Friday, August 13, 2021

Farmers help create ‘Virtual safe space’ to save bumblebees

UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

Foxglove — IMAGE: FOXGLOVE. CREDIT MATTHIAS. BECHER view more
CREDIT: MATTHIAS. BECHER

Solutions to help pollinators can be tested using a “virtual safe space” tool created by scientists at the University of Exeter in collaboration with farmers and land managers.

BEE-STEWARD is a decision-support tool which provides a computer simulation of bumblebee colony survival in a given landscape.

The tool lets researchers, farmers, policymakers and other interested parties test different land management techniques to find out which ones and where could be most beneficial for bees.

BEE-STEWARD – which is freely available online – is a powerful tool that can make bumblebee survival predictions, according to a new study.

“We know that pollinator decline is a really big problem for crops and also for wildflowers,” said Dr Grace Twiston-Davies, of the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

“BEE-STEWARD takes into account the many complicated factors that interact to affect bumblebees.”

“This provides a virtual safe space to test out different bee-friendly management options."

“It’s a free, user-friendly tool and we have worked with land managers and wildlife groups on the ground to create it together.”

Disentangling the many factors that affect bumblebee colonies is incredibly complicated, meaning real-word testing of different methods by land managers is often not feasible.

This problem prompted the Exeter scientists to create the BEEHAVE (honeybees) and Bumble-BEEHAVE (Bumblebees) computer models. But to help bumblebees thrive across our landscapes, these tools need to be used by people on the ground and not just scientists.

BEE-STEWARD has been designed with and for land managers, farmers and conservation practitioners to test out different ideas for land management and predict the impact that these may have on bumblebee survival.

BEE-STEWARD is being used by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust to help test and guide land management to help bumblebees and farm business thrive in Cornwall. Using BEE-STEWARD, bee-friendly actions are being tested across 1,500 ha of land in collaboration with the Duchy of Cornwall Estate, the National Trust, Treiwthen Dairy and Kellys of Cornwall.

BEE-STEWARD can simulate the growth, behaviour and survival of UK bumblebee species living in a landscape providing various nectar and pollen sources to forage on.

“The BEE-STEWARD model is a significant step towards enabling practitioners to support bumblebee populations,” said Professor Juliet Osborne, who leads the team.

“The tool can be used to inform conservation and farming decisions and for assigning bespoke management recommendations.”

Professor Osborne and team won the BBSRC Social Innovator of the Year 2017 award for creating the BEEHAVE models.

"We have worked with researchers and landowners who have been using the model and have given us valuable feedback so we could improve our models further" said model developer Dr Matthias Becher.

CAPTION

Bombus lapidarius. CREDIT Matthias. Becher

CREDIT

Matthias. Becher

“Testing the BEE-STEWARD tool has helped us predict how best to provide new and improved habitat for pollinators in an informed way, considering existing and proposed flora, flowering times and location. This has focused decision making by identifying pollinator habitats that are lacking in a particular landscape, enabling us to focus our attention to improve and protect these specific areas” Ashley Taylor, Assistant Land Steward, Duchy of Cornwall Estate

BEE-STEWARD could be an important virtual test-bed for scientists exploring the impacts of different stressors on bumblebees and used by those with little or no modelling experience. Enabling a shared methodology between research, policy and practice for bumblebee survival.

“'The Bee-Steward model will be fantastic for conservation planning - it lets us time-travel to see the long-term results of changing management and compare all the possible options to see which one will work out best for bumblebees” Dr Richard Comont, Science Manager, Bumblebee Conservation Trust.

The BEE-STEWARD tool sits alongside a wider body of research by Prof. Osborne, Dr Twiston-Davies and Dr Becher around pollinator-friendly land-management. Their work on the NERC-funded SWEEP programme has included providing advice on Managing Green Space to improve biodiversity and wildlife habitats and working on the ‘Farming for the Nation’ trial for a new Agri-environment scheme with Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

The new tool, published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, is entitled: ‘BEE-STEWARD: a research and decision support software for effective land management to promote bumblebee populations’.

JOURNAL

Methods in Ecology and Evolution

DOI

10.1111/2041-210X.13673

ARTICLE TITLE

‘BEE-STEWARD: a research and decision support software for effective land management to promote bumblebee populations’.

