10,323 research outputs found
Patterns of Individual Shopping Behavior
Much of economic theory is built on observations of aggregate, rather than
individual, behavior. Here, we present novel findings on human shopping
patterns at the resolution of a single purchase. Our results suggest that much
of our seemingly elective activity is actually driven by simple routines. While
the interleaving of shopping events creates randomness at the small scale, on
the whole consumer behavior is largely predictable. We also examine
income-dependent differences in how people shop, and find that wealthy
individuals are more likely to bundle shopping trips. These results validate
previous work on mobility from cell phone data, while describing the
unpredictability of behavior at higher resolution.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure
DTN routing optimised by human routines: the HURRy protocol
This paper proposes the HURRy (HUman Routines used for Routing) protocol, which infers and benefits from the social behaviour of nodes in disruptive networking environments. HURRy incorporates the contact duration to the information retrieved from historical encounters among neighbours, so that smarter routing decisions can be made. The specification of HURRy is based on the outcomes of a thorough experiment, which highlighted the importance of distinguishing between short and long contacts and deriving mathematical relations in order to optimally prioritize the available routes to a destination. HURRy introduces a novel and more meaningful rating system to evaluate the quality of each contact and overcome the limitations of other routing approaches in social environments.European Commission, Horizon 2020, Grant Agreement number 645124, UMOBIL
Does End-of-Life Decision Making Matter?: Perspectives of Older Homeless Adults
Gary & Mary West Foundatio
Photocurrent measurements of supercollision cooling in graphene
The cooling of hot electrons in graphene is the critical process underlying
the operation of exciting new graphene-based optoelectronic and plasmonic
devices, but the nature of this cooling is controversial. We extract the hot
electron cooling rate near the Fermi level by using graphene as novel
photothermal thermometer that measures the electron temperature () as it
cools dynamically. We find the photocurrent generated from graphene
junctions is well described by the energy dissipation rate , where the heat capacity is and is the
base lattice temperature. These results are in disagreement with predictions of
electron-phonon emission in a disorder-free graphene system, but in excellent
quantitative agreement with recent predictions of a disorder-enhanced
supercollision (SC) cooling mechanism. We find that the SC model provides a
complete and unified picture of energy loss near the Fermi level over the wide
range of electronic (15 to 3000 K) and lattice (10 to 295 K) temperatures
investigated.Comment: 7pages, 5 figure
Modeling the scaling properties of human mobility
While the fat tailed jump size and the waiting time distributions
characterizing individual human trajectories strongly suggest the relevance of
the continuous time random walk (CTRW) models of human mobility, no one
seriously believes that human traces are truly random. Given the importance of
human mobility, from epidemic modeling to traffic prediction and urban
planning, we need quantitative models that can account for the statistical
characteristics of individual human trajectories. Here we use empirical data on
human mobility, captured by mobile phone traces, to show that the predictions
of the CTRW models are in systematic conflict with the empirical results. We
introduce two principles that govern human trajectories, allowing us to build a
statistically self-consistent microscopic model for individual human mobility.
