In the modern era of computing, the news ecosystem has transformed from old traditional print media to social media outlets. Social media platforms allow us to consume news much faster, with less restricted editing results in the spread of fake news at an incredible pace and scale. In recent researches, many useful methods for fake news detection employ sequential neural networks to encode news content and social context-level information where the text sequence was analyzed in a unidirectional way. Therefore, a bidirectional training approach is a priority for modelling the relevant information of fake news that is capable of improving the classification performance with the ability to capture semantic and long-distance dependencies in sentences. In this paper, we propose a BERT-based (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) deep learning approach (FakeBERT) by combining different parallel blocks of the single-layer deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) having different kernel sizes and filters with the BERT. Such a combination is useful to handle ambiguity, which is the greatest challenge to natural language understanding. Classification results demonstrate that our proposed model (FakeBERT) outperforms the existing models with an accuracy of 98.90%.
Distrust of public serving institutions and anti-establishment views are on the rise (especially in the U.S.). As people turn to social media for information, it is imperative to understand whether and how social media environments may be contributing to distrust of institutions. In social media, content creators, influencers, and other opinion leaders often position themselves as having expertise and authority on a range of topics from health to politics, and in many cases devalue and dismiss institutional expertise to build a following and increase their own visibility. However, the extent to which this content appears and whether such content increases engagement is unclear. This study analyzes the prevalence of anti-establishment sentiment (AES) on the social media platform TikTok. Despite its popularity as a source of information, TikTok remains relatively understudied and may provide important insights into how people form attitudes towards institutions. We employ a computational approach to label TikTok posts as containing AES or not across topical domains where content creators tend to frame themselves as experts: finance and wellness. As a comparison, we also consider the topic of conspiracy theories, where AES is expected to be common. We find that AES is most prevalent in conspiracy theory content, and relatively rare in content related to the other two topics. However, we find that engagement patterns with such content varies by area, and that there may be platform incentives for users to post content that expresses anti-establishment sentiment.
Misinformation is a growing concern in a decade involving critical global events. While social media regulation is mainly dedicated towards the detection and prevention of fake news and political misinformation, there is limited research about religious misinformation which has only been addressed through qualitative approaches. In this work, we study the spread of fabricated quotes (Hadith) that are claimed to belong to Prophet Muhammad (the prophet of Islam) as a case study demonstrating one of the most common religious misinformation forms on Arabic social media. We attempt through quantitative methods to understand the characteristics of social media users who interact with fabricated Hadith. We spotted users who frequently circulate fabricated Hadith and others who frequently debunk it to understand the main differences between the two groups. We used Logistic Regression to automatically predict their behaviors and analyzed its weights to gain insights about the characteristics and interests of each group. We find that both fabricated Hadith circulators and debunkers have generally a lot of ties to religious accounts. However, circulators are identified by many accounts that follow the Shia branch of Islam, Sunni Islamic public figures from the gulf countries, and many Sunni non-professional pages posting Islamic content. On the other hand, debunkers are identified by following academic Islamic scholars from multiple countries and by having more intellectual non-religious interests like charity, politics, and activism.
Using data of N = 70 articles from newspapers in the United Kingdom, this study explores whether UK print media of both broadsheet and tabloid press make use of issue-specific frames (Entman, 1993) in the reporting on male rape. Current UK legislation does not recognize women as perpetrators of male rape; this was also reflected in the majority of articles addressing male rape. A total of nine frames were identified following Mayring’s (2015) approach to qualitative content analysis. The frames can be differentiated into situational, victim, and perpetrator frames. The reporting includes (male) rape myths based on sex stereotypes placing perpetrators and victims in unequal power dynamics. In line with previous research, the findings can be related to sex-role socialization, which places men and women into stereotypical categories of masculinity and femininity. In addition, sex-role socialization is expanded by matters of sexual orientation: Stereotypes of femininity are projected on homosexual men and the victims are placed in a subordinate role compared to the perpetrators. The comparison of tabloid and broadsheet press shows that both portray male rape similarly. However, tabloids put greater emphasis on entertainment and use ways that are more in touch with the audience to illustrate male rape.
Optical beam propagation in random media is characterized by familiar speckle patterns generated by intricate interference effects. Such patterns may be modified and possibly attenuated for partially coherent incident beam profiles. In the weak-coupling regime of the Itô-Schrödinger paraxial model of wave propagation, we show how the spatio-temporal statistics of the partially coherent beams interact with the statistics of the random medium to enhance or suppress scintillation effects.
Ismail Hossain, Sai Puppala, Md Jahangir Alam
et al.
