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UVR-absorbing mycosporine-like amino acids (MAAs) were detected in tissues of Strongylocentrotus purpuratus and in ten species of Rhodophyte macroalgae (eight previously untested) collected from intertidal microhabitats in November and January 2006–2007 in Central California (35°09′N, 120°45′W). In sea urchins, MAA concentrations were higher in ovaries than testes, while epidermal concentrations were similar between sexes. Ovaries and epidermal tissues had similar MAA signatures and broadband UVA/UVB absorbance, while testes had a narrower absorption ranges shifted toward higher energy wavelengths. Sea urchins occupying pits in the substrate exhibited lower MAA concentrations than those outside pits, suggesting adult microhabitat may impact UV protection. Light levels did not influence gonadal MAA concentrations, but correlated with elevated epidermal MAA concentrations for males in the sunniest microhabitat. This study suggests sex and habitat strongly influence MAA concentrations among individual S. purpuratus and that allocation of MAA sunscreens to tissues in response to UVR is sex-dependent.

Intertidal and subtidal Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis (Mueller) often hide among rocks or cover themselves with debris, including macroalgae, mussel shells, and pebbles. Similar reactions in other species of sea urchins have been interpreted as a response to bright sunlight. This study examined the response of S. droebachiensis specifically to ultraviolet radiation (UVR). In laboratory studies using artificial irradiation, S. droebachiensis exposed to UVR (290 to 400 nm) and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR, 400 to 700 nm) sought shade and covered themselves significantly more frequently than those exposed only to PAR. In outdoor aquaria, individuals were exposed to ambient solar radiation that was filtered to create 4 treatments (dark, PAR, PAR + UVA, or PAR + UVA + UVB) and observed for 6 h as total solar irradiance changed with time of day. Sea urchins covered themselves with significantly more material when exposed to PAR + UVA + UVB than in all other treatments, and in response to total irradiance. The amount of covering by sea urchins exposed to PAR + UVA (320 to 400 nm) varied over the course of the day, but were typically less than those exposed to UVB (295 to 320 nm). These sea urchins covered themselves more than those exposed to PAR alone or held in the dark. Sea urchins exposed to PAR alone did not differ in the amount of covering from those held in the dark, regardless of time of day. The amount of covering correlated significantly with UVB and UVA irradiance independently, but not PAR irradiance. This study does not rule out that multiple cues may cause the covering response, but it demonstrates that S. droebachiensis seeks shelter and covers itself in response to UVR, primarily UVB wavelengths or a combination of UVA and UVB, presumably to avoid UV-induced damage.

This study aimed to further the understanding of transactional relationships that exist between problem behaviors and academic performance in early childhood. Early academic and behavior difficulties increase the risk of school disengagement, academic failure, and dropout. Although children’s academic and behavioral difficulties have been shown to be intercorrelated, little research has focused on how the relationship reciprocates and progresses in early childhood. This study investigated how problem behaviors (i.e., externalizing and internalizing) influence and are influenced by academic performance (i.e., poor reading and math) from kindergarten to third grade. Participants included 18,135 students (51.22% boys) derived from a nationally representative sample in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2011 (ECLS-K: 2011). Teacher ratings of children’s internalizing (low self-esteem, anxiety, loneliness, or sadness) and externalizing (fighting, arguing, showing anger, impulsively acting, and disruptive behaviors) problem behaviors, as well as direct assessments of children’s academic performance (reading and math), were collected yearly. Cross-lagged panel modeling (CLPM) was employed to examine reciprocal relationships between problem behaviors and academic performance over time from kindergarten to third grade. The results supported the transactional relationships in early childhood, with higher externalizing as well as internalizing problem behaviors predicting lower academic performance and lower academic performance predicting higher externalizing and internalizing problem behaviors. The implications for research, prevention, and early intervention regarding the progression of academic and behavioral problems are discussed.

The proper measurement of emotion is vital to understanding the relationship between emotional expression in social media and other factors, such as online information sharing. This work develops a standardized annotation scheme for quantifying emotions in social media using recent emotion theory and research. Human annotators assessed both social media posts and their own reactions to the posts’ content on scales of 0 to 100 for each of 20 (Study 1) and 23 (Study 2) emotions. For Study 1, we analyzed English-language posts from Twitter ( N = 244) and YouTube ( N = 50). Associations between emotion ratings and text-based measures (LIWC, VADER, EmoLex, NRC-EIL, Emotionality) demonstrated convergent and discriminant validity. In Study 2, we tested an expanded version of the scheme in-country, in-language, on Polish ( N = 3648) and Lithuanian ( N = 1934) multimedia Facebook posts. While the correlations were lower than with English, patterns of convergent and discriminant validity with EmoLex and NRC-EIL still held. Coder reliability was strong across samples, with intraclass correlations of .80 or higher for 10 different emotions in Study 1 and 16 different emotions in Study 2. This research improves the measurement of emotions in social media to include more dimensions, multimedia, and context compared to prior schemes.

