making, technological and social innovation and professional networking. Though getting the biogas sector to succeed demands a comprehensive approach and involvement of more actors in demand side including local leaders and consumers, both enthusiasm and scepticism should be informed by a sound understanding of framework conditions and complexities for path-breaking transformations in energy systems. To promote biogas production, profitable and technologically feasible showcases should demonstrate benefits and issues to the target group and stakeholders. Instead agricultural and CHP development mode, the priority of using biogas in Estonia could be seen as green vehicle fuel for transport.     

Technological and social changes into the third millennium and the impact on refrigeration

A technological revolution based on information technologies is reshaping the nature of society while globalisation has impacted on the location and nature of economic production and ownership. The scope of these changes indicates a transformation that is equal to the extent of the changes associated with the Industrial Revolution. At the beginning of the third millennium, it is possible to anticipate how these transformative changes will impact upon the way societies and people produce, communicate, manage and live. This paper will outline some of the major changes that have occurred, or will be likely to, over the next two decades, with particular attention to the way in which social institutions and social interaction will evolve. It will also pose questions about the implications for facets of refrigeration given the fundamentally different ways in which societies and individuals will interact with, and expect to use, various technologies.     

Conceptual disruption and 21st century technologies: A framework

Modern technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, geo-engineering, social media, or next-generation genomics have been and will continue to be socially (culturally, economically, legally, etc.) disruptive. Several philosophers of technology have noted that technology is not only socially but also conceptually disruptive. Technologies do not only change the way we live together. They also challenge the way we conceptualize or classify ourselves and the world around us. However, it is not clear what it means for technology to disrupt our concepts, as the very idea of conceptual disruption and its relation to conceptual and social change remain opaque. In what way can technologies disrupt our concepts and how we can overcome such disruptions? This paper proposes a framework for studying technology-induced conceptual disruptions that draws both on mediation theory and recent work on conceptual engineering.     

On phatic technologies for creating and maintaining human relationships

In our time, with the growth in the Internet and associated technologies, technology and society are increasingly integrated. Although technology studies focus on the development of technical artefacts, systems and techniques, and their relation to society, current theories of technology do not seem to be sufficient to provide an understanding of new phenomena to be found in the intimate union between Internet technologies – our primary interest – and contemporary society. In this paper, we explore a concept of phatic technology in light of various technologies and theories about technology and society. The nature of a phatic technology is to establish, develop and maintain human relationships. Many technologies exhibit some degrees of phatic use. Examples range from telephones to software for social networking and building cybercommunities. We suggest that the Internet is a primary source of phatic technologies.     

Quantitative measurement of public opinions on new technologies

The article presents the methodology of structural equation modeling (SEM) to study social perceptions of new technologies. It argues that the SEM-methodology offers a better statistical approach for the analysis of technology-related attitudes than the techniques most often applied in the field of public opinion research. SEM eliminates, compensates for, or at least reduces many problems raised by common surveying practices researching attitudes on new technologies. In particular, SEM-methodology reduces difficulties of testing the validity and reliability of measuring instruments when those are applied to vague and weakly established opinions on new technologies. To demonstrate these advantages of SEM the research presented here concentrates on the cognitive formation of public attitudes toward the particular gene technologies of prenatal genetic testing (pGT) and prenatal genetic engineering (pGE). The study explores whether a statistical analysis of various opinions on these technologies can reveal a set of underlying, structured attitudes, and if so, whether these attitudes form an entire syndrome or are differentiated into several distinct, coherent complexes.     

Emerging biomedical sensing technologies and their applications

Recent progress in biomedical sensing technologies has resulted in the development of several novel sensor products and new applications. Modern biomedical sensors developed with advanced microfabrication and signal processing techniques are becoming inexpensive, accurate, and reliable. A broad range of sensing mechanisms has significantly increased the number of possible target measurands that can be detected. The miniaturization of classical "bulky" measurement techniques has led to the realization of complex analytical systems, including such sensors as the BioChemLab-on-a-Chip. This rapid progress in miniature devices and instrumentation development will significantly impact the practice of medical care as well as future advances in the biomedical industry. Currently, electrochemical, optical, and acoustic wave sensing technologies have emerged as some of the most promising biomedical sensor technologies. In this paper, important features of these technologies, along with new developments and some of the applications, are presented.     

