Uncovering stakeholders in public–private relations on social media: a case study of the 2015 Volkswagen scandal

Jung, K.,Chilton, K.,Valero, J. N. Springer Science + Business Media 2017 Quality & quantity Vol.51 No.3

<P>While researchers have focused on the nature of interpersonal communication on social media, few have investigated the patterns and structures of interactions among stakeholders engaged in an unexpected event. On September 18, 2015, the United States Environmental Protection Agency issued a notice of violation of the U.S. Clean Air Act to Volkswagen Group of America, Inc., citing Volkswagen's inappropriate software that circumvented the United States' emission standards. This research is systemically designed to examine the evolutionary structures of interpersonal issue networks on social media by focusing on the 2015 Volkswagen scandal on social media. The interpersonal network emerged and evolved to build a discourse on issues by stakeholders after the event. By using longitudinal data collected from the Volkswagen USA's Facebook page between September 17 and 20, 2015, this research tests four hypothesized network structures, which are reciprocity, transitivity, popularity, and activity, which assess the evolution of interpersonal issue networks. The results of exponential random graph models, analyzing 4131 stakeholders, show that interpersonal issue networks on social media have evolved overtime into a set of reciprocal relations and stakeholders transmitting critical information to bystanders. The findings imply that stakeholders who have Volkswagen's cars and stocks play a critical role in placating the scandal by mutually interacting with diverse bystanders on social media.</P>

Beacon-based active media control interface in indoor ubiquitous computing environment

Springer Science + Business Media 2016 CLUSTER COMPUTING Vol.19 No.1

<P>In ubiquitous computing, diverse media technologies have recently been extensively researched and applied to various fields. The goal of media technologies is to improve our daily lives by enabling us to control activemedia devices such as smart phones, tablets, and TVs. The locations of users are important to providing a variety of services to users. In addition, given that all devices cannot be simultaneously utilized, and only one device is sometimes being used, the location information can be utilized to help determine one of the core active media devices at a specific instant in time. This paper proposes an active media-control interface that is based on location recognition methods using beacons in indoor ubiquitous computing. In the proposed environment, users have a beacon that denotes the location of each user. The one that is the nearest from the beacon is selected from among multiple active media devices for servicing. In the experiments, four access points and one beacon was used to validate the proposed method. The advantage of the proposed method is that it enables us to apply active media technology to indoor environments. By recognizing user locations in indoor environments, several kinds of active media services become available.</P>

Hashtag-based topic evolution in social media

Alam, M. H.,Ryu, W. J.,Lee, S. Springer Science + Business Media 2017 World wide web Vol.20 No.6

<P>The rise of online social media has led to an explosion of metadata-containing user generated content. The tracking of metadata distribution is essential to understand social media. This paper presents two statistical models that detect interpretable topics over time along with their hashtags distribution. A topic is represented by a cluster of words that frequently occur together, and a context is represented by a cluster of hashtags, i.e., the hashtag distribution. The models combine a context with a related topic by jointly modeling words with hashtags and time. Experiments with real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed models discover topics over time with related contexts effectively.</P>

Effect of a microwave warming of cell culture media on cell viability and confluence rate

Yoon, J. K.,Sim, W. Y.,Xu, F.,Lee, W. G. Springer Science + Business Media 2016 Microsystem Technologies Vol.22 No.9

<P>Here we present a method for rapidly and stably warming up a small volume of cell culture media that can maintain cell viability and confluence rate. This method uses microwave radiation for warming without any direct contact with water, preventing the potential issue of contamination induced by the use of a water bath. To demonstrate the proof of concept validation, we used a conventional microwave oven for warming cell culture media. In our experiments, it took only 10 s to warm a 50 mL-media tube (mostly proper volume for the use of microfluidic cell culture experiments) up to 37 degrees C. Multiple tubes can also be used to increase the volume of cell culture media by placing them in a plastic support within the oven at the same time in a scalable manner. The results show that there was no jump discontinuity to a higher temperature than 37 degrees C within 10 s. Both apoptosis and necrosis were monitored and examined to confirm whether the new method can affect cell viability and metabolism. The proposed method is fast, easy and user-friendly in conventional cell culture process, even scalable for the use of large media volume, and free of biological contamination due to water contact occurred by use of conventional water baths. We urthermore believe that this approach can be potentially helpful for advancing on-chip cell culture process that may require a small volume of cell culture media often used in microfluidic devices.</P>

