Influence of human behavior and the principle of least effort on library and information science research

This study identified the influence of the main concepts contained in Zipf's classic 1949 book entitled Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (HBPLE) on library and information science (LIS) research. The study analyzed LIS articles published between 1949 and 2013 that cited HBPLE. The results showed that HBPLE has a growing influence on LIS research. Of the 17 cited concepts that were identified, the concept of “Zipf's law” was cited most (64.8%), followed by “the principle of least effort” (24.5%). Although the concept of “the principle of least effort,” the focus of HBPLE, was not most frequently observed, an increasing trend was evident regarding the influence of this concept. The concept of “the principle of least effort” has been cited mainly by researchers of information behavior and served to support the citing authors’ claims. By contrast, the concept of “Zipf's law” received the most attention from bibliometrics research and was used mainly for comparisons with other informetrics laws or research results.     

Governance rigidity,industry evolution,and value capture in platform ecosystems

Existing work has shown how, in platform ecosystems, firms can capture above-average rents by controlling hard-to-replace segments. However, initial conditions can have a lasting effect on a platform owner's ability to capture value as the ecosystem in which it operates evolves. We develop a theoretical framework that first considers the role of bargaining power and industry life cycle stage, showing how these shape initial governance arrangements and the platform owner's subsequent ability to capture value based on the rigidity of these arrangements. We then develop propositions, focusing on contingencies that moderate this degree of governance rigidity in platform ecosystems. Our framework helps understand the combined effects of initial conditions and governance rigidity as key drivers of a platform owner's ability to capture rents. Once we consider these dynamics, controlling a hard-to-replace segment may neither be sufficient nor necessary to obtain a large share of the value created by an ecosystem.     

Celestial and mythical origins of the citadel of Bukhara

Narshakhī's The History of Bukhara, an account from the tenth century AD that has been narrated as a mythical and strange story about the formation of the citadel of Bukhara, has received scanty scholarly attention. This study addresses some of the unknown semantic and symbolic origins of Iranian citadels and fortresses through an analysis of documented legends and other classical sources. This analysis shows that the citadel (qal'a) was built based on the conceptual archetype of the Utopia of Kangdiz (Siāvošgerd) and the geometric shape of Banāt Naʿsh (Big Dipper), which has played a symbolic role in protecting and guarding in Persian cosmology. This celestial analogy can explain the causes and origins of the irregular shape of some other Iranian citadels.     

Evidence for oxygenation of Fe-Mg oxides at mid-mantle conditions and the rise of deep oxygen

As the reaction product of subducted water and the iron core, FeO₂ with more oxygen than hematite (Fe₂O₃) has been recently recognized as an important component in the D” layer just above the Earth''s core-mantle boundary. Here, we report a new oxygen-excess phase (Mg, Fe)₂O_3+δ (0 < δ < 1, denoted as ‘OE-phase’). It forms at pressures greater than 40 gigapascal when (Mg, Fe)-bearing hydrous materials are heated over 1500 kelvin. The OE-phase is fully recoverable to ambient conditions for ex situ investigation using transmission electron microscopy, which indicates that the OE-phase contains ferric iron (Fe³⁺) as in Fe₂O₃ but holds excess oxygen through interactions between oxygen atoms. The new OE-phase provides strong evidence that H₂O has extraordinary oxidation power at high pressure. Unlike the formation of pyrite-type FeO₂Hx which usually requires saturated water, the OE-phase can be formed with under-saturated water at mid-mantle conditions, and is expected to be more ubiquitous at depths greater than 1000 km in the Earth''s mantle. The emergence of oxygen-excess reservoirs out of primordial or subducted (Mg, Fe)-bearing hydrous materials may revise our view on the deep-mantle redox chemistry.     

Human capital intensity in technology-based firms located in Portugal: Does foreign ownership matter?