We report the sequence and analysis of the 814-megabase genome of the sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, a model for developmental and systems biology. The sequencing strategy combined whole-genome shotgun and bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) sequences. This use of BAC clones, aided by a pooling strategy, overcame difficulties associated with high heterozygosity of the genome. The genome encodes about 23,300 genes, including many previously thought to be vertebrate innovations or known only outside the deuterostomes. This echinoderm genome provides an evolutionary outgroup for the chordates and yields insights into the evolution of deuterostomes.

Sentiments towards racial/ethnic minorities may impact cardiovascular disease (CVD) through direct and indirect pathways. In this study, we assessed the association between Twitter-derived sentiments towards racial/ethnic minorities at state-level and individual-level CVD-related outcomes from the 2017 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). Outcomes included hypertension, diabetes, obesity, stroke, myocardial infarction (MI), coronary heart disease (CHD), and any CVD from BRFSS 2017 ( N  = 433,434 to 433,680 across outcomes). A total of 30 million race-related tweets were collected using Twitter Streaming Application Programming Interface (API) from 2015 to 2018. Prevalence of negative and positive sentiment towards racial/ethnic minorities were constructed at the state level and merged with CVD outcomes. Poisson regression was used, and all the models adjusted for individual-level demographics as well as state-level demographics. Individuals living in states with the highest level of negative sentiment towards racial/ethnic minorities had 11% higher prevalence of hypertension (PR 1.11, 95% CI 1.08, 1.14), 15% higher prevalence of diabetes (PR 1.15, 95% CI 1.08, 1.22), 14% higher prevalence of obesity (PR 1.14, 95% CI 1.10, 1.18), 30% higher prevalence of stroke (PR 1.30, 95% CI 1.16, 1.46), 14% higher prevalence of MI (PR 1.14, 95% CI 1.03, 1.25), 9% higher prevalence of CHD (PR 1.09, 95% CI 1.00, 1.19), and 16% higher prevalence of any CVD outcomes (PR 1.16, 95% CI 1.09, 1.24). Conversely, Twitter-derived positive sentiment towards racial/ethnic minorities was associated with a lower prevalence of CVD outcomes. Programs and policies that promote racially inclusive environments may improve population health.

In the United States, racial disparities in birth outcomes persist and have been widening. Interpersonal and structural racism are leading explanations for the continuing racial disparities in birth outcomes, but research to confirm the role of racism and evaluate trends in the impact of racism on health outcomes has been hampered by the challenge of measuring racism. Most research on discrimination relies on self-reported experiences of discrimination, and few studies have examined racial attitudes and bias at the US national level. This study aimed to investigate the associations between state-level Twitter-derived sentiments related to racial or ethnic minorities and birth outcomes. We utilized Twitter's Streaming application programming interface to collect 26,027,740 tweets from June 2015 to December 2017, containing at least one race-related term. Sentiment analysis was performed using support vector machine, a supervised machine learning model. We constructed overall indicators of sentiment toward minorities and sentiment toward race-specific groups. For each year, state-level Twitter-derived sentiment data were merged with birth data for that year. The study participants were women who had singleton births with no congenital abnormalities from 2015 to 2017 and for whom data were available on gestational age (n=9,988,030) or birth weight (n=9,985,402). The main outcomes were low birth weight (birth weight ≤2499 g) and preterm birth (gestational age <37 weeks). We estimated the incidence ratios controlling for individual-level maternal characteristics (sociodemographics, prenatal care, and health behaviors) and state-level demographics, using log binomial regression models. The accuracy for identifying negative sentiments on comparing the machine learning model to manually labeled tweets was 91%. Mothers living in states in the highest tertile for negative sentiment tweets referencing racial or ethnic minorities had greater incidences of low birth weight (8% greater, 95% CI 4%-13%) and preterm birth (8% greater, 95% CI 0%-14%) compared with mothers living in states in the lowest tertile. More negative tweets referencing minorities were associated with adverse birth outcomes in the total population, including non-Hispanic white people and racial or ethnic minorities. In stratified subgroup analyses, more negative tweets referencing specific racial or ethnic minority groups (black people, Middle Eastern people, and Muslims) were associated with poor birth outcomes for black people and minorities. A negative social context related to race was associated with poor birth outcomes for racial or ethnic minorities, as well as non-Hispanic white people.

