Search Results (7)

This purpose of this research is to understand the role of networked narratives in social media in modulating viewer prejudice toward ethnic neighborhoods. We designed experimental videos on YouTube based on intergroup contact theory and narrative frameworks aimed at (1) gaining knowledge, (2) reducing anxiety, and (3) fostering empathy. Despite consistent storytelling across the videos, we observed significant variations in viewer emotions, especially in replies to comments. We hypothesized that these discrepancies could be explained by the influence of the surrounding digital network on the narrative’s reception. Two-stage research was conducted to understand this phenomenon. First, automated emotion analysis on user comments was conducted to identify the varying emotions. Then, we explored contextual factors surrounding each video on YouTube, focusing on algorithmic curation inferred from traffic sources, region, and search keywords. Findings revealed that negative algorithmic curation and user interactivity result in overall negative viewer emotion, largely driven by video placement and recommendations. However, videos with higher traffic originating from viewers who had watched the storyteller’s other videos result in more positive sentiments and longer visits. This suggests that consistent exposure within the channel can foster more positive acceptance of cultural outgroups by building trust and reducing anxiety. There is the need, then, for storytellers to curate discussions to mitigate prejudice in digital contexts. Full article

Video summarization aims to identify important segments in a video and merge them into a concise representation, enabling users to comprehend the essential information without watching the entire video. Graph structure-based video summarization approaches ignore the issue of redundant adjacency matrix. To address this issue, this paper proposes a video summary generation model based on graph structure reconstruction (VOGNet), in which the model first adopts a variational graph auto-encoders (VGAE) to reconstruct the graph structure to remove redundant information in the graph structure; followed by using the reconstructed graph structure in a graph attention network (GAT), allocating different weights to different shot features in the neighborhood; and lastly, in order to avoid the loss of information during the training of the model, a feature fusion approach is proposed to combine the training obtained shot features with the original shot features as the shot features for generating the summary. We perform extensive experiments on two standard datasets, SumMe and TVSum, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed model. Full article

Background: Residential green spaces and the co-inhabiting bird communities provide critical cultural ecosystem services for urban dwellers, which is critical for citizens’ psychological well-being but has largely been overlooked, especially in China. This study attempted to delineate the relationship between human-nature interactions occurring at different scenarios in the health deriving procedure, and identify the key factors influencing urban residents’ psychological well-being and the potential critical human-nature connections within their living spaces. Methods: Bird, plant, and social surveys were sequentially conducted. A model selection procedure based on AICc information was used to find the key factors that are responsible for residents’ psychological well-being, and logistic regression analysis was conducted to figure out the key drivers for the occurrence of critical within-living-space human-nature connections. Results: Most of the respondents are aware of the neighborhood biodiversity and most of them are fond of it, and respondents who prefer fauna over flora have a considerably lower depression degree. Watching birds is the only critical within-living-space nature-related activity that is responsible for residents’ psychological well-being. Both residents’ psychological well-being and bird watching activity were simultaneously affected by nature-related activities within and outside the living spaces, while their preference for different aspects of biodiversity and their capability in perceiving them were also important, despite the difference in exact parameters. In addition, personal attributes such as age, financial income, and physical or mental health status also contribute to psychological well-being. Conclusions: This study successfully bridged citizens’ minds with health products, and the major contribution was the demonstration of a spatial-scale-oriented circuit for people-nature connections, which contributes to the practical application of nature-based therapy. Full article

With the aggravation of rural aging, the well-being and self-rated health level of older people in rural communities are significantly lower than those in urban communities. Past studies hold that mobility is essential to the quality of life of the elderly, and well-being depends on their own adaptation strategies in the built environment. Therefore, this study combines three key factors related to active aging: environment, health and mobility, and assumes that the elderly with good health status will have environmental proactivity and a wider range of daily mobility in a poor rural built environment. This study attempts to track daily mobility by using a space–time path method in time geography and then to explore the relationship between outdoor mobility and older people’s self-rated health. A 1-week mobility path survey for 20 senior citizens of Xishi Village, a typical rural village in Taiwan, was conducted by wearing a GPS sports watch. A questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews were done to provide more information about the seniors’ personal backgrounds and lifestyles. The results show that when the built environment is unfit to the needs of daily activities, half of the participants can make adjustment strategies to go beyond the neighborhoods defined by administrative units. Correlation analysis demonstrated that mental health is associated with daily moving time and distance. In addition, men have higher self-rated health scores than women, and there are significant statistical differences between married and widowed seniors in daily outing time and distance. This exploratory study suggests that in future research on rural health and active aging in rural areas, understanding the daily outdoor mobility of the elderly can help to assess their health status and living demands and quickly find out whether there is a lack of rural living services or environmental planning. Full article

Modern society pays more and more attention to leisure activities, and watching sports is one of the most popular activities for people. In professional leagues, sports scheduling plays a very critical role. To efficiently arrange a schedule while complying with the relevant rules in a sports league has become a challenge for schedule planners. This research uses Major League Baseball (MLB) of the year 2016 as a case study. The study proposed the Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) algorithm with different coding structures to optimize the objective function—minimize the total travelling distance of all teams in the league. We have compared the algorithmic schedules with the 2016 and 2019 MLB regular-season schedules in the real-world case for its performance evaluation. The results have confirmed success in reducing the total travelling distances by 2.48% for 2016 and 6.02% in 2019 while lowering the standard deviation of total travelling distances by 7.06% for 2016. Full article

Somatostatin-secreting δ-cells have aroused great attention due to their powerful roles in coordination of islet insulin and glucagon secretion and maintenance of glucose homeostasis. δ-cells exhibit neuron-like morphology with projections which enable pan-islet somatostatin paracrine regulation despite their scarcity in the islets. The expression of a range of hormone and neurotransmitter receptors allows δ-cells to integrate paracrine, endocrine, neural and nutritional inputs, and provide rapid and precise feedback modulations on glucagon and insulin secretion from α- and β-cells, respectively. Interestingly, the paracrine tone of δ-cells can be effectively modified in response to factors released by neighboring cells in this interactive communication, such as insulin, urocortin 3 and γ-aminobutyric acid from β-cells, glucagon, glutamate and glucagon-like peptide-1 from α-cells. In the setting of diabetes, defects in δ-cell function lead to suboptimal insulin and glucagon outputs and lift the glycemic set-point. The interaction of δ-cells and non-δ-cells also becomes defective in diabetes, with reduces paracrine feedback to β-cells to exacerbate hyperglycemia or enhanced inhibition of α-cells, disabling counter-regulation, to cause hypoglycemia. Thus, it is possible to restore/optimize islet function in diabetes targeting somatostatin signaling, which could open novel avenues for the development of effective diabetic treatments. Full article

In this work, an intrusion detection system (IDS) framework based on multi-level clustering for hierarchical wireless sensor networks is proposed. The framework employs two types of intrusion detection approaches: (1) “downward-IDS (D-IDS)” to detect the abnormal behavior (intrusion) of the subordinate (member) nodes; and (2) “upward-IDS (U-IDS)” to detect the abnormal behavior of the cluster heads. By using analytical calculations, the optimum parameters for the D-IDS (number of maximum hops) and U-IDS (monitoring group size) of the framework are evaluated and presented. Full article