Independent View Research Articles

Older Adults' Perspectives of Independence Through Time: Results of a Longitudinal Interview Study.

Understanding how older people experience independence has implications for person-centered care. Existing understanding of older people's experience of independence, generated through methods that provide a "snapshot" view of a person's independence at a given time point, provides little insight into the process of maintaining independence through time. The aim of this study was to explore older participants' perceptions to understand the processes and resources that were most important for maintaining independence. Two semistructured interviews were conducted longitudinally to explore the perspectives of 12 community-dwelling, older people, aged 76-85 years. A social constructivist approach, using dramaturgical and descriptive codes, facilitated the interpretation of the data. Sixteen analytical questions guided the exploration of participants' perceptions of independence through time. Older people suggested that objective representations underestimated, and omitted, important aspects of their independence through time. Some participants perceived "snapshot" judgments of their independence as insensitive to their individual values and context. Change over time required some participants to adapt their methods for maintaining independence. The stability of participants' sense of independence was value dependent and informed by the purpose a participant ascribed to maintaining independence. This study augments the understanding of independence as a complex and multifaceted construct. The findings challenge the congruence of common interpretations of independence with older people's views, showing areas of commonality, and discrepancy. Exploration of independence in terms of form and function provides an important understanding of how function takes precedence to form in determining the maintenance of independence through time.

Mô hình ba tuyến và vai trò của kiểm toán nội bộ tại các doanh nghiệp niêm yết

Internal audit is an important part of corporate governance. Internal Audit as an independent and objective supervisor of operating processes, giving opinions to improve the efficiency of risk management processes, control processes and governance processes. Thereby, providing the Board of Directors and leaders with an independent view to promote cooperation, monitoring and early warning about new risks, improving the efficiency of business processes to add value and improve operations, while playing a catalytic role and fostering an internal corporate culture of risk management and compliance. In this article, the author mentions the three lines model and compares the three lines model with the previous three lines model of defense to identify challenges internal audit in joint stock companies. The research results make recommendations to enhance the role of internal audit in governance in order to minimize risks, fraud, and bring more value to businesses at Joint stock companies.

KGCL: A Knowledge-enhanced Graph Contrastive learning framework for session-based recommendation

Session-based Recommendation (SBR) aims at predicting the next item based on a short-term anonymous user behavior, whose main challenge lies at the sparsity problem of user–item​ interactions. Graph contrastive learning, which discovers ground-truth samples by data augmentation, is a promising paradigm to tackle this problem. However, the following two insights are often overlooked by most of these contrastive learning-based models. First, item knowledge (i.e., item attributes, which can be distilled from open knowledge graphs) provides side information to model the complex high-order relations among items. Second, effective embedding aggregating mechanism is capable of filtering noisy preference signals (i.e., unrelated items) in sessions and retaining higher weight for the related items. These insights motivate us to construct an item attribute hypergraph to summarize associations among items that share common attributes and develop a Knowledge-enhanced Graph Contrastive Learning framework for session-based recommendation (KGCL). Technically, KGCL constructs two independent and complementary views (cross-session graph and item attribute hypergraph) in terms of user–item interactions sequence and item intrinsic attributes respectively, so as to explicitly capture both internal and external factors of items. Then, we encode item and session embeddings with a query-aware graph attention network and a hypergraph convolutional network over the above two views. Finally, we devise two contrastive learning loss — global–global contrastive learning and local–global contrastive learning — that maximize agreement between these two views and generate high-quality recommendation results. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets show KGCL has a higher expressive power that enables SBR to predict the next item.

