It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
IMAGE: ELIZABETH NALBANDIAN, STUDY FIRST AUTHOR AND WSU FOOD SCIENCE GRADUATE STUDENT, PREPARES SOME SUGAR COOKIES MADE WITH QUINOA FLOUR FOR BAKING.view more
CREDIT: SHELLY HANKS, WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY
PULLMAN, Wash. – The “super grain” quinoa has the potential to make a super cookie, according to research by Washington State University.
In a study published in theJournal of Food Science, WSU researchers show that two types of quinoa, bred specifically to grow in Washington state, had great functionality as a potential high-fiber, high-protein additive flour for commercial cookies. This means when baked, the cookies had good “spreadability” and texture.
Taste tests are still underway, but preliminary results show that people preferred sugar cookies with 10% of the quinoa flour over a traditional all-wheat flour cookie.
“It’s the Holy Grail for food scientists: we want to develop something that people love to eat and want to go buy and buy again – and now we’re adding some fiber in without them even knowing it,” said Girish Ganjyal, a WSU food scientist and the study’s corresponding author.
Originating in South America, quinoa has a host of nutritional benefits: it is high in fiber, protein, vitamins and minerals. It is also gluten-free. While the grain is popular with health enthusiasts, it has yet to take off with many mainstream consumers. WSU researchers are working to change that.
While no official counts are available, WSU plant breeder Kevin Murphy estimates that quinoa is grown on more than 5,000 acres in the Pacific Northwest currently, and more farmers are interested.
Murphy, a co-author on this study, has been breeding quinoa lines specifically to grow well in the Pacific Northwest climate while maintaining, and even enhancing, the crop’s nutritional benefits. He has been collaborating with Ganjyal since 2014 on improving ways to bring these crops to consumers’ tables.
The current study also identified one type of quinoa that works best for “pre-cooked grain salad” – a more familiar use for quinoa – as well as identifying the quinoa varieties that worked well in baking cookies.
Food science studies like this, combined with field trials that demonstrate the crops’ agronomic traits, will help WSU researchers decide which quinoa breeding lines to release for growers’ use in 2023.
In turn, the information will help farmers decide which type of quinoa they might plant, already knowing how they could sell the crop they harvest, Ganjyal said.
In this study, researchers looked at ten different quinoa breeding lines and tested them as a flour in cookies at 25% up to 100% quinoa. Many of the breeding lines held up well at the lower levels but the cookies tended to crumble as they approached 100% quinoa flour.
The preliminary results from the taste tests also show that using up to 25% quinoa flour tended to have better results. The researchers purposely chose sugar cookies for the taste test because they are plain as opposed to chocolate chip cookies which might mask any flavor from the quinoa. For the sugar cookie, a little quinoa might have an advantage, said Elizabeth Nalbandian, the study’s first author and a Ph.D. student in Ganjyal’s lab.
“I think at 10%, quinoa added a type of nutty flavor that people really liked,” she said, noting the testers liked it even more than the control whole flour cookie.
The quinoa appreciation tended to wane after about 30% substitution, Nalbandian said, probably because the texture started becoming grittier. Still, she sees potential for quinoa flour particularly in the gluten-free market as many of those baked products can be low in nutritional content.
The researchers will continue working to develop and test quinoa food products, and Ganjyal noted that Nalbandian is particularly well suited for this work because she has experience in the culinary arts and holds an undergraduate degree in hospitality and business management as well as in food science.
“This is a chef’s art as well as a science,” he said.
Preliminary taste tests show that people preferred sugar cookies baked with 10% of the quinoa flour over traditional all-wheat flour cookies.
WSU food science graduate student Elizabeth Nalbandian prepares cookie dough containing quinoa flour for baking.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A new automated approach to detect doxing — a form of cyberbullying in which certain private or personally identifiable information is publicly shared without an individual's consent or knowledge — may help social media platforms better protect their users, according to researchers from Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology.
The research on doxing could lead to more immediate flagging and removal of sensitive personal information that has been shared without the owner’s authorization. To date, the research team has only studied Twitter, where their novel proposed approach uses machine learning to differentiate which tweet containing personally identifiable information is maliciously shared rather than self-disclosed.
