Quantifying the digital traces of Hurricane Sandy on Flickr

Society’s increasing interactions with technology are creating extensive “digital traces” of our collective human behavior. These new data sources are fuelling the rapid development of the new field of computational social science. To investigate user attention to the Hurricane Sandy disaster in 2012, we analyze data from Flickr, a popular website for sharing personal photographs. In this case study, we find that the number of photos taken and subsequently uploaded to Flickr with titles, descriptions or tags related to Hurricane Sandy bears a striking correlation to the atmospheric pressure in the US state New Jersey during this period. Appropriate leverage of such information could be useful to policy makers and others charged with emergency crisis management

Quantifying Wikipedia usage patterns before stock market moves

Financial crises result from a catastrophic combination of actions. Vast stock market datasets offer us a window into some of the actions that have led to these crises. Here, we investigate whether data generated through Internet usage contain traces of attempts to gather information before trading decisions were taken. We present evidence in line with the intriguing suggestion that data on changes in how often financially related Wikipedia pages were viewed may have contained early signs of stock market moves. Our results suggest that online data may allow us to gain new insight into early information gathering stages of decision making

Quantifying stock return distributions in financial markets

Being able to quantify the probability of large price changes in stock markets is of crucial importance in understanding financial crises that affect the lives of people worldwide. Large changes in stock market prices can arise abruptly, within a matter of minutes, or develop across much longer time scales. Here, we analyze a dataset comprising the stocks forming the Dow Jones Industrial Average at a second by second resolution in the period from January 2008 to July 2010 in order to quantify the distribution of changes in market prices at a range of time scales. We find that the tails of the distributions of logarithmic price changes, or returns, exhibit power law decays for time scales ranging from 300 seconds to 3600 seconds. For larger time scales, we find that the distributions tails exhibit exponential decay. Our findings may inform the development of models of market behavior across varying time scales

Investigating bacteriophages targeting the opportunistic pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii

The multi-drug resistance of the opportunistic pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii is of growing concern, with many clinical isolates proving to be resistant to last resort as well as front line antibiotic treatments. The use of bacteriophages is an attractive alternative to controlling and treating this emerging nosocomial pathogen. In this study, we have investigated bacteriophages collected from hospital wastewater in Thailand and we have explored their activity against clinical isolates of A. baumannii. Bacteriophage vB_AbaM_PhT2 showed 28% host range against 150 multidrug resistant (MDR) isolates and whole genome sequencing did not detect any known virulence factors or antibiotic resistance genes. Purified vB_AbaM_PhT2 samples had endotoxin levels below those recommended for preclinical trials and were not shown to be directly cytotoxic to human cell lines in vitro. The treatment of human brain and bladder cell lines grown in the presence of A. baumannii with this bacteriophage released significantly less lactate dehydrogenase compared to samples with no bacteriophage treatment, indicating that vB_AbaM_PhT2 can protect from A. baumannii induced cellular damage. Our results have also indicated that there is synergy between this bacteriophage and the end line antibiotic colistin. We therefore propose bacteriophage vB_AbaM_PhT2 as a good candidate for future research and for its potential development into a surface antimicrobial for use in hospitals. View Full-Tex

A new method for quantifying anisotropic martensitic transformation strains accumulated during constrained cooling

Martensitic phase transformations during welding can play a major role in determining the final residual stresses and they can be anisotropic if the transformation occurs under stress. Traditionally, the Satoh test has been used to quantify the response, but it suffers from the fact that the temperature is not uniform along the specimen length, making it difficult to interpret the data. This shortcoming is overcome in our new experimental method using digital image correlation (DIC) to quantify the temperature dependent evolution of the transformation strain locally both parallel and perpendicular to an applied load, in this case for a high-strength low alloy (HSLA) steel and a tough, low transformation temperature weld consumable designed to mitigate tensile weld residual stresses. The method is able to separate the volumetric component of the transformation strain from the deviatoric transformation plasticity component. The volumetric component is shown to be independent of applied load, while the deviatoric component varies approximately linearly with applied load. For the HSLA steel studied here the method also reveals that the transformation start temperature rises under both tensile and compressive loading, confirming previous work. From a weld modelling viewpoint our method provides sufficient information to include the stress dependency of the anisotropic transformation strain in numerical finite element models of the weld process

Error biases in inner and overt speech:Evidence from tongue twisters

To compare the properties of inner and overt speech, Oppenheim and Dell (2008) counted participants' self-reported speech errors when reciting tongue twisters either overtly or silently and found a bias toward substituting phonemes that resulted in words in both conditions, but a bias toward substituting similar phonemes only when speech was overt. Here, we report 3 experiments revisiting their conclusion that inner speech remains underspecified at the subphonemic level, which they simulated within an activation-feedback framework. In 2 experiments, participants recited tongue twisters that could result in the errorful substitutions of similar or dissimilar phonemes to form real words or nonwords. Both experiments included an auditory masking condition, to gauge the possible impact of loss of auditory feedback on the accuracy of self-reporting of speech errors. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were composed entirely from real words, whereas, in Experiment 2, half the tokens used were nonwords. Although masking did not have any effects, participants were more likely to report substitutions of similar phonemes in both experiments, in inner as well as overt speech. This pattern of results was confirmed in a 3rd experiment using the real-word materials from Oppenheim and Dell (in press). In addition to these findings, a lexical bias effect found in Experiments 1 and 3 disappeared in Experiment 2. Our findings support a view in which plans for inner speech are indeed specified at the feature level, even when there is no intention to articulate words overtly, and in which editing of the plan for errors is implicated

Mechanical Property Heterogeneity in Additively Manufactured Nickel Superalloy

Metallic additive manufacturing (AM) techniques do not produce a homogenous structure. Digital image correlation is used to quantify significant variations in mechanical properties in an AM nickel superalloy. Non-uniform properties at multiple length-scales are demonstrated, which could explain the poor mechanical properties common with AM alloys

Residual stress control of multipass welds using low transformation temperature fillers

Low transformation temperature (LTT) weld fillers can be used to replace tensile weld residual stresses with compressive ones and reduce the distortion of single-pass welds in austenitic plates. By contrast, weld fillers in multipass welds experience a number of thermal excursions, meaning that the benefit of the smart LTT fillers may not be realised. Here, neutron diffraction and the contour method are used to measure the residual stress in an eight pass groove weld of a 304 L stainless steel plate using the experimental LTT filler Camalloy 4. Our measurements show that the stress mitigating the effect of Camalloy 4 is indeed diminished during multipass welding. We propose a carefully selected elevated interpass hold temperature and demonstrate that this restores the LTT capability to successfully mitigate residual tensile stresses

Scenicness assessment of onshore wind sites with geotagged photographs and impacts on approval and cost-efficiency

Funding Information: We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of D. Schlund, who carried out some of the wind analysis whilst a Student Assistant at KIT, as well as C. Moutard, on whose Master’s Thesis at DTU this article builds (Assessing the ‘acceptable’ onshore wind potential in the UK, 2019, https://findit.dtu.dk/en/catalog/2451029061). M. D’Andrea, K. Paidis and T. Jaenicke supported the preparation of early versions of the manuscript whilst Student Assistants at DTU. I.M. gratefully acknowledges financial support from Kraks Fond, Copenhagen ([email protected]). T.P. and H.S.M. are grateful for support from The Alan Turing Institute under the EPSRC grant EP/N510129/1 (including awards TU/B/000006 and TU/B/000008).Peer reviewedPostprin