Online Construction Research Articles

Enhanced Expression of miR-34a Enhances Escherichia coli Lipopolysaccharide-Mediated Endometritis by Targeting LGR4 to Activate the NF-κB Pathway.

Background Persistent endometritis caused by bacterial infections has lethal effects on the reproductive performance of dairy cattle, which compromises animal welfare and delays or prevents pregnancy. The microRNA (miRNA) miR-34 family plays a pivotal role in the inflammatory process; however, the precise mechanism of miR-34a in endometritis has not been thoroughly elucidated to date. Methods In this study, the endometrium of cows diagnosed with endometritis was harvested for bacterial culture and Gram staining to evaluate bacterial contamination of the uterus. Based on this, a bovine endometrial epithelial cell (BEND) inflammation model and a mouse model stimulated with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in vitro and in vivo were constructed. Cell viability was assessed by CCK-8, trypan blue staining, and flow cytometry. H&E was applied to histopathological analysis. Immunohistochemical, immunofluorescence, qRT-PCR, and western blot assays were performed to measure the mRNA and protein expression of relevant genes. Online databases, plasmid construction, and dual-luciferase reporter gene assays were used to predict and validate the interaction between miR-34a and its target gene LGR4. Finally, mice were injected vaginally with a local antagomir to validate the role of miR-34a in murine uterine inflammation. Results In this study, we observed that Gram-negative bacteria, represented by Escherichia coli, are the predominant pathogenic agents responsible for the recurrent occurrence of endometritis in dairy cows. Further, miR-34a was found to repress the expression of LGR4 by targeting the 3′ untranslated region (3′UTR) of LGR4. miR-34a was upregulated in bovine uterine tissues and bovine endometrial epithelial cells stimulated with LPS. miR-34a induced the release of the proinflammatory cytokines IL-1β, IL-6, and TNF-α by activating the phosphorylation of NF-κB p65. Furthermore, IL-1β upregulated miR-34a transcription and downregulated LGR4 expression in an IL-1β-dependent manner. Conclusions Taken together, our study confirmed that miR-34a is regulated by IL-1β and suppresses the level of the LGR4 3′UTR, which in turn exacerbates the inflammatory response. Thus, the knockdown of miR-34a might be a new direction for the treatment of endometritis.

“You keep saying you are sorry”. Exploring the use of sorry in customer communication on Twitter

Customer service exchanges on social media have recently been described as taking place in “the Age of Sorry” (Segal 2018). In order to explore this claim further, this article studies the form sorry in the 6.4-million-word Airlines Twitter Corpus which includes tweets that customers directed at thirteen British and Irish airlines over a period of four months as well as the airlines’ replies. It discusses the airlines’ use of sorry in tweets which attempt to save face and maintain their reputation as reliable air travel providers. At the same time, the analysis explores the use of this form by customers, with a view to uncovering its metapragmatic potential and its perception as a communicative strategy for the legitimation of corporate activity. Embedded in the theoretical framework of discourse pragmatics, this study uses a corpus linguistic methodology to gain further insights into the form sorry and its communicative functions in the discursive construction of customer service online. The results show that airlines use sorry to a considerable extent to convey empathy rather than to apologise. Customers, on the other hand, tend to comment on airlines’ use of the word and their reactions to airlines’ tweets grant insights into the effectiveness of sorry as a communicative strategy. This study therefore contributes to an increased understanding of online service interactions and to enhancing customer communication on social media.

RT-EQcorrscan: Near-Real-Time Matched-Filtering for Rapid Development of Dense Earthquake Catalogs

