Annotation of the Complete Genome Sequences of Bacteriophages Sara and Birdfeeder.

Sara is a siphovirus with a linear 17,362bp genome containing 25 genes. Birdfeeder is a podovirus with a circularly permuted 53,897bp genome containing 52 genes. Sara and Birdfeeder were isolated from environmental samples in Plattsburgh, NY, USA and Forest Hill, MD, USA, respectively, using Microbacterium foliorum NRRL B-24224.

Computational timeline reconstruction of the stories surrounding Trump: Story turbulence, narrative control, and collective chronopathy.

Measuring the specific kind, temporal ordering, diversity, and turnover rate of stories surrounding any given subject is essential to developing a complete reckoning of that subject's historical impact. Here, we use Twitter as a distributed news and opinion aggregation source to identify and track the dynamics of the dominant day-scale stories around Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States. Working with a data set comprising around 20 billion 1-grams, we first compare each day's 1-gram and 2-gram usage frequencies to those of a year before, to create day- and week-scale timelines for Trump stories for 2016-2021.

Storywrangler: A massive exploratorium for sociolinguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political timelines using Twitter.

In real time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day, recording an ever-growing compendium of language change. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing curation of over 100 billion tweets containing 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2021.

How the world's collective attention is being paid to a pandemic: COVID-19 related n-gram time series for 24 languages on Twitter.

In confronting the global spread of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 pandemic we must have coordinated medical, operational, and political responses. In all efforts, data is crucial. Fundamentally, and in the possible absence of a vaccine for 12 to 18 months, we need universal, well-documented testing for both the presence of the disease as well as confirmed recovery through serological tests for antibodies, and we need to track major socioeconomic indices.

Social media usage patterns during natural hazards.

Natural hazards are becoming increasingly expensive as climate change and development are exposing communities to greater risks. Preparation and recovery are critical for climate change resilience, and social media are being used more and more to communicate before, during, and after disasters. While there is a growing body of research aimed at understanding how people use social media surrounding disaster events, most existing work has focused on a single disaster case study.

English verb regularization in books and tweets.

The English language has evolved dramatically throughout its lifespan, to the extent that a modern speaker of Old English would be incomprehensible without translation. One concrete indicator of this process is the movement from irregular to regular (-ed) forms for the past tense of verbs. In this study we quantify the extent of verb regularization using two vastly disparate datasets: (1) Six years of published books scanned by Google (2003-2008), and (2) A decade of social media messages posted to Twitter (2008-2017).

Divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter.

Since the shooting of Black teenager Michael Brown by White police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, the protest hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has amplified critiques of extrajudicial killings of Black Americans. In response to #BlackLivesMatter, other Twitter users have adopted #AllLivesMatter, a counter-protest hashtag whose content argues that equal attention should be given to all lives regardless of race. Through a multi-level analysis of over 860,000 tweets, we study how these protests and counter-protests diverge by quantifying aspects of their discourse.

Forecasting the onset and course of mental illness with Twitter data.

We developed computational models to predict the emergence of depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Twitter users. Twitter data and details of depression history were collected from 204 individuals (105 depressed, 99 healthy). We extracted predictive features measuring affect, linguistic style, and context from participant tweets (N = 279,951) and built models using these features with supervised learning algorithms.

Simon's fundamental rich-get-richer model entails a dominant first-mover advantage.

Herbert Simon's classic rich-get-richer model is one of the simplest empirically supported mechanisms capable of generating heavy-tail size distributions for complex systems. Simon argued analytically that a population of flavored elements growing by either adding a novel element or randomly replicating an existing one would afford a distribution of group sizes with a power-law tail. Here, we show that, in fact, Simon's model does not produce a simple power-law size distribution as the initial element has a dominant first-mover advantage, and will be overrepresented by a factor proportional to the inverse of the innovation probability.

COMT Val158Met polymorphism moderates the association between PTSD symptom severity and hippocampal volume.

Background: Memory-based alterations are among the hallmark symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and may be associated with the integrity of the hippocampus. However, neuroimaging studies of hippocampal volume in individuals with PTSD have yielded inconsistent results, raising the possibility that various moderators, such as genetic factors, may influence this association. We examined whether the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) Val158Met polymorphism, which has previously been shown to be associated with hippocampal volume in healthy individuals, moderates the association between PTSD and hippocampal volume.

The Lexicocalorimeter: Gauging public health through caloric input and output on social media.

