The relationship of social support to posttraumatic growth in COVID-19 among college students after experiencing campus lockdown: the effects of belief in a just world and meaning in life

BackgroundCampus lockdown orders were issued for the purpose of preventing and controlling COVID-19, which resulted in psychological problems among college students. However, the experiences they have during the pandemic may also lead to positive personal changes, including posttraumatic growth (PTG). The current study examined the mediating role of belief in a just world and meaning in life in social support and PTG during the COVID-19 campus lockdown.MethodAn online survey was conducted on 1711 college students in Hebei Province, China. Based on the survey results, a structural equation model was established.ResultsSocial support positively predicted PTG. Furthermore, belief in a just world and meaning in life played a mediating role between social support and PTG respectively. Besides, social support could also predict PTG through the multiple serial mediating effect of belief in a just world and meaning in life.ConclusionThese results indicated mechanisms by which social support influenced PTG, and this provided insights into how to promote post-traumatic growth among university students in the post-pandemic period

What Makes a Data-GIF Understandable?

GIFs are enjoying increasing popularity on social media as a format for data-driven storytelling with visualization; simple visual messages are embedded in short animations that usually last less than 15 seconds and are played in automatic repetition. In this paper, we ask the question, "What makes a data-GIF understandable?" While other storytelling formats such as data videos, infographics, or data comics are relatively well studied, we have little knowledge about the design factors and principles for "data-GIFs". To close this gap, we provide results from semi-structured interviews and an online study with a total of 118 participants investigating the impact of design decisions on the understandability of data-GIFs. The study and our consequent analysis are informed by a systematic review and structured design space of 108 data-GIFs that we found online. Our results show the impact of design dimensions from our design space such as animation encoding, context preservation, or repetition on viewers' understanding of the GIF's core message. The paper concludes with a list of suggestions for creating more effective Data-GIFs

KB4VA: A Knowledge Base of Visualization Designs for Visual Analytics

Visual analytics (VA) systems have been widely used to facilitate decision-making and analytical reasoning in various application domains. VA involves visual designs, interaction designs, and data mining, which is a systematic and complex paradigm. In this work, we focus on the design of effective visualizations for complex data and analytical tasks, which is a critical step in designing a VA system. This step is challenging because it requires extensive knowledge about domain problems and visualization to design effective encodings. Existing visualization designs published in top venues are valuable resources to inspire designs for problems with similar data structures and tasks. However, those designs are hard to understand, parse, and retrieve due to the lack of specifications. To address this problem, we build KB4VA, a knowledge base of visualization designs in VA systems with comprehensive labels about their analytical tasks and visual encodings. Our labeling scheme is inspired by a workshop study with 12 VA researchers to learn user requirements in understanding and retrieving professional visualization designs in VA systems. The theme extends Vega-Lite specifications for describing advanced and composited visualization designs in a declarative manner, thus facilitating human understanding and automatic indexing. To demonstrate the usefulness of our knowledge base, we present a user study about design inspirations for VA tasks. In summary, our work opens new perspectives for enhancing the accessibility and reusability of professional visualization designs

ComputableViz: Mathematical Operators as a Formalism for Visualization Processing and Analysis

Data visualizations are created and shared on the web at an unprecedented speed, raising new needs and questions for processing and analyzing visualizations after they have been generated and digitized. However, existing formalisms focus on operating on a single visualization instead of multiple visualizations, making it challenging to perform analysis tasks such as sorting and clustering visualizations. Through a systematic analysis of previous work, we abstract visualization-related tasks into mathematical operators such as union and propose a design space of visualization operations. We realize the design by developing ComputableViz, a library that supports operations on multiple visualization specifications. To demonstrate its usefulness and extensibility, we present multiple usage scenarios concerning processing and analyzing visualization, such as generating visualization embeddings and automatically making visualizations accessible. We conclude by discussing research opportunities and challenges for managing and exploiting the massive visualizations on the web.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures. In the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 202

EmoCo: Visual analysis of emotion coherence in presentation videos

Emotions play a key role in human communication and public presentations. Human emotions are usually expressed through multiple modalities. Therefore, exploring multimodal emotions and their coherence is of great value for understanding emotional expressions in presentations and improving presentation skills. However, manually watching and studying presentation videos is often tedious and time-consuming. There is a lack of tool support to help conduct an efficient and in-depth multi-level analysis. Thus, in this paper, we introduce EmoCo, an interactive visual analytics system to facilitate efficient analysis of emotion coherence across facial, text, and audio modalities in presentation videos. Our visualization system features a channel coherence view and a sentence clustering view that together enable users to obtain a quick overview of emotion coherence and its temporal evolution. In addition, a detail view and word view enable detailed exploration and comparison from the sentence level and word level, respectively. We thoroughly evaluate the proposed system and visualization techniques through two usage scenarios based on TED Talk videos and interviews with two domain experts. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in gaining insights into emotion coherence in presentations.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures. Accepted by IEEE VAST 201

Dashboard design mining and recommendation

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Effects of dietary N-carbamylglutamate on rumen fermentation parameters, and bacterial community diversity of Holstein dairy cows in Tibet

IntroductionThe Tibetan Plateau is characterized by low temperature and hypoxia. N-carbamylglutamic acid (NCG) can increase blood oxygen saturation, and have the potential to be used to prevent the high-altitude hypoxia stress state of cows. However, its beneficial effect on the rumen microbiota of Holstein dairy cows remains unclear.MethodsHence, the experiments 12 multiparous (parity ranged from 2 to 7) Holstein dairy cows (413.0 ± 42 kg) were randomly assigned to 2 treatments with 6 replicates in each treatment: basal diet (CON, control group) and basal diet plus 20 g/d/cow of NCG (NCG, experiment group), respectively. To study the effects of dietary NCG supplementation on rumen microbiota of Holstein dairy cows in Tibet. The experiment lasted for 45 days, with 15 days of pre-feeding and 30 days of formal trail period.ResultsThe results showed that ruminal NH3-N concentration in NCG group was lower (p < 0.05) than that in the CON group, while molar proportion of acetic acid and total volatile fatty acid (VFA) concentration were increased (p < 0.05) with the addition of NCG. Microbial diversity increased (p < 0.05) in NCG group, with Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, and Patescibacteria as the most abundant phyla. The KEGG pathway analysis showed that the potential function of ruminal bacteria was mainly enriched in metabolism (carbohydrates, amino acids, lipids, energy, and nucleotides) and genetic information processing (replication, repair, and translation).ConclusionIn conclusion, NCG can improve rumen nitrogen utilization, total VFA and acetic acid production, and increase rumen microbial diversity, all of which could make the introduced Holstein dairy cows to better adapt to the harsh environment in Tibet and improve their production performance