Supporting “Everyday Analysts” in Safety- and Time-Critical Situations

The need for quick, timely, and accurate information is critical in emergency events. During mass emergencies, people assemble information from both official and unofficial sources. As digital access expands, people will increasingly incorporate information from digital sources into decision making and assess it against the local circumstances they experience. If we extrapolate what such behavior means for the future, we can see that information management under emergency conditions will need to become increasingly socially distributed. The key question then is how to assess the quality of information: how “good” or “bad” it is; whether it is “misinformation” or “disinformation.” Borrowing from Simon's notion of satisficing, the authors argue that people's assessment of information helpfulness and credibility is a function of the “everyday analytic” skills they employ during mass emergencies. To facilitate the critical work of “everyday analysts,” we outline a research agenda for the development of analytical support tools.     

伊犁谷地灰钙土和风沙土剖面特性及生态建设意义

西部的生态环境安全关系到国家的生态安全。研究土壤特性及其垂直分布,能对区域生态环境建设和可持续发展提供重要的理论基础和指导。灰钙土与风沙土是新疆伊犁谷地的两种主要土壤类型。本文在对新疆伊犁谷地实地考察基础上,运用42个灰钙土剖面和12个风沙土剖面自然发生层各层的土壤样品测试数据—土壤有机质、pH值、电导率、总盐、八大阴阳离子,研究了灰钙土和风沙土土壤特性的垂直分布,并进行了比较;在此基础上提出区域生态建设中土壤利用和保护的建议。研究表明,伊犁河谷的不同土壤,其土壤特性的垂直分布和变化具有一致性和差异性。一致性体现在有机质和K＋的含量随土壤深度增加而减少,pH值、CO32-、Mg2＋和Na＋的含量随土壤深度增加而增加。差异性体现在两类土壤的有机质、pH值、电导率和总盐在数量上不同。此外,两类土壤的电导率、总盐及SO42-,Cl-,HCO3-,Ca2＋的含量随土壤深度发生变化的趋势不同。     

Combining evidence with a probabilistic framework for answer ranking and answer merging in question answering

Question answering (QA) aims at finding exact answers to a user’s question from a large collection of documents. Most QA systems combine information retrieval with extraction techniques to identify a set of likely candidates and then utilize some ranking strategy to generate the final answers. This ranking process can be challenging, as it entails identifying the relevant answers amongst many irrelevant ones. This is more challenging in multi-strategy QA, in which multiple answering agents are used to extract answer candidates. As answer candidates come from different agents with different score distributions, how to merge answer candidates plays an important role in answer ranking. In this paper, we propose a unified probabilistic framework which combines multiple evidence to address challenges in answer ranking and answer merging. The hypotheses of the paper are that: (1) the framework effectively combines multiple evidence for identifying answer relevance and their correlation in answer ranking, (2) the framework supports answer merging on answer candidates returned by multiple extraction techniques, (3) the framework can support list questions as well as factoid questions, (4) the framework can be easily applied to a different QA system, and (5) the framework significantly improves performance of a QA system. An extensive set of experiments was done to support our hypotheses and demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework. All of the work substantially extends the preliminary research in Ko et al. (2007a). A probabilistic framework for answer selection in question answering. In: Proceedings of NAACL/HLT.     

Cl-指示的石羊河流域地下水演化

化学示踪剂是研究干旱区地下水化学演化和补给来源追踪的有效手段之一。本文以Cl-为示踪剂,通过其他离子与Cl-的相互关系对石羊河流域地下水演化特征及影响因子进行分析:Br-/Cl-、Na+/Cl-、S042-/Cl-、HCO3-/Cl-、Ca2+/Cl-、Mg2+/Cl-相互关系指示了流域中游地区地下水与地表水补给关系密切,水质较好,水化学作用以溶滤为主,蒸发也起到一定作用,下游盆地地下水矿化度较高,不完全是现代降水的补给,石膏、方解石溶解和阳离子交换作用使得地下水富镁。总体而言,石羊河流域地下水演化在多种地球化学作用下进行,在以蒸发为主导动力的条件下,水岩相互作用和阳离子交换过程促使地下水演化为现代特征。     

Compositional question answering: A divide and conquer approach

This paper describes how questions can be characterized for question answering (QA) along different facets and focuses on questions that cannot be answered directly but can be divided into simpler ones so that they can be answered directly using existing QA capabilities. Since individual answers are composed to generate the final answer, we call this process as compositional QA. The goal of the proposed QA method is to answer a composite question by dividing it into atomic ones, instead of developing an entirely new method tailored for the new question type. A question is analyzed automatically to determine its class, and its sub-questions are sent to the relevant QA modules. Answers returned from the individual QA modules are composed based on the predetermined plan corresponding to the question type. The experimental results based on 615 questions show that the compositional QA approach outperforms the simple routing method by about 17%. Considering 115 composite questions only, the F-score was almost tripled from the baseline.     

