bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Anshimi
Authors: Yoo Chaeyoon , Dourish Paul
Published: April 2021

In this paper we examine Anshimi, a mobile safety application that hosts women's safety services. We present a case study based on qualitative data gathered from semi-structured interviews and a participatory design workshop with women in Seoul, South Korea. We examine women's perceptions of various kinds of safety data that Anshimi provides and collects from its users, such as GPS data, security camera footage, messages, personal information, etc. Exploring how women negotiate the tension between feeling protected and surveilled, we account for the nuanced ways in which women understand, feel, and use safety data in their daily lives. We also present scenarios for engaging with women's safety data, in the hopes of developing a guiding framework for designing women's safety applications and safety data practices.
Reaction or Speculation: Building Computational Support for Users in Catching-Up Series Based on an Emerging Media Consumption Phenomenon
Authors: Arakawa Riku , Yakura Hiromu
Published: April 2021

A growing number of people are using catch-up TV services rather than watching simultaneously with other audience members at the time of broadcast. However, computational support for such catching-up users has not been well explored. In particular, we are observing an emerging phenomenon in online media consumption experiences in which speculation plays a vital role. As the phenomenon of speculation implicitly assumes simultaneity in media consumption, there is a gap for catching-up users, who cannot directly appreciate the consumption experiences. This conversely suggests that there is potential for computational support to enhance the consumption experiences of catching-up users. Accordingly, we conducted a series of studies to pave the way for developing computational support for catching-up users. First, we conducted semi-structured interviews to understand how people are engaging with speculation during media consumption. As a result, we discovered the distinctive aspects of speculation-based consumption experiences in contrast to social viewing experiences sharing immediate reactions that have been discussed in previous studies. We then designed two prototypes for supporting catching-up users based on our quantitative analysis of Twitter data in regard to reaction- and speculation-based media consumption. Lastly, we evaluated the prototypes in a user experiment and, based on its results, discussed ways to empower catching-up users with computational supports in response to recent transformations in media consumption.
'A Library of People'
Authors: Israni Aarti , Ellison Nicole B. , Dillahunt Tawanna R.
Published: April 2021

Social media platforms provide access to informational and emotional resources that can enable low-income populations to further their socioeconomic mobility and cope with unexpected life demands. However, lack of both interpersonal trust and a sense of shared identity often prevent low-income individuals from eliciting resources from the diverse networks embedded in these platforms. Building on past research, we investigated factors that facilitated and deterred low-income members of the community-based non-profit organization Family Independence Initiative (FII) from seeking informational and emotional support from other members on the organization's social media platform, UpTogether. We found that despite participants' perceived shared identity, members primarily requested resources from other UpTogether members through offline interactions due to lack of interpersonal trust. We extend existing research on the limitations of shared identity and the role of interpersonal trust and social norms in facilitating resource-seeking interactions among strangers in low-income contexts. We suggest that social media platforms incorporate pseudonymous posting to facilitate relationship development and allow users to disclose their needs without revealing identifying information.
Being Regulated
Authors: Bidwell Nicola J. , Cibin Roberto , Linehan Conor , Maye Laura , Robinson Sarah
Published: April 2021

Licencing frameworks are embedded with sociotechnical imaginaries that limit the potential for networked technologies to make traditional media forms, like radio, more inclusive. We sought to refine and extend a platform, RootIO, which aims to enable diverse people to run small radio stations by using internet and mobile networks that avoid the costs of studios and specialist equipment. We situated design and refinement in the activities of groups that set up and ran four community stations in rural Romania and some Irish islands over three-years and found national regulations limited who articulated requirements. Activities in applying for, and complying with, licences shaped design priorities, embedded temporal demands, certain organisational structures and division of responsibilities, and assumptions about studios and professionalism. Indeed, small radio stations are subject to the same values as large media corporations that pursue market power. Regulatory frameworks are specific to nations and media form, yet our analysis illustrates that they impede designing platforms to widen inclusion by enacting broader sociotechnical imaginaries. We hope this reflection provokes discussion, in HCI and CSCW, about our responsibilities in engaging with the policies that shape possible futures.
A Social Media Study on Mental Health Status Transitions Surrounding Psychiatric Hospitalizations
Authors: Ernala Sindhu Kiranmai , Kashiparekh Kathan H. , Bolous Amir , Ali Asra , Kane John M. , Birnbaum Michael L. , De Choudhury Munmun
Published: April 2021

