Analyzing the Language of Food on Social Media

We investigate the predictive power behind the language of food on social media. We collect a corpus of over three million food-related posts from Twitter and demonstrate that many latent population characteristics can be directly predicted from this data: overweight rate, diabetes rate, political leaning, and home geographical location of authors. For all tasks, our language-based models significantly outperform the majority-class baselines. Performance is further improved with more complex natural language processing, such as topic modeling. We analyze which textual features have most predictive power for these datasets, providing insight into the connections between the language of food, geographic locale, and community characteristics. Lastly, we design and implement an online system for real-time query and visualization of the dataset. Visualization tools, such as geo-referenced heatmaps, semantics-preserving wordclouds and temporal histograms, allow us to discover more complex, global patterns mirrored in the language of food.Comment: An extended abstract of this paper will appear in IEEE Big Data 201

Informed Consent and Dual Purpose Research

The ethical treatment of human participants in psychological research is regulated by both federal guidelines and the ethical standards of the American Psychological Association (APA). Under certain circumstances, however, both APA standards and federal regulations allow for exceptions for informed consent. In spite of the possibility of exception, a number of factors have made it difficult to conduct and publish research that does not incorporate informed consent. The authors consider these factors and propose 2 approaches that may reduce reluctance to consider exceptions to informed consent under appropriate circumstances. First, journals should not rely on informed consent as the only method of screening research for the ethical treatment of human participants. Second, efforts must be made to work with institutional review boards and other units that review psychological research to ensure that their members are aware of the conditions under which informed consent is considered reasonable. Failure to consider ethical research without informed consent may have serious ethical consequences for research

WILLINGNESS TO PAY FOR LOCAL COHO SALMON ENHANCEMENT IN COASTAL COMMUNITIES

Salmon restoration and enhancement are dominant environmental policy issues in Oregon and Washington. In response to salmon species listings under the Endangered Species Act, salmon protection and recovery actions are being implemented throughout the Pacific Northwest at substantial opportunity costs. In this paper, we examine the willingness to pay (WTP) of coastal residents for local coho salmon enhancement programs. A contingent valuation study is completed using survey responses from five rural, coastal communities of Oregon and Washington, where coho salmon are prevalent. Our empirical results indicate that coastal residents are willing to pay for local coho salmon enhancement and that WTP varies considerably with individual opinions of the merit of the enhancement program.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

ILR Impact Brief - Knowledge, Skills, and Performance: Getting the Most From Team Training

Teams are an integral feature of the American workplace; indeed, more than 80% of the Fortune 500 companies make extensive use of work teams. Action teams, pulled together to carry out a particular time-limited function that requires the specialized expertise of its members, are becoming increasingly common. Researchers have noted that the success of these teams is often thwarted by their lack of information about teamwork in general and their insufficient mastery of basic team competencies. Most organizations train team members for the particular job at hand, so the question arises as to the utility of generic team training. In other words, would imparting knowledge and skills that could be applied in, and adapted to, any number of situations improve outcomes, and if so, what is the mechanism that facilitates this result

All quantum states useful for teleportation are nonlocal resources

Understanding the relation between the different forms of inseparability in quantum mechanics is a longstanding problem in the foundations of quantum theory and has implications for quantum information processing. Here we make progress in this direction by establishing a direct link between quantum teleportation and Bell nonlocality. In particular, we show that all entangled states which are useful for teleportation are nonlocal resources, i.e. lead to deterministic violation of Bell's inequality. Our result exploits the phenomenon of super-activation of quantum nonlocality, recently proved by Palazuelos, and suggests that the latter might in fact be generic.Comment: 4 pages. v2: Title and abstract changed, presentation improved, references updated, same result

Violations of local realism by two entangled quNits

Results obtained in two recent papers, \cite{Kaszlikowski} and \cite{Durt}, seem to indicate that the nonlocal character of the correlations between the outcomes of measurements performed on entangled systems separated in space is not robust in the presence of noise. This is surprising, since entanglement itself is robust. Here we revisit this problem and argue that the class of gedanken-experiments considered in \cite{Kaszlikowski} and \cite{Durt} is too restrictive. By considering a more general class, involving sequences of measurements, we prove that the nonlocal correlations are in fact robust.Comment: Reference added, 3 pages, accepted for publication in J. Phys. A: Math. and Genera

Identification of senescence and death in Emiliania huxleyi and Thalassiosira pseudonana: Cell staining, chlorophyll alterations, and dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) metabolism

We measured membrane permeability, hydrolytic enzyme, and caspase-like activities using fluorescent cell stains to document changes caused by nutrient exhaustion in the coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi and the diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana, during batch-culture nutrient limitation. We related these changes to cell death, pigment alteration, and concentrations of dimethylsulfide (DMS) and dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) to assess the transformation of these compounds as cell physiological condition changes. E. huxleyi persisted for 1 month in stationary phase; in contrast, T. pseudonana cells rapidly declined within 10 d of nutrient depletion. T. pseudonana progressively lost membrane integrity and the ability to metabolize 5-chloromethylfluorescein diacetate (CMFDA; hydrolytic activity), whereas E. huxleyi developed two distinct CMFDA populations and retained membrane integrity (SYTOX Green). Caspase-like activity appeared higher in E. huxleyi than in T. pseudonana during the post-growth phase, despite a lack of apparent mortality and cell lysis. Photosynthetic pigment degradation and transformation occurred in both species after growth; chlorophyll a (Chl a) degradation was characterized by an increase in the ratio of methoxy Chl a : Chl a in T. pseudonana but not in E. huxleyi, and the increase in this ratio preceded loss of membrane integrity. Total DMSP declined in T. pseudonana during cell death and DMS increased. In contrast, and in the absence of cell death, total DMSP and DMS increased in E. huxleyi. Our data show a novel chlorophyll alteration product associated with T. pseudonana death, suggesting a promising approach to discriminate nonviable cells in nature

Bell inequalities for three systems and arbitrarily many measurement outcomes

We present a family of Bell inequalities for three parties and arbitrarily many outcomes, which can be seen as a natural generalization of the Mermin Bell inequality. For a small number of outcomes, we verify that our inequalities define facets of the polytope of local correlations. We investigate the quantum violations of these inequalities, in particular with respect to the Hilbert space dimension. We provide strong evidence that the maximal quantum violation can only be reached using systems with local Hilbert space dimension exceeding the number of measurement outcomes. This suggests that our inequalities can be used as multipartite dimension witnesses.Comment: v1 6 pages, 4 tables; v2 Published version with minor typos correcte