Skip to main content

Home/ Bobcat Research Institute 2025/ Group items tagged computer science

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Sean Nash

Study traces an infectious language epidemic | ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...240513105214.htm

LLM ChatGPT language trace cause & effect study Reddit COVID words potential research idea computer science statistical analysis mathematic behavioralscience questions HSR HSR-2025 science

shared by Sean Nash on 15 May 24 - No Cached
  • Rho's work is grounded in a social science framework called Fuzzy Trace Theory that was pioneered by Valerie Reyna, a Cornell University professor of psychology and a collaborator on this Virginia Tech project. Reyna has shown that individuals learn and recall information better when it is expressed in a cause and effect relationship, and not just as rote information. This holds true even if the information is inaccurate or the implied connection is weak. Reyna calls this cause-and-effect construction a "gist."
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 15 May 24
       
      Fuzzy Trace Theory looks interesting for this, and perhaps many other reasons. I want to learn more about this myself, and I'm wondering if this theory could be put to work in other potential behavioral science projects. What do you think?
Sean Nash

Airplane Noise Exposure May Increase Risk of Chronic Disease | SPH - 0 views

www.bu.edu/...crease-risk-of-chronic-disease

HSR HSR-2025 airplane noise disease environmental science questions statistical analysis mathematics computer science potential research idea behavioralscience

shared by Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • people who were exposed to higher levels of noise from aircraft were more likely to have a higher body mass index, an indicator for obesity that can lead to stroke or hypertension. The findings highlight how the environment—and environmental injustices—can shape health outcomes
  • self-reported body mass index (BMI)
  • The study is the first to explore a connection between aircraft noise exposure and obesity nationwide in the United States; past studies on this subject have focused on European populations, and results have varied
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24
       
      It would be interesting to see how these studied varied. I would bet that there are other, stronger factors overlying this effect, and it would be challenging to tease out this signal from other socioeconomic factors, but I very much like this concept.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • “Prior research has shown that aircraft noise can elevate stress responses and disturb sleep, but there has been mixed evidence of any links with body mass index,” says study lead and corresponding author Matthew Bozigar, assistant professor of epidemiology at OSU and a former postdoctoral associate at SPH. “We were surprised to see a fairly robust link between aircraft noise and higher body mass index among women across the US.”
  • These new findings underscore the role of the environment on one’s risk of chronic disease.
  • Junenette Peters, associate professor of environmental health, and colleagues examined airplane noise exposure and self-reported BMI and other individual characteristics among nearly 75,000 participants living around 90 of the major US airports
  • The team examined aircraft noise levels every five years from 1995 to 2010, using a day-night estimate (DNL) that captures the average noise level over a 24-hour period and applies a 10 dB adjustment for aircraft noise occurring at night, when background noise is low.
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24
       
      I'm sure there are low-powered data loggers that measure dB that we could plant in various places (varying distances from airports (or other things... even just distances from population centers in general). This would allow us to not only work with and search for correlations between data points already collected, but also to generate more specific data on our own. The human data might not necessarily have to be collected by us. The challenge might be just to find databases that have already been collected for various reasons. Much science is done in this way, where instead of generating a ton of data to analyze, the researcher used previously collected data to ask new and interesting questions of.
  • Although the team acknowledges that BMI is a suboptimal metric, the independent and strong association between more aircraft noise exposure and higher BMI that they observed is notable.
  • “We can only hypothesize about why we saw these regional variations, but one reason may relate to the era of regional development, building characteristics, and climate which may affect factors such as housing age, design, and level of insulation,” says Peters. “Regional differences in temperature and humidity may influence behaviors such as window opening, so perhaps study participants living in the West were more exposed to aircraft noise due to open windows or housing type, which allowed more noise to penetrate.”
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24
       
      The really interesting work here would be teasing interesting patterns out of really complex data sets. For example, people living near airports typically live in housing that is less expensive due to the lesser desirability of living in that area. That tends to correlate with lower socio-economic status found near airports. However, this is interesting because the major flightpaths to the KCI airport do not exactly line up in this way. For example, three of the school districts in Missouri that line up with KCI runways (Park Hill Schools - where we live, Platte County Schools, Kearney Schools, Smithville Schools, and the northern part of North Kansas City Schools) are all of a higher than average socioeconomic status than outlying areas closer to the city. This is unusual in major metropolitan areas.
  • Previous data suggest that Black, Hispanic, and low-income populations are disproportionately exposed to aircraft noise. The participants in the NHS study groups were primarily White and of mid-level socioeconomic status. 
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24
       
      Again, this is a bit different than around most airports. The area immediately surrounding KCI is rather white and mid-to-upper SES.
  • “We need to study the potential health impacts of environmental injustices in transportation noise exposures alongside other environmental drivers of poor health outcomes” Bozigar says. “There is a lot more to figure out, but this study adds evidence to a growing body of literature that noise negatively impacts health.”
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24
       
      What other environmental factors can be studied either by direct measurement, or by querying previously-collected data to ask/answer questions about environmental health?
Sean Nash

Picture this: Snapping photos of our food could be good for us - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...240530132656.htm

food diet psychology photos science HSR-2025 HSR socialmedia potential research idea behavioralscience questions computer science

shared by Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • Research reveals taking pictures of food isn't just content for our social media feeds, but could be the key to improving people's diets
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24
       
      I just have a gut feeling that, over time, if you knew you were going to photograph every meal, you would tend to eat less, eat more colorful things, and eat more varied things... so that it would make a better photograph. Each of those elements might just lead to healthier meals over time. Very interesting. It is sort of like imposing a metacognitive approach to food selection.
Sean Nash

Virtual reality warps your sense of time | ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210514134213.htm

VR virtualreality computers gaming time senses behavioralscience potential research idea biology HSR HSR-2025 science

shared by Sean Nash on 15 May 24 - No Cached
  • Sean Nash on 15 May 24
     
    Interesting, perhaps. Well, we DO have a solid VR headset.
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20▼ items per page