This paper contributes to the scarce empirical literature on the impact of foreign ownership on human capital intensity. New evidence is provided, based on a comprehensive, large-scale survey of technology-based firms located in Portugal. The key findings are that: (1) foreign ownership directly (and significantly) impacts a firm's general human capital (education); (2) foreign ownership indirectly (and significantly) impacts a firm's specific human capital (skills); (3) the total impact of foreign ownership on a firm's human capital intensity is higher for education- (general) than for skills- (specific) related human capital intensity. Giving the critical importance of both FDI and human capital development for an ‘intermediate’ economy like Portugal (lagging behind in terms of human capital stock, and seeming to have lost part of its attractiveness as an FDI location), the paper discusses related policy implications. It is believed that our results and conclusions may be useful for other countries facing similar challenges.     

Scientific aspirations of the Chinese Space Station program: an interview with Ming Gao

On 17 June 2021, China''s spacecraft Shenzhou 12 took three Chinese astronauts into the Earth''s orbit and docked with the assembly of Tianhe and Tianzhou, the core module and cargo ship of the Chinese Space Station (CSS), which had been launched and assembled in orbit earlier this year. The three astronauts became the first visitors of the CSS and would stay in orbit for about three months. In 2022, two laboratory cabin modules, Wentian and Mengtian, will be launched and assembled into Tianhe, completing the basic structure of the CSS. The CSS is designed to be used for at least 10 years, and will provide an outer space experimental platform for researchers from multiple disciplines.On 23 July 2021, National Science Review (NSR) interviewed Professor Ming Gao (高铭), the Commander-in-Chief of the Space Utilizaiton System of the China Manned Space Program, Director General of the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization (CSU) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an Academician of the International Academy of Astronautics. The Space Utilizaiton System is the scientific part of the CSS project, responsible for the design and organization of the onboard research programs. Gao has been involved in China''s Manned Space Program since 1994, and has experienced the whole development process from the Shenzhou spacecraft to the CSS. In this interview, she introduces the scientific goals, plans and aspirations of the CSS.     

Content-oriented or persona-oriented? A text analytics of endorsement strategies on public willingness to participate in citizen science

This paper applies text analytics to study how the orientation of an endorsement strategy affects the public's willingness to participate in citizen science projects. Using 850 citizen science projects with 1,243 endorsements from an online citizen science platform Experiment.com as corpus, the orientation of the endorsement strategies is detected using the naïve Bayesian inference model with a Laplace estimator. Our results inform that 39% of the endorsements are persona-oriented while 61% are content-oriented. A persona-oriented endorsement strategy draws more participants but reduces the per capita invested. A content-oriented endorsement strategy has the opposite effect. Further, the project initiator's identity strengthens or weakens the effect of the endorsement orientation strategy. In the number of participants model, the projects initiated by the professional scientists and research students are positively moderated by persona-orientation endorsements, whereas the projects initiated by the amateur researchers are negatively moderated. The converse holds for the per capita invested model.     

Crowdsourcing for innovation: How related and unrelated perspectives interact to increase creative performance

In recent years, several organizations have opened up their innovation processes to individuals from outside of the organization by means of digital crowdsourcing. The literature on crowdsourcing has emphasized the importance of using digital technology to reach far beyond organizational boundaries and include individuals with (educational) backgrounds that are very different and unrelated to those within the organization in its innovation process. It has been argued that such individuals will contribute novel insights because they consider an organization's innovation challenge from different perspectives. Building on the literature on creativity and absorptive capacity, we instead argue that having a related perspective will positively affect an individual's idea performance, while unrelated perspectives only positively contribute to idea performance in combination with a related perspective. Analyses of 2178 ideas contributed by 948 crowd members to 68 crowdsourced idea challenges show that it is important to consider how (educational) backgrounds can provide individuals with multiple perspectives, which can be either related or unrelated, and study how the interplay of related and unrelated perspectives affects the value of ideas in organizational open innovation initiatives.     