Mykola Lysenko and Yakiv Hulak-Artemovskyi: to History of their Relationship

The purpose of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of communication between Mykola Lysenko-conductor and amateur singer Yakiv Hulak-Artemovskyi. Research methodology. The following methods have been used in the research: exploratory, analysis and generalisation method to reveal the communication of the eminent master with this specific member of the choir, based on the latter’s memories and epistolary. Scientific novelty of the research. The article reveals for the first time certain aspects of Mykola Lysenko's work with the choir and the conductor's collaboration with the amateur singer Yakiv Hulak-Artemovskyi, his faithful assistant, who became the “right hand” of the conductor. Conclusions. Yakiv Hulak-Artemovskyi is a person from Mykola Lysenko's circle, extremely responsible and devoted. Understanding Mykola Lysenko's business, his impracticality in financial affairs, at the same time his great love for his native people and cheering for their future, he agreed to become a voluntary assistant of the artist. The relationship of Mykola Lysenko – an outstanding Ukrainian composer and conductor, with Yakiv Hulak-Artemovskyi – an amateur singer and choir manager must be a model of deep respect, tolerance, and an example of devoted service to the cause of Ukrainian choral art. The creative tandem of these caring personalities contributed to coordinated and successful work of the choir, preparation of concert programmes, organisation of tour trips, and the popularisation of the native song among the Ukrainian population. Mykola Lysenko and Yakiv Hulak-Artemovskyi were Ukrainian patriots, highly spiritual personalities, and hardworking people who defended the right of the people to be treated with dignity within or under the conditions of the colonialist policy of the Russian Empire: Mykola Lysenko as a defining cultural figure, whereas Yakiv Hulak-Artemovskyi was an average, but dedicated representative of Ukrainian citizenship. Both faithfully served their native people and the Ukrainian culture. Yakiv Hulak-Artemovskyi respected Mykola Lysenko as a talented artist, admired him as a personality, as well as, his ability to maintain independent views, even in the most difficult times. In turn, Mykola Lysenko valued Yakiv Hulak-Artemovskyi as a singer and head of the choir, and as a reliable assistant and adviser.
 Key words: Mykola Lysenko, Yakiv Hulak-Artemovskyi, creative collaboration, relationships, choir.

Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks via View Fusion for Trajectory Data Analytics

Trajectory data contains rich spatial and temporal information. Turning trajectories into graphs and then analyzing them efficiently in an AI-empowered way is a representative branch of trajectory analysis in IoV and ITS environments, which is of great significance. This research attempts to project trajectories onto road networks to predict traffic conditions. Extracting accurate spatio-temporal dependencies is the key to improving the analysis. However, two problems exist in the current study. The first one is the focus on the network structure while ignoring node features, and the second one is that the structure cannot be fully utilized. In addition, the static spatial structure may not accurately reflect the dynamic real spatial dependency. In response to these problems, a novel Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks via View Fusion for Trajectory Data Analytics (STFGCN) model is designed. It contains two independent views: the structural view and feature view. The view fusion layer is further designed. It includes an extended graph convolutional module and a causal dilated module. The extended graph convolutional module fully extracts dynamic spatial dependencies, while the causal dilated module captures time tendencies. Stacked view fusion layers and a view fusion module perform fusion operations based on the advantages of the two views, efficiently integrating information from both. Several experiments are performed on two real-world trajectory datasets. The results show that a better prediction performance is obtained, especially on the long-range time prediction task.

Цифровые двойники в технологии графена

The Digital Twins concept in science has a long history that goes back to the beginnings of now widely accepted modelling. The ever-expanding amount of digital data accompanying modelling could not but cause a qualitative transition from modelling, subordinated to the goal of reproducing a real object, to an equal-right Digital Twins concept that offers an independent view of the real object. This chapter presents the first example of such a conceptual rethinking, using the example of material science of high-tech graphene materials.

“The World Has to Stop Discriminating Against African American Language” (AAL): Exploring the Language Ideologies of AAL-Speaking Students in College Writing

Drawing on recent decades, literature in college writing that theorizes the importance of Critical Language Awareness (CLA) curricula for African American Language (AAL)-speaking students, this article offers empirical evidence on the design and implementation of a college writing curriculum centered on CLA and its influence on AAL–speaking students’ language ideologies with respect to both speech and writing. Qualitative analyses of students’ pre- and-post-Questionnaires and the researcher’s field notes demonstrate that the curriculum helped students view AAL as an independent, natural, and legitimate language and view themselves as critically conscious thinkers and writers—more likely and willing to develop their academic writing skills and the strategies that support employing their native language in writing—for example, code-meshing strategies. This study offers important implications for college writing instruction.

Examining the association between cultural self-construal and dream structures in the United States and Japan.

Cultural differences in self-construal, human relationships, and values between Western and East Asian people have been suggested. The aim of this article is to investigate cultural difference in dreamers' self-construal based on their dreams. We examined the dreams sampled via online questionnaires from 300 non-clinical participants from America and Japan, respectively. The free response for the contents of "impressive dreams in childhood" "recent impressive dreams" was categorized into the five general dream structural patterns. Besides, the participants were asked to answer the scales to investigate participants' cultural self-construal. The current results revealed the prevalence of the independent view of self in American participants and the interdependent view of self in Japanese participants. In addition, we found significant cultural differences in the dream length and structural patterns. For American dreams, the dream-ego had a clear will and strong mobility, and there were obvious ends of dream events. Conversely, for Japanese dreams, the weak agency and vague conscious of the dream-ego were shown, and others could play a main role in one's dreams. These results suggested that each characteristic of the American and Japanese samples may be influenced by the differences in self-construal or in the process of self-formation between American and Japanese cultures.