For people diagnosed with a mental illness, psychiatric hospitalization is one step in a long journey, consisting of clinical recovery such as removal of symptoms, and social reintegration involving resuming social roles and responsibilities, overcoming stigma and self-maintenance of the condition. Both clinical recovery and social reintegration need to go hand-in-hand for the overall well-being of individuals. However, research exploring social media for mental health has considered narrower, disjoint conceptualizations of people with mental illness - either as a patient or as a support-seeker. In this paper, we combine medical records with social media data of 254 consented individuals who have experienced a psychiatric hospitalization to address this gap. Adopting a theory-driven, Gaussian Mixture modeling approach, we provide a taxonomy of six heterogeneous behavioral patterns characterizing peoples' mental health status transitions around hospitalizations. Then we present an empirically derived framework, based on feedback from clinical researchers, to understand peoples' trajectories around clinical recovery and social reintegration. Finally, to demonstrate the utility of this taxonomy and the empirical framework, we assess social media signals that are indicative of individuals' reintegration trajectories post-hospitalization. We discuss the implications of combining peoples' clinical and social experiences in mental health care and the opportunities this intersection presents to post-discharge support and technology-based interventions for mental health.
Someone Is Wrong on the Internet
Authors: Baughan Amanda , Petelka Justin , Yoo Catherine Jaekyung , Lo Jack , Wang Shiyue , Paramasivam Amulya , Zhou Ashley , Hiniker Alexis
Published: April 2021

Good faith disagreements and healthy conflict management are essential to deliberative democracy and building strong relationships. People increasingly use computer-mediated communication during disagreements, which raises the question of how technology and design impact users' disagreements and relationships. We conducted a mixed-methods study with 257 participants to understand how design impacts disagreements across both existing social media platforms and novel, user-generated designs. Through interviews, a survey, and storyboard evaluations, we found that users often want to discuss challenging topics online but avoid them due to fear of hurting their relationships. Further, we found that users are most excited about design interventions that empower collective group action, humanize others online, or support channel switching to more private or socially rich contexts. Our results suggest that although technology has the potential to support users during conflict, it is also rife with possibilities to do more harm than good by diluting users' intentions, intruding, or backfiring. We introduce "interpersonal design,'' which centers relationships in the design process, an essential step in supporting users in the challenging task of arguing well.
"They Can Only Ever Guide"
Authors: Klug Daniel , Bogart Christopher , Herbsleb James D.
Published: April 2021

Unlike in commercial software development, open source software (OSS) projects do not generally have managers with direct control over how developers spend their time, yet for projects with large, diverse sets of contributors, the need exists to focus and steer development in a particular direction in a coordinated way. This is especially important for "infrastructure" projects, such as critical libraries and programming languages that many other people depend on. Some projects have taken the approach of borrowing planning tools that originated in commercial development, despite the fact that these techniques were designed for very different contexts, e.g. strong top-down control and profit motives. Little research has been done to understand how these practices are adapted to a new context. In this paper, we examine the Rust project's use of roadmaps: how has an important OSS infrastructure project adapted an inherently top-down tool to the freewheeling world of OSS? We find that because Rust's roadmaps are built in part by summarizing what motivated developers most prefer to work on, they are in some ways more a description of the motivated labor available than they are a directive that the community move in a particular direction. They allow the community to avoid wasting time on unpopular proposals by revealing that there will be little help in building them, and encouraging work on popular features by making visible the amount of consensus in those features. Roadmaps generate a collective focus without limiting the full scope of what developers work on: roadmap issues consume proportionally more effort than other issues, but constitute a minority of the work done (i.e issues and pull requests made) by both central and peripheral participants. They also create transparency among and beyond the community into what central contributors' plans are, and allow more rational decision-making by providing a way for evidence about community needs to be linked to decision-making.
How do People Train a Machine?
Authors: Sanchez Téo , Caramiaux Baptiste , Françoise Jules , Bevilacqua Frédéric , Mackay Wendy E.
Published: April 2021

Machine learning systems became pervasive in modern interactive technology but provide users with little, if any, agency with respect to how their models are trained from data. In this paper, we are interested in the way novices handle learning algorithms, what they understand from their behavior and what strategy they may use to "make it work". We developed a web-based sketch recognition algorithm based on Deep Neural Network (DNN), called Marcelle-Sketch, that end-users can train incrementally. We present an experimental study that investigate people's strategies and (mis)understandings in a realistic algorithm-teaching task. Our study involved 12 participants who performed individual teaching sessions using a think-aloud protocol. Our results show that participants adopted heterogeneous strategies in which variability affected the model performances. We highlighted the importance of sketch sequencing, particularly at the early stage of the teaching task. We also found that users' understanding is facilitated by simple operations on drawings, while confusions are caused by certain inherent properties of DNN. From these findings, we propose implications for design of IML systems dedicated to novices and discuss the socio-cultural aspect of this research.
Supporting Goal-Based Collaboration for Hospitalized Children
Authors: Zhao Yiran , Kim Yoojung , Apodaca Calvin , Casanova-Perez Regina , Haldar Shefali , Mishra Sonali R. , Dunbar Julia C. , Pollack Ari , Pratt Wanda
Published: April 2021