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

12-Aug-2021

Disclaimer: AAAS a

Cancer patients use less marijuana than general public

Study shows that between 2013-2018, as many states were legalizing recreational marijuana, cancer patients continued to abstain in large numbers

Peer-Reviewed Publication

VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

Despite Legalization, Marijuana Use Remains Low Among Cancer Patients — IMAGE: ACCORDING TO DATA COLLECTED FROM 19,055 PARTICIPANTS BETWEEN 2013-2018, CANCER PATIENTS AROUND THE COUNTRY REPORTED SIGNIFICANTLY LESS MARIJUANA USE THAN PEOPLE WHO NEVER HAD CANCER, EVEN AFTER CORRECTING FOR AGE, RACE, GENDER AND OTHER FACTORS. view more
CREDIT: VCU MASSEY CANCER CENTER

Richmond, Va. — Aug. 13, 2021 — Last month, three states – Virginia, South Dakota and Connecticut – joined the ranks of more than a dozen others that have legalized marijuana – also known as cannabis – for recreational use. Yet, despite these changing laws and growing social acceptance of the drug, a new study finds that use is still lower among cancer patients.

The study, published today in the journal Cancer by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center, analyzed data from nearly 20,000 people over a span of four years and found that reports of marijuana use peaked at 9% for cancer patients, compared to 14% among people with no cancer history.

“Even when we looked at whether someone used cannabis over the four years of observation and we control for things like age and race, cancer patients are still not increasing their use over time like the general population,” said study lead author Bernard Fuemmeler, Ph.D., M.P.H., associate director for population science and interim co-leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control research program at VCU Massey Cancer Center. “I would have expected them to have at least mirrored what was happening in the general population.”

This paper drew on data collected between 2013 and 2018 from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH), which tracks a representative sample of Americans to survey smoking behaviors, including both tobacco and marijuana.

For people who never had cancer, rates of marijuana use rose during the four-year PATH study period. This same period saw a wave of recreational marijuana legalization sweep across the nation.

“Because of law enforcement changing, we expect to see changes in attitudes and perceived benefits and harms,” said study co-author Sunny Jung Kim, Ph.D., Harrison Scholar at VCU Massey Cancer Center and assistant professor of health behavior and policy at the VCU School of Medicine. “This work gives us perspective on prevalence of cannabis use among cancer patients and how it has changed over time.”

But why aren’t cancer patients following the same trend as the rest of the population? The odds of a cancer patient using marijuana in the past year were essentially flat between 2013 and 2018.

“There is that element of a life-changing moment when you have cancer,” said Fuemmeler, who is also a professor of health behavior and policy in the VCU School of Medicine and holds the Gordon D. Ginder, M.D., Chair in Cancer Research at Massey. “You have to be mindful of your health and contemplate whether something like cannabis is helpful or hurtful.”

Regardless of cancer history, this latest analysis revealed that people who reported higher levels of pain were more likely to use marijuana, whereas lower rates of marijuana use were seen among women, older people and those with higher incomes, medical insurance or better mental health.

The authors note the need for greater research into the health effects of marijuana use for cancer patients and survivors so that doctors and patients can have more informed conversations about whether the potential benefits might outweigh the risks.

“As with all health decisions, it’s best to talk to your doctor before making any big changes,” said study co-author Egidio Del Fabbro, M.D., the Thomas Palliative Care Endowed Chair and director of palliative care at VCU Massey Cancer Center and professor of internal medicine at VCU. “Now that marijuana is becoming legal in more parts of the country, we’re expecting more questions, and although we may not have all the answers, we’re here to listen and provide our patients with the best available evidence.”

Additional authors on the study include Elizabeth Do, Ph.D., and Albert Ksinan, Ph.D., both of the VCU Department of Health Behavior & Policy.

This research was funded by Massey’s NCI Cancer Center Support Grant P30 CA016059.

# # #

About VCU Massey Cancer Center
VCU Massey Cancer Center is working toward a future without cancer – one discovery, one successful therapy and one life saved at a time. Among the top 4 percent of cancer centers in the country to be designated by the National Cancer Institute to lead and shape America’s cancer research efforts, Massey is dedicated to saving and improving lives by discovering, developing, delivering and teaching effective means to prevent, detect and treat cancer and to making those advancements equally available to all. Massey is leading the nation in establishing a 21st-century model of equity for cancer research and care, in which the community is informing and partnering with Massey on its research to best address the cancer burden and disparities of those the cancer center serves. Massey conducts cancer research spanning basic, translational, clinical and population sciences; offers state-of-the-art cancer therapies and clinical trials, including a network that brings trials to communities statewide; provides oncology education, teaching and training; and promotes cancer prevention. At Massey, subspecialized oncology experts collaborate in multidisciplinary teams to provide award-winning, comprehensive cancer care at multiple sites throughout Virginia. Visit Massey online at masseycancercenter.org or call 877-4-MASSEY for more information.

