Biosecurity indemnification and attitudes of United States swine producers towards the prevention of an african swine fever outbreak.

Animal disease outbreaks, such as the recent outbreak of African Swine Fever in 2018, are a major concern for stakeholders across the food supply chain due to their potential to disrupt global food security, cause economic losses, and threaten animal welfare. As a result of their transboundary nature, discussions have shifted to preventive measures aimed at protecting livestock while ensuring food security and safety. Emergency assistance has been a critical response option during pandemics. However, this may not be sustainable in the long run because the expectation of government bailout may encourage risk taking behaviours. Our hypothesis is that an indemnity policy that is conditioned on showing biosecurity practices would increase compliance and reduce government expenditure during disease outbreaks. We developed and launched a survey from March to July 2022 targeted at swine producers across the US. From the survey, we examined livestock farmers' attitudes and intentions regarding biosecurity investment and assessed their attitudes towards the purchase of livestock insurance and reporting suspected infected livestock on their farm. We used a partial proportion odds model analysis to examine the model. Our analysis revealed that intention to call a veterinarian, trust in government agencies and risk perception of farmers were instrumental in the willingness to self-invest in biosecurity, purchase livestock insurance, and promptly report infected livestock on their farms. This provides evidence that biosecurity compliance would increase if indemnification was tied to a demonstration of effort to adopt biosecurity practices. We also show that individuals who have been in the industry for a longer period may become complacent and less likely to report outbreaks. Farmers with a higher share of income from their production operations bear a greater risk from their operational income and are more willing to report any suspected infections on their farms. The data suggest that motivating the willingness of farmers to invest in biosecurity while overcoming cost concerns is achievable.

Hashtags in Plastic Surgery: A Sentiment Analysis of over 1 Million Tweets.

BACKGROUND: Current literature has sparse recommendations that guide social networking practices in plastic surgery. To address this, we used natural language processing and sentiment analysis to investigate the differences in plastic surgery-related terms and hashtags on Twitter. METHODS: Over 1 million tweets containing keywords #plasticsurgery, #cosmeticsurgery, and their non-hashtagged versions plastic surgery and cosmetic surgery were collected from the Twitter Gardenhose feed spanning from 2012 to 2016. We extracted the average happiness/positivity (h-avg) using hedonometrics and created word-shift graphs to determine influential words. RESULTS: The most popular keywords were plastic and cosmetic surgery, comprising more than 90% of the sample. The positivity scores for plastic surgery, cosmetic surgery, #plasticsurgery, and #cosmeticsurgery were 5.72, 6.00, 6.17, and 6.18, respectively. Compared to plastic surgery, the term cosmetic surgery was more positive because it lacked antagonistic words, such as "fake," "ugly," "bad," "fails," and "wrong." For similar reasons, #plasticsurgery and #cosmeticsurgery were more positively associated than their non-hashtagged counterparts. CONCLUSION: Plastic surgery-related hashtags are more positively associated than their non-hashtagged versions. The language associated with such hashtags suggests a different user profile than the public and, given their underutilization, remain viable channels for professionals to achieve their diverse social media goals. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE V: This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266 .

Effects of message delivery on cross-cultural biosecurity compliance: Insights from experimental simulations.

Background: Effective biosecurity communication of transmission risks and associated protective behaviors can reduce the impacts of infectious diseases in US animal agriculture. Yet, more than 1/5 of animal production workers speak a language other than English at home, and more than 40 percent are less than fluent in English. Communicating with these workers often involves translating into their primary languages. However, communication strategies targeting different cultural groups are not well-understood. Aims: To identify cross-linguistic risk communication strategies to facilitate compliance, we hypothesized that uncertainty avoidance cultures associated with the languages might affect biosecurity compliance contingent upon two additional covariates: (1) the risk of acquiring an infection and (2) the delivery method of the infection risk. Methods: We designed an experimental game simulating a line of separation (LOS) biosecurity tactic in a swine production facility, where participants were tasked with completing tasks inside and outside of the facility. Data were collected using games in the two most spoken languages in the US: English (EN) and Spanish (SP). Participants made binary decisions about whether to use the LOS biosecurity tactic based on the risk information provided. Mixed-effect logistic models were used to test the effects of covariates on using the LOS tactic by different language groups. Results: We found that biosecurity compliance rates of participants who took the experiments in the language associated with high and low uncertainty cultures showed no significant differences. However, there are substantial differences in how risk information is perceived between the two language groups under different infection risks. Specifically, and counterintuitively, SP participants were more risk-averse in gain scenarios but more risk-taking in loss scenarios. These differences are most pronounced in numeric risk messaging, indicating that numbers may not be the best way to communicate risk information regarding biosecurity cross-culturally. Conclusions: When confronted with situational biosecurity decisions, risk perception and preferences vary by language group. Effective biosecurity communication needs to account for these differences and not assume that direct translation of risk messages will result in comparable compliance.