To increase patient engagement and facilitate patient-provider collaboration, tools that incorporate patients' goals into medical care plans are needed. However, few studies have explored how hospitalized patients set and share goals to communicate with their caregivers and clinical care teams. Even less is known for how pediatric patients experience sharing their goals during hospitalization. This paper presents a technology probe study to characterize how pediatric patients perceive goal-setting, and how goal-sharing affects their collaboration with their caregivers and clinical care teams. We conducted this study with 13 patient families and 4 clinicians. We found that goals set and shared by pediatric patients foster the patients' autonomy to participate in care decision-making, reveal the gaps of understanding between patients and caregivers, support the patients emotionally during patient and care team interaction, and convey the patients' personalities and preferences to the clinical care team. In addition, we recommend design opportunities to support the different ways that patients' goals can foster high-quality patient care. We also discuss how patients' goals impact the tension of shared decisional authority between patients and caregivers, and how goals support pediatric patients transition to self-care.
To Reuse or Not To Reuse?
Authors: Liu Michael Xieyang , Kittur Aniket , Myers Brad A.
Published: April 2021

As the amount of information online continues to grow, a correspondingly important opportunity is for individuals to reuse knowledge which has been summarized by others rather than starting from scratch. However, appropriate reuse requires judging the relevance, trustworthiness, and thoroughness of others' knowledge in relation to an individual's goals and context. In this work, we explore augmenting judgements of the appropriateness of reusing knowledge in the domain of programming, specifically of reusing artifacts that result from other developers' searching and decision making. Through an analysis of prior research on sensemaking and trust, along with new interviews with developers, we synthesized a framework for reuse judgements. The interviews also validated that developers express a desire for help with judging whether to reuse an existing decision. From this framework, we developed a set of techniques for capturing the initial decision maker's behavior and visualizing signals calculated based on the behavior, to facilitate subsequent consumers' reuse decisions, instantiated in a prototype system called Strata. Results of a user study suggest that the system significantly improves the accuracy, depth, and speed of reusing decisions. These results have implications for systems involving user-generated content in which other users need to evaluate the relevance and trustworthiness of that content.
Becoming Interdisciplinary
Authors: Soden Robert , Lallemant David , Hamel Perrine , Barns Karen
Published: April 2021

ICTs such as mapping platforms, algorithms, and databases are a central component of how society responds to the threats posed by disasters. However, these systems have come under increasing criticism in recent years for prioritizing technical disciplines over insights from the humanities and social science and failing to adequately incorporate the perspectives of at-risk or affected communities. This paper describes a unique month-long workshop that convened interdisciplinary experts to collaborate on projects related to flood data. In addition to findings about the practical accomplishment of interdisciplinary collaboration, we offer three interrelated contributions. First, we position interdisciplinarity as a critical practice and offer a detailed example of how we staged this process. We then discuss the benefits to interdisciplinarity of expanding the range of temporal logics normally deployed in design workshops. Finally, we reflect on approaches to evaluating the event's contributions toward sustained critique and reform of expert practice.
Join, Stay or Go?
Authors: Yao Zheng , Yang Diyi , Levine John M. , Low Carissa A. , Smith Tenbroeck , Zhu Haiyi , Kraut Robert E.
Published: April 2021

Online health communities (OHCs) have become important resources from which members can obtain social support. Since most benefits of OHCs are provided by its members, it is crucial that OHCs maintain a critical mass of active members. This paper examines temporal changes in members' participation in a cancer-orientedOHC, focusing on the changes in members' motivations and behavior as they transition from newcomers to other roles or when they ultimately leave the community. Our work used mixed methods, combining behavioral log analysis, automated content analysis, surveys and interviews. We found that shifts in members' motivations seemed to be driven by two sources: the internal dynamics common to becoming a member of most online communities and the external needs associated with their cancer journey. When members' disease-driven needs for support decreased, most members quit the site. The motivations of those who stayed shifted from receiving support to providing it to others in the community. As in many online communities, old-timers contributed the vast majority of content. However, they encountered challenges that threatened their commitment, including negative emotions related to other members' deaths, which led them to take leaves of absence from the community or to drop out permanently. Implications for the motivation changes ofOHC members are discussed.
Meeting Effectiveness and Inclusiveness in Remote Collaboration
Authors: Cutler Ross , Hosseinkashi Yasaman , Pool Jamie , Filipi Senja , Aichner Robert , Tu Yuan , Gehrke Johannes
Published: April 2021