Russian-Latin American diplomatic and trade-economic relations as the multipolar world’s formation basis

The article is dedicated to diplomatic and trade-economic relations between Russia and Latin American countries as one of bases of multipolar world’s formation. Clearly, the emergence of the multipolar world is a difficult and long-term process. Yet, this world is now being created by states, political and economic associations, regions and whole continents. Latin American and Caribbean countries are actively participating in the formation of this new world order. The countries of the region hold quite independent views on many international problems including the formation of new world order, and these views share much similarity with Russian opinion on the matter. These states support the leading role of the UN and its Security Council; they did not join the western sanctions against Russia and practically stopped being the USA’s “backyard”. Moreover, the majority of Latin American countries have introduced the visa-free regime for Russian citizens. This lets us consider the Latin America to be the element in the building of the new world order. Many states seek to develop and support the stable diplomatic and trade-economic relations with Latin American countries, especially China, the USA and the European Union. Russia has a long history of international relations with Latin American countries. In the XIX century the Russian Empire established the diplomatic relations with Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela. Later, the USSR supported close diplomatic and trade-economic relations with a number of Latin American states. After the dissolution of the USSR the Russian relations with these countries were recreated, developed and strengthened. Our cooperation is growing in all areas: diplomacy, trade, science, education, medicine, energy etc. Now the questions of creating the common bank and trading in national currencies are being discussed. Russia enjoys the diplomatic relations with all Latin American countries; these relations are evolving, and there are perspectives of their future enhancement.

View Types and Visual Communication Cues for Remote Collaboration

Over the last several years, remote collaboration has been getting more attention in the research community because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In previous studies, researchers have investigated the effect of adding visual communication cues or shared views in collaboration, but there has not been any previous study exploring the influence between them. In this paper, we investigate the influence of view types on the use of visual communication cues. We compared the use of the three visual cues (hand gesture, a pointer with hand gesture, and sketches with hand gesture) across two view types (dependent and independent views), respectively. We conducted a user study, and the results showed that hand gesture and sketches with the hand gesture cues were well matched with the dependent view condition, and using a pointer with the hand gesture cue was suited to the independent view condition. With the dependent view, the hand gesture and sketch cues required less mental effort for collaborative communication, had better usability, provided better message understanding, and increased feeling of co-presence compared to the independent view. Since the dependent view supported the same viewpoint between the remote expert and a local worker, the local worker could easily understand the remote expert’s hand gestures. In contrast, in the independent view case, when they had different viewpoints, it was not easy for the local worker to understand the remote expert’s hand gestures. The sketch cue had a benefit of showing the final position and orientation of the manipulating objects with the dependent view, but this benefit was less obvious in the independent view case (which provided a further view compared to the dependent view) because precise drawing in the sketches was difficult from a distance. On the contrary, a pointer with the hand gesture cue required less mental effort to collaborate, had better usability, provided better message understanding, and an increased feeling of co-presence in the independent view condition than in the dependent view condition. The pointer cue could be used instead of a hand gesture in the independent view condition because the pointer could still show precise pointing information regardless of the view type.

The Mobility Compass - towards more collaborative, open and efficient research in Europe

The development of sustainable solutions for the demanding challenges in mobility and transport research requires in particular the successful collaboration of interdisciplinary research groups. However, against the background of heterogeneous research cultures and sometimes poorly visible research networks, identifying relevant network partners can be very laborious. The Mobility Compass (www.mobility-compass.eu) supports researchers in this task with a comprehensive, open databased and independent view of the actors in the research landscape. It offers a modern thematic-explorative approach as well as classical search functions for this purpose. The development of the concrete functionalities is driven by the researchers themselves. This article describes the objective, the concept for implementation and the current status of this tool.

