High Quality Topic Extraction from Business News Explains Abnormal Financial Market Volatility

Understanding the mutual relationships between information flows and social activity in society today is one of the cornerstones of the social sciences. In financial economics, the key issue in this regard is understanding and quantifying how news of all possible types (geopolitical, environmental, social, financial, economic, etc.) affects trading and the pricing of firms in organized stock markets. In this article, we seek to address this issue by performing an analysis of more than 24 million news records provided by Thompson Reuters and of their relationship with trading activity for 206 major stocks in the S&P US stock index. We show that the whole landscape of news that affects stock price movements can be automatically summarized via simple regularized regressions between trading activity and news information pieces decomposed, with the help of simple topic modeling techniques, into their “thematic” features. Using these methods, we are able to estimate and quantify the impacts of news on trading. We introduce network-based visualization techniques to represent the whole landscape of news information associated with a basket of stocks. The examination of the words that are representative of the topic distributions confirms that our method is able to extract the significant pieces of information influencing the stock market. Our results show that one of the most puzzling stylized facts in financial economies, namely that at certain times trading volumes appear to be “abnormally large,” can be partially explained by the flow of news. In this sense, our results prove that there is no “excess trading,” when restricting to times when news is genuinely novel and provides relevant financial information.     

From Reef to Table: Social and Ecological Factors Affecting Coral Reef Fisheries,Artisanal Seafood Supply Chains,and Seafood Security

Ocean and coastal ecosystems provide critical fisheries, coastal protection, and cultural benefits to communities worldwide, but these services are diminishing due to local and global threats. In response, place-based strategies involve communities and resource users in management have proliferated. Here, we present a transferable community-based approach to assess the social and ecological factors affecting resource sustainability and food security in a small-scale, coral reef fishery. Our results show that this small-scale fishery provides large-scale benefits to communities, including 7,353 ± 1547 kg yr^-1 (mean ± SE) of seafood per year, equating to >30,000 meals with an economic value of $78,432. The vast majority of the catch is used for subsistence, contributing to community food security: 58% is kept, 33.5% is given away, and 8.5% is sold. Our spatial analysis assesses the geographic distribution of community beneficiaries from the fishery (the “food shed” for the fishery), and we document that 20% of seafood procured from the fishery is used for sociocultural events that are important for social cohesion. This approach provides a method for assessing social, economic, and cultural values provided by small-scale food systems, as well as important contributions to food security, with significant implications for conservation and management. This interdisciplinary effort aims to demonstrate a transferable participatory research approach useful for resource-dependent communities as they cope with socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental change.     

Markets and Morals: An Experimental Survey Study

Most societies prohibit some market transactions based on moral concerns, even when the exchanges would benefit the parties involved and would not create negative externalities. A prominent example is given by payments for human organs for transplantation, banned virtually everywhere despite long waiting lists and many deaths of patients who cannot find a donor. Recent research, however, has shown that individuals significantly increase their stated support for a regulated market for human organs when provided with information about the organ shortage and the potential beneficial effects a price mechanism. In this study we focused on payments for human organs and on another “repugnant” transaction, indoor prostitution, to address two questions: (A) Does providing general information on the welfare properties of prices and markets modify attitudes toward repugnant trades? (B) Does additional knowledge on the benefits of a price mechanism in a specific context affect attitudes toward price-based transactions in another context? By answering these questions, we can assess whether eliciting a market-oriented approach may lead to a relaxation of moral opposition to markets, and whether there is a cross-effect of information, in particular for morally controversial activities that, although different, share a reference to the “commercialization” of the human body. Relying on an online survey experiment with 5,324 U.S. residents, we found no effect of general information about market efficiency, consistent with morally controversial markets being accepted only when they are seen as a solution to a specific problem. We also found some cross-effects of information about a transaction on the acceptance of the other; however, the responses were mediated by the gender and (to a lesser extent) religiosity of the respondent—in particular, women exposed to information about legalizing prostitution reduced their stated support for regulated organ payments. We relate these findings to prior research and discuss implications for public policy.     

