Unreliable Information Research Articles

The Analysis of Human Feelings: A Practical Suggestion for a Robustness Test

Governments, multinational companies, and researchers today collect unprecedented amounts of data on human feelings. These data provide information on citizens' happiness, levels of customer satisfaction, employees' satisfaction, mental stress, societal trust, and other important variables. Yet a key scientific difficulty tends to be downplayed, or even ignored, by many users of such information. Human feelings are not measured in objective cardinal units. This paper aims to address some of the ensuing empirical challenges. It suggests an analytical way to approach the scientific complications of ordinal data. The paper describes a dichotomous-around-the-median (DAM) test, which, crucially, uses information only on direction within an ordering and deliberately discards the potentially unreliable statistical information in ordered data. Applying the proposed DAM approach, the paper demonstrates that it is possible to check and replicate some of the key conclusions of previous research—including earlier work on the effects upon human well-being of higher income.

METHOD OF AUTOMATIC TRANSMISSION OF THE INTEGRITY BREACH SIGNALS OF THE RIVER LOCAL DIFFERENTIAL SUBSYSTEM

The integrity of the navigation system is one of the important factors affecting the safety of navigation. Currently, on the inland waterways of Russia, alerts on the integrity of the GLONASS global navigation satellite system (GNSS) are transmitted through river local differential subsystems (LDSS), which include one or more reference stations. Industrial interference from industrial zones and power lines, mutual interference from neighboring reference stations and, especially, the inhomogeneity of the underlying surface affect the range of the reference stations, which leads to the integrity breach of the differential field and transmission of unreliable corrective information to the navigator. However, the navigator is not notified of the incorrect operation of the reference stations. As a result, inaccurate corrective information leads to errors in calculating the vessel position, which reduces the level of navigation safety. A method for the automatic transmission of notifications about the LDSS integrity breach from a remote control and management station (RCMS) to the ship is presented in the paper. The structure of the message transmitting the notification signal has been formed. Criteria characterizing the quality of the differential correction signal are presented. Possible combinations of such criteria, which determine the performance of the differential mode of the reference station, are identified. Each combination of criteria is juxtaposed the corresponding notification texts displayed on the monitors of the LDSS operators and on the navigator’s display. A scheme for the automatic transmission of an alarm message from a remote control point through the RCMS, the regional command and control center, the vessel traffic control center and base stations of the automatic identification system (AIS) to ship transponders has been developed. As a result, the developed method for transmitting the alarm message containing combinations of quality criteria for the differential correction signal allows to automatically inform the navigator about the reliability of the corrective information transmitted by one or another reference station.

Research on the Control of Audit Risk of Asset Reorganization

The risk of asset reorganization audit refers to the possibility of the failure of asset reorganization or the decision failure of information users caused by the auditors' inappropriate audit opinions on the financial statements of the underlying assets. It has the characteristics of universality, complexity and dynamics. This paper argues that the main causes of the audit risk of asset restructuring are the opportunistic behavior of asset restructuring, the high uncertainty of profit forecast report, the incomplete and unreliable non-accounting information disclosure and the lack of professional competence and professional ethics of auditors. Considering the institutional environment in China, it is considered that the joint efforts of accounting firms, relevant accounting policy formulation agencies and regulatory agencies are needed to effectively reduce the audit risk of asset restructuring. Among them, auditors should make clear the importance of strategic analysis, and on this basis, determine the audit focus according to the value driving factors and key operational risks, and at the same time emphasize the importance of the auditor's industry expertise and professional ethics construction.

