Twitter and the Flu

No, I don't mean that you are going to get the flu by tweeting. What I mean is that my colleague Dr. Ming-Hsiang Tsou here in the SDSU Department of Geography is working on an algorithm to track the spread of flu by monitoring Twitter traffic. The story is reported in the San Diego Union-Tribune:

San Diego State geographer Ming-Hsiang Tsou is testing new computer algorithms that spot key words — such as “flu” — appearing on the social-media website from users in the nation’s 30 largest cities, including San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The algorithms also are designed to recognize when people are saying they’re suffering from the flu, rather than simply mentioning the ailment.

“We’re looking for a correlation between the key words and actual reported cases on flu,” said Tsou, whose research is part of a long-term project harnessing social media to help health officials and emergency responders. He’ll soon begin advising the county on how it might monitor and use social media more effectively for natural disasters, such as an earthquake or a major storm.

Social media helped to bring about the spread of pro-democracy sentiment that created the Arab Spring. It is only reasonable, then, that tracking the spread of disease should also be possible through social media. Remember to tweet next time you feel sick. We need good data.

The Demographics of Student Debt

Rising student loan debt has become a huge issue in the United States, and so it was very interesting today to see the results of a new survey from "The Project on Student Debt" of the Institute for College Access and Success. I actually picked up on the story from the Huffington Post, but the Institute's website gives you the data from their survey state by state and college by college. The biggest surprise seems to be the wide variability in student debt. Some of the differences are obvious: private schools are more expensive than public schools, so the debt load for students tends to be higher--although there are exceptions like Princeton University. Indeed, the report notes that colleges with strong endowments are more likely to provide scholarships which reduce the need for student loans. The report also indicates that very few private for-profit schools responded to their survey, but those few that did had higher than average student debt among their recent graduates. The expectation is that these schools are disproportionate contributors to the increasing student loan indebtedness.

The geographic variability was also quite amazing: 

State averages for borrowers’ debt at graduation in 2012 ranged from $18,000 to $33,650. High-debt states remain concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, with Delaware the
highest. New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Rhode Island also had average debt over $30,000. Low-debt states were mainly in the West and South, with New Mexico the lowest. Other low- debt states include California, Arizona, Nevada, and Wyoming.

Since these averages include both public and private nonprofit institutions, it is not clear why there is such regional variability, but the data seem to suggest that you should "go west" for college!

Sadly, the single biggest reason for the rise in student debt is almost certainly the fact that state support for higher education in the US has not kept up with the increasing demand for a college education. This means that students who are admitted to public universities are paying an ever higher proportion of their educational expenses because taxpayers keep cutting back on support, and since the support doesn't exist to open new public campuses to meet demand, students are forced to go to more expensive private institutions, either non-profit or for-profit, even if they can't really afford them. 

…and who can't resist The Onion's story about student debt: 
Man Doesn’t Know How Parents Ever Going To Pay Off Massive Student Loan Debt

Humans are Going the Wrong Direction in Terms of Meat Consumption

As a species, humans are omnivores, being able to subsist on a range of foods, although we are closer to herbivores than we are to carnivores. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and reported by Nature.com suggests that, unfortunately, humans are moving more toward meat in their diets, rather than less. This is bad for health, and bad for the environment. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the biggest culprits are the world's two most populous nations.

The fast-growing economies of China and India are driving a global increase in meat consumption, cancelling out decreases elsewhere, according to a comprehensive study of global food consumption.

The work, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, takes a detailed look at what people eat, as well as trends from one country to the next. It is also the first time that researchers have calculated humanity's trophic level, a metric used in ecology to position species in the food chain.

Calculating human trophic levels reveals our place in the ecosystem and can help scientists to understand human impact on energy consumption and resource strength. Calorie for calorie, the environmental impact of producing meat — in terms of everything from carbon emissions to water use — is typically many times larger than that of producing vegetable foods. Furthermore, a 2006 FAO study2 found that the livestock industry is directly or indirectly responsible for 18% of global greenhouse-gas emissions — a larger share than all modes of transport combined. “If we all increase our trophic level, we’ll start to have a bigger impact on ecosystems,” says Bonhommeau [the French scientist directing the study].

This kind of study needs to be a wake-up call for all of us to rethink how we eat--both in terms of improving our health (more vegetables are better than more meat), and in terms of moving toward global sustainability of the food supply.

Young Adults Still Staying Home in Droves

One of the provisions of the new Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is that children under 26 are allowed to stay on their parents' health insurance policies. While the government does not require that they be living with the parents for this to be so, a lot of young adults are, in fact, still at home. This was one of the findings of the latest round of data from the annual demographic supplement to the Current Population Survey, released last week by the Census Bureau. Nearly 60 percent of males aged 18-24 in the US were living with their parents (or living in a college dorm) in 2013, and the figure was 52 for women. Among those aged 25-34 the percentages were 16 and 11, respectively. The story was covered by Elizabeth Aguilera of the San Diego Union-Tribune:

San Diego State University demographer John Weeks cautioned against reading too much into small statistical changes this year, but said the overall trends reflect the hardships that young adults face.

“In the post-recession era, the jobs, particularly for young people, have not come back in the same way the stock market has come back,” he said. “So people are sticking with their parents in a way we have not seen before.”

While young women may also be having a hard time finding jobs or dealing with other financial difficulties, the burgeoning numbers living at home signal growing gender equality, Weeks said.

The historical gap in the number of men and women living with their parents stemmed from women generally marrying at an earlier age and moving out of the family home, he explained. Today, women are delaying marriage and attending college in record numbers.

“I really think we are witnessing this continued evolution in the status and role of women in society,” Weeks said.

I couldn't agree more...

Syrian Refugee Crisis Just Keeps Getting Worse

As the Syrian civil war rages on without any obvious end in sight, the plight of the country's people continues to worsen. This week the UN warned the world about the potential for a lost generation of Syrian children. The New York Times reports that:

Syria’s conflict is creating a generation of damaged children, the United Nations warned Friday in a report on the plight of more than a million children who are refugees in neighboring countries, many of them deprived of access to education and of any semblance of a normal family life or childhood.

The agency [the UNHCR] has registered more than 1.1 million children among the total of 2.2 million refugees, presenting a crisis on a scale unseen since Rwanda two decades ago, Volker Türk, the agency’s director of international protection, told reporters in Geneva. Of these refugee children, more than 385,000 were in Lebanon and 290,000 were in Jordan, he said.

The conflict had caused children of all ages “to suffer immensely, both physically and psychologically,” the report said. “Children have been wounded or killed by sniper fire, rockets, missiles and falling debris. They have experienced firsthand conflict, destruction and violence.”

The Times also reported on the increasing number of Syrian refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean to get to Europe:

...since this summer, refugees have also started pouring into Europe in what became for many weeks a humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean. Over five months, Italy’s Coast Guard rescued thousands of Syrians, even as hundreds of other migrants, including many Syrians, died in two major shipwrecks in October.

Getting a residency permit in Europe is a long and difficult task, and so after being exploited by smugglers, people find that life is not easy once ashore in Europe. It is difficult to see many happy endings here.