JOURNAL

Cancer

DOI

10.1002/cncr.33794

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Cannabis Use in Cancer Survivors in the United States

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Aug-2021

COI STATEMENT

The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

‘Likes’ and ‘shares’ teach people to express more outrage online

Peer-Reviewed Publication

YALE UNIVERSIT

Social media platforms like Twitter amplify expressions of moral outrage over time because users learn such language gets rewarded with an increased number of “likes” and “shares,” a new Yale University study shows.

And these rewards had the greatest influence on users connected with politically moderate networks.

“Social media’s incentives are changing the tone of our political conversations online,” said Yale’s William Brady, a postdoctoral researcher in the Yale Department of Psychology and first author of the study. He led the research with Molly Crockett, an associate professor of psychology at Yale.

The Yale team measured the expression of moral outrage on Twitter during real life controversial events and studied the behaviors of subjects in controlled experiments designed to test whether social media’s algorithms, which reward users for posting popular content, encourage outrage expressions.

“This is the first evidence that some people learn to express more outrage over time because they are rewarded by the basic design of social media,” Brady said.

The study was published Aug. 13 in the journal Science Advances.

Moral outrage can be a strong force for societal good, motivating punishment for moral transgressions, promoting social cooperation, and spurring social change. It also has a dark side, contributing to the harassment of minority groups, the spread of disinformation, and political polarization, researchers said.

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter argue that they merely provide a neutral platform for conversations that would otherwise happen elsewhere. But many have speculated that social media amplifies outrage. Hard evidence for this claim was missing, however, because measuring complex social expressions like moral outrage with precision poses a technical challenge, the researchers said.

To compile that evidence, Brady and Crockett assembled a team which built machine learning software capable of tracking moral outrage in Twitter posts. In observational studies of 12.7 million tweets from 7,331 Twitter users, they used the software to test whether users expressed more outrage over time, and if so, why.

The team found that the incentives of social media platforms like Twitter really do change how people post. Users who received more “likes” and “retweets” when they expressed outrage in a tweet were more likely to express outrage in later posts. To back up these findings, the researchers conducted controlled behavioral experiments to demonstrate that being rewarded for expressing outrage caused users to increase their expression of outrage over time.

The results also suggest a troubling link to current debates on social media’s role in political polarization. Brady and his colleagues found that members of politically extreme networks expressed more outrage than members of politically moderate networks. However, members of politically moderate networks were actually more influenced by social rewards.

“Our studies find that people with politically moderate friends and followers are more sensitive to social feedback that reinforces their outrage expressions,” Crockett said. “This suggests a mechanism for how moderate groups can become politically radicalized over time — the rewards of social media create positive feedback loops that exacerbate outrage.”

The study did not aim to say whether amplifying moral outrage is good or bad for society, Crockett stressed. But the findings do have implications for leaders who use the platforms and policy makers who are considering whether to regulate them.

“Amplification of moral outrage is a clear consequence of social media’s business model, which optimizes for user engagement,” Crockett said. “Given that moral outrage plays a crucial role in social and political change, we should be aware that tech companies, through the design of their platforms, have the ability to influence the success or failure of collective movements.”

She added, “Our data show that social media platforms do not merely reflect what is happening in society. Platforms create incentives that change how users react to political events over time.”

Those wishing to learn more about the research and participate in future studies can follow the research team’s account on Twitter: @sms_researchers

JOURNAL

Science Advances

Spiral of jack fish wins 2021 BMC Ecology and Evolution image competition

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BMC (BIOMED CENTRAL)

From furry crustaceans to hunting wasps and escaping frogs, the 2021 BMC Ecology and Evolution Image Competition has produced an impressive collection of celebrated images that showcase the diversity of Earth’s animal and plant life. All images are open access and available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CCBY) license.

The overall winning image by Kristen Brown from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA depicts a school of jack fish in a spiral formation at Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia.

Kristen Brown said: “This image represents both the beauty and bounty of our oceans as well as the spiralling crisis unfolding within the marine environment. Coral reefs with high coral cover and plentiful fish populations like this one at Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef are sadly becoming rarer. Without a concentrated effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve water quality, coral reefs as we know them are at risk of disappearing within our lifetime.”