The impact of reference composition and genome build on the accuracy of genotype imputation in Australian Angus cattle

Context Genotype imputation is an effective method to increase the number of SNP markers available for an animal and thereby increase the overall power of genome-wide associations and accuracy of genomic predictions. It is also the key to achieve a common set of markers for all individuals when the original genotypes are obtained using multiple genotyping platforms. High accuracy of imputed genotypes is crucial to their utility. Aims In this study, we propose a method for the construction of a common set of medium density markers for imputation, which relies on keeping as much information as possible. We also investigated the impact of changing marker coordinates on the basis of the new bovine genome assembly, ARS-UCD 1.2, on imputation accuracy. Methods In total, 49 754 animals with 45 364 single nucleotide polymorphism markers were used in a 10-fold cross-validation to compare four different imputation scenarios. The four scenarios were based on two alternative designs for the reference datasets. (1) A traditional reference panel that was created using the overlapping SNP from five medium density arrays and (2) a composite reference panel created by combining SNPs across the five arrays. Each of the reference datasets was used to test imputation accuracy when the SNPs were aligned on the basis of two genome assemblies (UMD 3.1 and ARS-UCD 1.2). Key results Our results showed that a composite reference panel can achieve higher imputation accuracies than does a traditional overlap reference. Incorporating mapping information on the basis of the recent genome build slightly improved the imputation accuracies, especially for lower density chips. Conclusions Markers with unreliable mapping information and animals with low connectedness to the imputation reference dataset benefited the most from the ARS-UCD 1.2 assembly and composite reference respectively. Implications The presented method is straightforward and can be used to setup an optimal imputation for accurate inference of genotypes in Australian Angus cattle.

Attack Detection and Defense System Using an Unknown Input Observer for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Systems

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is a technology for the automated control of platoons of vehicles. CACC controls the behavior of vehicles based on information that is shared among the vehicles through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. However, cyberattacks on V2V communication can degrade the control performance and may cause serious accidents such as vehicle collisions; therefore, it is important to improve the resilience against such attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel attack detection and defense mechanism for CACC. Our approach is based on an unknown input observer (UIO), which estimates vehicle states by treating the unreliable information obtained through V2V communication as unknown inputs. Attacks on V2V communication are detected from the estimated states. When an attack is detected, the control method is switched to a secure method. Through simulation experiments, we show that the proposed mechanism can detect attacks immediately and accurately, allowing the stability of the platoon to be maintained.

Fakes in social media: fabrication, dissemination and diagnostic signs of unreliable information

Fakes in social media: fabrication, dissemination and diagnostic signs of unreliable information

ВІДПОВІДАЛЬНІСТЬ ЗА ПОРУШЕННЯ ЗЕМЕЛЬНОГО ЗАКОНОДАВСТВА

The article is devoted to the theoretical definition of the concepts of responsibility, legal responsibility, land offense «responsibility» and «legal responsibility for land offenses». It has been established that a land offense is a socially harmful criminal act or omission that contradicts the norms of land law. Land offenses are considered as negative social phenomena, as they encroach on the land system and law and order, aimed at ensuring the rational use and protection of land and protection of persons using land. It is concluded that legal liability is applied for the commission of the relevant offense: disciplinary or administrative misconduct, criminal offense, civil violation in the field of land relations. All the above indicates that a land offense is a guilty, illegal act or omission that contradicts the legal norms of rational use of land resources, impedes the rights and legitimate interests of landowners and land users, violates the state procedure for land management as the national wealth of our country. It is stated that depending on the specific type of objects, land offenses can be divided into two groups: the actual land offenses and land offenses of environmental orientation. It also identifies a number of important functions that are implemented during prosecution for violations of land legislation. These questions will be relevant for further research. A land offense is a socially harmful criminal act or omission that contradicts the norms of land law. Land offenses are considered as negative social phenomena, as they encroach on the land system and law and order, aimed at ensuring the rational use and protection of land and protection of persons who use land. Also, depending on the specific type of objects, land offenses can be divided into two groups: the actual land offenses and land offenses of environmental orientation. Offenses of the first group violate the requirements of rational use and protection of land, legal rights and interests of landowners and land users, including tenants. These include: noncompliance with the requirements for the use of land for its intended purpose; unauthorized occupation of land plots; destruction of boundary markers; evasion of state registration of land plots and submission of unreliable information about them and some others.

