The Scientometrics and Reciprocality Underlying Co-Authorship Panels in Google Scholar Profiles

Online academic profiles are used by scholars to reflect a desired image to their online audience. In Google Scholar, scholars can select a subset of co-authors for presentation in a central location on their profile using a social feature called the Co-authroship panel. In this work, we examine whether scientometrics and reciprocality can explain the observed selections. To this end, we scrape and thoroughly analyze a novel set of 120,000 Google Scholar profiles, ranging across four disciplines and various academic institutions. Our results suggest that scholars tend to favor co-authors with higher scientometrics over others for inclusion in their co-authorship panels. Interestingly, as one's own scientometrics are higher, the tendency to include co-authors with high scientometrics is diminishing. Furthermore, we find that reciprocality is central to explaining scholars' selections.

Economical-Epidemiological Analysis of the Coffee Trees Rust Pandemic

Coffee tree leaf rust is a prevalent botanical disease that causes a worldwide reduction in coffee supply and its quality, leading to immense economic losses. While several pandemic intervention policies (PIPs) for tackling this pandemic are commercially available, they seem to provide only partial epidemiological relief for farmers. In this work, we develop a high-resolution economical-epidemiological model that captures the pandemic's spread in coffee tree farms and its associated economic impact. Through extensive simulations for the case of Colombia, a country that consists mostly of small-size coffee farms and is the second-largest coffee producer in the world, our results show that it is economically impractical to sustain any profit without directly tackling the pandemic. Furthermore, even in the hypothetical case where farmers perfectly know their farm's epidemiological state and the weather in advance, any pandemic-related efforts can only amount to a limited profit of roughly 4% on investment. In the more realistic case, any pandemic-related efforts are expected to result in economic losses, indicating that major disturbances in the coffee market are anticipated.

High Resolution Spatio-Temporal Model for Room-Level Airborne Pandemic Spread

Airborne pandemics have caused millions of deaths worldwide, large-scale economic losses, and catastrophic sociological shifts in human history. Researchers have developed multiple mathematical models and computational frameworks to investigate and predict the pandemic spread on various levels and scales such as countries, cities, large social events, and even buildings. However, modeling attempts of airborne pandemic dynamics on the smallest scale, a single room, have been mostly neglected. As time indoors increases due to global urbanization processes, more infections occur in shared rooms. In this study, a high-resolution spatio-temporal epidemiological model with airflow dynamics to evaluate airborne pandemic spread is proposed. The model is implemented using high-resolution 3D data obtained using a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) device and computing the model based on the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model for the airflow and the Susceptible-Exposed-Infected (SEI) model for the epidemiological dynamics. The pandemic spread is evaluated in four types of rooms, showing significant differences even for a short exposure duration. We show that the room's topology and individual distribution in the room define the ability of air ventilation to reduce pandemic spread throughout breathing zone infection.