Section editor Josef Settele recommended the entry, saying: “Marine biodiversity sustains life and the health of our planet, but human activities are threatening the well-being of the world’s oceans. Kristen Brown’s striking image is a symbol for the need for concentrated efforts to manage biodiversity loss and set conservation priorities.”

In addition to the winning image, the judges also selected an overall runner up, as well as winners in six categories: Conservation Biology; Evolutionary Developmental Biology and Biodiversity; Behavioural Ecology; Human Evolution and Ecology; Ecological Developmental Biology; Population Ecology; and the Editor’s Pick. The winning images celebrate Earth’s biodiversity and its evolutionary origins, from how species learn and develop, to conflict, collaboration and parasitic relationships, both between and within species.

The Population Ecology category winner was captured by Roberto García-Roa from University of Valencia, Spain, who also submitted the winning images for the Behavioural Ecology and Human Evolution and Ecology categories. It shows soldier termites migrating along a length of abandoned rope in a Malaysian forest.

Roberto García-Roa said: “Thousands of soldier termites are able to migrate in a complex social environment where each individual has its own mission framed altogether in a global objective: the survivorship and reproduction of the colony. In this case, these termites used meters of an abandoned rope to move across the Malaysian forest. Once humans disappear, nature recovers its space and uses what is needed to survive.”

The Editor’s pick titled ‘Eerie Stalker’ by Dimitri Ouboter from the Institute for Neotropical Wildlife and Environmental Studies, Suriname captures a Giant Gladiator Frog seconds before escaping from an attempted snake attack. Giant Gladiator Frogs have been previously observed escaping from the jaws of snakes by emitting distress calls, jumping and inflating their lungs, making it harder for small snakes to hold on to them.

The BMC Ecology and Evolution Image Competition was created to give ecologists and evolutionary biologists the opportunity to use their creativity to highlight their work and celebrate the intersection between art and science. It follows on from the BMC Ecology competition, which ran for seven years until BMC Ecology merged with BMC Evolutionary Biology to form BMC Ecology and Evolution. The winning images are selected by the Editor of BMC Ecology and Evolution and senior members of the journal’s editorial board.

Editor Jennifer Harman said: “We had a wonderful experience judging the fantastic images submitted to this year’s competition. Our section editors used their expertise to ensure the winning images were picked as much for the scientific stories behind them as for the technical quality and beauty of the images themselves. As such, the competition very much reflects BMC’s ethos of innovation, curiosity and integrity. We thank all those who took part in this year’s competition; we hope that our readers enjoy viewing these images and discovering the stories behind them.”

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The winning images, along with caption information and image credits are available here: https://bit.ly/2XdZvK5. All images are available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Please name the journal in any story you write. If you are writing for the web, please link to the announcement.
BMC Ecology and Evolution is an open access, peer-reviewed journal interested in all aspects of ecological and evolutionary biology. The journal considers articles on a broad range of topics, including population genetics, conservation genetics, phylogenetics, behavioural ecology, population ecology, macroecology, palaeontology, biodiversity (e.g. environmental DNA approaches), theoretical research (e.g. terraforming) and ecological and evolutionary developmental biology.
A pioneer of open access publishing, BMC has an evolving portfolio of high quality peer-reviewed journals including broad interest titles such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, specialist journals such as Malaria Journal and Microbiome, and the BMC series. At BMC, research is always in progress. We are committed to continual innovation to better support the needs of our communities, ensuring the integrity of the research we publish, and championing the benefits of open research. BMC is part of Springer Nature, giving us greater opportunities to help authors connect and advance discoveries across the world.

JOURNAL

BMC Ecology and Evolution

DOI

10.1186/s12862-021-01886-7

ARTICLE TITLE

Inaugural BMC Ecology and Evolution image competition: the winning images

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

12-Aug-2021

CDC’s “honor system” mask guidance threatened vulnerable communities

Commentary argues that the agency’s policies may have increased risk of transmission of COVID-19 in the Black community.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL

BOSTON – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may have increased the threat of COVID-19 infection in the Black community and among some other racial and ethnic minority groups when the agency updated its mask guidance last May, according to a new commentary in the Journal of General Internal Medicine by two colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). At the time, the CDC announced that fully vaccinated people could go without masks in most circumstances, a policy recommendation that was intended to help restore a sense of normalcy, yet ignored certain realities that left some groups vulnerable, the authors argue.