Abstract Matched-filtering (template-matching) is an effective method for detecting clustered seismicity such as aftershocks, low-frequency earthquakes, repeating earthquakes, and tectonic and volcanic swarms. Several groups have developed efficient codes implementing matched-filter methods and demonstrated that earthquake catalogs can be substantially expanded using these methods. Here, we present a near-real-time implementation of the matched-filter method, designed to be used in response to ongoing seismicity. Its near-real-time capabilities enable dense catalogs of seismicity to be constructed rapidly, providing input into real-time seismic hazard and forecasting and thus informing the earthquake response and scientific understanding. Such rapid development of detailed earthquake catalogs has similar application in volcano monitoring, monitoring of induced seismicity, and for online construction of slow-earthquake catalogs. Our software package, RT-EQcorrscan, is an open-source extension of the EQcorrscan Python package. The package can either be deployed to apply near-real-time matched-filters to a specific geographic region or sequence on a continuous basis, or configured to respond to large earthquakes or high-rate sequences by automatically starting a matched-filter run in response to these events. The system relies on, and maintains, a constantly updated template database of waveforms and event metadata, which is then queried for the specific target region. This template database can be updated while the matched-filter is running to enable the set of templates to expand in response to previous results. Multiple region-specific matched-filters can be run in parallel, allowing the system to respond to distinct trigger events.

Innovative technologies in on-line construction production management

The article considers the problem of using on-line programming and management programs in the organization and construction technology. The introduction substantiates the importance and significance of the on-line construction management problem, reports on the universal model development of such management. The methods and study section give an idea of the on-line construction management methods. A visual diagram of the control model is proposed. The results and discussion section explore the prospects for using the programs based on this technology. The application areas of innovative software in construction are proposed. A review of such systems’ real application examples in the large construction companies’ practice is given. In conclusion, it is concluded that there is a significant reduction in human factors to ensure high quality construction, reducing time and labor costs when applying the proposed method of construction management and the merits of the model developed by the authors.

Top-level Design，Public Participation and Disclosure of Local Government Debt Information: A Follow-up Study on the Random Application

The disclosure of local government debt information is an effective way to supervise and restrict the government’s borrowing behavior and improve the level of financial governance, so it is of great practical significance to promote the disclosure of local government debt information. This paper takes 36 provincial issuers of local bonds in China as the object, takes the disclosure of local debt balance data in 2018 as the starting point, uses the top-level design opportunity of “measures for the disclosure of local government debt information（for Trial Implementation）” issued by the Ministry of Finance, seizes the short window period from the policy promulgation to the implementation in time, and constructs a random experiment by application of disclosure. This paper not only observes the one-time and immediate impact on the disclosure of local debts in budget implementation, but also tracks and observes the continuous impact on the disclosure of final accounts, and quantitatively analyzes the impact of top-level system design and public active participation on the disclosure of local debt information by using differences-in-differences method. The results show that: （1）Both top-level design and public participation can promote the disclosure of local debt information, and the combination of the two is more significant.（2）The implementation of the debt information disclosure system by local governments will be significantly enhanced due to public participation, and the implementation timeliness will also be significantly improved.（3）At the same time, public participation has not only an immediate one-time impact on the disclosure of local debt information, but also a long-term sustainable impact. From the perspective of the disclosure of final accounts, its impact still exists six months later. Therefore, first of all, we should further strengthen and improve the top-level system design related to the disclosure of local debt information, and improve the legislative level and legal effect of relevant laws and regulations. In addition, we should guide and encourage the active participation of the public, strengthen the channel construction and handling efficiency according to the application for publicity, strengthen and improve the complaint and reporting channels of the public for the departments that do not fulfill the obligation of information publicity, especially strengthen the channel construction of online reporting, effectively guarantee the legitimate supervision right of the public, and promote the standardized and benign governance of local debts through information publicity. Finally, in order to further strengthen the application right, administrative reconsideration right and administrative litigation right in the process of public participation, we should pay more attention to and design the system in the current administrative reconsideration right and administrative litigation right, so as to implement the implementation of the system with the joint efforts of the upper and lower levels and the superposition of each other.

Plantar Tactile Feedback for Biped Balance and Locomotion on Unknown Terrain

This work introduces a new sensing system for biped robots based on plantar robot skin, which provides not only the resultant forces applied on the ankles but a precise shape of the pressure distribution in the sole together with other extra sensing modalities (temperature, pre-touch and acceleration). The information provided by the plantar robot skin can be used to compute the center of pressure and the ground reaction forces. This information also enables the online construction of the supporting polygon and its preemptive shape before foot landing using the proximity sensors in the robot skin. Two experiments were designed to show the advantages of this new sensing technology for improving balance and walking controllers for biped robots over unknown terrain.

