scholarly journals Public Sense of Water Fluoridation as Reflected on Twitter 2009–2017

2019 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.J. Oh ◽  
C.H. Kim ◽  
J.G. Jeon
Keyword(s):  
Information Sources ◽  
The United States ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Water Fluoridation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Network Analyses ◽  
Current State ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Negative Sentiment

Though controversial, water fluoridation has been hailed as one of the top-ten public-health achievements of the 20th century in the United States of America. In this article, we aim to investigate the public sense of water fluoridation as reflected on Twitter, using data from 2009 to 2017. To this end, tweets related to water fluoridation were collected using queries such as “fluoridated water or fluoride water,” “water fluoridation or fluoridation of water,” and hashtags related to water fluoridation. The collected tweets ( n = 218,748) were examined through informetric, linguistic (word sentiment, word frequency, and word network analyses), and issue tweet analyses. We found that Twitter users who tweeted about water fluoridation in English between 2009 and 2017 constituted about <0.01% of all users including non-English users. In their tweets, words such as “poison” and “waste” were the strong negative sentiment words most often used. Of the top 30 words most frequently used, words related to information sources on water fluoridation and the safety of water fluoridation appeared more often than words related to its efficacy. Additionally, the words related to information sources on water fluoridation and the safety of water fluoridation were found to be core terms in the sentences of tweet mentions. Our linguistic analyses indicate that Twitter users responded sensitively to words that emphasize negative aspects of fluoridation. This is clearly shown in our issue tweet analysis, where tweet mentions expressing negative opinions about water fluoridation accounted for at least 59.2% of all mentions. By contrast, <15% of tweet mentions were found to be positive. These findings suggest that professionals need to reevaluate the current state of online information about water fluoridation, and improve it in a way so that the public can easily access reliable information sources.

Government Transparency Regarding HIV Infection and Anti-Black Stereotyping

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hiv Prevalence ◽  
Behavioral Approach ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Criminal Violence ◽  
The Public ◽  
Presentation Formats ◽  
Cognitive Accessibility

According to Fung’s (2013) ideal of democratic transparency, the public should use government-issued online information to hold government accountable. Limited cognitive accessibility, however, may lead members of the public instead to judge each other – especially African Americans – in stereotype-consistent ways. Using a behavioral approach to public administration (Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2017), we investigate perceptual biases that may compromise the comprehension of CDC information about HIV prevalence among African Americans. We experimentally demonstrate that the most common data presentation formats lead to significant over-estimates of HIV prevalence among African Americans and associated risk assessments. Further, they increase anti-Black stereotyping in domains that are unrelated to HIV, namely derogatory perceptions of African Americans as supposedly “more lazy” than Whites, “less intelligent,” and more “prone to criminal violence.” We propose proportional scaling as a simple solution to the way the CDC in the United States, and UNAIDS globally, publish HIV prevalence information.

scholarly journals Fake Product Monitoring and Removal for Genuine Product Feedback

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Mayuri Manikrao Patil ◽  
Snehal Nimba Nikumbh ◽  
Aparna Parshwanath Parigond
Keyword(s):  
Online Reviews ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
The Public ◽  
Fraud Risk ◽  
Network Analyses ◽  
User Behaviors ◽  
Opinion Spam ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Fraud Risk Management ◽  
Removal Model

A customer’s decision to purchase a product or service are primarily influenced by online reviews. Customers use online reviews, which are valuable sources of information to understand the public opinion on products and/or services. Dependability on online reviews can give rise to the potential concern that violator could give deceitful reviews in order to synthetically promote or decry products and services. This practice is known as Opinion Spam, where spammers manipulate reviews by making fake, untruthful, or deceptive reviews to get profit and boost their products, and devalue a competitor’s products. In order to tackle this issue, we propose to build a fraud risk management system and removal model. This captures fraudulent transactions based on user behaviors and network, analyses them in real-time using Data Mining, and accurately predicts the suspicious users and transactions. In this system, we use two algorithms NLP and TF-IDF to differentiate between fake and genuine reviews or feedback received by the customers

scholarly journals Identifying Protective Health Behaviors on Twitter: Observational Study of Travel Advisories and Zika Virus (Preprint)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashlynn R Daughton ◽  
Michael J Paul
Keyword(s):  
Zika Virus ◽  
Travel Behavior ◽  
English Language ◽  
Disease Modeling ◽  
Control Sample ◽  
Emerging Infectious Diseases ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Public ◽  
Machine Learning Classification ◽  
Twitter Users

