This study studies the role of Nepali print media in encouraging good governance, converging on transparency, accountability, public involvement and the rule of law. Print media in Nepal has factually represented as a watchdog of society which has been exposing corruption, maladministration and manipulation of power whereas provided as a platform for civic assignation and public discussion. In spite of constitutional and legal guarantees with legal provisions such as Right to Information Act, challenges together with political interfering, ownership bias, limited rural reach, financial unpredictability and weak monitoring enforcement hamper its effectiveness. Applying with qualitative and analytical research approaches, this study highlights how investigative journalism, ethical reporting and citizen-oriented media can reinforce democratic practices in Nepal. The democratic-participant theory has framed print media as an enabler of citizen empowerment and participatory dialogue rather than only a reporter of events. Strengthening recognized frameworks, professional values is important for Nepali print media to act as a catalyst for accountable, transparent and comprehensive governance.
A Review of:
Owens, E., Hwang, S., Kim, D., Manolovitz, T., & Shen, L. (2023). Do you love them now? Use and non-use of academic ebooks a decade later. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 49(3), 102703-. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102703
Objective – To determine the use of library-provided ebooks by faculty and graduate students, the change in use over the last decade, the features, benefits, and challenges of ebook use, and the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on ebook use in this population.
Design – Survey.
Setting – Medium-sized public university with four campuses: a main campus with a physical library, an online campus, and two satellite campuses.
Subjects – Faculty and graduate students.
Methods – The authors of this study used a Qualtrics survey similar to their previous 2011 survey, which tailored questions based on ebook users versus non-users (Cassidy et al., 2012). They added questions to their survey to assess the impact of COVID-19 on library-provided ebook use. The authors included language that directed respondents to focus on “ebooks that are being studied closely for class purposes.” Invitations to the survey were emailed to all faculty and graduate students and were posted in campus e-newsletters. The survey was open from September 2021 to October 2021 and included a small incentive to participate. Responses were anonymous.
Main Results – The initial list of survey recipients included 3377 graduate students and 1126 faculty members, a total of 4480 after 23 duplicate email addresses were removed. A total of 508, or 11.3 %, were included in the analysis: 53.2% were master's students, 16.1% were doctoral students, and 30.7% were faculty members. At this university, the College of Education and Humanities and Social Sciences had the most master’s and doctoral students and represented most of the responses: 26% and 22.8%, respectively. The remaining responses were represented by the colleges of Criminal Justice, 16.1%, Science & Engineering Technology, 11.4%, and less than 8% Colleges of Business Administration, Health Sciences, Osteopathic Medicine, and Arts and Media. Most respondents were female, 72.8%, and aged 20-29, 36%, or 30-39, 26.4%. The authors noted there was no statistical difference in gender identity nor the average age of ebook users versus non-users.
Most respondents were ebook users, 64.4%, compared to non-users, 35.6%, which did not vary significantly when comparing campuses. When comparing the same results to those from 2011, however, only 38% of respondents were ebook users. For ebook users, 22.3% reported that they would rather use a print book, 15.3% felt the same about ebooks and print, 29.4% reported that they liked some ebooks but disliked others, and 26.3% reported that they would rather use an ebook. The authors stated that the results were surprisingly similar to their 2011 survey. Of the non-users, 24.5% reported that they would rather use a print book, 28.8 % indicated that they did not necessarily dislike library ebooks but had no opportunity to use them, and 7.5 % reported that they specifically disliked the library ebooks. In 2011, slightly more respondents preferred print books, 30.9%, more reported that they did not have the opportunity to use them, 46.4%, and a similar proportion, 7.2%, reported that they specifically disliked the library ebooks. Of the non-users, 38.7% reported that they may or may not use ebooks in the future, 16.6% and 29.3% reported that they definitely or probably will use ebooks in the future, 13.8% and 1.7% probably or definitely will not. Physical complaints were among the most common reasons for disliking library ebooks related to focus and retention, sensory experience of not holding or handling a print book, fatigue, headache, and eye strain. Other complaints were related to their functionality and usability, such as lag time, clunky interface, accessibility, and challenges with annotation and note-taking. Also mentioned was the additional screen time required.
