News Archives Research Articles

News Video Summarization Combining SURF and Color Histogram Features.

Because the data volume of news videos is increasing exponentially, a way to quickly browse a sketch of the video is important in various applications, such as news media, archives and publicity. This paper proposes a news video summarization method based on SURF features and an improved clustering algorithm, to overcome the defects in existing algorithms that fail to account for changes in shot complexity. Firstly, we extracted SURF features from the video sequences and matched the features between adjacent frames, and then detected the abrupt and gradual boundaries of the shot by calculating similarity scores between adjacent frames with the help of double thresholds. Secondly, we used an improved clustering algorithm to cluster the color histogram of the video frames within the shot, which merged the smaller clusters and then selected the frame closest to the cluster center as the key frame. The experimental results on both the public and self-built datasets show the superiority of our method over the alternatives in terms of accuracy and speed. Additionally, the extracted key frames demonstrate low redundancy and can credibly represent a sketch of news videos.

Storywrangler: A massive exploratorium for sociolinguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political timelines using Twitter.

In real time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day, recording an ever-growing compendium of language change. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing curation of over 100 billion tweets containing 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2021. For each day, we break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 100+ languages, generating frequencies for words, hashtags, handles, numerals, symbols, and emojis. We make the dataset available through an interactive time series viewer and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. Although Storywrangler leverages Twitter data, our method of tracking dynamic changes in n-grams can be extended to any temporally evolving corpus. Illustrating the instrument's potential, we present example use cases including social amplification, the sociotechnical dynamics of famous individuals, box office success, and social unrest.

Radical praxis of computing in the PRC: forgotten stories from the maoist to post-Mao era

In his 1937 essay "On Practice (Shijian lun)", Mao Zedong argues for a distinctively Chinese model of communism that merges practise with theory, combining objective experience and subjective knowledge into a coherent dialectical process of praxis. This was, at the time, a radical idea within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the global communist movement dominated by Stalinism at its heyday. But it became institutionalized as a guiding principle of CCP, the ruling party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949, which has led, among other things, to the establishment of one of the world’s most important computing industries since the 1950s. This article interrogates the idea of “radical praxis” and applies it to the Chinese contexts of the 1950s–2000s in developing a holistic, emic understanding of the computing industry from the Maoist to the Post-Mao era. As such, we aim at reconstructing plural histories of Chinese technology that are longer, less deterministic, and more imaginative than mainstream accounts that would begin, almost always, with Deng Xiaoping’s marketization reforms. Longer, because we trace the radical praxis of Chinese computing back to the 1950s with remarkable continuity. Less deterministic, because it has multiple trajectories full of unforeseeable twists and turns. More imaginative, because praxis is as much about knowing, theorization, and subjectivities as it is about doing, implementation, and embodied struggle. Drawing from policy documents, news archives, memoirs of key CCP leaders as well as secondary materials in both Chinese and English, this article reveals and discusses hidden stories of Maoist radical praxis.

Realised Volatility Forecasting: Machine Learning via Financial Word Embedding

This study develops FinText, a financial word embedding compiled from 15 years of business news archives. The results show that FinText produces substantially more accurate results than general word embeddings based on the gold-standard financial benchmark we introduced. In contrast to well-known econometric models, and over the sample period from 27 July 2007 to 27 January 2022 for 23 NASDAQ stocks, using stock-related news, our simple natural language processing model supported by different word embeddings improves realised volatility forecasts on high volatility days. This improvement in realised volatility forecasting performance switches to normal volatility days when general hot news is used. By utilising SHAP, an Explainable AI method, we also identify and classify key phrases in stock-related and general hot news that moved volatility.

