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1. Mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: Impacts of disease, social isolation, and financial stressors

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277562  

   Kraut, Robert E. ; Li, Han ; Zhu, Haiyi ( November 2022 , PLOS ONE)

   Nabi, Mohammad Hayatun (Ed.)

   Although research shows that the Covid-19 pandemic has led to declines in mental health, the existing research has not identified the pathways through which this decline happens.

   The current study identifies the distinct pathways through which COVID-induced stressors (i.e., social distancing, disease risk, and financial stressors) trigger mental distress and examines the causal impact of these stressors on mental distress.

   We combined evidence of objective pandemic-related stressors collected at the county level (e.g., lack of social contact, infection rates, and unemployment rates) with self-reported survey data from over 11.5 million adult respondents in the United States collected daily for eight months. We used mediation analysis to examine the extent to which the objective stressors influenced mental health by influencing individual respondents’ behavior and fears.

   County-level, day-to-day social distancing predicted significantly greater mental distress, both directly and indirectly through its effects on individual social contacts, worries about getting ill, and concerns about finances. Economic hardships were indirectly linked to increased mental distress by elevating people’s concerns about their household’s finances. Disease threats were both directly linked to mental distress and indirectly through its effects on individual worries about getting ill. Although one might expect that social distancing from people outside the home would have a greater influence on people who live alone, sub-analyses based on household composition do not support this expectation.

   This research provides evidence consistent with the thesis that the COVID-19 pandemic harmed the mental well-being of adults in the United States and identifies specific stressors associated with the pandemic that are responsible for increasing mental distress.

    

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2. Introducing Point-of-Interest as an alternative to Area-of-Interest for fixation duration analysis

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250170  

   Rim, Nak Won ; Choe, Kyoung Whan ; Scrivner, Coltan ; Berman, Marc G. ( May 2021 , PLOS ONE)

   Kasneci, Enkelejda (Ed.)

   Many eye-tracking data analyses rely on the Area-of-Interest (AOI) methodology, which utilizes AOIs to analyze metrics such as fixations. However, AOI-based methods have some inherent limitations including variability and subjectivity in shape, size, and location of AOIs. In this article, we propose an alternative approach to the traditional AOI dwell time analysis: Weighted Sum Durations (WSD). This approach decreases the subjectivity of AOI definitions by using Points-of-Interest (POI) while maintaining interpretability. In WSD, the durations of fixations toward each POI is weighted by the distance from the POI and summed together to generate a metric comparable to AOI dwell time. To validate WSD, we reanalyzed data from a previously published eye-tracking study (n = 90). The re-analysis replicated the original findings that people gaze less towards faces and more toward points of contact when viewing violent social interactions. 

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3. Data science for pedestrian and high street retailing as a framework for advancing urban informatics to individual scales

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s44212-022-00009-x  

   Torrens, Paul M. ( October 2022 , Urban Informatics)

   In this paper, we consider the applicability of the customer journey framework from retailing as a driver for urban informatics at individual scales within urban science. The customer journey considers shopper experiences in the context of shopping paths, retail service spaces, and touch-points that draw them into contact. Around this framework, retailers have developed sophisticated data science for observation, identification, and measurement of customers in the context of their shopping behavior. This knowledge supports broad data-driven understanding of customer experiences in physical spaces, economic spaces of decision and choice, persuasive spaces of advertising and branding, and inter-personal spaces of customer-staff interaction.

   We review the literature on pedestrian and high street retailing, and on urban informatics. We investigate whether the customer journey could be usefully repurposed for urban applications. Specifically, we explore the potential use of the customer journey framework for producing new insight into pedestrian behavior, where a sort of empirical hyperopia has long abounded because data are always in short supply.

   Our review addresses how the customer journey might be used as a structure for examining how urban walkers come into contact with the built environment, how people actively and passively sense and perceive ambient city life as they move, how pedestrians make sense of urban context, and how they use this knowledge to build cognition of city streetscapes. Each of these topics has relevance to walking studies specifically, but also to urban science more generally. We consider how retailing might reciprocally benefit from urban science perspectives, especially in extending the reach of retailers' insight beyond store walls, into the retail high streets from which they draw custom.

   We conclude that a broad set of theoretical frameworks, data collection schemes, and analytical methodologies that have advanced retail data science closer and closer to individual-level acumen might be usefully applied to accomplish the same in urban informatics. However, we caution that differences between retailers’ and urban scientists’ viewpoints on privacy presents potential controversy.

    

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4. Distinct Contact Scaling Effects in MoS 2 Transistors Revealed with Asymmetrical Contact Measurements

   https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202210916  

   Cheng, Zhihui ; Backman, Jonathan ; Zhang, Huairuo ; Abuzaid, Hattan ; Li, Guoqing ; Yu, Yifei ; Cao, Linyou ; Davydov, Albert V. ; Luisier, Mathieu ; Richter, Curt A. ; et al ( April 2023 , Advanced Materials)

   2D semiconducting materials have immense potential for future electronics due to their atomically thin nature, which enables better scalability. While the channel scalability of 2D materials has been extensively studied, the current understanding of contact scaling in 2D devices is inconsistent and oversimplified. Here physically scaled contacts and asymmetrical contact measurements (ACMs) are combined to investigate the contact scaling behavior in 2D field‐effect transistors. The ACMs directly compare electron injection at different contact lengths while using the exact same MoS₂ channel, eliminating channel‐to‐channel variations. The results show that scaled source contacts can limit the drain current, whereas scaled drain contacts do not. Compared to devices with long contact lengths, devices with short contact lengths (scaled contacts) exhibit larger variations, 15% lower drain currents at high drain–source voltages, and a higher chance of early saturation and negative differential resistance. Quantum transport simulations reveal that the transfer length of Ni–MoS₂ contacts can be as short as 5 nm. Furthermore, it is clearly identified that the actual transfer length depends on the quality of the metal‐2D interface. The ACMs demonstrated here will enable further understanding of contact scaling behavior at various interfaces.

    

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5. Deciphering multi-way interactions in the human genome

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32980-z  

   Dotson, Gabrielle A. ; Chen, Can ; Lindsly, Stephen ; Cicalo, Anthony ; Dilworth, Sam ; Ryan, Charles ; Jeyarajan, Sivakumar ; Meixner, Walter ; Stansbury, Cooper ; Pickard, Joshua ; et al ( September 2022 , Nature Communications)

   Chromatin architecture, a key regulator of gene expression, can be inferred using chromatin contact data from chromosome conformation capture, or Hi-C. However, classical Hi-C does not preserve multi-way contacts. Here we use long sequencing reads to map genome-wide multi-way contacts and investigate higher order chromatin organization in the human genome. We use hypergraph theory for data representation and analysis, and quantify higher order structures in neonatal fibroblasts, biopsied adult fibroblasts, and B lymphocytes. By integrating multi-way contacts with chromatin accessibility, gene expression, and transcription factor binding, we introduce a data-driven method to identify cell type-specific transcription clusters. We provide transcription factor-mediated functional building blocks for cell identity that serve as a global signature for cell types.

    

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