Counter based suffix tree for DNA pattern repeats

In recent years, the string datasets have increased exponentially, so is the need to process them. Most of these datasets have been deeply rooted in the field of bioinformatics since the entire characteristics of any living organism is encoded in their genes. Genes consist of nucleic bases which will, therefore, makeup the entire genome. A genome is made of a concatenation of different types of nucleic bases. To efficiently extract the information encrypted in these sequences there is a need to use algorithms to decrypt it. Most available methods use the data structure commonly referred to as the suffix tree. They have tremendously evolved over the years, and the on-line construction of the suffix tree is deemed as the best data structure, however, it is not optimal when it comes to finding repeated sequences because of many traversals algorithm will have to do when identifying repeats. To improve the speed and of finding repeats we developed a counter based suffix tree algorithm. Our work presents a novel algorithm of constructing a counter based suffix tree without losing its properties. The counter based suffix tree time complexity is θ(n) where n represents the length of a string. Which is the same as the fastest suffix tree implementation. We have shown that the counter based suffix tree will reduce the search time when identifying repeats. We have proved that a counter based suffix tree can be developed during construction.

A Data-Driven Approach for Multiscale Elliptic PDEs with Random Coefficients Based on Intrinsic Dimension Reduction

We propose a data-driven approach to solve multiscale elliptic PDEs with random coefficients based on the intrinsic low dimension structure of the underlying elliptic differential operators. Our method consists of offline and online stages. At the offline stage, a low dimension space and its basis are extracted from the data to achieve significant dimension reduction in the solution space. At the online stage, the extracted basis will be used to solve a new multiscale elliptic PDE efficiently. The existence of low dimension structure is established by showing the high separability of the underlying Green's functions. Different online construction methods are proposed depending on the problem setup. We provide error analysis based on the sampling error and the truncation threshold in building the data-driven basis. Finally, we present numerical examples to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.

Fully-Online Suffix Tree and Directed Acyclic Word Graph Construction for Multiple Texts

We consider the construction of the suffix tree and the directed acyclic word graph (DAWG) indexing data structures for a collection $$\mathcal {T}$$ of texts, where a new symbol may be appended to any text in $$\mathcal {T} = \{T_1, \ldots , T_K\}$$, at any time. This fully-online scenario, which arises in dynamically indexing multi-sensor data, is a natural generalization of the long solved semi-online text indexing problem, where texts $$T_1, \ldots , T_{k}$$ are permanently fixed before the next text $$T_{k+1}$$ is processed for each k ($$1 \le k < K$$). We first show that a direct application of Weiner’s right-to-left online construction for the suffix tree of a single text to fully-online multiple texts requires superlinear time. This also means that Blumer et al.’s left-to-right online construction for the DAWG of a single text requires superlinear time in the fully-online setting. We then present our fully-online versions of these algorithms that run in $$O(N \log \sigma )$$ time and O(N) space, where N is the total length of the texts in $$\mathcal {T}$$ and $$\sigma $$ is their alphabet size. We then show how to extend Ukkonen’s left-to-right online suffix tree construction to fully-online multiple strings, with the aid of Weiner’s suffix tree for the reversed texts.

Creative identity (re)Construction, creative community building, and creative resistance: A qualitative analysis of queer ingroup members' tweets after the Orlando Shooting

With the proliferation of social media, a growing body of literature explores the significance of virtual grief, social support, and social capital in the construction of identity and community online. However, there is a dearth of research on how queer members use social media, particularly Twitter, as a tool to claim and re-define their identity—especially when their identity is under threat. The goal of this study is to understand how members of the queer community linguistically responded to the threat to their identity and safety that was caused by the shooting that took place on June 12, 2016, at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida. To achieve this goal, we use Social Identity Theory (SIT) as a framework to examine how queer individuals use a creative language strategy to redefine their shared identity when it is threatened. This study used a qualitative iterative analysis of tweets posted by queer individuals to determine how this group identified as ingroup after the Orlando shooting. The study reveals that members of the queer community communicatively responded to the Pulse shooting through social creativity. Specifically, members of the queer community responded to threats through using creative language that fostered stronger ingroup collaborative identities by provoking a) creative identity (re)construction, b) creative community building and c) creative resistance. This study advances SIT by providing additional evidence that the strategy of using creative language by a minority ingroup has the ability to support simultaneously salient and threatened identity.