Waste-to-energy technologies in continuous process industries

A range of new waste-to-energy (WtE) technologies in continuous process industries have been analyzed in terms of conversion, energy saving, heat recovery, electricity generation, transportation fuel, storing energy and fuel, environmental emissions, and recycling management. This new group of WtE technologies is an emerging technology group for energy-intensive industries apart from the wide concept of “clean energy technologies”. The current state of WtE technologies has been examined for five representative sectors in continuous industrial processes: iron and steel, cement, primary aluminum production, metal casting, and glass industry. The purpose of the study was to seek synergetic interactions between continuous process industries, with special emphasis on the case of the iron and steel industry. For the purpose of a comparative analysis, waste heat recovery (WHR) technology has been included. A case study in the steel sector is illustrated as a real-world example for solid recovery using WHR in sintering process.     

The effect of social balance on social fragmentation

With the availability of internet, social media, etc., the interconnectedness of people within most societies has increased tremendously over the past decades. Across the same timespan, an increasing level of fragmentation of society into small isolated groups has been observed. With a simple model of a society, in which the dynamics of individual opinion formation is integrated with social balance, we show that these two phenomena might be tightly related. We identify a critical level of interconnectedness, above which society fragments into sub-communities that are internally cohesive and hostile towards other groups. This critical communication density necessarily exists in the presence of social balance, and arises from the underlying mathematical structure of a phase transition known from the theory of disordered magnets called spin glasses. We discuss the consequences of this phase transition for social fragmentation in society.     

Soil and groundwater cleanup: benefits and limits of emerging technologies

Contaminated soil and groundwater have been the subject of study and research, so that the field of remediation has grown and evolved, continually developing and adopting new technologies in attempts to improve the decontamination. The cleanup of environmental pollution involves a variety of techniques, ranging from simple biological processes to advanced engineering technologies. Cleanup activities may also address a wide range of contaminants. This article is a short analysis of the technologies for cleaning up groundwater and soil, highlighting knowledge and information gaps. Challenges and strategies for cleaning up different types of contaminants, mainly heavy metals and persistent organic compounds are described. Included are technologies that treat ground water contaminants in place in the subsurface and soil technologies that treat the soil either in place or on site in a treatment unit. Emerging technologies such as those based on oxidation–reduction, bioremediation, and nanotechnologies are covered. It is evident that for a good efficiency of remediation, techniques or even whole new technologies may be incorporated into an existing technology as a treatment train, improving its performance or overcome limitations. Several economic and decision-making elements are developed in the final part, based on the analysis carried out throughout the article. The work highlights the fact that excellence in research and technology progress could be attained by the development of technologies to deal more effectively and economically with certain toxic contaminants such as heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, and persistent organic pollutants, associated with optimization of technologies under field remediation conditions and requirements, improving capacity and yields, and reducing costs. Moreover, increasing knowledge of the scope and problem of equipment development could improve the benefits.     

The rationality of low carbon technologies

Combustion of fossil fuels increases permanently the carbon content of the fast carbon cycle consisting of atmosphere,land and surface ocean.The carbon residence times in these reservoirs are relatively low in the order of some years.Hower,the carbon residence time in the whole fast cycle is in the order of 2,000 years.This means the final storage problem of fossil energy use is in the same order as that of nuclear energy use. There are two other main driving forces for a continuous decarbonisation of the world energy system.The first one is the shortening of raw materials,an the second one is the greenhous gas effect of carbon dioxide with the risk of climate change. Based on the "molecular fingerprints"of various fossil fuels a new quantity.the "energetic carbon efficiency"can be derived.This quantity favours methane(natural gas)more than any other fossil fuel.E.g.,methane is two times more efficient than lignite or hard coaL Therefore,the future role of this energy carrier will be discussed more in detail. Carbon capture and storage(CCS)is not a convincing concept and therefore it cannot be considered as a responsible excuse for new coal fired power stations.A reasonable way out may be the carbon moratorium.This means a thermal splitting of methane into carbon and hydrogen.Only the hydrogen is used as a fuel whereas the carbon is deposited in the earth,because storage of carbon is much safer than storage of carbon dioxide. Very often biofuels are considered as a sustainable option.Critical arguments are presented against the meander of biofuels. Negative climate implications and very low efficiencies are serious arguments against these teehnolgies.Even the fashionable new hope for bioenergy from algea farms has no rational fundament. A long-time sustainable energy system requires not only low carbon but zero carbon technologies.This means solar energy in all kinds of its appearance(water power,wind,solar heat and photovoltaics).However these kinds of energy require new energy storage technologies.Various storage technologies will be discussed with a special focus on electrochemical batteries and electromobility. All of these new energy technologies are not able to remove any carbon from the fast carbon cycle.Therefore,some prominent concepts of climate engineering will be introduced.     

