Instagram can help monitor teenage drinking patterns
Washington: Instagram could help monitor drinking habits of teenagers more cheaply and faster than conventional surveys and also find new patterns, such as what alcohol brands are favoured by the youth, says a new study.
Instagram is popular among teenagers and it offers large amounts of information about this target population in the form of photos and text, researchers said. Jiebo Luo, professor of computer science at the University of Rochester, and his colleagues said that underage drinkers are willing to share their alcohol consumption experience in social media. Studying the social media behaviour of this group allows the researchers to observe it passively in an “undisturbed state.”
An example of the disadvantages of traditional methods for monitoring underage alcohol consumption is that teenagers might not be honest when they respond to an administered survey about alcohol use. Also, those that choose to respond to such a survey might not be a representative sample and the sample size might be small to draw conclusions.
Instagram does not offer a way of selecting users by age, but the research team was able to select users that fit the profile they were looking for by applying computer vision techniques. Luo and his team have been pioneering techniques that teach computers to extract information from images on the Internet, something that is much more complex than just extracting information from text.
They were able to use computers to analyse the profile faces of Instagram uses to get sufficiently accurate guesses for their age, gender, and race. Having selected a group of underage users to study, the researchers monitored drinking related activities via their Instagram photos by analysing the social media tags associated with these photos using a constructed Internet slang dictionary and also any alcohol brands the users follow. In their study, the researchers found that underage alcohol consumption, like with adults, happens more on weekends and holidays and at the end of the day. There also wasn’t a strong bias toward one gender for alcohol consumption – it matched the gender ratio of Instagram users. The researchers did find that different alcohol brands are followed in varying degrees by teenagers, and that different genders follow different brands.
The researchers highlighted that this could point out brands that are attracting younger audiences in social media, information that could be useful to people working with underage drinkers. Luo said that an important next step is to check the results of their approach with surveys, to ensure their methodology is robust before applying it to extract even more information from Instagram. (PTI)
Oxygen detected on comet for first time
London: Scientists have for the first time detected abundant oxygen in the atmosphere of a comet which streaked past the Sun in August, a surprise finding that may change our understanding of the evolution of our solar system. The finding suggests the oxygen molecules were incorporated into the Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko during its formation.
European Space Agency (ESA)’s Rosetta spacecraft has been studying the comet for over a year and has detected an abundance of different gases pouring from its nucleus.
Water vapour, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide are the most prolific, with a rich array of other nitrogen-, sulphur- and carbon-bearing species, and noble gases also recorded.
“We weren’t really expecting to detect oxygen at the comet – and in such high abundance – because it is so chemically reactive, so it was quite a surprise,” said Kathrin Altwegg of the University of Bern, and principal investigator of the Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis instrument, ROSINA. “It’s also unanticipated because there aren’t very many examples of the detection of interstellar oxygen. And thus, even though it must have been incorporated into the comet during its formation, this is not so easily explained by current Solar System formation models,” Altwegg said.
The team analysed more than 3,000 samples collected around the comet between September 2014 and March 2015 to identify the oxygen molecule. They determined an abundance of 1–10 per cent relative to water, with an average value of 3.80 per cent, an order of magnitude higher than predicted by models describing the chemistry in molecular clouds.
The amount of molecular oxygen detected showed a strong relationship to the amount of water measured at any given time, suggesting that their origin on the nucleus and release mechanism are linked.
By contrast, the amount of molecular oxygen seen was poorly correlated with carbon monoxide and molecular nitrogen, even though they have a similar volatility to oxygen molecule.
In addition, no ozone was detected. Over the six-month study period, Rosetta was inbound towards the Sun along its orbit, and orbiting as close as 10–30 kilometre from the nucleus.
The comet made its closest approach to the Sun on August 13, 2015.
Despite the decreasing distance to the Sun, the oxygen/water ratio remained constant over time, and it also did not change with Rosetta’s longitude or latitude over the comet.
In more detail, the oxygen/water ratio was seen to decrease for high water abundances, an observation that might be influenced by surface water ice produced in the observed daily sublimation–condensation process.
“This is an intriguing result for studies both within and beyond the comet community, with possible implications for our models of Solar System evolution,” said Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist. (PTI)
Google’s internet balloons to circle Earth
London: Google’s much talked about Project Loon is on course and constant internet beaming from floating balloons may become a reality in certain regions as early as next year.
The company believes the move would let it trial a continuous data service to people living below the balloons’ path, BBC reported.
The declaration coincides with the announcement that three of Indonesia’s mobile networks intend to start testing Project Loon’s transmissions next year.
Google suggested that Project Loon would be a cheaper solution than installing fibre optic cables or building mobile phone masts across all of Indonesia’s islands, which contain jungles and mountains.
Google had first come up with the balloon plan in 2013.
“In the early days, the balloons would last five or seven or 10 days. Now we have had balloons that have lasted as long as 187 days,” vice-president of Project Loon, Mike Cassidy, was quoted as saying.
“(We need) about 300 balloons or so to make a continuous string around the world. As one moves along with the wind out of range, another one comes to take its place,” Cassidy explained.
Each balloon only provides connectivity to a ground area 40km in diameter below it — supplying the connected devices with about 10 megabits a second via antennae on the ground.
“We hope next year to build our first continuous ring around the world, and to have some sort of continuous coverage for certain regions. After that we will start rolling out our first beta commercial customers,” he was reported as saying. (IANS)