Topic category analysis on twitter via cross-media strategy

Springer Science + Business Media 2016 MULTIMEDIA TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS Vol.75 No.20

<P>The growing popularity of social media provides a huge volume of social data including Tweets. These collections of social data can be potentially useful, but the extent of meaningful data in these collections has not been sufficiently researched, especially in South Korea Twitter data. In general, the South Korea Twitter data has been researched as a source of political media. Nonetheless, previous research on South Korea Twitter data has not adequately covered what kind of trend Twitter represents in terms of major topic categories such as politics, economics, or sports. In this paper, we present a cross-media approach to define the nature of South Korea Tweets by inferring the topic category distribution through short-text categorization. We select newspapers as cross-media, examine the categorization of news articles from major newspapers, and then train our classifier based on the features from each topic category. In addition, for grafting news topics onto South Korea Tweets, we propose a word clustering and filtering approach to exclude those words that do not provide semantic content for the topic categories. Based on the proposed procedures, we analyze the South Korea Tweets to determine the primary topic category focus of Twitter users. We observe the special behaviors of the South Korea Twitter users based on various parameters such as date, time slot, and day of the week. Because our research includes a macroscopic analysis of Twitter data using a cross-media strategy, our research can provide useful resources for other social media analysis as well.</P>

Amelioration of Horticultural Growing Media Properties Through Rice Hull Biochar Incorporation

Kim, H. S.,Kim, K. R.,Yang, J. E.,Ok, Y. S.,Kim, W. I.,Kunhikrishnan, A.,Kim, K. H. Springer Science + Business Media 2017 Waste and biomass valorization Vol.8 No.2

<P>The current study was conducted in order to examine the applicability of rice hull derived biochar (BC) to improve the properties of growing media (GM). Biochar was incorporated into a growing media composed of coir dust, perlite and vermiculite at 0, 1, 2 and 5 % (w/w). Subsequently, the physicochemical properties of the GM-BC mixtures were determined in the cultivation of kale (Brassica oleracea L. var. acephala) for 25 days through the observation of the plant growth response. During kale cultivation in the GM-BC mixtures, the leachates were collected and analyzed to determine the changes in nutrient levels due to BC amendment. Application of rice hull-derived BC increased the retention of nutrients in the growing media due to a biochar-induced increase in cation exchange capacity, in addition to the biochar nutrient supply such as potassium and phosphorus. Furthermore, a higher water content of the growing media was observed when BC was used as an amendment, mainly due to the increased proportion of pore space available for water storage. The growth rate of kale was also increased as the biochar incorporation rate was increased. For example, the dry weight of the kale shoots was 150 % higher when grown in media containing 5 % GM-BC mixture than with the control growing media (with no biochar). From these results, it can be concluded that the rice hull-derived biochar would be a practically applicable amendment to improve the properties of the growing media.</P>

Compensation of audio data with a high frequency components for realistic media FTV

Springer Science + Business Media 2017 MULTIMEDIA TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS Vol.76 No.9

<P>Like the concept of free-viewpoint TV (FTV), the audio data should be rendered according to video data. However, on condition that minimum numbers of microphone are used, it is difficult to acquire accurate audio signal for rendering audio data to the image with the choice of view point. Especially, degradation of high frequency components (HFC) happens due to the characteristic of polar pattern for microphone. The degradation of HFC causes imperfection of signal restoration and leads to the degradation of clarity for hearing. In this paper, a compensation method for the degradation of HFC audio signal is proposed for producing an immersive audio effect at realistic media. Our experimental results show that low frequency components (LFC) of audio signal had a little directional degradation in spite of effect of the polar patterns of microphone and the compensation of HFC can be realized with adapting the attenuation inclination of LFC. This research is expected to be helpful for producing an immersive audio effect for a realistic media.</P>

α-Galactosidase delivery using 30Kc19-human serum albumin nanoparticles for effective treatment of Fabry disease

Lee, H. J.,Park, H. H.,Sohn, Y.,Ryu, J.,Park, J. H.,Rhee, W. J.,Park, T. H. Springer Science + Business Media 2016 Applied microbiology and biotechnology Vol.100 No.24