Flourishing on facebook: virtue friendship & new social media

The widespread and growing use of new social media, especially social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, invites sustained ethical reflection on emerging forms of online friendship. Social scientists and psychologists are gathering a wealth of empirical data on these trends, yet philosophical analysis of their ethical implications remains comparatively impoverished. In particular, there have been few attempts to explore how traditional ethical theories might be brought to bear upon these developments, or what insights they might offer, if any. In attempting to address this lacuna in applied ethical research, this paper investigates the ethical significance of online friendship by means of an Aristotelian theory of the good life, which holds that human flourishing is chiefly realized through ??complete?? friendships of virtue. Here, four key dimensions of ??virtue friendship?? are examined in relation to online social media: reciprocity, empathy, self-knowledge and the shared life. Online social media support and strengthen friendship in ways that mirror these four dimensions, particularly when used to supplement rather than substitute for face-to-face interactions. However, deeper reflection on the meaning of the shared life (suzên) for Aristotle raises important and troubling questions about the capacity of online social media to support complete friendships of virtue in the contemporary world, along with significant concerns about the enduring relevance of this Aristotelian ideal for the good life in the 21st century.     

A bottom-up approach to sentence ordering for multi-document summarization

Ordering information is a difficult but important task for applications generating natural language texts such as multi-document summarization, question answering, and concept-to-text generation. In multi-document summarization, information is selected from a set of source documents. However, improper ordering of information in a summary can confuse the reader and deteriorate the readability of the summary. Therefore, it is vital to properly order the information in multi-document summarization. We present a bottom-up approach to arrange sentences extracted for multi-document summarization. To capture the association and order of two textual segments (e.g. sentences), we define four criteria: chronology, topical-closeness, precedence, and succession. These criteria are integrated into a criterion by a supervised learning approach. We repeatedly concatenate two textual segments into one segment based on the criterion, until we obtain the overall segment with all sentences arranged. We evaluate the sentence orderings produced by the proposed method and numerous baselines using subjective gradings as well as automatic evaluation measures. We introduce the average continuity, an automatic evaluation measure of sentence ordering in a summary, and investigate its appropriateness for this task.     

Ethics in e-trust and e-trustworthiness: the case of direct computer-patient interfaces

In this paper, I examine the ethics of e-trust and e-trustworthiness in the context of health care, looking at direct computer-patient interfaces (DCPIs), information systems that provide medical information, diagnosis, advice, consenting and/or treatment directly to patients without clinicians as intermediaries. Designers, manufacturers and deployers of such systems have an ethical obligation to provide evidence of their trustworthiness to users. My argument for this claim is based on evidentialism about trust and trustworthiness: the idea that trust should be based on sound evidence of trustworthiness. Evidence of trustworthiness is a broader notion than one might suppose, including not just information about the risks and performance of the system, but also interactional and context-based information. I suggest some sources of evidence in this broader sense that make it plausible that designers, manufacturers and deployers of DCPIs can provide evidence to users that is cognitively simple, easy to communicate, yet rationally connected with actual trustworthiness.     

Association of Pro/Anti-inflammatory Cytokine Gene Polymorphisms with Benign Prostate Hyperplasia Risk

Benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) is a common condition in aged men and result from prolong chronic inflammation in prostate gland. Cytokines are important molecules responsible for inflammation. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in promoter region of cytokine genes have been shown to alter the level of cytokines. Hence we evaluated the association of pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokine SNPs in a North Indian cohort of BPH patients. We observed that IL-1B −511 CT + TT genotypes conferred protective effect for susceptibility to BPH (OR 0.39, P 0.001). Our results also demonstrated that TNF-A −1031 C allele to be associated with risk for BPH (OR 1.89, P < 0.0001). Moreover, we also observed twofold risk for IL-10 −1082 cytokine gene polymorphism (OR 1.96, P 0.048). No association was observed with risk of BPH for IFN-G +874, IL-1 RN VNTR, IL-6 −174, IL-10 −819 and TGF-B +28. Our findings of IL-1B −511, TNF-A −1031 and IL-10 −1082 suggested that these variants play important role in susceptibility to BPH. Future studies in large cohort of different ethnicity BPH groups are warranted to establish definite associations with other cytokine gene polymorphisms as well.     

