Navigating Monsters: Credibility in the Twittersphere

The increasing use of OSM during emergency, or potentially threatening, situations creates conditions in which emergency planners and responders need a high level of investigative skill to weed through a dynamic information landscape to determine the quality of information to contribute to improved situation awareness. This weeding process transforms the big data environment of OSM to focused information retrieval. Inquiry into indicators of quality in OSM (authority, objectivity, currency, coverage, and glyphicality) during severe weather situations informs how OSM impacts the information behavior of the severe weather enterprise of the U. S. Specifically, this paper focuses on investigation into how a particular element of the severe weather enterprise in the Midwest, the integrated warning team (IWT), identifies relevant information in OSM during severe weather events. This paper describes the theoretical framework of an inquiry into information behavior of the IWT during severe weather events through the lens of cognitive authority theory (Wilson, 1983) and Bonnici’s (2016) CAF-QIS for understanding the phenomena of both credibility and trustworthiness in the Twittersphere where author is potentially unknown

Gatekeeping in Crisis Communication: An Exploration of Leadership in the Press Conference

Community leaders significantly influence the community\u27s perception of and response to an emergency. This study explored the initial press conferences and communication efforts by community leaders as gatekeepers through an investigation of two large-scale disasters in the United States. Grounded in Patrick Wilson\u27s call to a reorientation toward the functional and to the point of the user, this study explores the initial communication efforts by Mayor Rudolf Giuliani immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, and by Mayor Ray Nagin in response to landfall of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, in order to identify instances of gatekeeping in the crisis communication process

Webs of Proximity and Just-in-Time Information

Disciplinary webs of proximity frequently overlap at the periphery of a topic where interests intersect for problem-solving. Failure to account for disciplinary differences can result in dis-ease – tension that interferes with meaning-making. This can be especially problematic in just-in-time information settings. An unexpected social media case study involving severe weather reporting and algorithm-driven system censorship makes evident the role of a constellation of pragmatic factors that can enhance or hinder just-in-time information delivery. Employing webs of proximity, we probe the severe weather censorship event with complementary bodies of knowledge and disciplinary perspectives. Intersectionalities are discussed through lenses of proximity and epidata. Entanglements of commonality between differing web plots are represented in a negotiation vestibule. The possibility of the communication channel itself being noise is presented. The vestibule highlights opportunities for negotiation points to attempt functional meaning-making

Storm Warnings: Time Sensitive Proximity

Weather-predictive tasks during high risk severe weather events are carried out for the common good of the community by virtual teams of weather professionals. Severe weather predictors are responsible for producing the early warnings that inform people in harms way and potentially save lives. Should we be concerned with the use of “other-generated” information from social media used by these professionals? Teams extend understanding of an event by looking to external sources of situationally relevant information such as storm spotters, publicly generated photos and comments posted to online social media (OSM), and communication with community partners. Situationally relevant OSM, specifically Twitter, provides insight to the information behavior of the team. Here we examine the role of proximity and how it impacts decisions on potentially life-saving information sharing in time sensitive information environments: proximity within the team (shared knowledge state) and proximity to the event (hashtag) specifically are addressed

New loci for body fat percentage reveal link between adiposity and cardiometabolic disease risk

To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of adiposity and its links to cardiometabolic disease risk, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of body fat percentage (BF%) in up to 100,716 individuals. Twelve loci reached genome-wide significance (P<5 × 10−8), of which eight were previously associated with increased overall adiposity (BMI, BF%) and four (in or near COBLL1/GRB14, IGF2BP1, PLA2G6, CRTC1) were novel associations with BF%. Seven loci showed a larger effect on BF% than on BMI, suggestive of a primary association with adiposity, while five loci showed larger effects on BMI than on BF%, suggesting association with both fat and lean mass. In particular, the loci more strongly associated with BF% showed distinct cross-phenotype association signatures with a range of cardiometabolic traits revealing new insights in the link between adiposity and disease risk

New loci for body fat percentage reveal link between adiposity and cardiometabolic disease risk

To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of adiposity and its links to cardiometabolic disease risk, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of body fat percentage (BF%) in up to 100,716 individuals. Twelve loci reached genome-wide significance (P <5 x 10(-8)), of which eight were previously associated with increased overall adiposity (BMI, BF%) and four (in or near COBLL1/GRB14, IGF2BP1, PLA2G6, CRTC1) were novel associations with BF%. Seven loci showed a larger effect on BF% than on BMI, suggestive of a primary association with adiposity, while five loci showed larger effects on BMI than on BF%, suggesting association with both fat and lean mass. In particular, the loci more strongly associated with BF% showed distinct cross-phenotype association signatures with a range of cardiometabolic traits revealing new insights in the link between adiposity and disease risk.Peer reviewe