Abductive Inference Method in Problems of Explaining the Observed

The problems of artificial intelligence, control and decision-making with incomplete or unreliable information include a wide class of problems of abductive explanation of the observed, including cause–effect problems. The study is devoted to the substantiation of the method of logical formation of hypotheses explaining the observed. Means of knowledge representation and derivation of hypotheses are proposed. A language possessing the property of substitutability is introduced. The properties of language and the calculi introduced in it provide hypothesizing by combining deduction and abduction. In contrast to the well-known logical methods of abduction, the proposed techniques make it possible to derive hypotheses (minorants) that are necessary and sufficient for a formal explanation of the observed. Based on minorants in combination with the basic theory of the subject area, reliable causes of the observed or relevant circumstances leading to these causes are formed. In this case, in situations with the availability of empirical data, these causes and circumstances can also be formed in plausible versions. Examples from technology and medicine are considered.

Infodemia and its influence on human behavior during quarantine

The article is devoted to the study of a newly formed during the pandemic term, infodemia, which significantly affects the behavior and life of people. Much effort is needed to fight the virus, but it is very costly to overcome false and unverified information. Misinformation, rumors and all sorts of fake information often lead to destructive increases of information flows to the public consciousness. In fact, destructive information is shared by word of mouth in the media more often than truthful and constructive one. Based on the increase in negative messages, there are negative changes in the emotional and behavioral states of each member of society. Infodemia, as a harmful epidemic of rumors, requires detailed study and improvement of ways to fight it. Identifying ways of perception of unverified information and the correct attitude to it will make it possible to make the right choice in an epidemic situation. Acquaintance with such methods influences the choice of the organization of own life, development of critical thinking and education of the correct attitude and estimation of media information. Mastering the techniques and methods of verifying the veracity of information on the Internet will allow a person to control and cultivate their own media immunity, reduce anxiety and promote the mobilization of behavioral patterns. Some step-by-step actions that help increase stress resistance and the ability to block and neutralize infodemia are described and presented in the article. The informational influence on psychological feeling of the person in the period of quarantine restrictions is considered. The skills of perceiving and dividing information, self-organizing and critical thinking are presented. Infodemia, misinformation, fakes and panic spread much faster than the virus itself. Conspiracy theories flow into the information pool like waterfalls, and then become overgrown with numerous variations and interpretations. Forced observance of quarantine measures, means of psychological, social, medical hygiene causes the emergence of different in content, depth and duration transformations in the behavior of the individual. Techniques and methods of finding constructive behavioral patterns are described. During quarantine and in isolation, people around the world began to work, communicate and spend leisure time online. In all age groups, both adults and children, there was a distribution of normal lifetime in the direction of increasing consumption of social networks and media. Moreover, it is because of this impact on human consciousness that the new term infodemia has emerged, as the growth of unreliable information during pandemic.

On the validity of criminalization of declaring unreliable information

On the validity of criminalization of declaring unreliable information

“Digital trust” vs “Distrust” in the Formation of Social Relations and Practices of Glocal Society

Introduction. The individual’s application of established social practices in the digital environment faces certain difficulties caused by the wide opportunities for “honest” and “dishonest” behavior on the Internet. The high level of trust in digital technologies and the possibility of manipulating personal data, the desire to rely on “expert opinion” and unreliable information, the social need for communication and the illusion of communication in social networks, as well as other dilemmas of relationships in the digital world and operating with big data create a sense of uncertainty, instability and disunity in the perception of digital reality. The purpose of the article is to identify social and ethical aspects of trust phenomenon as an attitude of consciousness, obstacles to digital trust and identify ways to develop it. Materials and Methods. The interdisciplinary approach based on ethics of information technology, sociology, and communication theory allows us to analyze the formation of new social practices and interpret the development of a person’s value attitude to new realities of life. Research result. The following areas of actualization of the concept of “trust” in the digital world are identified as trust in data and algorithms, trust in “digital subject”, “Internet of trust” as a space of obligations and rules. The formation of the “Internet of trust” is associated with awareness of all social, moral and psychological problems associated with the process of combining online and offline environments in the social practice of an individual, where new forms of applying traditional standards of behavior should be found. Discussion and Conclusion. Postponing the rational risk analysis of digital interaction by an individual “for later” provokes the creation of situations that are critical for the individual’s well-being and security. The costs of digital trust are reduced security and creation of “traps” in public relations and social practices. Digital environment creates a situation of vulnerability of an individual, which encourages him to resort to possible measures of protection. In turn, the “Internet of trust” as a new digital reality is absolutely necessary for the effective functioning and further development of society.

