Has the VIX index been manipulated?

Has the Online Discussion Been Manipulated? Quantifying Online Discussion Authenticity within Online Social Media

Online social media (OSM) has a enormous influence in today’s world. Some individuals view OSM as fertile ground for abuse and use it to disseminate misinformation and political propaganda, slander competitors, and spread spam. The crowdturfing industry employs large numbers of bots and human workers to manipulate OSM and misrepresent public opinion. The detection of online discussion topics ma...

The H-index can be easily manipulated

We prove two complexity results about the H-index concerned with the Google scholar merge operation on one’s scientific articles. The results show that, although it is hard to merge one’s articles in an optimal way, it is easy to merge them in such a way that one’s H-index increases. This suggests the need for an alternative scientific performance measure that is resistant to this type of manip...

Has acromegaly been diagnosed earlier?

PURPOSE We investigated whether acromegaly has been diagnosed earlier at the Niigata Medical and Dental University Hospital. METHODS Patients with acromegaly (n = 81) who underwent their first transsphenoidal surgery from 2006 to 2015 were reviewed. Two groups were compared: those who underwent surgery between 2006 and 2010 (n = 35) and those who underwent surgery between 2011 and 2015 (n = 4...

Has the burden of depression been overestimated?

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether high estimates of the burden of depression could be attributed to an overestimation of disability weights (reflecting more severe disability). METHODS We derived disability weights that were tailored to prevalence data. Empirical disability data from a Dutch community survey was used to describe three classes of severity of depression and their proportional pr...

Coronary stenting: has the rubicon been crossed?