Journalists' networks: Homophily and peering over the shoulder of other journalists.

Social media plays an important role in how journalists gather and report news. To understand journalists' professional environment, we examine the networks of journalists on Twitter who cover politics for U.S.

Examining Homophily, Language Coordination, and Analytical Thinking in Web-Based Conversations About Vaccines on Reddit: Study Using Deep Neural Network Language Models and Computer-Assisted Conversational Analyses.

Background: Vaccine hesitancy has been deemed one of the top 10 threats to global health. Antivaccine information on social media is a major barrier to addressing vaccine hesitancy. Understanding how vaccine proponents and opponents interact with each other on social media may help address vaccine hesitancy.

Engagement with fact-checked posts on Reddit.

Contested factual claims shared online are of increasing interest to scholars and the public. Characterizing temporal patterns of sharing and engagement with such information, as well as the effect of sharing associated fact-checks, can help us understand the online political news environment more fully. Here, we investigate differential engagement with fact-checked posts shared online via Reddit from 2016 to 2018.

Comparing beliefs in falsehoods based on satiric and non-satiric news.

This article seeks to quantify the extent to which Americans hold beliefs that are consistent with interpreting satiric news literally, and to assess whether factors known to promote misperceptions work differently depending on whether the source of the misperception is satire. We also test the robustness of those factors across a diverse set of real-world falsehoods. The study uses secondary data analysis, relying on data drawn from a 12-wave six-month panel conducted in 2019.

Sentinel node approach to monitoring online COVID-19 misinformation.

Understanding how different online communities engage with COVID-19 misinformation is critical for public health response. For example, misinformation confined to a small, isolated community of users poses a different public health risk than misinformation being consumed by a large population spanning many diverse communities. Here we take a longitudinal approach that leverages tools from network science to study COVID-19 misinformation on Twitter.

Changes in COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Among Black and White Individuals in the US.

Importance: COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Black individuals in the US; however, vaccination rates among Black individuals trail those among other racial groups. This disparity is often attributed to a high level of vaccine hesitancy among Black individuals, but few studies have examined changes in vaccine hesitancy over time.

Objectives: To compare changes in vaccine hesitancy between Black and White individuals in the US and to examine mechanisms that might help explain the observed differences.

Understanding the Relationship Between Official and Social Information About Infectious Disease: Experimental Analysis.

Background: Communicating official public health information about infectious diseases is complicated by the fact that individuals receive much of their information from their social contacts, either via interpersonal interaction or social media, which can be prone to bias and misconception.

Objective: This study aims to evaluate the effect of public health campaigns and the effect of socially communicated health information on learning about diseases simultaneously. Although extant literature addresses the effect of one source of information (official or social) or the other, it has not addressed the simultaneous interaction of official information (OI) and social information (SI) in an experimental setting.

Exploring the direct and indirect effects of elite influence on public opinion.

Political elites both respond to public opinion and influence it. Elite policy messages can shape individual policy attitudes, but the extent to which they do is difficult to measure in a dynamic information environment. Furthermore, policy messages are not absorbed in isolation, but spread through the social networks in which individuals are embedded, and their effects must be evaluated in light of how they spread across social environments.

I am a scientist . . . Ask Me Anything: Examining differences between male and female scientists participating in a Reddit AMA session.

This article investigates interactions between scientists and the online community Reddit. Given that past research on computer-mediated communication between scientists and the public found that male scientists are typically more popular in online spaces than female scientists, we examined differences in popularity as well as potential gendered differences in communication style. Specifically, we examined 269 Reddit "Ask Me Anything" sessions as well as the comments linked with each session ( = 125,580).

Conservatives' susceptibility to political misperceptions.

The idea that U.S. conservatives are uniquely likely to hold misperceptions is widespread but has not been systematically assessed.

Eye Movements Predict Large-Scale Voting Decisions.

More than 100 countries allow people to vote directly on policies in direct democracy elections (e.g., 2016 Brexit referendum).

Dynamics of social network emergence explain network evolution.

Networked systems emerge and subsequently evolve. Although several models describe the process of network evolution, researchers know far less about the initial process of network emergence. Here, we report temporal survey results of a real-world social network starting from its point of inception.

Testing of a (Spiritual) Self-Assessment Tool ((S)SAT) in a Community Hospital Setting.

