Social-Spatial Group Queries with Keywords

Social networks with location enabling technologies, also known as geo-social networks, allow users to share their location-specific activities and preferences through check-ins. A user in such a geo-social network can be attributed to an associated location (spatial), her preferences as keywords (textual), and the connectivity (social) with her friends. The fusion of social, spatial, and textual data of a large number of users in these networks provide an interesting insight for finding meaningful geo-social groups of users supporting many real-life applications, including activity planning and recommendation systems. In this article, we introduce a novel query, namely, Top- k Flexible Socio-Spatial Keyword-aware Group Query (SSKGQ), which finds the best k groups of varying sizes around different points of interest (POIs), where the groups are ranked based on the social and textual cohesiveness among members and spatial closeness with the corresponding POI and the number of members in the group. We develop an efficient approach to solve the SSKGQ problem based on our theoretical upper bounds on distance, social connectivity, and textual similarity. We prove that the SSKGQ problem is NP-Hard and provide an approximate solution based on our derived relaxed bounds, which run much faster than the exact approach by sacrificing the group quality slightly. Our extensive experiments on real data sets show the effectiveness of our approaches in different real-life settings.

COMPARISON OF THE TERMS CREATIVE ACCOUNTING, EARNINGS MANAGEMENT AND FRAUDULENT ACCOUNTING THROUGH BIBLIOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS

Research background: The article focuses on the issues of creative accounting, earnings management, and fraudulent accounting, which are global phenomena. These concepts are well known globally, as they are dealt with by many world-renowned authors. In this study, we applied bibliometric analysis to these concepts to reveal their interconnectedness. The research was conducted on a sample of more than 19,000 articles. Purpose of the article: The main goal of the study is to use the VosViewer design and visualisation program to capture and record the most common terms associated with the terms, ‘creative accounting’, ‘revenue management’, and ‘fraudulent accounting’, and to show a biometric network of the most commonly used terms. Methods: To capture and illustrate important words associated with the above terms, the VosViewer program was used, which drew mind maps that represented the words and expressions that were closest to the topic. Scientific articles from the Web of Science database, which contains many world-class articles related to the topic, were used as input data. Findings & Value added: The results of the study provided an interesting insight into the keywords associated with the issues of creative accounting, revenue management, and fraudulent accounting. The results show that the keywords and phrases are related, as several of them are repeated in each of the terms mentioned. This means that, although these terms are different in nature, they are nevertheless connected by many words and phrases. However, it remains necessary to observe that each of the given terms appears on a different colour of fraud (white, grey, or black fraud).

Cost-sensitive learning strategies for high-dimensional and imbalanced data: a comparative study

High dimensionality and class imbalance have been largely recognized as important issues in machine learning. A vast amount of literature has indeed investigated suitable approaches to address the multiple challenges that arise when dealing with high-dimensional feature spaces (where each problem instance is described by a large number of features). As well, several learning strategies have been devised to cope with the adverse effects of imbalanced class distributions, which may severely impact on the generalization ability of the induced models. Nevertheless, although both the issues have been largely studied for several years, they have mostly been addressed separately, and their combined effects are yet to be fully understood. Indeed, little research has been so far conducted to investigate which approaches might be best suited to deal with datasets that are, at the same time, high-dimensional and class-imbalanced. To make a contribution in this direction, our work presents a comparative study among different learning strategies that leverage both feature selection, to cope with high dimensionality, as well as cost-sensitive learning methods, to cope with class imbalance. Specifically, different ways of incorporating misclassification costs into the learning process have been explored. Also different feature selection heuristics have been considered, both univariate and multivariate, to comparatively evaluate their effectiveness on imbalanced data. The experiments have been conducted on three challenging benchmarks from the genomic domain, gaining interesting insight into the beneficial impact of combining feature selection and cost-sensitive learning, especially in the presence of highly skewed data distributions.

Temporal Monitoring and Assessment of Inorganic Nitrogen Content of Soil due to Nitrogen Fertilizers and their Related Cytotoxic Effects

Background: Indian economy is largely based on agriculture. Major share of agricultural investments goes into chemical fertilizers. Nitrogen (N) fertilizers are used in fields to enhance the crop yield. Most of the reports are based on growth related data, morphological and yield related data but very few reports reveal the facts about genotoxic and cytotoxic effects of these fertilizers. Therefore, the present communication is an attempt in the aforesaid direction. Methods: In a pot experiment, mineral N content of soil in the form of ammonium-N (NH4+-N) and nitrate-N (NO3--N) were analysed at regular interval of 5 days till 30 days after treatment (DAT). On the corresponding days root tip assay was done for cytotoxic analyses and also the temporal changes in NH4+-N and NO3--N contents were observed. Result: In the Ammonium nitrate treatments, higher mitotic index (MI%) percentages were obtained. While for the Urea, NH4+-N content and MI were found to have a positive correlation. Also, it was found that there is an optimum ratio of NH4+-N and NO3--N in each treatment at which the MI% was the maximum. The study gives an interesting insight for the possible cytotoxic effects of the N fertilizers.