BACKGROUND An estimated 3.9 billion individuals live in a location endemic for common mosquito-borne diseases. The emergence of Zika virus in South America in 2015 marked the largest known Zika outbreak and caused hundreds of thousands of infections. Internet data have shown promise in identifying human behaviors relevant for tracking and understanding other diseases. OBJECTIVE Using Twitter posts regarding the 2015-16 Zika virus outbreak, we sought to identify and describe considerations and self-disclosures of a specific behavior change relevant to the spread of disease—travel cancellation. If this type of behavior is identifiable in Twitter, this approach may provide an additional source of data for disease modeling. METHODS We combined keyword filtering and machine learning classification to identify first-person reactions to Zika in 29,386 English-language tweets in the context of travel, including considerations and reports of travel cancellation. We further explored demographic, network, and linguistic characteristics of users who change their behavior compared with control groups. RESULTS We found differences in the demographics, social networks, and linguistic patterns of 1567 individuals identified as changing or considering changing travel behavior in response to Zika as compared with a control sample of Twitter users. We found significant differences between geographic areas in the United States, significantly more discussion by women than men, and some evidence of differences in levels of exposure to Zika-related information. CONCLUSIONS Our findings have implications for informing the ways in which public health organizations communicate with the public on social media, and the findings contribute to our understanding of the ways in which the public perceives and acts on risks of emerging infectious diseases.

scholarly journals Public Opinions towards COVID-19 in California and New York on Twitter

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xueting Wang ◽  
Canruo Zou ◽  
Zidian Xie ◽  
Dongmei Li
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Topic Modeling ◽  
New York State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Opinions ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Negative Sentiment ◽  
Over Time

Background: With the pandemic of COVID-19 and the release of related policies, discussions about the COVID-19 are widespread online. Social media becomes a reliable source for understanding public opinions toward this virus outbreak. Objective: This study aims to explore public opinions toward COVID-19 on social media by comparing the differences in sentiment changes and discussed topics between California and New York in the United States. Methods: A dataset with COVID-19-related Twitter posts was collected from March 5, 2020 to April 2, 2020 using Twitter streaming API. After removing any posts unrelated to COVID-19, as well as posts that contain promotion and commercial information, two individual datasets were created based on the geolocation tags with tweets, one containing tweets from California state and the other from New York state. Sentiment analysis was conducted to obtain the sentiment score for each COVID-19 tweet. Topic modeling was applied to identify top topics related to COVID-19. Results: While the number of COVID-19 cases increased more rapidly in New York than in California in March 2020, the number of tweets posted has a similar trend over time in both states. COVID-19 tweets from California had more negative sentiment scores than New York. There were some fluctuations in sentiment scores in both states over time, which might correlate with the policy changes and the severity of COVID-19 pandemic. The topic modeling results showed that the popular topics in both California and New York states are similar, with "protective measures" as the most prevalent topic associated with COVID-19 in both states. Conclusions: Twitter users from California had more negative sentiment scores towards COVID-19 than Twitter users from New York. The prevalent topics about COVID-19 discussed in both states were similar with some slight differences.

