Social media: a new way of public and political communication in digital media

Today, social media are the new way of public and political communication in digital marketing. Companies or organizations are no longer the exclusive owners of the relation of consumers with their products/services; instead, the survival of the organizations depends of the effective utilization of the social media. New web technologies have made it easy for anyone to create and distribute their own content.  A tweet can be viewed by virtually millions of people for free, and advertisers don’t have to pay publishers huge sums of money to embed their messages. More consumers are on social media than ever before, and every second a company is not engaged is a wasted opportunity [1]. Consumers trust other people to provide recommendations about products and services in a very active way and it is important to know how and why social media influence organizations. This study analyzes through a literature review the importance of public and political communication through social media and proposes a model of business for successful marketing strategies

Whey protein supplement as a source of microencapsulated PUFA-rich vegetable oils

Whey protein supplements (WPS) intake has been increasing worldwide as they are mainly used to improve overall athletic performance. Adding other bioactives such as polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) may be an alternative to help fulfill nutritional needs. Microencapsulation is able to protect PUFA-rich oils from oxidation, but important aspects of particle production and their influence on food properties must be evaluated. This study aimed to develop WPS with microencapsulated green coffee and walnut oils using stearic acid as a wall material. Oxidative stability (differential scanning calorimetry) of the oils increased (from 82 ± 4 to 110 ± 10 kJ mol−1 for green coffee oil and from 90 ± 5 to 149 ± 1 kJ mol−1 for walnut oil) after encapsulation and WPS rheological properties were not affected by the microcapsules (p 0.05). Sensory analysis of the supplement containing microencapsulated green coffee oil showed a lower sensory preference than the blank sample, but no difference was found with the blank sample in the case of walnut oil (p 0.05). The encapsulation strategy used to produce an enriched WPS was efficient in protecting the oils from oxidative degradation.This study was financed in part by the Coordenaç~ao de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001. This work was financially supported by Associate Laboratory LSRE-LCM (UIDB/50020/2020) and CIMO (UIDB/00690/2020) funded by national funds through FCT/MCTES.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Body appreciation around the world: Measurement invariance of the Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2) across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age.

The Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2) is a widely used measure of a core facet of the positive body image construct. However, extant research concerning measurement invariance of the BAS-2 across a large number of nations remains limited. Here, we utilised the Body Image in Nature (BINS) dataset - with data collected between 2020 and 2022 - to assess measurement invariance of the BAS-2 across 65 nations, 40 languages, gender identities, and age groups. Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis indicated that full scalar invariance was upheld across all nations, languages, gender identities, and age groups, suggesting that the unidimensional BAS-2 model has widespread applicability. There were large differences across nations and languages in latent body appreciation, while differences across gender identities and age groups were negligible-to-small. Additionally, greater body appreciation was significantly associated with higher life satisfaction, being single (versus being married or in a committed relationship), and greater rurality (versus urbanicity). Across a subset of nations where nation-level data were available, greater body appreciation was also significantly associated with greater cultural distance from the United States and greater relative income inequality. These findings suggest that the BAS-2 likely captures a near-universal conceptualisation of the body appreciation construct, which should facilitate further cross-cultural research. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe