Search Results (7)

Set in a wide open plain, the monolith of Uluṟu (‘Ayers Rock’) has become an internationally recognizable symbol for the Australian outback, currently attracting hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. Promoted since the 1950s as an exotic tourist destination, one of the major activities has been the ‘conquest’ of Uluṟu by completing the steep climb to the top. Always disapproved by the Aṉangu, the Indigenous Australian community of the area, and actively discouraged since 1990, the climb became an extremely contentious issue in the final two years before it was permanently closed to tourists on 26 October 2019. Given that climbing Uluṟu as a tourist activity has become an event of the past, this paper will examine the nature, materiality, and potential heritage value of the portable material culture associated with the climb. The background to the history of climbing Uluṟu in the context of European invasion (‘exploration’), the nature of tourism at Uluṟu and the role climbing played in this, as well as the management decisions that led to the closure of the climb can be grouped into four thematic periods: the beginnings of settler colonialist ascents (1873–1950), the ‘heroic’ age of Uluṟu tourism (1950–1958), lodges in a National Park (1958–1985), and joint management and the eventual closure of the climb (1985–2019). Based on a description of the material culture associated with the climb, particularly badges, patches and certificates, and drawing on the methodologies of historic and material culture studies, this paper will discuss the various interpretations of climbing Uluṟu and how the portable material culture reflects or exemplifies climbing as a conquest and heroic deed, as a spiritual ritual, and as a violation of cultural rights. After examining the materiality of the wearable material culture, we conclude by exploring which of these portable items are culturally significant and which, if any, should be curated in public collections. Full article

Management of competencies is a crucial concern for both learners and workers as well as for training institutions and companies. For the former, it allows users to track and certify the acquired skills to apply for positions; for the latter, it enables better organisation of business processes. However, currently, most software systems for competency management adopted by the industry are either organisation-centric or centralised: that is, they either lock-in students and employees wishing to export their competencies elsewhere, or they require users’ trust and for users to give up privacy (to store their personal data) while being prone to faults. In this paper, we propose a user-centric, fully decentralised competency management system enabling verifiable, secure, and robust management of competencies digitalised as Open Badges via notarization on a public blockchain. This way, whoever acquires the competence or achievement retains full control over it and can disclose his/her own digital certifications only when needed and to the extent required, migrate them across storage platforms, and let anyone verify the integrity and validity of such certifications independently of any centralised organisation. The proposed solution is based on C-Box^®, an existing application for the management of digital competencies that has been improved to fully support models, standards, and technologies of the so-called Web 3.0 vision—a global effort by major web organisations to “give the web back to the people”, pushing for maximum decentralisation of control and user-centric data ownership. Full article

Journal policies continuously evolve to enable knowledge sharing and support reproducible science. However, that change happens within a certain framework. Eight modular standards with three levels of increasing stringency make Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines which can be used to evaluate to what extent and with which stringency journals promote open science. Guidelines define standards for data citation, transparency of data, material, code and design and analysis, replication, plan and study pre-registration, and two effective interventions: “Registered reports” and “Open science badges”, and levels of adoption summed up across standards define journal’s TOP Factor. In this paper, we analysed the status of adoption of TOP guidelines across two thousand journals reported in the TOP Factor metrics. We show that the majority of the journals’ policies align with at least one of the TOP’s standards, most likely “Data citation” (70%) followed by “Data transparency” (19%). Two-thirds of adoptions of TOP standard are of the stringency Level 1 (less stringent), whereas only 9% is of the stringency Level 3. Adoption of TOP standards differs across science disciplines and multidisciplinary journals (N = 1505) and journals from social sciences (N = 1077) show the greatest number of adoptions. Improvement of the measures that journals take to implement open science practices could be done: (1) discipline-specific, (2) journals that have not yet adopted TOP guidelines could do so, (3) the stringency of adoptions could be increased. Full article

The main purpose of this work is to describe the process of design and implementation of a novel e-Learning platform, named Digital Brick, intended to enhance the students’ experience in obtaining formal certifications of their competencies. The research method we followed starts form a deep study of the state of the art that showed us the need to invest more research effort on delivering open and flexible online environments to enable students in finding and passing courses with final formal certifications of learning. To reach this goal, we (i) designed a complete system architecture around a standard (SCORM compliant) learning management system in order the approach should be reusable as much as possible. We (ii) introduced specific modules to separate responsibilities on the definition and issuing of formal certifications using digital badges according to the IMS Open Badges standard. We (iii) exploited blockchain technology to make the sharing of badges among actors more secure, transparent and open. Finally, we (iv) introduced a new recommendation algorithm based on machine learning techniques to give advice to students about study materials and learning paths. We spent a significant part of our effort carrying out both a functional and quantitative validation of our proposal. The obtained results are presented through a laboratory case study that involves all the components of the architecture, and the outcomes are discussed providing numerical performance indicators. In conclusion, the resulting platform introduces digital badges and blockchain as tools to share recognized achievements among earners and issuers, and machine learning algorithms to provide students with recommendations on the learning material, learning objects, courses and learning paths more suitable for their learning styles. Full article