They have identified an approach that was able to automatically detect doxing on Twitter with over 96% accuracy, which could help the platform — and eventually other social media platforms — more quickly and easily identify true cases of doxing.
“The focus is to identify cases where people collect sensitive personal information about others and publicly disclose it as a way of scaring, defaming, threatening or silencing them,” said Younes Karimi, doctoral candidate and lead author on the paper. “This is dangerous because once this information is posted, it can quickly be shared with many people and even go beyond Twitter. The person to whom the information belongs needs to be protected.”
In their work, the researchers collected and curated a dataset of nearly 180,000 tweets that were likely to contain doxed information. Using machine learning techniques, they categorized the data as containing personal information tied to either an individual’s identity — their social security number — or an individual’s location — their IP address — and manually labeled more than 3,100 of the tweets that were found to contain either piece of information. They then further classified the data to differentiate malicious disclosures from self-disclosures. Next, the researchers examined the tweets for common potential motivations behind disclosures, determined whether the intent was likely defensive or malicious, and indicated whether it could be characterized as doxing.
“Not all doxing instances are necessarily malicious,” explained Karimi. “For example, a parent of a missing child might benignly share their private information with the desperate hope of finding them.”
Next, the researchers used nine different approaches based on existing natural language processing methods and models to automatically detect instances of doxing and malicious disclosures of two types of most sensitive private information, social security number and IP address, in their collected dataset. They compared the results and identified the approach with the highest accuracy rate, presenting their findings in November at the 25th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.
According to Karimi, this work is especially critical in a time when leading social media platforms — including Twitter — are conducting mass layoffs, minimizing the number of workers responsible for reviewing content that may violate the platforms’ terms of service. One platform’s policy, for example, states that unless a case of doxing has clearly abusive intent, the owner of the publicly shared information or their authorized representative must contact the platform before enforcement action is taken. Under this policy, private information could remain publicly available for long periods of time if the owner of the information is not aware that it has been shared.
“While there exist some prior studies on detection of private information in general and some automated approaches for detecting cyberbullying are applied by social media platforms, they do not differentiate self-disclosures from malicious disclosures of second- and third-parties in tweets,” he said. “Fewer people are now in charge of taking action for these manual user reports, so adding automation can help them to narrow down the most important and sensitive reports and prioritize them.”
Karimi collaborated with Anna Squicciarini, Frymoyer Chair in Information Sciences and Technology, and Shomir Wilson, assistant professor of information sciences and technology, on the paper.
JOURNAL
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The short-form video platform TikTok has become one of the top social media platforms in the United States where users go to join online dance trends, get their news and even discuss politics. With a goal of understanding how TikTok encourages content creation, especially political content, a Penn State-led research team has found that the platform's unique mobile-only interface and algorithm make content creation and opportunities to go viral particularly easy yet can lead to high rates of creator burnout.
“TikTok has the most total time spent on platform of any social media company in the United States with an average of 96 minutes a day,” said Kevin Munger, Jeffrey L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor of Political Science at Penn State and project lead. “The most important media includes the content that people spend the most time consuming. Figuring out what TikTok is and what it does is a necessary step in our academic and public conversations about social media politics.”
The researchers used hashtags related to the 2020 U.S. election, such as #politics, #MAGA and #democrats, to identify and label 865 TikTok accounts as political and leaning left, right or center. They identified additional potentially political accounts by looking at accounts that interacted with the nearly 273,000 videos produced by the initial sample.
After hand-coding nearly 2,000 accounts as political and leaning left, right or center, they trained a supervised machine learning classifier to identify additional accounts. In total, they analyzed 11,546 accounts and nearly 2 million political videos uploaded to TikTok. They compared the accounts to the top 33 political channels on YouTube, another video-forward platform, to study the aspects that drive video supply and demand on the platforms and how TikTok shapes political communication.
The research team found that approximately 78% of viewers who commented on political tiktoks uploaded videos to the platform compared to 18% of YouTube commenters. The team also found that TikTok’s “For You Page,” where users spend more than two-thirds of their time and is curated by the company’s recommendation algorithm, replaced “following” behavior. The page automatically starts playing tiktoks when users open the app and can choose from the trillions of videos on the company’s servers. The recommendation algorithm makes it easier for these political videos to go viral, or be viewed thousands or even millions of times, regardless of an account’s number of followers.
