ABSTRACT
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has spread across the globe from the beginning of 2020 and people worldwide have been receiving news about the same from government offices, press conferences and various other media outlets. The COVID-19 Information Watcher Project started in 2020 to collect and organize reliable information sources worldwide. However, it is difficult to automatically identify reliable information sources in foreign countries for several reasons. First, what kind of information sources are reliable heavily depend on each county situation. In some countries people trust their government's official information but in other countries they do not. Secondly, such reliable information sources often provide information in their local languages. Reliable information sources are not necessarily top-ranked by search engines. Crowdsourcing is a promising way to deal with such a case. However, crowd-sourcing platforms do not cover crowds in all countries. In this study, we report some results of our attempt to collect local information regarding COVID-19 from several countries through multi-hop crowdsourcing, in which we allow crowd workers on a crowdsourcing platform to use other platforms in other countries. We show two case studies, Russia and Afghanistan. Our results show that the multi-hop crowdsourcing is a promising way to collect COVID-19 information from different countries. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Today, with the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for remote and asynchronous lessons for musical performance is rapidly increasing. In these lessons, teachers listen to recordings of musical performances and then return textual critique documents to the performers. However, the common document formats that exist in other fields are not widely known in the field of performance instruction. To address this issue, we launched a project in 2020 to collect and publish a dataset of critique documents. This study describes a statistical analysis of the dataset to investigate which types of elements are useful for performers. The multilevel modeling results revealed that the content of the critiques differed more depending on the teacher than on the musical piece or the student. Particularly, the number of sentences about giving practice advice is a key factor for useful critique documents. These findings would lead to improved forms of critique documents and, eventually, to the development of educational programs for teachers. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
[Purpose] To examine the health-related quality of life of community-dwelling elderly by age group in the early stage of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. [Participants and Methods] The subjects were 201 older adults who had attended a university open lecture at least once in the past. Responses to a questionnaire, sent to the participants on April 1st, 2020, were compared with those collected after the most recent open lecture. The questionnaire items included age, outing frequency, and the Short Form-36 item health survey ver.2 (SF-36). [Results] For those in their 60s and 70s, the scores for “Physical functioning”, “Social functioning” and “Mental health” were significantly lower after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic than before. For those in their 80s, there was no significant difference between the SF-36 scores recorded before and after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. [Conclusion] Care for older adults in an emergency situation should be tailored according to age group. © 2020, Society of Physical Therapy Science (Rigaku Ryoho Kagakugakkai). All rights reserved.