Social Bots for Online Public Health Interventions

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States hundreds of thousands initiate smoking each year, and millions live with smoking-related dis- eases. Many tobacco users discuss their habits and preferences on social media. This work conceptualizes a framework for targeted health interventions to inform tobacco users about the consequences of tobacco use. We designed a Twitter bot named Notobot (short for No-Tobacco Bot) that leverages machine learning to identify users posting pro-tobacco tweets and select individualized interventions to address their interest in tobacco use. We searched the Twitter feed for tobacco-related keywords and phrases, and trained a convolutional neural network using over 4,000 tweets dichotomously manually labeled as either pro- tobacco or not pro-tobacco. This model achieves a 90% recall rate on the training set and 74% on test data. Users posting pro- tobacco tweets are matched with former smokers with similar interests who posted anti-tobacco tweets. Algorithmic matching, based on the power of peer influence, allows for the systematic delivery of personalized interventions based on real anti-tobacco tweets from former smokers. Experimental evaluation suggests that our system would perform well if deployed. This research offers opportunities for public health researchers to increase health awareness at scale. Future work entails deploying the fully operational Notobot system in a controlled experiment within a public health campaign

Artful encounters with nature: Ecological and spiritual dimensions of music learning

This ethnographic dissertation offers an in-depth analysis of how contemporary music practitioners/educators interpret, appropriate, and practice the tradition of spiritual music both inside and outside Japan, focusing on how they reframe and embody what I identify as indigenous cultural values in today???s educational settings. I specifically examine the nature of the traditional practice that approaches the shakuhachi (a type of bamboo flute) in a holistic, organic manner: Practitioners of this tradition personally harvest the bamboo and fashion their instruments directly out of nature, taking great care to preserve and appreciate the nature inherent to each piece of bamboo. Their instruments are much less processed and closely resemble the natural state of each piece of bamboo. This type of organic activities through music???hardly introduced and practiced in the educational realm???are observed both inside and outside of Japan. The practice of shakuhachi related more directly to Capra???s vision of environmental ethics. Capra (1996) argues that the basic principles of teaching and learning should be congruent with the characteristics of ecosystems such as interdependence, sustainability, ecological cycles, energy flows, partnerships, flexibility, diversity, and co-evolution. The practice of shakuhachi making, for instance, is interdependent on the natural resources available in each place and cannot occur without a sustainable relationship with the land. Diversity of musical practice is brought about through the various shapes and sounds yielded by different bamboo pieces. The natural materials make it possible for practitioners to embody the flow of the earth energy (ki) through sound. Co-evolution is observed when practitioners yield to the distinctive characteristics of their individual pieces of bamboo as they are, assimilating themselves to them, instead of altering them in favor of functionality. They get used to each bamboo segment in time while developing a sense of attachment, devotion, and responsibility. The findings of this dissertation suggested that music learning is place-based and instrument making serves as a process of localizing and personalizing music learning. In order to articulate this integrative, interactive nature of music practice, this dissertation submitted an emerging notion of ???self-integration??? as a form of actualizing the body-mind, human-nature integration

