scholarly journals Rapid assessment of disaster damage using social media activity

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. e1500779 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yury Kryvasheyeu ◽  
Haohui Chen ◽  
Nick Obradovich ◽  
Esteban Moro ◽  
Pascal Van Hentenryck ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Rapid Assessment ◽  
Early Warning Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hurricane Sandy ◽  
Economic Damage ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Twitter Activity

Could social media data aid in disaster response and damage assessment? Countries face both an increasing frequency and an increasing intensity of natural disasters resulting from climate change. During such events, citizens turn to social media platforms for disaster-related communication and information. Social media improves situational awareness, facilitates dissemination of emergency information, enables early warning systems, and helps coordinate relief efforts. In addition, the spatiotemporal distribution of disaster-related messages helps with the real-time monitoring and assessment of the disaster itself. We present a multiscale analysis of Twitter activity before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy. We examine the online response of 50 metropolitan areas of the United States and find a strong relationship between proximity to Sandy’s path and hurricane-related social media activity. We show that real and perceived threats, together with physical disaster effects, are directly observable through the intensity and composition of Twitter’s message stream. We demonstrate that per-capita Twitter activity strongly correlates with the per-capita economic damage inflicted by the hurricane. We verify our findings for a wide range of disasters and suggest that massive online social networks can be used for rapid assessment of damage caused by a large-scale disaster.

scholarly journals Economic damages from Hurricane Sandy attributable to sea level rise caused by anthropogenic climate change

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin H. Strauss ◽  
Philip M. Orton ◽  
Klaus Bittermann ◽  
Maya K. Buchanan ◽  
Daniel M. Gilford ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Sea Level Rise ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
East Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hurricane Sandy ◽  
Water Levels ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Economic Damage ◽  
Sea Levels

AbstractIn 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of the United States, creating widespread coastal flooding and over $60 billion in reported economic damage. The potential influence of climate change on the storm itself has been debated, but sea level rise driven by anthropogenic climate change more clearly contributed to damages. To quantify this effect, here we simulate water levels and damage both as they occurred and as they would have occurred across a range of lower sea levels corresponding to different estimates of attributable sea level rise. We find that approximately $8.1B ($4.7B–$14.0B, 5th–95th percentiles) of Sandy’s damages are attributable to climate-mediated anthropogenic sea level rise, as is extension of the flood area to affect 71 (40–131) thousand additional people. The same general approach demonstrated here may be applied to impact assessments for other past and future coastal storms.

How do personality traits affect communication among users in online social networks?

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose Maria Balmaceda ◽  
Silvia Schiaffino ◽  
Daniela Godoy
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Personality Traits ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Factor Model ◽  
Five Factor Model ◽  
Personality Dimensions ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Similarity Attraction

Purpose – The purpose of this work is to analyse the relationships between the personality traits of linked users in online social networks. First the authors tried to discover relation patterns between personality dimensions in conversations. They also wanted to verify some hypotheses: whether users' personality is stable throughout different conversation threads and whether the similarity-attraction paradigm can be verified in this context. They used the five factor model of personality or Big Five, which has been widely studied in psychology. Design/methodology/approach – One of the approaches to detect users' personalities is by analysing the language they use when they talk to others. Based on this assumption the authors computed users' personality from the conversations extracted from the MySpace social network. Then the authors analysed the relationships among personality traits of users to discover patterns. Findings – The authors found that there are patterns between some personality dimensions in conversation threads, for example, agreeable people tend to communicate with extroverted people. They confirmed that the personality stability theory can be verified in social networks. Finally the authors could verify the similarity-attraction paradigm for some values of personality traits, such as extroversion, agreeableness, and openness to experience. Originality/value – The results the authors found provide some clues about how people communicate within online social networks, particularly who they tend to communicate with depending on their personality. The discovered patterns can be used in a wide range of applications, such as suggesting contacts in online social networks. Although some studies have been made regarding the role of personality in social media, no similar analysis has been done to evaluate how users communicate in social media considering their personality.