A critical problem with the CDC’s May mask guidance was that there is no way to tell whether a person is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, says Simar Bajaj, a research fellow at MGH. That meant that the CDC was relying on the honor system to ensure that unvaccinated people continued to wear masks. However, earlier research indicates that people often lie about personal health information to avoid being judged, notes Bajaj. “Without a way to verify vaccination status, everyone is going to unmask,” he says, dooming the CDC’s mask guidance to fail.

Blacks in the United States were the group most likely to suffer the consequences of that failure, for a number of reasons, say Bajaj and his coauthor, Fatima Cody Stanford, MD, MPH, MPA, MBA, who is director of equity in MGH’s endocrinology division. For example, at around the time the CDC announced the mask guidance in mid May, just 28 percent of Black Americans had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to 42 percent of white Americans and 52 percent of Asians. “That’s a huge gap,” says Bajaj, who says it’s partly due to vaccine hesitancy that “is a product of everyday racism that Blacks face when navigating the health system.”

What’s more, Black Americans are far more likely than white Americans to be employed in essential jobs, meaning they can’t lower their risk for infection by working remotely. Black Americans have more medical comorbidities, which made those who became infected more likely to become seriously ill. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Blacks have had disproportionately high rates of rates of infection with the virus, hospitalization and death, point out Bajaj and Stanford.

All of these factors made the CDC guidance a threat to the Black community. “When you issue this one-size-fits-all guidance, it should come as no surprise that it could deleteriously impact communities that have been hurt the most already,” says Bajaj. A more nuanced approach, he suggests, might have used “quantitative benchmarks” to determine when it’s safe for a community to unmask, says Bajaj. One approach might be to set goals for what proportion of a community must be fully vaccinated before unmasking is recommended in a state, possibly with higher thresholds in certain racial or ethnic communities, he suggests. Digital health passes that could verify vaccination status are another tool that the CDC could explore.

Their Journal of General Internal Medicine “Viewpoint” article had already been accepted for publication when, in late July, the CDC changed its mask guidance once again, citing new scientific data about the rapidly spreading Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus—in particular, the fact that vaccinated people can transmit the variant. The revised advice encouraged vaccinated people in counties where transmission of the virus is “substantial” or “high” to wear a mask while in indoor public places. To Bajaj, that’s a step in the right direction, since the new guidance is using its own quantitative benchmark—degree of transmission in a county—to determine whether masks are necessary for vaccinated people.

“But it’s too little, too late. Once you have swung the pendulum in the direction of abandoning all caution, it’s hard to walk it back,” says Bajaj, adding that public health authorities should focus on increasing vaccination rates overall, including in communities of color, and promoting greater health equity: the idea of removing barriers to good health for all. “If we continue the current state of affairs, it will be a tale of two pandemics—one in the highly vaccinated, majority-white, suburban areas, and another ripping through and devasting minority communities,” says Bajaj. “I think that’s an unacceptable proposition.”

Bajaj is also a scholar in the department of the History of Science at Harvard College. Stanford is a physician-scientist in the departments of Medicine and Pediatrics and is an Equity Director at MGH. She is also director of Diversity for the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Harvard Medical School.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Massachusetts General Hospital Executive Committee on Research.

About the Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The Mass General Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with annual research operations of more than $1 billion and comprises more than 9,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments. In August 2021, Mass General was named #5 in the U.S. News & World Report list of “America’s Best Hospitals.”

JOURNAL

Journal of General Internal Medicine

DOI

10.1007/s11606-021-07026-7

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Commentary/editorial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The New CDC Mask Guidance: A Catastrophe for Health Equity

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

11-Aug-2021

COI STATEMENT

The authors declare that they do not have a conflict of interest.

Competitive success: New research finds performance feedback at clinics increases flu vaccination rates

Peer-Reviewed Publication

INSTITUTE FOR OPERATIONS RESEARCH AND THE MANAGEMENT SCIENCES

INFORMS Journal Management Science Study Key Takeaways:

Clinics that receive performance rankings saw a 12% increase in flu shots and outperformed all others.

Clinics that receive performance rankings try to avoid falling into last place; clinics near last place outperform other similar clinics by 23 percentage points.

Even a 1% increase in U.S. adult flu vaccination rates can translate to almost $400 million in societal benefits.

