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In recent years, the social impact of misinformation has intensified. The purpose of this study is to clarify the mechanism by which misinformation spreads in society.

Testing the following two hypotheses by a logit model analysis of survey data using actual fact-checked COVID-19 vaccine and political misinformation: people who believe that some misinformation is true are more likely to spread it than those who do not believe in its truthfulness; people with lower media and information literacy are more likely to spread misinformation than people with higher media and information literacy.

The two hypotheses are supported, and the trend was generally robust regardless of the method, whether the means of diffusion was social media or direct conversation.

The authors derived the following four implications from the results: governments need to further promote media information literacy education; platform service providers should consider mechanisms to facilitate the spread and display of posts by people who are aware of misinformation; fact-checking should be further promoted; people should acquire information based on the assumption that people who believe in some misinformation tend to spread it more.

First, it quantitatively clarifies the relationship between misinformation, true/false judgements and dissemination behaviour. Second, it quantitatively clarifies the relationship between literacy and misinformation dissemination behaviour. Third, it conducts a comprehensive analysis of diffusion behaviours, including those outside of social media.

This study aims to reveal how the COVID-19 vaccine was accepted in the Japanese Twitter-sphere. This study explores how the topics related to the vaccine promotion project changed on Twitter and how the topics that were likely to spread changed during the vaccine promotion project.

The computational social science methodology was adopted. This study collected all tweets containing the word “vaccine” using the Twitter API from March to October 2021 and conducted the following analysis: analyzing frequent words and identifying topics likely to spread through the cosine similarity and Tobit model.

First, vaccine hesitancy–related words were frequently mentioned during the vaccine introduction and dissemination periods and had diffusing power only during the former period. Second, vaccine administration–related words were frequently mentioned and diffused through April to May and had diffusing power throughout the period. The background to these findings is that the sentiment of longing for vaccines outweighed that of hesitancy toward vaccines during this period.

This study finds that the timing of the rise in vaccine hesitation sentiment and the timing of the start of vaccine supply were misaligned. This is one of the reasons that Japan, which originally exhibited strong vaccine hesitancy, did not face vaccine hesitancy in the COVID-19 vaccine promotion project.

This study aims to verify the following hypothesis: People with extreme opinions post on social media more than those with moderate opinions.

A social media posting model was constructed to estimate the influence of extreme opinions on the number of social media posts in Japan, Korea and the USA. For a quantitative verification, data from 5,095 questionnaire surveys were regressed using a Tobit model.

Extreme opinions were found to increase the number of social media posts in all three countries and for both surveyed topics (constitutional amendment in Japan and increasing number of foreigners in Japan, Korea and the USA). Furthermore, the higher the interest in the topic, the greater the effect. The hypothesis was thus supported.

The survey was conducted online, and the sample size in Korea and the USA was smaller than in Japan. The topics were limited to two, and only three countries were included.

People should use social media knowing that there are numerous extreme views online. Companies that provide social media platforms should consider measures to ensure that users are not exclusively exposed to extreme opinions.

This research conducts a quantitative analysis on the effects of opinion extremity on social media posting behavior and the resulting bias in online opinion distribution, a topic on which there is scant prior research.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-07-2020-0310.

This paper describes the cogging torque of the permanent magnet synchronous (PM) motors due to the magnetic anisotropy of motor core. The cogging torque due to the magnetic anisotropy is calculated by the finite element method using two kinds of modeling methods: one is the 2D magnetization property method, and the other is the conventional method. As a result, the PM motors with parallel laminated core show different cogging torque waveform from the PM motors with the rotational laminated core due to the influence of the magnetic anisotropy. The amplitudes of the cogging torque are different depending on the modeling methods in the region of high flux density.

The purpose of this study is to find out a simple cognitive intervention method to use MCI and suffering people with depression. As the elderly society increases around the world, the number of elderly people with diseases and dementia is increasing rapidly. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a pre-stage to dementia, is a critical treatment time to slow disease progression. However, there is currently no appropriate medication. Furthermore, MCI patients with depression are more difficult to treat.

To overcome these problems, the authors confirmed improvements and delayed effects in MCI patients in this study for three years through cognitive intervention, demonstrating its effectiveness. Cognitive interventions were conducted for memory retrieval and steadily stimulated the brain by performing tasks to solve problems during daily conversations.

