Leading Topics in Twitter Discourse on JUUL and Puff Bar Products: Content Analysis

Background In response to the recent government restrictions, flavored JUUL products, which are rechargeable closed-system electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), are no longer available for sale. However, disposable closed-system products such as the flavored Puff Bar e-cigarette continues to be available. If e-cigarette consumers simply switch between products during the current government restrictions limited to 1 type of product over another, then such restrictions would be less effective. A step forward in this line of research is to understand how the public discusses these products by examining discourse referencing both Puff Bar and JUUL in the same conversation. Twitter data provide ample opportunity to capture such early trends that could be used to help public health researchers stay abreast of the rapidly changing e-cigarette marketplace. Objective The goal of this study was to examine public discourse referencing both Puff Bar and JUUL products in the same conversation on Twitter. Methods We collected data from Twitter’s streaming application programming interface between July 16, 2019, and August 29, 2020, which included both “Puff Bar” and “JUUL” (n=2632). We then used an inductive approach to become familiar with the data and generate a codebook to identify common themes. Saturation was determined to be reached with 10 themes. Results Posts often mentioned flavors, dual use, design features, youth use, health risks, switching 1 product for the other, price, confusion over the differences between products, longevity of the products, and nicotine concentration. Conclusions On examining the public’s conversations about Puff Bar and JUUL products on Twitter, having described themes in posts, this study aimed to help the tobacco control community stay informed about 2 popular e-cigarette products with different device features, which can be potentially substituted for one another. Future health communication campaigns may consider targeting the health consequences of using multiple e-cigarette products or dual use to reduce exposure to high levels of nicotine among younger populations.

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Leading Topics in Twitter Discourse on JUUL and Puff Bar Products: Content Analysis (Preprint)

10.2196/preprints.26510 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Jon-Patrick Allem ◽

Allison Dormanesh ◽

Anuja Majmundar ◽

Vanessa Rivera ◽

Maya Chu ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Closed System ◽

Public Discourse ◽

Electronic Cigarettes ◽

Application Programming Interface ◽

Dual Use ◽

Future Health ◽

The Public ◽

Nicotine Concentration ◽

Control Community ◽

Application Programming

BACKGROUND In response to the recent government restrictions, flavored JUUL products, which are rechargeable closed-system electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), are no longer available for sale. However, disposable closed-system products such as the flavored Puff Bar e-cigarette continues to be available. If e-cigarette consumers simply switch between products during the current government restrictions limited to 1 type of product over another, then such restrictions would be less effective. A step forward in this line of research is to understand how the public discusses these products by examining discourse referencing both Puff Bar and JUUL in the same conversation. Twitter data provide ample opportunity to capture such early trends that could be used to help public health researchers stay abreast of the rapidly changing e-cigarette marketplace. OBJECTIVE The goal of this study was to examine public discourse referencing both Puff Bar and JUUL products in the same conversation on Twitter. METHODS We collected data from Twitter’s streaming application programming interface between July 16, 2019, and August 29, 2020, which included both “Puff Bar” and “JUUL” (n=2632). We then used an inductive approach to become familiar with the data and generate a codebook to identify common themes. Saturation was determined to be reached with 10 themes. RESULTS Posts often mentioned flavors, dual use, design features, youth use, health risks, switching 1 product for the other, price, confusion over the differences between products, longevity of the products, and nicotine concentration. CONCLUSIONS On examining the public’s conversations about Puff Bar and JUUL products on Twitter, having described themes in posts, this study aimed to help the tobacco control community stay informed about 2 popular e-cigarette products with different device features, which can be potentially substituted for one another. Future health communication campaigns may consider targeting the health consequences of using multiple e-cigarette products or dual use to reduce exposure to high levels of nicotine among younger populations.