CATONSVILLE, MD, August 12, 2021 – Every year the flu threatens the health of millions of people. Experts continue to recommend annual flu vaccination as the best line of defense, but despite these recommendations, flu vaccination rates haven’t broken 50% in more than a decade. New research in the INFORMS journal Management Science seeks to overcome this. The study finds that performance feedback at healthcare clinics can significantly increase vaccination rates. This has important public policy implications. Citing other research, the authors highlight that even just a 1% increase in U.S. adult flu vaccination rates could translate to some $400 million in societal benefits.

The study, “Focusing Provider Attention: An Empirical Examination of Incentives and Feedback in Flu Vaccinations,” was conducted by Bradley Staats and Robert Niewoehner III, both of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in partnership with VaxCare, a technology company that partners with clinics to coordinate vaccination logistics. The study looked at 145 clinics in nine different states and tested whether financial incentives or performance feedback might improve vaccination rates.

“We find clinics that got performance rankings grew their flu vaccinations more than all other clinics. Specifically, our experiment led to a 12% increase in flu shots for these clinics,” said Staats, a professor of operations and Sarah Graham Kenan Scholar, faculty director of the Center for the Business of Health and associate dean of MBA programs in the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill. “We also find that the clinics who received rankings don’t want to come in last – that is, they do whatever they can to avoid the bottom rankings. Because of this, in trying move up, the clinics near last-place end up outperforming their corresponding control clinics by 23 percentage points – a significant margin!”

This research stands to have a very large impact. If even just a portion of the increased vaccination rates go to at-risk groups, this could avert serious health consequences.

“Even further – if most of an increase in flu shots went to seniors, the CDC estimates that this could prevent thousands of hospitalizations,” said Niewoehner, a doctoral candidate in the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“Our study shows that behavioral interventions like our experiment can improve performance outcomes, even when targeting seemingly immutable trends, like flu vaccination rates. Going forward, we believe our findings hold great promise for improving public health and company operations in general.”

Link to full study.

About INFORMS and Management Science

Management Science is a premier peer-reviewed scholarly journal focused on research using quantitative approaches to study all aspects of management in companies and organizations. It is published by INFORMS, the leading international association for operations research and analytics professionals. More information is available at www.informs.org or @informs.

JOURNAL

Management Science

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

“Focusing Provider Attention: An Empirical Examination of Incentives and Feedback in Flu Vaccinations”

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

12-Aug-2021

Applying data-driven multimodal speed management strategies for safe, efficient transportation

Reports and Proceedings

PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

How can we use a variety of data-driven speed management strategies to make transportation safer and more efficient for all modes–whether you’re driving, walking or taking transit?

The project was led by Yao Jan Wu, director of the Smart Transportation Lab at the University of Arizona. Co-investigators were Xianfeng Terry Yang of the University of Utah, who researches traffic operations and modeling along with connected automated vehicles, and Sirisha Kothuri of Portland State University, whose research has focused on improving signal timing to better serve pedestrians. Join them on Sept 15, 2021 for a free webinar to learn more.

"We want to improve mobility for all users, be it pedestrians, vehicle drivers or transit riders, and there are different strategies to do this. How do we harness data to drive us to these strategies?" Kothuri said.

Funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), this multi-university collaboration addressed the question from three angles:

Wu and his students in Arizona looked at the impact of speed management strategies on conventional roadways.
Yang and his team examined the effects of speed management strategies on connected corridors, coordinating with transit signal priority (TSP) systems.
Kothuri and her PSU team came up with an approach to estimate pedestrian delay at signalized intersections.

The aim of their combined research efforts was to investigate the possibility of developing and implementing more innovative speed management strategies that are effective for multimodal transportation and can be applied in both conventional roadways and "connected" roadways - i.e. equipped with vehicle-to-infrastructure or infrastructure-to-infrastructure communication capabilities.

IMPACT OF SPEED FEEDBACK SIGNS ON TRAFFIC FLOW AND SAFETY

Working with Pima County, Arizona, Wu and the Arizona research team evaluated the mobility and safety impacts of speed feedback signs on conventional roadways. Ina Road, a major signalized arterial in Tucson, was selected as the study corridor. This corridor was chosen because of the existing speed feedback signs along the corridor between signalized intersections, and due to the presence of advanced traffic data collection systems. Traffic data were collected for four weeks (May 28-June 25, 2018), and the existing signs were disabled for two weeks (June 11th-June 25th) during the data collection.