The model not only accounts for the empirically observed scaling laws but also
allows us to analytically predict most of the pertinent scaling exponents
Mobile Communication Signatures of Unemployment
The mapping of populations socio-economic well-being is highly constrained by
the logistics of censuses and surveys. Consequently, spatially detailed changes
across scales of days, weeks, or months, or even year to year, are difficult to
assess; thus the speed of which policies can be designed and evaluated is
limited. However, recent studies have shown the value of mobile phone data as
an enabling methodology for demographic modeling and measurement. In this work,
we investigate whether indicators extracted from mobile phone usage can reveal
information about the socio-economical status of microregions such as districts
(i.e., average spatial resolution < 2.7km). For this we examine anonymized
mobile phone metadata combined with beneficiaries records from unemployment
benefit program. We find that aggregated activity, social, and mobility
patterns strongly correlate with unemployment. Furthermore, we construct a
simple model to produce accurate reconstruction of district level unemployment
from their mobile communication patterns alone. Our results suggest that
reliable and cost-effective economical indicators could be built based on
passively collected and anonymized mobile phone data. With similar data being
collected every day by telecommunication services across the world,
survey-based methods of measuring community socioeconomic status could
potentially be augmented or replaced by such passive sensing methods in the
future
Mesoscopic structure and social aspects of human mobility
The individual movements of large numbers of people are important in many
contexts, from urban planning to disease spreading. Datasets that capture human
mobility are now available and many interesting features have been discovered,
including the ultra-slow spatial growth of individual mobility. However, the
detailed substructures and spatiotemporal flows of mobility - the sets and
sequences of visited locations - have not been well studied. We show that
individual mobility is dominated by small groups of frequently visited,
dynamically close locations, forming primary "habitats" capturing typical daily
activity, along with subsidiary habitats representing additional travel. These
habitats do not correspond to typical contexts such as home or work. The
temporal evolution of mobility within habitats, which constitutes most motion,
is universal across habitats and exhibits scaling patterns both distinct from
all previous observations and unpredicted by current models. The delay to enter
subsidiary habitats is a primary factor in the spatiotemporal growth of human
travel. Interestingly, habitats correlate with non-mobility dynamics such as
communication activity, implying that habitats may influence processes such as
information spreading and revealing new connections between human mobility and
social networks.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures (main text); 11 pages, 9 figures, 1 table
(supporting information
Asymptomatic members with SOD1 mutation in a large kindred with familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis have abnormal water diffusion characterisitcs
DTI was carried out in FALS/SALS patients and familial members with SOD1 mutation (AFALS) who may be in a pre-symptomatic phase of ALS. The
changes in FA and TT were investigated in CBT/CST and in whole brain. In FALS/SALS, diffusion pattern changes were found in cerebral peduncle,
internal capsule, sub-cortical white matter, cerebellum and frontal lobe while in AFALS, abnormal pattern could also be detected in the cerebral peduncle,
cerebellum and frontal lobe but with a smaller extent. Our study indicates that DTI can show early diffusion changes in members with SOD1 mutation in
FALS prior to symptom-onset.published_or_final_versio
Spatiotemporal correlations of handset-based service usages
We study spatiotemporal correlations and temporal diversities of
handset-based service usages by analyzing a dataset that includes detailed
information about locations and service usages of 124 users over 16 months. By
constructing the spatiotemporal trajectories of the users we detect several
meaningful places or contexts for each one of them and show how the context
affects the service usage patterns. We find that temporal patterns of service
usages are bound to the typical weekly cycles of humans, yet they show maximal
activities at different times. We first discuss their temporal correlations and
then investigate the time-ordering behavior of communication services like
calls being followed by the non-communication services like applications. We
also find that the behavioral overlap network based on the clustering of
temporal patterns is comparable to the communication network of users. Our
approach provides a useful framework for handset-based data analysis and helps
us to understand the complexities of information and communications technology
enabled human behavior.Comment: 11 pages, 15 figure
Microstructural damage of the posterior corpus callosum contributes to the clinical severity of neglect
One theory to account for neglect symptoms in patients with right focal damage invokes a release of inhibition of the right parietal cortex over the left parieto-frontal circuits, by disconnection mechanism. This theory is supported by transcranial magnetic stimulation studies showing the existence of asymmetric inhibitory interactions between the left and right posterior parietal cortex, with a right hemispheric advantage. These inhibitory mechanisms are mediated by direct transcallosal projections located in the posterior portions of the corpus callosum. The current study, using diffusion imaging and tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS), aims at assessing, in a data-driven fashion, the contribution of structural disconnection between hemispheres in determining the presence and severity of neglect. Eleven patients with right acute stroke and 11 healthy matched controls underwent MRI at 3T, including diffusion imaging, and T1-weighted volumes. TBSS was modified to account for the presence of the lesion and used to assess the presence and extension of changes in diffusion indices of microscopic white matter integrity in the left hemisphere of patients compared to controls, and to investigate, by correlation analysis, whether this damage might account for the presence and severity of patients' neglect, as assessed by the Behavioural Inattention Test (BIT). None of the patients had any macroscopic abnormality in the left hemisphere; however, 3 cases were discarded due to image artefacts in the MRI data. Conversely, TBSS analysis revealed widespread changes in diffusion indices in most of their left hemisphere tracts, with a predominant involvement of the corpus callosum and its projections on the parietal white matter. A region of association between patients' scores at BIT and brain FA values was found in the posterior part of the corpus callosum. This study strongly supports the hypothesis of a major role of structural disconnection between the right and left parietal cortex in determining 'neglect'
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