“TikTok is better at guaranteeing at least some audience for every post, even if you don’t have a big network of followers,” said Munger, who described the platform as being the first social post-network where the importance of the algorithm has replaced that of the user’s network. “It gives you more of a likelihood of going viral out of nowhere. You’re more likely to see one tiktok or a few tiktoks get huge viewership numbers and the rest very few views. I think this inequality for a given account’s viewership reflects the more central role of the algorithm in determining what people watch.”
TikTok has released little information about how its algorithm chooses which videos to show on the “For You Page,” and Munger said this may leave content creators to guess what will go viral next. Because viewership relies more on the algorithm instead of an account’s number of followers, creators have to continually produce new videos to maintain higher view counts, potentially leading to high burnout rates, according to the researchers. They reported their findings in the journal Computational Communication Research.
TikTok takes advantage of a smartphone’s vertical, user-facing camera and provides filters and audio files that make it easy to create videos and tap into existing trends. These affordances incentivize more users to become creators, Munger said.
The central role of the algorithm differentiates TikTok from its competitors, according to the researchers. On YouTube, the number of views that a video receives largely correlates with the number of people subscribed to the account. In general, large subscriber numbers result in more views. Creators on YouTube can also consider viewer comments when deciding what to post in future.
TikTok’s recommendation algorithm and “For You Page” play a more central role in determining whether a video goes viral or flops, replacing the need for a large account following. The researchers looked at the peak-median views ratio, or how many more views an account’s most popular video received compared to their average video. They found that a political TikTok account’s most popular video has 64 as many views as their average video, compared to 40 on YouTube. Without the viewership security that comes with a large follower count, creators on TikTok must continually post new content in the hope that it goes viral, and the importance of the algorithm means that viewer comments carry less weight in content creators’ decision-making. These aspects can lead to high creator burnout, and the algorithm’s central role means that the company is ultimately in charge of what users see, said the researchers.
Despite the potential for burnout, TikTok’s easy-to-use interface and short-video format can lead to more cross-partisan communication compared to other platforms, added Munger.
“The fact that it’s very short – many users stick with the default 15-second video – and you can debate people point-by-point is part of what’s unique about TikTok,” he said. “There is more cross-ideological communication here than on YouTube, where hours-long videos can change the political discussion toward more fringe worldviews. I think the need for new content and to get a more personalized back-and-forth debate going engages the audience.”
Although TikTok may help facilitate political discussion, the platform’s user base skews younger, and much of the political content is poorly argued or evidenced, said Munger. He sees the platform as an opportunity for more experienced individuals to engage younger audiences.
“On the one hand, I’m quite sympathetic,” he said. “Thinking back to when I was a teenager, I did not make the best political arguments. Still, the fact that these arguments now are being consumed not just by friends but by potentially hundreds of thousands of people means that it’s important for established individuals who have different, perhaps richer perspectives to engage these audiences where they are on these platforms.”
Additional contributors to the research include Benjamin Guinaudeau, University of Kostanz, Germany; and Fabio Votta, University of Amsterdam.
IMAGE: TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES SUCH AS DEEP LEARNING, NEURAL NETWORKS AND INTERNET-OF-THINGS TECHNOLOGY ARE IMPROVING AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES CONTINUOUSLY. IN THIS STUDY, RESEARCHERS FROM KOREA, UK, AND CANADA PROPOSE A NOVEL 3D OBJECT DETECTION SYSTEM FOR THESE VEHICLES TO REALIZE A SAFER AND MORE RELIABLE DRIVING EXPERIENCE.view more
CREDIT: SCOTT SCHRANTZ FROM FLICKR (HTTPS://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SCOTTSCHRANTZ/6125665813/)
Self-driving cars, or autonomous vehicles, have long been earmarked as the next generation mode of transport. To enable the autonomous navigation of such vehicles in different environments, many different technologies relating to signal processing, image processing, artificial intelligence deep learning, edge computing, and IoT, need to be implemented.
One of the largest concerns around the popularization of autonomous vehicles is that of safety and reliability. In order to ensure a safe driving experience for the user, it is essential that an autonomous vehicle accurately, effectively, and efficiently monitors and distinguishes its surroundings as well as potential threats to passenger safety.