Comparing behavioral risk assessment strategies for quantifying biosecurity compliance to mitigate animal disease spread.

Understanding the impact of human behavior on the spread of disease is critical in mitigating outbreak severity. We designed an experimental game that emulated worker decision-making in a swine facility during an outbreak. In order to combat contamination, the simulation features a line-of-separation biosecurity protocol. Participants are provided disease severity information and can choose whether or not to comply with a shower protocol. Each simulated decision carried the potential for either an economic cost or an opportunity cost, both of which affected their potential real-world earnings. Participants must weigh the risk infection vs. an opportunity cost associated with compliance. Participants then completed a multiple price list (MPL) risk assessment survey. The survey uses a context-free, paired-lottery approach in which one of two options may be selected, with varying probabilities of a high and low risk payouts. We compared game response data to MPL risk assessment. Game risk was calculated using the normalized frequency of biosecurity compliance. Three predominant strategies were identified: risk averse participants who had the highest rate of compliance; risk tolerant participants who had the lowest compliance rate; and opportunists who adapted their strategy depending on disease risk. These findings were compared to the proportion of risk averse choices observed within the MPL and were classified into 3 categories: risk averse, risk tolerant and neutral. We found weak positive correlation between risk measured in our experimental game compared to the MPL. However, risk averse classified participants in the MPL tended to comply with the biosecurity protocol more often than those classified as risk tolerant. We also found that the behavioral risk clusters and categorization via the MPL were significantly, yet weakly associated. Overall, behavioral distributions were skewed toward more risk averse choices in both the MPL and game. However, the MPL risk assessment wasn't a strong predictor for observed game behavior. This may indicate that MPL risk aversion metrics might not be sufficient to capture these simulated, situational risk aversion behaviors. Experimental games have a large potential for expanding upon traditional survey instruments by immersing participants in a complex decision mechanism, and capturing dynamic and evolving behavioral signals.

The Adverse Event Unit (AEU): A novel metric to measure the burden of treatment adverse events.

OBJECTIVE: To design a physician and patient derived tool, the Adverse Event Unit (AEU), akin to currency (e.g. U.S. Dollar), to improve AE burden measurement independent of any particular disease or medication class. PATIENTS/METHODS: A Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) online survey was administered to United States physicians with board certification or board eligibility in general neurology, subspecialty neurology, primary care internal medicine or family medicine, subspecialty internal medicine, general pediatrics, and subspecialty pediatrics. Physicians assigned value to 73 AE categories chosen from the Common Terminology Criteria of Adverse Events (CTCAE) relevant to neurologic disorder treatments. An online forced choice survey was administered to non-physician, potential patients, through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurK) to weight the severity of the same AE categories. Physician and non-physician data was combined to assign value to the AEU. Surveys completed between 1/2017 and 3/2019. RESULTS: 363 physicians rated the 73 AE categories derived from CTCAE. 660 non-physicians completed forced choice experiments comparing AEs. The AEU provides 0-10, weighted values for the AE categories studied that differ from the ordinal 1-4 CTCAE scale. For example, CTCAE severe diabetes (category 4) is assigned an AEU score of 9. Although non-physician input changed physician assigned AEU values, there was general agreement among physicians and non-physicians about severity of AEs. CONCLUSION: The AEU has promise to be a useful, practical tool to add precision to AE burden measurement in the clinic and in comparative efficacy research with neurology patients. AEU utility will be assessed in planned comparative efficacy clinical trials.

Connecting livestock disease dynamics to human learning and biosecurity decisions.