Twitter Users Display Desensitization to Bad Health News: An Observational Study (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah R Stevens ◽  
Yoo Jung Oh ◽  
Laramie R Taylor
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Coping Behaviors ◽  
Health News ◽  
The Public ◽  
Death Toll ◽  
The Us ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Over Time

BACKGROUND Among the countries affected by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), the US shows the highest number of confirmed cases (18.7 million, 23.5% of confirmed cases worldwide) and deaths (0.3 million, 18.9% of death worldwide) as of December 26, 2020. Early on in the pandemic, widespread social, financial, and mental insecurities led to extreme and irrational coping behaviors, such as panic buying. Yet, despite the consistent spread of COVID-19 transmission, the public have begun to violate public safety measures. From such observations, two key considerations arise. First, fear-eliciting health messages have a significant effect on eliciting motivation to take action in order to control the threat. However, repeated exposure to these messages over long periods results in desensitization to those stimuli. OBJECTIVE In this work, we examine the effect of fear-inducing news articles on people’s expression of anxiety on Twitter. Additionally, we investigate desensitization to the fear-inducing health news over time, despite the steadily rising COVID-19 death toll. METHODS This study examined the anxiety levels in news articles (n=1,465) and corresponding tweets containing “COVID,” “COVID-19,” “pandemic,” and “coronavirus” over 11 months, then correlated that information with the death toll of COVID-19 in the United States. RESULTS Overall, tweets that shared links to anxious articles were more likely to be anxious. (OR 2.62, 95% CI 1.58-4.43, p < .001). These odds decreased (OR 0.41, 95% CI 0.2-0.83, p = .01) when the death toll reached the 3rd quartile and 4th quartile (OR 0.42, 95% CI 0.21-0.85, p = .01). Yet tweet anxiety rose rapidly with articles when the death toll was low and then decreased in the 3rd quartile of deaths (OR .61, 95% CI 0.37-1.01, p=.058). As predicted, in addition to the increasing death toll being matched by a lower level of article anxiety, the extent to which article anxiety elicited tweet anxiety decreased when the death count reached the 2nd quartile. CONCLUSIONS Tweets increased sharply in response to article anxiety early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, but as the casualty count climbed, news articles seemingly lost their ability to elicit anxiety among readers. This work investigated how individuals' emotional reactions to news of the COVID-19 pandemic manifest as the death toll increases. Findings suggest individuals became desensitized to the increased COVID-19 threat and their emotional responses were blunted over time.

Characteristics, uniqueness and overlap of information sources linked from North American public library Web sites

First Monday ◽  
2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chandra Prabha ◽  
Raymond Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Web Sites ◽  
Information Sources ◽  
Public Libraries ◽  
Public Library ◽  
The United States ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
Web Based ◽  
The Public ◽  
Library Community ◽  
Specific Search

This article reports on the availability, domain distribution, percentage of Web sites versus Web pages, perceived value, and category of 31,400 Web–based resources selected by 50 public libraries in the United States and Canada. Eighty–seven percent of these resources were available, 60 percent were Web pages, and resources selected by 20 percent of the sampled libraries were finding tools such as general or subject specific search engines. Ninety–three percent of the resources were selected by just one of the 50 libraries; only 17 percent of the resources appeared to be primarily of local interest. The public may be unaware of these unique resources. The public library community must develop programs to increase the awareness and sharing of these evaluated resources.

scholarly journals Community engagement in higher education: Online information sources

2017 ◽  
Vol 78 (10) ◽  
pp. 563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Marie Gruber
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Service Learning ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Information Sources ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Community Based Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
Real World Learning ◽  
Increased Pressure

In an age of challenging public discourse and increased pressure for educational accountability, many colleges are renewing their commitments to the public purposes of higher education. In fact, presidents and chancellors at more than 450 institutions signed Campus Compact’s 30th Anniversary Action Statement1 in 2016, reaffirming their dedication to preparing students for engaged citizenship, to changing social and economic inequalities, and to contributing to their communities as place-based institutions. In practical terms, many campuses are placing increased emphasis on real-world learning experiences for students through opportunities such as service-learning, internships, and community-based research.

scholarly journals Where are we? Using Scopus to map the literature at the intersection between artificial intelligence and research on crime

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gian Maria Campedelli
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Scientific Collaboration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
International Partnerships ◽  
Current State ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Research Problems ◽  
Disconnected Structure ◽  
Using Data

