The Image of Media and Journalism on the Pages of the Bulgarian Journalist Periodical (1959–1996): Results of а Quantitative Content Analysis

This paper presents and analyzes the results of a quantitative content analysis of the periodical called Bulgarian Journalist ‒ Journalism and Society. The main research topic is the role of journalism and media in Bulgaria. Based on publications on the topic, it aims to “bring to light”, as far as possible, journalistic, political and public reflections on the role and place of media and journalism in Bulgarian society during the communist regime and the first years of democratic transformation. The main focus is on five research questions, on the basis of which the periodical is monitored and analyzed. The conclusions drawn at the end have an important research significance.

The formula of Islamic community development in Indonesia through the social entrepreneurship approach

This study aims to analyze the importance of a social entrepreneurship approach and celestial entrepreneurship in the midst of Islamic societies in Indonesia. Empirically, Indonesia as a country with the largest Muslim population in the world has great potential in developing community empowerment programs, especially in the Covid-19 pandemic situation which has created many new layers of indigent society. However, at the same time the availability of literature that examines social entrepreneurship as an important instrument of community development is relatively rare. Methodologically, this research is a library research conducted using literature in various forms, which are positioned equally depending on the connection with the main research topic. The results of this study indicate that developing a social entrepreneurship ecosystem that promotes innovation and collaboration is one of the solutions to overcome social problems that occur in the midst of the Indonesian Muslim community. In addition, this study also concludes that entrepreneurial practices carried out by the Muslim community are part of social responsibility, where the overall practice must be framed by Islamic values that prioritize the social dimension of humanity rather than being solely oriented to personal financial benefits.

Analysis of the impact of the relief on the soil structure in Smolensk region

The main research topic is the theoretical justification of integrated regionalization of rural areas to optimize the use of natural agro-potential by developing conceptual frameworks and new methodological approaches to assessing the effectiveness of its use and determining environmentally and economically options for the interaction of natural and production-territorial systems. The problem of creating a theoretical (conceptual) model of integrated regionalization of rural areas using modern geographical methods and GIS technologies to optimize the use of natural agro-resource potential is arisen. The object of study is the natural agropotential of Smolensk region. Considering the complexity character of research we used the model area. The aim of the study is to assess the relationship of the spatial soil’s distribution and relief. For this aim, the model area on the territory of Smolensk region was chosen, digital model was created and analyzed. The research results have independent scientific interest and optimize the using of the natural agro-resource potential. The development of theoretical and methodological aspects of agricultural zoning is the most current problem of modern geography. The solution to this problem is necessary to develop recommendations for agricultural management. At the present stage of development of agriculture in Russia with extremely limited material, labor and financial resources, overcoming of the agrarian crisis will be possible on the basis of more efficient using of the natural potential of the territory. For the first time, the correlation of the spatial distribution of soil cover depending on the relief was studied using the model area of Smolensk region. The series of diagrams with the distribution of soil types by height, the distribution of the prevailing soil types on the slopes of different exposures, distribution of the prevailing soil types on the slopes of different angles have been constructed.

Analytic Philosophy

The paper provides an overview of the most fundamental ideas representing analytic philosophy throughout its history from the beginning of 20th century up to now. The history of analytic philosophy is divided into two stages – the early and the contemporary ones. The main distinguishing features of early analytic philosophy are using mathematical logic as a tool of stating and solving philosophical problems, and critical attitude toward ‘metaphysics’, i.e., traditional and contemporary non-analytic philosophical theories. The genesis of analytic philosophy was closely related to the revolution in logic that led to the rise of mathematical logic, and it is no coincidence that some founders of analytic tradition (first of all Frege, Russell, and Carnap) were also prominent logicians. (But there were also authors and schools within early analytic philosophy whose researches were based on less formal tools such as classical logic and linguistic methods of analysis of language. Ordinary language philosophy is an example of this type of philosophy.) Using the new logic as a philosophical tool led to a huge number of new ideas and generated a new type of philosophical criticism that was implemented in a number of projects of ‘overcoming metaphysics’. These features constituted the methodological and thematic profile of early analytic philosophy. As opposed to the later, contemporary analytic philosophy cannot be characterized by a prevailing method or a set of main research topic. Its characteristic features are rather of historical, institutional, and stylistic nature. In the paper, early analytic philosophy is represented by Frege, Russell, early Wittgenstein, Vienna Circle (Schlick, Carnap etc.), and ordinary language philosophy (later Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin, and Searle). Contemporary analytic philosophy is represented by Quine, and direct reference theory in philosophy of language (Kripke, Donnellan, Kaplan, and Putnam).

