Vulnerability - Science topic

Introduction: This article shows that among residents of Rincon Grande of Pavas, a group of vulnerable neighborhoods in capital of Costa Rica, circulate negative rumors regarding police activity against drug dealing. These rumors reflect discontent of local population towards police forces in the analyzed area. Objective: There are no studies in Co...

Resumen Objetivo: identificar el perfil sociodemográfico y las características de la violencia interpersonal contra los adultos mayores en el primer año de la pandemia de COVID-19 en una ciudad capital de la región sureste de Brasil. Método: investigación descriptiva, exploratoria con diseño transversal a partir del análisis de las notificaciones d...

The aim of the special issue is to deliver new evidence on traffic culture, practices, and implementation of policies related to Traffic Safety Culture (TSC) worldwide, with emphasis on countries that serve as leading paradigms in reducing TSC-related road fatalities. This Special Issue will facilitate the exchange of knowledge, especially of best...

Studies of online influence operations, coordinated efforts to disseminate and amplify disinformation, focus on forensic analysis of social networks or of publicly available datasets of trolls and bot accounts. However, little is known about the experiences and challenges of human participants in influence operations. We conducted semi-structured i...

The design and vulnerability assessment of earth-filled water retaining structures require the elaboration of reliable seepage analyses. Model predictions, however, can result highly unreliable because of poor parameter estimations. To address this issue, inverse modelling techniques can be implemented, incorporating observations of ongoing process...

Public hosting services provide convenience for domain owners to build web applications with better scalability and security. However, if a domain name points to released service endpoints (e.g., nameservers allocated by a provider), adversaries can take over the domain by applying the same endpoints. Such a threat is called hosting-based domain ta...

Recently, precast concrete (PC) structures are vulnerable to progressive collapse, because during construction, the structural integrity of the beam–column joint is poor. Even after construction, the interface between PC beam and column is a critical section, due to the discontinuity of concrete and reinforcement. In this study, to investigate the...

The present study aims to verify a part of the Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model, indicating that personal vulnerability predisposing an individual to Social Networking Sites (SNS) addiction should be mediated by specific use expectancies. We focus on four aspects of narcissism (i.e., admirative, communal, rivalrous, a...

The Ebola virus diseases (EVD) declared in Uganda in September 22, 2022, has spread to seven districts by early November, with a total of 131 confirmed cases and 48 deaths. Public health emergency response in Uganda deserves a specific and tailored approach due to the current population composition, which accounts to around 1.4 million refugees and...

This research explains how to design and plan fixed wireless access connections in an urban setting using 5th generation (5G) technology in a multiuser urban scenario. Although the antennas used had a high gain, the 28 GHz carrier frequency proved incompatible with the connections due to path loss. The additional loss due to foliage led to a drop i...

The availability and usage of the Internet of Things (IoT) have grown significantly over the last decade. This growth in ubiquitous computing has enabled continuous observation, decision-making, and execution of actions to improve the livelihood of millions. However, IoT also has an increased cybersecurity risk by making the user vulnerable to atta...

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a collaboration of sensors, networking equipment, and devices to collect data from industrial operations. IIoT systems possess numerous security vulnerabilities due to inter-connectivity and limited computational power. Machine learning based intrusion detection system (IDS) is one possible security approach...

The measured data of the power system with voltage source converter (VSC) depending on data communication network, are monitored and analyzed by Dynamic state estimation (DSE), which can provide predictive data to control system. However, information communication technology may contain unknown risks and be vulnerable to cyber-attacks, resulting in...

The subleasing of rooms is a widespread reality in large urban areas, however, the absence of statistics in this regard makes its analysis difficult. A large part of the immigrant population has access to a dwelling through this modality. Therefore, in this study, 27 semi-structured interviews are analyzed to evaluate the role of subleasing in the...

As the Internet has transformed into a critical infrastructure, society has become more vulnerable to its security flaws. Despite substantial efforts to address many of these vulnerabilities by industry, government, and academia, cyber security attacks continue to increase in intensity, diversity, and impact. Thus, it becomes intuitive to investiga...