A primary goal of remote collaboration tools is to provide effective and inclusive meetings for all participants. To study meeting effectiveness and meeting inclusiveness, we first conducted a large-scale email survey (N=4,425; after filtering N=3,290) at a large technology company (pre-COVID-19); using this data we derived a multivariate model of meeting effectiveness and show how it correlates with meeting inclusiveness, participation, and feeling comfortable to contribute. We believe this is the first such model of meeting effectiveness and inclusiveness. The large size of the data provided the opportunity to analyze correlations that are specific to sub-populations such as the impact of video. The model shows the following factors are correlated with inclusiveness, effectiveness, participation, and feeling comfortable to contribute in meetings: sending a pre-meeting communication, sending a post-meeting summary, including a meeting agenda, attendee location, remote-only meeting, audio/video quality and reliability, video usage, and meeting size. The model and survey results give a quantitative understanding of how and where to improve meeting effectiveness and inclusiveness and what the potential returns are. Motivated by the email survey results, we implemented a post-meeting survey into a leading computer-mediated communication (CMC) system to directly measure meeting effectiveness and inclusiveness (during COVID-19). Using initial results based on internal flighting we created a similar model of effectiveness and inclusiveness, with many of the same findings as the email survey. This shows a method of measuring and understanding these metrics which are both practical and useful in a commercial CMC system. By improving meeting effectiveness, companies can save significant time and money. Improving meeting inclusiveness is hypothesized to improve meeting effectiveness, but also improves the working environment and employee retention at organizations.
The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects
Authors: Geiger R. Stuart , Howard Dorothy , Irani Lilly
Published: April 2021

Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions. In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly.
"Positive Energy"
Authors: Lu Zhicong , Jiang Yue , Shen Chenxinran , Jack Margaret C. , Wigdor Daniel , Naaman Mor
Published: April 2021

The COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in a worldwide public health crisis. In such times of crisis, access to relevant and accurate information is critical. For many people in China, domestic social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo have become dominant sources of COVID-19-related information and news. People have to evaluate the trustworthiness of COVID-19-related information and make sharing decisions using platforms that have to contend with government censorship policies, astroturfers, and other government interventions. We interviewed 33 Chinese WeChat users to understand how individuals were seeking COVID-19-related information and how they identified and evaluated specific COVID-19-related misinformation. This work exposes how COVID-19-related content with "positive energy" was prevalent on social media in China. A significant number of interviewees exhibited a willingness to prioritize information valence over veracity when evaluating and sharing content with others. Further, the work revealed how Chinese citizens' understanding of information ecosystems played an important role in their attitudes towards censorship and official media, and also influenced their evaluation of domestic and international information during a global crisis.
Critical Affects
Authors: Su Norman Makoto , Lazar Amanda , Irani Lilly
Published: April 2021

Techlash encapsulates a breaking point reached with the critique of technology companies. To investigate how this whirlwind of rage, inquiry, and accountability affects the lives of tech workers, we conducted interviews with 19 tech workers. Our methodological approach and contribution adopts a style of writing and analysis associated with anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, where we focus on the affective textures of everyday life in an attempt to redirect the temptation to representational thinking to a slowed ethnographic practice. This paper dwells on the affects of tech workers facing critique and scrutiny. Through this approach, we find that emotional habitus conditions the possibilities of personal and political action and inaction in response to critique. By emotional habitus, we refer to the emotional dispositions honed among tech workers by tech culture's rationality and optimism. This habitus must shift if people are to access new ways of relating and acting. We argue for more fruitful attitudes and practices in relation to critique.
"I can show what I really like."
Authors: Cheng Ti-Chung , Li Tiffany Wenting , Chou Yi-Hung , Karahalios Karrie , Sundaram Hari
Published: April 2021

Surveys are a common instrument to gauge self-reported opinions from the crowd for scholars in the CSCW community, the social sciences, and many other research areas. Researchers often use surveys to prioritize a subset of given options when there are resource constraints. Over the past century, researchers have developed a wide range of surveying techniques, including one of the most popular instruments, the Likert ordinal scale, to elicit individual preferences. However, the challenge to elicit accurate and rich self-reported responses with surveys in a resource-constrained context still persists today. In this study, we examine Quadratic Voting (QV), a voting mechanism powered by the affordances of a modern computer and straddles ratings and rankings approaches, as an alternative online survey technique. We argue that QV could elicit more accurate self-reported responses compared to the Likert scale when the goal is to understand relative preferences under resource constraints. We conducted two randomized controlled experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk, one in the context of public opinion polling and the other in a human-computer interaction user study. Based on our Bayesian analysis results, a QV survey with a sufficient amount of voice credits, aligned significantly closer to participants' incentive-compatible behaviors than a Likert scale survey, with a medium to high effect size. In addition, we extended QV's application scenario from typical public policy and education research to a problem setting familiar to the CSCW community: a prototypical HCI user study. Our experiment results, QV survey design, and QV interface serve as a stepping stone for CSCW researchers to further explore this surveying methodology in their studies and encourage decision-makers from other communities to consider QV as a promising alternative.
Towards Accessible Remote Work
Authors: Das Maitraye , Tang John , Ringland Kathryn E. , Piper Anne Marie
Published: April 2021