Ebook features reported to be important were searching within the text, 91% of respondents, seeing the search terms highlighted, 78%, downloading the book to read offline, 75.2%, copying and pasting from the ebook, 70.5%, printing pages, 62%, or chapters, 60%. In 2011, features of the highest importance were searching within the text, 63.3%, printing individual pages, 49.0%, copying and pasting from the ebook, 47.7 %, and taking and saving notes, 39.4 %. The authors also collected open-ended comments, and respondents indicated ebook features such as annotation, formatting and compatibility, no print limit, no time limit, navigation, and text-to-speech were important. A little over 72% of respondents used an electronic device, such as a tablet, smartphone, or e-reader, for reading, whereas only 51.2% reported the use of an electronic device for reading in 2011. Of the respondents who attended the university before the COVID-19 pandemic, 71.4% reported their use of ebooks remained the same during the pandemic, which, according to the authors was not as significant as expected. The authors wrapped up the survey by including questions for graduate students regarding the future use of ebooks: 75.9% of respondents wanted the library to purchase more ebooks to support their classes, 59.9% responded that their use of ebooks would likely increase with a recommendation by the professor, and 90.1% would rather use an ebook than wait for a print copy to be returned to the library.
Conclusion – The authors report that library ebook users compared to non-users have significantly increased since their 2011 survey, yet the feelings about ebooks remain consistent, and the use of ebooks before and after the COVID-19 pandemic remained the same for most respondents. They acknowledged that many frustrations with library ebook use are related to copyright restrictions and device compatibility and suggested that publishers could improve compatibility and increase usability by loosening restrictions. They suggested that libraries communicate with their local users before making major changes in their print versus ebook collection. Electronic availability alone may not be enough, and users are looking for accessibility, ease of use, and device compatibility with fewer restrictions. The authors suggest more research into strategies for promoting ebooks to teaching faculty and advocating for publisher improvements.
Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
Social media use has been shown to be associated with low fertility desires. However, we know little about the discourses surrounding childbirth and parenthood that people consume online. We analyze 219,127 comments on 668 short videos related to reproduction and parenthood from Douyin and Tiktok in China, South Korea, and Japan, a region famous for its extremely low fertility level, to examine the topics and sentiment expressed online. BERTopic model is used to assist thematic analysis, and a large language model QWen is applied to label sentiment. We find that comments focus on childrearing costs in all countries, utility of children, particularly in Japan and South Korea, and individualism, primarily in China. Comments from Douyin exhibit the strongest anti-natalist sentiments, while the Japanese and Korean comments are more neutral. Short video characteristics, such as their stances or account type, significantly influence the responses, alongside regional socioeconomic indicators, including GDP, urbanization, and population sex ratio. This work provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of online discourses on family formation via popular algorithm-fed video sharing platforms in regions experiencing low fertility rates, making a valuable contribution to our understanding of the spread of family values online.
This paper proposes temporally aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) as a tool for longitudinal analysis of social media data. We fine-tune Temporal Adapters for Llama 3 8B on full timelines from a panel of British Twitter users, and extract longitudinal aggregates of emotions and attitudes with established questionnaires. We focus our analysis on the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that had a strong impact on public opinion and collective emotions. We validate our estimates against representative British survey data and find strong positive, significant correlations for several collective emotions. The obtained estimates are robust across multiple training seeds and prompt formulations, and in line with collective emotions extracted using a traditional classification model trained on labeled data. We demonstrate the flexibility of our method on questions of public opinion for which no pre-trained classifier is available. Our work extends the analysis of affect in LLMs to a longitudinal setting through Temporal Adapters. It enables flexible, new approaches towards the longitudinal analysis of social media data.
Loris Belcastro, Riccardo Cantini, Fabrizio Marozzo
et al.
In the digital era, the prevalence of depressive symptoms expressed on social media has raised serious concerns, necessitating advanced methodologies for timely detection. This paper addresses the challenge of interpretable depression detection by proposing a novel methodology that effectively combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) and conversational agents like ChatGPT. In our methodology, explanations are achieved by integrating BERTweet, a Twitter-specific variant of BERT, into a novel self-explanatory model, namely BERT-XDD, capable of providing both classification and explanations via masked attention. The interpretability is further enhanced using ChatGPT to transform technical explanations into human-readable commentaries. By introducing an effective and modular approach for interpretable depression detection, our methodology can contribute to the development of socially responsible digital platforms, fostering early intervention and support for mental health challenges under the guidance of qualified healthcare professionals.
