From Micro to Macro: Uncovering and Predicting Information Cascading Process with Behavioral Dynamics

Cascades are ubiquitous in various network environments. How to predict these cascades is highly nontrivial in several vital applications, such as viral marketing, epidemic prevention and traffic management. Most previous works mainly focus on predicting the final cascade sizes. As cascades are typical dynamic processes, it is always interesting and important to predict the cascade size at any time, or predict the time when a cascade will reach a certain size (e.g. an threshold for outbreak). In this paper, we unify all these tasks into a fundamental problem: cascading process prediction. That is, given the early stage of a cascade, how to predict its cumulative cascade size of any later time? For such a challenging problem, how to understand the micro mechanism that drives and generates the macro phenomenons (i.e. cascading proceese) is essential. Here we introduce behavioral dynamics as the micro mechanism to describe the dynamic process of a node's neighbors get infected by a cascade after this node get infected (i.e. one-hop subcascades). Through data-driven analysis, we find out the common principles and patterns lying in behavioral dynamics and propose a novel Networked Weibull Regression model for behavioral dynamics modeling. After that we propose a novel method for predicting cascading processes by effectively aggregating behavioral dynamics, and propose a scalable solution to approximate the cascading process with a theoretical guarantee. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on a large scale social network dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly outperform other state-of-the-art baselines in multiple tasks including cascade size prediction, outbreak time prediction and cascading process prediction.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure

Governance Policy Evaluation in the United States during the Pandemic: Nonpharmaceutical Interventions or Else?

Scientific evidence suggests that nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) effectively curb the spread of COVID-19 before a pharmaceutical solution. Implementing these interventions also significantly affects regular socioeconomic activities and practices of social, racial, and political justice. Local governments often face conflicting goals during policymaking. Striking a balance among competing goals during a global pandemic is a fine science of governance. How well state governments consume the scientific evidence and maintain such a balance remains less understood. This study employs a set of Bayesian hierarchical models to evaluate how state governments in the United States use scientific evidence to balance the fighting against the spread of COVID-19 disease and socioeconomic, racial, social justice, and other demands. We modeled the relationships between five NPI strategies and COVID-19 caseload information and used the modeled result to perform a balanced governance evaluation. The results suggest that governmental attitude and guidance effectively guide the public to fight back against a global pandemic. The more detailed spatiotemporally varying coefficient process model produces 612,000 spatiotemporally varying coefficients, suggesting all measures sometimes work somewhere. Summarized results indicate that states emphasizing NPIs fared well in curbing the spread of COVID-19. With over 1 million deaths due to COVID-19 in the United States, we feel the balance scale likely needs to tip toward preserving human lives. Our evaluation of governance policies is hence based on such an argument. This study aims to provide decision support for policymaking during a national emergency

Stereotyping, AffiliAtion, And Self-Stereotyping of UnderrepreSented groUpS in the SAleS force

This study adds theoretical and managerial insights to the sales literature regarding the unfortunate but prevalent issue of stereotyping in sales by supervisors toward underrepresented groups of sales employees. Specifically, we examine (1) the self-evaluative, social, and emotional consequences of being stereotyped by a supervisor, and (2) the moderating role of employees' self-construal (i.e., the employee's level of independence versus interdependence) as it relates to their responses toward a supervisor who holds stereotypical expectations. The results suggest that when a sales supervisor endorses stereotypical views, more interdependent (versus independent) sales employees will likely affiliate more with, and experience fewer negative emotions toward, the supervisor. The results also suggest that sales employees' self-construal moderates the impact of intentions to affiliate with the supervisor on positive stereotypical traits (that are valued in the sales context) but not negative stereotypical traits. While not every sales employee comes from an underrepresented background, every company is interested in the success of their underrepresented sales employees. And, simply being interested in hiring underrepresented employees is not enough. Rather, firms need to understand how to effectively manage diversity and facilitate strong sales supervisor-employee relationships. This research provides such understanding. linyun W. yan

Anthropogenic influence on 2018 summer persistent heavy and daily extreme rainfall in central western China

Anthropogenic forcing has reduced the probability of summer persistent heavy rainfall in central western China similar to 2018 by ~47%, but increased that of daily extremes by ~1.5 times, based on HadGEM3-GA6 ensembles

Observation of Dirac hierarchy in three-dimensional acoustic topological insulators