The changes in the effects of social media use of Cypriots due to COVID-19 pandemic

Social media is the leading medium which is used for communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research conducted aims to fill the gap of literature related to social media use during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research aims at uncovering the influences of social media use in several dimensions during lockdown(s). The study aims to answer the research question of: Are the influences of social media use different from normal times? The online questionnaire has been completed by six hundred and sixty-eight users within the period of lockdown. The author prepared the questionnaire, which is composed of 22 positive statements in order to evaluate the effects of social media use during the COVID-19 pandemic. A 5 point Likert scale was used, where reliability and validity were calculated by the Cronbach's alpha value, which was 0.751. Findings highlight that users have more information about COVID-19, and they follow recent information via social media, which shows the shift towards digital medium. Findings also indicate that users are aware of fake news, and they follow official sources. Social media is powerful to affect decision-makers, and respondents' social media use did not create any panic or anxiety amongst them. This research indicates that respondents' social media use during COVID-19 is different from normal times as a common purpose triggers this, survival. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, most of social media shares were like a dream or a strong desire that may cause anxiety in others. During the pandemic, people are in lockdown and share similar feelings and follow similar behavioural patterns. As there is a common purpose and struggle via users, psychological well-being is not affected negatively.     

“These devices have not been made for older people's needs” – Older adults' perceptions of digital technologies in Finland and Ireland

This article examines how older adults use and perceive digital technologies in Finland and Ireland. These two countries are at different stages regarding two important global trends – demographic ageing and digitalization. Finland, being the fastest ageing society in Europe, is also one of the leaders in implementing digital technologies in social and health care services. In contrast, Ireland is a demographically younger and less digitalized society. Drawing on focus group discussions on the usage of digital technologies, conducted with older adults in both countries, we analyse how digital technologies are adopted and viewed by older generations. The analyses showed that older adults associate digitalization with both advantages and drawbacks. To encapsulate these two contrasting aspects, we developed the term Janus-faced conceptions of technology. This concept encapsulates how the successful adoption of digital technology facilitates everyday activities whereas the inability to utilise technologies results in feelings of alienation and being out-of-touch. The digital divide was found to occur not only between generations but also between different socioeconomic groups of older adults.     

The foundations of a policy for the use of social robots in care

Should we deploy social robots in care settings? This question, asked from a policy standpoint, requires that we understand the potential benefits and downsides of deploying social robots in care situations. Potential benefits could include increased efficiency, increased welfare, physiological and psychological benefits, and experienced satisfaction. There are, however, important objections to the use of social robots in care. These include the possibility that relations with robots can potentially displace human contact, that these relations could be harmful, that robot care is undignified and disrespectful, and that social robots are deceptive. I propose a framework for evaluating all these arguments in terms of three aspects of care: structure, process, and outcome. I then highlight the main ethical considerations that have to be made in order to untangle the web of pros and cons of social robots in care as these pros and cons are related the trade-offs regarding quantity and quality of care, process and outcome, and objective and subjective outcomes.     

Factors influencing user participation in social media: Evidence from twitter usage during COVID-19 pandemic in Saudi Arabia

With increasing frequency, people are using social media sites to obtain timely information about the world's grand challenges and this phenomenon is amplified during crises. However, little research has been conducted to determine how people participate and how their involvement can be promoted on social media sites, although the critical role played by those sites has been well documented. Based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB), this study develops and tests a theoretical model to establish the effect of several factors with survey data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, in Saudi Arabia. The relationship was verified on a sample of 213 respondents active on Twitter, using Partial Least Square (PLS). The study found that attitude, perceived behavioural control and subjective norm affect Twitter users' active participation significantly within the context of a time of crisis. It also found a positive effect of utilitarian and hedonic values and trust. These results will provide a more comprehensive evaluation of Twitter users in grand challenges (and more specifically during a crisis) and furnish academics and managers with instructive guidance.     

多机器人编队技术

本文对多机器人编队技术的相关研究进行了系统概述.首先介绍了多机器人编队技术的定义和概念;然后讨论了相关领域中的一些理论和技术问题以及它们在多机器人编队技术中的影响,在对各种研究方法进行分类的基础上,介绍了各类多机器人编队技术和他们的优缺点;最后总结了多机器人编队技术的研究现状并展望了未来多机器人编队技术的发展.