Circumstanges to be proved in the procedure of investigation of inaccurate information (case law analysis)

The article analyzes the circumstances to be proved during the investigation of declaring unreliable information, the author analyzessome court decisions, identifies some of their patterns, highlights some shortcomings and gaps in the regulations. In addition, thecircumstances to be proved in the investigation of this category of criminal offenses are hidden. It is proved that the important circumstancesto be proved in the investigation of declaring unreliable information are: the guilt of the accused in committing a criminaloffense, the form of guilt, motive and purpose of its commission; as well as the event of the criminal offense. During the preparationof the article the author used a comparative legal method, methods of analysis and induction, which led to the reasonable conclusionthat the crime scene can not be attributed to significant circumstances to be proved, because in this type of crime it does not affect thecomposition of the criminal offense and sentencing.It was also emphasized that the level of corruption partly depends on the effectiveness of the pre-trial investigation by the autho -rized bodies. One such indicator of effectiveness is the rapid, complete and impartial investigation of criminal offenses, which to someextent is reflected in the relevance and admissibility of the evidence obtained. Therefore, in the context of this study, the circumstancesto be proved in the investigation of declaring unreliable information on the basis of the analysis of court decisions are considered. It isthe court that plays a crucial role in determining the admissibility of a piece of evidence, makes a decision based on the assessment ofthe admissibility, reliability, sufficiency and appropriateness of the evidence provided by the parties to confirm their legal positions.

Getting serious about the dirty little secrets of health care reform to guarantee true Universal Health Care for all Filipinos

Getting serious about the dirty little secrets of health care reform to guarantee true Universal Health Care for all Filipinos

Content and Quality Analysis of Websites as a Patient Resource for Temporomandibular Disorders.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the content and quality of internet information resources in Turkey about temporomandibular disorders (TMDs). In July 2020, the keywords "jaw joint disease" (çene eklemi rahatsızlığı) and "jaw joint pain" (çene eklemi ağrısı) were searched on Google, Bing, YAHOO!, and Yandex. The first 20 websites were listed for 2 keywords on the 4 search engines. Scientific articles, product websites, repetitive sites, advertisements, and irrelevant websites were excluded from the list. The remaining 77 websites were assessed using the Quality Criteria for Consumer Health Information (DISCERN), Global Quality Score (GQS) and Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) benchmarks. The topics related to TMDs that were thought to be important in informing the patient were determined and the Temporomandibular Disorder Content Score (TMDCS) was calculated to evaluate whether these contents were available on the website. The sources of the 77 websites included dentists in private practice (6.5%, n=5), hospitals/polyclinics (32.5%, n=25), universities (6.5%, n=5), and others (54.5%, n=42). The total DISCERN scores of all websites included were poor (average score 26.96). Mean scores of JAMA, GQS, and TMDCS were 1.75, 2.31, and 8.4, respectively. The quality and reliability of the information on the websites related to TMDs are poor. Clinicians should be aware that patients may have access to unreliable or incomplete information. There is a need for improvement on websites about TMDs, especially by professionals through imparting more comprehensive and reliable information.