scholarly journals COVID-19 scenarios for the United States

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Simon I Hay
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Model Performance ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Damage ◽  
Reference Scenario ◽  
Level Model ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
The Impact

The United States (US) has not been spared in the ongoing pandemic of novel coronavirus disease. COVID-19, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), continues to cause death and disease in all 50 states, as well as significant economic damage wrought by the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) adopted in attempts to control transmission. We use a deterministic, Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Recovered (SEIR) compartmental framework to model possible trajectories of SARS-CoV-2 infections and the impact of NPI at the state level. Model performance was tested against reported deaths from 01 February to 04 July 2020. Using this SEIR model and projections of critical driving covariates (pneumonia seasonality, mobility, testing rates, and mask use per capita), we assessed some possible futures of the COVID-19 pandemic from 05 July through 31 December 2020. We explored future scenarios that included feasible assumptions about NPIs including social distancing mandates (SDMs) and levels of mask use. The range of infection, death, and hospital demand outcomes revealed by these scenarios show that action taken during the summer of 2020 will have profound public health impacts through to the year end. Encouragingly, we find that an emphasis on universal mask use may be sufficient to ameliorate the worst effects of epidemic resurgences in many states. Masks may save as many as 102,795 (55,898-183,374) lives, when compared to a plausible reference scenario in December. In addition, widespread mask use may markedly reduce the need for more socially and economically deleterious SDMs.

scholarly journals Porosity : Networking Cities for a Changing Climate

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett snyder ◽  
N. Claire Napawan
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
Homeland Security ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hurricane Sandy ◽  
Storm Events

On October 28th 2013 Hurricane Sandy hit land on the East Coast of the United States. The deadliest storm to hit the country since 2005 it caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, destroyed thousands of homes, left millions without electric service, and caused 117 deaths in the United States, including 53 in New York, making Sandy the most life costly hurricane to hit the United States mainland since Hurricane Katrina. In all an estimated 186 people were killed across the United States, the Caribbean, and Canada. In the immediate aftermath of the storm not only did the emergency services, state and federal government implement emergency plans of action, including both direct intervention on the ground and massive financial support, so too did a number of charities, community and residents groups across the US. One of the most surprising of these groups was what became known as Occupy Sandy. As noted by the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute: “Within hours of Sandy’s landfall, members from the Occupy Wall Street movement used social media to tap the wider Occupy network for volunteers and aid. Overnight, a volunteer army of young, educated, tech-savvy individuals with time and a desire to help others emerged. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, “Occupy Sandy” became one of the leading humanitarian groups providing relief to survivors across New York City and New Jersey. At its peak, it had grown to an estimated 60,000 volunteers—more than four times the number deployed by the American Red Cross.” What this phenomenon clearly demonstrates is the potential for digital networking to improve response to catastrophic storm events at a community level. Far from being solely a question of material support and logistics, the response to the disaster was one equally definable as digital. Pointing to the possible rethinking of issues around the extreme and localised consequences of climate change and responses to it in purely traditional infrastructural terms, the social media focused organisation of Occupy Sandy potentially offers us a new frame of reference to deal with these, and less catastrophic issues around climate change and our response to it. This paper provides a discussion of the projected impacts of global environmental change in urban environments in the United States, with a particular focus on their impact on existing storm and sanitary water infrastructure. However, it theorizes a new approach to this archaic system of infrastructure that exploits social networking tools and digital technologies to build greater networks for climate change resilience across the United States and, by extension, elsewhere.

scholarly journals Big Data, artificial intelligence and the geography of entrepreneurship in the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Obschonka ◽  
Neil Lee ◽  
Andrés Rodríguez-Pose ◽  
johannes Christopher Eichstaedt ◽  
Tobias Ebert
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Big Five ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Outcomes ◽  
Entrepreneurial Activity ◽  
Personality Profile ◽  
Artificial Intelligence Methods ◽  
Wide Range