User activities can influence their subsequent interactions with a post, generating interest in the user. Typically, users interact with posts from friends by commenting and using reaction emojis, reflecting their level of interest on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Our objective is to analyze user history over time, including their posts and engagement on various topics. Additionally, we take into account the user's profile, seeking connections between their activities and social media platforms. By integrating user history, engagement, and persona, we aim to assess recommendation scores based on relevant item sharing by Hit Rate (HR) and the quality of the ranking system by Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), where we achieve the highest for NeuMF 0.80 and 0.6 respectively. Our hybrid approach solves the cold-start problem when there is a new user, for new items cold-start problem will never occur, as we consider the post category values. To improve the performance of the model during cold-start we introduce collaborative filtering by looking for similar users and ranking the users based on the highest similarity scores.
The prevalence of social media platforms and their use across the globe makes them attractive options for studying large groups of people, particularly when some of these platforms provide access to large amounts of structured data. However, with the collection, storage, and use of this data comes ethical and legal responsibilities, which are particularly important when looking at social groups such as migrants, who are often stigmatised and criminalised. Various guidelines, frameworks and laws have been developed to ensure social media data is used in the most ethical way. However, they have quickly evolved within the past few years and are scattered across various fields and domains. To help researchers navigate these issues, this chapter provides an overview of the ethical considerations of studying migration via social media platforms. Building on relevant academic literature, as well as national and supranational frameworks and legislations, we review how the main ethical issues related to social media research have been discussed in the past twenty years and outline good practice examples to mitigate them. This overview is designed to provide researchers with theoretical and practical tools to consider and mitigate the ethical challenges related to social media research in migration-related contexts.
Андрій Іванович Іванко, Ілля Олександрович Колінько
Наукове дослідження присвячене проєктуванню принципово нового високопродуктивного привода натискної плити. Привод є невід’ємною важливою складовою поліграфічної машини, що відіграє важливу роль в якості виготовлення майбутньої поліграфічної продукції. Особливо це стосується пакувальної галузі — виробів з картону.
Класичні приводні шарнірні важільні механізми натискної плити мають ряд недоліків: створюють надлишкові вібраційні навантаження, контактні елементи прискорено виходять з ладу та мають громіздкі конструкції загалом. Тому метою роботи є розробка нового пневматичного привода реверсивної дії натискної плити плоского штанцювального для виготовлення картонних розгорток.
Завданням наукової роботи є детальний аналіз відомих класичних циклових приводів натискної плити та проєктування на їх основі принципово нового пневматичного механізму для висікання картонних паковань. Удосконалення та модернізація приводного механізму натискної плити для висікання розгорток реалізується за рахунок використання чотирьох опорних пневмоциліндрів.
Проведені аналітичні розрахунки дають загальну характеристику технологічного процесу висікання картонних розгорток з використанням пневматичного привода. Підібрані силові показники пневмоциліндрів привода натискної плити дозволяють нам стверджувати про доцільність їх використання. Основними технічними показники вдосконаленої технології є: робочі об’єми пневматичних циліндрів, діаметри трубопроводів, розрахункові площі поршня та штока пневматичного циліндра. Перевірка працездатності пневматичного привода натискної плити здійснюється за рахунок критеріїв інерційності та швидкісних характеристик поршня.
Рекомендовано використовувати пневматичні циліндри з відносно його найменшим робочим тиском і більшою площею поршня, так як вибрані дані позитивно впливатимуть на підготовчий часовий період. Крім того можна стверджувати, що пневматичний приводний механізм натискної плити буде високопродуктивним і може суттєво здешевити конструкцію.