Trends of the researches related to ethical topic in Korean nursing students

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the trends of research related to ethical topics in Korean nursing students.Methods: A total of 131 articles that were published from 2000 to 2020 were analyzed and summarized according to publishing type, research design, subject, data analysis method, main research topic, research variables and instrument.Results: Most studies were journal articles (93.9%) and their most frequent research design was survey (75.7%). The research subjects covered all grades (35.1%) or they were divided between clinical nursing practicum (29.8%) or not (21.4%). The main research topics were biomedical ethics, ethical values, moral judgment and ethics education. Recently, ethical decision making and practical ability in nursing practice were reported. The instruments for measuring variables were limited and the same tools were used several times.Conclusion: Based on the findings of this study, it is suggested that the selection of various research topics and the application of research methods related to ethics for nursing students will continue in response to rapidly changing social phenomena in the future. In particular, it is necessary that research related to ethical and practical ability as well as ethical attitudes and perceptions of nursing students be actively carried out.

AUGUST AHLQVIST’S “CULTURAL WORDS”: EXCERPTS ON THE HISTORY OF FINNO-UGRIC LANGUAGE STUDY DURING THE 1860S-1880S

Karl August Engelbrekt Ahlqvist (literary pseudonym A. Oksanen) was a Finnish scholar, philologist and patriot who worked hard to create the Finnish standard language. The authors of the paper turn to some milestone facts from A. Ahlqvist’s academic biography. His meetings with some outstanding scholars, scientific expeditions to the kindred Finno-Ugric peoples, gathering of the unique field data as well as his educational activity were among those events. So-called “cultural words” became the main research topic of the paper. A. Ahlqvist classified “cultural words” according to human endeavors, locating genuine Finnish words among the loanwords. Having come to the conclusion that proper Finnish vocabulary comprised words which defined historically early, not specialized kinds of labour, A. Ahlqvist got firmly convinced that this fact witnessed the people’s historic youth period rather than its backwardness. Doing his research the scholar came to another important conclusion that the most part of the linguistic methodology was outdated then and needed updating. Thus A. Ahlqvist can be called a forerunner of the Neogrammarian turn. A. Ahlqvist became a pioneer in the Finno-Ugric language etymology study as well as in interdisciplinary approach in science, using the opportunities of “cultural words” analysis in the framework of the comparative historical method and as a means to reconstruct the Finnish ethnic history and culture.

Vietnam’s Scientific Publications in the Period of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic is considered a global disaster that affects all areas of the world; however, it is also seen as a motivation for domestic and foreign scientists to focus on researching solutions to reduce its damage. This article aims to explore the correlation of scientific publications of countries in Southeast Asia, among research fields in Vietnam and among topics published by Vietnamese educational institutions in the context of a pandemic. 1392 Southeast Asian countries’ publications related to COVID-19 were referenced from the Scopus database, including 123 articles from Vietnam (up to August 27th, 2020). Statistics show that Vietnam ranks fifth in the number of scientific publications with research cooperation of researchers from 20 different countries. Regarding the research fields of Vietnam, medicine is the main research topic, social science ranks third following environmental science. In the field of social science, articles focus on four key topics: epidemic prevention, reduction of pandemic effects on life and socioeconomics, factors related to online learning of students, healthcare for the elderly. From the analysis results, the authors recommend that researchers should pay attention to other topics in the social sciences that have not been published, such as psychological effects of infected or suspected nCovi, the impact of COVID-19 to disadvantaged groups in society

Venn-diaNet : venn diagram based network propagation analysis framework for comparing multiple biological experiments