SOLICITATION OF ONLINE SOCIAL SUPPORT: SELF-DISCLOSURE OF EATING DISORDER PATIENTS

This paper focuses on the online construction of self-disclosure of individuals suffering from eating disorders and demonstrates how strategies of soliciting online social support are mediated within the public sphere. McCormack (2010) indicates that participation of individuals suffering from eating disorders in online support groups, where they anonymously share their feelings and issues via the Internet, is more accessible and non-costly compared to offline settings. This serves as motivation for data to be collected from the discussion forums on the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) website. Relevant posts of self-disclosure containing instances of online solicitation of support dated from January 2018 to March 2018 were analysed using the computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) method and North’s (1997) Strategies of Soliciting Social Support. The findings reveal that the sharing of experience is regarded as the most frequent strategy of soliciting support opted by ED patients. This result in a lengthier posts where detailed explanation of their problems were disclosed. It appears that the strategy utilized in online support-solicitation is merely a channel used in portraying the actual state of the support-seekers in handling their illness. In addition, as ED is perceived to be uncommon and unprioritized in Asia (Miller &amp; Pumariega, 2001), the possibility of getting help from various channels may be scarce. Thus, this study’s outcome provides a vivid image on how online social support discussions can be considered as one of the potential effective platforms to help individuals in the Southeast Asia who suffer from ED in their recovery process. Keywords: Computer-mediated discourse, eating disorders, online social support, self-disclosure, soliciting. Cite as: Zulkarnain, N. A. &amp; Mohd Jan, J. (2019). Solicitation of online social support: Self-disclosure of eating disorder patients. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 4(1), 344-364. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol4iss1pp344-364

Metonymy and frame integration: Interfacing between concepts and discourse

AbstractThis article inquiries into specific aspects of the relation between conceptual contiguity found in metonymic shifts and the online construction of frames, seen as a dynamic process of construal. It first reviews the theory of metonymy regarding the conceptual, lexical and contextual facets of the phenomenon. It then explores the possibility of extending the conceptual relevance of metonymy beyond the traditional typological approach of metonymic categorization, re-interpreting it as a frame-integration mechanism, or blending, whereby two frames are brought together into an extended ICM. Metonymic blending is formulated as a partial integration between two input spaces discursively driven, whereby anad hocidentification of a referential commonness plays the role of the generic space of the blending. Subsequently, in the light of the assumption that frame-extension is not given categorically but it also includes – beyond its cognitive relevance – an interactional aspect, this analysis draws an interesting link: that between the generic space of metonymic blend, andcommon ground. The latter is precisely what facilitates the metonymic blend, regulating the distance between the integrated frames, at the same time remaining silent as discursively given information.

THE METHOD OF CONSTRUCTING RECOMMENDATIONS ONLINE ON THE TEMPORAL DYNAMICS OF USER INTERESTS USING MULTILAYER GRAPH

The problem of the online construction of a rating list of objects in the recommender system is considered. A method for constructing recommendations online using the presentation of input data in the form of a multi-layer graph based on changes in user interests over time is proposed. The method is used for constructing recommendations in a situation with implicit feedback from the user. Input data are represented by a sequence of user choice records with a time stamp for each choice. The method includes the phases of pre-filtering of data and building recommendations by collaborative filtering of selected data. At pre-filtering of the input data, the subset of data is split into a sequence of fixed-length non-overlapping time intervals. Users with similar interests and records with objects of interest to these users are selected on a finite continuous subset of time intervals. In the second phase, the pre-filtered subset of data is used, which allows reducing the computational costs of generating recommendations. The method allows increasing the efficiency of building a rating list offered to the target user by taking into account changes in the interests of the user over time.