To this end, autonomous vehicles employ high-tech sensors, such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDaR), radar, and RGB cameras that produce large amounts of data as RGB images and 3D measurement points, known as a “point cloud.” The quick and accurate processing and interpretation of this collected information is critical for the identification of pedestrians and other vehicles. This can be realized through the integration of advanced computing methods and Internet-of-Things (IoT) into these vehicles, which allows for fast, on-site data processing and navigation of various environments and obstacles more efficiently.
In a recent study published in the IEEE Transactions of Intelligent Transport Systems journal on 17 October 2022, a group of international researchers, led by Professor Gwanggil Jeon from Incheon National University, Korea have now developed a smart IoT-enabled end-to-end system for 3D object detection in real time based on deep learning and specialized for autonomous driving situations.
“For autonomous vehicles, environment perception is critical to answer a core question, ‘What is around me?’ It is essential that an autonomous vehicle can effectively and accurately understand its surrounding conditions and environments in order to perform a responsive action,” explains Prof. Jeon. “We devised a detection model based onYOLOv3, a well-known identification algorithm. The model was first used for 2D object detection and then modified for 3D objects,” he elaborates.
The team fed the collected RGB images and point cloud data as input to YOLOv3, which, in turn, output classification labels and bounding boxes with confidence scores. They then tested its performance with the Lyft dataset. The early results revealed that YOLOv3 achieved an extremely high accuracy of detection (>96%) for both 2D and 3D objects, outperforming other state-of-the-art detection models.
The method can be applied to autonomous vehicles, autonomous parking, autonomous delivery, and future autonomous robots as well as in applications where object and obstacle detection, tracking, and visual localization is required. “At present, autonomous driving is being performed through LiDAR-based image processing, but it is predicted that a general camera will replace the role of LiDAR in the future. As such, the technology used in autonomous vehicles is changing every moment, and we are at the forefront,” highlights Prof. Jeon. “Based on the development of element technologies, autonomous vehicles with improved safety should be available in the next 5-10 years,” he concludes optimistically.
Authors: Imran Ahmed1, Gwanggil Jeon2,*, and Abdellah Chehri3
Affiliations:
1School of Computing and Information Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University
2Department of Embedded Systems Engineering, Incheon National University
3Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Royal Military College of Canada
About Incheon National University
Incheon National University (INU) is a comprehensive, student-focused university. It was founded in 1979 and given university status in 1988. One of the largest universities in South Korea, it houses nearly 14,000 students and 500 faculty members. In 2010, INU merged with Incheon City College to expand capacity and open more curricula. With its commitment to academic excellence and an unrelenting devotion to innovative research, INU offers its students real-world internship experiences. INU not only focuses on studying and learning but also strives to provide a supportive environment for students to follow their passion, grow, and, as their slogan says, be INspired.
A Smart IoT Enabled End-to-End 3D Object Detection System for Autonomous Vehicles
Does throwing my voice make you want to shop here?
By breaking the laws of physics in a virtual reality environment, researchers from the University of Tsukuba find that changing the location of a virtual assistant's voice in specific ways can be used as a tool to build rapport with customers
Tsukuba, Japan—Virtual environments, including those for commerce, are increasingly common so as to provide an experience for the user that is as realistic as possible. However, virtual environments also provide a new opportunity for researchers to conduct experiments that would not be possible in the real world. Researchers from the University of Tsukuba have done just that by exploring how changing the position of the virtual shop assistant's voice from its visual position would impact the shopping experience of humans in a virtual reality store.
Humans locate sound by combining visual and auditory cues. Because the visual cues are generally less variable, they can override audio cues, leading to the well-known ventriloquism effect, which occurs when a human perceives the location of a sound to be different from its actual source. It is also well known that humans have personal space, which varies according to social, personal, and environmental factors. Although both phenomena have long been studied individually, until the development of virtual reality, it has not been possible to study how the ventriloquism effect alters personal space.
"In particular, we wanted to know how it affects the rapport between the user and shop assistant," says Professor Zempo Keiichi, lead author of the study. Rapport, or the quality of interpersonal service, strongly affects loyalty and satisfaction, and skilled salespeople use several techniques to build rapport with customers.