Working from home has become a mainstream work practice in many organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. While remote work has received much scholarly and public attention over the years, we still know little about how people with disabilities engage in remote work from their homes and what access means in this context. To understand and rethink accessibility in remote work, the present paper studies work-from-home practices of neurodivergent professionals who have Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, learning disabilities (e.g., dyslexia) and psychosocial disabilities (e.g., anxiety, depression). We report on interviews with 36 US-based neurodivergent professionals who have been working from home during the pandemic. Our findings reveal that while working from home, neurodivergent professionals create accessible physical and digital workspaces, negotiate accessible communication practices, and reconcile tensions between productivity and wellbeing. Our analysis reconsiders what access means in remote work for neurodivergent professionals and offers practical insights for inclusive work practices and accessibility improvements in remote collaboration tools.
Political Ecologies of Participation
Authors: Rossitto Chiara
Published: April 2021

This paper presents an unexpected story about the outcomes of a civic project. CSCW and HCI scholarship has argued for a long-term perspective to assess civic projects and to understand how local communities appropriate - or maybe disregard - the material outcomes of these types of interventions. Nevertheless, it is still unclear how to interpret the outcomes of such projects and how to make sense of their social impact on the wider contexts they are bound to. This article draws on the notion of "political ecologies of participation" to illustrate: i) how outcomes of socially engaged projects circulate through communities and can be appropriated independently of the research inquiries they stem from; and ii) how, through such processes, impact is reconfigured as issues are added to shared concerns. The paper sets out by analyzing the entanglement of actors, meanings (e.g., values, narratives, opinions) and forms of participation that were configured throughout the transformation observed. Attention is then drawn to their political qualities, including their inherent openness and their capacity to produce change locally. The paper introduces four analytical sensitivities illustrating how thinking with political ecologies of participation can help CSCW research focus on the longer processes whereby impact can be configured.
Formation of Social Ties Influences Food Choice
Authors: Gligorić Kristina , White Ryen W. , Kiciman Emre , Horvitz Eric , Chiolero Arnaud , West Robert
Published: April 2021

Nutrition is a key determinant of long-term health, and social influence has long been theorized to be a key determinant of nutrition. It has been difficult to quantify the postulated role of social influence on nutrition using traditional methods such as surveys, due to the typically small scale and short duration of studies. To overcome these limitations, we leverage a novel source of data: logs of 38 million food purchases made over an 8-year period on the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) university campus, linked to anonymized individuals via the smartcards used to make on-campus purchases. In a longitudinal observational study, we ask: How is a person's food choice affected by eating with someone else whose own food choice is healthy vs. unhealthy? To estimate causal effects from the passively observed log data, we control confounds in a matched quasi-experimental design: we identify focal users who at first do not have any regular eating partners but then start eating with a fixed partner regularly, and we match focal users into comparison pairs such that paired users are nearly identical with respect to covariates measured before acquiring the partner, where the two focal users' new eating partners diverge in the healthiness of their respective food choice. A difference-in-differences analysis of the paired data yields clear evidence of social influence: focal users acquiring a healthy-eating partner change their habits significantly more toward healthy foods than focal users acquiring an unhealthy-eating partner. We further identify foods whose purchase frequency is impacted significantly by the eating partner's healthiness of food choice. Beyond the main results, the work demonstrates the utility of passively sensed food purchase logs for deriving insights, with the potential of informing the design of public health interventions and food offerings, especially on university campuses.
Hobbling: The Effects of Proactive Policing and Mass Imprisonment on Children's Education
Authors: Justice Benjamin
Published: April 2021

Researchers have written a good deal in the last two decades about the relationship between public education and criminal justice as a pipeline by which public school practices correlate with or cause increased lifetime risk for incarceration for Black and Latinx youth. This article flips the script of the school-to-prison pipeline metaphor by reversing the question. What are the effects of criminal justice on public schooling? Reviewing recent social science research from multiple disciplines on policing and incarceration, this article describes the relationship of criminal justice to public education as hobbling, a social process by which the massification of policing and incarceration systematically compromises the ability of target demographics of American children to enjoy their rights to a free and appropriate public education.
Reducing Ambipolar Conduction in a Graphene Tunneling Field Effect Transistor (GTFET) via Bandgap Engineering
Authors: Mazrouei Mina , Dideban Daryoosh , Jooypa Hamed
Published: April 2021

