Mapping the invisible: knowledge, credibility and visions of earth in early modern cave maps

This paper examines cave environments as unique spaces of knowledge production and shows how visualizations of natural cavities in maps came to be powerful tools in scientific reasoning. Faced with the challenge of limited vision, mapmakers combined empiricism and imagination in an experimental setting and developed specific translation strategies to deal with the uncertain origin of underground objects and the shifting boundaries between the known and the unknown. By deconstructing this type of cartographic representation, which has barely been studied, this paper furnishes surprising insights into the scholarly practices and tools used to deal with this considerable epistemic uncertainty and to signal credibility and trust to potential users. The array of maps used for this study includes both archival and published sources, depicting caves in Europe, America and Siberia.

Endoscopic and Robotic Stapes Surgery: Review with Emphasis on Recent Surgical Refinements

Purpose of Review Stapes surgery has been established as the gold standard for surgical treatment of conductive hearing loss in otosclerosis. Excellent outcomes with very low complication rate are reported for this surgery. Recent advances to improve surgical outcome have modified the surgical technique with endoscopes, and recent studies report development of robotical assistance. This article reviews the use of endoscopes and robotical assistance for stapes surgery. Recent Findings While different robotic models have been developed, 2 models for stapes surgery have been used in the clinical setting. These can be used concomitant to an endoscope or microscope. Endoscopes are used on a regular base regarding stapes surgery with similar outcomes as microscopes. Endoscopic stapes surgery shows similar audiological results to microscopic technique with an advantage of less postoperative dysgeusia and pain. Its utility in cases of revision surgery or malformation is emphasized. Summary Endoscopic stapes surgery is used on a regular basis with excellent outcomes similar to the microscopic approach, while reducing surgical morbidity. Robotic technology is increasingly being developed in the experimental setting, and first applications are reported in its clinical use.

The Effect of Geographic Distance on Earnings Management Decisions

Prior research has found evidence that country factors and management styles influence earnings management decisions in various geographic locations. Extending this research, we utilize an experimental setting to isolate the effect of geographic distance on the willingness to manage earnings in a near/distant location. In an initial experiment, we find less acceptable earnings management methods generate greater concerns about the method (ethicality and riskiness) leading to less willingness to manage earnings. Yet, greater geographic distance between the decisionmaker and reporting location attenuates these concerns, resulting in increased willingness to use a less acceptable method. In contrast, individuals are willing to use a more acceptable method to manage earnings regardless of geographic distance. These findings are consistent with construal level theory (CLT) and are corroborated in a second experiment where we find that greater geographic distance reduces managers’ focus on the means of earnings management, thereby reducing concerns about the method.

Combining weighted SMOTE with ensemble learning for the class-imbalanced prediction of small business credit risk

In small business credit risk assessment, the default and nondefault classes are highly imbalanced. To overcome this problem, this study proposes an extended ensemble approach rooted in the weighted synthetic minority oversampling technique (WSMOTE), which is called WSMOTE-ensemble. The proposed ensemble classifier hybridizes WSMOTE and Bagging with sampling composite mixtures to guarantee the robustness and variability of the generated synthetic instances and, thus, minimize the small business class-skewed constraints linked to default and nondefault instances. The original small business dataset used in this study was taken from 3111 records from a Chinese commercial bank. By implementing a thorough experimental study of extensively skewed data-modeling scenarios, a multilevel experimental setting was established for a rare event domain. Based on the proper evaluation measures, this study proposes that the random forest classifier used in the WSMOTE-ensemble model provides a good trade-off between the performance on default class and that of nondefault class. The ensemble solution improved the accuracy of the minority class by 15.16% in comparison with its competitors. This study also shows that sampling methods outperform nonsampling algorithms. With these contributions, this study fills a noteworthy knowledge gap and adds several unique insights regarding the prediction of small business credit risk.

The Usage of Emoji in Tourism-Related Instagram Posts: Suggestions from a Marketing Perspective

The relevance of emoji in social media marketing has attracted tremendous interest from academics and marketing professionals alike ever since emoji became a fixed component in user-to-user and business-to-user communication on online platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. Using a quantitative research approach in the form of a self-administered online survey in an experimental setting, the purpose of this study is to investigate what type of emoji positively impacts consumer behaviour, purchase intention, and user interaction in tourism-related Instagram posts. This research is novel in that it bridges the usage of emoji in the context of social media and tourism. The findings support tourism managers in the practical use of emoji for social media marketing campaigns on Instagram and show that (positive) face emoji evoke more positive emotions than non-face emoji.