<P>Fabry disease is a genetic lysosomal storage disease caused by deficiency of alpha-galactosidase, the enzyme-degrading neutral glycosphingolipid that is transported to lysosome. Glycosphingolipid accumulation by this disease causes multi-organ dysfunction and premature death of the patient. Currently, enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) using recombinant alpha-galactosidase is the only treatment available for Fabry disease. To maximize the efficacy of treatment, enhancement of cellular delivery and enzyme stability is a challenge in ERT using alpha-galactosidase. In this study, protein nanoparticles using human serum albumin (HSA) and 30Kc19 protein, originating from silkworm, were used to enhance the delivery and intracellular alpha-galactosidase stability. 30Kc19-HSA nanoparticles loaded with the alpha-galactosidase were formed by desolvation method. 30Kc19-HSA nanoparticles had a uniform spherical shape and were well dispersed in cell culture media. 30Kc19-HSA nanoparticles had negligible toxicity to human cells. The nanoparticles exhibited enhanced cellular uptake and intracellular stability of delivered alpha-galactosidase in human foreskin fibroblast. Additionally, they showed enhanced globotriaosylceramide degradation in Fabry patients' fibroblasts. It is expected that 30Kc19-HSA protein nanoparticles could be used as an effective tool for efficient delivery and enhanced stability of drugs.</P>

Human-centric storage resource mechanism for big data on cloud service architecture

Kim, H. W.,Park, J. H.,Jeong, Y. S. Springer Science + Business Media 2016 The Journal of supercomputing Vol.72 No.7

<P>With the rapid advancement of information technology in recent years, significant research addressing the efficient storage of big data has been conducted. Traditionally, big data with media-driven service have simply implied extensive amounts of data. However, this definition has evolved to include the extraction of values, analysis, and the prediction of results from a vast volume of unstructured and varied datasets. Because of the explosive growth of computer processing technologies, the creation of big data has originated from unstructured data, text data, image data, and location data created by a variety of digital devices. Classically, the storage of big data has been administered by companies that provide storage services or by specialized storage companies. Significant cost is incurred to store big data efficiently and maintain sufficient storage requirements, which increase continuously. In this paper, a human-centric Resource-Integrated System for Big Data (RISBD) is proposed that utilizes the resources of legacy desktop computers for big data storage to future communication. This is advantageous in terms of the cost of implementing a new storage system. Furthermore, it provides high storage scalability because it is an XML-based standard storage integration system developed using software.</P>

Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase-interacting multifunctional protein 1 suppresses tumor growth in breast cancer-bearing mice by negatively regulating myeloid-derived suppressor cell functions

Hong, H. J.,Lim, H. X.,Song, J. H.,Lee, A.,Kim, E.,Cho, D.,Cohen, E. P.,Kim, T. S. Springer Science + Business Media 2016 Cancer immunology, immunotherapy Vol.65 No.1

<P>Myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) are one of the most important cell types that contribute to negative regulation of immune responses in the tumor microenvironment. Recently, aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase-interacting multifunctional protein 1 (AIMP1), a novel pleiotropic cytokine, was identified as an antitumor protein that inhibits angiogenesis and induces antitumor responses. However, the effect of AIMP1 on MDSCs in the tumor environment remains unclear. In the present study, we demonstrated that AIMP1 significantly inhibited tumor growth in 4T1 breast cancer-bearing mice and reduced MDSCs population of tumor sites and spleens of tumor-bearing mice. AIMP1 reduced expansion of MDSCs from bone marrow-derived cells in the tumor-conditioned media. AIMP1 also negatively regulated suppressive activities of MDSCs by inhibiting IL-6 and NO production, and Arg-1 expression. Furthermore, treatment of breast cancer-bearing mice with AIMP1 decreased the capacity of MDSCs to suppress T cell proliferation and Treg cell induction. Western blot and inhibition experiments showed that downregulation of MDSCs functions by AIMP1 may result from attenuated activation of STATs, Akt, and ERK. These findings indicate that AIMP1 plays an essential role in negative regulation of suppressive functions of MDSCs. Therefore, it has a significant potential as a therapeutic agent for cancer treatment.</P>