РОССИЯ И СТРАНЫ ЦЕНТРАЛЬНОЙ АЗИИ В МОЛОДЕЖНЫХ ОБМЕНАХ В РАМКАХ ШОС

Youth exchanges have become an essential component of people-to-people exchanges in international relations, both in bilateral and multilateral formats. This paper analyses the participation of Russia and its Central Asian partners (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) in youth exchanges in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The authors consequently discuss the institutional structure and formats of the multilateral cooperation, its development within the last decade, and the representation and role of the member states. The research is based on the study of the SCO multilateral documents, SCO institutions’ documentation, official addresses and interviews of the SCO politicians and NGO leaders, online news archives of NGOs and media. The authors conclude that the SCO has formed a multilateral cooperation mechanism for youth exchanges, in which Russia and Central Asia are fully represented, with minor exclusions. Meanwhile, the cooperation demonstrates the evident rivalry between Russia and China in this cooperation. The Central Asian countries have become subject to this rivalry, however, at the same time they have already started to put forward their own initiatives, too, which can be significant for the development of multilateral dialogue. Finally, the paper discusses the potential benefits of cooperation for its participants.

The First Decade of the BRICS Group: Evolution of the Cooperation Structure

This paper analyses the institutional development of the BRICS group throughout the first decade of its functioning, from 2009 to 2019. The evolution of the cooperation structure is studied through the analysis of the BRICS’ documents, such as multilateral declarations and communiqués, reports of state institutions of member countries, comments of the political leaders. The practical implementation of the agreements has been traced by studying the group’s reports and the online news archives of the mass media of the member states. The author proposes a periodisation of the BRICS structural development. 2009–2011 – the initial stage, the formation of the group’s structure. The key working mechanisms were formed at that stage. However, the first permanent institutions of BRICS were formed at the next stage, in 2012–2014, the stage of permanent structure formation for the group. Then, in 2015–2016, the group has undergone the stage of intensive structural diversification. And in 2017–2019, BRICS maintained this trend, but the key structural changes were related to the group’s joint contacts with the rest of the world. The structure of cooperation within BRICS has changed significantly during the decade. The group formed both non-institutionalised, but regular dialogue formats, and permanent institutions for cooperation. The system of the contacts between the member states covers all aspects of cooperation. At the same time, the group has not institutionalised as an international organisation and remained a forum. The reasons for this are the collective support of a non-integrating format and the divergence of the member states’ approaches to cooperation, which has also had its impact on the BRICS work.

Cultural Exchanges between Russia and Turkmenistan: Structure, Dynamics, and Defining Features

Cultural exchanges are an essential component of humanitarian interaction between countries and societies, in particular, between political partners and neighboring states whose citizens regularly communicate with each other. This paper discusses cooperation in the area of cultural exchanges between the Russian Federation and one of its Central Asian neighbors the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. To date, cultural exchanges and humanitarian cooperation have received very little attention in Central Asian studies, despite the attention paid to Russian-Turkmen economic cooperation and policy aspects. This paper is aimed at illuminating the modes, factors, dynamics, and defining features of the Russia-Turkmenistan cooperation in the area of cultural exchanges over the recent decade. The notions “cultural exchanges”, “humanitarian cooperation”, and “cooperation in the area of cultural exchanges” are explored in Russian-Turkmen diplomatic documents and the legislation of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The author has studied such sources as diplomatic documents, interviews, newsletters of state institutions and non-governmental organizations, and news archives of Russian and Turkmen media.

BRICS GROUP AS AN ACTOR OF WORLD POLITICS

This paper analyzes the self-positioning of the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) in world politics. The author has studied BRICS multilateral documents, addressed to the rest of the world, from 2009 to 2019, the documents related to summits procedure, and the related news archives of the international mass media. By means of discourse analysis, the paper traces the collective view of the group on the international issues, the changes in the group’s self-representation, and the reasons for them. The author concludes that, in spite of legally being not an intergovernmental organization, but a forum, BRICS still has a joint and consolidated position on many international issues, which is being outlined in the group’s multilateral documents. Shared views cover such issues as the reform of international financial institutions, the reform of the United Nations Organization, the regional conflicts in Africa and in the Middle East, the need for increase in representation of the Global South in international financial institutions, the international struggle against terrorism and other security threats. In addition, since 2013, BRICS has carried out annual (except for 2019) joint meetings with non-BRICS countries during its summits. In 2013-2016, there were BRICS meetings with the representatives of the chair country’s region. In 2018, there were two meetings held: “BRICS plus” summit with the leading countries of the international institutions of the Global South, and “BRICS outreach” summit with regional leaders. In 2020, both formats were planned, too. Therefore, we can observe the group’s self-positioning as an actor of world politics, however, at the same time, this trend largely depends on the priorities of the chair country every year. Each of the member countries has its own view of the group, and each tries to fulfill its own needs. Probably, the group would be fully self-represented as a world politics actor, if the states’ foreign policies were more consolidated. Yet, they do not reach complete consensus, because of the divergent national interests. This research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (grant № 18-18-00236)

