We report initial findings around the Facebook and Twitter adoption trends of 840 fire and police departments affected by Hurricane Sandy. The data show that adoption increased during the time period directly surrounding Hurricane Sandy. Despite this increase, the creation of new online accounts since that time has been declining and overall adoption rates seem to be stabilizing. Lastly, the da...

As the world population grows, recent climatic changes seem to bring powerful storms to populated areas. The impact of these storms on utility services is devastating. Hurricane Sandy is a recent example of the enormous damages that storms can inflict on infrastructure, society, and the economy. Quick response to these emergencies represents a big challenge to electric power utilities. Traditio...

The main goal of the paper is to generalize the Duistermaat-Guillemin trace formula to the case of transversally elliptic operators on a compact foliated manifold. First, let us recall briefly the setting of the classical formula. Let P be a positive self-adjoint elliptic pseudodifferential operator of order one on a closed manifold M (for example, P = √ ∆, where ∆ is the Laplace-Beltrami opera...

Adaptive learning capacity is a critical component of community resilience that describes the ability of a community to effectively gauge its vulnerability to the external environment and to make appropriate changes to its coping strategies. Traditionally, the relationship between government and community learning was framed within a deterministic paradigm. Learning outcomes were understood to ...

Humor is a ubiquitous experience that facilitates coping, social coordination, and well-being. We examine how humorous responses to a tragedy change over time by measuring reactions to jokes about Hurricane Sandy. Inconsistent with the belief that the passage of time monotonically increases humor, but consistent with the benign violation theory of humor, a longitudinal study reveals that humoro...

This paper presents a system for classifying disaster-related tweets. The focus is on Twitter data generated before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy, which impacted New York in the fall of 2012. We propose an annotation schema for identifying relevant tweets as well as the more fine-grained categories they represent, and develop feature-rich classifiers for relevance and fine-grained categori...

Ratcliff, Gomez and McKoon (2004) suggested much of what goes on in lexical decision is attributable to decision processes, and may not be particularly informative about word recognition. They proposed that lexical decision should be characterized by a decision process, taking the form of a drift-diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978), which operates on the output of lexical model. The present paper ...