There and back again: Revisiting Vannevar Bush,the linear model,and the freedom of science

Despite its age, Vannevar Bushs Science: The Endless Frontier has remained a touchstone for science funding policy discussions. More specifically, many claim that Bush ushered in a new ‘social contract’ that allowed scientists to freely choose projects in accordance with their own interests while promising deliverables for the society that funds scientific institutions. Despite the prominence of The Endless Frontier, there are countless interpretations of its argumentative structure. Building off others, I develop an interpretation of how the linear model relates to the freedom of science in SEF. I critically assess this view and argue that it provides a valuable starting point for a social contract for the 21st century. To accomplish this, I clarify Bush's stance on the linear model and show that it bypasses the most common objections against its plausibility, consider the relationship between Bush's conception of the freedom of science and the rise of citizen science, and articulate a more nuanced approach to government intervention in research priority setting.     

Agriculture: science and technology safeguard sustainability

China has traditionally placed tremendous importance on agricultural research. Meanwhile, in recent years, sustainable agriculture has been increasingly highlighted in both policy agenda and the capital market. However, while terms like environmental friendliness, low carbon, organic and green agriculture have become buzzwords in the media, few meaningful discussions have been raised to examine the relationship between science and technology (S&T) development and sustainable agriculture. What''s more, some environmentalists stress that sustainable agriculture should abandon modern agriculture''s heavy reliance on science and industrialization, making the link between agricultural S&T and sustainable agriculture seem problematic. What is the truth? If S&T are to play an important role in advancing sustainable agriculture, what is the current status of the field? What factors have caused the sustainable development of agriculture in China? At an online forum organized by the National Science Review (NSR), Hepeng Jia, commissioned by NSR executive editor-in-chief Mu-ming Poo, asked four scientists in the field to examine the dynamic relationship between sustainable agriculture and agricultural S&T in the Chinese context. Jikun Huang Agricultural economist at Peking University, Beijing, China Xiaofeng Luo Agricultural economist at Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China Jianzhong Yan Agricultural and environmental scientist at Southwest University, Chongqing, China Yulong Yin Veterinary scientist at Institute of Subtropical Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changsha, China Hepeng Jia (Chair) Science communication scholar at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA     

Prediction of drive-by download attacks on Twitter

The popularity of Twitter for information discovery, coupled with the automatic shortening of URLs to save space, given the 140 character limit, provides cybercriminals with an opportunity to obfuscate the URL of a malicious Web page within a tweet. Once the URL is obfuscated, the cybercriminal can lure a user to click on it with enticing text and images before carrying out a cyber attack using a malicious Web server. This is known as a drive-by download. In a drive-by download a user's computer system is infected while interacting with the malicious endpoint, often without them being made aware the attack has taken place. An attacker can gain control of the system by exploiting unpatched system vulnerabilities and this form of attack currently represents one of the most common methods employed. In this paper we build a machine learning model using machine activity data and tweet metadata to move beyond post-execution classification of such URLs as malicious, to predict a URL will be malicious with 0.99 F-measure (using 10-fold cross-validation) and 0.833 (using an unseen test set) at 1 s into the interaction with the URL. Thus, providing a basis from which to kill the connection to the server before an attack has completed and proactively blocking and preventing an attack, rather than reacting and repairing at a later date.     

Differences and similarities in information seeking: children and adults as Web users

This study examined the success and information seeking behaviors of seventh-grade science students and graduate students in information science in using Yahooligans! Web search engine/directory. It investigated these users' cognitive, affective, and physical behaviors as they sought the answer for a fact-finding task. It analyzed and compared the overall patterns of children's and graduate students' Web activities, including searching moves, browsing moves, backtracking moves, looping moves, screen scrolling, target location and deviation moves, and the time they took to complete the task. The authors applied Bilal's Web Traversal Measure to quantify these users' effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of moves they made. Results were based on 14 children's Web sessions and nine graduate students' sessions. Both groups' Web activities were captured online using Lotus ScreenCam, a software package that records and replays online activities in Web browsers. Children's affective states were captured via exit interviews. Graduate students' affective states were extracted from the journal writings they kept during the traversal process. The study findings reveal that 89% of the graduate students found the correct answer to the search task as opposed to 50% of the children. Based on the Measure, graduate students' weighted effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of the Web moves they made were much higher than those of the children. Regardless of success and weighted scores, however, similarities and differences in information seeking were found between the two groups. Yahooligans! poor structure of keyword searching was a major factor that contributed to the “breakdowns” children and graduate students experienced. Unlike children, graduate students were able to recover from “breakdowns” quickly and effectively. Three main factors influenced these users' performance: ability to recover from “breakdowns”, navigational style, and focus on task. Children and graduate students made recommendations for improving Yahooligans! interface design. Implications for Web user training and system design improvements are made.     

