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We examined initial newspaper coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak (January–May 2020) in the United States and China, countries with contrasting media systems and pandemic experiences. We join the context-rich media systems literature and the longitudinal nature of the issue-attention literature to expand each by providing more system-level context for explaining how media cover an issue over time. U.S. coverage peaked later and stayed consistently high, while Chinese coverage was more variable. The most prominent topics in Chinese coverage were related to domestic outbreak response, while U.S. coverage focused on politics, highlighting how issue-attention cycles differ across countries.

The CD200–CD200R immunoregulatory signaling axis plays an etiologic role in the survival and spread of numerous cancers, primarily through suppression of antitumor immune surveillance. Our previous work outlined a prometastatic role for the CD200–CD200R axis in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) that is independent of direct T-cell suppression but modulates the function of infiltrating myeloid cells. To identify effectors of the CD200–CD200R axis important for cSCC metastasis, we conducted RNA sequencing profiling of infiltrating CD11B+Cd200R+ cells isolated from CD200+ versus CD200-null cSCCs and identified the cysteine protease cathepsin K (Ctsk) to be highly upregulated in CD200+ cSCCs. CD11B+Cd200R+ cells expressed phenotypic markers associated with myeloid-derived suppressor cell–like cells and tumor-associated macrophages and were the primary source of Ctsk expression in cSCC. A Cd200R+ myeloid cell–cSCC coculture system showed that induction of Ctsk was dependent on engagement of the CD200–CD200R axis, indicating that Ctsk is a target gene of this pathway in the cSCC tumor microenvironment. Inhibition of Ctsk, but not matrix metalloproteinases, significantly blocked cSCC cell migration in vitro. Finally, targeted CD200 disruption in tumor cells and Ctsk pharmacologic inhibition significantly reduced cSCC metastasis in vivo. Collectively, these findings support the conclusion that CD200 stimulates cSCC invasion and metastasis via induction of Ctsk in CD200R+ infiltrating myeloid cells. Significance: These findings highlight the relationship between CD200–CD200R and cathepsin K in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma metastasis and suggest that either of these components may serve as a viable therapeutic target in this disease.

In a rapidly changing public health crisis such as COVID-19, researchers need innovative approaches that can effectively link qualitative approaches and computational methods. In this article, computational and qualitative methods are used to analyze survey data collected in March 2020 ( n = 2,270) to explore the content of persuasive messages and their relationship with self-reported health behavior—that is, social distancing. Results suggest that persuasive messages, based on participants’ perspectives, vary by gender and race and are associated with self-reported health behavior. This article illustrates how qualitative analysis and structural topic modeling can be used in synergy in a public health study to understand the public’s perception and behavior related to science issues. Implications for health communication and future research are discussed.

Public discourse and deliberation are key to developing socially responsible and acceptable human gene editing research and applications. Researchers have raised concerns, however, that discourse a...

This study investigates economic convergence and sustainable development in Africa. By introducing an aggregate production technology and directional distance function, it examines the productivity growth of 28 African economies from 1990 to 2019. The proposed approach considers all decision-making units (countries) as a whole, and the productivity gains are then estimated under a nonparametric framework. In the empirical analysis, the carbon emissions are included in the Luenberger productivity measurement, called green productivity. The results show that the annual average growth rate of green productivity is 1.51% in African, and different types of club convergence for green productivity indicator and its decomposition are observed during the sample period. The decomposition of the Luenberger indicator shows that green African growth is mainly driven by technological progress, not efficiency change. Furthermore, the overall inefficiency is decomposed into technical and structural effects. The latter measure the potential improvement in terms of resource reallocation. Structural inefficiency is larger than technical inefficiency, suggesting that African countries could improve their economic and environmental performances by optimizing input/output mixes.

Contains fulltext : 240024.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Objective: To investigate the applicability of supervised machine learning (SML) to classify health-related webpages as 'reliable' or 'unreliable' in an automated way. Methods: We collected the textual content of 468 different Dutch webpages about early childhood vaccination. Webpages were manually coded as 'reliable' or 'unreliable' based on their alignment with evidence-based vaccination guidelines. Four SML models were trained on part of the data, whereas the remaining data was used for model testing. Results: All models appeared to be successful in the automated identification of unreliable (F1 scores: 0.54–0.86) and reliable information (F1 scores: 0.82–0.91). Typical words for unreliable information are 'dr', 'immune system', and 'vaccine damage', whereas 'measles', 'child', and 'immunization rate', were frequent in reliable information. Our best performing model was also successful in terms of out-of-sample prediction, tested on a dataset about HPV vaccination. Conclusion: Automated classification of online content in terms of reliability, using basic classifiers, performs well and is particularly useful to identify reliable information. Practice implications The classifiers can be used as a starting point to develop more complex classifiers, but also warning tools which can help people evaluate the content they encounter online. 7 p.

The recent decade has witnessed a resurgence of nationalism across the world, which is evident in numerous sites such as offline protests to online discourse, from politics to science. Anecdotal evidence shows that nationalism narratives have become prevalent in dis(mis)information campaigns. The challenges posed by nationalism and misinformation have become more salient in the context of an increasingly fragmented, high-choice media environment. However, researchers know little about how one’s pride in their national identity and out-group derogation can influence one’s perception of misinformation and the role of media exposure in moderating the relationship between one’s nationalist attitudes and misinformation. Moreover, despite extensive studies on nationalism and misinformation in political communication, the role of nationalism in one’s processing of science misinformation is still not well-understood, which poses a critical challenge for informed citizenship. This paper theorizes the relationship between misinformation and nationalism in communication research by distinguishing various dimensions of nationalism and how they affect one’s belief in various types of science misinformation. Surveying a diverse sample of participants across mainland China (N=984), we find that pride in national identity does not always increase the misperception of science knowledge. However, out-group derogation substantially boosts one’s misperception of factual knowledge of science, epistemic knowledge of science, and conspiratorial thinking. Interestingly, out-group derogation also decreases certainty perception of misinformation. We also find that people’s exposure to social and traditional media strengthens the impact of out-group derogation on misperception of science knowledge. These findings suggest that nationalism is a central critical vector for misinformation to affect knowledge beyond the domain of political communication. Our findings provide important suggestions for fostering an informed citizenry and correcting misperceptions in a high-choice media environment.

Understanding how individuals perceive the barriers and benefits of precautionary actions is key for effective communication about public health crises, such as the COVID-19 outbreak. This study used innovative computational methods to analyze 30,000 open-ended responses from a large-scale survey to track how Wisconsin (U.S.A.) residents' perceptions of the benefits of and barriers to performing social distancing evolved over a critical time period (March 19th to April 1st, 2020). Initially, the main barrier was practical related, however, individuals later perceived more multifaceted barriers to social distancing. Communication about COVID-19 should be dynamic and evolve to address people's experiences and needs overtime.