The Distorting Prism of Social Media: How Self-Selection and Exposure to Incivility Fuel Online Comment Toxicity

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this recordThough prior studies have analyzed the textual characteristics of online comments about politics, less is known about how selection into commenting behavior and exposure to other people’s comments changes the tone and content of political discourse. This article makes three contributions. First, we show that frequent commenters on Facebook are more likely to be interested in politics, to have more polarized opinions, and to use toxic language in comments in an elicitation task. Second, we find that people who comment on articles in the real world use more toxic language on average than the public as a whole; levels of toxicity in comments scraped from media outlet Facebook pages greatly exceed what is observed in comments we elicit on the same articles from a nationally representative sample. Finally, we demonstrate experimentally that exposure to toxic language in comments increases the toxicity of subsequent comments.Dartmouth CollegeEuropean Union Horizon 202

Model estimates of CO2 emissions from soil in response to global warming

One effect of global warming will be to accelerate the decomposition of soil organic matter, thereby releasing CO2 to the atmosphere, which will further enhance the warming trend 1-7. Such a feedback mechanism could be quantitatively important, because CO2 is thought to be responsible for approximately 55% of the increase in radiative forcing arising from anthropogenic emissions of gases to the atmosphere 8, and there is about twice as much carbon in the top metre of soil as in the atmosphere 9. Here we use the Rothamsted model for the turnover of organic matter in soil 3 to calculate the amount of CO2 that would be released from the world stock of soil organic matter if temperatures increase as predicted, the annual return of plant debris to the soil being held constant. If world temperatures rise by 0.03-degrees-C yr-1 (the increase considered as most likely by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 8), we estimate that the additional release of CO2 from soil organic matter over the next 60 years will be 61 x 10(15) gC. This is approximately 19% of the CO2 that will be released by combustion of fossil fuel during the next 60 years if present use of fuel continues unabated.&nbsp

Self-injurious behavior: gene-brain-behavior relationships.

This paper summarizes a conference held at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development on December 6-7, 1999, on self-injurious behavior [SIB] in developmental disabilities. Twenty-six of the top researchers in the U.S. from this field representing 13 different disciplines discussed environmental mechanisms, epidemiology, behavioral and pharmacological intervention strategies, neurochemical substrates, genetic syndromes in which SIB is a prominent behavioral phenotype, neurobiological and neurodevelopmental factors affecting SIB in humans as well as a variety of animal models of SIB. Findings over the last decade, especially new discoveries since 1995, were emphasized. SIB is a rapidly growing area of scientific interest to both basic and applied researchers. In many respects it is a model for the study of gene-brain-behavior relationships in developmental disabilities