The growth of primary tumors and metastases is associated with excess body fat. In bone metastasis formation, the bone marrow microenvironment, and particularly adipocytes, play a pivotal role as growth mediators of disseminated tumor cells in the bone marrow. The aim of the present study is to non-invasively characterize the pathophysiologic processes in experimental bone metastasis resulting from accelerated tumor progression within adipocyte-rich bone marrow using multimodal imaging from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT). To achieve this, we have employed small animal models after the administration of MDA-MB 231 breast cancer and B16F10 melanoma cells into the bone of nude rats or C57BL/6 mice, respectively. After tumor cell inoculation, ultra-high field MRI and µPET/CT were used to assess functional and metabolic parameters in the bone marrow of control animals (normal diet, ND), following a high-fat diet (HFD), and/or treated with the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-gamma (PPARγ) antagonist bisphenol-A-diglycidylether (BADGE), respectively. In the bone marrow of nude rats, dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) and diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), as well as [¹⁸F]fluorodeoxyglucose-PET/CT([¹⁸F]FDG-PET/CT), was performed 10, 20, and 30 days after tumor cell inoculation, followed by immunohistochemistry. DCE-MRI parameters associated with blood volume, such as area under the curve (AUC), were significantly increased in bone metastases in the HFD group 30 days after tumor cell inoculation as compared to controls (p < 0.05), while the DWI parameter apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) was not significantly different between the groups. [¹⁸F]FDG-PET/CT showed an enhanced glucose metabolism due to increased standardized uptake value (SUV) at day 30 after tumor cell inoculation in animals that received HFD (p < 0.05). BADGE treatment resulted in the inversion of quantitative DCE-MRI and [¹⁸F]FDG-PET/CT data, namely a significant decrease in AUC and SUV in HFD-fed animals as compared to ND-fed controls (p < 0.05). Finally, immunohistochemistry and qPCR confirmed the HFD-induced stimulation in vascularization and glucose activity in murine bone metastases. In conclusion, multimodal and multiparametric MRI and [¹⁸F]FDG-PET/CT were able to derive quantitative parameters in bone metastases, revealing an increase in vascularization and glucose metabolism following HFD. Thus, non-invasive imaging may serve as a biomarker for assessing the pathophysiology of bone metastasis in obesity, opening novel options for therapy and treatment monitoring by MRI and [¹⁸F]FDG-PET/CT. Full article

Windows Push Notifications (WPN) is a relevant part of Windows 10 interaction with the user. It is comprised of badges, tiles and toasts. Important and meaningful data can be conveyed by notifications, namely by so-called toasts that can popup with information regarding a new incoming email or a recent message from a social network. In this paper, we analyze the Windows 10 Notification systems from a digital forensic perspective, focusing on the main forensic artifacts conveyed by WPN. We also briefly analyze Windows 11 first release’s WPN system, observing that internal data structures are practically identical to Windows 10. We provide an open source Python 3 command line application to parse and extract data from the Windows Push Notification SQLite3 database, and a Jython module that allows the well-known Autopsy digital forensic software to interact with the application and thus to also parse and process Windows Push Notifications forensic artifacts. From our study, we observe that forensic data provided by WPN are scarce, although they still need to be considered, namely if traditional Windows forensic artifacts are not available. Furthermore, toasts are clearly WPN’s most relevant source of forensic data. Full article

In this paper, we present a badge awarding system for performance assessment in education using blockchain technology. Learners will be awarded badges, which are certified for a predetermined level of progress in terms of learning. All the badges are stored in a backpack, which is an environment for storing and presenting the obtained badges. Badges are immutable and verifiable as well as rigid. The use of badges in the education system makes education more interesting, skill-based, and adaptable to changes. The key contribution of our work is in terms of compatibility with Openbadge specification and integrated cooperating platform between digital badge awarding and blockchaining. Our system implementation is compatible with Open Badges of IMS Global Learning Consortium, which is used to earn, issue, and award badges across various platforms. The badges are trusted by the IMS standard, the criteria to earn a badge is verified through the network, and the overall process is transparent compared to the traditional education system. Moreover, all badge awarding events in our system are recorded in a blockchain. Once stored, the contents cannot be tampered with. Thereafter, anyone can check the validity of the badge through the blockchain. Our platform will be useful for distance learning as well as time and location independent learning. The experimental results are as follows. On a Bitcoin-based digital badge publishing platform, the execution time required to award the badge is 24.53 s, while on the Ethereum-based digital badge publishing platform, the execution time to award the badge is only 3.86 s. It can also be used for career management and personal history. The learners can obtain the current knowledge required for a job. Lifelong learning will be also possible with this platform. Full article