People and Nature of the Urals: Variants of Representation in the Wartime Literature

The study is focused on identifying and analysis of the two conceptual blocks that literary represent the Urals in wartime: the Ural character and the Ural nature. The study material consists of works of different genres, from documentary essays to verse journalism. It is shown that the idea of the original Ural character is generally perceived by an independent view of journalists sent to the Urals to report labor feats at the home front (it is akin to the military feats), and writers stranded in the Urals as a result of the evacuation. Optical differences allowed the creation of a sophisticated image of the Ural people. On the one hand, these are soldiers of fabulous courage, and masters of high work culture, but on the other hand, these people are reserved, strict, and not always friendly. The representation of the Urals’ nature is just as ambiguous. The article describes two variants offered by the writers of wartime. The first one fully meets the socialist realism canons: the mighty people of the Urals were born of a majestic nature, and this place is cold and barely adjusted to life. It is emphasized that the conviction of the necessity of living and working under the circumstances in which people found themselves during the wartime, was dominant regarding all literature.

아쿠타가와의 역사소설에 나타난 예술적 미학

This study examined fictionality of historical description and art(novel writing) superiority shown in ‘truthful history’ and ‘beautiful history’ from a viewpoint of Heinrich Rickert’s 『history and art』 by focusing on 『Saigo Takamori』 published in 1918. An old gentleman, the main character in the work of art, argues that no one knows the historical truth as the objective descriptions such as ‘truthful history’ through the historical facts are impossible. And he emphasizes an artistic and aesthetic value by expressing ‘surprising sights’ through the description of ‘beautiful history’ if so. It is this that is Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s purpose of creating historical novels and his own way of looking at the historical facts, that is, the distinguishing features from other historical novels as the independent view of history and art.

Tomographic reconstruction of an azimuthally forced flame in an annular chamber

Azimuthally forced spinning modes on a single ethylene-air swirl flame in an annular combustor were investigated using phase-averaged three-dimensional (3D) Computed Tomography of Chemiluminescence. Strongly spinning azimuthal modes in the clockwise (CW) and anticlockwise (ACW) directions were introduced by means of carefully controlled acoustic forcing. Tomographic reconstructions were calculated based on 25 independent views for an unforced, and CW and ACW forced cases. Using only a single flame in an annular enclosure resulted in a flame shape that differed from previous multi-flame investigations. The flame experiences significantly less flame-wall and no flame-flame interactions. Results at high and low equivalence ratio indicate that in the absence of significant enclosure effects, the global heat release rate (HRR) response is the same for both forcing directions. The 3D HRR oscillation distributions were investigated in detail, and the local flame response to modes with opposite spin direction was shown to feature 180∘ rotational symmetry. High magnitude HRR oscillations are formed close to the flame base, but due to the combined azimuthal and axial excitation the response on one side of the flame is significantly higher in magnitude, and concentrations of HRR oscillations are seen close to the inner or outer annular walls during CW or ACW excitation respectively. Swirl also causes these high magnitude structures to rotate slowly with downstream distance, although the spatial redistribution of HRR oscillations through this effect is subtle. This improves our physical understanding of previous observations of differing global flame responses to CW and ACW azimuthal excitation.

Corrigendum: How do independent directors view carbon information disclosure? Evidence from China

Corrigendum: How do independent directors view carbon information disclosure? Evidence from China

A reinforcement learning approach for single redundant view co-training text classification

We tackle the problem of learning classification models with very small amounts of labeled data (e.g., less than 10% of the dataset) by introducing a novel Single View Co-Training strategy supported by Reinforcement Learning (CoRL). CoRL is a novel semi-supervised learning framework that can be used with a single view (representation). Differently from traditional co-training that requires at least two sufficient and independent data views (e.g., modes), our solution is applicable to any kind of data. Our approach exploits a reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm as a strategy to relax the view independence assumption, using a stronger iterative agent that builds more precise combined decision class boundaries. Our experimental evaluation with four popular textual benchmarks demonstrates that CoRL can produce better classifiers than confidence-based co-training methods, while producing high effectiveness in comparison with the state-of-the-art in semi-supervised learning. In our experiments, CoRL reduced the labeling effort by more than 80% with no losses in classification effectiveness, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines, including methods based on neural networks, with gains of up to 96% against some of the best competitors.

