Western Balkan societies' awareness of air pollution. Estimations using natural language processing techniques

Air pollution remains a severe concern in European countries, especially in Western Balkan, where the air monitoring data point to harmful ambient pollution. The public concern with this issue becomes particularly critical during the fall and winter months, when the contamination is more visible, provoking a series of reactions directed principally to the government authorities as the responsible entities for regulating air pollution levels. Since citizen-contributed data are generally considered valuable additional information for assessing the impacts of air pollution, the public contribution could act as a tool for increasing awareness and response about air pollution. Consequently, this study's objective focuses on researching public awareness of air pollution in Western Balkan. The study assumes that citizens' reactions will grow more intensely during the months with an increase in air pollution levels, principally due to winter heating. Therefore, Twitter activity and news articles related to air pollution have been investigated for the case of Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, from November 2021 to March 2022. Natural Language Processing techniques such as sentiment analysis, topic modelling, and cross-correlations statistical analysis were employed to determine the relationship between Twitter discussions and news with actual PM₁₀ levels measured by official air monitoring stations. The aim was to observe whether tweets and news teasers reflect the realistic air pollution situation. The results affirm that social media discussions, mainly with a negative connotation, can serve as a measure of public awareness of temporal changes in the PM₁₀ concentration in the air and the negative consequences. The content of the resources reveals several topics of concern, contributing to better identification of public opinion and possibilities for tracking news trends. Nevertheless, attention should be paid to news interpretation, provided that sometimes they might offer a more neutral understanding of the situation, failing, in this way, to present the actual air conditions and possibly impacting society in forming an unrealistic opinion. Additionally, the public might not be able to obtain sufficient or accurate information about the primary sources of air pollution, emphasizing the need for more transparent communication and greater education regarding air pollution monitoring. Finally, the study provides deeper insights into the content of the data and helps detect the reasons for skepticism towards pro-environmental behavior occurring in social media discussions. Explicitly, personal disappointment with the air quality should be taken as an inflection point by responsible parties to intervene in improving citizens' quality of life.     

Assessing vaccination sentiments with online social media: implications for infectious disease dynamics and control

There is great interest in the dynamics of health behaviors in social networks and how they affect collective public health outcomes, but measuring population health behaviors over time and space requires substantial resources. Here, we use publicly available data from 101,853 users of online social media collected over a time period of almost six months to measure the spatio-temporal sentiment towards a new vaccine. We validated our approach by identifying a strong correlation between sentiments expressed online and CDC-estimated vaccination rates by region. Analysis of the network of opinionated users showed that information flows more often between users who share the same sentiments - and less often between users who do not share the same sentiments - than expected by chance alone. We also found that most communities are dominated by either positive or negative sentiments towards the novel vaccine. Simulations of infectious disease transmission show that if clusters of negative vaccine sentiments lead to clusters of unprotected individuals, the likelihood of disease outbreaks is greatly increased. Online social media provide unprecedented access to data allowing for inexpensive and efficient tools to identify target areas for intervention efforts and to evaluate their effectiveness.     

The Effect of Bad News and CEO Apology of Corporate on User Responses in Social Media

While social media has become an important platform for social reputation, the emotional responses of users toward bad news have not been investigated thoroughly. We analyzed a total of 20,773 Twitter messages by 15,513 users to assess the influence of bad news and public apology in social media. Based on both computerized, quantitative sentiment analysis and in-depth qualitative analysis, we found that rapid public apology effectively and immediately reduced the level of negative sentiment, where the degree of change in sentiments differed by the type of interactions users engaged in. The majority of users who directly conversed with corporate representatives on the new media were not typical consumers, but experts and practitioners. We extend the existing cognitive model and suggest the audiences’ psychological reaction model to describe the information processing process during and after an organizational crisis and response. We also discuss various measures through which companies can respond to a crisis properly in social media in a fashion that is different from conventional mass media.     

