Detecting Incentivized Review Groups With Co-Review Graph

Online reviews play a crucial role in the ecosystem of nowadays business (especially e-commerce platforms), and have become the primary source of consumer opinions. To manipulate consumers’ opinions, some sellers of e-commerce platforms outsource opinion spamming with incentives (e.g., free products) in exchange for incentivized reviews. As incentives, by nature, are likely to drive more biased reviews or even fake reviews. Despite e-commerce platforms such as Amazon have taken initiatives to squash the incentivized review practice, sellers turn to various social networking platforms (e.g., Facebook) to outsource the incentivized reviews. The aggregation of sellers who request incentivized reviews and reviewers who seek incentives forms incentivized review groups. In this paper, we focus on the incentivized review groups in e-commerce platforms. We perform the data collections from various social networking platforms, including Facebook, WeChat, and Douban. A measurement study of incentivized review groups is conducted with regards to group members, group activities, and products. To identify the incentivized review groups, we propose a new detection approach based on co-review graphs. Specifically, we employ the community detection method to find the suspicious communities from co-review graphs. We also build a “gold standard” dataset from the data we collected, which contains the information of reviewers who belong to incentivized review groups. We utilize the “gold standard” dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of our detection approach

What Scale of Audience a Campaign can Reach in What Price on Twitter?

Abstract—Campaigns with commercial and spam purposes have flooded the Twitter community. To understand what scale of audience a campaign could reach, we first perform a measurement study by collecting a dataset of about 10 million tweets via streaming API and one million search tweets for targeting topics, as well as 37,313 user accounts that are suspended by Twitter. From the dataset, we extract a spam campaign and a commercial promotion campaign accompanied by spamming activities. Then, we characterize the way in which a campaign can reach its audience, especially revealing the features that dominate the information diffusion. After identifying the accounts suspended by Twitter, we further inspect to what extent these features can help to weed out spam accounts. Also, the retrospective inspection is useful to uncover the tactics that malicious accounts utilize to avoid being suspended. Using the measurement results, we then develop a theoretical framework based on an epidemic model to investigate the dynamics of spammers and victims whom spammers reach in the spam campaign. With the theoretical framework, we conduct a benefit-cost analysis of the spam campaign, shedding lights on how to restrict the benefit of the spam campaign. I

Twist angle effects on the dynamic response of in-plane-switching liquid crystal displays

Twist angle effect on the response time of in-plane-switching liquid crystal displays are analyzed. We propose a device configuration whose top and bottom boundary liquid crystal layers are symmetric to each other with respect to the electric field direction. The analytical results of this device configuration indicate that the response time is improved at least 4X faster than that of a conventional in-plane-switching twisted-nematic mode and normal in-plane-switching mode.Comment: 12 Pages, 3 Figures. will be appeared in Appl. Phys. Let

Cell surface-specific N-glycan profiling in breast cancer

Aberrant changes in specific glycans have been shown to be associated with immunosurveillance, tumorigenesis, tumor progression and metastasis. In this study, the N-glycan profiling of membrane proteins from human breast cancer cell lines and tissues was detected using modified DNA sequencer-assisted fluorophore-assisted carbohydrate electrophoresis (DSA-FACE). The N-glycan profiles of membrane proteins were analyzed from 7 breast cancer cell lines and MCF 10A, as well as from 100 pairs of breast cancer and corresponding adjacent tissues. The results showed that, compared with the matched adjacent normal tissue samples, two biantennary N-glycans (NA2 and NA2FB) were significantly decreased (p <0.0001) in the breast cancer tissue samples, while the triantennary glycan (NA3FB) and a high-mannose glycan (M8) were dramatically increased (p = 0.001 and p <0.0001, respectively). Moreover, the alterations in these specific N-glycans occurred through the oncogenesis and progression of breast cancer. These results suggested that the modified method based on DSA-FACE is a high-throughput detection technology that is suited for analyzing cell surface N-glycans. These cell surface-specific N-glycans may be helpful in recognizing the mechanisms of tumor cell immunologic escape and could be potential targets for new breast cancer drugs

A new semi-analytical flow model for multi-branch well testing in natural gas hydrates