天山乌鲁木齐河源区径流水化学特征及影响因素分析

在乌鲁木齐河源区采集两年的大气降水和1号冰川、空冰斗、总控3个水文点逐日定时径流样品,对主要离子、pH、电导率EC和总溶解固体TDS进行了分析。结果表明,大气降水离子类型为Ca^2＋-Na^＋-HCO3--SO4^2-,接近中性;径流离子类型为Ca^2＋-Na^＋-HCO3--SO4^2-,呈弱碱性。径流中EC和TDS均值总控〉1号冰川〉空冰斗,其中1号冰川径流的峰值远高于其它两个水文点。受不同下垫面的影响,1号冰川水文点TDS变化受日径流量影响显著,而空冰斗水文点基本不受影响。径流中离子组成主要受岩石风化作用影响,离子比值和Piper图分析说明控制径流离子的主要过程是碳酸盐、黄铁矿和长石类矿物风化。海盐校正分析得出,大气降水对1号冰川、空冰斗、总控径流离子贡献率分别为4.91％,9．10％和5．42％。通过阳离子通量计算,2006年、2007年1号冰川径流的化学风化侵蚀率分别为18．1t／（km^2·a）和12．3t／（km^2·a）。     

Data Mining to Combat Terrorism and the Roots of Privacy Concerns

Recently, there has been a heavy debate in the US about the government’s use of data mining in its fight against terrorism. Privacy concerns in fact led the Congress to terminate the funding of TIA, a program for advanced information technology to be used in the combat of terrorism. The arguments put forward in this debate, more specifically those found in the main report and minority report by the TAPAC established by the Secretary of Defense to examine the TIA issue, will be analysed to trace the deeper roots of this controversy. This analysis will in turn be used as a test case to examine the adequacy of the usual theoretical frameworks for these kinds of issues, in particular the notion of privacy. Whereas the dominant theoretical framing of the notion of privacy turns around access to information, most of the core arguments in the debate do not fit in this kind of framework. The basic disagreements in the controversy are not about mere access, they involve both access and use. Furthermore, whereas the issue of access by itself refers to a more or less static situation, the real disagreements much more concern the organisational dynamics of the use of information, the mechanisms in the organisation that control these dynamics, and the awareness present within the organisation of the ‘social risks’ these dynamics represent. The bottom line question is whether the assessment of these gives sufficient reason for trust.     

天津北三河水系雨洪水资源潜力的估算及其应用

基于资源水利的理念,以雨洪水资源为研究对象,针对其动态性分别引入理论潜力、可实现潜力、现实潜力及待开发潜力的概念及算法。以天津北三河水系为典型区域,分别计算了各流域和整个水系的各个频率年的自产水量、理论潜力、可实现潜力,给出了各频率来水情况下雨洪水资源潜力的年内分配过程,并以待开发潜力为主要关注对象,对其进行频率分析,计算得到50%、20%、10%、5%各频率年下的待开发潜力值依次为4.42×10⁸m³、12.96×10⁸m³、20.02×10⁸m³、27.35×10⁸m³,为以后的雨洪水资源利用模式的制定提供了依据。     

Using the taxonomy of cognitive learning to model online searching

In this research, we investigated whether a learning process has unique information searching characteristics. The results of this research show that information searching is a learning process with unique searching characteristics specific to particular learning levels. In a laboratory experiment, we studied the searching characteristics of 72 participants engaged in 426 searching tasks. We classified the searching tasks according to Anderson and Krathwohl’s taxonomy of the cognitive learning domain. Research results indicate that applying and analyzing, the middle two of the six categories, generally take the most searching effort in terms of queries per session, topics searched per session, and total time searching. Interestingly, the lowest two learning categories, remembering and understanding, exhibit searching characteristics similar to the highest order learning categories of evaluating and creating. Our results suggest the view of Web searchers having simple information needs may be incorrect. Instead, we discovered that users applied simple searching expressions to support their higher-level information needs. It appears that searchers rely primarily on their internal knowledge for evaluating and creating information needs, using search primarily for fact checking and verification. Overall, results indicate that a learning theory may better describe the information searching process than more commonly used paradigms of decision making or problem solving. The learning style of the searcher does have some moderating effect on exhibited searching characteristics. The implication of this research is that rather than solely addressing a searcher’s expressed information need, searching systems can also address the underlying learning need of the user.     