Literature review of the health of technical intern trainees in Japan: A study using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health

This study aimed to clarify the health of technical intern trainees and factors that affect their health and examine the necessary support. Articles related to the health of technical intern trainees, published between January 2010 and September 2019, were extracted from databases (Ichushi-Web, CiNii Articles, and news archives) using the keywords "technical intern training" and "health." Additional articles were extracted by hand-searching related reports and magazines. The articles were sorted using the partial Bernard Berelson method of content analysis and classified into the components of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF). There were 24 categories, 71 subcategories, and 422 recording units extracted from 127 documents. Using the ICF classification, the 【Environmental factors】 component had the largest number of recording units, with the "support from supervising and implementing organizations" (n = 108) and "inadequate enforcement of labor-related laws" (n = 48) categories. This was followed by the 【Health condition】 component, with the "death of technical intern trainees" (n = 27) and "increase of tuberculosis cases" (n = 24) categories. It is assumed that while some technical intern trainees are in a high-risk situation because of the difficulty of receiving medical care and severe working conditions that may worsen their health, including the development of brain and heart disease and tuberculosis, some receive positive effects such as early detection and treatment of diseases through health checks. In addition to improving the working environment, it is important to translate the results of health checks into trainees' understandable languages, provide supplementary explanations of the results, and support the promotion of multicultural coexistence.

Spatiotemporal Analysis of Web News Archives for Crime Prediction

In today’s world, security is the most prominent aspect which has been given higher priority. Despite the rapid growth and usage of digital devices, lucrative measurement of crimes in under-developing countries is still challenging. In this work, unstructural crime data (900 records) from the news archives of the previous eight years were extracted to predict the behavior of criminals’ networks and transform it into useful information using natural language processing (NLP). To estimate the next move of criminals in Pakistan, we performed hotspot-based spatial analysis. Later, this information is fed to two different classifiers for possible identification and prediction. We achieved the maximum accuracy of 92% using K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and 62% using the Random Forest algorithm. In terms of crimes, the results showed that the most prevalent crime events are robberies. Thus, the usage of digital information archives, spatial analysis, and machine learning techniques can open new ways of handling a peaceful and sustainable society in eradicating crimes for countries having paucity of financial resources.

'Tiny numbers' are actually tiny: Evidence from gestures in the TV News Archive.

We report a large-scale, quantitative investigation of manual gestures that speakers perform when speaking metaphorically about numerical quantities. We used the TV News Archive–an online database of over 2 million English language news broadcasts–to examine 681 videos in which 584 speakers used the phrase 'tiny number', 'small number', 'large number', or 'huge number', which metaphorically frame numerical quantity in terms of physical size. We found that the gestures speakers used reflect a number of different strategies to express the metaphoric size of quantities. When referring to greater versus lesser quantities, speakers were far more likely to gesture (1) with an open versus closed hand configuration, (2) with an outward versus inward movement, and (3) with a wider distance between the gesturing hands. These patterns were often more pronounced for the phrases containing more extreme adjectives ('tiny/huge number'). However, we did not find that speakers performed two-handed versus one-handed gestures. Nor did we find that speakers performed right-handed versus left-handed gestures, when referring to greater versus lesser quantities. Overall, this work supports the claim that metaphoric thought is involved in the production of verbal metaphors that describe numerical magnitudes. It demonstrates that size-based numerical associations observed in previous lab experiments are active in real-life communication outside the lab.