EVALUATION OF AIR MOVEMENT IN EQUESTRIAN FACILITIES AND ON EQUINE ATHLETES

Ventilation and air movement are important aspects of animal agriculture and is frequently neglected in equine facilities. This paper discusses three different studies that examine different components of ventilation and air movement. One is a fan orientation study which examines how fans impact the stall environment, the second is a cooling study questioning whether forced air speed across a horse increases the rate of cool out after intense exercise, and the last is a survey examining ventilation, air quality, and health concerns in indoor arenas. The stall fan study took place over two summers with the goal of determining how the placement and orientation of different fans impacted the temperature within the stall, the air movement around the stall, and if the fans could provide fly control. Two barns with vastly different designs and natural ventilation properties were used. The barn in the first year had good natural ventilation, while the barn in the second year did not. Overall, the fans had little to no effect on reducing the temperature within the stalls, providing air movement throughout the stall, and did not produce sufficient air movement for fly control. After intense exercise such as a running a race, cross country, or participating in an endurance race, it is necessary to cool the horses and bring their vital signs back to resting ranges. The predominant method for this is hand walking or drenching and scraping the horses until the heart rate, respiration rate, and rectal temperature have returned to an acceptable level. The cooling study sought to examine whether providing forced air speed across the horses increased their rate of cool out through placing a Bannon Tilted Belt Drive 42 in drum fan around the horses during the drenching period of their cool out process. Heart rate, respiration rate, and rectal temperature were all monitored throughout the cool out process and the rate of return to resting values of the vital signs was used to determine the effectiveness of the cooling techniques. The presence of the fan and the air speed across the horses tended to increase their rate of cool out after exercise with the fan blowing from the hindquarters towards their head provided the greatest increase. Finally, the indoor arena study included an online survey and site visits with the purpose of gathering information regarding indoor arenas. As this is an under-researched topic, the goal of this study was to establish common characteristics, identify problems or issues within the facilities, and any health concerns for the horses and humans who use the facilities. The information gathered in this study covered a multitude of topics including arena construction and design, arena usage, footing type, maintenance practices, environmental concerns, and potential health issues within the facilities. This study will serve as the framework to build future research studies to examine and rectify issues within the facilities and, ultimately, provide design recommendations for building or retrofitting indoor arenas to mitigate or eliminate concerns

The Concept of “New Life” as a Powerful Psycholinguistic Element in the Inaugural Addresses of the U.S. Presidents

The article deals with the concept of “new life” in the inaugural addresses of the U.S. presidents. A political language, as a reflection of people’s behavior in a certain ethnocultural community, is under the consideration. The investigation of political language caused the special approach to the analysis of lexical units that comprise the semantic group “novelty”. Based on this analysis a group of words that have the common sema “new” was singled out. The means of expressions and stylistic devices that presidents used to express the idea of “new life” were determined. The presidents make people believe in their ability to take new actions and change the situation, lead the nation to new, better life. Adjective “new” is often used by the presidents in context of the necessity to revitalize old values, to renew the nation spiritually. Analysis of inaugural address of American presidents showed that ideas of “new life” run through the entire speech of every president. In this article the role of the idea of “new life” in inaugural addresses of American presidents and means of its conveying has been studied. Model of a “new life” can be rather complex, needs more or less strong argumentation. The very word-combination the “better life” predetermines that this life should be different from the existing one, i.e. new. Thus concept of “new life” plays important role in political discourse. Consequently, our research may be understood not only as belonging to a narrow sphere of analysis of political discourse but to wider branch of science – linguistic political science

Spartan Daily, March 11, 1958

Volume 45, Issue 87https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/12579/thumbnail.jp

When Can We Answer Queries Using Result-Bounded Data Interfaces?

We consider answering queries where the underlying data is available only over limited interfaces which provide lookup access to the tuples matching a given binding, but possibly restricting the number of output tuples returned. Interfaces imposing such "result bounds" are common in accessing data via the web. Given a query over a set of relations as well as some integrity constraints that relate the queried relations to the data sources, we examine the problem of deciding if the query is answerable over the interfaces; that is, whether there exists a plan that returns all answers to the query, assuming the source data satisfies the integrity constraints. The first component of our analysis of answerability is a reduction to a query containment problem with constraints. The second component is a set of "schema simplification" theorems capturing limitations on how interfaces with result bounds can be useful to obtain complete answers to queries. These results also help to show decidability for the containment problem that captures answerability, for many classes of constraints. The final component in our analysis of answerability is a "linearization" method, showing that query containment with certain guarded dependencies -- including those that emerge from answerability problems -- can be reduced to query containment for a well-behaved class of linear dependencies. Putting these components together, we get a detailed picture of how to check answerability over result-bounded services.Comment: 45 pages, 2 tables, 43 references. Complete version with proofs of the PODS'18 paper. The main text of this paper is almost identical to the PODS'18 except that we have fixed some small mistakes. Relative to the earlier arXiv version, many errors were corrected, and some terminology has change

Spartan Daily, May 6, 2009

Volume 132, Issue 51https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10588/thumbnail.jp