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COVID-19: A Relook at Healthcare Systems and Aged Populations

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su12104200 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (10) ◽

pp. 4200 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Thanh-Long Giang ◽

Dinh-Tri Vo ◽

Quan-Hoang Vuong

Keyword(s):

Application Programming Interface ◽

Healthcare Systems ◽

Finite Sample ◽

Death Rates ◽

Development Indicators ◽

The Public ◽

Macroeconomic Indicators ◽

Application Programming ◽

Using Data ◽

Programming Interface

Using data from the WHO’s Situation Report on the COVID-19 pandemic from 21 January 2020 to 30 March 2020 along with other health, demographic, and macroeconomic indicators from the WHO’s Application Programming Interface and the World Bank’s Development Indicators, this paper explores the death rates of infected persons and their possible associated factors. Through the panel analysis, we found consistent results that healthcare system conditions, particularly the number of hospital beds and medical staff, have played extremely important roles in reducing death rates of COVID-19 infected persons. In addition, both the mortality rates due to different non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and rate of people aged 65 and over were significantly related to the death rates. We also found that controlling international and domestic travelling by air along with increasingly popular anti-COVID-19 actions (i.e., quarantine and social distancing) would help reduce the death rates in all countries. We conducted tests for robustness and found that the Driscoll and Kraay (1998) method was the most suitable estimator with a finite sample, which helped confirm the robustness of our estimations. Based on the findings, we suggest that preparedness of healthcare systems for aged populations need more attentions from the public and politicians, regardless of income level, when facing COVID-19-like pandemics.

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OPTIMADE, an API for exchanging materials data

Scientific Data ◽

10.1038/s41597-021-00974-z ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Casper W. Andersen ◽

Rickard Armiento ◽

Evgeny Blokhin ◽

Gareth J. Conduit ◽

Shyam Dwaraknath ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Application Programming Interface ◽

Worked Examples ◽

Materials Design ◽

The Public ◽

Software Packages ◽

Application Programming ◽

Programming Interface ◽

Universal Application

AbstractThe Open Databases Integration for Materials Design (OPTIMADE) consortium has designed a universal application programming interface (API) to make materials databases accessible and interoperable. We outline the first stable release of the specification, v1.0, which is already supported by many leading databases and several software packages. We illustrate the advantages of the OPTIMADE API through worked examples on each of the public materials databases that support the full API specification.

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Public Opinions and Concerns Regarding the Canadian Prime Minister’s Daily COVID-19 Briefing: Longitudinal Study of YouTube Comments Using Machine Learning Techniques

Journal of Medical Internet Research ◽

10.2196/23957 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 23 (2) ◽

pp. e23957

Author(s):

Chengda Zheng ◽

Jia Xue ◽

Yumin Sun ◽

Tingshao Zhu

Keyword(s):

Machine Learning ◽

Language Processing ◽

Public Discourse ◽

Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽

Prime Minister ◽

Machine Learning Techniques ◽

Future Health ◽

The Public ◽

Learning Techniques ◽

The Government

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau provided updates on the novel coronavirus and the government’s responses to the pandemic in his daily briefings from March 13 to May 22, 2020, delivered on the official Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) YouTube channel. Objective The aim of this study was to examine comments on Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s COVID-19 daily briefings by YouTube users and track these comments to extract the changing dynamics of the opinions and concerns of the public over time. Methods We used machine learning techniques to longitudinally analyze a total of 46,732 English YouTube comments that were retrieved from 57 videos of Prime Minister Trudeau’s COVID-19 daily briefings from March 13 to May 22, 2020. A natural language processing model, latent Dirichlet allocation, was used to choose salient topics among the sampled comments for each of the 57 videos. Thematic analysis was used to classify and summarize these salient topics into different prominent themes. Results We found 11 prominent themes, including strict border measures, public responses to Prime Minister Trudeau’s policies, essential work and frontline workers, individuals’ financial challenges, rental and mortgage subsidies, quarantine, government financial aid for enterprises and individuals, personal protective equipment, Canada and China’s relationship, vaccines, and reopening. Conclusions This study is the first to longitudinally investigate public discourse and concerns related to Prime Minister Trudeau’s daily COVID-19 briefings in Canada. This study contributes to establishing a real-time feedback loop between the public and public health officials on social media. Hearing and reacting to real concerns from the public can enhance trust between the government and the public to prepare for future health emergencies.