The acceleration of animal disease spread worldwide due to increased animal, feed, and human movement has driven a growing body of epidemiological research as well as a deeper interest in human behavioral studies aimed at understanding their interconnectedness. Biosecurity measures can reduce the risk of infection, but human risk tolerance can hinder biosecurity investments and compliance. Humans may learn from hardship and become more risk averse, but sometimes they instead become more risk tolerant because they forget negative experiences happened in the past or because they come to believe they are immune. We represent the complexity of the hog production system with disease threats, human decision making, and human risk attitude using an agent-based model. Our objective is to explore the role of risk tolerant behaviors and the consequences of delayed biosecurity investments. We set up experiment with Monte Carlo simulations of scenarios designed with different risk tolerance amongst the swine producers and we derive distributions and trends of biosecurity and porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDv) incidence emerging in the system. The output data allowed us to examine interactions between modes of risk tolerance and timings of biosecurity response discussing consequences for disease protection in the production system. The results show that hasty and delayed biosecurity responses or slow shifts toward a biosecure culture do not guarantee control of contamination when the disease has already spread in the system. In an effort to support effective disease prevention, our model results can inform policy making to move toward more resilient and healthy production systems. The modeled dynamics of risk attitude have also the potential to improve communication strategies for nudging and establishing risk averse behaviors thereby equipping the production system in case of foreign disease incursions.

A Multi-Site Analysis of the Prevalence of Food Insecurity in the United States, before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic profoundly affected food systems including food security. Understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted food security is important to provide support and identify long-term impacts and needs. OBJECTIVE: The National Food Access and COVID research Team (NFACT) was formed to assess food security over different US study sites throughout the pandemic, using common instruments and measurements. This study presents results from 18 study sites across 15 states and nationally over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: A validated survey instrument was developed and implemented in whole or part through an online survey of adults across the sites throughout the first year of the pandemic, representing 22 separate surveys. Sampling methods for each study site were convenience, representative, or high-risk targeted. Food security was measured using the USDA 6-item module. Food security prevalence was analyzed using ANOVA by sampling method to assess statistically significant differences. RESULTS: Respondents (n = 27,168) indicate higher prevalence of food insecurity (low or very low food security) since the COVID-19 pandemic, compared with before the pandemic. In nearly all study sites, there is a higher prevalence of food insecurity among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), households with children, and those with job disruptions. The findings demonstrate lingering food insecurity, with high prevalence over time in sites with repeat cross-sectional surveys. There are no statistically significant differences between convenience and representative surveys, but a statistically higher prevalence of food insecurity among high-risk compared with convenience surveys. CONCLUSIONS: This comprehensive study demonstrates a higher prevalence of food insecurity in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. These impacts were prevalent for certain demographic groups, and most pronounced for surveys targeting high-risk populations. Results especially document the continued high levels of food insecurity, as well as the variability in estimates due to the survey implementation method.

Nuclear dynamics and stress responses in Alzheimer's disease.

In response to extracellular and intracellular stressors, the nucleus and nuclear compartments undergo distinct molecular changes to maintain cell homeostasis. In the context of Alzheimer's disease, misfolded proteins and various cellular stressors lead to profound structural and molecular changes at the nucleus. This review summarizes recent research on nuclear alterations in AD development, from the nuclear envelope changes to chromatin and epigenetic regulation and then to common nuclear stress responses. Finally, we provide our thoughts on the importance of understanding cell-type-specific changes and identifying upstream causal events in AD pathogenesis and highlight novel sequencing and gene perturbation technologies to address those challenges.

Message Delivery Strategy Influences Willingness to Comply With Biosecurity.

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues worldwide, it has become increasingly clear that effective communication of disease transmission risks associated with protective behaviors is essential, and that communication tactics are not ubiquitously and homogenously understood. Analogous to Covid-19, communicable diseases in the hog industry result in millions of animal deaths and in the United States costs hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Protective behaviors such as preventative biosecurity practices are implemented to reduce these costs. Yet even with the knowledge of the importance of biosecurity, these practices are not employed consistently. The efficacy of biosecurity practices relies on consistent implementation and is influenced by a variety of behavioral factors under the umbrella of human decision-making. Using an experimental game, we collected data to quantify how different messages that described the likelihood of a disease incursion would influence willingness to follow biosecurity practices. Here we show that graphical messages combined with linguistic phrases demarking infection risk levels are more effective for ensuring compliance with biosecurity practices, as contrasted with either simple linguistic phrases or graphical messages with numeric demarcation of risk levels. All three of these delivery methods appear to be more effective than using a simple numeric value to describe probability of infection. Situationally, we saw greater than a 3-fold increase in compliance by shifting message strategy without changing the infection risk, highlighting the importance of situational awareness and context when designing messages.

Complementary and divergent functions of zebrafish Tango1 and Ctage5 in tissue development and homeostasis.

