Hot MedFax

Big boys don't cry.  Or talk about their emotions with their friends.  Or say "cute." According to a new study, real men don't say "cute." The study looked at data and Twitter to analyze the accuracy of stereotypes, newswise.com reports. From gender to education, the words used on social media carry impressions to others. Using publicly available tweets, social psychologists and computer scientists from the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center, Germany, and Australia are helping us to parse out the stereotypes formed by word choices on Twitter. Using natural language processing (NLP), a form of artificial intelligence, the researchers show where stereotyping goes from "plausible" to wrong. In a series of studies, participants were asked to categorize the authors of tweets based solely on the content of their social media posts. In these studies, people made judgements about a writer's gender, age, education le...

Quick.  What's the one word tweeted most?  No, it's not sex.  Or Hillary.  Or Trump.  It's a food.  And it's "coffee", followed by "pizza," then "beer." Besides hinting at which foods are popular, tweets may reveal something about our health, according to newswise.com. Communities that expressed positive sentiments about healthy foods were more likely to be healthier overall. Scientists at the University of Utah surveyed nearly 80 million Twitter messages - a random sample of one percent of publicly available, geo-tagged tweets - over the course of one year. They then sorted through the 4 million tweets about food for ones that fell on opposite ends of the health spectrum: tweets mentioning fast food restaurants, or lean meats, fruits, veggies or nuts. Out of that top 10 list, only the fourth most popular food-related item, "Starbucks", fit into the fast food category. The seventh, "chicken", was the onl...

Do you think you can tell anything about someone by their tweets ? I believe I can.  I have friends who tweet every single thing they do -- what they're eating for dinner, what music they're listening to, even their new running shoes.  (WHO CARES? I often want to tweet back.)  But I know these people are just self-obsessed and desperate for attention. Then there are those who like to bloviate about what's going on in the world.  Sometimes the opinions are learned (that's when they agree with me), but most of the time it's just people blowing off steam (or hot air). But now a new study that looked at more than 20 million tweets has uncovered that we tend to tweet more negatively during the week, and more positively on the weekend and that people in urban and rural areas experience situations that are, for the most part, psychologically similar, according to newswise.com. People frequently tweet about their locations, what they are doing, how they are feeli...

If you're like me, you pretty much check Twitter to see what your friends are up to, and what's going on in the world (that's how I knew exactly what was going on minute-by-minute during the Boston Marathon massacre).  But what would you think if it could tell you how happy your city was? That's the new plan developed by  the University of California, San Diego and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).  They're collecting and analyzing tweeted images of cities to measure just how happy people are in cities. According to newswise.com, the project will tackle a simple question: Is it possible to measure the overall happiness of metropolitan areas based on the study of images shared on Twitter? "Can visual characteristics of images shared on social media tell us something about the ‘moods’ of cities?” the Web site quotes principal investigator Mehrdad Yazdani, a data scientist with the Software Studies Initiative (SSI) at the Qualcomm Ins...

Got a migraine that won't quit?  Your five-year-old won't stop bashing his sister in the head with a truck? Your 20th high school reunion is coming up and you're 40 pounds heavier? Tweets can temper your problems.  According to a new  study , sharing your pain with other sufferers can help alleviate some of the discomfort and stress. "As technology and language evolve, so does the way we share our suffering," newswise.com quotes principal investigator Alexandre DaSilva, assistant professor and director of the Headache and Orofacial Pain Effort at University of Michigan School of Dentistry. "It's the first known study to show the instant and broad impact of migraine attacks on modern patients' lives by decoding manually each one of their individual attack-related tweets." Say what?  Simply put, put your agony out there and you are sure to find fellow sufferers. I remember the old bulletin boards that were the precursor of Twitter and Faceb...

Advertisers are compiling data on us just about everything we do -- the sites we visit on the Internet, the purchases we make, even the way we browse the Web. But what happens to all this data when we die?  Unlike what you may think, it doesn't just disappear.  The data resides on corporate servers, according to Kirsten Korosec, and "are likely subject to that company’s terms of service. Depending on the email provider or social media company’s policy, the data might not remain private or can’t be transferred to a spouse or family member after your death." But here comes Google to the rescue. Korosec reports that a new feature recently rolled out ( hat tip Fast Company ) makes it easier for users to determine what happens to their digital assets if they die or can no longer use the account. Google asks users what they want done with their photos, emails and documents when they are no longer alive, who your data should be shared with, and ultimately gives users the ...

Well, not really.  It's not the tweeting that does it, but the distraction -- and disruption -- it brings to your day.  And the Instagraming, Facebooking, iTubing, Pinteresting, etc. According to Bob Sullivan at The New York Times, each time our cell phone rings, or a text tings, or an email pops up on the screen, it interrupts the task we're working on. He noted that Gloria Mark, of the University of California, Irvine,  found  that "it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption." But worse, no one really knows the quality of work "done during these periods of rapid toggling." And what's been found to have an even bigger effect on disruption is the anticipation that a call or email or text might come in. Sullivan and his staff conducted three tests on volunteers sitting in labs to perform a cognitive skills test.  One group simply completed the test but the second group was interrupted while the third was ...