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Serverless Geospatial Data Processing Workflow System Design

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information ◽

10.3390/ijgi11010020 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 20

Author(s):

Mete Ercan Pakdil ◽

Rahmi Nurhan Çelik

Keyword(s):

Data Processing ◽

System Design ◽

Application Programming Interface ◽

Geospatial Data ◽

Proof Of Concept ◽

The Public ◽

Workflow System ◽

Application Programming ◽

Open Geospatial Consortium ◽

Programming Interface

Geospatial data and related technologies have become an increasingly important aspect of data analysis processes, with their prominent role in most of them. Serverless paradigm have become the most popular and frequently used technology within cloud computing. This paper reviews the serverless paradigm and examines how it could be leveraged for geospatial data processes by using open standards in the geospatial community. We propose a system design and architecture to handle complex geospatial data processing jobs with minimum human intervention and resource consumption using serverless technologies. In order to define and execute workflows in the system, we also propose new models for both workflow and task definitions models. Moreover, the proposed system has new Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Application Programming Interface (API) Processes specification-based web services to provide interoperability with other geospatial applications with the anticipation that it will be more commonly used in the future. We implemented the proposed system on one of the public cloud providers as a proof of concept and evaluated it with sample geospatial workflows and cloud architecture best practices.

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What You Can Scrape and What Is Right to Scrape: A Proposal for a Tool to Collect Public Facebook Data

Social Media + Society ◽

10.1177/2056305120940703 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 6 (3) ◽

pp. 205630512094070 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Moreno Mancosu ◽

Federico Vegetti

Keyword(s):

Personal Information ◽

Public Information ◽

Application Programming Interface ◽

Published Data ◽

The Public ◽

Ethical Concerns ◽

The Social ◽

Application Programming ◽

Ethical And Legal Issues ◽

Programming Interface

In reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has restricted the access to its Application Programming Interface (API). This new policy has damaged the possibility for independent researchers to study relevant topics in political and social behavior. Yet, much of the public information that the researchers may be interested in is still available on Facebook, and can be still systematically collected through web scraping techniques. The goal of this article is twofold. First, we discuss some ethical and legal issues that researchers should consider as they plan their collection and possible publication of Facebook data. In particular, we discuss what kind of information can be ethically gathered about the users (public information), how published data should look like to comply with privacy regulations (like the GDPR), and what consequences violating Facebook’s terms of service may entail for the researcher. Second, we present a scraping routine for public Facebook posts, and discuss some technical adjustments that can be performed for the data to be ethically and legally acceptable. The code employs screen scraping to collect the list of reactions to a Facebook public post, and performs a one-way cryptographic hash function on the users’ identifiers to pseudonymize their personal information, while still keeping them traceable within the data. This article contributes to the debate around freedom of internet research and the ethical concerns that might arise by scraping data from the social web.

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Commenting on PM Trudeau’s COVID-19 daily briefing in Canada: data mining public opinions and concerns on YouTube (Preprint)

10.2196/preprints.23957 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Chengda Zheng ◽

Jia Xue ◽

Yumin Sun ◽

Tingshao Zhu

Keyword(s):

Language Processing ◽

Public Discourse ◽

Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽

Machine Learning Techniques ◽

Future Health ◽

Frontline Workers ◽

The Public ◽

Learning Techniques ◽

Public Health Officials ◽

The Government

BACKGROUND During the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has provided updates on the noval coronavirus and government’s responses in his daily briefings from March 13 to May 22, 2020, delivered on the CBC official YouTube channel (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). OBJECTIVE This study aims to examine and track YouTube users’ comments on PM Trudeau’s COVID-19 daily briefings in Canada over time. METHODS We used machine learning techniques and longitudinally analyzed a total of 46,732 English YoutTube comments retrieved from 57 videos of PM Trudeau’s COVID-19 daily briefings from March 13 to May 22, 2020. The natural language processing, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model was used to choose salient topics among the sampled comments in each of the single days. Thematic analysis was used to classify and summarize these salient topics into different prominent themes. RESULTS We found 11 prominent themes, including “strict border measures,” “public responses to PM Trudeau’s policies,” “essential work and frontline workers,” “individuals’ financial challenges,” “rental and mortgage bursary,” “quarantine,” “government financial aid for enterprises and individuals,” “PPE,” “Canada and China relationship,” “vaccine,” and “re-opening.” CONCLUSIONS The present study is the first to longitudinally investigate public discourse and concerns of PM Trudeau’s COVID-19 daily briefings in Canada. This study contributes to the establishment of a real-time feedback loop between the public and public health officials on YouTube. Hearing and reacting to real concerns from the public can enhance trust between the government and the public to prepare for a future health emergency.

