Measuring International Online Human Values with Word Embeddings

As the Internet grows in number of users and in the diversity of services, it becomes more influential on peoples lives. It has the potential of constructing or modifying the opinion, the mental perception, and the values of individuals. What is being created and published online is a reflection of people’s values and beliefs. As a global platform, the Internet is a great source of information for researching the online culture of many different countries. In this work we develop a methodology for measuring data from textual online sources using word embedding models, to create a country-based online human values index that captures cultural traits and values worldwide. Our methodology is applied with a dataset of 1.7 billion tweets, and then we identify their location among 59 countries. We create a list of 22 Online Values Inquiries (OVI) , each one capturing different questions from the World Values Survey, related to several values such as religion, science, and abortion. We observe that our methodology is indeed capable of capturing human values online for different counties and different topics. We also show that some online values are highly correlated (up to c = 0.69, p < 0.05) with the corresponding offline values, especially religion-related ones. Our method is generic, and we believe it is useful for social sciences specialists, such as demographers and sociologists, that can use their domain knowledge and expertise to create their own Online Values Inquiries, allowing them to analyze human values in the online environment.

A Game Theory Approach for Estimating Reliability of Crowdsourced Relevance Assessments

In this article, we propose an approach to improve quality in crowdsourcing (CS) tasks using Task Completion Time (TCT) as a source of information about the reliability of workers in a game-theoretical competitive scenario. Our approach is based on the hypothesis that some workers are more risk-inclined and tend to gamble with their use of time when put to compete with other workers. This hypothesis is supported by our previous simulation study. We test our approach with 35 topics from experiments on the TREC-8 collection being assessed as relevant or non-relevant by crowdsourced workers both in a competitive (referred to as “Game”) and non-competitive (referred to as “Base”) scenario. We find that competition changes the distributions of TCT, making them sensitive to the quality (i.e., wrong or right) and outcome (i.e., relevant or non-relevant) of the assessments. We also test an optimal function of TCT as weights in a weighted majority voting scheme. From probabilistic considerations, we derive a theoretical upper bound for the weighted majority performance of cohorts of 2, 3, 4, and 5 workers, which we use as a criterion to evaluate the performance of our weighting scheme. We find our approach achieves a remarkable performance, significantly closing the gap between the accuracy of the obtained relevance judgements and the upper bound. Since our approach takes advantage of TCT, which is an available quantity in any CS tasks, we believe it is cost-effective and, therefore, can be applied for quality assurance in crowdsourcing for micro-tasks.

Strategies of European Energy Producers. Directions of Evolution

The article presents an innovative method of analyzing energy companies’ strategies, which aims to identify the strategic orientation of the entities subject to the research and, thus, to initially define the directions of strategic changes in the analyzed sector. The aim of the research, the results of which were used in this publication, was to identify the features of energy sector companies’ strategies in the European Union in the period of sector transformation caused by the new climate policy. The analysis area is the energy sector, i.e., the sector whose fundamental strategic goal is energy production. The research used a critical analysis of the subject literature and desk research method with the use of the researchers’ own analytical equipment, developed for the needs of this analysis. It was assumed in the conducted research that the primary source of information in the empirical study, the information subject to subsequent analysis, was the analysis of official documents (strategies, financial reports, etc.) posted on the websites of the surveyed corporations. The research results indicate the dominance of the resource-based approach in implementing strategic postulates of the surveyed companies. Nevertheless, the operational activity focuses on the implementation of innovative solutions towards decarbonization and climate neutrality.

Press treatment of the economic crisis in light of the Corona pandemic in the Iraqi press..Al-zaman newspaper as a model.. Analytical study

This research aims to identify the journalistic treatment of the economic crisis in the Iraqi newspaper Al-Zaman, in order to give a clear picture of the types and methods of processing, the press arts, sources of information and the elements of the typographic highlights that dealt with the economic crisis, and the developments and effects of this crisis in many political, social, environmental and other fields, as The Iraqi press treatment of the economic crisis resulting from the Corona crisis? The objectives of the research are a reflection of the questions identified by the research. The research reached a set of conclusions as follows: 1. Surface treatment ranked first in the newspaper's press content, which means that the newspaper moved away from deepening topics related to the economic crisis because it wanted to win the public in the shortest and simplest way by presenting simple information about the crisis and the superficial opinions it deals with. 2. Zaman relied a lot on the art of journalistic investigation among other journalistic arts in dealing with the economic crisis in an effort to reveal the shortcomings and mismanagement that caused the crisis in order to compensate for the competition of weak newspapers in the field of journalistic precedence with the new media and its outputs. 3. The reliance of time on the source (journalist writer) in the category of the source of information was a clear imbalance in its editorial policy, as this revealed a weakness in the use of delegates and correspondents in dealing with the topics of the economic crisis.