On-chip three-dimensional cell culture in phaseguides improves hepatocyte functions in vitro

The in vitro study of liver functions and liver cell specific responses to external stimuli deals with the problem to preserve the in vivo functions of primary hepatocytes. In this study, we used the biochip OrganoPlate^TM (MIMETAS) that combines different advantages for the cultivation of hepatocytes in vitro: (1) the perfusion flow is achieved without a pump allowing easy handling and placement in the incubator; (2) the phaseguides allow plating of matrix-embedded cells in lanes adjacent to the perfusion flow without physical barrier; and (3) the matrix-embedding ensures indirect contact of the cells to the flow. In order to evaluate the applicability of this biochip for the study of hepatocyte''s functions, Matrigel^TM-embedded HepG2 cells were cultured over three weeks in this biochip and compared to a static Matrigel culture (3D) and a monolayer culture (2D). Chip-cultured cells grew in spheroid-like structures and were characterized by the formation of bile canaliculi and a high viability over 14 days. Hepatocyte-specific physiology was achieved as determined by an increase in albumin production. Improved detoxification metabolism was demonstrated by strongly increased cytochrome P450 activity and urea production. Additionally, chip-cultured cells displayed increased sensitivity to acetaminophen. Altogether, the OrganoPlate seems to be a very useful alternative for the cultivation of hepatocytes, as their behavior was strongly improved over 2D and static 3D cultures and the results were largely comparable and partly superior to the previous reports on biochip-cultured hepatocytes. As for the low technical needs, this platform has the appearance of being highly applicable for further studies of hepatocytes'' responses to external stimuli.     

Paleontology: advancing China's international leadership

In recent years, Chinese scientists have achieved significant progress in paleontological discoveries and scientific studies. Series of studies published in top journals, such as Science, Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), have astonished the world by presenting beautiful fossils that furnish robust evidence to enrich the understanding of organismic evolution, major extinctions and stratigraphy. It has been portrayed as the heyday in the paleontology of China. What is the status of the field? What factors have caused the avalanche of fossil discoveries in China? What implications can these new discoveries provide for our understanding of current evolution theories? How, given their significant contribution to the world''s paleontology scholarship, can Chinese scientists play a due leadership role in the field? At an online forum organized by the National Science Review (NSR), its associate editor-in-chief, Zhonghe Zhou, asked four scientists in the field as well as NSR executive editor-in-chief Mu-ming Poo to join the discussion. Jin Meng Paleobiologist at American Museum of Natural History Mu-ming Poo Neurobiologist at Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Shuzhong Shen Stratigrapher at Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Shuhai Xiao Paleobiologist and geobiologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Zhonghe Zhou (Chair) Paleobiologist at Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), Chinese Academy of Sciences     

Colored polydimethylsiloxane micropillar arrays for high throughput measurements of forces applied by genetic model organisms

Measuring forces applied by multi-cellular organisms is valuable in investigating biomechanics of their locomotion. Several technologies have been developed to measure such forces, for example, strain gauges, micro-machined sensors, and calibrated cantilevers. We introduce an innovative combination of techniques as a high throughput screening tool to assess forces applied by multiple genetic model organisms. First, we fabricated colored Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) micropillars where the color enhances contrast making it easier to detect and track pillar displacement driven by the organism. Second, we developed a semi-automated graphical user interface to analyze the images for pillar displacement, thus reducing the analysis time for each animal to minutes. The addition of color reduced the Young''s modulus of PDMS. Therefore, the dye-PDMS composite was characterized using Yeoh''s hyperelastic model and the pillars were calibrated using a silicon based force sensor. We used our device to measure forces exerted by wild type and mutant Caenorhabditis elegans moving on an agarose surface. Wild type C. elegans exert an average force of ∼1 μN on an individual pillar and a total average force of ∼7.68 μN. We show that the middle of C. elegans exerts more force than its extremities. We find that C. elegans mutants with defective body wall muscles apply significantly lower force on individual pillars, while mutants defective in sensing externally applied mechanical forces still apply the same average force per pillar compared to wild type animals. Average forces applied per pillar are independent of the length, diameter, or cuticle stiffness of the animal. We also used the device to measure, for the first time, forces applied by Drosophila melanogaster larvae. Peristaltic waves occurred at 0.4 Hz applying an average force of ∼1.58 μN on a single pillar. Our colored microfluidic device along with its displacement tracking software allows us to measure forces applied by multiple model organisms that crawl or slither to travel through their environment.     