A Global Optimization Approach to Multi-Polarity Sentiment Analysis

Following the rapid development of social media, sentiment analysis has become an important social media mining technique. The performance of automatic sentiment analysis primarily depends on feature selection and sentiment classification. While information gain (IG) and support vector machines (SVM) are two important techniques, few studies have optimized both approaches in sentiment analysis. The effectiveness of applying a global optimization approach to sentiment analysis remains unclear. We propose a global optimization-based sentiment analysis (PSOGO-Senti) approach to improve sentiment analysis with IG for feature selection and SVM as the learning engine. The PSOGO-Senti approach utilizes a particle swarm optimization algorithm to obtain a global optimal combination of feature dimensions and parameters in the SVM. We evaluate the PSOGO-Senti model on two datasets from different fields. The experimental results showed that the PSOGO-Senti model can improve binary and multi-polarity Chinese sentiment analysis. We compared the optimal feature subset selected by PSOGO-Senti with the features in the sentiment dictionary. The results of this comparison indicated that PSOGO-Senti can effectively remove redundant and noisy features and can select a domain-specific feature subset with a higher-explanatory power for a particular sentiment analysis task. The experimental results showed that the PSOGO-Senti approach is effective and robust for sentiment analysis tasks in different domains. By comparing the improvements of two-polarity, three-polarity and five-polarity sentiment analysis results, we found that the five-polarity sentiment analysis delivered the largest improvement. The improvement of the two-polarity sentiment analysis was the smallest. We conclude that the PSOGO-Senti achieves higher improvement for a more complicated sentiment analysis task. We also compared the results of PSOGO-Senti with those of the genetic algorithm (GA) and grid search method. From the results of this comparison, we found that PSOGO-Senti is more suitable for improving a difficult multi-polarity sentiment analysis problem.     

The relationship between lay and technical views of Escherichia coli O157 risk

Here, we bring together and contrast lay (accessible primarily through social science methodologies) and technical (via risk assessment and epidemiological techniques) views of the risk associated with the Escherichia coli O157 pathogen using two case study areas in the Grampian region of Scotland, and North Wales. Epidemiological risk factors of contact with farm animals, visiting farms or farm fields and having a private water supply were associated with postcode districts of higher than average disease incidence in the human population. However, this was not the case for the epidemiological risk factor of consumption of beef burgers, which was independent of disease incidence in the postcode district of residence. The proportion of the population expressing a high knowledge of E. coli O157 was greatest in high-incidence disease districts compared with low-incidence areas (17% cf. 7%). This supports the hypothesis that in high-disease-incidence areas, residents are regularly exposed to information about the disease through local cases, the media, local social networks, etc. or perhaps that individuals are more likely to be motivated to find out about it. However, no statistically significant difference was found between high- and low-incidence postcode districts in terms of the proportion of the population expressing a high likelihood of personal risk of infection (10% cf. 14%), giving a counterintuitive difference between the technical (epidemiological and quantitative microbiological risk assessment (QMRA)) and the lay assessment of E. coli O157 risk. This suggests that lay evaluations of E. coli O157 risk reflect intuitive and experience-based estimates of the risk rather than probabilistic estimates. A generally strong correspondence was found in terms of the rank order given to potential infection pathways, with environment and foodborne infection routes dominating when comparing public understanding with technical modelling results. Two general conclusions follow from the work. First, that integrative research incorporating both lay and technical views of risk is required in order that informed decisions can be made to handle or treat the risk by the groups concerned (e.g. the public, policy makers/risk managers, etc.). Second, when communicating risk, for example, through education programmes, it is important that this process is two-way with risk managers (e.g. including Food Standards Agency officials and communications team, public health infection control and environmental health officers) both sharing information with the public and stakeholder groups, as well as incorporating public knowledge, values and context (e.g. geographical location) into risk-management decisions.     

Focus: Vaccines: COVID-19, Vaccination,and Conspiracies: A Micro-Level Qualitative Study in Islamabad,Pakistan

Although vaccination is the only hope to fight against COVID-19, existing vaccine hesitancy is a thought-provoking phenomenon. Significantly, vaccine hesitancy is worsening the situation in Pakistan, leading to an increased number of COVID cases. In this context, this study aims to examine people’s perceptions and attitudes towards vaccination. Here the focus was on determining the factors causing disease hesitancy among the masses. The researchers randomly selected a sample of n=17 individuals and gathered data by using telephone interviews and assessed data by using the Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach. Results revealed that the increased vaccine hesitancy is due to misinformation, conspiracies, myths, and rumors about the side effects of the vaccination. It was also notable that the participants indicated digital media as the primary source of information, showing a potential relationship between social media and misinformation. Also, an intense uncertainty about the healthcare system in Pakistan is hindering the efforts to sustain herd immunity. Thus, due to several myths, rumors, and distrust of the healthcare system, vaccine hesitancy is halting the country’s ability to overcome the COVID-19 outbreak. Misinformation is vigorously circulating due to ease of access to different communication platforms, instilling fear of presumed side effects. Hence, the researchers suggest some practical considerations for the government, healthcare workers, and media platforms to counteract the misinformation and increase vaccine acceptance among the masses.     

A Case Study in Serendipity: Environmental Researchers Use of Traditional and Social Media for Dissemination

In the face of demands for researchers to engage more actively with a wider range of publics and to capture different kinds of research impacts and engagements, we explored the ways a small number of environmental researchers use traditional and social media to disseminate research. A questionnaire was developed to investigate the impact of different media as a tool to broker contact between researchers and a variety of different stakeholders (for example, publics, other researchers, policymakers, journalists) as well as how researchers perceive that their use of these media has changed over the past five years. The questionnaire was sent to 504 researchers whose work had featured in a policy-oriented e-news service. 149 valid responses were received (29%). Coverage in traditional media (newspapers, broadcast) not only brokers contact with other journalists, but is a good source of contact from other researchers (n=47, 62%) and members of the public (n=36, 26%). Although the use of social media was limited amongst our sample, it did broker contact with other researchers (n=17, 47%) and the public (n=10, 28%). Nevertheless, few environmental researchers were actively using social media to disseminate their research findings, with many continuing to rely on academic journals and face-to-face communication to reach both academic and public audiences.     

Anger Is More Influential than Joy: Sentiment Correlation in Weibo

Recent years have witnessed the tremendous growth of the online social media. In China, Weibo, a Twitter-like service, has attracted more than 500 million users in less than five years. Connected by online social ties, different users might share similar affective states. We find that the correlation of anger among users is significantly higher than that of joy. While the correlation of sadness is surprisingly low. Moreover, there is a stronger sentiment correlation between a pair of users if they share more interactions. And users with larger number of friends possess more significant sentiment correlation with their neighborhoods. Our findings could provide insights for modeling sentiment influence and propagation in online social networks.     

Twitter in the Cross Fire—The Use of Social Media in the Westgate Mall Terror Attack in Kenya

On September 2013 an attack on the Westgate mall in Kenya led to a four day siege, resulting in 67 fatalities and 175 wounded. During the crisis, Twitter became a crucial channel of communication between the government, emergency responders and the public, facilitating the emergency management of the event. The objectives of this paper are to present the main activities, use patterns and lessons learned from the use of the social media in the crisis. Using TwitterMate, a system developed to collect, store and analyze tweets, the main hashtags generated by the crowd and specific Twitter accounts of individuals, emergency responders and NGOs, were followed throughout the four day siege. A total of 67,849 tweets were collected and analyzed. Four main categories of hashtags were identified: geographical locations, terror attack, social support and organizations. The abundance of Twitter accounts providing official information made it difficult to synchronize and follow the flow of information. Many organizations posted simultaneously, by their manager and by the organization itself. Creating situational awareness was facilitated by information tweeted by the public. Threat assessment was updated through the information posted on social media. Security breaches led to the relay of sensitive data. At times, misinformation was only corrected after two days. Social media offer an accessible, widely available means for a bi-directional flow of information between the public and the authorities. In the crisis, all emergency responders used and leveraged social media networks for communicating both with the public and among themselves. A standard operating procedure should be developed to enable multiple responders to monitor, synchronize and integrate their social media feeds during emergencies. This will lead to better utilization and optimization of social media resources during crises, providing clear guidelines for communications and a hierarchy for dispersing information to the public and among responding organizations.     

'It's really a myriad of different signals, not just the textbook': the complexities of diagnosing depression in gay men in general practice

This paper reports on in-depth interviews with general practitioners (GPs) about their views and experiences of diagnosing depression in gay men - some of whom are living with HIV - and the broader social contexts in which such a diagnosis is located. This analysis is a key outcome of a collaboration between social researchers, primary healthcare researchers, GPs and community partners, to investigate the management of depression in gay men in primary care settings. As the qualitative component of this project, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 GPs with high caseloads of gay men, in three geographical settings in Australia: Sydney, Adelaide and a rural-coastal town. GPs considered the diagnosis and management of depression to be an integral part of primary care, especially in gay male patients. They had a heightened sense of awareness that depression was common in the group of patients they were seeing. Central to diagnosing depression was the ongoing, long-term relationship GPs had with their gay male patients. GPs were vigilant and proactively inquired about depression, taking into account somatic, social and psychological indicators. In their approach to diagnosing depression, GPs considered not only the life circumstances of individual patients but also the broader social context of stigma related to homosexuality, and the effects that the HIV epidemic has had on individuals, especially on gay men who have been living with HIV for a long time.     

