Events and Controversies: Influences of a Shocking News Event on Information Seeking

It has been suggested that online search and retrieval contributes to the intellectual isolation of users within their preexisting ideologies, where people's prior views are strengthened and alternative viewpoints are infrequently encountered. This so-called "filter bubble" phenomenon has been called out as especially detrimental when it comes to dialog among people on controversial, emotionally charged topics, such as the labeling of genetically modified food, the right to bear arms, the death penalty, and online privacy. We seek to identify and study information-seeking behavior and access to alternative versus reinforcing viewpoints following shocking, emotional, and large-scale news events. We choose for a case study to analyze search and browsing on gun control/rights, a strongly polarizing topic for both citizens and leaders of the United States. We study the period of time preceding and following a mass shooting to understand how its occurrence, follow-on discussions, and debate may have been linked to changes in the patterns of searching and browsing. We employ information-theoretic measures to quantify the diversity of Web domains of interest to users and understand the browsing patterns of users. We use these measures to characterize the influence of news events on these web search and browsing patterns

Career Transitions and Trajectories: A Case Study in Computing

From artificial intelligence to network security to hardware design, it is well-known that computing research drives many important technological and societal advancements. However, less is known about the long-term career paths of the people behind these innovations. What do their careers reveal about the evolution of computing research? Which institutions were and are the most important in this field, and for what reasons? Can insights into computing career trajectories help predict employer retention? In this paper we analyze several decades of post-PhD computing careers using a large new dataset rich with professional information, and propose a versatile career network model, R^3, that captures temporal career dynamics. With R^3 we track important organizations in computing research history, analyze career movement between industry, academia, and government, and build a powerful predictive model for individual career transitions. Our study, the first of its kind, is a starting point for understanding computing research careers, and may inform employer recruitment and retention mechanisms at a time when the demand for specialized computational expertise far exceeds supply.Comment: To appear in KDD 201

Physicochemical characterisation of inhalation grade lactose after the removal of intrinsic fines

Lactose is a common excipient in Dry Powder Inhaler (DPI) formulations, used as a carrier for the micronized drug particles. The presence of intrinsic lactose fines in the formulation influences its performance and their role and interactions between the lactose carrier and the micronized drug is still not fully understood. As a first step towards this investigation, “clean” lactose, with removed fines, was produced via wet decantation. Ethanol and isopropyl alcohol have been used in wet decantation, successfully removing lactose fines from the surface of the coarse particles. Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) was employed to show that the powders maintained their crystalline character. Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) showed tomahawk-shaped particles in all the powders and some surface alteration occurring after decantation. An airflow titration method using laser diffraction (LDA) allowed the estimation of the removal of fines as well as the particle size distributions, while the non-polar and the polar components of the surface energy of the powders were calculated via Inverse Gas Chromatography-Surface Energy Analysis (iGC-SEA). As both solvents successfully removed fines, we propose the addition of isopropyl alcohol in the list of organic solvents suitable for this purpose.Peer reviewe

VoG: Summarizing and Understanding Large Graphs

How can we succinctly describe a million-node graph with a few simple sentences? How can we measure the "importance" of a set of discovered subgraphs in a large graph? These are exactly the problems we focus on. Our main ideas are to construct a "vocabulary" of subgraph-types that often occur in real graphs (e.g., stars, cliques, chains), and from a set of subgraphs, find the most succinct description of a graph in terms of this vocabulary. We measure success in a well-founded way by means of the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle: a subgraph is included in the summary if it decreases the total description length of the graph. Our contributions are three-fold: (a) formulation: we provide a principled encoding scheme to choose vocabulary subgraphs; (b) algorithm: we develop \method, an efficient method to minimize the description cost, and (c) applicability: we report experimental results on multi-million-edge real graphs, including Flickr and the Notre Dame web graph.Comment: SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) 201

The concealed presence of the other: the imprint of European literature on the production of the first Greek novel Leander

“Some people could accuse us of having copied from Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis or from Goethe’s Werther, but, if you read these books, they witness in our favour” writes Panayotis Soutsos in the introduction of Leander, defending his novel. Nevertheless, we find passages where the author closely imitates those texts, endorsing the idea of a creative translation. This is however a provocation; he throws caution to the wind, challenging the reader to reveal his deceit and thereby match his own knowledge. Though Soutsos’s writing points to some specific models, he conceals his greatest influence, French literature. The more extended passages, adapted and embedded in his text, come from Lamartine’s poetry and Chateaubriand’s novels. Is this a voluntary or a subconscious failure to quote his source? To what extent can attentive reading affect the creative procedure? These questions lead us to the problem: how do Modern Greeks position themselves in respect to Europe? The Greek Enlightenment claims Ancient Greek culture back from Europe, integrating it into the Greek tradition. As Koraes points out, now is the time for Europeans to pay their debt, by transposing the culture they received to the Modern Greeks. In a way, the text reflects these ideas by appropriating discourse. Europe is the Other, cherished and detested. It is therefore present in absentia, haunting creation, emerging throughout the Greek text

Fault detection of helicopter gearboxes using the multi-valued influence matrix method

In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of a pattern classifying fault detection system that is designed to cope with the variability of fault signatures inherent in helicopter gearboxes. For detection, the measurements are monitored on-line and flagged upon the detection of abnormalities, so that they can be attributed to a faulty or normal case. As such, the detection system is composed of two components, a quantization matrix to flag the measurements, and a multi-valued influence matrix (MVIM) that represents the behavior of measurements during normal operation and at fault instances. Both the quantization matrix and influence matrix are tuned during a training session so as to minimize the error in detection. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this detection system, it was applied to vibration measurements collected from a helicopter gearbox during normal operation and at various fault instances. The results indicate that the MVIM method provides excellent results when the full range of faults effects on the measurements are included in the training set

Cysticercosis of the neck - A report of unusual case

Cysticerosis in humans is caused by the larvae of the tapeworm Taenia solium, which is normally found in the subcutaneous tissue, brain and eyes. In this report, the rare case of cysticercosis of neck is demonstrated. The diagnosis was performed based on the gross and microscopic examination which T. solium larvae are found