Data Mining in Electronic Commerce

Modern business is rushing toward e-commerce. If the transition is done properly, it enables better management, new services, lower transaction costs and better customer relations. Success depends on skilled information technologists, among whom are statisticians. This paper focuses on some of the contributions that statisticians are making to help change the business world, especially through the development and application of data mining methods. This is a very large area, and the topics we cover are chosen to avoid overlap with other papers in this special issue, as well as to respect the limitations of our expertise. Inevitably, electronic commerce has raised and is raising fresh research problems in a very wide range of statistical areas, and we try to emphasize those challenges.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000204 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Institutionalized Child Abuse: The Troubled Teen Industry

The “troubled teen industry” is an industry providing behavioral modification treatment to youths that promises to keep children safe, but by design is a breeding grounds for institutionalized child abuse through legal loopholes. By analyzing the legal shortcomings and alleged abuses, Yasmin Younis stresses the importance of heavy regulation in order to provide the necessary treatment some of these children need.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1071/thumbnail.jp

Effect of Methotrexate on the Liver Enzymes and Lipid Profile in Adult Female Albino Mice

Methotrexate (MTX) was used for treatment of malignancies and now is widely used in treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. In this research the evaluation of the effects of MTX on some liver enzymes and lipid profile was studied. Twenty four adult female mice divided into three groups (8 mice each). The first two groups were treated with MTX while the third group was used as a control. MTX was intraperitoneally given at 50 µg/ml and 75 µg/ml to the first and second groups respectively for 35 days ,whereas the control group was intraperitoneally injected with normal saline. The results showed a significant (

Neurobiologie de la toxicomanie : avancées récentes et nouvelles stratégies d’intervention