Public Awareness and Knowledge of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) Control Activities in Abuja,Nigeria

The need to engage the public in Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) control activities has become imperative in the context of morbidity reduction through preventive chemotherapy and community participation. Therefore, a survey was conducted among the general public to assess their knowledge and awareness of NTDs control activities in Nigeria. A simple questionnaire was administered to the general public attending a job fair in Abuja, Nigeria. Of the 461 respondents, a significant proportion 337 (73.1%) have heard of NTD before, but only 291 (63.1%) have good knowledge about NTDs. However, among the specific NTDs, only the control of onchocerciasis (50.8%) was of average public awareness in Nigeria, while all the other NTDs control activities were significantly less known to the general public. 397 (87.1%) stated that government support for NTD control activities is poor and were willing to assist to advocate for NTDs control. This survey demonstrates that despite government''s numerous activities towards the control of NTDs in Nigeria, there is little sensitization of the general public. There is a need for policy changes that would raise the participation and involvement of the general public in NTDs control activities for sustainability.     

Rabies in Ireland: a precarious freedom

The prolonged freedom from rabies enjoyed by Ireland is based on both its island location and the rigid enforcement of national legislation. The yachting tourist and the increased level of shipping activity in ports and harbours are a major threat of disease introduction. Mass media publicity and public awareness are the main safeguards necessary to protect the freedom of our island.     

Tweeting the meeting: an in-depth analysis of Twitter activity at Kidney Week 2011

In recent years, the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) has increased its efforts to use its annual conference to inform and educate the public about kidney disease. Social media, including Twitter, has been one method used by the Society to accomplish this goal. Twitter is a popular microblogging service that serves as a potent tool for disseminating information. It allows for short messages (140 characters) to be composed by any author and distributes those messages globally and quickly. The dissemination of information is necessary if Twitter is to be considered a tool that can increase public awareness of kidney disease. We hypothesized that content, citation, and sentiment analyses of tweets generated from Kidney Week 2011 would reveal a large number of educational tweets that were disseminated to the public. An ideal tweet for accomplishing this goal would include three key features: 1) informative content, 2) internal citations, and 3) positive sentiment score. Informative content was found in 29% of messages, greater than that found in a similarly sized medical conference (2011 ADA Conference, 16%). Informative tweets were more likely to be internally, rather than externally, cited (38% versus 22%, p<0.0001), thereby amplifying the original information to an even larger audience. Informative tweets had more negative sentiment scores than uninformative tweets (means -0.162 versus 0.199 respectively, p<0.0001), therefore amplifying a tweet whose content had a negative tone. Our investigation highlights significant areas of promise and improvement in using Twitter to disseminate medical information in nephrology from a scientific conference. This goal is pertinent to many nephrology-focused conferences that wish to increase public awareness of kidney disease.     

The evaluation of a mass media campaign aimed at weight gain prevention among young Dutch adults

Objective: The objective was to evaluate a 3‐year nationwide mass media campaign aimed at preventing weight gain. The campaign was aimed primarily at raising awareness of the importance of weight‐gain prevention and bringing these issues to the attention of the Dutch public. Research Methods and Procedures: Eleven serial, independent, cross‐sectional, population‐based telephone surveys were used to assess campaign awareness and impact (N ranged between 483 and 493 for each of the 11 surveys). The surveys were conducted before and after six campaign waves. Multiple linear and logistic regression analyses were used to test for trends over time and for differences among the surveys for campaign awareness, message recall, perceived body weight status, overweight‐related risk perceptions, attitudes, perceived social support, self‐efficacy expectations, and motivations for preventing weight gain. Results: Campaign awareness ranged from 61% after the 1st campaign wave to 88.4% after the final wave. The campaign's television broadcasting activities were an important source of campaign awareness, from both the campaign's television commercials and television‐based free publicity. Message recall ranged from 41.9% to 68.1%. Small positive differences were found in attitudes, perceived social support, and intentions for preventing weight gain. Additionally, the results suggest mixed effects on self‐efficacy expectations and a negative effect on risk perception. Discussion: The campaign resulted in high campaign awareness, especially as a result of television commercials and free publicity on television. The results suggest that the campaign was able to create more positive attitudes and motivation but lower risk perceptions and efficacy for preventing weight gain.     

