Intimate Partner Violence: Providing Resources to Patients and Facilitating Understanding

Intimate Partner Violence is defined as physical violence, emotional violence, sexual violence, psychological aggression and stalking against a current or former partner. High volume primary care offices like UVMHN Berlin Family Medicine address primarily medical concerns of patients. While this includes mental health, IPV is infrequently a part of doctor-patient interactions. This project assesses available data on IPV nationally and in Vermont. It aims to understand how IPV is currently addressed, recommendations regarding addressing it and provides resources to patients.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1192/thumbnail.jp

The Role of Visual Association Cortex in Associative Memory Formation across Development

Associative learning underlies the formation of new episodic memories. Associative memory improves across development, and this age-related improvement is supported by the development of the hippocampus and pFC. Recent work, however, additionally suggests a role for visual association cortex in the formation of associative memories. This study investigated the role of category-preferential visual processing regions in associative memory across development using a paired associate learning task in a sample of 56 youths (age 6–19 years). Participants were asked to bind an emotional face with an object while undergoing fMRI scanning. Outside the scanner, participants completed a memory test. We first investigated age-related changes in neural recruitment and found linear age-related increases in activation in lateral occipital cortex and fusiform gyrus, which are involved in visual processing of objects and faces, respectively. Furthermore, greater activation in these visual processing regions was associated with better subsequent memory for pairs over and above the effect of age and of hippocampal and pFC activation on performance. Recruitment of these visual processing regions mediated the association between age and memory performance, over and above the effects of hippocampal activation. Taken together, these findings extend the existing literature to suggest that greater recruitment of category-preferential visual processing regions during encoding of associative memories is a neural mechanism explaining improved memory across development

Storywrangler: A massive exploratorium for sociolinguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political timelines using Twitter

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’

WASP-80b has a dayside within the T-dwarf range

AHMJT is a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) fellow under grant number P300P2-147773. MG and EJ are Research Associates at the F.R.S-FNRS; LD received the support the support of the F.R.I.A. fund of the FNRS. DE, KH, and SU acknowledge the financial support of the SNSF in the frame of the National Centre for Competence in Research ‘PlanetS’. EH and IR acknowledge support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the ‘Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional’ (FEDER) through grants AYA2012-39612-C03-01 and ESP2013-48391-C4-1-R.WASP-80b is a missing link in the study of exo-atmospheres. It falls between the warm Neptunes and the hot Jupiters and is amenable for characterisation, thanks to its host star's properties. We observed the planet through transit and during occultation with Warm Spitzer. Combining our mid-infrared transits with optical time series, we find that the planet presents a transmission spectrum indistinguishable from a horizontal line. In emission, WASP-80b is the intrinsically faintest planet whose dayside flux has been detected in both the 3.6 and 4.5 $\mu$m Spitzer channels. The depths of the occultations reveal that WASP-80b is as bright and as red as a T4 dwarf, but that its temperature is cooler. If planets go through the equivalent of an L-T transition, our results would imply this happens at cooler temperatures than for brown dwarfs. Placing WASP-80b's dayside into a colour-magnitude diagram, it falls exactly at the junction between a blackbody model and the T-dwarf sequence; we cannot discern which of those two interpretations is the more likely. Flux measurements on other planets with similar equilibrium temperatures are required to establish whether irradiated gas giants, like brown dwarfs, transition between two spectral classes. An eventual detection of methane absorption in transmission would also help lift that degeneracy. We obtained a second series of high-resolution spectra during transit, using HARPS. We reanalyse the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect. The data now favour an aligned orbital solution and a stellar rotation nearly three times slower than stellar line broadening implies. A contribution to stellar line broadening, maybe macroturbulence, is likely to have been underestimated for cool stars, whose rotations have therefore been systematically overestimated. [abridged]Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The lexicocalorimeter: Gauging public health through caloric input and output on social media

We propose and develop a Lexicocalorimeter: an online, interactive instrument for measuring the caloric content of social media and other large-scale texts. We do so by constructing extensive yet improvable tables of food and activity related phrases, and respectively assigning them with sourced estimates of caloric intake and expenditure. We show that for Twitter, our naive measures of caloric input , caloric output , and the ratio of these measures are all strong correlates with health and well-being measures for the contiguous United States. Our caloric balance measure in many cases outperforms both its constituent quantities; is tunable to specific health and well-being measures such as diabetes rates; has the capability of providing a real-time signal reflecting a population\u27s health; and has the potential to be used alongside traditional survey data in the development of public policy and collective self-awareness. Because our Lexicocalorimeter is a linear superposition of principled phrase scores, we also show we can move beyond correlations to explore what people talk about in collective detail, and assist in the understanding and explanation of how population-scale conditions vary, a capacity unavailable to black-box type methods

The effect of distance on reaction time in aiming movements

Target distance affects movement duration in aiming tasks but its effect on reaction time (RT) is poorly documented. RT is a function of both preparation and initiation. Experiment 1 pre-cued movement (allowing advanced preparation) and found no influence of distance on RT. Thus, target distance does not affect initiation time. Experiment 2 removed pre-cue information and found that preparing a movement of increased distance lengthens RT. Experiment 3 explored movements to targets of cued size at non-cued distances and found size altered peak speed and movement duration but RT was influenced by distance alone. Thus, amplitude influences preparation time (for reasons other than altered duration) but not initiation time. We hypothesise that the RT distance effect might be due to the increased number of possible trajectories associated with further targets: a hypothesis that can be tested in future experiments

Human language reveals a universal positivity bias

Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (i ) the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, (ii ) the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages under translation, and (iii ) this positivity bias is strongly independent of frequency of word use. Alongside these general regularities, we describe interlanguage variations in the emotional spectrum of languages that allow us to rank corpora. We also show how our word evaluations can be used to construct physical-like instruments for both real-time and offline measurement of the emotional content of large-scale texts

Reply to Garcia et al.: Common mistakes in measuring frequency-dependent word characteristics

We demonstrate that the concerns expressed by Garcia et al. are misplaced, due to (1) a misreading of our findings in [1]; (2) a widespread failure to examine and present words in support of asserted summary quantities based on word usage frequencies; and (3) a range of misconceptions about word usage frequency, word rank, and expert-constructed word lists. In particular, we show that the English component of our study compares well statistically with two related surveys, that no survey design influence is apparent, and that estimates of measurement error do not explain the positivity biases reported in our work and that of others. We further demonstrate that for the frequency dependence of positivity---of which we explored the nuances in great detail in [1]---Garcia et al. did not perform a reanalysis of our data---they instead carried out an analysis of a different, statistically improper data set and introduced a nonlinearity before performing linear regression.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table. Expanded version of reply appearing in PNAS 201