Impact of TOEIC as a University Exit Test: A Vietnamese Perspective

<p>The Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) has recently become a language exit test in many Vietnamese universities. Despite the high stakes of the test for a large number of Vietnamese students, no robust research has been done to explore its impact on teaching and learning yet. Also, although the powerful influence of tests on teaching and learning has been well documented, the way test impact occurs is very complicated and varied because of a myriad of context-specific factors. Language testers, therefore, have called for more research in different contexts. In response to the needs mentioned above, this study examined the impact of TOEIC on teaching and learning in Vietnamese universities with an emphasis on discovering the variations of the test impact due to school settings. To meet the research objectives, a mixed-methods study was conducted at two different locations in Vietnam. The perspectives from three groups of stakeholders, namely educational policymakers, teachers, and students were sought by means of semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and case study. The study was conducted in two phases. Phase 1 aimed at understanding policymakers’ perspectives on the TOEIC-as-exit-test policy and identifying the general patterns of the actual test impact from the teachers’ and students’ perspectives. Phase 2 had the purpose of explaining the patterns found in Phase 1 through a case study. Both the questionnaire and case study participants came from the same three large universities. The study gave interesting insight into the nature of the impact of the TOEIC test in the Vietnamese context. It showed a clear tendency of teaching and learning to the test since its introduction. However, the test impact varied greatly in form and intensity across different groups of participants although, contrary to expectations, school settings did not seem to be a major factor that caused this variability. On the one hand, the findings confirmed the indirect nature of the relationship between a test and its impact found in many other studies. On the other hand, they shed light on specific features of the mechanism of the impact of the TOEIC-as-exit-test, which might be attributed to the socio-cultural and educational context in Vietnam. The study suggested that the test impact on teaching and learning operated differently. While the influence of the TOEIC test on teaching was likely to be first filtered through the course factors, the latter was through students’ abilities. In both cases, beliefs about communicative language teaching and learning and some other person factors only played subservient roles in shaping the test impact. The study also had important implications for stakeholders, especially policymakers. It proved certain values of the TOEIC-as-exit-test policy as well as revealed negative issues associated with it. It suggested measures that need to be taken to modify the policy.</p>

Impact of TOEIC as a University Exit Test: A Vietnamese Perspective

<p>The Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) has recently become a language exit test in many Vietnamese universities. Despite the high stakes of the test for a large number of Vietnamese students, no robust research has been done to explore its impact on teaching and learning yet. Also, although the powerful influence of tests on teaching and learning has been well documented, the way test impact occurs is very complicated and varied because of a myriad of context-specific factors. Language testers, therefore, have called for more research in different contexts. In response to the needs mentioned above, this study examined the impact of TOEIC on teaching and learning in Vietnamese universities with an emphasis on discovering the variations of the test impact due to school settings. To meet the research objectives, a mixed-methods study was conducted at two different locations in Vietnam. The perspectives from three groups of stakeholders, namely educational policymakers, teachers, and students were sought by means of semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and case study. The study was conducted in two phases. Phase 1 aimed at understanding policymakers’ perspectives on the TOEIC-as-exit-test policy and identifying the general patterns of the actual test impact from the teachers’ and students’ perspectives. Phase 2 had the purpose of explaining the patterns found in Phase 1 through a case study. Both the questionnaire and case study participants came from the same three large universities. The study gave interesting insight into the nature of the impact of the TOEIC test in the Vietnamese context. It showed a clear tendency of teaching and learning to the test since its introduction. However, the test impact varied greatly in form and intensity across different groups of participants although, contrary to expectations, school settings did not seem to be a major factor that caused this variability. On the one hand, the findings confirmed the indirect nature of the relationship between a test and its impact found in many other studies. On the other hand, they shed light on specific features of the mechanism of the impact of the TOEIC-as-exit-test, which might be attributed to the socio-cultural and educational context in Vietnam. The study suggested that the test impact on teaching and learning operated differently. While the influence of the TOEIC test on teaching was likely to be first filtered through the course factors, the latter was through students’ abilities. In both cases, beliefs about communicative language teaching and learning and some other person factors only played subservient roles in shaping the test impact. The study also had important implications for stakeholders, especially policymakers. It proved certain values of the TOEIC-as-exit-test policy as well as revealed negative issues associated with it. It suggested measures that need to be taken to modify the policy.</p>