Background The main research topic in this paper is how to compare multiple biological experiments using transcriptome data, where each experiment is measured and designed to compare control and treated samples. Comparison of multiple biological experiments is usually performed in terms of the number of DEGs in an arbitrary combination of biological experiments. This process is usually facilitated with Venn diagram but there are several issues when Venn diagram is used to compare and analyze multiple experiments in terms of DEGs. First, current Venn diagram tools do not provide systematic analysis to prioritize genes. Because that current tools generally do not fully focus to prioritize genes, genes that are located in the segments in the Venn diagram (especially, intersection) is usually difficult to rank. Second, elucidating the phenotypic difference only with the lists of DEGs and expression values is challenging when the experimental designs have the combination of treatments. Experiment designs that aim to find the synergistic effect of the combination of treatments are very difficult to find without an informative system. Results We introduce Venn-diaNet, a Venn diagram based analysis framework that uses network propagation upon protein-protein interaction network to prioritizes genes from experiments that have multiple DEG lists. We suggest that the two issues can be effectively handled by ranking or prioritizing genes with segments of a Venn diagram. The user can easily compare multiple DEG lists with gene rankings, which is easy to understand and also can be coupled with additional analysis for their purposes. Our system provides a web-based interface to select seed genes in any of areas in a Venn diagram and then perform network propagation analysis to measure the influence of the selected seed genes in terms of ranked list of DEGs. Conclusions We suggest that our system can logically guide to select seed genes without additional prior knowledge that makes us free from the seed selection of network propagation issues. We showed that Venn-diaNet can reproduce the research findings reported in the original papers that have experiments that compare two, three and eight experiments. Venn-diaNet is freely available at: http://biohealth.snu.ac.kr/software/venndianet

Business analytics: new concepts and trends

Research question: In the last decade, the concept of Business analytics (BA) has gone through revolutionary changes. It has gained a lot in popularity and attracted immense interest both in academic and commercial communities. Accepting this reality, the main research topic of the paper is to investigate and present the global tendencies regarding the development of business analytics concept. Motivation: We have been motivated by huge changes in ICT environment and have studied how they reflect on the domain of Business analytics. Idea: The main idea was to elaborate and make distinction between crucial characteristics of the classical and new emerging concepts of Business analytics. In addition to technical aspects, the broader business context of all presented concepts and phenomena are discussed. Findings: Dealing with essential elements of the BA concept, this paper points out that the history of Business analytics has been strongly influenced by the changes and innovations in the sphere of information communications technologies (ICT). In particular, the paper addresses two tendencies connected to the status of Business analytics in the digital economy. The first tendency concerns the emergence of Big Data phenomenon and its implications on both business and public environment. The other tendency concerns the increasing business request and need for data and analytics democratization. The paper concludes that specifically two forms of analytics – embedded analytics and self-service analytics – appeared as strong enablers of the process of data and analytics democratization. Contribution: Although a considerable part of the paper tackled the issue of the ICT trends and its impact on the business analytics, one specific part of the paper presents the broader business implications of data and analytics deployment. Our opinion is that this part provides a significant contribution to the BA topic. We demonstrate that there is strong evidence that one of the most important benefits that BA brings to the company is competitive advantage. Also, it is emphasized that the other big issue in business domain concerns the forms of BA deployment in the organization. We strongly support the opinion that successful BA deployment requires a clear data and analytics strategy, with elements of proposed ICT innovations and BA solutions.

The Exact Security of PMAC with Two Powering-Up Masks

PMAC is a rate-1, parallelizable, block-cipher-based message authentication code (MAC), proposed by Black and Rogaway (EUROCRYPT 2002). Improving the security bound is a main research topic for PMAC. In particular, showing a tight bound is the primary goal of the research, since Luykx et al.’s paper (EUROCRYPT 2016). Regarding the pseudo-random-function (PRF) security of PMAC, a collision of the hash function, or the difference between a random permutation and a random function offers the lower bound Ω(q2/2n) for q queries and the block cipher size n. Regarding the MAC security (unforgeability), a hash collision for MAC queries, or guessing a tag offers the lower bound Ω(q2m /2n + qv/2n) for qm MAC queries and qv verification queries (forgery attempts). The tight upper bound of the PRF-security O(q2/2n) of PMAC was given by Gaži et el. (ToSC 2017, Issue 1), but their proof requires a 4-wise independent masking scheme that uses 4 n-bit random values. Open problems from their work are: (1) find a masking scheme with three or less random values with which PMAC has the tight upper bound for PRF-security; (2) find a masking scheme with which PMAC has the tight upper bound for MAC-security.In this paper, we consider PMAC with two powering-up masks that uses two random values for the masking scheme. Using the structure of the powering-up masking scheme, we show that the PMAC has the tight upper bound O(q2/2n) for PRF-security, which answers the open problem (1), and the tight upper bound O(q2m /2n + qv/2n) for MAC-security, which answers the open problem (2). Note that these results deal with two-key PMACs, thus showing tight upper bounds of PMACs with single-key and/or with one powering-up mask are open problems.