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An Analysis of Self-reported Longcovid Symptoms on Twitter

10.1101/2020.08.14.20175059 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Shubh Mohan Singh ◽

Chaitanya Reddy

Keyword(s):

Acute Infection ◽

Application Programming Interface ◽

Search Term ◽

Shortness Of Breath ◽

Public Health Importance ◽

The Public ◽

Streaming Application ◽

Application Programming ◽

Multiple Symptoms ◽

Programming Interface

Abstract Objectives: A majority of patients suffering from acute COVID-19 are expected to recover symptomatically and functionally. However there are reports that some people continue to experience symptoms even beyond the stage of acute infection. This phenomenon has been called longcovid. Study design: This study attempted to analyse symptoms reported by users on twitter self-identifying as longcovid. Methods: The search was carried out using the twitter public streaming application programming interface using a relevant search term. Results: We could identify 89 users with usable data in the tweets posted by them. A majority of users described multiple symptoms the most common of which were fatigue, shortness of breath, pain and brainfog/concentration difficulties. The most common course of symptoms was episodic. Conclusions: Given the public health importance of this issue, the study suggests that there is a need to better study post acute-COVID symptoms.

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BrAPI—an application programming interface for plant breeding applications

Bioinformatics ◽

10.1093/bioinformatics/btz190 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 35 (20) ◽

pp. 4147-4155 ◽

Cited By ~ 22

Author(s):

Peter Selby ◽

Rafael Abbeloos ◽

Jan Erik Backlund ◽

Martin Basterrechea Salido ◽

Guillaume Bauchet ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Plant Breeding ◽

Data Exchange ◽

Application Programming Interface ◽

Multiple Systems ◽

The Public ◽

Collaborative Community ◽

Application Programming ◽

Developer Tools ◽

Modern Genomic ◽

Programming Interface

Abstract Motivation Modern genomic breeding methods rely heavily on very large amounts of phenotyping and genotyping data, presenting new challenges in effective data management and integration. Recently, the size and complexity of datasets have increased significantly, with the result that data are often stored on multiple systems. As analyses of interest increasingly require aggregation of datasets from diverse sources, data exchange between disparate systems becomes a challenge. Results To facilitate interoperability among breeding applications, we present the public plant Breeding Application Programming Interface (BrAPI). BrAPI is a standardized web service API specification. The development of BrAPI is a collaborative, community-based initiative involving a growing global community of over a hundred participants representing several dozen institutions and companies. Development of such a standard is recognized as critical to a number of important large breeding system initiatives as a foundational technology. The focus of the first version of the API is on providing services for connecting systems and retrieving basic breeding data including germplasm, study, observation, and marker data. A number of BrAPI-enabled applications, termed BrAPPs, have been written, that take advantage of the emerging support of BrAPI by many databases. Availability and implementation More information on BrAPI, including links to the specification, test suites, BrAPPs, and sample implementations is available at https://brapi.org/. The BrAPI specification and the developer tools are provided as free and open source.

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Search Engine Get Application Programming Interface

Jurnal Sains dan Informatika ◽

10.34128/jsi.v5i2.175 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 88-97

Author(s):

M. Fuadi Aziz Muri ◽

Hendrik Setyo Utomo ◽

Rabini Sayyidati

Keyword(s):

Web Service ◽

Search Engine ◽

Application Programming Interface ◽

Function Concept ◽

The Public ◽

Representational State Transfer ◽

State Transfer ◽

General Search ◽

Application Programming ◽

Programming Interface

Application Programming Interface (API) is a function concept that can be called by other programs. The API works as a link that unites various applications of various types of platforms, commonly known as API public names. The public API has been widely spread, while its users, programmers who want to search for public APIs, must browse through various methods such as general search engines, repository documentation or directly in web articles. The user does not yet have a system specifically for collecting public-public APIs, so that users have difficulty in performing API public link searches. The solution to these problems can be solved by building a web framework with a search engine interface that provides specific public-public searches for the API, so that users can search the API public more easily. Web Service is an API that is made to support the interaction between two or more different applications through a network. Representational State Transfer (ReST) is one of the rules.

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