Coat protein complex II (COPII) factors mediate cargo export from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), but bulky collagens and lipoproteins are too large for traditional COPII vesicles. Mammalian CTAGE5 and TANGO1 have been well characterized individually as specialized cargo receptors at the ER that function with COPII coats to facilitate trafficking of bulky cargoes. Here, we present a genetic interaction study in zebrafish of deletions in ctage5, tango1, or both to investigate their distinct and complementary potential functions. We found that Ctage5 and Tango1 have different roles related to organogenesis, collagen versus lipoprotein trafficking, stress-pathway activation, and survival. While disruption of both ctage5 and tango1 compounded phenotype severity, mutation of either factor alone revealed novel tissue-specific defects in the building of heart, muscle, lens, and intestine, in addition to previously described roles in the development of neural and cartilage tissues. Together, our results demonstrate that Ctage5 and Tango1 have overlapping functions, but also suggest divergent roles in tissue development and homeostasis.

Effects of Social Cues on Biosecurity Compliance in Livestock Facilities: Evidence From Experimental Simulations.

Disease outbreaks in U.S. animal livestock industries have economic impacts measured in hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Biosecurity, or procedures intended to protect animals against disease, is known to be effective at reducing infection risk at facilities. Yet, to the detriment of animal health, humans do not always follow biosecurity protocols. Human behavioral factors have been shown to influence willingness to follow biosecurity protocols. Here we show how social cues may affect cooperation with a biosecurity practice. Participants were immersed in a simulated swine production facility through a graphical user interface and prompted to make a decision that addressed their willingness to comply with a biosecurity practice. We tested the effect of varying three experimental variables: (1) the risk of acquiring an infection, (2) the delivery method of the infection risk information (numerical vs. graphical), and (3) the behavior of an automated coworker in the facility. We provide evidence that participants changed their behavior when they observed a simulated worker making a choice to follow or not follow a biosecurity protocol, even though the simulated worker had no economic effect on the participants' payouts. These results advance the understanding of human behavioral effects on biosecurity protocol decisions, demonstrating that social cues need to be considered by livestock facility managers when developing policies to make agricultural systems more disease resilient.

Using experimental gaming simulations to elicit risk mitigation behavioral strategies for agricultural disease management.

Failing to mitigate propagation of disease spread can result in dire economic consequences for agricultural networks. Pathogens like Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus, can quickly spread among producers. Biosecurity is designed to prevent infection transmission. When considering biosecurity investments, management must balance the cost of protection versus the consequences of contracting an infection. Thus, an examination of the decision making processes associated with investment in biosecurity is important for enhancing system wide biosecurity. Data gathered from experimental gaming simulations can provide insights into behavioral strategies and inform the development of decision support systems. We created an online digital experiment to simulate outbreak scenarios among swine production supply chains, where participants were tasked with making biosecurity investment decisions. In Experiment One, we quantified the risk associated with each participant's decisions and delineated three dominant categories of risk attitudes: risk averse, risk tolerant, and opportunistic. Each risk class exhibited unique approaches in reaction to risk and disease information. We also tested how information uncertainty affects risk aversion, by varying the amount of visibility of the infection as well as the amount of biosecurity implemented across the system. We found evidence that more visibility in the number of infected sites increases risk averse behaviors, while more visibility in the amount of neighboring biosecurity increased risk taking behaviors. In Experiment Two, we were surprised to find no evidence for differences in behavior of livestock specialists compared to Amazon Mechanical Turk participants. Our findings provide support for using experimental gaming simulations to study how risk communication affects behavior, which can provide insights towards more effective messaging strategies.

Emulating Agricultural Disease Management: Comparing Risk Preferences Between Industry Professionals and Online Participants Using Experimental Gaming Simulations and Paired Lottery Choice Surveys.

