AI-based research reveals that extreme temperatures fuel online hate speech
Sep 2022, phys.org
Temperatures above or below a feel-good window of 12–21 degrees Celsius (54–70 °F) are linked to a marked rise in aggressive online behavior across the U.S.Detecting hate tweets in more than four billion tweets from U.S. users with our AI-algorithm and combining them with weather data.
via Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: Temperature impacts on hate speech online: evidence from 4 billion geolocated tweets from the USA, The Lancet Planetary Health (2022). DOI: 10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00173-5
Also: A Stechemesser et al, Strong increase of racist tweets outside of climate comfort zone in Europe, Environmental Research Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac28b3 , dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac28b3
Image credit: AI Art Hybrid Prabhu B 15 - 2022
Urban elites seize most of the benefits of big cities, finds study
Jan 2023, phys.org
Ouch. This is pretty messed up.
Back up to 2010: A unified theory of urban living (Bettencourt and West) -- the legends of sociothermodynamics -- decide to measure cities like living things and find a universal scaling law similar to metabolic rates and body size. Basically everything you want to know about a city you can tell just by its size. Gas stations, patents, hospitals, suicides, cars, even average pedestrian walking speed. Everything. But wait, there's efficiency built into this scaling law -- for every doubling of a city's population, the number of new gas stations required is only 85%, not 100%, and the number of patents goes up 115%, not 100%. And that goes for everything, better medical care for less money, better garbage pick up, better job opportunities, better car dealerships, all for less money because the more people there are, the cheaper everything gets.
Cities are a stellar reactor of wealth, creativity and even social services. The more people there are, the bigger and better everything gets, and for less time and less money. This has been measured by scientists only in the past decade.
But now, when we look a bit more carefully at the data, we find that averages aren't always a good indicator of the average person's experience. Instead, the rich get all the good stuff, and the poor get even less than they would if they lived in the soul-less suburbs.
The study draws attention to the partial exclusion of most city dwellers from the socioeconomic benefits of growing cities. Their lifestyle, different than among the urban elite, benefits less from geographical location. When accounting for the cost of living in larger cities, many big-city dwellers will in fact be worse off as compared to similar people living in smaller places.
In other words, when it comes to cities, or anything for that matter, the rich get richer (insert astronaut meme).
via Linköping University: Martin Arvidsson, Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities, Nature Human Behaviour (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01509-1
Post Script:
Active matter theory explains fire-ant group behavior
Jan 2023, phys.org
Ants are considered active particles that use chemical energy to move. They can be easily concentrated to create a dense collective that we can use to address active matter questions.Active matter is based on particles that can self-propel and move due to local consumption of energy, unlike atomic or colloidal systems, whose constituents move as a result of temperature.There are two large behaviors that emerge in active matter: the first is the transition into a state in which the set of particles moves in the same direction (collective mode), a behavior usually related to bird flocks and fish schools. The other is when the motility of the particles decreases with their pair-separation distance, which can lead to the formation of aggregates, and in some cases, to the separation of a phase formed by stationary ants and a phase formed by moving ants.They can tell us about material properties: mechanical properties changed drastically depending on the state of the ant collective. In attraction-dominated phases, the behavior was similar to that of an elastic solid. In contrast, in active phases, the community reorganizes itself at the particle level to somewhat flow as a liquid
via University of Barcelona and Georgia Institute of Technology: Caleb Anderson et al, Ant waves—Spontaneous activity waves in fire-ant columns, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add0635
Also: Caleb Anderson et al, Social interactions lead to motility-induced phase separation in fire ants, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34181-0
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