There is increasing interest in the potential of artificial intelligence and Big Data (e.g., generated via social media) to help understand economic outcomes and processes. But can artificial intelligence models, solely based on publicly available Big Data (e.g., language patterns left on social media), reliably identify geographical differences in entrepreneurial personality/culture that are associated with entrepreneurial activity? Using a machine learning model processing 1.5 billion tweets by 5.25 million users, we estimate the Big Five personality traits and an entrepreneurial personality profile for 1,772 U.S. counties. We find that these Twitter-based personality estimates show substantial relationships to county-level entrepreneurship activity, accounting for 20% (entrepreneurial personality profile) and 32% (all Big Five trait as separate predictors in one model) of the variance in local entrepreneurship and are robust to the introduction in the model of conventional economic factors that affect entrepreneurship. We conclude that artificial intelligence methods, analysing publically available social media data, are indeed able to detect entrepreneurial patterns, by measuring territorial differences in entrepreneurial personality/culture that are valid markers of actual entrepreneurial behaviour. More importantly, such social media datasets and artificial intelligence methods are able to deliver similar (or even better) results than studies based on millions of personality tests (self-report studies). Our findings have a wide range of implications for research and practice concerned with entrepreneurial regions and eco-systems, and regional economic outcomes interacting with local culture.

U.S. College Student Media and Twitter: Are Student Media Following Best Practices?

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-305
Author(s):  
Jeremy Saks ◽  
Sally Ann Cruikshank ◽  
Molly Yanity
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
College Student ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Wide Range

The current study examines how student media in the United States utilize Twitter and if those media outlets are following best practices. A constructed-sample content analysis of 10 Twitter feeds over the course of four semesters was conducted. The findings show that student media are generally not following best practices with a wide range of differences among those outlets in the sample. Discussion includes what this means for institutions teaching social media for journalists and other concerns.

scholarly journals Social Media and Students’ Wellbeing: An Empirical Analysis during the Covid-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (18) ◽  
pp. 10442
Author(s):  
Hedviga Tkáčová ◽  
Martina Pavlíková ◽  
Zita Jenisová ◽  
Patrik Maturkanič ◽  
Roman Králik
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Social Media ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Young People ◽  
Online Education ◽  
Online Social Networks ◽  
Slovak Republic ◽  
Well Being ◽  
School Students ◽  
Wide Range

Various forms of social media (SM) appear to be very popular among young people because they provide information and entertainment, including a wide range of web technologies such as blogs, wikis, online social networks, and virtual networks. SM plays a huge role in the lives of children and teenagers, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the computer becomes not only a means of entertainment or leisure, but also a necessary and everyday means of education and communication with other people. Thus, COVID-19 has brought a radical change, not only in the daily schedule and leisure time of pupils and students, but also in the perception of the procedures used by this specific group in the online space. Through our own research, using structured interviews and a questionnaire, we examine the use of SM as a tool to promote sustainable well-being in a group of high school students from various schools in central Slovak Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia). The research confirms that during the pandemic, the use of SM by the young respondents contributes significantly to well-being. This is the case when SM is used by high school students as a tool in promoting: (1) personal interests; (2) motivation; (3) communication and interpersonal connectivity; (4) preferred forms of online education; and (5) online games. The article presents a set of recommendations regarding the use of SM as a tool for sustaining the well-being of young people during the pandemic.

Communicating about Hydropower, Dams, and Climate Change

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Lundberg ◽  
Caroline Gottschalk Druschke ◽  
Bridie McGreavy ◽  
Sara Randall ◽  
Tyler Quiring ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Sustainable Energy ◽  
Dam Removal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Hydropower Dams