While significant interests have been devoted to the double diffusive phase change heat transfer of binary solutions, the understanding on the melting heat transfer of salty ice in porous media is still imcomplete. This work aims to explore the melting heat transfer characteristics of salty ice in a square cavity filled with homogeneous porous media subjected to lateral heating. In order to facilitate the visualization of melting dynamics in a uniform porous media, a three-dimensional (3D) printed transparent cavity filled with porous matrix was manufactured, featuring an open upper end. Aqueous solutions of sodium chloride at concentration both higher and lower than the eutectic concentration were investigated. Lateral heating experiments with constant heat flux were conducted in a subzero temperature environment. The effect of heating power, initial concentrations and different sizes of porous matrix was investigated. Distinct phenomena were observed based on the concentration of the aqueous solution. Specifically, the concentration lower than the eutectic concentration results in an upward bending melting interface. Whereas the concentration surpassing the eutectic concentration resulted in a downward bending melting interface. In the presence of salt, a melting convex appears at the bottom of the melting interface and manifests during the whole melting process. Notably, smaller matrix enables faster melting rate. Furthermore, three distinct stages were revealed in our experiments, characterized as conduction, mixture of conduction and ultimately convection stage. The correlations for Nu and the average propagation rate of mushy/liquid interface were established by order of magnitude analysis and fit well with the experiments.
Xavier Guidetti, Ankita Mukne, Marvin Rueppel
et al.
The quality of 3D prints often varies due to different conditions inherent to each print, such as filament type, print speed, and nozzle size. Closed-loop process control methods improve the accuracy and repeatability of 3D prints. However, optimal tuning of controllers for given process parameters and design geometry is often a challenge with manually tuned controllers resulting in inconsistent and suboptimal results. This work employs Bayesian optimization to identify the optimal controller parameters. Additionally, we explore transfer learning in the context of 3D printing by leveraging prior information from past trials. By integrating optimized extrusion force control and transfer learning, we provide a novel framework for closed-loop 3D printing and propose an automated calibration routine that produces high-quality prints for a desired combination of print settings, material, and shape.
Rabindra Lamsal, Maria Rodriguez Read, Shanika Karunasekera
et al.
During times of crisis, social media platforms play a crucial role in facilitating communication and coordinating resources. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, communities often rely on these platforms to share urgent pleas for help, extend support, and organize relief efforts. However, the overwhelming volume of conversations during such periods can escalate to unprecedented levels, necessitating the automated identification and matching of requests and offers to streamline relief operations. Additionally, there is a notable absence of studies conducted in multi-lingual settings, despite the fact that any geographical area can have a diverse linguistic population. Therefore, we propose CReMa (Crisis Response Matcher), a systematic approach that integrates textual, temporal, and spatial features to address the challenges of effectively identifying and matching requests and offers on social media platforms during emergencies. Our approach utilizes a crisis-specific pre-trained model and a multi-lingual embedding space. We emulate human decision-making to compute temporal and spatial features and non-linearly weigh the textual features. The results from our experiments are promising, outperforming strong baselines. Additionally, we introduce a novel multi-lingual dataset simulating help-seeking and offering assistance on social media in 16 languages and conduct comprehensive cross-lingual experiments. Furthermore, we analyze a million-scale geotagged global dataset to understand patterns in seeking help and offering assistance on social media. Overall, these contributions advance the field of crisis informatics and provide benchmarks for future research in the area.
Getnet Mitike, Frehiwot Nigatu, Eskinder Wolka
et al.
