Few existing surveys provide detailed longitudinal information on households and their homes. This article introduces a data source, the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which has this detailed information but has received little attention by housing researchers to date. The HRS is a rich longitudinal data set that provides information on house values, house prices, and detailed personal char...

Twitter has become a popular data source as a surrogate for monitoring and detecting events. Targeted domains such as crime, election, and social unrest require the creation of algorithms capable of detecting events pertinent to these domains. Due to the unstructured language, short-length messages, dynamics, and heterogeneity typical of Twitter data streams, it is technically difficult and lab...

Understanding human mobility patterns—how people move in their everyday lives—is an interdisciplinary research field. It is a question with roots back to the 19th century that has been dramatically revitalized with the recent increase in data availability. Models of human mobility often take the population distribution as a starting point. Another, sometimes more accurate, data source is land-u...

IDACT serves as an automated middle-layer which acts as an interface between the user and the heterogeneous data sources. Data sources are registered with the middle-layer, and a user can then request data from any (or all) of the available sources without having knowledge of the specific implementation details and formats. The data returned will be automatically converted from the native forma...

Outbreaks in which most or all persons were exposed to the same suspected source of infection, so-called universal exposure, are common. They represent a challenge for public health specialists because conducting analytical studies in such investigations is complicated by the absence of a nonexposed group. We describe different strategies that can support investigations of outbreaks with univer...

When anger or happiness flashes on a face in the crowd, do we misperceive that emotion as belonging to someone else? Two studies found that misperception of apparent emotional expressions - "illusory conjunctions" - depended on the gender of the target: male faces tended to "grab" anger from neighboring faces, and female faces tended to grab happiness. Importantly, the evidence did not suggest ...

OBJECTIVES To find evidence, either corroborating or refuting, for many persisting beliefs regarding the feasibility of carrying out surgical randomised controlled trials with a placebo arm, with emphasis on the challenges related to recruitment, funding, anaesthesia or blinding. DESIGN Systematic review. DATA SOURCES AND STUDY SELECTION The analysis involved studies published between 1959 ...

BACKGROUND Dialogue is a foundational feature of social life and an important way in which we come to understand one another. In situations of controversy dialogue is often absent because of a range of social barriers. We have developed a new film-based qualitative research method for studying controversial issues in healthcare and social policy. We call this method Brokered Dialogue. Theoretic...

Adaptivity in e-learning systems can be provided by efficient modeling of the learners. Learners are modeled based on their individual needs, differences and preferences. In this context, learning styles models are generally used for adaptivity purposes, as they model how the users learn in an effective way. Felder and Silverman learning styles model is the most widely used learning styles mode...

The objective of this paper is to show that observations of total lightning activity provide significant benefits for thunderstorm nowcasting problems. For the purposes of this paper, the term “total lightning activity” refers to the combination of in-cloud (IC) and cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning flashes. We focus on a couple of key nowcasting issues in this paper: (1) thunderstorm growth and d...