Lectin in agglutination and its role in detection of sugars on the surface of RBC of normal and cancer patients

In the present studies the property of Lectins as agglutinin and to bind sugars in the blood on normal and cancer cervix patients has been studied. Out of 36 lectins extracted from the seeds of various plants, 25 were non-specific haemagglutinins and 11 were non-reactive with the RBC of normal persons. The titre value greatly varied from 1∶4 to 1∶4096. The titre value of RBC of patients of carcinoma cervix (Stage III) was compared with the normal person’s RBC. Out of 25 non-specific haemagglutinins 16 lectins did not show any difference in titre value. Nine lectins agglutinated RBC of cancer patient at a higher dilution than the normal. On the contrary, 3 lectins agglutinated the cancerous patient’s RBC at a higher concentration than the normal (Control). Sugar specificity of 25 non-specific haemagglutinins was tested with 13 sugars separately. Haemagglutination Inhibition (HI) reaction showed marked difference in the RBC of normal and in carcinoma cervix patient. Four marked reactions were noticed. RBC of normal (N) and carcinoma patient (C) with positive HI reaction (C₊/N₊), with negative HI reaction (C_?/N_?); with C positive and N negative HI reaction (C₊/N_?) and with C negative and N positive HI reaction (C_?/N₊). Three lectins were specific to sugar moieties.Vicia faba JV II showed dissimilarity with fructose and glucose moiety and also indicated that cellulose is common in both RBC of normal and cancer cervix patient.Triticum vulgare lectin showed the difference in cellulose moiety.Linum usitatissimum lectin showed the difference in lactose moiety and indicated that melibiose is present in both. It was also observed that mannose gave positive HI reaction with lectins ofR. communis, L. esculentus, P. sativum, P. sativum Pusa 10,P. sativum R?1,D. lablab, A. indica, H. vulgare andZ. mays in the blood of cancer cervix patient suggesting that mannose perhaps is present in the RBC while it may not be present in the normal person’s RBC. Raffinose also gave the positive HI reaction with cancer patient’s blood and not with the normal person’s blood.     

Strongly and uniformly convergent Green's function expansions

The convergence of Green's function expansions used in the exact analytical treatment of problems involving boundaries of different shapes is a property crucial in obtaining their solution. Existing expansions in most cases suffer from two serious setbacks: they do not converge uniformly in their region of validity, exhibiting a slow and conditional convergence near the source (singular) point and, even worse, they change expression when the field point moves past the source point. For such reasons they are unsuited for the solution of singular integral equations, in which values of the Green's function G at the source point do appear inside the integral. These inadequacies are met head-on by extracting the singular behavior in a closed-form term. Additional simple terms are also extracted to improve the convergence of the expansion of the remaining, non-singular part of G. The so-obtained new eigenfunction expansions for G converge uniformly over the whole region of their validity and very strongly (exponentially) near the source point. They are particularly suited for the solution of singular integral equations by the Carleman-Vekua method, otherwise known as the method of regularization by solving the dominant equation. These new expansions can be further subjected to a Watson transformation yielding a third expansion exhibiting strong convergence in regions where the convergence of the preceding series weakens, and vise versa. All these considerations are illustrated in this paper by means of a two-dimensional harmonic Green's function of a line source inside a rectangular shield, which is useful in a variety of shieldedline configurations. Extensions to different dielectric sublayers, to wave (Helmholtz) Green's functions, etc., are also discussed.     

