The experiences of international students at an Australian University: An exploratory qualitative study

The number of international students studying in Australia has steadily increased over the last ten years providing many benefits both to the country and Australian universities. However, little is known about the transition experiences of these students and there has been little acknowledgment of the issues facing students adjusting to a new environment and learning context. Typical issues that international students encounter include; language difficulties, homesickness, culture shock, lack of background knowledge and skills, housing difficulties, developing new social relationships and adapting to their new environment. Much of the research has been in the form of questionnaires and surveys focusing on academic issues, for instance, language skill, learning style and class participation. However, recent research suggests that social and cultural issues such as mixing with Australians, making new friends and functioning in a foreign country are of greater concern to international students. This review explores the major findings relating to students studying abroad and the future direction of research in this field

Expanding Awareness: Comparing Location, Keyword, and Network Filtering Methods to Collect Hyperlocal Social Media Data

Opportunities to collect real-time social media data during a crisis remain limited to location and keyword filtering despite the sparsity of geographic metadata and the tendency of keyword-based methods to capture information posted by remote rather than local users. Here we introduce a third, network filtering method that uses social network ties to infer the location of social media users in a geographic community and collect data from networks of these users during a crisis. In this paper we compare all three methods by analyzing the distribution of situational reports of infrastructure damage and service disruption across location, keyword, and network-filtered social media data during a weather emergency. We find that network filtering doubles the number of situational reports collected in real-time compared to location and keyword filtering alone, but that all three methods collect unique reports that can support situational awareness of incidents occurring across a community

A Semantic Approach to Negation Detection and Word Disambiguation with Natural Language Processing

This study aims to demonstrate the methods for detecting negations in a sentence by uniquely evaluating the lexical structure of the text via word-sense disambiguation. The proposed framework examines all the unique features in the various expressions within a text to resolve the contextual usage of all tokens and decipher the effect of negation on sentiment analysis. The application of popular expression detectors skips this important step, thereby neglecting the root words caught in the web of negation and making text classification difficult for machine learning and sentiment analysis. This study adopts the Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach to discover and antonimize words that were negated for better accuracy in text classification using a knowledge base provided by an NLP library called WordHoard. Early results show that our initial analysis improved on traditional sentiment analysis, which sometimes neglects negations or assigns an inverse polarity score. The SentiWordNet analyzer was improved by 35%, the Vader analyzer by 20% and the TextBlob by 6%

Tweet Factors Influencing Trust and Usefulness During Both Man-Made and Natural Disasters

ABSTRACT To this date, research on crisis informatics has focused on the detection of trust in Twitter data through the use of message structure, sentiment, propagation and author. Little research has examined the usefulness of these messages in the crisis response domain. Toward detecting useful messages in case of crisis, in this paper, we characterize tweets, which are perceived useful or trustworthy, and determine their main features. Our analysis is carried out on two datasets (one natural and one man made) gathered from Twitter concerning hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the Boston Bombing 2013. The results indicate that there is a high correlation and similar factors (support for the victims, informational data, use of humor and type of emotion used) influencing trustworthiness and usefulness for both disaster types. This could have impacts on how messages from social media data are analyzed for use in crisis response

Role Playing Next Generation 9-1-1: Sensemaking with Social Media in Public-Safety Answering Points

For over a decade, research has suggested that social media can enhance the situational awareness of emergency responders during a crisis. Rarely, however, do studies examine the sensemaking processes of emergency responders by which situational awareness is achieved. We examine sensemaking in a Public-Safety Answering Point (PSAP) through role plays with 9-1-1 telecommunicators that imagine how social media analysts can contribute to sensemaking processes among 9-1-1 call takers, dispatchers, and emergency responders. These role plays suggest social media can address information gaps that emerge when 9-1-1 callers fail to provide critical information and vice versa, suggesting social media enhances situational awareness only when integrated into sensemaking processes that synthesize information across multiple, incomplete, but complementary data sources. This synthesis, however, requires cooperative information gathering and sharing among call takers, dispatchers, and social media analysts that PSAPs can coordinate using common interpretive frameworks and common information spaces