Jittering: A computationally efficient method for generating realistic route networks from origin-destination data

Origin-destination (OD) data is a vital source of information on travel patterns but its utility is limited by reliance on zone centroids. This paper presents a reproducible and open two-stage ‘jittering’ approach to tackling this problem, which (1) uses random points to represent unique start and end points (sampling), and (2) splits OD pairs representing many trips into many ‘sub-OD’ pairs. We find that route networks generated from jittered OD data are more diffuse and potentially realistic based on an example from Edinburgh. Further work is needed to validate the approach and to find optimal parameters for sampling and disaggregation.

Responsibilities, Opportunities, and Challenges for Human Factors in the Digital Age

Today’s challenges for scientific publications require operating at a time when trust in science depends upon effective vetting of data, identifying questionable practices, and scrutinizing research. The Editor-in-Chief has an invaluable opportunity to influence the direction and reputation of our field but also has the responsibility to confront contemporary trends that threaten the publication of quality research. The editor is responsible for maintaining strict scientific standards for the journal through the exercise of good judgment and steadfast commitment to upholding the highest ethical principles. Opportunities exist to create and implement new initiatives for improving the peer review process and elevating the journal’s stature. The journal must address the challenges as well as effectively communicate with the public, who seek a reliable source of information.

The challenges of integrating publishers’, book trade and library information organizations in the Republic of Uzbekistan

The libraries being the state organizations are funded by the government and are limited in their resources. Therefore, despite the fact that the book market today is crowded with document resources, the libraries and information organization cannot afford purchasing all the publications they need. Their activities are regulated through norms and laws that provide both for competitive and single-source procurement. Mandatory copies alone are insufficient for collection development, and the library and information organizations have to find additional collection development sources through integration with publishers and bookselling organizations. Price lists, publishers’ and bookstores’ websites make the main source of information. Information technologies and computer systems enable to analyze whether the purchased publications are demanded by the users. The libraries have to provide for communicate between user services, acquisition department and the users. The team effort to draw acquisition lists enables to get the quality collection. The author examines the problems of integration of library and information organizations with publishers and booksellers as the case study of A. Navoi National Library of the Republic of Uzbekistan and State Scientific Medical library of the Republic of Uzbekistan.

Admirative Category with an Assessment of Possibility and Motivation in Russian and Persian Interrogative Sentences

In Russian and Persian, the category of indirect evidentiality points out to some unreliable source of information. The category of admirativity expresses unexpected and new information gained by the speaker. Such interrogative sentences convey combine admirativity with diff erent modal meanings. Foreign students of Russian often fi nd it hard to distinguish these meanings in Russian interrogative sentences. The authors compared Russian and Persian interrogative sentences and the linguistics tools that refl ect the admirative category with an assessment of modal meanings of possibility and motivation. This is the fi rst research of the category of admirativity in the Persian language and the fi rst publication on the comparison of Russian and Persian interrogative sentences, as well as on the relationship between admirativity and modal meanings in Russian and Persian interrogative sentences. The research objective was to perform a comparative analysis of admirativity in Russian and Persian interrogative sentences and to study the situations in which this meaning conveys the surprise of the speaker from the availability or lack of possibility to perform a certain action. In both languages, admirativity can accompany the feeling of motivation in the subject of the speech act. The findings can be useful in teaching Russian as a foreign language.

Haplotype-based inference of the distribution of fitness effects

Recent genome sequencing studies with large sample sizes in humans have discovered a vast quantity of low-frequency variants, providing an important source of information to analyze how selection is acting on human genetic variation. In order to estimate the strength of natural selection acting on low-frequency variants, we have developed a likelihood-based method that uses the lengths of pairwise identity-by-state between haplotypes carrying low-frequency variants. We show that in some non-equilibrium populations (such as those that have had recent population expansions) it is possible to distinguish between positive or negative selection acting on a set of variants. With our new framework, one can infer a fixed selection intensity acting on a set of variants at a particular frequency, or a distribution of selection coefficients for standing variants and new mutations. We show an application of our method to the UK10K phased haplotype dataset of individuals.