Lymphangitis associated with herpetic whitlow

The objective was to describe and analyze national network television news framing of contraception, recognizing that onscreen news can influence the public's knowledge and beliefs.We used the Vanderbilt Television News Archives and LexisNexis Database to obtain video and print transcripts of all relevant national network television news segments covering contraception from January 2010 to June 2014. We conducted a content analysis of 116 TV news segments covering contraception during the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Segments were quantitatively coded for contraceptive methods covered, story sources used, and inclusion of medical and nonmedical content (intercoder reliability using Krippendorf's alpha ranged 0.6–1 for coded categories).Most (55%) news stories focused on contraception in general rather than specific methods. The most effective contraceptive methods were rarely discussed (implant, 1%; intrauterine device, 4%). The most frequently used sources were political figures (40%), advocates (25%), the general public (25%) and Catholic Church leaders (16%); medical professionals (11%) and health researchers (4%) appeared in a minority of stories. A minority of stories (31%) featured medical content.National network news coverage of contraception frequently focuses on contraception in political and social terms and uses nonmedical figures such as politicians and church leaders as sources. This focus deemphasizes the public health aspect of contraception, leading medical professionals and health content to be rarely featured.Media coverage of contraception may influence patients' views about contraception. Understanding the content, sources and medical accuracy of current media portrayals of contraception may enable health care professionals to dispel popular misperceptions.

Catholic News Archive

The Catholic News Archive (CNA) is a freely available unique digital collection of American Catholic Newspapers. With an impressive range of advanced search options and search filters, and a friendly mobile layout, it encourages serious research as well as easy browsing. Every newspaper page is scanned with optimal character recognition (OCR). The lack of export options is a serious hindrance to heavy-duty research, which is unfortunate given how extensive and interdisciplinary the content is. The uncorrected OCR is counterbalanced by powerful search options, diverse result display options, and user-corrected OCR.

Going Dark or Living Forever: the Right to be Forgotten, Search Engines and Press Archives

The internet has brought many new opportunities to all walks of life. It has given us the possibility to address the public on a global scale, communicate more easily, and drastically broadened our access to all kinds of information. One of the downsides of these blessings has been reflected in the privacy concerns that accompany these technological advancements. In a connected world, one’s digital identity can quickly become a heavy millstone around the neck. As a consequence, calls have been made to introduce a ‘right to be forgotten’ online. This thesis starts with the observation that two key information disseminators in the digital age have been subjected to new responsibilities under the umbrella of the ‘right to be forgotten’. The desire of some individuals to change – and exercise control over – their online image led them to approach media outlets that made their personal information initially available online or search engines that subsequently brought it to the public at large, or both. However, as appears, these routes significantly differ from each other. The first part of this research is devoted to taking stock of the saga on the right to de-reference links – i.e., the manifestation of the ‘right to be forgotten’ in search engines – that triggered the landmark judgment of the CJEU in Google Spain. This part discusses the CJEU’s follow-up cases that elaborated on important unanswered questions, along with, inter alia, the referring courts’ recent answers to the cases underlying those preliminary questions. Following Google Spain, search engines attracted a bulk of attention. The second part of this thesis, conversely, expounds the broader right to erasure – due to free speech concerns – in the thorny context of the press and their archives. It reveals that the ‘press’ route should not be excluded all too fast. This chapter stresses that balancing is a key element, so a pivotal role is reserved for the case-law of the ECtHR. The court in Strasbourg has been reluctant so far in upholding erasure or anonymisation of news archives (or parts of them), but it suggested that ‘less restrictive measures’ might be tolerable. The latter arguably enables one to tailor approaches to what the balancing requires in individual cases. Cases at national level at least illustrate that balancing not necessarily turns out favouring the freedom of expression and information. Against this background, the third chapter examines whether the initiator of a request chooses the avenue he or she wishes to pursue. It argues that data subjects should be able to freely determine the route that seems to be most appropriate for their request. The thesis concludes that EU data protection law does not allow one to estimate in general which route is better suited for the purpose. This last chapter eventually provides recommendations that should guide individuals when they seek the state of being forgotten.