Dirac cones (DCs) play a pivotal role in various unique phenomena ranging from massless electrons in graphene to robust surface states in topological insulators (TIs). Recent studies have theoretically revealed a full Dirac hierarchy comprising an eightfold bulk DC, a fourfold surface DC, and a twofold hinge DC, associated with a hierarchy of topological phases including first-order to third-order three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators, using the same 3D base lattice. Here, we report the first experimental observation of the Dirac hierarchy in 3D acoustic TIs. Using acoustic measurements, we unambiguously reveal that lifting of multifold DCs in each hierarchy can induce two-dimensional (2D) topological surface states with a fourfold DC in a first-order 3D TI, one-dimensional (1D) topological hinge states with a twofold DC in a second-order 3D TI, and zero-dimensional (0D) topological corner states in a third-order 3D TI. Our work not only expands the fundamental research scope of Dirac physics, but also opens up a new route for multidimensional robust wave manipulation

Immunogenicity and safety of an inactivated enterovirus 71 vaccine coadministered with trivalent split-virion inactivated influenza vaccine: A phase 4, multicenter, randomized, controlled trial in China

BackgroundFew data exist on the immunogenicity and safety of an inactivated enterovirus 71 vaccine (EV71 vaccine) coadministered with trivalent split-virion inactivated influenza vaccine (IIV3) in infants.MethodsThis trial was a phase 4, randomized, controlled trial. Infants aged 6-11 months were eligible, with no history of hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) and no history of EV71 vaccine or any influenza vaccine. Eligible infants were randomly assigned to EV71+IIV3 group, EV71 group or IIV3 group. Blood samples were collected on day 0 and 56.ResultsBetween September 2019 and June 2020, 1151 infants met eligibility criteria and 1134 infants were enrolled. 1045 infants were included in the per-protocol population, including 347 in the EV71+IIV3 group, 343 in the EV71 group, and 355 in the IIV3 group. The seroconversion rate (98.56% vs 98.54%; seroconversion rates difference of 0.02% [95% CI: 0.70-0.98]) and GMT (419.05 vs 503.72; GMT ratio of 0.83 [95% CI 0.70 - 0.98]) of EV71 neutralizing antibodies in the EV71+IIV3 group was not inferior to those in the EV71 group. The non-inferiority results for influenza virus antibodies (A/H1N1, A/H3N2 and B) showed that the seroconversion rates and GMTs of the EV71+IIV3 group were non-inferiority to those of the IIV3 group. Systemic and local adverse event rates were similar between groups. None of serious adverse events (SAEs) were related to vaccination.ConclusionsCoadministration of the EV71 vaccine with IIV3 was safe and did not interfere with immunogenicity. These findings support a viable immunization strategy for infants with the EV71 vaccine coadministered with IIV3 in China. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT04091880

Adenovirus-mediated stromal cell-derived factor-1 alpha gene transfer improves cardiac structure and function after experimental myocardial infarction through angiogenic and antifibrotic actions

Stromal cell-derived factor 1α (SDF-1) is not only a major chemotactic factor, but also an inducer of angiogenesis. The effects of SDF-1α on the left ventricular remodeling in a rat myocardial infarction (MI) model were analyzed. Myocardial infarction was induced by ligation of the left coronary artery in rats. 0.5 × 1010 pfu/ml AdV-SDF-1 or 0.5 × 1010 pfu/ml Adv-LacZ were immediately injected into the infarcted myocardium, 120 μl cell-free PBS were injected into the infarcted region or the myocardial wall in control, and sham group, respectively. We found that AdV-SDF-1 group had higher LVSP and ±dP/dtmax, lower LVEDP compared to control or Adv-LacZ group. The number of c-Kit+ stem cells, and gene expression of SDF-1, VEGF and bFGF were obviously increased, which was associated with reduced infarct size, thicker left ventricle wall, greater vascular density and cardiocytes density in infarcted hearts of AdV-SDF-1 group. Furthermore, the expression of collagen type I and type III mRNA, and collagen accumulation in the infarcted area was lower, which was associated with decreased TGF-β1, TIMP-1 and TIMP-2 expression in AdV-SDF-1 group. Conclusion: SDF-1α could improve cardiac structure and function after Myocardial infarction through angiogenic and anti-fibrotic actions

How Stereotype Targets Perceive Positive Stereotypes

It is well established that the portrayal of negative stereotypes in the media is frowned upon, but it is less clear how positive stereotypes are viewed, particularly by stereotype targets. We find that an individuals' level of identification with the group influences how they perceive positive stereotyping of their ingroup. High identifiers, who are more sensitive to threats to their group, interpret the portrayal of positive stereotypes more negatively than low identifiers, and we find that this interpretation leads to more negative evaluations of advertisements that promote these positive stereotypes