In their experiments, the researchers asked 16 people in the virtual shop environment to define their personal space and record their impression when approached by shop assistants. Some assistants had both a voice and an image at the same position, and others had a voice that was located at different distances between the user and assistant.
"We found that rapport was not affected when the deviation between the sound and visual positions could not be tolerated; however, when it could be tolerated, we found two distinct phenomena," explains Professor Zempo Keiichi. The first was similar to the "uncanny valley," which occurs when an imperfect human representation invokes feelings of uneasiness in a real human. This decreased rapport with the virtual assistant. But when the sound moved even closer to the human, the rapport increased.
The authors call this phenomenon the "mouth-in-the-door" phenomenon because it is similar to the "foot-in-the-door" phenomenon, in which a small, unconscious consent, such as not moving away when someone starts to speak, causes a person to improve their evaluation of the other person. Without these virtual experiments, this phenomenon would have likely remained undiscovered. But now that it is known, the authors believe it can be used to improve the user experience, especially in virtual shop scenarios.
Original Paper
The article, "Mouth-in-the-door: The effect of a sound image of an avatar intruding on personal space that deviates in position from the visual image," was published in IEEE Access at DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3222804
A critical set of genes linked to successful racehorses has been identified by an international research team.
Scientists from Asia, Europe, North America, and the Irish equine science company Plusvital compared the genomes of Thoroughbred, Arabian and Mongolian racehorses to horses bred for other sports and leisure, and were able to pinpoint a set of genes that play a significant role in muscle, metabolism, and neurobiology.
These genes were found to be clearly different in racing horses, and were common to all racing breeds compared to those animals from non-racing breeds.
“Since the discovery of the ‘Speed Gene’ in 2009, we have generated genetic data for thousands of Thoroughbreds and horses from other breeds,” said University College Dublin Professor Emmeline Hill, lead scientist on the project and Chief Science Officer at Plusvital.
“This is the first time this set of genes has been linked to the success of racing breeds. Two of the genes were previously identified for performance in Thoroughbreds and Arabians, but the approach we took was to ask what genes were common to all racing breeds and different from non-racing breeds.
“The very large number of horse breeds developed over the last hundreds of years all over the world have been carefully shaped by selective breeding for different traits desired by breeders. This has led to tall horses, small horses, powerful draft horses, useful riding horses, and fast racing horses.
“We have discovered a set of genes common to racing horses, but not all horses within a racing breed have the advantageous gene version, so these findings will be useful to identify the most suitable individuals within a breed for racing or for breeding.”
Co-author UCD Professor David MacHugh commented “Although racing is a multifactorial trait, with management and training having a considerable influence on the success of a racehorse, this study provides good evidence for major-effect genes shaping the racing trait in horse populations.”
The research, published in Communications Biology, an open access journal from Nature, included the collection of hair samples from 100 horses owned by the champion Ajnai Sharga Horse Racing Team at their breeding farm in Khentii province, Mongolia, the birthplace of Chinggis Khan.
Using the DNA from these Mongolian racing horses, along with Thoroughbred and racing Arabian horses, the scientists compared the genomes of these breeds with 21 other non-racing breeds, such as Clydesdale, Connemara pony, Hanoverian, Morgan, Norwegian Fjord, Paint, Shetland, Shire, and identified seven essential genes for racing.
Among the top genes was NTM, which functions in brain development and influences learning and memory. This gene was selected during the horse domestication process, and in Thoroughbred racehorses influences whether a horse ever races.
“This finding suggests that equine neurological systems perturbed by natural and artificial selection associated with domestication may overlap with adaptive traits that are required for racing,” said Professor MacHugh.
Dr Haige Han, another project collaborator and first author of the paper added: “Testing these variants in new sets of hundreds of horses from racing and non-racing breeds identified seven essential genes for racing. These genes have roles in muscle, metabolism, and neurobiological functions, and are central to racing ability among horse breeds.”
The researchers used gene expression data from skeletal muscle from Thoroughbred horses to investigate if the genes they had identified were involved in the muscle response to exercise and training.
“By integrating these two different data sets we fine-tuned the list of racing genes to those that were most biologically relevant to racing. One of these genes was MYLK2 which is required for muscle contraction. In humans, MYLK2 is associated with exercise-induced muscle damage,” said Professor Hill.