Towards evidence-based conservation of subterranean ecosystems

Subterranean ecosystems are among the most widespread environments on Earth, yet we still have poor knowledge of their biodiversity. To raise awareness of subterranean ecosystems, the essential services they provide, and their unique conservation challenges, 2021 and 2022 were designated International Years of Caves and Karst. As these ecosystems have traditionally been overlooked in global conservation agendas and multilateral agreements, a quantitative assessment of solution-based approaches to safeguard subterranean biota and associated habitats is timely. This assessment allows researchers and practitioners to understand the progress made and research needs in subterranean ecology and management. We conducted a systematic review of peer-reviewed and grey literature focused on subterranean ecosystems globally (terrestrial, freshwater, and saltwater systems), to quantify the available evidence-base for the effectiveness of conservation interventions. We selected 708 publications from the years 1964 to 2021 that discussed, recommended, or implemented 1,954 conservation interventions in subterranean ecosystems. We noted a steep increase in the number of studies from the 2000s while, surprisingly, the proportion of studies quantifying the impact of conservation interventions has steadily and significantly decreased in recent years. The effectiveness of 31% of conservation interventions has been tested statistically. We further highlight that 64% of the reported research occurred in the Palearctic and Nearctic biogeographic regions. Assessments of the effectiveness of conservation interventions were heavily biased towards indirect measures (monitoring and risk assessment), a limited sample of organisms (mostly arthropods and bats), and more accessible systems (terrestrial caves). Our results indicate that most conservation science in the field of subterranean biology does not apply a rigorous quantitative approach, resulting in sparse evidence for the effectiveness of interventions. This raises the important question of how to make conservation efforts more feasible to implement, cost-effective, and long-lasting. Although there is no single remedy, we propose a suite of potential solutions to focus our efforts better towards increasing statistical testing and stress the importance of standardising study reporting to facilitate meta-analytical exercises. We also provide a database summarising the available literature, which will help to build quantitative knowledge about interventions likely to yield the greatest impacts depending upon the subterranean species and habitats of interest. We view this as a starting point to shift away from the widespread tendency of recommending conservation interventions based on anecdotal and expert-based information rather than scientific evidence, without quantitatively testing their effectiveness.Peer reviewe

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy

Effects of antiplatelet therapy after stroke due to intracerebral haemorrhage (RESTART): a randomised, open-label trial

Background: Antiplatelet therapy reduces the risk of major vascular events for people with occlusive vascular disease, although it might increase the risk of intracranial haemorrhage. Patients surviving the commonest subtype of intracranial haemorrhage, intracerebral haemorrhage, are at risk of both haemorrhagic and occlusive vascular events, but whether antiplatelet therapy can be used safely is unclear. We aimed to estimate the relative and absolute effects of antiplatelet therapy on recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage and whether this risk might exceed any reduction of occlusive vascular events. Methods: The REstart or STop Antithrombotics Randomised Trial (RESTART) was a prospective, randomised, open-label, blinded endpoint, parallel-group trial at 122 hospitals in the UK. We recruited adults (≥18 years) who were taking antithrombotic (antiplatelet or anticoagulant) therapy for the prevention of occlusive vascular disease when they developed intracerebral haemorrhage, discontinued antithrombotic therapy, and survived for 24 h. Computerised randomisation incorporating minimisation allocated participants (1:1) to start or avoid antiplatelet therapy. We followed participants for the primary outcome (recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage) for up to 5 years. We analysed data from all randomised participants using Cox proportional hazards regression, adjusted for minimisation covariates. This trial is registered with ISRCTN (number ISRCTN71907627). Findings: Between May 22, 2013, and May 31, 2018, 537 participants were recruited a median of 76 days (IQR 29–146) after intracerebral haemorrhage onset: 268 were assigned to start and 269 (one withdrew) to avoid antiplatelet therapy. Participants were followed for a median of 2·0 years (IQR [1·0– 3·0]; completeness 99·3%). 12 (4%) of 268 participants allocated to antiplatelet therapy had recurrence of intracerebral haemorrhage compared with 23 (9%) of 268 participants allocated to avoid antiplatelet therapy (adjusted hazard ratio 0·51 [95% CI 0·25–1·03]; p=0·060). 18 (7%) participants allocated to antiplatelet therapy experienced major haemorrhagic events compared with 25 (9%) participants allocated to avoid antiplatelet therapy (0·71 [0·39–1·30]; p=0·27), and 39 [15%] participants allocated to antiplatelet therapy had major occlusive vascular events compared with 38 [14%] allocated to avoid antiplatelet therapy (1·02 [0·65–1·60]; p=0·92). Interpretation: These results exclude all but a very modest increase in the risk of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage with antiplatelet therapy for patients on antithrombotic therapy for the prevention of occlusive vascular disease when they developed intracerebral haemorrhage. The risk of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage is probably too small to exceed the established benefits of antiplatelet therapy for secondary prevention