<h4>Introduction</h4>There was limited data on the experiences and roles of sub-national health systems in the response against COVID-19 in Ethiopia. This study explored how sub-national primary health care units and coordinating bodies in Ethiopia responded to COVID-19 during the first 6 months of pandemic.<h4>Methods</h4>We conducted a qualitative study with descriptive phenomenological design using 59 key informants that were purposively selected. The interviews included leaders across Ethiopia's 10 regions and 2 administrative cities. Data were collected using a semi-structured interview guide that was translated into a local language. The interviews were conducted in person or by phone. Coding and categorizing led to the development of themes and subthemes. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis.<h4>Results</h4>Local administrators across different levels took the lead in responding to COVID-19 by organizing multisectoral planning and monitoring committees at regional, zonal and woreda (district) levels. Health leaders reacted to the demand for an expanded workforce by reassigning health professionals to COVID-19 surveillance and case management activities, adding COVID-19-related responsibilities to their workloads, temporarily blocking leave, and hiring new staff on contractual basis. Training was prioritized for: rapid response teams, laboratory technicians, healthcare providers assigned to treatment centers where care was provided for patients with COVID-19, and health extension workers. COVID-19 supplies and equipment, particularly personal protective equipment, were difficult to obtain at the beginning of the pandemic. Health officials used a variety of means to equip and protect staff, but the quantity fell short of their needs. Local health structures used broadcast media, print materials, and house-to-house education to raise community awareness about COVID-19. Rapid response teams took the lead in case investigation, contact tracing, and sample collection. The care for mild cases was shifted to home-based isolation as the number of infections increased and space became limited. However, essential health services were neglected at the beginning of the pandemic while the intensity of local multisectoral response (sectoral engagement) declined as the pandemic progressed.<h4>Conclusions</h4>Local government authorities and health systems across Ethiopia waged an early response to the pandemic, drawing on multisectoral support and directing human, material, and financial resources toward the effort. But, the intensity of the multisectoral response waned and essential services began suffering as the pandemic progressed. There is a need to learn from the pandemic and invest in the basics of the health system-health workers, supplies, equipment, and infrastructure-as well as coordination of interventions.
This paper presents an online system that leverages social media data in real time to identify landslide-related information automatically using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques. The designed system can (i) reduce the information overload by eliminating duplicate and irrelevant content, (ii) identify landslide images, (iii) infer geolocation of the images, and (iv) categorize the user type (organization or person) of the account sharing the information. The system was deployed in February 2020 online at https://landslide-aidr.qcri.org/landslide_system.php to monitor live Twitter data stream and has been running continuously since then to provide time-critical information to partners such as British Geological Survey and European Mediterranean Seismological Centre. We trust this system can both contribute to harvesting of global landslide data for further research and support global landslide maps to facilitate emergency response and decision making.
Improvements in fabrication devices such as 3D printers are becoming possible for personal fabrication to freely fabricate any products. To clarify who is liable for the product, the fabricator should keep the fabrication history in an immutable and sustainably accessible manner. In this paper, we propose a new scheme, "Fabchain," that can record the fabrication history in such a manner. By utilizing a scheme that employs a blockchain as an audit-able communication channel, Fabchain manages print jobs for the fabricator's 3D printer over the blockchain, while maintaining a history of a print job. We implemented Fabchain on Ethereum and evaluated the performance for recording a print job. Our results demonstrate that Fabchain can complete communication of a print job sequence in less than 1 minute on the Ethereum test network. We conclude that Fabchain can manage a print job in a reasonable duration for 3D printing, while satisfying the requirements for immutability and sustainability.
Johannes Jakubik, Michael Vössing, Dominik Bär
et al.
The storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 has led to the killing of 5 people and is widely regarded as an attack on democracy. The storming was largely coordinated through social media networks such as Parler. Yet little is known regarding how users interacted on Parler during the storming of the Capitol. In this work, we examine the emotion dynamics on Parler during the storming with regard to heterogeneity across time and users. For this, we segment the user base into different groups (e.g., Trump supporters and QAnon supporters). We use affective computing (Kratzwald et al. 2018) to infer the emotions in the contents, thereby allowing us to provide a comprehensive assessment of online emotions. Our evaluation is based on a large-scale dataset from Parler, comprising of 717,300 posts from 144,003 users. We find that the user base responded to the storming of the Capitol with an overall negative sentiment. Akin to this, Trump supporters also expressed a negative sentiment and high levels of unbelief. In contrast to that, QAnon supporters did not express a more negative sentiment during the storming. We further provide a cross-platform analysis and compare the emotion dynamics on Parler and Twitter. Our findings point at a comparatively less negative response to the incidents on Parler compared to Twitter accompanied by higher levels of disapproval and outrage. Our contribution to research is three-fold: (1) We identify online emotions that were characteristic of the storming; (2) we assess emotion dynamics across different user groups on Parler; (3) we compare the emotion dynamics on Parler and Twitter. Thereby, our work offers important implications for actively managing online emotions to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Media framing has a significant role in demonstrating a certain perspective and eventually determining the context and intention of the news creator. While this research focused on the trends in framing news on cross-border political issues in Times of India and The Hindu from India and Dawn and The Nation from Pakistan from June 1st, 2014, to May 31st,2018. The news coverage of political issues pertaining to morality;exploitation of religious, moral, and ethical sentiments across the board,were studied to examine the political agenda-setting by the selected dailies.The data of 7236 were collected on census bases from the selected dailies and analyzed with respect to three main indicators of morality framing;religion, ethics, and moral values. The research concludes that both India and Pakistani media use the moral aspect of religion and ethics in framing political issues to set certain political agendas and deteriorated bilateral political efforts.
The paper is researching the value of solidarity in contemporary Russian journalism, actualized in its professional and civic aspects. The pandemic has contributed to the development of practices of solidarity and mutual
aid, and a surge in discussions about this value. Journalism reflects the processes of the birth of new practices
and the reincarnation of traditional ones, and takes part in the formation of solidarity, sharing its humanist and
civic character. At the same time, solidarity in journalism is actualized as a professional value, allowing the media
community to resist external pressure. The object of the study is civil and professional values in journalism; the
subject of the study is the value of solidarity. Monitoring of posts and comments in social networks, primary and
secondary data analysis, and case analysis were used as methods of research. The empirical material includes
cases from contemporary journalistic solidarity practice.The author examines the circumstances that become the
background for journalistic solidarity, its traditional and new actors. The fragmented and discrete nature of journalism also manifests itself in the interaction (or lack thereof) between the various actors of journalistic solidarity.
The digital nature of the modern media environment makes its contribution: solidarity is being implemented in an
online format and the role of the community manager is increasing. Other trends of journalistic solidarity are its
publicity, its mediatization, and monetization. The palette of solidarity tools in journalism is constantly expanding,
incorporating tools from other fields. Modern solidarity absorbs elements of social projection, taking the form of
public campaigns and mobilization projects. Manifestations of journalistic solidarity are situational, often centered around a particular media outlet, an iconic or high-profile event, or a journalist in a particular short period
of time. Publicity becomes the primary goal. Examples of extended solidarity are rare and forced to be informationally recalled, interest maintained and moderated. The author concludes that various solidarity practices in
journalism are built on the actualized value of solidarity and offers an understanding of it.
This paper deals with photography in illustrated magazines and photobooks, and with what unfolds when photographs migrate from one media to the other. In such instances, we argue, reformatting is performed in distinctive affordances; yet such transfers also make visible the format conditions that underlie both the magazine and book media. By conducting an in-depth analysis of two exemplary photographs, by Horst P. Horst and Henri Cartier-Bresson, circulating between magazines and books, we aim to show how format markedly shapes photography in print and thus to demonstrate the work of format. In the process, matters of authoring and re-appropriating, as well as mechanisms of canonization and/or memorialization are brought to light. All contribute to structure and solidify the photographic field, as well as periodicals and books as media, in relationship to one another (and to their mediatic content). The established hierarchy of formats, in which photographs move up from magazines to books, in fact proved beneficial to both, bolstering the distinction – and thus the identity – of the media book and periodical.
We present an overview of the EmotionGIF2020 Challenge, held at the 8th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP), in conjunction with ACL 2020. The challenge required predicting affective reactions to online texts, and included the EmotionGIF dataset, with tweets labeled for the reaction categories. The novel dataset included 40K tweets with their reaction GIFs. Due to the special circumstances of year 2020, two rounds of the competition were conducted. A total of 84 teams registered for the task. Of these, 25 teams success-fully submitted entries to the evaluation phase in the first round, while 13 teams participated successfully in the second round. Of the top participants, five teams presented a technical report and shared their code. The top score of the winning team using the Recall@K metric was 62.47%.