Using MioVision’s TrafficLink platform and high-resolution data, the researchers measured:

Percentage arrival on red: The percentage of vehicles that arrived at the intersection when the signal was red.
Split failure: The occurrence of leftover demand (when at least one vehicle in the queue was not able to go, but had to wait for the next green cycle) for a specific approach at an intersection.
Intersection delay: Total amount of time that all vehicles spend in the intersection queue while waiting to pass the intersection.

For a given time of day before and after disabling the speed feedback signs, only a little variation in traffic flow was observed. Similar traffic flow peaks for all the segments suggest that arterial mobility and traffic flow were not affected by disabling the signs. But what about the signs' effect on safety?

Data from the Pima Association of Governments show that the total number of severe crashes (four) on the study corridor all occurred before implementing the speed feedback signs in 2015. Moreover, using speed as a performance indicator, the researchers found a reduction in drivers' speeds along each link of the corridor, in between intersections (see page 21 of the final report for a table of speed results on weekdays and weekends). The reduction in the link speed was significant during the times the feedback signs were enabled, suggesting a reduced likelihood of severe crashes.

RETIMING SIGNALS FOR TRANSIT SIGNAL PRIORITY

Yang and the Utah team explored the impact of a speed management strategy on a connected corridor in Salt Lake City, Utah: how does signal retiming impact a transit signal priority (TSP) system?

Although TSP is a promising way to reduce bus delays at intersections, improve transit operational reliability, and consequently increase transit ridership with improved service, the effectiveness of TSP is subject to things like bus schedule, signal timing plan, passenger flows, etc. Considering this, the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) adopted a speed management strategy – signal coordination and retiming – to improve the effectiveness of TSP. UDOT implemented signal coordination along a stretch of Redwood Road, a connected corridor with dedicated short-range communication, and applied several signal timing plans with the aim of maximizing the benefits of TSP.

In general, researchers found, the average rate of TSP served before signal retiming was 33.13%, which is lower than that of 35.29% after signal retiming. This means that more buses requesting signal priority had their requests met, after the signals were retimed. In other words, the speed management strategies were also helping to improve bus reliability.

In addition, bus travel time and bus running time were reduced after signal retiming. All of these findings indicate that the speed management strategy implemented along this connected vehicle corridor results in an improvement of TSP and bus service.

ESTIMATING PEDESTRIAN DELAY

There is technology, like signal controllers that can record high-resolution data, capable of recording pedestrian delay; but not every intersection is equipped with this technology because it is costly. Agencies are upgrading their infrastructure when possible, but there are still a lot of intersections where there is no means of knowing how long of a delay a pedestrian may experience.

The PSU team, led by Kothuri, developed an alternative method for estimating pedestrian delay by using controller data for estimating multimodal signal performance measures.

Traditionally, signal timing is calibrated to prioritize vehicle movement, and long delays for pedestrians can increase noncompliance, causing unnecessary risk. So the team's goal was to find a way to use data to estimate what the pedestrian delay would be, at intersections that are not equipped with the latest infrastructure. Researchers took data from Ina Road, the same study corridor in Pima County, Arizona used to evaluate speed management strategies, and used finite mixture modeling to model pedestrian delay. Results showed that their method was able to successfully model the delay fluctuations with less than 10% mean absolute error. This method can be applied to intersections with similar characteristics as the test intersections. So cities and agencies that do not have signal controllers to capture pedestrian delay can use this finite mixture modeling method to figure out where they need to apply strategies to reduce that delay.

The application of the proposed method could be beneficial to transportation agencies in three capacities:

providing a more reliable, robust, and accurate approach for estimating pedestrian delay at signalized intersections where sensors are not available to collect pedestrian delay;
a tool for analyzing the risk of pedestrians violating the signal;
calibrating a network-wide model for estimating pedestrian delay at all intersections without the need to use additional resources

OUTCOMES OF THE RESEARCH

An effective strategy for improving mobility needed to consider both motorized and non-motorized modes of transportation. The three main achievements of this project were:

Evaluate the impact of speed management strategies along conventional arterials using smart sensor data;
Understand the role of conventional speed management strategies in supporting connected arterials;
Examine the possibility of using controller event-based data to estimate multimodal signal performance measures.

Improved multimodal speed management strategies foster a safer community that will, in turn, encourage more people to walk and bike. This project addressed data-driven multimodal speed management strategies for traditional corridors using traffic sensors, and for future evaluation of connected vehicle-based strategies. The project also strengthened relationships between the three universities and their local partners, including Pima County and the Utah DOT.