Attacks on passwords by thermal cameras are a poignant example of how emerging technologies can pose unforeseen security risks. Despite being easy to perform and effective, thermal attacks are not commonly understood or counteracted, hence a strategy to mitigate this is required. In this paper, we propose an AI-driven strategy to obfuscate vulnerab...

In the present study, eight sub-watersheds are prioritized in Hiranyakeshi lower sub-basin based on the morphometric analysis using Remote Sensing and Geographical Information System. An evaluation of morphometric parameters is conducted to determine the potential of sub-watersheds. Sub-watersheds were prioritised as they are the most vulnerable an...

The voices of the marginalized and vulnerable groups, i.e., the sexual minorities, the underprivileged, and the victims of abusive/unfair treatment, are often neglected and understudied in policy research due to their social sensitiveness. Researchers may face difficulties accessing the data. Thus, they are unable to uncover the hidden truth. This...

Current adaptation responses to sea-level rise tend to focus on protecting existing infrastructure resulting in unsustainable adaptation pathways. At the same time, urban development compromises a city's adaptive capacity if the climate risk component is ignored. While fighting for the same space, these two domains are currently widely analyzed sep...

Varroa is a major world-wide pest to Western honey bees (Apis mellifera), causing huge ongoing losses of colonies every year. Conversely, the Eastern honey bee (Apis cerana) is less vulnerable to the mite having existed alongside it over a long evolutionary period. Research conducted during the 1980s and 1990s, shortly after Varroa had spread acros...

The nonstationary nature of water and oxygen content in the vadose zone determines various biogeochemical reactions regarding arsenic (As) therein, which affects the groundwater vulnerability to As contamination at a site. In the present study, we evaluated the effect of soil organic matter (OM) on the behavior of As using specifically designed soi...

While previous work on multilingual speech rhythm has found evidence of progressive cross-linguistic influence of a first or second language (L1, L2) on a third language (L3), regressive cross-linguistic influence (rCLI) in rhythm remains understudied. In the current study, we tested the roles of order of acquisition and of language similarity in s...

‘Collective adaptation’ has recently become a widely used concept in climate change science and advocacy work. Yet, the current engagement with collective adaptation suffers from a few shortcomings: While the debate has been normative for the largest part, a coherent conceptual framing and theoretical engagement have been underdeveloped, hampering...

Climate change and uneven urbanization processes have intensified the occurrence and magnitude of disasters. The purpose of this article is to discuss the integration between the National Policy for Protection and Civil Defense and the empowerment of women and communities in Brazil, revealing the innovative potential of gender-sensitive disaster ma...

The reliability of infrastructure that is critical to society’s functionality, survival and progression has gained significance for both national security and research because of its large-scale and interdependent nature. However, the theoretical basis of the relatively new research field of critical infrastructure is incomplete and the common parl...

Background and aims: Alexithymia and psychological symptomatology have been closely associated with gambling disorder (GD). However, sex differences remain underexplored. This study aims, firstly, to explore the differences between groups (GD and no-GD) and sexes (women vs. men) in alexithymia and psychological symptomatology (depression, anxiety...

Drawing on two Southern California neighborhoods, this paper assesses children’s perceptions of the risks of walking to school in urban and low-income communities of color, balanced against the expected benefits of child independent mobility. Quantitatively-estimated relationships between children’s travel modes and environmental observations show...

Climate transition zone is a sensitive area of climate change and ecological transition where forests are vulnerable to climate extremes. Extreme droughts are increasing in frequency and magnitude under climate change, resulting in structure and function changes of forest ecosystems. Here, to analyze climate-growth relationships and quantify tree r...

In this observational quasi-experimental study, we recruited 200 participants during the Federal University of Petroleum Resources Effurun's (FUPRE) orientation, who were exposed to socially engineered (phishing) attacks over nine months. Attacks sought to extract participants' data and/or entice them to click (compromised) links. The study aims to...

Limited information is known about fern diversity and ecology in roadside vegetation becausefern studies are mostly conducted in montane ecosystems. This study aimed to report the diversityand distribution of fern species in the roadside vegetation of Quezon Province, Philippines. Weestablished sampling plots along selected roadside vegetation of M...