Effects of antiplatelet therapy after stroke due to intracerebral haemorrhage (RESTART): a randomised, open-label trial

Background: Antiplatelet therapy reduces the risk of major vascular events for people with occlusive vascular disease, although it might increase the risk of intracranial haemorrhage. Patients surviving the commonest subtype of intracranial haemorrhage, intracerebral haemorrhage, are at risk of both haemorrhagic and occlusive vascular events, but whether antiplatelet therapy can be used safely is unclear. We aimed to estimate the relative and absolute effects of antiplatelet therapy on recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage and whether this risk might exceed any reduction of occlusive vascular events. Methods: The REstart or STop Antithrombotics Randomised Trial (RESTART) was a prospective, randomised, open-label, blinded endpoint, parallel-group trial at 122 hospitals in the UK. We recruited adults (≥18 years) who were taking antithrombotic (antiplatelet or anticoagulant) therapy for the prevention of occlusive vascular disease when they developed intracerebral haemorrhage, discontinued antithrombotic therapy, and survived for 24 h. Computerised randomisation incorporating minimisation allocated participants (1:1) to start or avoid antiplatelet therapy. We followed participants for the primary outcome (recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage) for up to 5 years. We analysed data from all randomised participants using Cox proportional hazards regression, adjusted for minimisation covariates. This trial is registered with ISRCTN (number ISRCTN71907627). Findings: Between May 22, 2013, and May 31, 2018, 537 participants were recruited a median of 76 days (IQR 29–146) after intracerebral haemorrhage onset: 268 were assigned to start and 269 (one withdrew) to avoid antiplatelet therapy. Participants were followed for a median of 2·0 years (IQR [1·0– 3·0]; completeness 99·3%). 12 (4%) of 268 participants allocated to antiplatelet therapy had recurrence of intracerebral haemorrhage compared with 23 (9%) of 268 participants allocated to avoid antiplatelet therapy (adjusted hazard ratio 0·51 [95% CI 0·25–1·03]; p=0·060). 18 (7%) participants allocated to antiplatelet therapy experienced major haemorrhagic events compared with 25 (9%) participants allocated to avoid antiplatelet therapy (0·71 [0·39–1·30]; p=0·27), and 39 [15%] participants allocated to antiplatelet therapy had major occlusive vascular events compared with 38 [14%] allocated to avoid antiplatelet therapy (1·02 [0·65–1·60]; p=0·92). Interpretation: These results exclude all but a very modest increase in the risk of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage with antiplatelet therapy for patients on antithrombotic therapy for the prevention of occlusive vascular disease when they developed intracerebral haemorrhage. The risk of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage is probably too small to exceed the established benefits of antiplatelet therapy for secondary prevention