Drug repurposing approach to fight COVID-19.

Currently, there are no treatment options available for the deadly contagious disease, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Drug repurposing is a process of identifying new uses for approved or investigational drugs and it is considered as a very effective strategy for drug discovery as it involves less time and cost to find a therapeutic agent in comparison to the de novo drug discovery process. The present review will focus on the repurposing efficacy of the currently used drugs against COVID-19 and their mechanisms of action, pharmacokinetics, dosing, safety, and their future perspective. Relevant articles with experimental studies conducted in-silico, in-vitro, in-vivo, clinical trials in humans, case reports, and news archives were selected for the review. Number of drugs such as remdesivir, favipiravir, ribavirin, lopinavir, ritonavir, darunavir, arbidol, chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, tocilizumab and interferons have shown inhibitory effects against the SARS-CoV2 in-vitro as well as in clinical conditions. These drugs either act through virus-related targets such as RNA genome, polypeptide packing and uptake pathways or target host-related pathways involving angiotensin-converting enzyme-2 (ACE2) receptors and inflammatory pathways. Using the basic knowledge of viral pathogenesis and pharmacodynamics of drugs as well as using computational tools, many drugs are currently in pipeline to be repurposed. In the current scenario, repositioning of the drugs could be considered the new avenue for the treatment of COVID-19.

Automated Text Classification of News Articles: A Practical Guide

Automated text analysis methods have made possible the classification of large corpora of text by measures such as topic and tone. Here, we provide a guide to help researchers navigate the consequential decisions they need to make before any measure can be produced from the text. We consider, both theoretically and empirically, the effects of such choices using as a running example efforts to measure the tone ofNew York Timescoverage of the economy. We show that two reasonable approaches to corpus selection yield radically different corpora and we advocate for the use of keyword searches rather than predefined subject categories provided by news archives. We demonstrate the benefits of coding using article segments instead of sentences as units of analysis. We show that, given a fixed number of codings, it is better to increase the number of unique documents coded rather than the number of coders for each document. Finally, we find that supervised machine learning algorithms outperform dictionaries on a number of criteria. Overall, we intend this guide to serve as a reminder to analysts that thoughtfulness and human validation are key to text-as-data methods, particularly in an age when it is all too easy to computationally classify texts without attending to the methodological choices therein.

A Standard Reading of Selected Online Readers’ Comments on Domestic Violence against Men in Nigeria

The study performs a standard reading of online readers’ comments on Domestic Violence against Men (henceforth, DVAM). This is with a view to exploring how the readers’ comments develop dialogically to build up threads that depict salient motifs on DVAM in the Nigerian sociocultural domain. The specific objectives of the study are to identify the dialogic developments of threads among the commenters; construe motifs cum shared socio-cultural values in the identified threadal developments; and elicit the rhetorical implications of the threadal developments on the phenomenon of DVAM in Nigeria. The data comprise two purposively selected online news reports on DVAM with their readers' comments, sourced from the news archives of The News and Sahara Reporters. The study adopts the Dialogic Dual Reading Model as the analytical framework. The standard reading of the threadal developments of the readers’ comments in the two selected news reports reveals that a large number of the commenters maintain the ideological stance that DVAM is unjustifiable; some commenters, however, argue that acts of DVAM are often perpetrated in self-defense. This contrary ideological notion of self-defense not only portrays the women-offenders in these cases as victims but also justifies their acts of violence.

POLAND–UKRAINE RELATIONS IN THE DIGITAL POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF POLAND (ON THE MATERIAL OF POLISH PRESIDENT OFFICIAL WEBSITE IN 2004-2015)