Mitigating the spread of disease is crucial for the well-being of agricultural production systems. Implementing biosecurity disease prevention measures can be expensive, so producers must balance the costs of biosecurity investments with the expected benefits of reducing the risk of infections. To investigate the risk associated with this decision making process, we developed an online experimental game that simulates biosecurity investment allocation of a pork production facility during an outbreak. Participants are presented with several scenarios that vary the visibility of the disease status and biosecurity protection implemented at neighboring facilities. Certain rounds allowed participants to spend resources to reduce uncertainty and reveal neighboring biosecurity and/or disease status. We then test how this uncertainty affects the decisions to spend simulation dollars to increase biosecurity and reduce risk. We recruited 50 attendees from the 2018 World Pork Expo to participate in our simulation. We compared their performance to an opportunity sample of 50 online participants from the survey crowdsourcing tool, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). With respect to biosecurity investment, we did not find a significant difference between the risk behaviors of industry professionals and those of MTurk participants for each set of experimental scenarios. Notably, we found that our sample of industry professionals opted to pay to reveal disease and biosecurity information more often than MTurk participants. However, the biosecurity investment decisions were not significantly different during rounds in which additional information could be purchased. To further validate these findings, we compared the risk associated with each group's responses using a well-established risk assessment survey implementing paired lottery choices. Interestingly, we did not find a correlation in risk quantified with simulated biosecurity investment in comparison to the paired lottery choice survey. This may be evidence that general economic risk preferences may not always translate into simulated behavioral risk, perhaps due to the contextual immersion provided by experimental gaming simulations. Online recruitment tools can provide cost effective research quality data that can be rapidly assembled in comparison to industry professionals, who may be more challenging to sample at scale. Using a convenience sample of industry professionals for validation can also provide additional insights into the decision making process. These findings lend support to using online experimental simulations for interpreting risk associated with a complex decision mechanism.

Establishment and validation of an endoplasmic reticulum stress reporter to monitor zebrafish ATF6 activity in development and disease.

Induction of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress is associated with diverse developmental and degenerative diseases. Modified ER homeostasis causes activation of conserved stress pathways at the ER called the unfolded protein response (UPR). ATF6 is a transcription factor activated during ER stress as part of a coordinated UPR. ATF6 resides at the ER and, upon activation, is transported to the Golgi apparatus, where it is cleaved by proteases to create an amino-terminal cytoplasmic fragment (ATF6f). ATF6f translocates to the nucleus to activate transcriptional targets. Here, we describe the establishment and validation of zebrafish reporter lines for ATF6 activity. These transgenic lines are based on a defined and multimerized ATF6 consensus site, which drives either eGFP or destabilized eGFP, enabling dynamic study of ATF6 activity during development and disease. The results show that the reporter is specific for the ATF6 pathway, active during development and induced in disease models known to engage UPR. Specifically, during development, ATF6 activity is highest in the lens, skeletal muscle, fins and gills. The reporter is also activated by common chemical inducers of ER stress, including tunicamycin, thapsigargin and brefeldin A, as well as by heat shock. In models for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and cone dystrophy, ATF6 reporter expression is induced in spinal cord interneurons or photoreceptors, respectively, suggesting a role for ATF6 response in multiple neurodegenerative diseases. Collectively our results show that these ATF6 reporters can be used to monitor ATF6 activity changes throughout development and in zebrafish models of disease.This article has an associated First Person interview with the first author of the paper.

Plastic Surgery and Social Media: Examining Perceptions.

BACKGROUND: Social media play an important role in plastic surgery, yet there are limited studies in the literature to guide plastic surgeons' social networking practices. To address this deficiency and provide further insight, the authors set out to investigate the public's attitude toward plastic surgery using Twitter, a popular social media platform. The authors examined a large body of messages (tweets) related to plastic surgery using novel techniques of natural language processing and sentiment analysis. METHODS: The authors collected over 1 million tweets with the keywords "plastic," "cosmetic," "aesthetic," and "reconstruction" surgery spanning from 2012 to 2016 from the Twitter Gardenhose feed. Using hedonometrics, the authors extracted the average happiness/positivity (havg) of tweets and created word-shift graphs to determine the most influential words. RESULTS: The positivity scores for keywords "plastic," "cosmetic," "aesthetic," and "reconstruction" surgery were 5.72, 6.00, 6.16, and 6.09, respectively. In relation to "plastic," keywords "cosmetic" and "aesthetic" were more positive because they lacked antagonistic words, such as "fake," "ugly," "bad," "fails," or "wrong." The keyword "reconstruction," however, was more positively associated than the term "plastic" because of an increase in positive words, such as "honor," "amazing," "successful," and "respect." CONCLUSIONS: Tweets containing the term "plastic" surgery trended toward negativity, and may be explained by the increase in unfavorable, associative words. Conversely, related terms such as "aesthetic," "cosmetic," and "reconstruction" were more favorably regarded because of the lack of antagonistic words and the presence of supportive words. The authors' results are informative and may serve to guide plastic surgeons' social media practices.

Vaporous Marketing: Uncovering Pervasive Electronic Cigarette Advertisements on Twitter.