The how and why of societal publications for citizen science projects and scientists

In the scientific community, the importance of communication to society is often underestimated. Scientists and scientific organisations often lack the skills to organise such communication effectively. The Dutch citizen science phenology network Nature’s Calendar has been successful in communicating to the general public via numerous newspaper articles, television appearances, presentations, websites and social media. We refer to these publications as societal publications. Due to active communication to mass media, we frequently reach millions of people. This communication helped us to involve thousands of volunteers in recording the timing of phenological events like the start of flowering, leaf unfolding and bird migration, but also several health-related events like hay fever symptoms and tick bites. In this paper, we analyse and present our experiences with the Nature’s Calendar project regarding societal publications. Based on this analysis, we explain the importance of societal publications for citizen science projects and scientists in general, and we show how scientists can increase the newsworthiness of scientific information and what factors and activities can increase the chances of media paying attention to this news. We show that societal publications help phenological networks by facilitating the recruitment, retention and instruction of observers. Furthermore, they stimulate the generation of new ideas and partners that lead to an increase in knowledge, awareness and behavioural change of the general public or specific stakeholders. They make projects, and scientists involved, better known to the public and increase their credibility and authority. Societal publications can catalyse the production of new publications, thereby enforcing the previous mentioned points.     

Astrophysicists’ Conversational Connections on Twitter

Because Twitter and other social media are increasingly used for analyses based on altmetrics, this research sought to understand what contexts, affordance use, and social activities influence the tweeting behavior of astrophysicists. Thus, the presented study has been guided by three research questions that consider the influence of astrophysicists’ activities (i.e., publishing and tweeting frequency) and of their tweet construction and affordance use (i.e. use of hashtags, language, and emotions) on the conversational connections they have on Twitter. We found that astrophysicists communicate with a variety of user types (e.g. colleagues, science communicators, other researchers, and educators) and that in the ego networks of the astrophysicists clear groups consisting of users with different professional roles can be distinguished. Interestingly, the analysis of noun phrases and hashtags showed that when the astrophysicists address the different groups of very different professional composition they use very similar terminology, but that they do not talk to each other (i.e. mentioning other user names in tweets). The results also showed that in those areas of the ego networks that tweeted more the sentiment of the tweets tended to be closer to neutral, connecting frequent tweeting with information sharing activities rather than conversations or expressing opinions.     

Climate Change Sentiment on Twitter: An Unsolicited Public Opinion Poll

The consequences of anthropogenic climate change are extensively debated through scientific papers, newspaper articles, and blogs. Newspaper articles may lack accuracy, while the severity of findings in scientific papers may be too opaque for the public to understand. Social media, however, is a forum where individuals of diverse backgrounds can share their thoughts and opinions. As consumption shifts from old media to new, Twitter has become a valuable resource for analyzing current events and headline news. In this research, we analyze tweets containing the word “climate” collected between September 2008 and July 2014. Through use of a previously developed sentiment measurement tool called the Hedonometer, we determine how collective sentiment varies in response to climate change news, events, and natural disasters. We find that natural disasters, climate bills, and oil-drilling can contribute to a decrease in happiness while climate rallies, a book release, and a green ideas contest can contribute to an increase in happiness. Words uncovered by our analysis suggest that responses to climate change news are predominately from climate change activists rather than climate change deniers, indicating that Twitter is a valuable resource for the spread of climate change awareness.     

Social traits,social networks and evolutionary biology

The social environment is both an important agent of selection for most organisms, and an emergent property of their interactions. As an aggregation of interactions among members of a population, the social environment is a product of many sets of relationships and so can be represented as a network or matrix. Social network analysis in animals has focused on why these networks possess the structure they do, and whether individuals’ network traits, representing some aspect of their social phenotype, relate to their fitness. Meanwhile, quantitative geneticists have demonstrated that traits expressed in a social context can depend on the phenotypes and genotypes of interacting partners, leading to influences of the social environment on the traits and fitness of individuals and the evolutionary trajectories of populations. Therefore, both fields are investigating similar topics, yet have arrived at these points relatively independently. We review how these approaches are diverged, and yet how they retain clear parallelism and so strong potential for complementarity. This demonstrates that, despite separate bodies of theory, advances in one might inform the other. Techniques in network analysis for quantifying social phenotypes, and for identifying community structure, should be useful for those studying the relationship between individual behaviour and group‐level phenotypes. Entering social association matrices into quantitative genetic models may also reduce bias in heritability estimates, and allow the estimation of the influence of social connectedness on trait expression. Current methods for measuring natural selection in a social context explicitly account for the fact that a trait is not necessarily the property of a single individual, something the network approaches have not yet considered when relating network metrics to individual fitness. Harnessing evolutionary models that consider traits affected by genes in other individuals (i.e. indirect genetic effects) provides the potential to understand how entire networks of social interactions in populations influence phenotypes and predict how these traits may evolve. By theoretical integration of social network analysis and quantitative genetics, we hope to identify areas of compatibility and incompatibility and to direct research efforts towards the most promising areas. Continuing this synthesis could provide important insights into the evolution of traits expressed in a social context and the evolutionary consequences of complex and nuanced social phenotypes.