Measuring Malaysia’s Illicit Tobacco Trade: An Excise Tax Gap Analysis

There is a lack of independent data regarding the illicit tobacco trade in Malaysia. Tobacco Industry (TI) commissioned data has previously been criticised for overestimating the illicit tobacco trade and for a lack of methodological transparency. The aim of this study is to present an independent overview of Malaysia’s illicit tobacco market by measuring the country’s factory-made cigarette excise tax gap. Using data sourced from Malaysian government publications we calculate the excise tax gap between 2011 and 2019 based on existing approaches whereby the excise tax actually paid is compared with that theoretically due based on estimates of total tobacco consumption. For sensitivity analysis, we established 4 different scenarios of tobacco consumption levels. Our central estimate is that the tax gap increased from 49% (2012) to 65% (2017), indicating that about two-thirds of cigarettes consumed were illicit, untaxed cigarettes. Increases in the tax gap occurred when taxes increased (e.g., 2014) and when they did not (e.g., 2017), and a slight decline was also evident when taxes were unchanged (e.g., 2012). The size of the tax gap was sensitive to the consumption estimates, where a 10% increase in consumption was generally associated with 3–5 percentage point increase in the tax gap. This study, to our knowledge, is the first independent estimate of Malaysia’s tax gap/rate of the illicit tobacco trade. We suggest the Malaysian government maintain its tax policies whilst strengthening its anti-illicit tobacco trade measures, including ratifying the Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products. <strong>Highlights</strong><ul><li>An independent view of the illicit tobacco trade in Malaysia by measuring the country’s tobacco excise tax gap.</li><li>Insights into the accuracy of TI estimates on Malaysia’s tobacco trade.</li><li>Suggestions for actions that should be taken by the Malaysian government to combat the illicit tobacco trade.</li><li>Government Survey data is used to measure consumption which isn’t available each year, so yearly consumption estimates are produced via linear interpolation between survey waves.</li><li>Consumption estimates cover those aged 15 or above.</li></ul>

Education Application Testing Perspective to Empower Students' Higher Order Thinking Skills Related to The Concept of Adaptive Learning Media

This article aims at arguing for the importance of the testing step when designing an educational application by taking a case study from the development of adaptive learning media. The media contains a set of in-struments that are specifically built to empower students' critical thinking skills. Three aspects that are con-sidered in testing this educational application are application validity at each stage of system development, measurement of the final system feasibility test for user needs, and system implementation by running learning media on the test sample. Implementation of testing on application products is carried out accord-ing to system requirements and models. The existence of the characteristics of adaptive media and the diver-sity of menus in the application implies the importance of doing a lot of improvisation when carrying out tests, such as determining the right test cases, choosing the appropriate test model and method, determining a suitable test environment, and considering several other aspects aimed at optimizing test results. obtained in order to ensure the quality of learning media products. This study analyzed the test data using Likert scale as an interpretation of the results of the validation assessment from the experts by referring to certain perceived standards of assessment. Meanwhile, the analysis of the data from the feasibility test results from a sample of 20 students using the system usability scale (SUS) instrument. The technique to test the effec-tiveness was using a pretest-posttest control group design with a sample of 98 students. Parametric/non-parametric data analysis was then applied to analyze the data on the results of testing the effectiveness or efficacy of adaptive media products in improving students' higher order thinking skills (HOTS). Based on the testing steps applied to the application of adaptive learning media, the results obtained that the product was considered feasible and effective in empowering students' HOTS. The study concludes that the educa-tional application testing that has been carried out is able to provide an objective and independent view of the application of adaptive learning media which will be useful in operational functions to understand the level of effectiveness in its implementation before being widely used in learning.

A Spectral Independence View on Hard Spheres via Block Dynamics

A Spectral Independence View on Hard Spheres via Block Dynamics

On the challenges of precise velocity measurements in transparent pipes using robotic volumetric LPT with Shake-the-Box

In this study, a comparison between measurements in a transparent pipe with and without arbitrary optical distortions using robotic volumetric Lagrangian Particle Tracking (LPT) is presented. Here, the coaxial volumetric velocimeter (CVV) in combination with a robotic arm enables the measurement from the outside (air and acrylic wall) and the inside (only air) of the tube at the end of the pipe section. Experimental results from the pipe flow using helium-filled soap bubbles (HFSB) as tracers and Shake-the-Box (StB) algorithm for the three-dimensional LPT data analyses are presented. A calibration plate with a high spatial resolution was used at every position of the independent views (sub-volumes) for the measurements with arbitrary optical distortions. The evaluations shows that a complete calibration set, consisting of a geometrical calibration and a volume self-calibration, for every sub-volume is mandatory. For comparison, the total number of recorded double frames is varied in order to study the effect on the velocity fields. In this case, 1000 double frames are a good compromise between accuracy and storage space. Moreover, only half of the particle tracks are present in the case with optical distortions (acrylic wall).