The bearing connection between the bridge girder and substructure plays a crucial role in resisting wave forces. Previous works pointed out that the box-girder bridge with laminated rubber bearings is susceptible to unseating, sliding, and overturning under extreme waves. This study develops a tension-compression (TC) bearing system to enhance the...

The growth of mobile payments gave rise to several security threats to users. These threats are attributed to vulnerabilities due to ignorance, technical issues, inadequate regulations, information about mobile transactions, and lack of formal complaints and redress mechanisms. This study aimed to design a framework to address security vulnerabilit...

An ongoing discussion between formal and non-formal theological training has been going on for some time. This presentation presents the findings from a workshop track at ICETE 2022 at EMS SW Region as an opportunity to learn within the Global Mission community to enhance mission education. From the presentation: Pastoral training has failed to ke...

The ever-more frequent extreme weather, mainly depending on climate changes, has particularly emphasized the fragility of urban and extra-urban environments where, together with man-made structures, nature-made structures certainly play a crucial role. Regarding the latter, the frequent events of falling trees point out the attention toward the stu...

El libro recupera de la memoria histórica de la Fundación Samaritanos de la Calle, institución que desde 1998 ha venido produciendo un saber para la atención integral de las personas más vulnerables de Cali desde la primera infancia hasta la adultez, al igual que lo acontece en torno al fenómeno de habitabilidad en calle.

The present research paper deals with the study of threatened status of flowering plants assessed in forest of Nashik district (M.S) India, according to IUCN guidelines. During the course of investigation the forest of Nashik district extensive and intensive field survey was conducted during 2018-2019. Some plants not only showed restricted distrib...

India is one of the hotspot for lightning activities, experiencing a large number of deaths every year; more than any other natural disaster. Vulnerability to lightning is not the same for all states; some states like Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha are more vulnerable compared to others. Also, deaths are observed more among m...

The pandemic affected more than 1.5 billion students and youth, and the most vulnerable learners were hit hardest, making digital inequality in educational settings impossible to overlook. Given this reality, we, all educators, came together to find ways to understand and address some of these inequalities. As a product of this collaboration, we pr...

Building up on pre-existing vulnerabilities and social exclusions, refugees and migrants are disproportionately suffering from the negative effects of the COVID-19 outbreak. Insecure legal status is an additional stressor that may accentuate social cleavages and ultimately impair their trust in host society and institutions. Based on a diverse samp...

Background: HIV-exposed uninfected infants (HEU) experience appear more vulnerable to infections compared to their HIV-unexposed uninfected (HUU) peers, generally attributed to poor passive immunity acquired from the mother. This may be due to some genetic factors that could alter the immune system. We thus sought to determine the distribution of K...

This paper highlights the findings of research on access to services for migrants with a precarious immigration status in the city of Cardiff. It is a summary of the full report of an 18-month study, Local Responses to Precarious Migrants: Frames, Strategies and Evolving Practices in Europe (LoReMi). There are parallel reports on Frankfurt and Vien...

Periyar is still relevant and contextual in the contemporary modern society for his lifelong struggles against casteism, social injustice, irrational thinking, superstition, blind adherence to religion, custom and tradition, exploitation of weaker and vulnerable sections of the society, etc. He was the champion of social justice and campaigner of m...

Sea-level rise amplifies the frequency of extreme sea levels by raising their baseline height. Amplifications are often projected for arbitrary future years and benchmark frequencies. Consequently, such projections do not indicate when flood risk thresholds may be crossed given the current degree of local coastal protection. To better support adapt...

Anthropogenic change is a major threat to dwindling freshwater biodiversity. We present and synthesise available information regarding the fish community , ecology, threats and conservation options within The Cape Fold Ecoregion (CFE) of South Africa. The CFE is a particularly vulnerable region, with many range-restricted species and highly fragmen...

Deep neural networks have been known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are inputs that are modified slightly to fool the network into making incorrect predictions. This has led to a significant amount of research on evaluating the robustness of these networks against such perturbations. One particularly important robustness metric is...

