Determining the accuracy of crowdsourced tweet verification for auroral research

The Aurorasaurus citizen science project harnesses volunteer crowdsourcing to identify sightings of an aurora (or the "northern/southern lights") posted by citizen scientists on Twitter. Previous studies have demonstrated that aurora sightings can be mined from Twitter but with the caveat that there is a high level of accompanying non-sighting tweets, especially during periods of low auroral activity. Aurorasaurus attempts to mitigate this, and thus increase the quality of its Twitter sighting data, by utilizing volunteers to sift through a pre-filtered list of geo-located tweets to verify real-time aurora sightings. In this study, the current implementation of this crowdsourced verification system, including the process of geo-locating tweets, is described and its accuracy (which, overall, is found to be 68.4%) is determined. The findings suggest that citizen science volunteers are able to accurately filter out unrelated, spam-like, Twitter data but struggle when filtering out somewhat related, yet undesired, data. The citizen scientists particularly struggle with determining the real-time nature of the sightings and care must therefore be taken when relying on crowdsourced identification

How People Experience the Hospital to Home Project

Many individuals who experience chronic homelessness with complex medical and mental health issues use the Emergency Room often. A new program called the Hospital to Home Program (HHP) has been created for people who have at least one chronic health condition, have been to the emergency room five or more times in the previous year, and have a history of chronic homelessness. This qualitative research project sought to explore the participant’s experiences of the HHP as there has been no qualitative research done with the program currently. Seven participants were asked open-ended questions to elicit responses about their quality of life being in the program, about their housing, and what Guild Incorporated has helped with. The findings indicate that the participants were all housed, they felt their overall quality of life was better, and they reported some of the barriers they previously faced and are currently facing. It was found that participants of the HHP enjoy being in the program and feel they have benefited greatly from the services

How People Experience the Hospital to Home Project

Many individuals who experience chronic homelessness with complex medical and mental health issues use the Emergency Room often. A new program called the Hospital to Home Program (HHP) has been created for people who have at least one chronic health condition, have been to the emergency room five or more times in the previous year, and have a history of chronic homelessness. This qualitative research project sought to explore the participant’s experiences of the HHP as there has been no qualitative research done with the program currently. Seven participants were asked open-ended questions to elicit responses about their quality of life being in the program, about their housing, and what Guild Incorporated has helped with. The findings indicate that the participants were all housed, they felt their overall quality of life was better, and they reported some of the barriers they previously faced and are currently facing. It was found that participants of the HHP enjoy being in the program and feel they have benefited greatly from the services

Mapping auroral activity with Twitter

Twitter is a popular, publicly-accessible, social media service that has proven useful in mapping large-scale events in real-time. In this study, for the first time, the use of Twitter as a measure of auroral activity is investigated. Peaks in the number of aurora-related tweets are found to frequently coincide with geomagnetic disturbances (detection rate of 91%). Additionally, the number of daily aurora-related tweets is found to strongly correlate with several auroral strength proxies (ravg ≈ 0.7). An examination is made of the bias for location and time of day within Twitter data, and a first order correction of these effects is presented. Overall, the results suggest that Twitter can provide both specific details about an individual aurora and accurate real-time indication of when, and even from where, an aurora is visible

The Structure of Citizen Bystander Offering Behaviors Immediately After the Boston Marathon Bombing

In April of 2013, two pressure cooker bombs detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The resulting crowdsourced criminal investigation has been subject to intense scrutiny. What has not been discussed are the offering behaviors of Twitter users immediately following the detonations. The hashtag #BostonHelp offers a case study of what emergent, computer-mediated groups offer victims of a crisis event. Through creative appropriation of at-hand technologies (CAAT), this emergent group organized online offering and information about tangible resources on the ground. In this case, #BostonHelp participants harnessed blogs, social media, Google Forms, and pre-existing services to organize help for those in need. The resulting structure stabilized and became a symbol of the response itself. This case study offers an analysis of the structure created by computer-mediated crowds. We conclude with a discussion of trying to design, or even detect these behaviors at the start of a crisis response

Endogenous Levels of Echinacea Alkylamides and Ketones Are Important Contributors to the Inhibition of Prostaglandin E2 and Nitric Oxide Production in Cultured Macrophages

Because of the popularity of Echinacea as a dietary supplement, researchers have been actively investigating which Echinacea constituent or groups of constituents are necessary for immunemodulating bioactivities. Our prior studies indicate that alkylamides may play an important role in the inhibition of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) production. High-performance liquid chromatography fractionation, employed to elucidate interacting anti-inflammatory constituents from ethanol extracts of Echinacea purpurea, Echinacea angustifolia, Echinacea pallida, and Echinacea tennesseensis, identified fractions containing alkylamides and ketones as key anti-inflammatory contributors using lipopolysaccharideinduced PGE2 production in RAW264.7 mouse macrophage cells. Nitric oxide (NO) production and parallel cytotoxicity screens were also employed to substantiate an anti-inflammatory response. E. pallida showed significant inhibition of PGE2 with a first round fraction, containing gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) peaks for Bauer ketones 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24, with 23 and 24 identified as significant contributors to this PGE2 inhibition. Chemically synthesized Bauer ketones 21 and 23 at 1 μM each significantly inhibited both PGE2 and NO production. Three rounds of fractionation were produced from an E. angustifolia extract. GC-MS analysis identified the presence of Bauer ketone 23 in third round fraction 3D32 and Bauer alkylamide 11 making up 96% of third round fraction 3E40. Synthetic Bauer ketone 23 inhibited PGE2 production to 83% of control, and synthetic Bauer alkylamide 11 significantly inhibited PGE2 and NO production at the endogenous concentrations determined to be present in their respective fraction; thus, each constituent partially explained the in vitro anti-inflammatory activity of their respective fraction. From this study, two key contributors to the anti-inflammatory properties of E. angustifolia were identified as Bauer alkylamide 11 and Bauer ketone 23

The Technology Crisis in US-based Emergency Management: Toward a Well-Connected Future

For many years, CI has tried to show the value of computational techniques for response to hazard events but has yet to see success outside of post-hoc analyses. Meanwhile, emergency management (EM) has been struggling to cope with the impact of computation. This duality wherein we know technology can be useful yet also complicates EM (and has not yet been fully integrated into EM) is what we dub the technology crisis in EM. To begin to address this crisis and revitalize CI, we argue that it is necessary to develop an inventory of what technologies EM is competent with and to design training that can extend that competency. This research reports a survey of EM Practitioners in the United States. We offer one of the first inventories of EM technologies and technological skills and identify how current EM technological integration issues are a crisis