Samuel N. Sanders, Tracy H. Schloemer, Mahesh K. Gangishetty
et al.
Two-photon photopolymerization delivers prints without support structures and minimizes layering artifacts in a broad range of materials. This volumetric printing approach scans a focused light source throughout the entire volume of a resin vat and takes advantage of the quadratic power dependence of two photon absorption to produce photopolymerization exclusively at the focal point. While this approach has advantages, the widespread adoption of two photon photopolymerization is hindered by the need for expensive ultrafast lasers and extremely slow print speeds. Here we present an analogous quadratic process, triplet-triplet-annihilation-driven 3D printing, that enables volumetric printing at a focal point driven by <4 milliwatt-power continuous wave excitation. To induce photopolymerization deep within a vat, the key advance is the nanoencapsulation of photon upconversion solution within a silica shell decorated with solubilizing polymer ligands. This scalable self-assembly approach allows for scatter-free nanocapsule dispersal in a variety of organic media without leaking the capsule contents. We further introduce an excitonic strategy to systematically control the upconversion threshold to support either monovoxel or parallelized printing schemes, printing at power densities multiple orders of magnitude lower than power densities required for two-photon-based 3D printing. The application of upconversion nanocapsules to volumetric 3D printing provides access to the benefits of volumetric printing without the current cost, power, and speed drawbacks. The materials demonstrated here open opportunities for other triplet fusion upconversion-controlled applications.
Information on social media spreads through an underlying diffusion network that connects people of common interests and opinions. This diffusion network often comprises multiple layers, each capturing the spreading dynamics of a certain type of information characterized by, for example, topic, language, or attitude. Researchers have previously proposed methods to infer these underlying multilayer diffusion networks from observed spreading patterns, but little is known about how well these methods perform across the range of realistic spreading data. In this paper, we conduct an extensive series of synthetic data experiments to systematically analyze the performance of the multilayer diffusion network inference framework, under varied network structure (e.g. density, number of layers) and information diffusion settings (e.g. cascade size, layer mixing) that are designed to mimic real-world spreading on social media. Our results show extreme performance variation of the inference framework: notably, it achieves much higher accuracy when inferring a denser diffusion network, while it fails to decompose the diffusion network correctly when most cascades in the data reach a limited audience. In demonstrating the conditions under which the inference accuracy is extremely low, our paper highlights the need to carefully evaluate the applicability of the inference before running it on real data. Practically, our results serve as a reference for this evaluation, and our publicly available implementation, which outperforms previous implementations in accuracy, supports further testing under personalized settings.
In the present study, we summarize the status (seizures number, quantity, hotspot, trade rout & mode of transportation) of illegal trade of pangolin with seizures reported from 2009 to 2018 in India using available data from print and electronic media. Over the last decade ca.119 pangolin seizures were recorded and it is estimated that ca.7500 individuals perished in a decade. It is concluded that in India its north-eastern part is the hub of trade of pangolins. From, here it moves into China and Myanmar though road and postal services.
In the scientific literature, the study of the typology of journal periodicals is a significant and debatable problem. With the increasing number of periodicals and the continued segmentation of the print media audience, there are some new magazines that cannot always be successfully introduced into existing typologies. Publications of a pro-family theme have become an integral part of the modern media system; they have not only recognizable typological characteristics but also require further classification. An important segment of the media market, in our opinion, is newspapers and magazines for foster parents, which must be positioned as separate specialized publications. The authors of the article suggest considering magazines for foster parents within three typological groups: children’s bases, magazines for potential foster parents and magazines for families in which foster children are brought up. Separately, we can designate magazines that are published for specialists of guardianship and custody bodies and organizations that professionally deal withthe family placement of orphans and children left without parental care. The indicated typological groups are a generalization of the results of the content analysis of the publications of magazines for foster parents. They recorded similarities and differences in the content of publications of various types, which were identified by induction, systematization and interpretation of the data of the study. The article focuses on the fact that the modern family needs information support, along with legal, socio-economic support from the state and society. The presence in the modern media space of socially oriented publications, which include magazines for foster parents, contributes to a positive change in the vector of disseminated media of family information.