Tunneling field effect devices suffer from two main problems comprised of low on-state current and intrinsic ambipolar conduction. In the present work, we propose a graphene tunneling field effect transistor (GTFET), that uses graphene nanoribbon (GNR) with a narrow bandgap (0.1 eV) in the source and another GNR with a wider bandgap (0.7 eV) in the drain and channel regions. This structure improves on-state current, reduces ambipolar conduction and increases the ION/IOFF. We also examine the effect of important parameters including doping concentration, drain voltage, bandgap, gate work function, and dielectric thickness on the electrical performance of the proposed device. Moreover, we compare the digital and analog performance of the proposed structure with two other GTFETs having GNRs with wide or narrow bandgaps across the source, channel and drain regions. The proposed GTFET shows a very high on-state to off-state current ratio (1E11) and thus, it is superior for digital applications. In addition, by calculating the transconductance (g

m
) and output conductance (g

d
) we find that the proposed structure has a higher intrinsic gain compared to the two other structures. Therefore, it is more suitable for analogue applications in comparison with two other structures.
TESOT: a teaching modality targeting the learning obstacles in global medical education
Authors: Wang Xiaoran , Liu Xiao-Yu , Jia Shuwei , Jiao Runsheng , Zhang Yunhong , Tang Liyong , Ni Xiaoli , Zhu Hui , Zhang Fengmin , Parpura Vladimir , Wang Yu-Feng
Published: April 2021

In higher education, it is a great challenge for instructors to teach international medical students (IMSs) efficiently. These students usually have different learning obstacles and learning style preferences from domestic students. Thus it is necessary to use teaching modalities targeting the specific characteristics of IMSs. Accordingly, we have developed a teaching modality composed of classical teacher-centered approach (TCA), enriched with components of student-centered approach (SCA) and online interactions targeting the learning characteristics of IMSs, which we defined as TESOT (an acronym made of the underlined words' initials). Aside from the online interactions that provide both answers to questions raised by students and guidance throughout a course, this modality contains additional in-classroom components (i.e., pre-lecture quiz, student-led summary, and post-lecture quiz). The effectiveness of this modality was tested in the nervous system module of the Physiology course for IMSs. The final exam scores in the nervous system module in the year taught with TESOT were higher than those earned by students taught with a classical TCA modality in preceding 2 yr. The improvement of teaching effectiveness is attributable to increasing communication, bridging course contexts, and meeting diverse learning style preferences. These results indicate that TESOT as an effective teaching modality is useful for enhancing efficiency of teaching IMSs.
Sirtuin 1 is not required for contraction-stimulated glucose uptake in mouse skeletal muscle
Authors: Kang Ji H. , Park Ji E. , Dagoon Jason , Masson Stewart W. C. , Merry Troy L. , Bremner Shannon N. , Dent Jessica R. , Schenk Simon
Published: April 2021

Here, we demonstrate that glucose uptake in response to ex vivo contractions is not affected by the loss of sirtuin 1 (SIRT1) deacetylase function in muscle, regardless of sex or muscle type. Interestingly, however, similar to studies on insulin-stimulated glucose uptake, we demonstrate that contraction-stimulated glucose uptake is robustly higher in female compared with the male skeletal muscle. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of sex-based differences in contraction-stimulated glucose uptake in skeletal muscle.
Influence of habitual aerobic and resistance exercise on cerebrovascular reactivity in healthy young adults
Authors: Corkery Adam T. , Howery Anna J. , Miller Kathleen B. , Barnes Jill N.
Published: April 2021

Habitual exercise may influence the cerebral hemodynamics, as it affects other variables of vascular health in this population. We report that habitual exercise training does not influence cerebrovascular reactivity in young adults, as there were no significant differences between aerobic-trained, resistance-trained, and untrained individuals. Despite this finding, the mode of habitual exercise training had a moderate influence on resting cerebral hemodynamics such that resistance-trained adults had greater cerebrovascular conductance compared with aerobic-trained adults.
Effects of opioids on respiration assessed by a contact-free unconstraint respiratory monitor with load cells under the bed in patients with advanced cancer
Authors: Hasegawa Makoto , Nozaki-Taguchi Natsuko , Shono Koyo , Mizuno Yuko , Takai Hiromichi , Sato Yasunori , Isono Shiroh
Published: April 2021

Through usage of a novel contact-free unconstraint vital sign monitoring system with four load cells placed under the bed legs allowing continuous measurements of respiratory changes of center of gravity on the bed, this study is the first to assess detailed respiratory characteristics throughout day and night periods without interference of daily activities in patients with advanced cancer receiving opioids. Respiratory rhythm irregularity is a predominant specific feature of opioid dose-dependent respiratory depression particularly in female patients with advanced cancer.
In vivo assessment of changes to canine airway smooth muscle following bronchial thermoplasty with OR-OCT
Authors: Adams David C. , Holz Jasmin A. , Szabari Margit V. , Hariri Lida P. , Mccrossan Andrew F. , Manley Christopher J. , Fleury Sean , O’Shaughnessy Seamus , Weiner Jason , Suter Melissa J.
Published: April 2021