The (Spiritual) Self-Assessment Tool Study was designed to test the novel engagement tool's effectiveness. Providing the (Spiritual) Self-Assessment Tool Study to newly admitted medical patients led to few instances where the tool was completed. Nevertheless, the (Spiritual) Self-Assessment Tool Study patient questionnaire generated significant secondary findings: a third of responding patients consider their hospital care incomplete without their care team having access to (Spiritual) Self-Assessment Tool data.

Low-cost, high-impact altruistic punishment promotes cooperation cascades in human social networks.

Theoretical models and experiments suggest that social networks may significantly impact the emergence and stability of cooperation in humans. Similarly, theoretical models and experiments have shown that punishing behavior can significantly increase cooperative behavior in individuals. However, how punishing impacts the effects of social networks on cooperation is not yet understood.

Social influence and political mobilization: Further evidence from a randomized experiment in the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

A large-scale experiment during the 2010 U.S. Congressional Election demonstrated a positive effect of an online get-out-the-vote message on real world voting behavior.

Temporal Dynamics of Rituals in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by obsessions, defined as intrusive and persistent thoughts, and compulsions, defined as repetitive ritualistic behaviors that attempt to neutralize the anxiety associated with the obsessions. The present study investigated the patterns of symptoms as they occur over time in order to generate new insights about the triggers to symptoms. Fourteen adult participants who met the DSM-5 criteria for OCD completed 7-day logbooks of daily activities including the times when they engaged in compulsive rituals.

The Contagious Spread of Violence Among US Adolescents Through Social Networks.

Objectives: To test the hypothesis that violence among US adolescents spreads like a contagious disease through social networks.

Methods: Participants were a nationally representative sample of 90 118 US students aged 12 to 18 years who were involved in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Violence was assessed by having participants report the number of times in the preceding 12 months they had been involved in a serious physical fight, had hurt someone badly, and had pulled a weapon on someone.

CD14(+) macrophages that accumulate in the colon of African AIDS patients express pro-inflammatory cytokines and are responsive to lipopolysaccharide.

Background: Intestinal macrophages are key regulators of inflammatory responses to the gut microbiome and play a central role in maintaining tissue homeostasis and epithelial integrity. However, little is known about the role of these cells in HIV infection, a disease fuelled by intestinal inflammation, a loss of epithelial barrier function and increased microbial translocation (MT).

Methods: Phenotypic and functional characterization of intestinal macrophages was performed for 23 African AIDS patients with chronic diarrhea and/or weight loss and 11 HIV-negative Africans with and without inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Aperiodic deterministic structure of OCD and the familial effect on rituals.

A dynamical disease is one in which the symptoms appear and disappear over time in a deterministic pattern that could be chaotic. By determining the dynamic structure of the temporal pattern it would be possible to gain some insight into the triggers for symptoms if not the disease process as a whole. The present study investigated whether obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) could be considered a dynamical disease because of the intermittent outbursts of ritual behaviors.

Impaired CD4+ T-cell restoration in the small versus large intestine of HIV-1-positive South Africans receiving combination antiretroviral therapy.

Background: Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection is associated with a massive depletion of intestinal CD4(+) T cells that is only partially reversed by combination antiretroviral therapy (cART). Here, we assessed the ability of nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitor/nonnucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitor treatment to restore the CD4(+) T-cell populations in the intestine of South African patients with AIDS.

Methods: Thirty-eight patients with advanced HIV-1 infection who had chronic diarrhea (duration, >4 weeks) and/or unintentional weight loss (>10% decrease from baseline) of uncertain etiology were enrolled.

Yahtzee: an anonymized group level matching procedure.

Researchers often face the problem of needing to protect the privacy of subjects while also needing to integrate data that contains personal information from diverse data sources. The advent of computational social science and the enormous amount of data about people that is being collected makes protecting the privacy of research subjects ever more important. However, strict privacy procedures can hinder the process of joining diverse sources of data that contain information about specific individual behaviors.

Inferring tie strength from online directed behavior.

Some social connections are stronger than others. People have not only friends, but also best friends. Social scientists have long recognized this characteristic of social connections and researchers frequently use the term tie strength to refer to this concept.

A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization.

Human behaviour is thought to spread through face-to-face social networks, but it is difficult to identify social influence effects in observational studies, and it is unknown whether online social networks operate in the same way. Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people.

Age of the association between Helicobacter pylori and man.

When modern humans left Africa ca. 60,000 years ago (60 kya), they were already infected with Helicobacter pylori, and these bacteria have subsequently diversified in parallel with their human hosts. But how long were humans infected by H.