Extreme Multiclass Classification Criteria

We analyze the theoretical properties of the recently proposed objective function for efficient online construction and training of multiclass classification trees in the settings where the label space is very large. We show the important properties of this objective and provide a complete proof that maximizing it simultaneously encourages balanced trees and improves the purity of the class distributions at subsequent levels in the tree. We further explore its connection to the three well-known entropy-based decision tree criteria, i.e., Shannon entropy, Gini-entropy and its modified variant, for which efficient optimization strategies are largely unknown in the extreme multiclass setting. We show theoretically that this objective can be viewed as a surrogate function for all of these entropy criteria and that maximizing it indirectly optimizes them as well. We derive boosting guarantees and obtain a closed-form expression for the number of iterations needed to reduce the considered entropy criteria below an arbitrary threshold. The obtained theorem relies on a weak hypothesis assumption that directly depends on the considered objective function. Finally, we prove that optimizing the objective directly reduces the multi-class classification error of the decision tree.

Implementing work-integrated learning in online construction management courses

Implementing online learning can pose serious pedagogical challenges particularly when programs contain work-integrated learning (WIL) components. One such component is the site visit, where student groups are led by subject matter experts through an authentic environment. These WIL experiences help students relate the theory learnt in classrooms to practice. Construction management students particularly benefit from repeated visits to the same building site to appreciate the spatial and temporal constraints and how they change over the life of the building project. Unfortunately, logistics and occupational health and safety concerns have increasingly limited the inclusion of site visits in school and university curricula. Online construction management students are widely dispersed and therefore it is impractical to include shared physical site visits in the curriculum, although students are able to observe locally-based construction sites and report back their findings. In response, universities have collaborated with construction companies and, using significant federal funding, created an interactive learning environment that follows the construction of an eight-storey building over time. This high quality resource is a type of virtual WIL that has been primarily used in face-to-face teaching. In this case study we implement this resource in a fully online construction management course and create three comparatively low-cost environments that demonstrate the construction of residential, industrial, and multi-storey building construction sites, for implementation in another two online construction courses. As an enhancement, within these new environments are embedded images, explanatory videos and documents which students can interact with to create a virtual tour that can be embedded directly alongside the concepts being studied in their weekly learning materials. In addition, these tours are linked to specific online learning activities designed to motivate students to reflect on and refine their understandings based on the authentic context they are experiencing. To better understand the processes involved in this collaboration between school academics, staff from a central teaching innovation unit, and two construction companies, the business processes employed were modelled using a swimlane diagram. Insights into the practicalities of implementing these virtual tours are shared. The experiential learning outcomes of students using virtual WIL are comparable to traditional site visits. Initial online student feedback of small cohorts of online students has been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging for the development of more interactive virtual tours. The implementation of virtual tours and activities, blended with independent face-to-face site visits and assessment, forms an authentic, supported and constructively-aligned WIL experience for students undertaking fully online courses.

On-line construction of electrodialyzer with mono-cation permselectivity and its application in reclamation of high salinity wastewater

Electrodialysis (ED) technology has been paid special attention in reclamation of high salinity effluents. Therein, the attempts on how to separate out scale-forming cations are never ending. Different from a conventional scheme, an on-line endowment of mono-cation permselectivity to a conventional ED stack was put forward in this work by electro-deposition of branched polyethyleneimine with an optimized molecular weight. Subsequently, series of work performances, including limiting current, mono-cation permselectivity, permselectivity between specific anions, water transport behavior, current efficiency and energy consumption, were investigated in reclamation of a typical saline wastewater. The pilot-scale ED experiments showed that the modified ED stack displayed a significant mono-cation permselectivity, for examples, PNa+Ca2+ and PNa+Mg2+ were reduced from 0.36 and 0.81 to 0.11 and 0.12, respectively. Interestingly, a certain permeability priority for SO42- was also achieved at the same time. Moreover, the five-month service life tests indicated the ED stack can maintain a stable separation performance. On the other hand, some problems induced by the modification were also revealed, such as the facilitated water transport and the increase of energy consumption. Anyway, it is reasonable to believe that the scheme should have broad and promising application perspectives due to its effectiveness, economy and simplicity.