The Importance of Being Uncertain―or What I Learned From Writing History With Rumors

Rumors are a challenging kind of archival material for historical research. They provide vague, unreliable and obscure information—far from the reliable source material required to write history “as it really happened.” In this article I will, however, show how the uncertainty that is characteristic for rumors opens up a chance to understand knowledge-in-the making. By looking at reports of slave revolts in the U.S. South I try to find out how people at the time grappled with contradictory information and tried to evaluate the credibility of their sources. In a moment of crisis, rumor-mongering for nineteenth-century southerners functioned as a narrative way to come to terms with their collective fear and to performatively reestablish order. In the end, rumors became collective stories that help us, as historians, to understand the ambiguous character of uncertainty that can both challenge and stabilize power structures. In that, the focus on rumors also allows us to embrace uncertainty, fuzziness and speechlessness as constitutive elements in our own writing.

Bureaupathology and paper pressing in the Russian education

The redundancy, intensity and formalization of paperwork in education have become its painful feature: educational bureaucracy and evaluation mania ignore the social mission of education, paper pressure and paper genocide are barriers to its progress and manageability. The article presents the results of an interregional study of managerial information flows in the Russian education system: it analyzes data of representative surveys and timing of the workloads of the main personnel groups, expert assessments, document flows in the education system in the perspective of the theory of bureaucracy and institutional functions of education. Thus, the redundancy of information flows in the school system exceeds the functional needs of management by more than 20 times. The number of the types of documents written by the teacher reaches 95 on average, and their labor intensity is comparable to teaching. Most of the collected information is not reliable and is not used for educational purposes; it is rather a means to ensure the managerial omnipotence and excess personnel. The key source of paper pressure and paper genocide in the education system is the management strategy that ignores the social mission of education and its social efficiency. This strategy expresses bureaucratic distrust to educators and to the possibilities of public-private administration. Practices based on this strategy lead to irrelevant, unreliable and ineffective information flows, deformed social relations and professional culture of teachers, their widespread burnout and outflow from education. The identified management strategy is a dead end for the Russian education system and an obstacle for preserving its potential and development under the growing global competition.

How much can the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale Cognitive Subscale (ADAS‐Cog) tell us? Insights from a latent state‐trait auto‐regressive (LST‐AR) model

AbstractBackgroundThe ADAS‐Cog assesses several cognitive domains and is the international gold standard for monitoring cognitive decline in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia. These manifold cognitive deficits can progress differently and therefore, individual ADAS‐Cog items may contain different sources of information: some predictable based on the baseline score (i.e. trait), and some based on progression from one occasion to the next (i.e. accumulated or “autoregressive” effects), while some reflects unpredictable “occasion specific” fluctuations in symptoms (i.e state).MethodOver multiple occasions of measurement, latent state‐trait autoregressive (LST‐AR) models can be used to decompose each item into reliable consistent information (composed of trait information and accumulated effects), reliable occasion‐specific information (i.e. state effects), and unreliable information (i.e. measurement error). Thus, consistency (trait + accumulated effects) and reliability (consistency + occasion specificity) can be determined for each item, at each assessment. The LST‐AR model was fit to four waves of data assessments (baseline, 6, 12 and 24 months) among 341 mild AD patients that participated in the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) study.ResultThe reliabilities of the memory (43.4%‐80.1%) and language (63.8%‐92.5%) items were generally greater than those of the praxis (average of 65.6%) and orientation (average of 60.8%) items. At the last assessment, all of the memory and language items had more consistency (ranging from 63.4% for comprehension of spoken language to 88.2% for word recognition) than occasion specificity. Disentangling the consistency into traits and accumulated effects, the items most reflective of traits were word recognition (79.4%) and commands (64.1%). Word recall, orientation and naming tasks contained roughly equal amounts of trait and accumulated information. Scores on comprehension of spoken language and spoken language ability were mainly related to accumulated effects (71.4% and 64.7%, respectively).ConclusionIn mild AD, most individual ADAS‐Cog memory and language items were reliable over time. Moreover, the scale captured additional information about the state, trait and accumulated effects of AD; the memory items tended to be more reflective of trait differences between subjects, whereas the language items tended to reflect effects that accumulated from one visit to the next, consistent with the typical progression of AD.

