Online Obituaries Research Articles

Euphemistic Expression in Indonesian Obituaries

Euphemisms are common in obituaries because a written announcement of someone's death has a touchy topic. In the case of obituaries, people mostly use feelings to avoid using hurtful words to give good effect to society in conveying or announcing someone's death in an effort to minimize any negative societal impact. Thus, the study aims to analyze the euphemism expression in written data obtained from the Indonesian obituaries and take into account the types and functions. The research data in this study consists of the euphemism expression; words, phrases, and clauses in Tempo (January–July 2021), Detik.com, and Kompas (July–December 2021) online obituaries. The qualitative method was used and descriptive tables including frequencies and percentages were shown. As a result, in Indonesian obituaries, the following euphemism expressions were found in the types: (1) metaphor (14.34%), (2) one-for-one substitution (34.73%), (3) abbreviation (1.80%), (4) acronym (1.20%), (5) using pronoun (7.78%), (6) general for specific (1.20%), (7) circumlocution (6.58%), (8) hyperbole (8.98%), (9) understatement (3.60%), and (10) borrowing (19.76%). The highest frequency of the euphemism types is one-for-one substitution. It is found in 58 instances out of 167 of the total data, or 34.73%. Thus, it is concluded that Indonesian obituaries often replace the term related to the death, which has a hurtful connotation with the softer expression that has relationships in its meaning component. In addition, euphemisms also served a number of functions in Indonesian obituaries, including (1) the protective (12.57%), (2) the underhand (36.52%), (3) the uplift (5.98%), (4) the provocative (33.55%), (5) the cohesive (9.58%), and (6) the ludic (1.80%). The euphemism function of the underhand is dominated in the findings with 61 instances or 36.52%, so it conveys that Indonesian obituaries often blur the sensitiveness by not using the direct term.

Who are the Vascular Society Presidents?

We noted distinct differences between the demographics among the presidents of various vascular societies. To help characterize these among the present United States, Canadian, and European vascular societies, we queried the websites for the United States, Canadian, and European vascular societies in a systematic review for the names of their presidents since their respective inceptions. Age and ethnicity were determined by a search on healthgrades.com, Google, and online obituaries. The year of ascendency to the presidency and the year of birth were used as identifying time points. There are significant differences between the ages of the presidents of the various vascular societies. While the presidents of Vascular and Endovascular Surgical Society were significantly younger than those of every other vascular society examined, Midwestern Vascular Surgical Society, Canadian Society for Vascular Surgery, and Society of Vascular Medicine were also significantly younger than the remainder of the societies examined (P<0.0001). The presidents of the remaining societies were not significantly different in age from each other. When comparing the ages of the presidents in the first and last decades of each society, 2 were found to have significantly increased (Society of Vascular Medicine [P=0.0029] and Vascular and Endovascular Surgical Society [P<0.0001]), while 2 others were found to have significantly decreased (New England Society for Vascular Surgery [P=0.0092] and Eastern Vascular Society [P=0.0085]). Of the 532 total entries for these presidents examined over these 13 societies, 19 (3.6%) of these were filled by women and 37 (7%) with minorities. There was a great deal of variability in terms of age, gender, and minority representation of the presidents among the vascular societies examined. While the share of women and minorities to serve as presidents in vascular societies varied between societies, both groups were under-represented across the board. However, in recent years, the number of women and minorities elected as presidents of vascular societies has been trending upwards.

The trial effect in patients with glioblastoma: effect of clinical trial enrollment on overall survival.

To determine whether participation in a clinical trial was associated with improved survival in patients with glioblastoma (GBM). Following IRB approval, patients were identified using CPT and ICD codes. Data was collected using retrospective review of electronic medical records. When necessary, death data was obtained from online obituaries. Inverse propensity score matching was utilized to transform the two cohorts to comparable sets. Survival was compared using Kaplan-Meyer curves and Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test. In this cohort of 365 patients, 89 were enrolled in a clinical trial and 276 were not. Patients enrolled in clinical trials had a significantly higher mean baseline KPS score, higher proportion of surgical resections, and were more likely to receive temozolomide treatment than patients not enrolled in a clinical trial. After inverse propensity score matching, patients enrolled in a clinical trial lived significantly longer than those not enrolled (28.8 vs 22.2months, p = 0.005). A potential confounder of this study is that patients not in a clinical trial had significantly fewer visits with neuro-oncologists than patients enrolled in a clinical trial (7 ± 8 vs 12 ± 9, p < 0. 0001). Clinical trials enroll patients with the most favorable prognostic features. Even when correcting for this bias, clinical trial enrollment is an independent predictor of increased survival regardless of treatment arm.