BACKGROUND: Twitter has become the "wild-west" of marketing and promotional strategies for advertisement agencies. Electronic cigarettes have been heavily marketed across Twitter feeds, offering discounts, "kid-friendly" flavors, algorithmically generated false testimonials, and free samples. METHODS: All electronic cigarette keyword related tweets from a 10% sample of Twitter spanning January 2012 through December 2014 (approximately 850,000 total tweets) were identified and categorized as Automated or Organic by combining a keyword classification and a machine trained Human Detection algorithm. A sentiment analysis using Hedonometrics was performed on Organic tweets to quantify the change in consumer sentiments over time. Commercialized tweets were topically categorized with key phrasal pattern matching. RESULTS: The overwhelming majority (80%) of tweets were classified as automated or promotional in nature. The majority of these tweets were coded as commercialized (83.65% in 2013), up to 33% of which offered discounts or free samples and appeared on over a billion twitter feeds as impressions. The positivity of Organic (human) classified tweets has decreased over time (5.84 in 2013 to 5.77 in 2014) due to a relative increase in the negative words 'ban', 'tobacco', 'doesn't', 'drug', 'against', 'poison', 'tax' and a relative decrease in the positive words like 'haha', 'good', 'cool'. Automated tweets are more positive than organic (6.17 versus 5.84) due to a relative increase in the marketing words like 'best', 'win', 'buy', 'sale', 'health', 'discount' and a relative decrease in negative words like 'bad', 'hate', 'stupid', 'don't'. CONCLUSIONS: Due to the youth presence on Twitter and the clinical uncertainty of the long term health complications of electronic cigarette consumption, the protection of public health warrants scrutiny and potential regulation of social media marketing.

Identifying missing dictionary entries with frequency-conserving context models.

In an effort to better understand meaning from natural language texts, we explore methods aimed at organizing lexical objects into contexts. A number of these methods for organization fall into a family defined by word ordering. Unlike demographic or spatial partitions of data, these collocation models are of special importance for their universal applicability. While we are interested here in text and have framed our treatment appropriately, our work is potentially applicable to other areas of research (e.g., speech, genomics, and mobility patterns) where one has ordered categorical data (e.g., sounds, genes, and locations). Our approach focuses on the phrase (whether word or larger) as the primary meaning-bearing lexical unit and object of study. To do so, we employ our previously developed framework for generating word-conserving phrase-frequency data. Upon training our model with the Wiktionary, an extensive, online, collaborative, and open-source dictionary that contains over 100000 phrasal definitions, we develop highly effective filters for the identification of meaningful, missing phrase entries. With our predictions we then engage the editorial community of the Wiktionary and propose short lists of potential missing entries for definition, developing a breakthrough, lexical extraction technique and expanding our knowledge of the defined English lexicon of phrases.

Zipf's law holds for phrases, not words.

With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in scaling. Here, building on the simple observation that phrases of one or more words comprise the most coherent units of meaning in language, we show empirically that Zipf's law for phrases extends over as many as nine orders of rank magnitude. In doing so, we develop a principled and scalable statistical mechanical method of random text partitioning, which opens up a rich frontier of rigorous text analysis via a rank ordering of mixed length phrases.

Drosophila muller f elements maintain a distinct set of genomic properties over 40 million years of evolution.

The Muller F element (4.2 Mb, ~80 protein-coding genes) is an unusual autosome of Drosophila melanogaster; it is mostly heterochromatic with a low recombination rate. To investigate how these properties impact the evolution of repeats and genes, we manually improved the sequence and annotated the genes on the D. erecta, D. mojavensis, and D. grimshawi F elements and euchromatic domains from the Muller D element. We find that F elements have greater transposon density (25-50%) than euchromatic reference regions (3-11%). Among the F elements, D. grimshawi has the lowest transposon density (particularly DINE-1: 2% vs. 11-27%). F element genes have larger coding spans, more coding exons, larger introns, and lower codon bias. Comparison of the Effective Number of Codons with the Codon Adaptation Index shows that, in contrast to the other species, codon bias in D. grimshawi F element genes can be attributed primarily to selection instead of mutational biases, suggesting that density and types of transposons affect the degree of local heterochromatin formation. F element genes have lower estimated DNA melting temperatures than D element genes, potentially facilitating transcription through heterochromatin. Most F element genes (~90%) have remained on that element, but the F element has smaller syntenic blocks than genome averages (3.4-3.6 vs. 8.4-8.8 genes per block), indicating greater rates of inversion despite lower rates of recombination. Overall, the F element has maintained characteristics that are distinct from other autosomes in the Drosophila lineage, illuminating the constraints imposed by a heterochromatic milieu.