With the rapid development of new psychoactive substances (NPS) and changes in the use of more traditional drugs, it is increasingly difficult for researchers and public health practitioners to keep up with emerging drugs and drug terms. Substance use surveys and diagnostic tools need to be able to ask about substances using the terms that drug users themselves are likely to be using. Analyses of social media may offer new ways for researchers to uncover and track changes in drug terms in near real time. This study describes the initial results from an innovative collaboration between substance use epidemiologists and linguistic scientists employing techniques from the field of natural language processing to examine drug-related terms in a sample of tweets from the United States. The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of using distributed word-vector embeddings trained on social media data to uncover previously unknown (to researchers) drug terms. In this pilot study, we trained a continuous bag of words (CBOW) model of distributed word-vector embeddings on a Twitter dataset collected during July 2016 (roughly 884.2 million tokens). We queried the trained word embeddings for terms with high cosine similarity (a proxy for semantic relatedness) to well-known slang terms for marijuana to produce a list of candidate terms likely to function as slang terms for this substance. This candidate list was then compared with an expert-generated list of marijuana terms to assess the accuracy and efficacy of using word-vector embeddings to search for novel drug terminology. The method described here produced a list of 200 candidate terms for the target substance (marijuana). Of these 200 candidates, 115 were determined to in fact relate to marijuana (65 terms for the substance itself, 50 terms related to paraphernalia). This included 30 terms which were used to refer to the target substance in the corpus yet did not appear on the expert-generated list and were therefore considered to be successful cases of uncovering novel drug terminology. Several of these novel terms appear to have been introduced as recently as 1 or 2 months before the corpus time slice used to train the word embeddings. Though the precision of the method described here is low enough as to still necessitate human review of any candidate term lists generated in such a manner, the fact that this process was able to detect 30 novel terms for the target substance based only on one month's worth of Twitter data is highly promising. We see this pilot study as an important proof of concept and a first step toward producing a fully automated drug term discovery system capable of tracking emerging NPS terms in real time.

In this dissertation, several related aspects of arguments to ditransitive verbs are explored. The aim is to discover in what ways certain asymmetries in what is frequently referred to as a \"symmetric object\" language are interconnected while still allowing the other symmetric object behavior. These asymmetries are: (1) The requirement that the indirect object be object-marked in case both objects are discourse-old. (2) The ability to passivize an indirect object and object-mark a direct object but not passivize a direct object and object-mark an indirect object. (3) The ability to use the so-called \"long form\" of the verb for indirect objects in ditransitives but not for direct objects in ditransitives. To this end, the related features of object marking (Chapter 2), the long/short verbal alternation (Chapter 3), passivization (Chapter 4), and NPI and wh-phrase licensing (Chapter 5), are all examined first for their basic characteristics and then for how they operate in the ditransitive verb. I find in many cases that looking at ditransitives is particularly revealing in understanding the nature of these related processes, with key properties of the syntactic structure not being revealed until we attempt to incorporate multiple objects into these processes. In particular, data from ditransitives leads me to argue that certain phenomena that have been accounted for by other means, namely focus accounts of the long/short alternation and phonology-syntax alignment accounts of restrictions on vP focus, are in fact syntactically based. Furthermore, ditransitive data also leads us to conclude that multiple agreement (as in Hiraiwa 2001) is illicit. I argue this to be true for phi-feature agreement, case checking, and focus feature checking. Though the primary focus of this dissertation is of course on Zulu, other Bantu languages are frequently cited for comparison, including among others Swahili, Chichewa, Kinyarwanda, and Siswati. Reference is also be made to non-Bantu languages such as Greek, Icelandic, and Somali.

Intertidal and subtidalStrongylocentrotus droebachiensis(Müller) often hide among rocks or cover themselves with debris, including macroalgae, mussel shells, and pebbles. Similar reactions in other species of sea urchins have been interpreted as a response to bright sunlight. This study examined the response ofS. droebachiensisspecifically to ultraviolet radiation (UVR). In laboratory studies using artificial irradiation,S. droebachiensisexposed to UVR (290 to 400 nm) and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR, 400 to 700 nm) sought shade and covered themselves significantly more frequently than those exposed only to PAR. In outdoor aquaria, individuals were exposed to ambient solar radiation that was filtered to create 4 treatments (dark, PAR, PAR + UVA, or PAR + UVA + UVB) and observed for 6 h as total solar irradiance changed with time of day. Sea urchins covered themselves with significantly more material when exposed to PAR + UVA + UVB than in all other treatments, and in response to total irradiance. The amount of covering by sea urchins exposed to PAR + UVA (320 to 400 nm) varied over the course of the day, but were typically less than those exposed to UVB (295 to 320 nm). These sea urchins covered themselves more than those exposed to PAR alone or held in the dark. Sea urchins exposed to PAR alone did not differ in the amount of covering from those held in the dark, regardless of time of day. The amount of covering correlated significantly with UVB and UVA irradiance independently, but not PAR irradiance. This study does not rule out that multiple cues may cause the covering response, but it demonstrates thatS. droebachiensisseeks shelter and covers itself in response to UVR, primarily UVB wavelengths or a combination of UVA and UVB, presumably to avoid UV-induced damage.