We propose and develop a Lexicocalorimeter: an online, interactive instrument for measuring the "caloric content" of social media and other large-scale texts. We do so by constructing extensive yet improvable tables of food and activity related phrases, and respectively assigning them with sourced estimates of caloric intake and expenditure. We show that for Twitter, our naive measures of "caloric input", "caloric output", and the ratio of these measures are all strong correlates with health and well-being measures for the contiguous United States.

Mild traumatic brain injury is associated with reduced cortical thickness in those at risk for Alzheimer's disease.

Moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury is one of the strongest environmental risk factors for the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as late-onset Alzheimer's disease, although it is unclear whether mild traumatic brain injury, or concussion, also confers risk. This study examined mild traumatic brain injury and genetic risk as predictors of reduced cortical thickness in brain regions previously associated with early Alzheimer's disease, and their relationship with episodic memory. Participants were 160 Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans between the ages of 19 and 58, many of whom carried mild traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses.

Game story space of professional sports: Australian rules football.

Sports are spontaneous generators of stories. Through skill and chance, the script of each game is dynamically written in real time by players acting out possible trajectories allowed by a sport's rules. By properly characterizing a given sport's ecology of "game stories," we are able to capture the sport's capacity for unfolding interesting narratives, in part by contrasting them with random walks.

Tracking Climate Change through the Spatiotemporal Dynamics of the Teletherms, the Statistically Hottest and Coldest Days of the Year.

Instabilities and long term shifts in seasons, whether induced by natural drivers or human activities, pose great disruptive threats to ecological, agricultural, and social systems. Here, we propose, measure, and explore two fundamental markers of location-sensitive seasonal variations: the Summer and Winter Teletherms-the on-average annual dates of the hottest and coldest days of the year. We analyse daily temperature extremes recorded at 1218 stations across the contiguous United States from 1853-2012, and observe large regional variation with the Summer Teletherm falling up to 90 days after the Summer Solstice, and 50 days for the Winter Teletherm after the Winter Solstice.

Predicting Flow Reversals in a Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulated Thermosyphon Using Data Assimilation.

A thermal convection loop is a annular chamber filled with water, heated on the bottom half and cooled on the top half. With sufficiently large forcing of heat, the direction of fluid flow in the loop oscillates chaotically, dynamics analogous to the Earth's weather. As is the case for state-of-the-art weather models, we only observe the statistics over a small region of state space, making prediction difficult.

Climate Change Sentiment on Twitter: An Unsolicited Public Opinion Poll.

The consequences of anthropogenic climate change are extensively debated through scientific papers, newspaper articles, and blogs. Newspaper articles may lack accuracy, while the severity of findings in scientific papers may be too opaque for the public to understand. Social media, however, is a forum where individuals of diverse backgrounds can share their thoughts and opinions.

Human language reveals a universal positivity bias.

Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (i) the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, (ii) the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation, and (iii) this positivity bias is strongly independent of frequency of word use. Alongside these general regularities, we describe interlanguage variations in the emotional spectrum of languages that allow us to rank corpora. We also show how our word evaluations can be used to construct physical-like instruments for both real-time and offline measurement of the emotional content of large-scale texts.

Frontal eye field involvement in sustaining visual attention: evidence from transcranial magnetic stimulation.

The frontal eye field (FEF), particularly the right FEF, is broadly implicated in top-down control of transient acts of attention, but less is known about its involvement in sustained attention. Although neuroimaging studies of sustained attention tasks commonly find FEF activation, it is unclear how this region contributes to moment-to-moment fluctuations in sustained performance. We sought to determine if the FEF plays a critical role in sustained attention, and if that role differs between periods of worse performance (out-of-the-zone) and periods of better performance (in-the-zone).

Reward reveals dissociable aspects of sustained attention.

Although reward is known to have a powerful influence on performance, its effects on the ability to continuously sustain performance over time are poorly understood. The current study examines multiple measures of sustained attention (accuracy and variability) and their decrements over time, while introducing reward in the form of a monetary incentive or the promise of early completion. Compared with unrewarded participants, rewarded participants demonstrated greater overall accuracy and lower reaction time variability.

Collective philanthropy: describing and modeling the ecology of giving.

Reflective of income and wealth distributions, philanthropic gifting appears to follow an approximate power-law size distribution as measured by the size of gifts received by individual institutions. We explore the ecology of gifting by analysing data sets of individual gifts for a diverse group of institutions dedicated to education, medicine, art, public support, and religion. We find that the detailed forms of gift-size distributions differ across but are relatively constant within charity categories.