The inability to assess ASM in vivo is a significant hurdle in advancing our understanding of airway diseases such as asthma, as well as evaluating potential treatments and therapies. In this study, we demonstrate that endoscopic OR-OCT can be used to accurately measure changes to ASM structure following BT. Our results demonstrate how this technology could occupy an important role in asthma treatments targeting ASM.
Essential Oils Derived from Momordica charantia Seeds Exhibited Antiulcer Activity against Hydrogen Chloride/Ethanol and Indomethacin
Authors: Abu Bakar Nurul 'Ain , Hakim Abdullah Muhammad Nazrul , Lim Vuanghao , Yong Yoke Keong
Published: April 2021

Momordica charantia (MC) is popular for its medicinal uses especially for treating diabetic-related complications. However, the antiulcer activity of essential oil derived from the seeds has not been systematically studied. This study aims to evaluate the gastroprotective activities of essential oil derived from the seed of MC induced by hydrochloride acid/ethanol (HCl/EtOH) and indomethacin and pylorus-ligation model. Gastric ulceration was induced by oral administration of HCl/EtOH solution or indomethacin on day 7 after animals have been pretreated with testing compounds. The first group received just distilled water and the second group received ranitidine (100 mg/kg). Groups 3, 4, and 5 received 10, 50, and 100 mg/kg of essential oil based on their body weight (10 mL/kg), respectively. Macroscopically, pretreatment of essential oil extracted from MC significantly decreased ulceration induced by HCl/EtOH and indomethacin in vivo. Microscopically, essential oil also significantly suppressed the formation of edema, epithelial disruption, and mucosa erosions. Moreover, essential oil significantly elevated the pH without decreasing the total acidity of the gastric juice and was able to increase the amount of adherent mucus compared to control. Current results provide scientific basis to the ethno-pharmacological usage of the MC in preventing ulcer formation induced by HCl/EtOH and indomethacin.
Classification of COVID-19 Chest CT Images Based on Ensemble Deep Learning
Authors: Li Xiaoshuo , Tan Wenjun , Liu Pan , Zhou Qinghua , Yang Jinzhu
Published: April 2021

Novel coronavirus pneumonia (NCP) has become a global pandemic disease, and computed tomography-based (CT) image analysis and recognition are one of the important tools for clinical diagnosis. In order to assist medical personnel to achieve an efficient and fast diagnosis of patients with new coronavirus pneumonia, this paper proposes an assisted diagnosis algorithm based on ensemble deep learning. The method combines the Stacked Generalization ensemble learning with the VGG16 deep learning to form a cascade classifier, and the information constituting the cascade classifier comes from multiple subsets of the training set, each of which is used to collect deviant information about the generalization behavior of the data set, such that this deviant information fills the cascade classifier. The algorithm was experimentally validated for classifying patients with novel coronavirus pneumonia, patients with common pneumonia (CP), and normal controls, and the algorithm achieved a prediction accuracy of 93.57%, sensitivity of 94.21%, specificity of 93.93%, precision of 89.40%, and F1-score of 91.74% for the three categories. The results show that the method proposed in this paper has good classification performance and can significantly improve the performance of deep neural networks for multicategory prediction tasks.
Hyperspectral Band Selection Based on Adaptive Neighborhood Grouping and Local Structure Correlation
Authors: Wang Xin , Wang Guoqiang
Published: April 2021

Band selection is a direct and effective dimension reduction method and is one of the hotspots in hyperspectral remote sensing research. However, most of the methods ignore the orderliness and correlation of the selected bands and construct band subsets only according to the number of clustering centers desired by band sequencing. To address this issue, this article proposes a band selection method based on adaptive neighborhood grouping and local structure correlation (ANG‐LSC). An adaptive subspace method is adopted to segment hyperspectral image cubes in space to avoid obtaining highly correlated subsets. Then, the product of local density and distance factor is utilized to sort each band and select the desired cluster center number. Finally, through the information entropy and correlation analysis of bands in different clusters, the most representative bands are selected from each cluster. Regarding evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed method, comparative experiments with the state‐of‐the‐art methods are conducted on three public hyperspectral datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and robustness of ANG‐LSC.
Walnut Supplementation Restores the SIRT1‐FoxO3a‐MnSOD/Catalase Axis in the Heart, Promotes an Anti‐Inflammatory Fatty Acid Profile in Plasma, and Lowers Blood Pressure on Fructose‐Rich Diet
Authors: Bošković Maja , Živković Maja , Korićanac Goran , Stanišić Jelena , Zec Manja , Krga Irena , Stanković Aleksandra
Published: April 2021

