Fine-grained epidemiological modeling of the spread of SARS-CoV-2 -- capturing who is infected at which locations -- can aid the development of policy responses that account for heterogeneous risks of different locations as well as the disparities in infections among different demographic groups. Here, we develop a metapopulation SEIR disease model that uses dynamic mobility networks, derived from US cell phone data, to capture the hourly movements of millions of people from local neighborhoods (census block groups, or CBGs) to points of interest (POIs) such as restaurants, grocery stores, or religious establishments. We simulate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 from March 1-May 2, 2020 among a population of 105 million people in 10 of the largest US metropolitan statistical areas. We show that by integrating these mobility networks, which connect 60k CBGs to 565k POIs with a total of 5.4 billion hourly edges, even a relatively simple epidemiological model can accurately capture the case trajectory despite dramatic changes in population behavior due to the virus. Furthermore, by modeling detailed information about each POI, like visitor density and visit length, we can estimate the impacts of fine-grained reopening plans: we predict that a small minority of "superspreader" POIs account for a large majority of infections, that reopening some POI categories (like full-service restaurants) poses especially large risks, and that strategies restricting maximum occupancy at each POI are more effective than uniformly reducing mobility. Our models also predict higher infection rates among disadvantaged racial and socioeconomic groups solely from differences in mobility: disadvantaged groups have not been able to reduce mobility as sharply, and the POIs they visit (even within the same category) tend to be smaller, more crowded, and therefore more dangerous. By modeling who is infected at which locations, our model supports fine-grained analyses that can inform more effective and equitable policy responses to SARS-CoV-2.
We classify and analyze 200,000 US congressional speeches and 5,000 presidential communications related to immigration from 1880 to the present. Despite the salience of antiimmigration rhetoric today, we find that political speech about immigration is now much more positive on average than in the past, with the shift largely taking place between World War II and the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965. However, since the late 1970s, political parties have become increasingly polarized in their expressed attitudes toward immigration, such that Republican speeches today are as negative as the average congressional speech was in the 1920s, an era of strict immigration quotas. Using an approach based on contextual embeddings of text, we find that modern Republicans are significantly more likely to use language that is suggestive of metaphors long associated with immigration, such as “animals” and “cargo,” and make greater use of frames like “crime” and “legality.” The tone of speeches also differs strongly based on which nationalities are mentioned, with a striking similarity between how Mexican immigrants are framed today and how Chinese immigrants were framed during the era of Chinese exclusion in the late 19th century. Overall, despite more favorable attitudes toward immigrants and the formal elimination of race-based restrictions, nationality is still a major factor in how immigrants are spoken of in Congress.
We present an iterative annotation process for producing aligned, parallel corpora of abstractive and extractive summaries for narrative.Our approach uses a combination of trained annotators and crowd-sourcing, allowing us to elicit human-generated summaries and alignments quickly and at low cost. We use crowd-sourcing to annotate aligned phrases with the text-to-text generation techniques needed to transform each phrase into the other. We apply this process to a corpus of 476 personal narratives, which we make available on the Web.
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