Technical Note: Novel method for water vapor monitoring using wireless communication networks measurements

International audienceWe propose a new technique that overcomes the obstacles of the existing methods for monitoring near-surface water vapor, by estimating humidity from data collected through existing wireless communication networks. Weather conditions and atmospheric phenomena affect the electromagnetic channel, causing attenuations to the radio signals. Thus, wireless communication networks are in effect built-in environmental monitoring facilities. The wireless microwave links, used in these networks, are widely deployed by cellular providers for backhaul communication between base stations, a few tens of meters above ground level. As a result, the proposed method can provide moisture observations at high temporal and spatial resolution. Further, the implementation cost is minimal, since the data used are already collected and saved by the cellular operators. In addition ? many of these links are installed in areas where access is difficult such as orographic terrain and complex topography. As such, our method enables measurements in places that have been hard to measure in the past, or have never been measured before. We present results from real-data measurements taken from two microwave links used in a backhaul cellular network that show excellent correlation to surface station humidity measurements. The measurements were taken daily in two sites, one in northern Israel (28 measurements), the other in central Israel (29 measurements).The correlation of the microwave link measurements to those of the humidity gauges were 0.9 and 0.82 for the north and central sites, respectively. The RMSE were 20.8% and 33.1% for the northern and central site measurements, respectively

Patterns of dual use of cigarettes and smokeless tobacco among US males: findings from national surveys

Background: In the USA, consumption of moist snuff continues to increase and cigarette manufacturers now control nearly its entire market. Manufacturers have developed new products that represent cigarette brand extension and in test marketing are promoting dual use of cigarettes and snuff. This study examined patterns of concurrent use of smokeless tobacco (ST) and cigarettes among young people and adults in the USA just before cigarette companies' control of the nation's ST market. Methods: Data were drawn from four US nationally representative surveys. Stratified analyses applied sampling weights and accounted for the complex sample designs. Results: Cigarette smoking was substantially more prevalent among young males who used ST than among those who did not. Among adult males, those who smoked daily were less likely than others to have used snuff every day. Men who used moist snuff daily had the lowest prevalence of daily smoking, but the prevalence of daily smoking was relatively high among men who used moist snuff less than daily. Unsuccessful past-year attempts by daily smokers to quit smoking were more prevalent among non-daily snuff users (41.2%) than among those who had never used snuff (29.6%). Conclusions: Although dual daily use of ST and cigarettes is relatively uncommon in the USA, concurrent ST use is more common among adolescent and young adult male smokers than among more mature tobacco users. Among adult males, daily smoking predominates and non-daily ST use is very strongly associated with current smoking. Adult male smokers who also use ST daily tend to have relatively high levels of serum cotinine and high prevalence of a major indicator for tobacco dependence

Three months of informational trends in COVID-19 across New York City

© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Faculty of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. In the midst of widespread community transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in New York, residents have sought information about COVID-19. We analyzed trends in New York State (NYS) and New York City (NYC) data to quantify the extent of COVID-19-related queries. Data on the number of 311 calls in NYC, Google Trend data on the search term \u27Coronavirus\u27 and information about trends in COVID-19 cases in NYS and the USA were compiled from multiple sources. There were 1228 994 total calls to 311 between 22 January 2020 and 22 April 2020, with 50 845 calls specific to COVID-19 in the study period. The proportion of 311 calls related to COVID-19 increased over time, while the \u27interest over time\u27 of the search term \u27Coronavirus\u27 has exponentially increased since the end of February 2020. It is vital that public health officials provide clear and up-to-date information about protective measures and crucial communications to respond to information-seeking behavior across NYC

Universality in solar flare and earthquake occurrence

Earthquakes and solar flares are phenomena involving huge and rapid releases of energy characterized by complex temporal occurrence. By analysing available experimental catalogs, we show that the stochastic processes underlying these apparently different phenomena have universal properties. Namely both problems exhibit the same distributions of sizes, inter-occurrence times and the same temporal clustering: we find afterflare sequences with power law temporal correlations as the Omori law for seismic sequences. The observed universality suggests a common approach to the interpretation of both phenomena in terms of the same driving physical mechanism