Construction of Genealogical Knowledge Graphs From Obituaries: Multitask Neural Network Extraction System.

BackgroundGenealogical information, such as that found in family trees, is imperative for biomedical research such as disease heritability and risk prediction. Researchers have used policyholder and their dependent information in medical claims data and emergency contacts in electronic health records (EHRs) to infer family relationships at a large scale. We have previously demonstrated that online obituaries can be a novel data source for building more complete and accurate family trees.ObjectiveAiming at supplementing EHR data with family relationships for biomedical research, we built an end-to-end information extraction system using a multitask-based artificial neural network model to construct genealogical knowledge graphs (GKGs) from online obituaries. GKGs are enriched family trees with detailed information including age, gender, death and birth dates, and residence.MethodsBuilt on a predefined family relationship map consisting of 4 types of entities (eg, people’s name, residence, birth date, and death date) and 71 types of relationships, we curated a corpus containing 1700 online obituaries from the metropolitan area of Minneapolis and St Paul in Minnesota. We also adopted data augmentation technology to generate additional synthetic data to alleviate the issue of data scarcity for rare family relationships. A multitask-based artificial neural network model was then built to simultaneously detect names, extract relationships between them, and assign attributes (eg, birth dates and death dates, residence, age, and gender) to each individual. In the end, we assemble related GKGs into larger ones by identifying people appearing in multiple obituaries.ResultsOur system achieved satisfying precision (94.79%), recall (91.45%), and F-1 measures (93.09%) on 10-fold cross-validation. We also constructed 12,407 GKGs, with the largest one made up of 4 generations and 30 people.ConclusionsIn this work, we discussed the meaning of GKGs for biomedical research, presented a new version of a corpus with a predefined family relationship map and augmented training data, and proposed a multitask deep neural system to construct and assemble GKGs. The results show our system can extract and demonstrate the potential of enriching EHR data for more genetic research. We share the source codes and system with the entire scientific community on GitHub without the corpus for privacy protection.

Predictors of long‐term outcomes greater than 10 years after cardiac resynchronization therapy implantation

Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is indicated in patients with medically refractory heart failure and wide QRS duration. While much is known about predictors of left ventricular (LV) remodeling after CRT implantation and short-term mortality, limited data exist on long-term outcomes after CRT placement. We retrospectively reviewed all patients undergoing CRT implantation at our center between 2003 and 2008 and examined mortality using institutional electronic records, social security death index, and online obituary search. We included only patients with preimplant echoes with LV ejection fraction (LVEF) 35% or below. Variable selection was performed using stepwise regression and models were compared using goodness-of-fit criteria. A final model was validated with the bootstrap regression method. Out of the 877 CRT patients undergoing implantation during this time, 287 (32.7%) survived longer than 10 years. Significant (P < .05) predictors of survival in our multivariate model were age, left ventricular diastolic diameter, sex, presence of nonischemic vs ischemic cardiomyopathy, QRS duration, atrial fibrillation, BNP levels, and creatinine levels at the time of CRT implantation. A model using the odds ratios from these variables had a receiver operating curve with an area under the curve score of 0.816 (standard error, 0.019) at predicting survival or freedom from LVAD or heart transplant for longer than 10 years after CRT implantation. The specificity for factors 3 or above and 5 or above was 68% and 77%, respectively. A large proportion of patients are still alive 10 years after CRT implantation. Variables at the time of CRT implant can help provide prognostic information to patients and electrophysiologists to determine the long-term benefit and survival of patients after CRT implantation.

The Application of Internet-Based Sources for Public Health Surveillance (Infoveillance): Systematic Review.