Ad hoc categorization in Russian and multifunctional general extenders

AbstractRussian, as well as many other languages, displays a wide number of strategies to name non-lexicalized categories, that is, categories which have a conceptual reality, but are not encoded as single lexical items (e.g.fruit, furniture) or set phrases (e.g.equipment for sport, food for dog). One way to address this lack of lexical means is to provide one or more concrete exemplars of the intended category, in an attempt to capture the superordinate non-lexicalized concept. This paper aims to provide an overview of the different generalizing means used in Russian for the online construction of exemplar-driven categories, and, at the same time, to explore the interplay between discourse-resources (e.g. exemplification, listing and reformulation) and system-resources (e.g. collective affixation, co-compounding and discourse markers) in the process of categorization. Particular attention will be focused on the description of schematic general extenders, that is, partially lexicalized syntactic patterns, realizing the different extending, generalizing and similative functions of general extenders. The last part of the paper is devoted to a discussion of the processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization of the general extenderi vse takoe‘and so on’ (lit. ‘and all such’). The form is interesting because of its discursive multifunctionality.

Just-in-time semi-supervised soft sensor for quality prediction in industrial rubber mixers

Increasing data-driven soft sensors have been adopted to online predict the quality indices in polymerization processes to improve the availability of measurements and efficiency. However, in industrial rubber mixing processes, most existing soft sensors for online prediction of the Mooney viscosity only utilized the limited labeled data. By exploring the unlabeled data, a novel soft sensor, namely just-in-time semi-supervised extreme learning machine (JSELM), is proposed to online predict the Mooney viscosity with multiple recipes. It integrates the just-in-time learning, extreme learning machine (ELM), and the graph Laplacian regularization into a unified online modeling framework. When a test sample is inquired online, the useful information in both of similar labeled and unlabeled data is absorbed into its prediction model. Unlike traditional just-in-time learning models only utilizing labeled data (e.g., just-in-time ELM and just-in-time support vector regression), the prediction performance of JSELM can be enhanced by taking advantage of the information in lots of unlabeled data. Moreover, an efficient model selection strategy is formulated for online construction of the JSELM prediction model. Compared with traditional soft sensor methods, the superiority of JSELM is validated via the Mooney viscosity prediction in an industrial rubber mixer.

MPart: miss-ratio curve guided partitioning in key-value stores

Web applications employ key-value stores to cache the data that is most commonly accessed. The cache improves an web application's performance by serving its requests from memory, avoiding fetching them from the backend database. Since the memory space is limited, maximizing the memory utilization is a key to delivering the best performance possible. This has lead to the use of multi-tenant systems, allowing applications to share cache space. In addition, application data access patterns change over time, so the system should be adaptive in its memory allocation. In this work, we address both multi-tenancy (where a single cache is used for multiple applications) and dynamic workloads (changing access patterns) using a model that relates the cache size to the application miss ratio, known as a miss ratio curve. Intuitively, the larger the cache, the less likely the system will need to fetch the data from the database. Our efficient, online construction of the miss ratio curve allows us to determine a near optimal memory allocation given the available system memory, while adapting to changing data access patterns. We show that our model outperforms an existing state-of-the-art sharing model, Memshare, in terms of overall cache hit ratio and does so at a lower time cost. We show that for a typical system, overall hit ratio is consistently 1 percentage point greater and 99.9th percentile latency is reduced by as much as 2.9% under standard web application workloads containing millions of requests.

Shared neural correlates for building phrases in signed and spoken language

Research on the mental representation of human language has convincingly shown that sign languages are structured similarly to spoken languages. However, whether the same neurobiology underlies the online construction of complex linguistic structures in sign and speech remains unknown. To investigate this question with maximally controlled stimuli, we studied the production of minimal two-word phrases in sign and speech. Signers and speakers viewed the same pictures during magnetoencephalography recording and named them with semantically identical expressions. For both signers and speakers, phrase building engaged left anterior temporal and ventromedial cortices with similar timing, despite different linguistic articulators. Thus the neurobiological similarity of sign and speech goes beyond gross measures such as lateralization: the same fronto-temporal network achieves the planning of structured linguistic expressions.