Topic Difficulty: Collection and Query Formulation Effects

Several recent studies have explored the interaction effects between topics, systems, corpora, and components when measuring retrieval effectiveness. However, all of these previous studies assume that a topic or information need is represented by a single query. In reality, users routinely reformulate queries to satisfy an information need. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the notion of “query variations” which are essentially multiple user formulations for an information need. Like many retrieval models, some queries are highly effective while others are not. This is often an artifact of the collection being searched which might be more or less sensitive to word choice. Users rarely have perfect knowledge about the underlying collection, and so finding queries that work is often a trial-and-error process. In this work, we explore the fundamental problem of system interaction effects between collections, ranking models, and queries. To answer this important question, we formalize the analysis using ANalysis Of VAriance (ANOVA) models to measure multiple components effects across collections and topics by nesting multiple query variations within each topic. Our findings show that query formulations have a comparable effect size of the topic factor itself, which is known to be the factor with the greatest effect size in prior ANOVA studies. Both topic and formulation have a substantially larger effect size than any other factor, including the ranking algorithms and, surprisingly, even query expansion. This finding reinforces the importance of further research in understanding the role of query rewriting in IR related tasks.

The Effect of Collaborative Learning on Academic Motivation

This paper explores the effect of collaborative learning on academic motivation among students from 17 institutions throughout the United States. Even in the presence of a wide array of potential confounders, collaborative learning exerted a statistically significant and positive influence on students’ academic motivation levels across four years of undergraduate education. Tests for the presence of interaction effects suggest that the relationship between collaborative learning and academic motivation is similar for all students, regardless of racial or ethnic background.

Seismic Fragility Analysis of Low-Rise RC Buildings with Brick Infills in High Seismic Region with Alluvial Deposits

Most of the reinforced concrete buildings in Nepal are low-rise construction, as this type of construction is the most dominant structural form adopted to construct residential buildings in urban and semi-urban neighborhoods throughout the country. The low-rise residential constructions generally follow the guidelines recommended by the Nepal Building Code, especially the mandatory rules of thumb. Although low-rise buildings have brick infills and are randomly constructed, infill walls and soil–structure interaction effects are generally neglected in the design and assessment of such structures. To this end, bare frame models that are used to represent such structures are questionable, especially when seismic vulnerability analysis is concerned. To fulfil this gap, we performed seismic vulnerability analysis of low-rise residential RC buildings considering infill walls and soil–structure interaction effects. Considering four analysis cases, we outline comparative seismic vulnerability for various analysis cases in terms of fragility functions. The sum of observations highlights that the effects of infills, and soil–structure interaction are damage state sensitive for low-rise RC buildings. Meanwhile, the design considerations will be significantly affected since some performance parameters are more sensitive than the overall fragility. We also observed that the analytical fragility models fundamentally overestimate the actual seismic fragility in the case of low-rise RC buildings.

Growth and Decomposition of Millets in Odisha: 1960-61 to 2019-20

Background: Odisha started a programme to revive millets in 2017. Keeping this in the background, this paper examines growth of production, area and yield and decomposition of production of millets in Odisha in the last six decades by using triennium ending data, TE1962-63 to TE2019-20. Methods: Boyce’s kinked exponential method has been used to estimate growth for production, area and yield. Production was decomposed to area, yield and interaction effects. Millets as a crop group is compared with other foodgrain groups and then analysis was carried out for four specific millet crops - ragi, jowar, bajra and small millets. Result: In Odisha, the 1960s and 1970s indicate an increasing trend in production of and area under millets. There is a reversal of these trends since 1980s. The decline started first for small millets in the 1980s and subsequently since the 1990s for the three major millets - bajra, jowar and ragi. Decomposition of millets production indicates that the decline since 1980s is largely on account of area effect, but also because of yield effect in the 1990s and 2010s.

Hypothesis-free detection of gene-interaction effects on biomarker concentration in UK Biobank using variance prioritisation

Blood biomarkers include disease intervention targets that may interact with genetic and environmental factors resulting in subgroups of individuals who respond differently to treatment. Such interactions may be observed in genetic effects on trait variance. Variance prioritisation is an approach to identify genetic loci with interaction effects by estimating their association with trait variance, even where the modifier is unknown or unmeasured. Here, we develop and evaluate a regression-based Brown-Forsythe test and variance effect estimate to detect such interactions. We provide scalable open-source software (varGWAS) for genome-wide association analysis of SNP-variance effects (https://github.com/MRCIEU/varGWAS) and apply our software to 30 blood biomarkers in UK Biobank. We find 468 variance quantitative trait loci across 24 biomarkers and follow up findings to detect 82 gene-environment and six gene-gene interactions independent of strong scale or phantom effects. Our results replicate existing findings and identify novel epistatic effects of TREH rs12225548 x FUT2 rs281379 and TREH rs12225548 x ABO rs635634 on alkaline phosphatase and ZNF827 rs4835265 x NEDD4L rs4503880 on gamma glutamyltransferase. These data could be used to discover possible subgroup effects for a given biomarker during preclinical drug development.

Varying importance of the work-life balance dimension of career success for Korean accountants: The effects of gender and generation

In this study, we examine the effects of gender, generation, and the interaction between gender and generation on Korean accountants’ perception of career success. With the large survey data collected from 1,000 accountants working in South Korea, we found that Korean female accountants have higher perceived importance of work-life balance dimension of career success than male accountants; and younger generations (Millennials or younger) have higher perceived importance for this dimension than older generations (Generation X or older). No interaction effects between gender and generation were found in relation to the perceived importance of work-life balance dimension of career success. Specifically, female accountants had higher perceived importance of work-life balance than their male counterparts regardless of generation; and while the mean was higher for younger generations the gap between the female accountants’ means and the male accountants’ means of work-life balance dimension has not been reduced. The insignificant interaction effects between gender and generation regarding the perceived level of the work-life balance dimension of career success suggest that, despite the national and organizational efforts in changing the gender discriminating practices, Korean accounting field may still be making a very slow progress in breaking its glass ceiling.