信息化社会环境下高校图书馆发展战略

在当今的信息社会,随着文献及媒介资源数字化、网络化的不断发展,传统图书馆的运行模式越来越受到了挑战。如何应对成了摆在图书馆面前迫切需要解决的问题。文章从图书馆发展战略角度出发。提出了图书馆应对未来挑战的五个方面的工作及他们之间的联系与组织。     

Understanding the formation mechanism of high-quality knowledge in social question and answer communities: A knowledge co-creation perspective

The social question and answer (Q&A) community provides people with an effective tool to obtain high-quality information. From the perspective of reciprocal determinism and value co-creation, this study aims to investigate the formation mechanism of high-quality knowledge in the community. We develop a model to investigate how cognitive factors and community technological factors influence users’ knowledge co-creation behavior, thereby influencing knowledge quality in the community. A survey of 382 knowledge contributors in a social Q&A community shows that knowledge self-efficacy, topic richness, personalized recommendation, and social interactivity have a positive impact on users' knowledge sharing and integration behavior, which subsequently affect the community’s knowledge quality. Moreover, users' ratings moderate the influence of knowledge sharing on knowledge quality. This research demonstrates the synergistic effect of people and technology in knowledge co-creation, thus advances literature about value co-creation and content quality in online communities.     

Information ethics: On the philosophical foundation of computer ethics

The essential difficulty about Computer Ethics' (CE) philosophical status is a methodological problem: standard ethical theories cannot easily be adapted to deal with CE-problems, which appear to strain their conceptual resources, and CE requires a conceptual foundation as an ethical theory. Information Ethics (IE), the philosophical foundational counterpart of CE, can be seen as a particular case of “environmental” ethics or ethics of the infosphere. What is good for an information entity and the infosphere in general? This is the ethical question asked by IE. The answer is provided by a minimalist theory of deseerts: IE argues that there is something more elementary and fundamental than life and pain, namely being, understood as information, and entropy, and that any information entity is to be recognised as the centre of a minimal moral claim, which deserves recognition and should help to regulate the implementation of any information process involving it. IE can provide a valuable perspective from which to approach, with insight and adequate discernment, not only moral problems in CE, but also the whole range of conceptual and moral phenomena that form the ethical discourse.     

Joint reasoning with knowledge subgraphs for Multiple Choice Question Answering

Humans are able to reason from multiple sources to arrive at the correct answer. In the context of Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA), knowledge graphs can provide subgraphs based on different combinations of questions and answers, mimicking the way humans find answers. However, current research mainly focuses on independent reasoning on a single graph for each question–answer pair, lacking the ability for joint reasoning among all answer candidates. In this paper, we propose a novel method KMSQA, which leverages multiple subgraphs from the large knowledge graph ConceptNet to model the comprehensive reasoning process. We further encode the knowledge graphs with shared Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and perform joint reasoning across multiple subgraphs. We evaluate our model on two common datasets: CommonsenseQA (CSQA) and OpenBookQA (OBQA). Our method achieves an exact match score of 74.53% on CSQA and 71.80% on OBQA, outperforming all eight baselines.     

The Somatic Marker Hypotheses, and What the Iowa Gambling Task Does and Does not Show

Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis (SMH) is a prominent neuroscientifichypothesis about the mechanisms implementing decision-making.This paper argues that, since its inception, the SMH has notbeen clearly formulated. It is possible to identify at leasttwo different hypotheses, which make different predictions:SMH-G, which claims that somatic states generally implementpreferences and are needed to make a decision; and SMH-S, whichspecifically claims that somatic states assist decision-makingby anticipating the long-term outcomes of available options.This paper also argues that neither hypothesis is adequatelysupported empirically; the task originally proposed to testSMH is not a good test for SMH-S, and its results do not supportSMH-G either. In addition, it is not clear how SMH-G could beempirically invalidated, given its general formulation. Suggestionsare made that could help provide evidence for SMH-S, and makeSMH-G more specific.

1 Introduction

2 Two Hypotheses: SomaticMarkers as Embodied Preferences, andas a Source of Farsightedness

3 Lack of Evidence for Somatic Farsightedness

4 Does MakingDecisions Require Somatic Markers, and can itbe Shown in theLaboratory?

5 Conclusion

     

关系嵌入性对技术创新绩效作用机制案例研究

 为了探究关系嵌入性对企业技术创新绩效的作用规律,促进中国本土制造企业整合利用网络资源,提升学习能力与创新水平,文章围绕“关系嵌入性如何影响技术创新绩效”这一基本问题进行了实证研究。在理论预设基础上,通过对 5个中国制造企业的案例内分析与案例间分析,探讨和考察了关系嵌入性如何通过影响企业的探索型学习进而影响其技术创新绩效,并由此提出了10个命题,构建了关系嵌入性影响企业技术创新绩效的理论框架。研究发现,全球制造网络中的企业间信任、信息共享与共同解决问题能通过促进企业的新知识获取和新知识利用,进而提升企业的技术创新绩效。