In this study news policy of the polish president official website is regarded to be a mirror of Poland – Ukraine relations. It’s assumed that it’s possible to recreate the dynamics of international relations forming within both news geography analysis (comparative analysis of different countries coverage) and formal analysis of news headlines types. News from news archive of the official website of the President of the Republic of Poland were collected and content-analyzed for the dynamics of international relations recreation. With the simple qualitative comparable analysis was shown, that Ukraine was the most popular country among the post-Soviet countries (it was so even before the Euromaidan). And the change of Ukraine presidents in 2010 with radical shift of international orientations didn’t reflect the intensity of attention. With the additional analysis of headlines types was shown, that for Poland Ukraine isn’t only the most popular country, the contacts with it are more varied than mutual relations with other countries. It can be demonstrated with the different levels and different formats usage. In the result of comparison with Polish – Russia relations was demonstrated, that the similar approach towards seeking ways for maintain relations between the countries was used (especially before 2008), however, it was con the deficit of both attention intensity and headlines variety. In the cases of Georgia and Ukraine news policy is more formal for Georgia, more detailed and informal for Ukraine. Thus, comparative analysis of different types of headlines use shows a special, attentive and favorable attitude towards Ukraine, which don’t change during Ukrainian changes of priorities in international politics and during times of crises. During the latter, Poland implements more new formats of contacts with Ukrainian politicians and appeals for wide network of international community. Meanwhile, the analysis have some limitations. It may be implemented only for countries with high number of mentions and doesn’t consider the types of news and. Thus, it’s may be complicated to define the essence of international relations. So, there is a need to define other formal approaches, which will help to classify texts.

УЧАСТИЕ МНОГОСТОРОННИХ БАНКОВ В ИНФРАСТРУКТУРНЫХ ПРОЕКТАХ ЕВРАЗИЙСКОГО ЭКОНОМИЧЕСКОГО СОЮЗА И ИНИЦИАТИВЫ «ПОЯС И ПУТЬ» В ЦЕНТРАЛЬНОЙ АЗИИ

This article analyses the infrastructure projects in Central Asia, which are being financed by two major international organisations, two multilateral banks: the Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The article aims to evaluate the activity of these two institutions in the region and to compare their priorities and the probable efficiency of their projects for the development of Central Asian countries. The choice of the region for the study is conditioned by the fact that Central Asian states are Russia’s close neighbours, and the whole region is characterised by its critical strategic value for Russia’s foreign policy. The methodology of the study is based on the use of discourse analysis of the organisations’ documents, accessible for public: agreements, plans, reports, project-related documentation. In addition, the authors have monitored and analysed the relevant news archives of Russian and foreign mass media. The article consequently analyses the typology of both organisations through the lens of the international integration studies, the institutional structure of the EDB and the AIIB, the specific features of their functioning as international relations actors, and the actual infrastructure projects financed by these institutions in Central Asia. The study demonstrates that the policies and the priorities of the two international banks differ considerably. While the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank prefers to finance the construction of roads and energy infrastructure, the Eurasian Development Bank remarkably credits production more and finances projects aimed at the industrial cooperation of Eurasian countries. Obviously, in the view of the long-term development, all areas of infrastructure expansion are worth financing; however, one can note that projects, approved by the EDB, can be characterised as more significant both at the present stage and in the long-term perspective. In addition, they contribute to the development of regional economic cooperation and Eurasian integration. If we look at the environmental and social safety of the infrastructure projects, the activities of the AIIB, regardless of its declarations on sustainable development, bear certain risks due to the existing cases of violation of environmental rules by the bank’s founder and major operator – the People’s Republic of China – in its infrastructure projects abroad. This circumstance highlights the critical importance of elaboration of national and multilateral mechanisms of control and inspection of major international infrastructure projects, as well as the necessity to fulfill the obligation of demanding their approval by the citizens of the recipient countries.

Preservation and archiving of digital media

This paper provides a brief history of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive that was established in 1968 with the goal of recording and preserving national news programming on the three major networks at the time (ABC, NBC, and CBS). The archive has faced several challenges as it evolved (it now covers representative news from the Fox and CNN cable networks) - most notably financial and legal issues – who really “owns” the news? Even today archiving digital news remains financially and legally challenged as the number of news networks increase and privacy laws emerge, resulting in the creation of “piracy archives”. The author also touches on the many ongoing issues that need to be addressed; e.g. the number of copies to be created, the importance of metadata, the technical requirements, what qualifies for preservation, and the ever-present issue of sustainability.