This research was supported by National Key R&D Program of China; National Natural Science Foundation of China; Science Foundation Ireland; US National Institutes of Health; Royal Agricultural University Cirencester Fund; and Plusvital Ltd.
It was performed in collaboration with the UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science and UCD Conway Institute, Ireland; the Royal Agricultural University, UK; Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, China; Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Ajnai Sharga Horse Racing Team, Mongolian University of Science and Technology, and Mongolian National University of Medical Sciences, Mongolia; Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Switzerland; California Institute of Technology and the Saban Research Institute, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, USA; and Plusvital Ltd.
Plusvital has been a leader in equine science since its formation in 1975, growing out of Ireland’s world-famous racing and sport horse tradition.
In 2015, Plusvital acquired Equinome, a UCD spin-out company co-founded by Professor Hill, which now provides tests that analyse the DNA of horses to predict racing performance potential. Plusvital’s clients include leading trainers, owners, and breeders in all of the major thoroughbred regions around the world.
Authors: Haige Han, Beatrice A. McGivney, Lucy Allen, Dongyi Bai, Leanne R. Corduff, Gantulga Davaakhuu, Jargalsaikhan Davaasambuu, Dulguun Dorjgotov, Thomas J. Hall, Andrew J. Hemmings, Amy R. Holtby, Tuyatsetseg Jambal, Badarch Jargalsaikhan, Uyasakh Jargalsaikhan, Naveen K. Kadri, David E. MacHugh, Hubert Pausch, Carol Readhead, David Warburton, Manglai Dugarjaviin, and Emmeline W. Hill.
IMAGE: AMBULANCE RESPONDING TO AN EMERGENCYview more
CREDIT: JOURNAL OF STUDIES ON ALCOHOL AND DRUGS
By Kimberly Flynn
PISCATAWAY, NJ — When people are injured severely enough to require treatment at the hospital and they are either intoxicated or have an alcohol use disorder, they have a fivefold increased risk of dying in the next year, according to a new study in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
“Injuries are one of the most immediate hazards of problematic drinking behavior,” says lead researcher Sidra Goldman-Mellor, Ph.D., from the Department of Public Health at the University of California, Merced. “In addition to getting injured from things like car accidents and falls, some people may get injured in fights or even engage in self-harm after they’ve been drinking. However, we actually know very little about what happens to people with an alcohol use disorder after they’ve had a serious injury. So we wanted to investigate the most important outcome of all: how likely they were to die.”
To study this, Goldman-Mellor and colleagues examined data on all 10 million emergency department visits by California residents age 10 and older from 2009 to 2012. Of these patients, 262,222 had a nonfatal injury and either had a diagnosis of an alcohol use disorder or were intoxicated at the time of the injury.
Most (76.9%) of these injuries were coded as unintentional, with an additional 13.2% due to assault, 7.9% to self-harm and 2.1% due to undetermined intent.
Within 12 months of their hospital visit, 13,175 of these patients had died -- more than 5% -- with a total mortality rate of nearly 5,205 per 100,000. The researchers determined this is more than five times the rate for the rest of the California population, matched for age, gender, race and ethnicity, all strong determinants of mortality risk.
Goldman-Mellor says she and her colleagues were prompted to study this topic because of evidence that alcohol use -- including problematic alcohol use -- has increased over the last several years, especially during the pandemic. She says they were surprised by their findings.
“Injuries associated with alcohol use disorders are a public health problem in their own right, but now we know that they’re also associated with a substantially increased risk of death,” says Goldman-Mellor. “Most people who struggle with alcohol misuse don’t get the help they need.”
The research team was not able to examine what happened to the patients after discharge but suspects that many were already quite sick when they initially came to the hospital, with patients’ health declining after that.
Goldman-Mellor points to emergency departments themselves as one place in which people with alcohol problems might be able to get additional help. She notes that some emergency departments can connect patients to resources such as outpatient programs integrating substance use treatment with regular primary care for chronic conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and liver disease.
“Hopefully studies like ours can be used to increase resources for getting all such patients connected with comprehensive care, both for their substance use and general health,” she says.
