Building domain-specific web collections for scientific digital libraries: A meta-search enhanced focused crawling method

Collecting domain-specific documents from the Web using focused crawlers has been considered one of the most important strategies to build digital libraries that serve the scientific community. However, because most focused crawlers use local search algorithms to traverse the Web space, they could be easily trapped within a limited sub-graph of the Web that surrounds the starting URLs and build domain-specific collections that are not comprehensive and diverse enough to scientists and researchers. In this study, we investigated the problems of traditional focused crawlers caused by local search algorithms and proposed a new crawling approach, meta-search enhanced focused crawling, to address the problems. We conducted two user evaluation experiments to examine the performance of our proposed approach and the results showed that our approach could build domain-specific collections with higher quality than traditional focused crawling techniques

SpidersRUs: Automated development of vertical search engines in different domains and languages

In this paper we discuss the architecture of a tool designed to help users develop vertical search engines in different domains and different languages. The design of the tool is presented and an evaluation study was conducted, showing that the system is easier to use than other existing tools. Categories and Subject Descriptor

Building Knowledge Management System for Researching Terrorist Groups on the Web

Nowadays, terrorist organizations have found a cost-effective resource to advance their courses by posting high-impact Web sites on the Internet. This alternate side of the Web is referred to as the “Dark Web.” While counterterrorism researchers seek to obtain and analyze information from the Dark Web, several problems prevent effective and efficient knowledge discovery: the dynamic and hidden character of terrorist Web sites, information overload, and language barrier problems. This study proposes an intelligent knowledge management system to support the discovery and analysis of multilingual terrorist-created Web data. We developed a systematic approach to identify, collect and store up-to-date multilingual terrorist Web data. We also propose to build an intelligent Web-based knowledge portal integrated with advanced text and Web mining techniques such as summarization, categorization and cross-lingual retrieval to facilitate the knowledge discovery from Dark Web resources. We believe our knowledge portal provide counterterrorism research communities with valuable datasets and tools in knowledge discovery and sharing

Disclosure of sexual orientation to health professionals in China: results from an online cross-sectional study: Tang W et al.

Background: Many men who have sex with men (MSM) in China are “in the closet.” The low rate of disclosure may impact sexual behaviours, testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and diseases transmission. This study examines factors associated with overall sexual orientation disclosure and disclosure to healthcare professionals

HIV self-testing among men who have sex with men in China: a qualitative implementation research study.

BACKGROUND: HIV self-testing (HIVST) may expand HIV testing, but there have been few pilot programmes among men who have sex with men (MSM). This purpose of this study was to evaluate HIVST implementation among MSM in China using qualitative methods. METHODS: We undertook semistructured interviews among MSM and those organising HIVST programmes for MSM. Purposive sampling method was used to ensure men with different HIV serostatuses, ages and HIVST frequencies were included. Men were recruited from MSM community-based organisations and a local HIV clinic. An implementation science framework was used to interpret the findings. Two individuals used a standard code-based methodology to identify themes. RESULTS: Forty-two MSM and six stakeholders were interviewed. Our data showed many MSM and stakeholders preferred HIVST to facility-based testing. Most men reported that HIVST empowered MSM and informed sexual decision making. Many men noted that decreasing the HIVST price may increase demand. Some men noted that HIVST could be scaled up through social media and by modifying bulky packaging. Minimal adverse events were reported. CONCLUSIONS: HIVST may expand HIV testing and promote empowerment of MSM. Minimal adverse outcomes were noted, but further implementation research is needed

Comparing the effectiveness of a crowdsourced video and a social marketing video in promoting condom use among Chinese men who have sex with men: a study protocol

Crowdsourcing has been used to spur innovation and increase community engagement in public health programmes. Crowdsourcing is the process of giving individual tasks to a large group, often involving open contests and enabled through multisectoral partnerships. Here we describe one crowdsourced video intervention in which a video promoting condom use is produced through an open contest. The aim of this study is to determine whether a crowdsourced intervention is as effective as a social marketing intervention in promoting condom use among high-risk men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender male-to-female (TG) in China