Human Activity Dampens the Benefits of Group Size on Vigilance in Khulan (Equus hemionus) in Western China

Animals receive anti-predator benefits from social behavior. As part of a group, individuals spend less time being vigilant, and vigilance decreases with increasing group size. This phenomenon, called “the many-eyes effect”, together with the “encounter dilution effect”, is considered among the most important factors determining individual vigilance behavior. However, in addition to group size, other social and environmental factors also influence the degree of vigilance, including disturbance from human activities. In our study, we examined vigilance behavior of Khulans (Equus hemionus) in the Xinjiang Province in western China to test whether and how human disturbance and group size affect vigilance. According to our results, Khulan showed a negative correlation between group size and the percentage time spent vigilant, although this negative correlation depended on the groups’ disturbance level. Khulan in the more disturbed area had a dampened benefit from increases in group size, compared to those in the undisturbed core areas. Provision of continuous areas of high-quality habitat for Khulans will allow them to form larger undisturbed aggregations and to gain foraging benefits through reduced individual vigilance, as well as anti-predator benefits through increased probability of predator detection.     

Memory for Expectation-Violating Concepts: The Effects of Agents and Cultural Familiarity

Previous research has shown that ideas which violate our expectations, such as schema-inconsistent concepts, enjoy privileged status in terms of memorability. In our study, memory for concepts that violate cultural (cultural schema-level) expectations (e.g., “illiterate teacher”, “wooden bottle”, or “thorny grass”) versus domain-level (ontological) expectations (e.g., “speaking cat”, “jumping maple”, or “melting teacher”) was examined. Concepts that violate cultural expectations, or counter-schematic, were remembered to a greater extent compared with concepts that violate ontological expectations and with intuitive concepts (e.g., “galloping pony”, “drying orchid”, or “convertible car”), in both immediate recall, and delayed recognition tests. Importantly, concepts related to agents showed a memory advantage over concepts not pertaining to agents, but this was true only for expectation-violating concepts. Our results imply that intuitive, everyday concepts are equally attractive and memorable regardless of the presence or absence of agents. However, concepts that violate our expectations (cultural-schema or domain-level) are more memorable when pertaining to agents (humans and animals) than to non-agents (plants or objects/artifacts). We conclude that due to their evolutionary salience, cultural ideas which combine expectancy violations and the involvement of an agent are especially memorable and thus have an enhanced probability of being successfully propagated.     

Naturalistic Stimulus Structure Determines the Integration of Audiovisual Looming Signals in Binocular Rivalry

Rapid integration of biologically relevant information is crucial for the survival of an organism. Most prominently, humans should be biased to attend and respond to looming stimuli that signal approaching danger (e.g. predator) and hence require rapid action. This psychophysics study used binocular rivalry to investigate the perceptual advantage of looming (relative to receding) visual signals (i.e. looming bias) and how this bias can be influenced by concurrent auditory looming/receding stimuli and the statistical structure of the auditory and visual signals.Subjects were dichoptically presented with looming/receding visual stimuli that were paired with looming or receding sounds. The visual signals conformed to two different statistical structures: (1) a ‘simple’ random-dot kinematogram showing a starfield and (2) a “naturalistic” visual Shepard stimulus. Likewise, the looming/receding sound was (1) a simple amplitude- and frequency-modulated (AM-FM) tone or (2) a complex Shepard tone. Our results show that the perceptual looming bias (i.e. the increase in dominance times for looming versus receding percepts) is amplified by looming sounds, yet reduced and even converted into a receding bias by receding sounds. Moreover, the influence of looming/receding sounds on the visual looming bias depends on the statistical structure of both the visual and auditory signals. It is enhanced when audiovisual signals are Shepard stimuli.In conclusion, visual perception prioritizes processing of biologically significant looming stimuli especially when paired with looming auditory signals. Critically, these audiovisual interactions are amplified for statistically complex signals that are more naturalistic and known to engage neural processing at multiple levels of the cortical hierarchy.     

Social Information Embedded in Vocalizations Induces Neurogenomic and Behavioral Responses

Social cues facilitate relationships within communities. Zebra finches form long-term stable mate pairs and produce offspring within a multi-family, multi-generational community that can include hundreds of birds. Males use song to communicate in this complex environment. Males sing as part of their courtship display but also abundantly throughout each day, suggesting a role for their vocal signature outside of a reproductive context. One advantage of a vocal social cue is that it can be exchanged when birds are out of visual contact, as regularly occurs in a zebra finch community. Previous works have demonstrated that females hearing song are affected by their social relationship to the bird singing it, and the immediate social context. Here, we probed the question of whether or not the song itself carried social information, as would be expected from the situations when males sing outside of view of the female. We quantified behavioral and neurogenomic responses to two songs we predicted would have distinct “attractive” qualities in adult females housed in either mixed sex or female-only social communities. Our results show that only mixed sex-housed females show distinctive behavioral and neurogenomic responses to attractive songs. These data are consistent with the idea that the acoustic properties of song carry social information, and that the current social situation modulates the neural and behavioral responses to these signals.     