Abstract Research on artificial intelligence (AI) applications has spread over many scientific disciplines. Scientists have tested the power of intelligent algorithms developed to predict (or learn from) natural, physical and social phenomena. This also applies to crime-related research problems. Nonetheless, studies that map the current state of the art at the intersection between AI and crime are lacking. What are the current research trends in terms of topics in this area? What is the structure of scientific collaboration when considering works investigating criminal issues using machine learning, deep learning, and AI in general? What are the most active countries in this specific scientific sphere? Using data retrieved from the Scopus database, this work quantitatively analyzes 692 published works at the intersection between AI and crime employing network science to respond to these questions. Results show that researchers are mainly focusing on cyber-related criminal topics and that relevant themes such as algorithmic discrimination, fairness, and ethics are considerably overlooked. Furthermore, data highlight the extremely disconnected structure of co-authorship networks. Such disconnectedness may represent a substantial obstacle to a more solid community of scientists interested in these topics. Additionally, the graph of scientific collaboration indicates that countries that are more prone to engage in international partnerships are generally less central in the network. This means that scholars working in highly productive countries (e.g. the United States, China) tend to mostly collaborate domestically. Finally, current issues and future developments within this scientific area are also discussed.

Blaming Women or Blaming the System? Public Perceptions of Women’s Underrepresentation in Elected Office

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 668-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Dolan ◽  
Michael Hansen
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Attitudes Toward Women ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
Women Candidates ◽  
The Public ◽  
Underrepresentation Of Women ◽  
Using Data ◽  
People’S Attitudes ◽  
Attribution Theories ◽  
Elected Office

While scholars understand some of the reasons for the underrepresentation of women in elected office in the United States, we know almost nothing about what the public sees as the explanation for this reality. We also know relatively little about the degree to which people see women’s underrepresentation as a problem. Drawing on blame attribution theories, we examine whether people believe that there are systematic or individual explanations for the number of women in elected office. As blame explanations often influence positions on outcomes, we also test whether these explanations are related to people’s attitudes toward women in office and their vote choice behaviors in U.S. House races with women candidates present. Using data from a 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) survey, we find differences among people in the blame explanations they make. These explanations are significantly related to attitudes about women in office but do not influence vote choice decisions when women run for office.

scholarly journals Public Reactions towards the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter in the United Kingdom and the United States

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Canruo Zou ◽  
Xueting Wang ◽  
Zidian Xie ◽  
Dongmei Li
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Topic Modeling ◽  
Health Workers ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Public ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Twitter Data ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
Twitter Users

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread globally since December 2019. Twitter is a popular social media platform with active discussions about the COVID-19 pandemic. The public reactions on Twitter about the COVID-19 pandemic in different countries have not been studied. This study aims to compare the public reactions towards the COVID-19 pandemic between the United Kingdom and the United States from March 6, 2020 to April 2, 2020. Data: The numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom and the United States were obtained from the 1Point3Acres website. Twitter data were collected using COVID-19 related keywords from March 6, 2020 to April 2, 2020. Methods: Temporal analyses were performed on COVID-19 related Twitter posts (tweets) during the study period to show daily trends and hourly trends. The sentiment scores of the tweets on COVID-19 were analyzed and associated with the policy announcements and the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. Topic modeling was conducted to identify related topics discussed with COVID-19 in the United Kingdom and the United States. Results: The number of daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom was significantly lower than that in the United States during our study period. There were 3,556,442 COVID-19 tweets in the United Kingdom and 16,280,065 tweets in the United States during the study period. The number of COVID-19 tweets per 10,000 Twitter users in the United Kingdom was lower than that in the United States. The sentiment scores of COVID-19 tweets in the United Kingdom were less negative than those in the United States. The topics discussed in COVID-19 tweets in the United Kingdom were mostly about the gratitude to government and health workers, while the topics in the United States were mostly about the global COVID-19 pandemic situation. Conclusion: Our study showed correlations between the public reactions towards the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter and the confirmed COVID-19 cases as well as the policies related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom and the United States.

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