Rotating 5D black holes: Interactions and deformations near extremality

We study a two-dimensional theory of gravity coupled to matter that is relevant to describe holographic properties of black holes with two equal angular momenta in five dimensions (with or without cosmological constant). We focus on the near-horizon geometry of the near-extremal black hole, where the effective theory reduces to Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity coupled to a massive scalar field. We compute the corrections to correlation functions due to cubic interactions present in this theory. A novel feature is that these corrections do not have a definite sign: for AdS_55 black holes the sign depends on the mass of the extremal solution. We discuss possible interpretations of these corrections from a gravitational and holographic perspective. We also quantify the imprint of the JT sector on the UV region, i.e. how these degrees of freedom, characteristic for the near-horizon region, influence the asymptotically far region of the black hole. This gives an interesting insight on how to interpret the IR modes in the context of their UV completion, which depends on the environment that contains the black hole.

Co-expression Analysis to Identify Key Modules and Hub Genes Associated With COVID19 in Platelets

The severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a highly contagious virus that causes a severe respiratory disease known as Corona virus disease 2019 (COVID19). Indeed, COVID19 increases the risk of cardiovascular occlusive/thrombotic events and is linked to poor outcomes. The pathophysiological processes underlying COVID19-induced thrombosis are complex, and remain poorly understood. To this end, platelets play important roles in regulating our cardiovascular system, including via contributions to coagulation and inflammation. There is an ample of evidence that circulating platelets are activated in COVID19 patients, which is a primary driver of the thrombotic outcome observed in these patients. However, the comprehensive molecular basis of platelet activation in COVID19 disease remains elusive, which warrants more investigation. Hence, we employed gene co-expression network analysis combined with pathways enrichment analysis to further investigate the aforementioned issues. Our study revealed three important gene clusters/modules that were closely related to COVID19. Furthermore, enrichment analysis showed that these three modules were mostly related to platelet metabolism, protein translation, mitochondrial activity, and oxidative phosphorylation, as well as regulation of megakaryocyte differentiation, and apoptosis, suggesting a hyperactivation status of platelets in COVID19. We identified the three hub genes from each of three key modules according to their intramodular connectivity value ranking, namely: COPE, CDC37, CAPNS1, AURKAIP1, LAMTOR2, GABARAP MT-ND1, MT-ND5, and MTRNR2L12. Collectively, our results offer a new and interesting insight into platelet involvement in COVID19 disease at the molecular level, which might aid in defining new targets for treatment of COVID19–induced thrombosis.

Translation of forms of address from Portuguese to Turkish through English: The case of José Saramago’s A Jangada de Pedra

The study of forms of address in translation is a type of register analysis that provides an interesting insight into the way specific linguistic patterns are transferred from one language to another. This article explores how the forms of address are rendered in the Turkish translation of A Jangada de Pedra (1986) by the Portuguese author José Saramago. Paratextual and textual analyses demon­strate that this work has been translated into Turkish through the English translation of the book, and that the English translation has influenced the choices of the Turkish translator. The findings of the study seem to support the hypothesis that using a mediating language/text that lacks similar forms of address as the ultimate source and the target languages/texts can cause shifts in tenor, which results in a different reading of interpersonal relationships between fictional characters in the target text.

Identification of Cellular Factors Required for SARS-CoV-2 Replication

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the recently emerged virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Clinical presentation can range from asymptomatic disease and mild respiratory tract infection to severe disease with lung injury, multiorgan failure, and death. SARS-CoV-2 is the third animal coronavirus to emerge in humans in the 21st century, and coronaviruses appear to possess a unique ability to cross borders between species and infect a wide range of organisms. This is somewhat surprising as, except for the requirement of host cell receptors, cell–pathogen interactions are usually species-specific. Insights into these host–virus interactions will provide a deeper understanding of the process of SARS-CoV-2 infection and provide a means for the design and development of antiviral agents. In this study, we describe a complex analysis of SARS-CoV-2 infection using a genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 knock-out system in HeLa cells overexpressing entry receptor angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). This platform allows for the identification of factors required for viral replication. This study was designed to include a high number of replicates (48 replicates; 16 biological repeats with 3 technical replicates each) to prevent data instability, remove sources of bias, and allow multifactorial bioinformatic analyses in order to study the resulting interaction network. The results obtained provide an interesting insight into the replication mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2.