Fighting the ongoing COVID-19 infodemic has been declared as one of the most important focus areas by the World Health Organization since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the information that is consumed and disseminated consists of promoting fake cures, rumors, and conspiracy theories to spreading xenophobia and panic, at the same time there is information (e.g., containing advice, promoting cure) that can help different stakeholders such as policy-makers. Social media platforms enable the infodemic and there has been an effort to curate the content on such platforms, analyze and debunk them. While a majority of the research efforts consider one or two aspects (e.g., detecting factuality) of such information, in this study we focus on a multifaceted approach, including an API,\url{https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis/yifan2019/Tanbih/0.8.0/} and a demo system,\url{https://covid19.tanbih.org}, which we made freely and publicly available. We believe that this will facilitate researchers and different stakeholders. A screencast of the API services and demo is available.\url{https://youtu.be/zhbcSvxEKMk}
Петро Олексійович Киричок, Катерина Олександрівна Чепурна, Максим Володимирович Коробка
У роботі розглянуто використання мікрорельєфних напрямних на робочих поверхнях поліграфічного устаткування, що дозволяє покращити функціональні властивості механізмів і поверхонь, що контактують. Запропоновано застосувати мікрорельєфні напрямні на транспортувальних механізмах тампонного друку. Для забезпечення точного позиціювання виробів, суміщення фарб та відсутності графічного спотворення зображень транспортувальний механізм не повинен мати паразитних поперечних коливань при збільшенні робочої швидкості друку. Для забезпечення точного позиціювання виробів у зоні друку, запропоновано двоетапну технологію утворення мікронапрямних на транспортувальному механізмі тампонного пристрою. Експериментально встановлено підвищення точності позиціювання виробів при підвищенні робочої швидкості друку, а саме до 1200 цикл./год, при застосуванні мікрорельєфних напрямних на транспортувальному механізмі виробів. Для вертикальних контрольних полів точність позиціювання контрольних полів збільшується на 21 %, для горизонтальних контрольних полів на 28 %. Виявлено, що застосування мікрорельєфних напрямних на транспортувальних механізмах у тампонному друці, сприятиме покращенню позиціювання виробів у зоні друку при збільшенні робочої швидкості друку.
Mohit Singhal, Nihal Kumarswamy, Shreyasi Kinhekar
et al.
Prior work has extensively studied misinformation related to news, politics, and health, however, misinformation can also be about technological topics. While less controversial, such misinformation can severely impact companies' reputations and revenues, and users' online experiences. Recently, social media has also been increasingly used as a novel source of knowledgebase for extracting timely and relevant security threats, which are fed to the threat intelligence systems for better performance. However, with possible campaigns spreading false security threats, these systems can become vulnerable to poisoning attacks. In this work, we proposed novel approaches for detecting misinformation about cybersecurity and privacy threats on social media, focusing on two topics with different types of misinformation: phishing websites and Zoom's security & privacy threats. We developed a framework for detecting inaccurate phishing claims on Twitter. Using this framework, we could label about 9% of URLs and 22% of phishing reports as misinformation. We also proposed another framework for detecting misinformation related to Zoom's security and privacy threats on multiple platforms. Our classifiers showed great performance with more than 98% accuracy. Employing these classifiers on the posts from Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter, we found respectively that about 18%, 3%, 4%, and 3% of posts were misinformation. In addition, we studied the characteristics of misinformation posts, their authors, and their timelines, which helped us identify campaigns.
There has been considerable debate about the comparative advantages of marketing education emphasizing theoretical knowledge and applied skills. The current study investigated the skills necessary for entry-level marketing positions, specifically that of Social Media Manager (SMMgr) and Social Media Marketer (SMMkt). Data was collected from Indeed.com using a web crawler to extract job postings for SMMgr and SMMkt. A total of 766 and 654 entry-level jobs for SMMgr and SMMkt, respectively, across the entire United States, was collected. Independent raters separately analyzed the data for keywords and categories. Findings suggest that the most desired skills are occupational digital marketing skills. Other relevant skill categories included communication, employee attributes, problem-solving, and information technology skills. This study extends the current literature by highlighting the desired skills prevalent across the social media industry. The findings also have relevance in designing the marketing education curriculum, specifically in isolating core skills that could be integrated into the marketing courses.
We investigate the upscaling of diffusive transport parameters as function of pore scale material structure using a stochastic framework. We focus on sub-REV (representative elementary volume) scale where the complexity of pore space geometry leads to a significant scatter of transport observations. We study a large data set of sub-REV measurements on porosity and transport ability being a dimensionless parameter representing the ratio of diffusive flow through the porous volume and through an empty volume. We characterize transport ability as probability distribution functions (PDFs) of porosity capturing the effect of pore structure differences among samples. We then investigate domain size effects and predict the REV scale. While scatter in porosity observation decrease linearly with increasing sample size, the observed scatter in transport ability converges towards a constant value larger zero. Our results confirm that differences in pore structure topology impact transport parameters at all scales. Consequently, the use of PDFs to describe the relationship of effective transport coefficients to porosity is advantageous to deterministic semi-empirical functions. We discuss the consequences and advocate the use of PDFs for effective parameters in both continuum equations and data interpretation of experimental or computational work. We believe that the presented statistics-based upscaling technique of sub-REV microscopy data provides a new tool in understanding, describing and predicting macroscopic transport behavior of micro-porous media.