This paper presents a new semi-analytical solution and the related methodology to analyze the pressure behavior of multi-branch wells produced from natural gas hydrates. For constant bottom-hole pressure production, the transient flow solution is obtained by Laplace transforms. The interference among various branches is investigated using the superposition principle. A simplified form of the proposed model is validated using published analytical solutions. The complete flow profile can be divided into nine distinct regimes: wellbore storage and skin, vertical radial flow, linear flow, pseudo-radial flow, composite flow, dissociated flow, transitional flow, improvement flow and stress-sensitive flow. A well’s multi-branch structure governs the vertical radial and the linear flow regimes. In our model, a dynamic interface divides the natural gas hydrates deposit into dissociated and non-dissociated regions. Natural gas hydrates formation properties govern the compositeeffect, dissociated, transitional, and improvement flow regimes. A dissociation coefficient governs the difference in flow resistance between dissociated and non-dissociated natural gas hydrates regions. The dissociated-zone radius affects the timing of these flow regimes. Conversion of natural gas hydrates to natural gas becomes instantaneous as the dissociation coefficient increases. The pressure derivative exhibits the same features as a homogeneous formation. The natural gas hydrates parameter values in the Shenhu area of the South China Sea cause the prominent dissociated flow regime to conceal the later transitional and improvement flow regimes. Due to the maximum practical well-test duration limitation, the first five flow regimes (through composite flow) are more likely to appear in practice than later flow regimes.Cited as: Chu, H., Zhang, J., Zhang, L., Ma, T, Gao Y., Lee, W. J. A new semi-analytical flow model for multi-branch well testing in natural gas hydrates. Advances in Geo-Energy Research, 2023, 7(3): 176-188. https://doi.org/10.46690/ager.2023.03.0

Reflective in-plane switching liquid crystal displays

The performance of a reflective in-plane switching (IPS) liquid crystal display is simulated by the parameter space method. The IPS electrodes and reflectors can be separately fabricated on the top and bottom substrates. The normally black reflective in-plane switching display shows wide viewing angle, high contrast ratio, weak color dispersion, and fast response time

Surface bioactivation through the nanostructured layer on titanium modified by facile HPT treatment

AbstractFacile fabrication of nanostructured surface is of great importance for the use of titanium (Ti) implants in biomedical field. In this study, a low-cost and easy-to-operate method called HPT (hydrothermal &amp; pressure) here has been developed and used to fabricate the expected nanostructured surface on Ti substrates. The effects of experimental parameters on the morphology of Ti surface were investigated and characterized. The results indicated that by altering the hydrothermal pressure, NaOH concentration and treating time, surface nanostructure like nanopetals or nanoflakes could be formed on the surface of Ti substrates. The orthogonal experiments were conducted to demonstrate the optimized operation conditions. A formation mechanism of the nanostructured titanate layer was proposed, revealing that the nanostructured layer could be formed via a special upward and downward co-growth manner. In vitro cell culture showed that the HPT treated Ti substrates, especially the T-10 sample, could greatly enhance the cell-material interactions, i.e. the cell proliferation and differentiation, focal protein adhesion, and osteogenic factor expression. The HPT method paves a new way to modify the surface of Ti implants with better bioactivity and promising prospect for future biomedical applications.</jats:p

A lake ice phenology dataset for the Northern Hemisphere based on passive microwave remote sensing

Lake ice phenology (LIP) is an essential indicator of climate change and helps with understanding of the regional characteristics of climate change impacts. Ground observation records and remote sensing retrieval products of lake ice phenology are abundant for Europe, North America, and the Tibetan Plateau, but there is a lack of data for inner Eurasia. In this work, enhanced-resolution passive microwave satellite data (PMW) were used to investigate the Northern Hemisphere Lake Ice Phenology (PMW LIP). The Freeze Onset (FO), Complete Ice Cover (CIC), Melt Onset (MO), and Complete Ice Free (CIF) dates were derived for 753 lakes, including 409 lakes for which ice phenology retrievals were available for the period 1978 to 2020 and 344 lakes for which these were available for 2002 to 2020. Verification of the PMW LIP using ground records gave correlation coefficients of 0.93 and 0.84 for CIC and CIF, respectively, and the corresponding values of the RMSE were 11.84 and 10.07 days. The lake ice phenology in this dataset was significantly correlated (P < 0.001) with that obtained from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data–the average correlation coefficient was 0.90 and the average RMSE was 7.87 days. The minimum RMSE was 4.39 days for CIF. The PMW is not affected by the weather or the amount of sunlight and thus provides more reliable data about the freezing and thawing process information than MODIS observations. The PMW LIP dataset provides the basic freeze–thaw data that is required for research into lake ice and the impact of climate change in the cold regions of the Northern Hemisphere. The dataset is available at http://www.doi.org/10.11922/sciencedb.j00076.00081.Peer reviewe