Assessing the Online Social Environment for Surveillance of Obesity Prevalence

Background: Understanding the social environmental around obesity has been limited by available data. One promising approach used to bridge similar gaps elsewhere is to use passively generated digital data. Purpose This article explores the relationship between online social environment via web-based social networks and population obesity prevalence. Methods: We performed a cross-sectional study using linear regression and cross validation to measure the relationship and predictive performance of user interests on the online social network Facebook to obesity prevalence in metros across the United States of America (USA) and neighborhoods within New York City (NYC). The outcomes, proportion of obese and/or overweight population in USA metros and NYC neighborhoods, were obtained via the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance and NYC EpiQuery systems. Predictors were geographically specific proportion of users with activity-related and sedentary-related interests on Facebook. Results: Higher proportion of the population with activity-related interests on Facebook was associated with a significant 12.0% (95% Confidence Interval (CI) 11.9 to 12.1) lower predicted prevalence of obese and/or overweight people across USA metros and 7.2% (95% CI: 6.8 to 7.7) across NYC neighborhoods. Conversely, greater proportion of the population with interest in television was associated with higher prevalence of obese and/or overweight people of 3.9% (95% CI: 3.7 to 4.0) (USA) and 27.5% (95% CI: 27.1 to 27.9, significant) (NYC). For activity-interests and national obesity outcomes, the average root mean square prediction error from 10-fold cross validation was comparable to the average root mean square error of a model developed using the entire data set. Conclusions: Activity-related interests across the USA and sedentary-related interests across NYC were significantly associated with obesity prevalence. Further research is needed to understand how the online social environment relates to health outcomes and how it can be used to identify or target interventions

What Search Data Shows About Americans and Guns During the COVID-19 Crisis

With millions of Americans staying at home across the country during a crisis of intense emotional and economic stress, gun safety advocates have raised concerns about increased risks of unintentional shootings, domestic violence shootings, gun suicides, and city gun violence. Unprecedented spikes in background checks, meanwhile, reflect a dramatic increase in gun purchasing that compounds these risks.Federal background check data, however, fails to capture the full spectrum of ways that people acquire guns, as well as the number of people who are removing guns from gun lockers or other storage. In an effort to cast additional light on issues of firearm access during this stage of the COVID-19 crisis, we used real-time Google search data to gauge interest in buying and cleaning guns across the country

Revisiting the Rise of Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems Using Search Query Surveillance

Public perceptions of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) remain poorly understood because surveys are too costly to regularly implement and when implemented there are large delays between data collection and dissemination. Search query surveillance has bridged some of these gaps. Herein, ENDS’ popularity in the U.S. is reassessed using Google searches

Don’t quote me: reverse identification of research participants in social media studies

We investigated if participants in social media surveillance studies could be reverse identified by reviewing all articles published on PubMed in 2015 or 2016 with the words “Twitter” and either “read,” “coded,” or “content” in the title or abstract. Seventy-two percent (95% CI: 63–80) of articles quoted at least one participant’s tweet and searching for the quoted content led to the participant 84% (95% CI: 74–91) of the time. Twenty-one percent (95% CI: 13–29) of articles disclosed a participant’s Twitter username thereby making the participant immediately identifiable. Only one article reported obtaining consent to disclose identifying information and institutional review board (IRB) involvement was mentioned in only 40% (95% CI: 31–50) of articles, of which 17% (95% CI: 10–25) received IRB-approval and 23% (95% CI:16–32) were deemed exempt. Biomedical publications are routinely including identifiable information by quoting tweets or revealing usernames which, in turn, violates ICMJE ethical standards governing scientific ethics, even though said content is scientifically unnecessary. We propose that authors convey aggregate findings without revealing participants’ identities, editors refuse to publish reports that reveal a participant’s identity, and IRBs attend to these privacy issues when reviewing studies involving social media data. These strategies together will ensure participants are protected going forward

Digital Detection for Tobacco Control: Online Reactions to the 2009 U.S. Cigarette Excise Tax Increase

The Internet is revolutionizing tobacco control, but few have harnessed the Web for surveillance. We demonstrate for the first time an approach for analyzing aggregate Internet search queries that captures precise changes in population considerations about tobacco

South Korean Military Service Promotes Smoking: A Quasi-Experimental Design

∙ The authors have no financial conflicts of interest. © Copyright: Yonsei University College of Medicine 2012 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Licens

Characterization of the near-Earth Asteroid 2002NY40

In August 2002, the near-Earth asteroid 2002 NY40, made its closest approach to the Earth. This provided an opportunity to study a near-Earth asteroid with a variety of instruments. Several of the telescopes at the Maui Space Surveillance System were trained at the asteroid and collected adaptive optics images, photometry and spectroscopy. Analysis of the imagery reveals the asteroid is triangular shaped with significant self-shadowing. The photometry reveals a 20-hour period and the spectroscopy shows that the asteroid is a Q-type

US consumer interest in non-cigarette tobacco products spikes around the 2009 federal tobacco tax increase

This quasi-experimental longitudinal study monitored aggregate Google search queries as a proxy for consumer interest in non-cigarette tobacco products (NTP) around the time of the 2009 US federal tobacco tax increase

Follow‐Up Survey on Functionality of Nutrition Documentation and Ordering Nutrition Therapy in Currently Available Electronic Health Record Systems

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141915/1/ncp0401.pd