How We Express Ourselves Freely: Censorship, Self-censorship, and Anti-censorship on a Chinese Social Media

Censorship, anti-censorship, and self-censorship in an authoritarian regime have been extensively studies, yet the relationship between these intertwined factors is not well understood. In this paper, we report results of a large-scale survey study (N = 526) with Sina Weibo users toward bridging this research gap. Through descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and regression analysis, we uncover how users are being censored, how and why they conduct self-censorship on different topics and in different scenarios (i.e., post, repost, and comment), and their various anti-censorship strategies. We further identify the metrics of censorship and self-censorship, find the influence factors, and construct a mediation model to measure their relationship. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for democratic social media design and future censorship research.Comment: iConference 2023 has accepte

Estimation of precipitable water from the thermal infrared hyperspectral data

Inst. Electr. Electron. Eng. Geosci.; Remote Sens. Soc. (IEEE GRSS)<span class="MedBlackText">Total precipitable water (TPW) is an important atmospheric parameter in many applications. A method was proposed to estimate TPW from thermal infrared hyperspectral data. First, 21 channel groups were selected to retrieve TPW. Then, two indices, namely, the difference- and the ratio-depth in each channel group, were used as the measurement of the water vapor absorption. By multivariate regression, the relationship between the TPW and the indices was established. Finally, this relationship was applied to the simulated thermal infrared hyperspectral data. Results showed that the root mean square error (RMSE) of the model is 0.102 g&middot;cm^-2, and the relative error is 8.1 %. The proposed method needs to be further refined in the future work, including the complete elimination of the Earth's emission in the retrieval. </span