Today I'm starting a new chapter as a tenured Associate Professor of Planetary Behavioral Data Science at the University of Copenhagen (@cphsodas.bsky.social & Department of Psychology)! It has been an Orwellian kind of year for scientists. But as history shows, science persists.

There are days in life that shake you.

I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University
& academic career... 1/🧵

Thanks Ruth!

Interestingly, we also found that the social media amplifying effects of worse weather persist when excluding weather-related posts from the analysis, too.

Just how big are these effects? A day of inclement (very cold + snowy) weather amplifies social media activity by more than double the effect of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 6X the Boston Marathon, and nearly three times the effect of New Years Eve in New York City! 5/7

Considering weather mixtures as a surface rather than separate variables, we show that compound temperature and precipitation extremes exact very large digital behavioral impacts... 4/7

Consistent across platforms, we show that both hotter and colder temperatures + more intense precipitation significantly amplify social media activity at the scale of entire (U.S.) cities, and within-individuals. 3/7

We pair billions of posts from two of the world's largest social media platforms (Facebook & Twitter/X) with weather data over the (continental) U.S. to investigate the relationship between randomly timed fluctuations in weather and local posting activity. 2/7