Forehead Tactile Hallucination Is Augmented by the Perceived Risk and Accompanies Increase of Forehead Tactile Sensitivity

Tactile hallucinations frequently occur after mental illnesses and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Despite their common occurrence, there are several complicating factors that make it difficult to elucidate the tactile hallucinations. The forehead tactile hallucination, evoked by the physical object approaching to the forehead, can be easily and consistently evoked in healthy-bodied subjects, and therefore it would help with investigating the mechanism of tactile hallucinations. In this pilot study, we investigated the principles of the forehead tactile hallucination with eight healthy subjects. We designed the experimental setup to test the effect of sharpness and speed of objects approaching towards the forehead on the forehead tactile hallucination, in both a physical and virtual experimental setting. The forehead tactile hallucination was successfully evoked by virtual object as well as physical object, approaching the forehead. The forehead tactile hallucination was increased by the increase of sharpness and speed of the approaching object. The forehead tactile hallucination also increased the tactile sensitivity on the forehead. The forehead tactile hallucination can be solely evoked by visual feedback and augmented by the increased perceived risk. The forehead tactile hallucination also increases tactile sensitivity. These experimental results may enhance the understanding of the foundational mechanisms of tactile hallucinations.

Signal Enhancement in Oriented Immunosorbent Assays: A Balance between Accessibility of Antigen Binding Sites and Avidity

The sensitivity of immunoassays was reported to be increased by the orientation of antibodies. We investigated how the size and valence of antigens and orientation and valence of antibodies contribute to the analytical sensitivity of ELISA. Antigens differing in size and number of epitopes were compared using oriented and non-oriented ELISAs: the orientation of antibodies was obtained coating half-fragment antibodies on maleimide microplates, while, in non-oriented ELISA, whole antibodies were randomly physisorbed. The oriented assay performed better than the non-oriented one at each concentration (0.4–3.3 ng/mL) of a small monomeric antigen (cardiac Troponin I, 24 kDa, Rh 3 nm). No significant differences were observed with a large monovalent antigen (prostate-specific antigen-alpha(1) antichymotrypsin, 90 kDa, Rh > 3 nm), since its steric hindrance overcame the increased availability of antigen binding sites given by orientation. Large multivalent antigens (ferritin, 280 kDa, Rh 6 nm; α-fetoprotein, >70 kDa, Rh > 3.3 nm) performed better in non-oriented assays. In this case, the repeated epitopes on the surface of the antigens favored the engagement of both antigen binding sites of the whole IgG, thus suggesting that avidity represented the leading force in this experimental setting. In conclusion, the design of high-sensitivity ELISAs should consider the dimension and valency of antigens in addition to the affinity and avidity of antibodies.

Live Human Detection Robot in Earthquake Conditions

This report outlines a human searching device that takes the form of a robotic car and serves as a backup mechanism for saving lives in the event of a disaster. The temperature sensor, in general, detects the thermal image of the human body, and there has been extensive research into human searching with the gas and humidity sensor. In the intelligent robot device’s study, achieving accurate and reliable human detection and tracking is a difficult challenge. The architecture of human detection and tracking mechanisms over non-overlapping field of views is examined in this paper. To compensate for their respective flaws, a search method is proposed. The proposed method’s rate and accuracy of human detection was tested in an experimental setting. We may guide the robot’s movement by commanding it to move left, right, forward, or backward. We plan to equip the robot with sensors that will enable us to track and detect humans behind the wall.

Reasoning with PCP-Nets

We introduce PCP-nets, a formalism to model qualitative conditional preferences with probabilistic uncertainty. PCP-nets generalise CP-nets by allowing for uncertainty over the preference orderings. We define and study both optimality and dominance queries in PCP-nets, and we propose a tractable approximation of dominance which we show to be very accurate in our experimental setting. Since PCP-nets can be seen as a way to model a collection of weighted CP-nets, we also explore the use of PCP-nets in a multi-agent context, where individual agents submit CP-nets which are then aggregated into a single PCP-net. We consider various ways to perform such aggregation and we compare them via two notions of scores, based on well known voting theory concepts. Experimental results allow us to identify the aggregation method that better represents the given set of CP-nets and the most efficient dominance procedure to be used in the multi-agent context.

The Measuring Engagement (ME™) Tool

Studies on human engagement behavior whilst interacting with multimedia environment has now become very important due to the era of convergences of immersive technology in various digital platforms. This paper will describe a system to measure human engagement behavior in NORMA (Natural Observation and Reflection of Multimedia Application) experimental setting. The tool was developed as a Proof of Concept of The NEMD MODEL (Norma™ Engagement Multimedia Design Model) a renamed of An Engaging Multimedia Design Model that could explain the engagement phenomenon that has enticed the use of virtual spaces to complement its physical form. This paper is a description of The Measuring Engagement (ME™) Tool automated system in comparison to a system done manually. The system has proven to be a useful tool to enable us knows more about engagement and the phenomenon surrounding it. Findings could help us know more about engagement that may lead to excessive, immersive and addictive use of innovative technologies.