Predictors of Irregular International Migration among Youth in Jimma Zone, South West Ethiopia

This article deals with irregular international migration among the youth in south-west Ethiopia, which is one of the major issues that grabbed the attention of the international community in recent years. The article draws on a study which aimed at determining major predictors of irregular migration intention among youth in Jimma Zone, Southwest Ethiopia. Irregular migration and human trafficking are serious challenges that people face in Ethiopia in general and in Jimma Zone in particular. Concurrent cross-sectional mixed method study design was deployed, and a total of 347 respondents participated in a quantitative survey and 33 and 6 took part in five Focus Group Discussions and in-depth interviews respectively. The study was conducted in three selected woredas/districts of Jimma Zone between March and April 2018. Variables such as age, political unrest, unreliable information from social media, social networks, the desire for life enhancement, and readiness for taking risk are found to be good predictors or reasons of irregular migration. Age has strong negative correlation (r=-0.73) with irregular migration intention. Personal readiness has very strong (r=0.96) and positive correlation with irregular migration intention. In conclusion, youth in particular and community in general in Jimma Zone favor irregular migration to home situation and prefer to try out other life as livelihood strategy.

Mobile phones in the spread of unreliable information on Twitter: evidence from the 2017 French presidential campaign

This article analyzes the spread of unreliable information on Twitter during the 2017 French presidential campaign, focusing on the use of mobile phones with regard to information-sharing behavior. The corpus is composed of 38,346,765 tweets, posted by 2,163,812 supporters of the five main French political parties, from November 25, 2016 to May 12, 2017. We examine more precisely a sub-corpus of tweets (13,044,619) containing links to external information sources, in order to evaluate the different types of information sources and their reliability. Our research shows that information-sharing behavior within Twitter in France is generally based on reliable information sources, produced by journalists and professional media. However, we highlight that smartphone users tended to share a greater amount of user-generated content, as well as articles from a wider range of alternative political information sources (blogs, activists’ websites); such sources were most likely to publish unreliable information. Thus it appears that users of mobile phones tend to share more unreliable news than those who use Twitter from a computer web browser. Further, we show that this “device effect” on the spread of unreliable information is primarily amplified among the practices of one political community—namely, the far-right party and its network of supporters—which is more likely to organize debate around a larger number of unreliable references. We are claiming here that the design-based interoperability of these unreliable political news and social media applications helps to understand why the French far-right community shared more unreliable information from the Twitter application.

CSL+

Using unreliable information sources generating conflicting evidence may lead to a large uncertainty, which significantly hurts the decision making process. Recently, many approaches have been taken to integrate conflicting data from multiple sources and/or fusing conflicting opinions from different entities. To explicitly deal with uncertainty, a belief model called Subjective Logic (SL), as a variant of Dumpster-Shafer Theory, has been proposed to represent subjective opinions and to merge multiple opinions by offering a rich volume of fusing operators, which have been used to solve many opinion inference problems in trust networks. However, the operators of SL are known to be lack of scalability in inferring unknown opinions from large network data as a result of the sequential procedures of merging multiple opinions. In addition, SL does not consider deriving opinions in the presence of conflicting evidence. In this work, we propose a hybrid inference method that combines SL and Probabilistic Soft Logic (PSL), namely, Collective Subjective Plus, CSL + , which is resistible to highly conflicting evidence or a lack of evidence. PSL can reason a belief in a collective manner to deal with large-scale network data, allowing high scalability based on relationships between opinions. However, PSL does not consider an uncertainty dimension in a subjective opinion. To take benefits from both SL and PSL, we proposed a hybrid approach called CSL + for achieving high scalability and high prediction accuracy for unknown opinions with uncertainty derived from a lack of evidence and/or conflicting evidence. Through the extensive experiments on four semi-synthetic and two real-world datasets, we showed that the CSL + outperforms the state-of-the-art belief model (i.e., SL), probabilistic inference models (i.e., PSL, CSL), and deep learning model (i.e., GCN-VAE-opinion) in terms of prediction accuracy, computational complexity, and real running time.