Quantifying social influence in an online cultural market

We revisit experimental data from an online cultural market in which 14,000 users interact to download songs, and develop a simple model that can explain seemingly complex outcomes. Our results suggest that individual behavior is characterized by a two-step process--the decision to sample and the decision to download a song. Contrary to conventional wisdom, social influence is material to the first step only. The model also identifies the role of placement in mediating social signals, and suggests that in this market with anonymous feedback cues, social influence serves an informational rather than normative role.     

Short and Long Term Investor Synchronization Caused by Decoupling

The dynamics of collective decision making is not yet well understood. Its practical relevance however can be of utmost importance, as experienced by people who lost their fortunes in turbulent moments of financial markets. In this paper we show how spontaneous collective “moods” or “biases” emerge dynamically among human participants playing a trading game in a simple model of the stock market. Applying theory and computer simulations to the experimental data generated by humans, we are able to predict the onset of such moments before they actually happen.     

Measuring the Effectiveness of Conservation: A Novel Framework to Quantify the Benefits of Sage-Grouse Conservation Policy and Easements in Wyoming

Increasing energy and housing demands are impacting wildlife populations throughout western North America. Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), a species known for its sensitivity to landscape-scale disturbance, inhabits the same low elevation sage-steppe in which much of this development is occurring. Wyoming has committed to maintain sage-grouse populations through conservation easements and policy changes that conserves high bird abundance “core” habitat and encourages development in less sensitive landscapes. In this study, we built new predictive models of oil and gas, wind, and residential development and applied build-out scenarios to simulate future development and measure the efficacy of conservation actions for maintaining sage-grouse populations. Our approach predicts sage-grouse population losses averted through conservation action and quantifies return on investment for different conservation strategies. We estimate that without conservation, sage-grouse populations in Wyoming will decrease under our long-term scenario by 14–29% (95% CI: 4–46%). However, a conservation strategy that includes the “core area” policy and $250 million in targeted easements could reduce these losses to 9–15% (95% CI: 3–32%), cutting anticipated losses by roughly half statewide and nearly two-thirds within sage-grouse core breeding areas. Core area policy is the single most important component, and targeted easements are complementary to the overall strategy. There is considerable uncertainty around the magnitude of our estimates; however, the relative benefit of different conservation scenarios remains comparable because potential biases and assumptions are consistently applied regardless of the strategy. There is early evidence based on a 40% reduction in leased hectares inside core areas that Wyoming policy is reducing potential for future fragmentation inside core areas. Our framework using build-out scenarios to anticipate species declines provides estimates that could be used by decision makers to determine if expected population losses warrant ESA listing.     

Transmission of Facial Expressions of Emotion Co-Evolved with Their Efficient Decoding in the Brain: Behavioral and Brain Evidence

Competent social organisms will read the social signals of their peers. In primates, the face has evolved to transmit the organism''s internal emotional state. Adaptive action suggests that the brain of the receiver has co-evolved to efficiently decode expression signals. Here, we review and integrate the evidence for this hypothesis. With a computational approach, we co-examined facial expressions as signals for data transmission and the brain as receiver and decoder of these signals. First, we show in a model observer that facial expressions form a lowly correlated signal set. Second, using time-resolved EEG data, we show how the brain uses spatial frequency information impinging on the retina to decorrelate expression categories. Between 140 to 200 ms following stimulus onset, independently in the left and right hemispheres, an information processing mechanism starts locally with encoding the eye, irrespective of expression, followed by a zooming out to processing the entire face, followed by a zooming back in to diagnostic features (e.g. the opened eyes in “fear”, the mouth in “happy”). A model categorizer demonstrates that at 200 ms, the left and right brain have represented enough information to predict behavioral categorization performance.     

Culture and Disability Behavior

A substantial amount of literature suggests that illness behavior in the United States is a product of a patient''s core culture; equally credible findings do not support this contention. Most students and graduates in the health care professions believe that illness and disability behavior are affected by a patient''s culture, but they are hard put to find convincing examples of that relationship. In experience with medical students studying the social and cultural bases of illness behavior, with patients who are disabled and with persons who claim disability in the absence of physical disease or disabling psychopathology, I observed no deviant disability behavior that was typical for the members of any cultural group, and no behavior was displayed by the members of one cultural group that was not seen in members of other cultural groups. No cultural stereotypes were upheld. I did find evidence that disability behavior is influenced by personality factors, social situations and the gains derived from the disability status. Evolving concepts of “entitlement,” which are closely related to socioeconomic status, also have a significant influence. The impact of feedback from others in a person''s many social and medical subcultures is a more crucial determinant of illness and disability behavior, except in those for whom illness and disability behavior is determined by the limitations imposed by the disease or by a personality structure resistant to cultural expectations and social feedback.     