Pendant longtemps, la toxicomanie a été associée sur le plan neurobiologique à la modulation à court terme de différents systèmes de neurotransmission. Les stratégies de traitement ciblaient conséquemment les récepteurs auxquels se lie directement la substance étant source d’abus. Ces approches ont contribué à améliorer le soulagement des symptômes d’intoxication et de sevrage, tout en favorisant l’accès à des services psychosociaux adaptés. Toutefois, les données soulignent, chez certains sous-groupes d’individus, l’efficacité parfois mitigée de ces interventions visant à diminuer de façon soutenue la consommation et les symptômes associés à la toxicomanie, particulièrement le craving. Les avancées récentes en neurosciences ont permis de mieux comprendre les mécanismes neurobiologiques expliquant la vulnérabilité à la rechute. D’une conception essentiellement dopaminergique et striatale, les théories biologiques de la toxicomanie intègrent maintenant la contribution des systèmes glutamatergique, opioïde et endocannabinoïde, de même que l’interaction entre ces différentes composantes au sein des structures corticales et sous-corticales. L’intérêt semble avoir migré des phénomènes neurobiologiques à court terme vers la modulation prolongée du fonctionnement des structures en jeu dans la toxicomanie. Ce changement de paradigmes a mené à l’émergence de plusieurs stratégies thérapeutiques visant à diminuer les risques de rechute en modulant de façon plus spécifique les circuits neuronaux dont le fonctionnement est altéré par la prise chronique de substances. Les systèmes endocannabinoïde et glutamatergique, notamment, apparaissent comme une cible de choix pour le traitement du craving et la prévention de la rechute. Le présent article a pour objectif de résumer certains des plus récents courants en matière de conceptualisation neurobiologique de la toxicomanie de même que les nouvelles pistes de traitement en découlant.For years, the neurobiology of drug addiction was characterized by the short-term modulation of different neurotransmission systems, therapeutic strategies directly targeting the receptors that are bound by substances. These approaches have helped to improve the treatment of drug intoxication and withdrawal, while promoting access to a broad array of psychosocial services. However, the data highlight the mixed effectiveness of these interventions to induce a sustained decrease in consumption and other symptoms of addiction, especially craving, among subgroups of individuals. Recent advances in neuroscience have led to a growing understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the vulnerability to relapse and other behaviors associated with addiction. The primarily dopaminergic and striatal hypothesis of these phenomena has been replaced by a theory incorporating the contribution of the glutamatergic, endocannabinoid and opioid systems, as well as the interaction between these various components within cortical and sub-cortical structures. The focus has moved from the short-term neurobiological changes to the long-lasting modulation of the structures involved in addiction. This paradigm shift led to the emergence of several therapeutic strategies that aim at reducing the risk of relapse by modulating specific neural circuits whose functions are altered by chronic substance use. The endocannabinoid and glutamate systems, in particular, are promising targets for the treatment of craving and relapse. This article aims to summarize some of the latest trends in the neurobiology of addiction as well as new avenues of treatment.Durante mucho tiempo la toxicomanía estuvo asociada en el plano neurobiológico con la modulación a corto plazo de diferentes sistemas de neurotransmisión. Las estrategias de tratamiento apuntaban, por consiguiente, a los receptores que se vinculan directamente con la sustancia que es el origen del abuso. Estos enfoques contribuyeron a mejorar el alivio de los síntomas de intoxicación y abstinencia, favoreciendo al mismo tiempo el acceso a servicios psicosociales adaptados. Sin embargo, en ciertos grupos de individuos, los datos destacan la eficacia a veces mitigada de estas intervenciones destinadas a disminuir de manera continua el consumo y los síntomas relacionados con la toxicomanía, particularmente el craving. Los recientes progresos de la neurociencia permitieron comprender mejor los mecanismos neurobiológicos que explican la vulnerabilidad ante la recaída. De concepción esencialmente dopaminérgica y estratial, las teorías biológicas de la toxicomanía integran ahora la contribución de los sistemas glutamatérgico, opiáceo y endocanabinoide, así como la interacción entre estos diferentes componentes dentro de las estructuras corticales y subcorticales. El interés parece haberse desplazado de los fenómenos neurobiológicos de corto plazo hacia la modulación prolongada del funcionamiento de las estructuras que están en juego en la toxicomanía. Este cambio de paradigmas condujo al surgimiento de numerosas estratégicas terapéuticas destinadas a disminuir los riesgos de recaída al modular más específicamente los circuitos neuronales cuyo funcionamiento está alterado por el consumo crónico de drogas. Los sistemas endocanabinoide y glutamatérgico, principalmente, aparecen como un objetivo a privilegiar para el tratamiento del craving y la prevención de la recaída. El presente artículo está destinado a resumir algunas de las más recientes corrientes en materia de conceptualización neurobiológica de la toxicomanía y las nuevas vías de tratamiento a las que dichas corrientes dan origen

Combining Storytelling and Web Archives

PDF of a powerpoint presentation from an Old Dominion University Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) Department Colloquium, November 13, 2015. Also available on Slideshare.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/computerscience_presentations/1007/thumbnail.jp

Storytelling for Summarizing Collections in Web Archives

PDF of a powerpoint presentation from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Spring 2016 Membership Meeting in San Antonio, Texas, April 5, 2016. Also available on Slideshare.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/computerscience_presentations/1005/thumbnail.jp

Characteristics of Social Media Stories

An emerging trend in social media is for users to create and publish stories , or curated lists of web resources with the purpose of creating a particular narrative of interest to the user. While some stories on the web are automatically generated, such as Facebook’s Year in Review , one of the most popular storytelling services is Storify , which provides users with curation tools to select, arrange, and annotate stories with content from social media and the web at large. We would like to use tools like Storify to present automatically created summaries of archival collections. To support automatic story creation, we need to better understand as a baseline the structural characteristics of popular (i.e., receiving the most views) human-generated stories. We investigated 14,568 stories from Storify, comprising 1,251,160 individual resources, and found that popular stories (i.e., top 25 % of views normalized by time available on the web) have the following characteristics: 2/28/1950 elements (min/median/max), a median of 12 multimedia resources (e.g., images, video), 38 % receive continuing edits, and 11 % of the elements are missing from the live web

Tools Managing Seed URls (Detecting Off-Topic Pages)

PDF of a powerpoint presentation from the Columbia University Web Archiving Collaboration: New Tools and Models Conference, in New York, New York, June 4-5, 2015. Also available on Slideshare.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/computerscience_presentations/1034/thumbnail.jp