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ABSTRACTWe propose a new hybrid metaheuristic VNSMADS that is an implementation of the Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) algorithm with the Mesh Adaptive Direct Search (MADS) as the local search. Because MADS is a Derivative‐Free Optimization method, the targeted problems may be non‐smooth on black box functions possessing several local optima. Constraints other than bounds on the variables are not considered. VNSMADS is applied on a real‐world problem from Finance: the portfolio selection problem using the investor preferences. Numerical results show the efficiency of our approach. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This thesis shows a robust approach to helping people living with HIV (PLHIV). The health policy in helping PLHIV to live longer needs to be adjusted. All elements in the process of receiving treatment among PLHIV contained stigma. Even though government has offered policy to increase patient's engagement to HIV care, the results are still far from expectations. We criticize HIV strategies implemented in Papua for neglecting the social and cultural realities of Papuan society. The government should take into account the importance of local evidence to reform HIV policy and practice. Government should also prioritize stigma reduction. One way to do this is by improving the pharmaceutics education curriculum to strengthen the role of pharmacists caring for PLHIV in Indonesia.

Irregularities and frauds are frequent in the real estate market in Bulgaria due to the substantial lack of rigorous legislation. For instance, agencies frequently publish unreal or unavailable apartment listings for a cheap price, as a method to attract the attention of unaware potential new customers. For this reason, systems able to identify unreal listings and improve the transparency of listings authenticity and availability are much on demand. Recent research has highlighted that the number of days a published listing remains online can have a strong correlation with the probability of a listing being unreal. For this reason, building an accurate predictive model for the number of days a published listing will be online can be very helpful to accomplish the task of identifying fake listings. In this paper, we investigate the use of four different machine learning algorithms for this task: Lasso, Ridge, Elastic Net, and Artificial Neural Networks. The results, obtained on a vast dataset made available by the Bulgarian company Homeheed, show the appropriateness of Lasso regression.

Currently, 4.0 technologies have generated important changes in government entities, promoting digital government transformation (DGT). This article addresses the challenge of improving the security, reliability and traceability of communications and certified notifications of state entities, particularly in the case of the Colombian government entity called the Comisión de Regulación de Comunicaciones (CRC). Four important points are presented in this report: (a) Research interest in blockchain and smart contracts has been greatly increasing, evidenced in a literature review conducted in the SCOPUS index; (b) a global reference framework on the use of emerging technologies, as is the case of blockchain, has been developed, as well as the legal and juridical framework in Colombia as a baseline; (c) a multi-criteria decision making framework has been used, resulting in the choice of the Zilliqa platform; and (d) The Tecnotifica™ V1.0 software tool is developed to automate notifications with stakeholders using blockchain. Its effectiveness and acceptance is validated with a technology acceptance level test (TAM). It is concluded that the incorporation of emerging technologies such as blockchain is of a very high interest and relevance in the digital transformation of the state sector in the world.

Interviewers occupy a key position in face-to-face interviews. Their behavior decisively contributes
to the quality of surveys. However, monitoring interviewers in face-to-face surveys is much more
challenging than in telephone surveys. It is often up to the interviewer when they conduct the
interviews and which addresses they work on first. Nevertheless, homogeneous fieldwork, i.e. that
which has a geographically similar processing status, is particularly essential for time- and eventdependent
studies such as election studies. Irregular fieldwork combined with geographical
differences can have substantial impacts on data quality. Using the example of the German
Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we propose and present a visual strategy by plotting key
indicators of fieldwork onto a geographical map to monitor and optimize the fieldwork in face-toface
interviews. The geographic visualization of fieldwork can be an additional tool not only for
election studies, but also other studies.

In 2013, China imported 282 million tons of crude oil with an external dependence of 58.1%, surpassing the USA as the world's largest net oil importer. An import source diversification strategy has been adopted by China to ensure oil supply security and to prevent oil supply disruption. However, the strategy is restricted by the imbalance of oil reserves. What is the reasonable and clear objective of the diversification strategy under an imbalanced environment? How do we assess the natural imbalance? This paper analyzes the oil import diversification of China and the USA, as well as the oil production of oil export countries by the oil import source diversification index (OISDI). Our results are as follows: the distribution of oil import sources for China tends to coincide with the oil production distribution of oil exporters in the world. Compared with the USA, China has more diversified import sources. The Chinese government paid much attention to import sources in the past. In the future, China will adjust the distributions of regional sources rather than focus on the number of sources to further optimize the structure of imported regions in the course of implementing the import source diversification strategy.

Research objective. The article examines the issues of regulating the management of social adaptation of cadets of higher military schools of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. Young people entering higher military educational institutions (military universities) not only change the level of the educational institution, as higher military education requires significantly higher levels of autonomy, personal responsibility, and self-organization, along with motivation to study more complex and difficult professional areas of knowledge, but also the social environment. During their training in military universities, cadets pass through a stage of forming the main professional characteristics of social adaptation. It is during this period that the institutional development of the university's activities to support students in socio-psychological support of the processes of their adaptation and regulation of its management in the university occurs. Such an institutional system should include, at least, three aspects of the development of the system for managing the social adaptation of a cadet and its regulation - goal setting, processes and structures. The article concludes on the expediency of solving the problem of institutional development of adaptation through the creation of a monitoring and regulation service for managing the social adaptation of cadets.

A guide devoted exclusively to social media metrics. Whether you are selling online, through a direct sales force, or via distribution channels, what customers are saying about you online is now more important than your advertising. Social media is no longer a curiosity on the horizon but a significant part of your marketing mix. While other books explain why social media is critical and how to go about participating, Social Media Metrics focuses on measuring the success of your social media marketing efforts

ABSTRACT
The article analyzes two recent German novels, Die Optimierer by Theresa Hannig and QualityLand by Marc-Uwe Kling, regarding their depiction of societies undergoing datafication and automation processes and argues that instead of conforming to more common dystopian visions as anti-individualist, the depicted societies are highly individualized in their engagement with social media. Even though the political and economic systems in both novels function differently, both claim that the already existing surveillance capitalism will be further entrenched and that instrumentarian power structures will be established to shape the behavior of citizens for the system's benefits. The article reads the novels as warnings against instrumentarian mechanisms that are enhanced by processes of automation and algorithmic control.

Over the past twenty years, Indonesia has pursued an ambitious policy agenda for decentralization. Indonesia's subnational governments play a key role in providing frontline services. In 2014, Indonesia's Village Law ushered in a new chapter in the country's decentralization agenda. The law establishes a legal and financial foundation for villages to contribute to Indonesia's rural development. In 2020, village transfers accounted for around ten percent of all subnational transfers, playing an important role in Indonesia's Coronavirus (COVID-19) response strategy. Despite these positive results, several frontier issues in the overall decentralization agenda hinder villages' contributing potential to improving frontline service delivery. This report categorizes these structural challenges into four broad categories of regulatory challenges, coordination gaps, limited capacity building systems, and fragmentation in accountability systems. The report aims to show how overcoming these structural challenges can enable the government to institutionalize systems of accountability and participation into its wider service delivery framework.