Coupling News Sentiment with Web Browsing Data Improves Prediction of Intra-Day Price Dynamics

The new digital revolution of big data is deeply changing our capability of understanding society and forecasting the outcome of many social and economic systems. Unfortunately, information can be very heterogeneous in the importance, relevance, and surprise it conveys, affecting severely the predictive power of semantic and statistical methods. Here we show that the aggregation of web users’ behavior can be elicited to overcome this problem in a hard to predict complex system, namely the financial market. Specifically, our in-sample analysis shows that the combined use of sentiment analysis of news and browsing activity of users of Yahoo! Finance greatly helps forecasting intra-day and daily price changes of a set of 100 highly capitalized US stocks traded in the period 2012–2013. Sentiment analysis or browsing activity when taken alone have very small or no predictive power. Conversely, when considering a news signal where in a given time interval we compute the average sentiment of the clicked news, weighted by the number of clicks, we show that for nearly 50% of the companies such signal Granger-causes hourly price returns. Our result indicates a “wisdom-of-the-crowd” effect that allows to exploit users’ activity to identify and weigh properly the relevant and surprising news, enhancing considerably the forecasting power of the news sentiment.     

Community‐based social interventions for people with severe mental illness: a systematic review and narrative synthesis of recent evidence

People living with severe mental illness (SMI) are one of the most marginalized groups in society. Interventions which aim to improve their social and economic participation are of crucial importance to clinicians, policy‐makers and people with SMI themselves. We conducted a systematic review of the literature on social interventions for people with SMI published since 2016 and collated our findings through narrative synthesis. We found an encouragingly large amount of research in this field, and 72 papers met our inclusion criteria. Over half reported on the effectiveness of interventions delivered at the service level (supported accommodation, education or employment), while the remainder targeted individuals directly (community participation, family interventions, peer‐led/supported interventions, social skills training). We identified good evidence for the Housing First model of supported accommodation, for the Individual Placement and Support model of supported employment, and for family psychoeducation, with the caveat that a range of models are nonetheless required to meet the varied housing, employment and family‐related needs of individuals. Our findings also highlighted the importance of contextual factors and the need to make local adaptations when “importing” interventions from elsewhere. We found that augmentation strategies to enhance the effectiveness of social interventions (particularly supported employment and social skills training) by addressing cognitive impairments did not lead to transferable “real life” skills despite improvements in cognitive function. We also identified an emerging evidence base for peer‐led/supported interventions, recovery colleges and other interventions to support community participation. We concluded that social interventions have considerable benefits but are arguably the most complex in the mental health field, and require multi‐level stakeholder commitment and investment for successful implementation.     

“Selling” Value: The Influence of Language on Willingness-to-Accept

In behavioral economics, the “endowment effect” describes the robust finding that prices people are willing to accept (WTA) for a good exceed prices people are willing to pay (WTP) for the same good. The increase in WTA values is often explained by the sellers’ negative hedonic response to losing their item. Recent studies, however, show that subtle cues may change participants’ perspective, influencing their valuations. We hypothesized that implicit connotations of instructional language may be one of those cues. To test this hypothesis we manipulated the wording of instructions in two conditions: in the Sell condition, subjects were endowed with a set of pens and asked to select an amount of money for which they would sell the pens back and in the Take condition, subjects were endowed with the pens and asked to select an amount of money they would take for the pens. Participants in each condition also estimated the market value of the pens. Consistent with our hypothesis, WTA in the Sell condition was higher than in the Take condition, though there were no differences in market values between conditions. These findings show that instructional language does influence participant valuations. Furthermore, we suggest that those being asked to “sell” use their market estimations as the salient reference point in the transaction.     

Protein degradation sets the fraction of active ribosomes at vanishing growth

Growing cells adopt common basic strategies to achieve optimal resource allocation under limited resource availability. Our current understanding of such “growth laws” neglects degradation, assuming that it occurs slowly compared to the cell cycle duration. Here we argue that this assumption cannot hold at slow growth, leading to important consequences. We propose a simple framework showing that at slow growth protein degradation is balanced by a fraction of “maintenance” ribosomes. Consequently, active ribosomes do not drop to zero at vanishing growth, but as growth rate diminishes, an increasing fraction of active ribosomes performs maintenance. Through a detailed analysis of compiled data, we show that the predictions of this model agree with data from E. coli and S. cerevisiae. Intriguingly, we also find that protein degradation increases at slow growth, which we interpret as a consequence of active waste management and/or recycling. Our results highlight protein turnover as an underrated factor for our understanding of growth laws across kingdoms.     

