scholarly journals Covid-19 Twitter Sentiments Across the United States in August 2020

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Umesh R. Hodeghatta ◽  
Sanath V. Haritsa

COVID-19 has drastically affected the entire nation. This study involved collecting tweets and analyzing the COVID tweets for August 2020. The aim was to understand whether people have expressed sentiments related to COVID-19 across all the states of the United States and find any correlation between the sentiment tweets and the number of actual cases reported. Around 400000 COVID-19 Twitter data was collected for August 2020 from the primary Twitter database. A simple NLP-based unigram sentiment analyser, a novel approach different from the traditional machine learning approach, was adopted to identify twitter sentiments. The results indicate that tweets related to COVID demonstrate the two types of sentiments, one related to the deaths and the other about the COVID symptoms. Furthermore, the results show that the sentiments for each category vary from State to State. For example, states of New York, California, Texas are higher tweets sentiments regarding expressing death sentiment, and states of New York, California, Nevada, are higher regarding sentiments of expressing COVID-19 symptoms with an accuracy of 83%. As a part of the research, a new sentiment scorecard was created to provide a sentiment score based on the sentiments of the tweets expressed to the actual reported death cases. The sentiment scores for the ‘symptoms’ class are higher for Maryland, New Jersey, and Oregon, whereas sentiment scores for the 'death' class are higher for Virginia, Delaware, and Hawaii. These sentiment scores indicate that the Twitter users of these states are actively tweeting about symptoms and deaths even though the actual reported cases are less in these states. The analysis results also found no or little correlation between the COVID Tweets and the number of COVID death cases reported across all the states.

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (30) ◽  
pp. eabb5824 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meysam Alizadeh ◽  
Jacob N. Shapiro ◽  
Cody Buntain ◽  
Joshua A. Tucker

We study how easy it is to distinguish influence operations from organic social media activity by assessing the performance of a platform-agnostic machine learning approach. Our method uses public activity to detect content that is part of coordinated influence operations based on human-interpretable features derived solely from content. We test this method on publicly available Twitter data on Chinese, Russian, and Venezuelan troll activity targeting the United States, as well as the Reddit dataset of Russian influence efforts. To assess how well content-based features distinguish these influence operations from random samples of general and political American users, we train and test classifiers on a monthly basis for each campaign across five prediction tasks. Content-based features perform well across period, country, platform, and prediction task. Industrialized production of influence campaign content leaves a distinctive signal in user-generated content that allows tracking of campaigns from month to month and across different accounts.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Canruo Zou ◽  
Xueting Wang ◽  
Zidian Xie ◽  
Dongmei Li

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.


1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”


Author(s):  
Federico Varese

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As this book explains, the truth is more complicated. The author has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. The book spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, the book charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. The book explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. A pioneering chapter on China examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. This book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.


2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G Picciano ◽  
Robert V. Steiner

Every child has a right to an education. In the United States, the issue is not necessarily about access to a school but access to a quality education. With strict compulsory education laws, more than 50 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and billions of dollars spent annually on public and private education, American children surely have access to buildings and classrooms. However, because of a complex and competitive system of shared policymaking among national, state, and local governments, not all schools are created equal nor are equal education opportunities available for the poor, minorities, and underprivileged. One manifestation of this inequity is the lack of qualified teachers in many urban and rural schools to teach certain subjects such as science, mathematics, and technology. The purpose of this article is to describe a partnership model between two major institutions (The American Museum of Natural History and The City University of New York) and the program designed to improve the way teachers are trained and children are taught and introduced to the world of science. These two institutions have partnered on various projects over the years to expand educational opportunity especially in the teaching of science. One of the more successful projects is Seminars on Science (SoS), an online teacher education and professional development program, that connects teachers across the United States and around the world to cutting-edge research and provides them with powerful classroom resources. This article provides the institutional perspectives, the challenges and the strategies that fostered this partnership.


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