I reexamine the Spanish Transition in terms of the interventions that cartoonists in the 1970s used to lay bare the machinations of the old regime still in power. Specifically, I analyze Carlos Giménez’s España, Una, Grande y Libre series, an exemplary counter-narrative against the dominant discourse produced by post-Franco government officials and economic power brokers. This collection—which denounces state-sanctioned violence and champions popular mobilizations in the name of a more just society—is also a pioneering work that makes visible the victims of the long-silenced crimes of Francoism.
Raphael Haas, Michelle Hufnagel, Roman Abrosimov
et al.
Four different techniques were applied for the production of $^{233}$U alpha recoil ion sources, providing $^{229}$Th ions. They were compared with respect to a minimum energy spread of the $^{229}$Th recoil ions, using the emitted alpha particles as an indicator. The techniques of Molecular Plating, Drop-on-Demand inkjet printing, chelation from dilute nitric acid solution on chemically functionalized silicon surfaces, and self-adsorption on passivated titanium surfaces were used. All fabricated sources were characterized by using alpha spectrometry, radiographic imaging, and scanning electron microscopy. A direct validation for the estimated recoil ion rate was obtained by collecting $^{228}$Th recoil ions from $^{232}$U recoil ion sources prepared by self-adsorption and Molecular Plating. The chelation and the self-adsorption based approaches appear most promising for the preparation of recoil ion sources delivering monochromatic recoil ions.
Tarunima Prabhakar, Anushree Gupta, Kruttika Nadig
et al.
Volume of content and misinformation on social media is rapidly increasing. There is a need for systems that can support fact checkers by prioritizing content that needs to be fact checked. Prior research on prioritizing content for fact-checking has focused on news media articles, predominantly in English language. Increasingly, misinformation is found in user-generated content. In this paper we present a novel dataset that can be used to prioritize check-worthy posts from multi-media content in Hindi. It is unique in its 1) focus on user generated content, 2) language and 3) accommodation of multi-modality in social media posts. In addition, we also provide metadata for each post such as number of shares and likes of the post on ShareChat, a popular Indian social media platform, that allows for correlative analysis around virality and misinformation. The data is accessible on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/4032629) under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0).
Muhammad Rizwan Aslam, Taokeer Ahmed Rizvi, Muhammad Tariq Munawar
et al.
Objective: To ascertain the increase in paediatric burn admissions in our tertiary care facility. Find various causes of this trend and assess the morbidity and mortality in paediatric population, and suggest remedies.
Study Design: This is a “descriptive case series study”
Place of Study: This Study was conducted during September 2017 to August 2019 at Department of Burns & Plastic surgery.
Materials and Methods: Total number of acute burn admissions under 12 years were recorded. Subdivided this group into 0 to 2 years and 2 to 12 years. We assessed epidemiology, sex, cause of burn, mode of admission, location of incident, type of first aid given, mortality, and compared results during two equal halves of this period. We used SPSS 20 for data analysis.
Results: 504 (49.85%) were pediatric acute burn admissions. Their age ranged from 25 days to 12 years (mean 5 ±1.2 years). 152 were infants/toddlers aged 0-2 years. 270 male and 234 females. 316 were direct admissions. There were 72.43% more pediatric burn admissions. 381 were scalds, 91 flame burns, 21 electric burns and 11 chemical burns. There was 11.94% improved survival among burn patients. Two temporal peaks, largest in summer from May to Jul and second in Dec to Feb.
Conclusion: There is an increasing trend in acute pediatric burn admissions. Majority of victims did not receive proper first aid. We need to start a very aggressive campaign on print and electronic media for public education.
The meaning that a communicator intends to make determines the choice of the lexemes that the individual employs. Thus, this study explored the textual choices of MTN advertisements; as such entities were utilised to generate meaning potential. Seven advertisements of MTN functioned as the objects of analysis. The application of Halliday’s Theme-Rheme theoretical lens permitted the processing of the MTN advertisements into various semiotic slots. Such conceptual procedure informed the calibration of the textual components into different frequencies, using the table and graph to demonstrate clearer pictures of the outcomes. Observations showed the kinds of MTN advertising textual choices in two distinct sequences. The first was the thematic choices in the form of marked (As Nigerians, we can weave…), unmarked (Friends are the reason…) and conjunctive logical (so, and, that) constructs. The second aspect was the clause choices available in the texts. These clause choices emanated as declarative (Love is a feeling…), imperative (So reach out) with predicated themes (Share the priceless gift of love), and interrogative (Are you in love?) elements. One could also acknowledge disjunctive grammar (A year of new challenges…) and minor clauses (Happy Valentine’s Day), operating in the communications. Contextually, the study might influence the MTN telecommunications operator to review the nature of textual choices of persuasion, having understood the structures available in the current analysis.