The onset of deep recycling of supracrustal materials at the Paleo-Mesoarchean boundary

The recycling of supracrustal materials, and in particular hydrated rocks, has a profound impact on mantle composition and thus on the formation of continental crust, because water modifies the physical properties of lithological systems and the mechanisms of partial melting and fractional fractionation. On the modern Earth, plate tectonics offers an efficient mechanism for mass transport from the Earth''s surface to its interior, but how far this mechanism dates back in the Earth''s history is still uncertain. Here, we use zircon oxygen (O) isotopes to track recycling of supracrustal materials into the magma sources of early Archean igneous suites from the Kaapvaal Craton, southern Africa. The mean δ¹⁸O values of zircon from TTG (tonalite–trondhjemite–granodiorite) rocks abruptly increase at the Paleo-Mesoarchean boundary (ca. 3230 million years ago; Ma), from mantle zircon values of 5‰–6‰ to approaching 7.1‰, and this increase occurs in ≤3230 Ma rocks with elevated Dy/Yb ratios. The ¹⁸O enrichment is a unique signature of low-temperature water–rock interaction on the Earth''s surface. Because the later phase was emplaced into the same crustal level as the older one and TTG magmas would derive from melting processes in the garnet stability field (>40 km depth), we suggest that this evident shift in TTG zircon O isotopic compositions records the onset of recycling of the mafic oceanic crust that underwent seawater hydrothermal alteration at low temperature. The onset of the enhanced recycling of supracrustal materials may also have developed elsewhere in other Archean cratons and reflects a significant change in the tectonic realm during craton formation and stabilization, which may be important processes for the operation of plate tectonics on early Earth.     

Reliability Measures and Optimal Maintenance Policies for a Standby System with Repair Facilities Subject to Breakdown

The problem of determining optimal maintenance policies for a repairable standby system whose repair facilities are subject to random breakdowns is considered. The reliability measures of this system are derived by the discrete-state continuous-time Markov model, as well as by a more general probabilistic approach. The dynamic optimization problem is discussed and treated by a generalized version of Pontryagin's minimum principle based on an integral Hamiltonian functional. This is applied to the Markov model of the system for deriving both time-variable and fixed maintenance policies over the whole mission time. Then an appropriate cost function, involving a maintenance cost term and a down-time cost term, is minimized with respect to the vector repair rate function u(t) subject to the practical constraint 0 ⩽ u(t) ⩽ U, where U is a given upper repair rate limit. A particular nontrivial example is given.     

Machine learning based customer meta-combination brand equity analysis for marketing behavior evaluation

At present, the focus of marketing research is mostly on the influencing factors, composition, and measurement of brand equity. The meta-combined brand equity analysis is based on two main research perspectives: financial perspective and customer perspective. While the financial perspective is based on the incremental discounted future cash flows that would result from a branded product's revenue over the revenue of an unbranded product, the brand equity from the customer's perspective is the consumer's reaction to brand marketing behavior, the impact on brand knowledge. The decision-making of marketing behaviors often faces choices related to ethics. Therefore, once the moral value of a company through marketing behavior is recognized by consumers, the ethical behavior presented in this article through marketing behavior will make consumers feel more about the brand. How does the brand equity of your customer's products affect you? In this experiment, shopping groups with the same shopping experience were selected. During the survey process, all customers in different periods and the same time were selected as far as possible based on the practicability of the survey. The study survey covered 4 main aspects; customer satisfaction, overall overview of customer satisfaction; the advantages and disadvantages of marketing strategies through quantitative analysis and to put forward reasonable marketing strategy improvement opinions and suggestions to improve customer satisfaction. Using the technique of parameter prediction of the financial industry, the experiment proved that the non-standard promotion behavior, the integrity of the enterprise and the social responsibility are three aspects (P<0.05) that have an impact on the customer's brand equity among the corporate marketing components. It was a detailed study of the current state of brand marketing strategies and customer satisfaction, found key indicators of brands that could improve customer satisfaction, and presented corresponding suggestions for optimizing marketing strategies. It shows that. It has the importance of good guidance and references to improve customer satisfaction in the industry.