As a result, the intervention group retained mini-mental state examination and Montreal cognitive assessment scores on the domains of cognitive function and also instrumental activities of daily living in the domain of motion compared to the non-intervention group. Moreover, significant improvements in geriatric depression scales-15 and quality-of-life scales enabled the patients to maintain stable living compared to before the intervention. In addition, the intervention group showed a change in patterns that allowed them to voluntarily devote time to going out at the end of the study.

This study was originally planned to compare the rates of transmission from MCI to dementia by tracking over five years (2016–2021). However, due to the impact of COVID-19, which began to spread around the world in 2020, further face-to-face visits and cognitive intervention became impossible. Thus, only half of the data in the existing plans were collected. Although it is difficult to present accurate results for the rate of transmission from MCI to dementia, the tendency was confirmed, indicating sufficient implications as an intervention.

This study was originally planned to compare the rates of transmission from MCI to dementia by tracking three years (2016–2019). The authors had studied for long-term effect.

This chapter examines the issues of the low-cost carriers (LCCs) in Japan and their impact on the domestic and international aviation markets. “Genuine” LCCs, such as Peach Aviation and Jetstar Japan, began their operations in 2012 to follow the new movement of low-cost and low-fare airlines, which are different from the “new emerging” airlines, such as Skymark and AIRDO that appeared in the late 1990s. We discuss the recent history of LCCs in Japan, the characteristics of each LCC, the competitiveness of the high-speed railway in the domestic market, the impact of open sky policies, and the contribution of inbound foreign visitors to the international passenger volume increase. As LCCs in Japan have recently begun operations, they can continue to play a significant role in the Japanese aviation market.

This study aims to build on the well-documented case of the Olympus scandal to dissect how social networks and corporate culture enabled corporate elites to commit fraud across multiple generations of leaders.

A flexible pattern matching approach was used to identify matches and mismatches between behavioural theory in corporate governance and the patterns observed in data from diverse sources.

The study applies the behavioural theory of corporate governance from different perspectives. Social networks and relationships were essential for the execution of the fraud and keeping it secret. The group of corporate elites actively created opportunities for committing misappropriation. This research presents individuals committing embezzlement because the opportunity already exists, and they can enrich themselves. The group of insiders who committed the fraud elaborated the rationalizations to others and asked outside associates to help rationalise the activities, while usually individuals provide rationalizations to themselves only.

The social processes among actors described in this case can inform the design of mechanisms to detect these behaviours in similar contexts.

This study provides both perspectives on the fraud scandal: the one of the whistle-blowers, and the opposing side of the transgressors and their associates. The extant case studies on Olympus presented the timeframe of the scandal right after the exposure. The current study dissects the events during the fraud execution and presents the case in a neutral or a negative light.

The common understanding of generalization/specialization relations assumes the relation to be equally strong between a classifier and any of its related classifiers and also at every level of the hierarchy. Assigning a grade of relative distance to represent the level of similarity between the related pairs of classifiers could correct this situation, which has been considered as an oversimplification of the psychological account of the real-world relations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The evaluation followed an end-user perspective. In order to obtain a consistent data set of specialization distances, a group of 21 persons was asked to assign values to a set of relations from a selection of terms from the AGROVOC thesaurus. Then two sets of representations of the relations between the terms were built, one according to the calculated concept of specialization weights and the other one following the original order of the thesaurus. In total, 40 persons were asked to choose between the two sets following an A/B test-like experiment. Finally, short interviews were carried out after the test to inquiry about their decisions.

The results show that the use of this information could be a valuable tool for search and information retrieval purposes and for the visual representation of knowledge organization systems (KOS). Furthermore, the methodology followed in the study turned out to be useful for detecting inconsistencies in the thesaurus and could thus be used for quality control and optimization of the hierarchical relations.

The use of this relative distance information, namely, “concept specialization distance,” has been proposed mainly at a theoretical level. In the current experiment, the authors evaluate the potential use of this information from an end-user perspective, not only for text-based interfaces but also its application for the visual representation of KOS. Finally, the methodology followed for the elaboration of the concept specialization distance data set showed potential for detecting possible inconsistencies in KOS.