Applying the pedagogy of vulnerability and self-expansion theory, the exercise known as the Know Me Activity (KMA) enhances self-expansion by encouraging connections between students and the instructor. The pedagogy of vulnerability is premised on risking self-disclosure as an act of courage. Self-expansion theory is grounded in personal relationsh...

Baulism is an esoteric cult based lifestyle cum philosophy, based on detachment and search for self. It is one of the rare eastern Indic cultures, which incorporates lifestyle and serenity of oneself. In Baul philosophy, self-clarity means a practical picture of the mirroring the self, which can be realized and not explicitly empirically justified....

This study investigates the production of subject and object restrictive relatives in child heritage Romanian in contact with French. The main goal is to evaluate to what extent input reduction over a longer period of time, during the developmental stages following onset of schooling, may trigger language deterioration, incomplete acquisition or la...

The vulnerability of statistical learning has been demonstrated in reading difficulties in both the visual and acoustic modalities. We examined segmentation abilities of Hungarian speaking adolescents with different levels of reading fluency in the acoustic verbal and visual nonverbal domains. We applied online target detection tasks, where the ext...

This paper investigates how the introduction of AI to decision making increases moral distance and recommends the ethics of care to augment the ethical examination of AI decision making. With AI decision making, face-to-face interactions are minimized, and decisions are part of a more opaque process that humans do not always understand. Within deci...

In this paper, we perform a detailed pooled cross-sectional analysis on the innovation performance in nine European countries by using data stemming from the Community Innovation Survey. The temporal dimension of our dataset includes three waves of CIS surveys from 2008 until 2014. As such, it allows us to evaluate the changes in the innovation pro...

Motivated by the realistic demand of reducing the flood risk of urban metro stations, this paper proposes an innovative research framework for flood risk assessment and classification. In this framework, a specified criterion system is established from the perspective of hazard, vulnerability, exposure and rescue capacity. Furthermore, we introduce...

Conspiracy theories command much attention these days. However, the reasons why people come to believe in them is elusive. An overlooked perspective is the developmental one. We propose the importance of looking at the ways our early relationships to "otherness, " authority, and agency inform the different epistemologies or world views that we adop...

Arguably, the biggest challenge of the 21st century is human-induced climate change. This article proposes the cultural memory of the Anthropocene as the dominant reason for our inadequate climate mitigation, whilst simultaneously arguing for the process of hoping-mourning as a possible solution. As such, this article analyzes the Anthropocene as a...

The vulnerability of machine learning models to adversarial attacks has been attracting considerable attention in recent years. Most existing studies focus on the behavior of stand-alone single-agent learners. In comparison, this work studies adversarial training over graphs, where individual agents are subjected to perturbations of varied strength...

Mahatma Gandhi is not only recognized for his instrumental leadership role in the Indian independence movement but prominently known as an emblem of the truth and nonviolence across the world also. The concept of Satyagraha expounded by him is the combined manifestation of truth and nonviolence. He was the preacher and practitioner of truth and non...

Community-based participatory research in Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Muntinlupa is geared towards financial, entrepreneurial, and technological literacy.

Pakistan has been grappling with the issue of religious terrorism for several decades. The country has experienced numerous acts of violence carried out by extremist religious groups, which have caused significant damage to both human lives and property. Religious terrorism in Pakistan has its roots in the country's complex history, which is deeply...

Metals stored in sediments of lakes can bioaccumulate through the food chain, posing a risk to the environment and human health. Alpine lakes are supposed to be less affected by pollution than lowland lakes and are vulnerable to any changes and impacts in their catchment areas because of their remote position and ultra-oligotrophic character. There...

1. The timing of germination, driven by seasonal cues, is critical for the life cycle of plants. Variation among species in germination responses can reflect evolutionary processes and adaptation to local climate and can reveal vulnerability to changing conditions. Climate change is altering the timing of precipitation and associated temperatures,...