"This project highlighted the strong collaboration we have among the universities. Trying to find innovative solutions during the process tied our universities together, bringing local resources together as well," Wu said.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Data-Driven Mobility Strategies for Multimodal Transportation

Yao-Jan Wu, University of Arizona; Xianfeng Yang, University of Utah; Sirisha Kothuri, Portland State University

This research was funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities, with additional support from Pima County Public Works Administration, Portland State University, University of Arizona, University of Utah, and Utah Department of Transportation.

RELATED RESEARCH

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The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) is one of seven U.S. Department of Transportation national university transportation centers. NITC is a program of the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University. This PSU-led research partnership also includes the Oregon Institute of Technology, University of Arizona, University of Oregon, University of Texas at Arlington and University of Utah. We pursue our theme — improving mobility of people and goods to build strong communities — through research, education and technology transfer.

Is your mobile provider tracking your location? This new technology could stop it.

For the first time, researchers have found a way to protect phone users’ identity and location, without compromising connectivity.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Right now, there is a good chance your phone is tracking your location—even with GPS services turned off. That’s because, to receive service, our phones reveal personal identifiers to cell towers owned by major network operators. This has led to vast and largely unregulated data-harvesting industries based around selling users’ location data to third parties without consent.

For the first time, researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering and Princeton University have found a way to stop this privacy breach using existing cellular networks. The new system, presented at USENIX Security conference on Aug. 11, protects users’ mobile privacy while providing normal mobile connectivity.

The new architecture, called “Pretty Good Phone Privacy” or PGPP, decouples phone connectivity from authentication and billing by anonymizing personal identifiers sent to cell towers. The software-based solution, described by the researchers as an “architecture change,” does not alter cellular network hardware.

“We’ve unwittingly accepted that our phones are tracking devices in disguise, but until now we’ve had no other option—using mobile devices meant accepting this tracking,” said study co-author Barath Raghavan, an assistant professor in computer science at USC. “We figured out how to decouple authentication from connectivity and ensure privacy while maintaining seamless connectivity, and it is all done in software.”

Decoupling authentication and phone connectivity

Currently, for your phone to work, the network has to know your location and identify you as paying customer. As such, both your identity and location data are tracked by the device at all times. Data brokers and major operators have taken advantage of this system to profit off revealing sensitive user data—to date, in the United States, there are no federal laws restricting the use of location data.

“Today, whenever your phone is receiving or sending data, radio signals go from your phone to the cell tower, then into the network,” said Raghavan. “The networks can scoop up all that data and sell it to companies or information-for-hire middlemen. Even if you stop apps tracking your location, the phone still talks to the tower, which means the carrier knows where you are. Until now, it seemed like a fundamental thing we could never get around.”

But Raghavan, with study co-author Paul Schmitt who recently joined USC’s Information Sciences Institute from Princeton University, found a way: they decoupled what’s known as authentication—who you are—from your phone connectivity. The key finding: there is no reason why your personal identifier has to grant you network connectivity.

Their new system works by breaking the direct line of communication between the user’s cellphone and the cell tower. Instead of sending a personally identifiable signal to the cell tower, it sends an anonymous “token.” It does this by using a mobile virtual network operator, such as Cricket or Boost, as a proxy or intermediary.

“The key is – if you want to be anonymous, how do they know you’re a paying customer?” said Raghavan. “In the protocol we developed, the user pays the bills, and gets a cryptographically signed token from the provider, which is anonymous. Now the identity in a specific location is separated from the fact that there is a phone at that location.”

Restoring control

The duo, who have launched a startup called Invisv, prototyped and tested everything with real phones in the lab. Crucially, their approach adds almost zero latency and doesn’t introduce new bottlenecks, avoiding performance and scalability problems of other anonymity networks. The service could handle tens of millions of users on a single server and would be deployed seamlessly to customers through the network operator.

Since the system works by stopping a phone from identifying its user to the cell tower, all other location-based services—such as searching for the nearest gas station, or contact tracing—still work as usual. The researchers hope the technology will be accepted by major networks as default, particularly with mounting legal pressure to adopt new privacy measures.

“For the first time in human history, almost every single human being on the planet can be tracked in real-time,” said Raghavan. “Until now, we had to just silently accept this loss of control over our own data—we believe this new measure will help to restore some of that control.”

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Pretty Good Phone Privacy

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

11-Aug-2021