Parties, Patronage and COVID-19 Vaccination Distribution in Indonesia

During the COVID-19 pandemic, as Indonesia mobilized to deliver vaccines to the population, an unexpected phenomenon occurred: political parties became directly involved in the vaccine delivery effort. In this article, we draw on online reports and interviews to demonstrate that these campaigns acted as an extension of the patronage politics that dominate the country's political arena. The involvement of political parties had little effect on the national vaccination effort, as parties delivered a relatively small number of vaccines and often targeted areas that already had high coverage. Instead, parties and politicians used these events to strengthen links with constituents and supporters. We identify three main pathways that allowed political parties to access the vaccines: lobbying by members of the national legislature's health commission;through local governments;and by direct executive government access to the national Ministry of Health. This "hijacking" of a national policy for clientelistic purposes provides insight into the presence of intra-party coordination of patronage goods but also demonstrates the personalization and fragmentation of patronage distribution highlighted in the existing literature. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the quality of public healthcare and other services in Indonesia.

Preventing Domain Name Infringement: An Introduction to Approaches Adopted by the United Nations, the European Union, and Taiwan

The boom in e-commerce around the world since the COVID-19 outbreak has indirectly yet markedly affected business brands and the marketing strategies they use to promote products and services. To effectively respond to this e-commerce trend, companies must formulate plans to navigate the new digital business landscape and to ensure that their brands stand out from those of competitors. A domain name is a string of text that represents a company. Users type a domain name or URL into a browser's search bar to reach a particular website that they wish to view. All registered domain names are unique and cannot be used by anyone other than their owner. For these reasons, some scholars suggested that domain names must be protected through intellectual property laws. However, because the owner of a registered domain name is only entitled to use that particular domain name for a specific period and thus does not have full ownership of it, domain names are not protected by copyright. Because domain names can be used to promote businesses, improve companies' reputation, and create business opportunities similar to any other form of intellectual property, many cases of domain name infringement have been occurred. Such cases include copying of the domain name owned by somebody else to deceive customers into believing a camouflage website is the corresponding official website. Various preventive measures and policies have been adopted in many countries to resolve such disputes. Taiwan's legal system, however, has not yet taken action to avoid such disputes. Any cases regarding the infringement of domain names can only be handled through negotiation, investigation, and evidence collection. First of all, this paper will introduce the definition of a domain name and then describe the types of infringement may occur in various situations as well as the policies regarding domain name management and protection. This study can serve as a useful reference for Taiwan's legal practitioners and future researchers.

The SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Activates the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor-Mediated Signaling.

The coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic is caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). At the molecular and cellular levels, the SARS-CoV-2 uses its envelope glycoprotein, the spike S protein, to infect the target cells in the lungs via binding with their transmembrane receptor, the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). Here, we wanted to investigate if other molecular targets and pathways may be used by SARS-CoV-2. We investigated the possibility of the spike 1 S protein and its receptor-binding domain (RBD) to target the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and its downstream signaling pathway in vitro using the lung cancer cell line (A549 cells). Protein expression and phosphorylation were examined upon cell treatment with the recombinant full spike 1 S protein or RBD. We demonstrate for the first time the activation of EGFR by the Spike 1 protein associated with the phosphorylation of the canonical Extracellular signal-regulated kinase1/2 (ERK1/2) and AKT kinases and an increase in survivin expression controlling the survival pathway. Our study suggests the putative implication of EGFR and its related signaling pathways in SARS-CoV-2 infectivity and COVID-19 pathology. This may open new perspectives in the treatment of COVID-19 patients by targeting EGFR.

Detection of Social Media Hashtag Hijacking Using Dictionary-based and Machine Learning Methods

Nowadays, hashtags are widely utilized on all social media platforms since they deliver numerous benefits, particularly for corporations aiming to reach a larger audience. However, hashtag exploitation has resulted in the problem of hashtag hijacking, which is a type of cyber content threat that anyone or any organization can carry out. As a result, this research presents a framework for detecting social media hashtag hijacking through machine learning algorithms. This paper aims to identify methods to classify relevant and irrelevant hashtags to their contents. This paper demonstrates the unsupervised machine learning method, namely the dictionary-based approach, to classify the relevance of hashtags with the content of tweets on an unlabeled dataset, and also the implementation of supervised machine learning methods, including the Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes classifier, and Decision Tree algorithms, to classify the relevance of hashtags used with their contents and compare the machine's performances on labeled datasets. Our results showed that the Support Vector Machine (SVM) performs the best in classifying the relevance of hashtags with an accuracy of 93.36%, an F1 score of 96.19% and ROC-AVC score of 97.22 %. The findings of the study present an automated detection framework for hashtag hijacking that can overcome the limitations of previous studies and adapt to external threats with high performance over time. © 2022 IEEE.

Viral hijacking mechanism in humans through protein-protein interactions.

Numerous viruses have evolved mechanisms to inhibit or alter the host cell's apoptotic response as part of their coevolution with their hosts. The analysis of virus-host protein interactions require an in-depth understanding of both the viral and host protein structures and repertoires, as well as evolutionary mechanisms and pertinent biological facts. Throughout the course of a viral infection, there is constant battle for binding between virus and cellular proteins. Exogenous interfaces facilitating viral-host interactions are well known for constantly targeting and suppressing endogenous interfaces mediating intraspecific interactions, such as viral-viral and host-host connections. In these interactions, the protein-protein interactions (PPIs), are mostly shown as networks (protein interaction networks, PINs), with proteins represented as nodes and their interactions represented as edges. Host proteins with a higher degree of connectivity are more likely to interact with viral proteins. Due to technical advancements, three-dimensional interactions may now be visualized computationally utilizing molecular modeling and cryo-EM approaches. The uniqueness of viral domain repertoires, their evolution, and their activities during viral infection make viruses fascinating models for research. This chapter aims to provide readers a complete picture of the viral hijacking mechanism in protein-protein interactions.