At last count, 1.8 billion websites were online. That number grows every day and is telling of the popularity the internet has among hobbyists, business owners, and everybody in between. If you’re a business owner and you haven’t gotten online yet or your online presence is meek, it’s time to start doubling down on your presence by investing in quality website design. But what is the average cost of website design? Can you afford it? In this post, our team breaks down everything you need to know so you understand how best to approach design pricing and can determine which avenues…
Author: Loknath Das
Abstract Deepfake aims to swap a face of an image with someone else’s likeness in a reasonable manner. Existing methods usually perform deepfake frame by frame, thus ignoring video consistency and producing incoherent results. To address such a problem, we propose a novel framework Neural Identity Carrier (NICe), which learns identity transformation from an arbitrary face-swapping proxy via a U-Net. By modeling the incoherence between frames as noise, NICe naturally suppresses its disturbance and preserves primary identity information. Concretely, NICe inputs the original frame and learns transformation supervised by swapped pseudo labels. As the temporal incoherence has an uncertain or stochastic…
Abstract Most studies addressing social media use as a normal social behavior with positive or negative effects on health-related outcomes have conceptualized and measured social media use and its effects in terms of dose–effect relations. These studies focus on measuring frequency and duration of use, and have seldom considered users’ emotional connections to social media use and the effects associated with such connections. By using a scale with two dimensions capturing users’ integration of social media use into their social routines and their emotional connection to the sites’ use, the present study has brought preliminary evidence that may help map…
A descendant of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID-19, is spreading rapidly in England. This has led to concerns that the new variant, called AY.4.2, may be partly responsible for the high rate of infections in the United Kingdom. Based on what we know so far, however, the new variant is unlikely to be the main culprit. Over the past year, the evolution of new, increasingly infectious variants of SARS-CoV-2 has fueled surges in the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths around the world. In the U.K., the Alpha variant caused a spike in…
Abstract Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research. Introduction Since their introduction, social network sites (SNSs) such as MySpace, Facebook,…
People opposing vaccine mandates, or COVID vaccines more broadly, have claimed the vaccines violate the Nuremberg Code. They say COVID vaccines are experimental and people have been coerced into vaccination. They say this breaches the ethical code drawn up after the second world war to guide medical research and human clinical trials. But this argument is flawed. Here’s why the Nuremberg Code doesn’t apply, and how to correct this misunderstanding. What is the Nuremberg Code? The Nuremberg Code was a direct response to atrocities Nazi doctors performed in concentration camps during WWII. They perpetrated this so-called medical experimentation on people with no capacity to…
Some users have reportedly been asked by Instagram to provide a video selfie taken from multiple angles to verify their account. According to XDADevelopers, several users have said they were asked to take a video selfie to verify their current accounts. For the uninitiated, the social platform began testing the feature last year, but stopped midway because of technical issues. Instagram has struggled with the issue of bot accounts for a long time, and such accounts usually send spam messages, harass other users and artificially inflate followers. This is the reason why the app is looking to curb the prevalence of bots on the…
Imagine you were compiling a course curriculum for a class on online marketing. What would be your go-to resources? In digging through my bookmarks and starred articles, I noticed a growing list of awesome stories and helpful links. If I threw them all together, it’d make for quite the collection! I’d love to share with you what I’ve got so far, and it’d be awesome if you’d consider adding any personal favorites in the comments. Here is what I’ve bookmarked as my must-read social media articles and content marketing resources. 23 Must-Read Social Media Articles and Content Resources 1. Stock and Flow Robin…
Much research investigating detrimental aspects of social media Use focuses on person characteristics and happens in isolation from each other Currently, nearly four billion people all over the world use platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, WeChat or TikTok (Clement, 2020; Wearesocial.com, 2020). Given the impact that social media platforms have on humanity, it is not surprising that important lines of research seek to shed light on the who and why questions in the context of (over-)use of social media [for a comprehensive definition of the term “social media” see (Carr and Hayes, 2015)]. The who-question aims to understand who uses social media, whereas the why-question asks why people are using social…
The impact of plastic banknotes Over the years much have been discussed about the impact of plastic on the environment, with striking images and news of it harming animal and human health. In fact, past research revealed that plastic banknotes are distinctively worse for the planet than cotton-based as they have a high carbon footprint and increase permanent waste at the end-of-life cycle. According to statistics, between 1950 and 2015, more than 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic were produced worldwide. Not even 10% of this was recycled. The negative environmental impact is also exacerbated by the ongoing problem of counterfeiting plastic banknotes,…