Significance of Thymosin β4 and Implication of PINCH-1-ILK-α-Parvin (PIP) Complex in Human Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Myocardial remodeling is a major contributor in the development of heart failure (HF) after myocardial infarction (MI). Integrin-linked kinase (ILK), LIM-only adaptor PINCH-1, and α-parvin are essential components of focal adhesions (FAs), which are highly expressed in the heart. ILK binds tightly to PINCH-1 and α-parvin, which regulates FA assembly and promotes cell survival via the activation of the kinase Akt. Mice lacking ILK, PINCH or α-parvin have been shown to develop severe defects in the heart, suggesting that these proteins play a critical role in heart function. Utilizing failing human heart tissues (dilated cardiomyopathy, DCM), we found a 2.27-fold (p<0.001) enhanced expression of PINCH, 4 fold for α-parvin, and 10.5 fold (p<0.001) for ILK as compared to non-failing (NF) counterparts. No significant enhancements were found for the PINCH isoform PINCH-2 and parvin isoform β-parvin. Using a co-immunoprecipitation method, we also found that the PINCH-1-ILK-α-parvin (PIP) complex and Akt activation were significantly up-regulated. These observations were further corroborated with the mouse myocardial infarction (MI) and transaortic constriction (TAC) model. Thymosin beta4 (Tβ4), an effective cell penetrating peptide for treating MI, was found to further enhance the level of PIP components and Akt activation, while substantially suppressing NF-κB activation and collagen expression—the hallmarks of cardiac fibrosis. In the presence of an Akt inhibitor, wortmannin, we show that Tβ4 had a decreased effect in protecting the heart from MI. These data suggest that the PIP complex and activation of Akt play critical roles in HF development. Tβ4 treatment likely improves cardiac function by enhancing PIP mediated Akt activation and suppressing NF-κB activation and collagen-mediated fibrosis. These data provide significant insight into the role of the PIP-Akt pathway and its regulation by Tβ4 treatment in post-MI

Multilingual Web Retrieval: An Experiment in English–Chinese Business Intelligence

As increasing numbers of non-English resources have become available on the Web, the interesting and important issue of how Web users can retrieve documents in different languages has arisen. Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), the study of retrieving information in one language by queries expressed in another language, is a promising approach to the problem. Cross-language information retrieval has attracted much attention in recent years. Most research systems have achieved satisfactory performance on standard Text REtrieval Conference (TREC)collections such as news articles, but CLIR techniques have not been widely studied and evaluated for applications such as Web portals. In this article, the authors present their research in developing and evaluating a multilingual English–Chinese Web portal that incorporates various CLIR techniques for use in the business domain. A dictionary-based approach was adopted and combines phrasal translation, co-occurrence analysis, and pre- and posttranslation query expansion. The portal was evaluated by domain experts, using a set of queries in both English and Chinese. The experimental results showed that co-occurrence-based phrasal translation achieved a 74.6 % improvement in precision over simple word-byword translation. When used together, pre- and posttranslation query expansion improved the performance slightly, achieving a 78.0 % improvement over the baseline word-by-word translation approach. In general, applying CLIR techniques in Web applications shows promise

Digital Government Portal: A Tool for Digital Government Research

this paper. While the Web has provided a convenient means for sharing research ideas, digital government researchers often find themselves facing the problem of information overload (Blair et al., 1985), in which a search on a general-purpose search engine such as Google results in thousands of hits. In addition, the diversity of research perspectives and applications areas has resulted in terminology and vocabulary differences. Researchers in different disciplines use different terminologies to describe their findings, and user search terms may be different from the indexing terminologies used in databases. Information sources and quality on the web are equally diverse (Lawrence &amp; Giles, 1999), forcing researchers to go to multiple information sources (Web sites, search engines, online academic databases, etc.) and conduct significant manual analysis to identify quality, time-critical information. The lack of an integrated, &quot;onestop shopping&quot; service is an urgent problem to be resolve