Inequalities persist when it comes to the attention, resource allocation and political prioritization, and provision of appropriate, adequate, and timely health interventions to populations in need. Set against a complex socio-political backdrop, the pressure on public health science is significant: institutions and scientists are accountable for helping to find the origins of disease, and to p...

There is great uncertainty due to challenges of escalating population growth and climate change. Public perception that diverges from the scientific community may decrease the effectiveness of scientific inquiry and innovation as tools to solve these challenges. The objective of this study was to identify the factors associated with the divergence of public opinion from scientific consensus reg...

This paper introduces a new paradigm for unsupervised audiovisual document structuring. In this paradigm, a novel Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) algorithm is applied on histograms of counts (relating to a bag of features representation of the content) to jointly discover latent structuring patterns and their activations in time. Our NMF variant employs the Kullback-Leibler divergence as...

Social media allow people to express and promote different opinions, on which people’s sentiments to a subject often diverge when their opinions conflict. An intuitive visualization that unfolds the process of sentiment divergence from the rich and massive social media data will have far-reaching impact on various domains including social science, politics and economics. In this paper, we propo...

We document a divergence in the duration of rule for monarchs in Western Europe and the Islamic world beginning in the medieval period. While leadership tenures in the two regions were similar in the 8th century, Christian kings became increasingly long lived compared to Muslim sultans. We argue that forms of executive constraint that emerged under feudal institutions in Western Europe were ass...

A recent disclosure of a presidential scandal and the following development of subsequent events have been a major news topic in South Korea. We conducted a data-driven study to examine public reactions to the scandal and their effect on the Korean media landscape. Our analysis is based on 59,224 news articles published by five popular newsrooms that received a total of 47,906,770 Likes on Face...

Introduction At present, the educational system is significantly influenced by quick divergence in the field of science, communication and information technology in addition with current perception about political, social, economical and cultural issues. In the competitive world, the explosion of science and technology create a need for a person to be more skilful for searching, analyzing and a...

The European Union’s ambition on environmental issues proves to be highly uneven. While it has agreed on stringent binding sustainability objectives in its reforms of the Common Fisheries Policy in 2013, it failed to reach such agreement on its 2030 climate change objectives at almost the same time. How can we make sense of this uneven performance of the European Union (EU) in environmental pol...