Generalized h-index for Disclosing Latent Facts in Citation Networks

What is the value of a scientist and its impact upon the scientific thinking? How can we measure the prestige of a journal or of a conference? The evaluation of the scientific work of a scientist and the estimation of the quality of a journal or conference has long attracted significant interest, due to the benefits from obtaining an unbiased and fair criterion. Although it appears to be simple, defining a quality metric is not an easy task. To overcome the disadvantages of the present metrics used for ranking scientists and journals, J.E. Hirsch proposed a pioneering metric, the now famous h-index. In this article, we demonstrate several inefficiencies of this index and develop a pair of generalizations and effective variants of it to deal with scientist ranking and with publication forum ranking. The new citation indices are able to disclose trendsetters in scientific research, as well as researchers that constantly shape their field with their influential work, no matter how old they are. We exhibit the effectiveness and the benefits of the new indices to unfold the full potential of the h-index, with extensive experimental results obtained from DBLP, a widely known on-line digital library.Comment: 19 pages, 17 tables, 27 figure

The fossil record of early tetrapods: worker effort and the end-Permian mass extinction

It is important to understand the quality of the fossil record of early tetrapods (Tetrapoda, minus Lissamphibia and Amniota) because of their key role in the transition of vertebrates from water to land, their dominance of terrestrial faunas for over 100 million years of the late Palaeozoic and earlyMesozoic, and their variable fates during the end−Permian mass extinction. The first description of an early tetrapod dates back to 1824, and since then discoveries have occurred at a rather irregular pace, with peaks and troughs corresponding to some of the vicissitudes of human history through the past two centuries. As expected, the record is dominated by the well−sampled sedimentary basins of Europe and North America, but finds from other continents are increasing rapidly. Comparisons of snapshots of knowledge in 1900, 1950, and 2000 show that discovery of new species has changed the shape of the species−level diversification curve, contrary to earlier studies of family−level taxa. There is, however, little evidence that taxon counts relate to research effort (as counted by numbers of publications), and there are no biasing effects associated with differential study of different time intervals through the late Palaeozoic and Mesozoic. In fact, levels of effort are apparently not related to geological time, with no evidence that workers have spent more time on more recent parts of the record. In particular, the end−Permian mass extinction was investigated to determine whether diversity changes through that interval might reflect worker effort: it turns out that most records of early tetrapod taxa (when corrected for duration of geological series) occur in the Lower Triassic

The Cowl - v.83 - n.21 - Mar 28, 2019

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Vol. 83 No. 21 - March 28, 2019. 24 pages

The Effects and Implications of Vaping on the Youth Population

Youth today have adopted the “cessation tool” known as the e-cigarette as a form of recreational activity. An examination of the history of tobacco use and prevention enables a fuller understanding of the problem presented by this product. Youth around the country are addicted to the sensation of vaping and are largely unaware of the associated health dangers. To address this growing issue among adolescents, vaping and its impact on the youth population should be carefully examined by health professionals. Although an overall solution has not yet been determined, there are several ways to impede the spread of the vaping epidemic from a public health standpoint

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FUNCTION AND DESIGN OF SPACES IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES THROUGH THE DIGITAL ERA

Along with technology development in all fields of contemporary life, activities come development regarding architectural requirements. The functions, spaces usage, types of buildings, etc. have changed. Certain architectural elements and spaces have disappeared while other functions have either disappeared or been minimized. The change has also exceeded the architectural level to the urban level, affecting the urban planning elements, sizes, and decision-making processes. Developments in technology exert a great influence on communication as well as data entry, saving, and archiving; which, in return, has had a direct impact on libraries’ spaces, operating systems, functions, and user types. As a result, the traditional space requirements and old architectural theories should be revised. This research aims to study the theoretical requirements of architectural academic libraries and the implications of technology development for spaces, functions, and types of users in the last ten years, through analyzing ten university libraries that were recently established in Europe and the USA that use the latest technologies. The outcome is applied to a case study: the architectural academic library of Beirut Arab University on Debbieh campus. The research finds that physical libraries will not be replaced by digital libraries easily, although the extensive use of technology has led to continuous changes in library spaces. The technological revolution in the field of mobile phones and applications which facilitated the accessibility of information and the possibility of searching and indexing has boosted the trend in changing library collections from physical to digital phenomena. In addition, the ideas of shared spaces and Pop-up Campuses, where libraries are completely virtual and universities are without boundaries, will also affect these traditional library-related theories. It is hoped that the results and recommendations will assist the development of a new approach and method regarding library design, which may consequently affect university buildings design, especially since the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing us toward social distancing and online applications

A Comparative Plague Study of Cacao Fungal Disease in Cacao Pods Within Monocultures and Indigenous Agroforests in Ecuador’s Napo Province

This study analyzes the composition of three major fungal diseases in Theobroma cacao fruits compared between monocultures and chakra agroforests in the Napo province of Ecuador with the goal of noting similarities and differences in the disease composition between the two systems, as well as investigate possible variation within this poorly understood category of agroforest to better structure future studies. Cacao pods on sampled trees were counted and fungal infections identified visually and by touch. Chakra systems were selected in the communities of Cinco de Enero and Seis de Marzo to the Southwest of Tena, Ecuador. Monoculture data was collected from Chonta Punta, Ecuador, East of Tena. Black pod rot (Phytophthera spp.) was the most prevalent disease affecting cacao pods in chakra systems, followed closely by frosty pod rot (Moniliopthera roreri). Monocultures exhibited significantly lower proportions of black pod rot and instead were dominated by infections of frosty pod rot. Witches’ broom (Moniliopthera perniciosa) was the least present in both. Overall, monocultures had a much lower rate of infection than chakra systems, likely explained by differences in management intensity, lower rainfall, and differences in cacao. More than half of young pods in both systems were lost due to cherelle wilt, a poorly understood physiological condition with tenuous ties to fungal disease. Subvarieties of cacao nacional exhibited little difference in disease composition, with similar slight differences being observed along an age gradient of cacao trees. Overall, these findings suggest that chakra cacao systems in Tena’s climate suffer greater losses to disease than neighboring monocultures to the East under and would benefit from continued research on responsible factors and the increased application of cultural management practices

Learning Tuple Probabilities

Learning the parameters of complex probabilistic-relational models from labeled training data is a standard technique in machine learning, which has been intensively studied in the subfield of Statistical Relational Learning (SRL), but---so far---this is still an under-investigated topic in the context of Probabilistic Databases (PDBs). In this paper, we focus on learning the probability values of base tuples in a PDB from labeled lineage formulas. The resulting learning problem can be viewed as the inverse problem to confidence computations in PDBs: given a set of labeled query answers, learn the probability values of the base tuples, such that the marginal probabilities of the query answers again yield in the assigned probability labels. We analyze the learning problem from a theoretical perspective, cast it into an optimization problem, and provide an algorithm based on stochastic gradient descent. Finally, we conclude by an experimental evaluation on three real-world and one synthetic dataset, thus comparing our approach to various techniques from SRL, reasoning in information extraction, and optimization