Development, access and engagement of a digital study app for women with menstrual pain

Background: Smartphone apps could support patients with self-care while reducing human-to-human contact. A smartphone app previously developed by our study team demonstrated that self-acupressure could achieve reduction in menstrual pain in comparison to usual care. Modernization and adaption of the app and a new trial were needed to keep the knowledge up to date and relevant for current implementation. Objective: The aim of this study was to develop an app-based pragmatic randomized controlled trial (pRCT) for women with menstrual pain that is feasible, to describe the conceptual and technical development process, and to evaluate the user access and user engagement data of this study app. Methods: Based on the previous study and app an adapted study and reengineered app were developed in a multidisciplinary context. The app uses the ResearchKit framework and behaviour change techniques (BCTs) with strict consideration of data protection. User access was estimated by the number of recruited participants over time. User engagement was assessed by the user conversion rate (numbers and proportions of downloads as well as consented and recruited participants) and the baseline survey completion rate. Results: The pRCT and the study app were successfully launched. The app was accessible and participants were well-engaged without external advertising. Within 9 months, the app was downloaded 1458 times and 328 participants were recruited from the German App Store. A total of 98.27% (5157/5248) of the app-based baseline questions were answered. Conclusions: Conducting an app study requires multidisciplinary effort. The resulting study app allowed easy access and active engagement after recruitment via the App Store. Future research is needed to further investigate the determinants of user engagement.Hintergrund: Smartphone-Apps könnten Patienten bei der Selbsthilfe unterstützen und gleichzeitig den Mensch-zu-Mensch-Kontakte reduzieren. Eine frühere Smartphone-App, die von unserem Studienteam zur Unterstützung der Selbstakupressur entwickelt wurde, konnte bereits eine nachhaltige Reduktion von Menstruationsschmerzen im Vergleich zu Normalversorgung erreichen. Die Modernisierung und Anpassung der App und eine neue Studie wurden notwendig, um das Wissen für die aktuelle Implementierung aktuell und relevant zu halten. Zielsetzung: Das Ziel dieser Arbeit war es, eine praktikable App-basierte randomisierte kontrollierte pragmatische Studie (pRCT) für Frauen mit Menstruationsschmerzen zu entwickeln, den konzeptionellen und technischen Entwicklungsprozess zu beschreiben sowie den Nutzer*innenzugang und die Daten zum Nutzer*innen-Engagement der Studien-App zu evaluieren. Methoden: Basierend auf der vorherigen Studie und App eine adaptierte Studie und überarbeitete App wurden in einem multidisziplinären entwickelt. Die App nutzt das ResearchKit-Framework und Verhaltensänderungstechniken (Behaviour-Change-Techniques, BCTs) unter strikter Berücksichtigung des Datenschutzes. Der Nutzer*innenzugang wurde anhand der Anzahl der rekrutierten Teilnehmer im Laufe der Zeit geschätzt. Das Nutzer*innen-Engagement wurde anhand der Konversionsrate (Anzahl und Anteil der heruntergeladenen, eingewilligten und rekrutierten Teilnehmer) und der Ausfüllrate der Baseline-Umfrage bewertet. Ergebnisse: Der pragmatische RCT und die Studien-App wurden erfolgreich gestartet. Die App war zugänglich und wurde von den Teilnehmer*innen ohne externe Werbung gut angenommen. Innerhalb von 9 Monaten wurde die App 1458 Mal heruntergeladen und 328 Studienteilnehmerinnen wurden aus dem deutschen App Store rekrutiert. Insgesamt wurden 98,27% (5157/5248) der App-basierten Baseline-Fragen beantwortet. Schlussfolgerungen：Die Durchführung einer App-Studie erfordert einen multidisziplinären Aufwand. Die resultierende Studien-App konnte einen einfachen Zugang und ein aktives Engagement für selbstständige Nutzer*innen ermöglichen. Weitere Forschung ist erforderlich, um die Determinanten des Nutzer*innen-Engagements weiter zu untersuchen