The benefits of walnut (Juglans regia) consumption for metabolic health are known, but the molecular background underlying their putative antioxidant and anti‐inflammatory/immunomodulatory effects is underexplored. We assessed that walnut supplementation (6 weeks) reverted unfavorable changes of the SIRT1/FoxO3a/MnSOD/catalase axis in the heart induced by fructose‐rich diet (FRD). Intriguingly, Nox4 was increased by both FRD and walnut supplementation. FRD increased the cytosolic fraction and decreased the nuclear fraction of the uniquely elucidated ChREBP in the heart. The ChREBP nuclear fraction was decreased in control rats subjected to walnuts. In addition, walnut consumption was associated with a reduction in systolic BP in FRD and a decrease in fatty acid AA/EPA and AA/DHA ratios in plasma. In summary, the protective effect of walnut supplementation was detected in male rats following the fructose‐induced decrease in antioxidative/anti‐inflammatory capacity of cardiac tissue and increase in plasma predictors of low‐grade inflammation. The current results provide a novel insight into the relationship between nutrients, cellular energy homeostasis, and the modulators of inflammatory/immune response in metabolic syndrome, emphasizing the heart and highlighting a track for translation into nutrition and dietary therapeutic approaches against metabolic disease.
Study on Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos Suppression of Active Magnetic Bearing Systems Based on Synchronization
Authors: Chang Shun-Chang
Published: April 2021

This study employed a variety of nonlinear dynamic analysis techniques to explore the complex phenomena associated with a nonlinear mathematical model of an active magnetic bearing (AMB) system. The aim was to develop a method with which to assume control over chaotic behavior. The bifurcation diagram comprehensively explicates rich nonlinear dynamics over a range of parameter values. In this study, we examined the complex nonlinear behaviors of AMB systems using phase portraits, Poincaré maps, and frequency spectra. Furthermore, estimates of the largest Lyapunov exponent based on the properties of synchronization confirmed the occurrence of chatter vibration indicative of chaotic motion. Thus, the proposed continuous feedback control approach based on synchronization characteristics eliminates chaotic oscillations. Finally, some simulation results demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed control scheme.
Coverless Steganography Based on Motion Analysis of Video
Authors: Tan Yun , Qin Jiaohua , Xiang Xuyu , Zhang Chunhu , Wang Zhangdong
Published: April 2021

With the rapid development of interactive multimedia services and camera sensor networks, the number of network videos is exploding, which has formed a natural carrier library for steganography. In this study, a coverless steganography scheme based on motion analysis of video is proposed. For every video in the database, the robust histograms of oriented optical flow (RHOOF) are obtained, and the index database is constructed. The hidden information bits are mapped to the hash sequences of RHOOF, and the corresponding indexes are sent by the sender. At the receiver, through calculating hash sequences of RHOOF from the cover video, the secret information can be extracted successfully. During the whole process, the cover video remains original without any modification and has a strong ability to resist steganalysis. The capacity is investigated and shows good improvement. The robustness performance is prominent against most attacks such as pepper and salt noise, speckle noise, MPEG-4 compression, and motion JPEG 2000 compression. Compared with the existing coverless information hiding schemes based on images, the proposed method not only obtains a good trade-off between hiding information capacity and robustness but also can achieve higher hiding success rate and lower transmission data load, which shows good practicability and feasibility.
Tooth Surface Modification for Helical Gear Pairs considering Mesh Misalignment Tolerance
Authors: Han Guosheng , Yuan Bing , Qiao Guan
Published: April 2021

Mesh misalignment in mating the gear tooth surface is common and difficult to be determined accurately because of system deformation and bearing clearances, as well as manufacturing and assembly errors. It is not appropriate to consider the mesh misalignment as a constant value or even completely ignore it in the tooth surface modification design. Aiming to minimize the expectation and variance of static transmission error (STE) fluctuations in consideration of mesh misalignment tolerance, a multiobjective optimization model of tooth surface modification parameters is proposed through coupling the NSGA‐II algorithm and an efficient loaded tooth contact analysis (LTCA) model. The modified tooth flank of helical gear pairs is defined using 6 design variables which are related to profile modification, lead modification, and bias modification. The influences of mesh misalignment on time‐dependent meshing stiffness (TDMS) and STE of unmodified and modified helical gear pairs are investigated. Then, the dynamic transmission error (DTE) of modified helical gears in consideration of mesh misalignment is discussed. The results indicate that the designed modified tooth surface shows good robustness to mesh misalignment.