----- Goldman-Mellor, S., Kaplan M. S., & Qin P. (2022). Mortality risk following nonfatal injuries with alcohol use disorder involvement: A one-year follow-up of emergency department patients using linked administrative data. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 83, 879–887. doi:10.15288/jsad.21-00444 ----- To arrange an interview with Sidra Goldman-Mellor, Ph.D., please contact Juan Flores at jflores331@ucmerced.edu or (562) 201-7317. ----- The Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (jsad.com) is published by the Center of Alcohol & Substance Use Studies (alcoholstudies.rutgers.edu) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. It is the oldest substance-related journal published in the United States. ----- The Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs considers this press release to be in the public domain. Editors may publish this press release in print or electronic form without legal restriction. Please include a byline and citation. ----- To view the public domain, stock-photo database of alcohol, tobacco and other drug-related images compiled by the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, please visit www.jsad.com/photos.
Mortality risk following nonfatal injuries with alcohol use disorder involvement: A one-year follow-up of emergency department patients using linked administrative data
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), alcohol kills on average 2,760 people per year. The leading causes include 641 poisoning deaths, 350 deaths from alcoholic liver disease, 294 deaths from cancers attributable to alcohol use, and 211 liver cirrhosis deaths.
Alcohol’s toll in terms of death and disability rose by 13.8% from 2009 to 2019—faster than lung cancer, diabetes, hypertension, dietary risks or tobacco use. During the pandemic, nearly two in five (38%) of Massachusetts adults reported they increased their drinking, while nationwide, deaths involving alcohol increased by 25.5% from 2019 to 2020.
Meanwhile, the state’s alcohol taxes have lost 72% of their value in real dollars since they were last raised, and now amount to less than a nickel per drink. The CDC estimated that alcohol problems cost the state $5.6 billion in 2010, the last year for which an estimate is available. Of that, $2.26 billion (or $345 per person and $.77 per drink consumed) was paid directly by governments.
“Alcohol is clearly not paying its way in the Bay State,” said Rep. Kay Khan (D-11th Middlesex District), in response to the report. Rep. Khan has repeatedly introduced bills in the legislature to increase the state’s alcohol tax. “Our taxes on alcohol are far out of date, while alcohol problems have continued to increase.”
Massachusetts has a reputation for strict alcohol policies and high taxes, but according to the report, this is inaccurate. While Bay State drinkers consume and binge drink more than the national average, the state’s alcohol policies rank 17th in restrictiveness among the 50 states, and they have fallen behind other states in moving in more restrictive directions.
Massachusetts has five times as many licenses for bars and restaurants as are permitted in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Of 16 states that set quotas on retail alcohol outlets, just three—Montana, South Dakota and Washington State—are more generous with these licenses than the Bay State.
And the state’s taxes on beer and wine are the lowest of the New England states, while its tax on distilled spirits is lower than all its neighbors except New Hampshire, which sells spirits at a discount in its state-run stores.
“In Massachusetts, alcohol policies are mostly discussed from a business point of view,” said David Jernigan, lead author of the report and a professor of health law, policy and management at BUSPH. “Health and safety data tell a different alcohol story, and need to be part of the policy debate.”
Binge drinking—consuming four or more drinks for females or five or more for males within two hours—is the most common and costly pattern of excessive alcohol use in the U.S., according to the CDC. In Massachusetts, binge drinking is common among both in the general population and among underage drinkers: 44% of current (past-30 day) drinkers age 12 and above, and 63% of current underage drinkers (ages 12-20) binged in the past month.
“The fact that Massachusetts has such a high rate of youth binge drinking is very concerning,” said Senator Jason Lewis, Senate Chair of the Joint Committee on Education and previously Senate Chair of the Joint Committee on Public Health. “This is no doubt linked to the easy and widespread availability of cheap alcohol, and is a public health issue that I hope we will tackle in the new legislative session.”
The report was coauthored by Xixi Zhou, a Master of Public Health candidate at BUSPH, and it was funded by a grant from BUSPH’s idea hub.
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About Boston University School of Public Health Founded in 1976, Boston University School of Public Health is one of the top five ranked private schools of public health in the world. It offers master's- and doctoral-level education in public health. The faculty in six departments conduct policy-changing public health research around the world, with the mission of improving the health of populations—especially the disadvantaged, underserved, and vulnerable—locally and globally.