Superconducting cosmic strings as sources of cosmological fast radio bursts

In this paper we calculate the radio burst signals from three kinds of structures of superconducting cosmic strings. By taking into account the observational factors including scattering and relativistic effects, we derive the event rate of radio bursts as a function of redshift with the theoretical parameters $G\mu$ and $\mathcal{I}$ of superconducting strings. Our analyses show that cusps and kinks may have noticeable contributions to the event rate and in most cases cusps would dominate the contribution, while the kink-kink collisions tend to have secondary effects. By fitting theoretical predictions with the normalized data of fast radio bursts, we for the first time constrain the parameter space of superconducting strings and report that the parameter space of $G\mu \sim [10^{-14}, 10^{-12}]$ and $\mathcal{I} \sim [10^{-1}, 10^{2}] ~ \rm{GeV}$ fit the observation well although the statistic significance is low due to the lack of observational data. Moreover, we derive two types of best fittings, with one being dominated by cusps with a redshift $z = 1.3$, and the other dominated by kinks at the range of the maximal event rate.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, 1 table; references update

Internet Finance: A Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis

Internet finance has gained growing popularity in internet plus environment. While various problems have emerged, and hindered the sustainable growth of internet finance industry. Thus, a summary of existent research and directions for future study are expected. However, few comprehensive literature reviews has been published. This paper presents a thorough bibliometric and network analysis following a systematic literature review methodology. The analysis begins by identifying 331 published studies in Web of Science. Prolific authors, institutions and nations are identified by rigorous bibliometric tools. Based on citation and co-citation analysis, influential papers from different time periods are identified. Established and emergent research clusters are identified for topological analysis by coupling analysis. Future research opportunities are pointed out

Title-Guided Encoding for Keyphrase Generation

Keyphrase generation (KG) aims to generate a set of keyphrases given a document, which is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP). Most previous methods solve this problem in an extractive manner, while recently, several attempts are made under the generative setting using deep neural networks. However, the state-of-the-art generative methods simply treat the document title and the document main body equally, ignoring the leading role of the title to the overall document. To solve this problem, we introduce a new model called Title-Guided Network (TG-Net) for automatic keyphrase generation task based on the encoder-decoder architecture with two new features: (i) the title is additionally employed as a query-like input, and (ii) a title-guided encoder gathers the relevant information from the title to each word in the document. Experiments on a range of KG datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models with a large margin, especially for documents with either very low or very high title length ratios.Comment: AAAI 1

A Brief Discussion on Wide Area Security and Stability Control of Power System Based on Response

At present, with the continuous development of China's social economy, the scale of domestic power system has been further expanded, which also makes the structure of China's power grid system gradually become more complex[1]. Therefore, it is necessary to continuously increase the single unit capacity of power equipment. The purpose is to make the single unit capacity match the operation of power system, so as to improve the operation performance of power system. Besides, it can also increase economic benefits. Based on this, this paper expounds the concept and control mode of power system stability. Then the key technology of wide area security and stability control of power system based on response is analyzed from four aspects. They are wide area dynamic feature information extraction, disturbed trajectory prediction, system stability discrimination and stability control. Finally, the practical application is discussed in detail. It hopes that the power sectors can improve the stability control level of power system wide area security

Non-GAAP Tax Rate: Do Managers Use It to Achieve Earnings Targets?

In this study, we examine tax reporting in a non-GAAP setting. We focus on non-GAAP tax rates, which we define as the tax rates applied to non-GAAP exclusions (hereafter, exclusions). Using detailed hand-collected data, we find that non-GAAP tax rates are systematically lower (higher) when exclusions are income-increasing (income-decreasing), leading to higher after-tax non-GAAP earnings. In addition, using GAAP effective tax rate (hereafter, GAAP ETR) and the statutory tax rate as proxies for the non-discretionary portion of the non-GAAP tax rate, we find robust evidence that managers opportunistically use non-GAAP tax rates to achieve after-tax non-GAAP earnings targets. Finally, we document that firm-reported after-tax non-GAAP earnings are less persistent for future GAAP earnings, compared to non-GAAP earnings calculated using GAAP ETR or the statutory tax rate. The lower persistence of firm-reported non-GAAP earnings implies that non-GAAP tax rates are sometimes too high or too low, thus contaminating the after-tax non-GAAP earnings with mostly transitory exclusion items