Rapid evolution of social learning

Culture is widely thought to be beneficial when social learning is less costly than individual learning and thus may explain the enormous ecological success of humans. Rogers (1988. Does biology constrain culture. Am. Anthropol.  90 : 819–831) contradicted this common view by showing that the evolution of social learning does not necessarily increase the net benefits of learned behaviours in a variable environment. Using simulation experiments, we re‐analysed extensions of Rogers’ model after relaxing the assumption that genetic evolution is much slower than cultural evolution. Our results show that this assumption is crucial for Rogers’ finding. For many parameter settings, genetic and cultural evolution occur on the same time scale, and feedback effects between genetic and cultural dynamics increase the net benefits. Thus, by avoiding the costs of individual learning, social learning can increase ecological success. Furthermore, we found that rapid evolution can limit the evolution of complex social learning strategies, which have been proposed to be widespread in animals.     

Female Genitalia Concealment Promotes Intimate Male Courtship in a Water Strider

Violent coercive mating initiation is typical for animals with sexual conflict over mating. In these species, the coevolutionary arms-race between female defenses against coercive mating and male counter-adaptations for increased mating success leads to coevolutionary chases of male and female traits that influence the mating. It has been controversial whether one of the sexes can evolve traits that allow them to “win” this arms race. Here, we use morphological analysis (traditional and scanning electron micrographs), laboratory experiments and comparative methods to show how females of a species characterized by typical coercive mating initiation appear to “win” a particular stage of the sexual conflict by evolving morphology to hide their genitalia from direct, forceful access by males. In an apparent response to the female morphological adaptation, males of this species added to their typically violent coercive mounting of the female new post-mounting, pre-copulatory courtship signals produced by tapping the water''s surface with the mid-legs. These courtship signals are intimate in the sense that they are aimed at the female, on whom the male is already mounted. Females respond to the signals by exposing their hidden genitalia for copulatory intromission. Our results indicate that the apparent victory of coevolutionary arms race by one sex in terms of morphology may trigger evolution of a behavioral phenotype in the opposite sex.     

Is the Excessive Use of Microblogs an Internet Addiction? Developing a Scale for Assessing the Excessive Use of Microblogs in Chinese College Students

More and more college students are using microblogs, with some excessive users demonstrating addiction-like symptoms. However, there is currently no published scale available for use in assessing excessive use of these microblogs, a significant impediment to advancing this area of research. We collected data from 3,047 college students in China and developed a Microblog Excessive Use Scale (MEUS) for Chinese college students, comparing it with criteria used for assessing Internet addiction. Our diagnostic scale featured three factors, two of which–“withdrawal and health problem” and “time management and performance”–are already included in Internet addiction assessment scales. The third factor, “social comfort,” does not appear in Internet addiction assessment scales. Our study found that females have significantly higher MEUS scores than males, and that total MEUS scores positively correlated with scores from “self-disclosure” and “real social interaction” scales. These findings differ from results obtained in previous investigations into Internet addiction. Our results indicate that some characteristics of the excessive use of microblogs are different to those of Internet addiction, suggesting that microblog overuse may not correspond exactly to the state of Internet addiction.     

Dominant male song performance reflects current immune state in a cooperatively breeding songbird

Conspicuous displays are thought to have evolved as signals of individual “quality”, though precisely what they encode remains a focus of debate. While high quality signals may be produced by high quality individuals due to “good genes” or favourable early‐life conditions, whether current immune state also impacts signalling performance remains poorly understood, particularly in social species. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that male song performance is impaired by immune system activation in the cooperatively breeding white‐browed sparrow weaver (Plocepasser mahali). We experimentally activated the immune system of free‐living dominant males via subcutaneous injection of phytohemagglutinin (PHA) and contrasted its effects with those of a control (phosphate buffered saline) injection. PHA‐challenged males showed significant reductions in both the duration and the rate of their song performance, relative to controls, and this could not be readily attributed to effects of the challenge on body mass, as no such effects were detected. Furthermore, male song performance prior to immune‐challenge predicted the scale of the inflammatory response to the challenge. Our findings suggest that song performance characteristics are impacted by current immune state. This link between current state and signal performance might therefore contribute to enforcing the honesty of signal performance characteristics. Impacts of current state on signaling may be of particular importance in social species, where subordinates may benefit from an ability to identify and subsequently challenge same‐sex dominants in a weakened state.