Climate change and neoliberalism are threat multipliers: they combine risks, increase instability and penalise disproportionately poor countries and poor people by virtue of their greater vulnerability disruption. This article examines the complex relationships between neoliberalism and climate change, and outlines a democratic economic strategy (D...

The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has raised concerns about the security of connected devices. There is a need to develop suitable and cost-efficient methods to identify vulnerabilities in IoT devices in order to address them before attackers seize opportunities to compromise them. The deception technique is a prominent approach to...

We inspected 45 actively deployed Operational Technology (OT) product families from ten major vendors and found that every system suffers from at least one trivial vulnerability. We reported a total of 53 weaknesses, stemming from insecure by design practices or basic security design failures. They enable attackers to take a device offline, manipul...

Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become the main drivers in many image recognition applications. However, they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which can lead to disastrous consequences. This paper introduces ShuffleDetect as a new and efficient unsupervised method for the detection of adversarial images against trained con...

Precarity has been established as a central theoretical issue in labour market research and numerous attempts have been made in the past to provide indicators that measure it. Precarity has also been present in political discourse and linked to specific new forms of employment (temporary, part-time, insecure, and atypical amongst others) and certai...

Efficient and convenient vulnerability detection for smart contracts is a key issue in the field of smart contracts. The earlier vulnerability detection for smart contracts mainly relies on static symbol analysis, which has high accuracy but low efficiency and is prone to path explosion. In this paper, the authors propose a static method for vulner...

In this chapter I examine female marriage migration to South Korea from Vietnam as a transnational case study, to explain the discriminatory consequences of South Korea’s laws and policies on nationality which frame such migration as ‘a critical project for the nation-state’ (Toyota M. Citizensh Stud 12(1):1, 2008, p. 3). Through a socio-legal stud...

Neurodegenerative diseases are incurable and debilitating conditions that result in progressive degeneration and loss of nerve cells. Oxidative stress has been proposed as one factor that plays a potential role in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disorders since neuron cells are particularly vulnerable to oxidative damage. Nuclear factor (eryt...

Sustainable harvest of wild populations requires knowledge of the underlying population structure. The focus of this study is on goldsinny wrasse (Ctenolabrus rupestris), a small marine fish inhabiting coastal waters of the north-eastern Atlantic. This species is caught in large numbers to serve as cleaner fish in salmonid aquaculture. We genotyped...

In this paper, we study the severity of cascading failures in supply chain networks defined by a node percolation process corresponding to product suppliers failing independently due to systemic shocks. We first show that the size of the cascades follows a power law in random directed acyclic graphs, whose topology encodes the natural ordering of p...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the level of readiness of future preschool teachers regarding the teaching of outdoor learning activities in classes. Using the questionnaire, we have drawn the recent theory and research of primary school curriculum that outlines the necessity of outdoor education in primary school. This tool shows the e...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has spread rapidly across the globe. Cancer patients have a higher risk of severe infections and associated mortality than the general population. However, the lethal effect of Omicron-variant affection on advanced pancreatic and biliary cancer patients is still not clear. Herein, we designed an observational study...

The worm wheel is the critical element and is vulnerable to failure due to fault occurring on it that leads to downtime hampering productivity. The condition monitoring can predict deteriorating health due to the fault. This work presents the experimental investigation of the worm gearbox carried out by the design of experiments (DOE) that utilizes...

In practice, metric analysis on a specific train and test dataset does not guarantee reliable or fair ML models. This is partially due to the fact that obtaining a balanced, diverse, and perfectly labeled dataset is typically expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. Rather than relying on a carefully designed test set to assess ML models' failur...

Th Security and privacy issues in the internet of things the Internet of Things (IoT) presents a number of challenges. One of the biggest challenges in IoT is security. IoT devices are often connected to critical infrastructure systems and can be vulnerable to cyberattacks. Other challenges include interoperability, data privacy, and scalability.

The vulnerability of groundwater as the primary source of water for human survival should be assessed for the purpose of pollution management. The Ajabshir plain, one of the major agricultural areas in the northwest of Iran, is always prone to pollution. Therefore, to prevent the increase in pollution, it is necessary to determine the polluting fac...