As the global imperative for sustainable energy builds and with hydroelectricity proposed as one aspect of a sustainable energy profile, public discourse reflects the complex and competing discourses and social-ecological trade-offs surrounding hydropower and dams. Is hydropower “green”? Is it “sustainable”? Is it “renewable”? Does hydropower provide a necessary alternative to fossil fuel dependence? Can the ecological consequences of hydropower be mitigated? Is this the end of the hydropower era, or is it simply the beginning of a new chapter? These pressing questions circulate through discussions about hydropower in a time of changing climate, globally declining fisheries, and aging infrastructure, lending a sense of urgency to the many decisions to be made about the future of dams. The United States and European Union (EU) saw an enduring trend of dam building from the Industrial Revolution through the mid-1970s. In these countries, contemporary media discussions about hydropower are largely focused on removing existing hydropower dams and retrofitting existing dams that offer hydropower potential. Outside of these contexts, increasing numbers of countries are debating the merits of building new large-scale hydropower dams that, in many developing countries, may have disproportionate impacts on indigenous communities that hold little political or economic power. As a result, news and social media attention to hydropower outside the United States/EU often focus on activist efforts to oppose hydropower and on its complex consequences for ecosystems and communities alike. Despite hydropower’s wide range of ecological, economic, and social trade-offs, and the increasing urgency of global conversations about hydropower, relatively little work in communication studies explores news media, social media, or public debate in the context of hydropower and dam removal. In an effort to expand the scope of communication studies, after reviewing existing work the attention here shifts to research focused more broadly on human dimensions of hydropower. These dual bodies of work focus on small and large dams from Europe to the Americas to Asia and have applied a range of methods for analyzing media coverage of the hydropower debate. Those studies are reviewed here, with an emphasis on the key themes that emerge across studies—including trust, communication, local engagement, and a call to action for interdisciplinary approaches, intertwined with conflict, conflict resolution, and social and ecological resistance. The conclusion offers an original case brief that elucidates emerging themes from our ongoing research about hydropower and dam removal in the United States, and suggests future directions for research.

The Association between Twitter Activity and E-cigarette Purchasing

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 502-517
Author(s):  
Carla J. Berg ◽  
Regine Haardörfer ◽  
Zachary Cahn ◽  
Steven Binns ◽  
Yoonsang Kim ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Market Area ◽  
Cigarette Taxes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Consumer Panel ◽  
Twitter Activity ◽  
Consumer Age ◽  
Over Time

Objectives: Industry, policymakers, researchers, and others have interest in social media, assuming that they influence – or reflect – individual behavior, despite limited supporting research. Electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) emerged in the United States in the past decade alongside strong social media presence, making ENDS relevant for examining this issue. In this study, we examined monthly ENDS-related Twitter activity (tweet volume) in relation to monthly ENDS purchasing among ENDS purchasers. Methods: Data from 2105 Nielsen Consumer Panel households with any ENDS purchases from October 2012 to September 2015 were examined, accounting for ENDS advertising expenditures, state-level tobacco environment, and consumer characteristics. Results: ENDS-related purchases and twitter volume increased over time; advertising expenditures did not increase at the same level. Bivariate analyses indicated that ENDS purchases increased over time (p < .001) and were related to lower designated market area advertising expenditures (p = .025), higher cigarette taxes (p = .015), and older consumer age (p = .001). Among ENDS purchasers, multivariate analyses indicated that purchases correlated positively with tweet volume but negatively with advertising expenditure measures. Conclusions: Social media (eg, Twitter) may offer platforms for monitoring and/or intervening with respect to ENDS use, and potentially the ENDS industry, which engages in social media.

Music after the Fall

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

By the start of the 21st century many of the foundations of postwar culture had disappeared: Europe had been rebuilt and, as the EU, had become one of the world’s largest economies; the United States’ claim to global dominance was threatened; and the postwar social democratic consensus was being replaced by market-led neoliberalism. Most importantly of all, the Cold War was over, and the World Wide Web had been born. Music After The Fall considers contemporary musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing on theories from the other arts, in particular art and architecture, it expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter considers a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions are considered critically to build up a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from South American electroacoustic studios to pianos in the Australian outback. A new approach to the study of contemporary music is developed that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique, and more on the comparison of different responses to common themes, among them permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

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