BackgroundPublic health surveillance is based on the continuous and systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of data. This informs the development of early warning systems to monitor epidemics and documents the impact of intervention measures. The introduction of digital data sources, and specifically sources available on the internet, has impacted the field of public health surveillance. New opportunities enabled by the underlying availability and scale of internet-based sources (IBSs) have paved the way for novel approaches for disease surveillance, exploration of health communities, and the study of epidemic dynamics. This field and approach is also known as infodemiology or infoveillance.ObjectiveThis review aimed to assess research findings regarding the application of IBSs for public health surveillance (infodemiology or infoveillance). To achieve this, we have presented a comprehensive systematic literature review with a focus on these sources and their limitations, the diseases targeted, and commonly applied methods.MethodsA systematic literature review was conducted targeting publications between 2012 and 2018 that leveraged IBSs for public health surveillance, outbreak forecasting, disease characterization, diagnosis prediction, content analysis, and health-topic identification. The search results were filtered according to previously defined inclusion and exclusion criteria.ResultsSpanning a total of 162 publications, we determined infectious diseases to be the preferred case study (108/162, 66.7%). Of the eight categories of IBSs (search queries, social media, news, discussion forums, websites, web encyclopedia, and online obituaries), search queries and social media were applied in 95.1% (154/162) of the reviewed publications. We also identified limitations in representativeness and biased user age groups, as well as high susceptibility to media events by search queries, social media, and web encyclopedias.ConclusionsIBSs are a valuable proxy to study illnesses affecting the general population; however, it is important to characterize which diseases are best suited for the available sources; the literature shows that the level of engagement among online platforms can be a potential indicator. There is a necessity to understand the population’s online behavior; in addition, the exploration of health information dissemination and its content is significantly unexplored. With this information, we can understand how the population communicates about illnesses online and, in the process, benefit public health.

Themes in published obituaries of people who have died of opioid overdose

This study gauged public perceptions of the opioid epidemic in online obituaries related to opioid overdose by analyzing emotional themes and tones. A thematic analysis was performed on a consecutive listing of online obituaries from the United States. Three hundred electronic obituaries of people who died due to opioid, heroin, and prescription drug overdose, identified in an online obituary platform (Legacy.com) using the keyword “overdose” were used. Tones, emotions, terms used to describe death, and types of opioids were measured using the string search function of Stata and IBM Watson Tone Analyzer. Our analysis showed that joy and sadness are the most prevalent tones in these obituaries (92% and 88%, respectively) and the most common emotion was love (79%). The two most commonly used terms to describe death due to opioid overdose were ‘accidental’ (53%) and ‘addiction’ (34%). The two types of narcotics named were ‘heroin’ (35%) and ‘prescription opioids’ (7.8%). Obituaries of people who have died due to opioid overdose contain main themes of love, joy, and sadness. The fact that stigma and shame were less prevalent themes might suggest support of the concept that addiction should be regarded as a disease rather than a criminal behavior.

Investigating Sociodemographic Disparities in Cancer Risk Using Web-Based Informatics

Cancer health disparities due to demographic and socioeconomic factors are an area of great interest in the epidemiological community. Adjusting for such factors is important when developing cancer risk models. However, for digital epidemiology studies relying on online sources such information is not readily available. This paper presents a novel method for extracting demographic and socioeconomic information from openly available online obituaries. The method relies on tailored language processing rules and a probabilistic scheme to map subjects’ occupation history to the occupation classification codes and related earnings provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. Using this information, a case-control study is executed fully in silico to investigate how age, gender, parity, and income level impact breast and lung cancer risk. Based on 48,368 online obituaries (4,643 for breast cancer, 6,274 for lung cancer, and 37,451 cancer-free) collected automatically and a generalized cancer risk model, our study shows strong association between age, parity, and socioeconomic status and cancer risk. Although for breast cancer the observed trends are very consistent with traditional epidemiological studies, some inconsistency is observed for lung cancer with respect to socioeconomic status.

Description of a Method to Obtain Complete One-Year Follow-Up in the Society of Thoracic Surgeons/American College of Cardiology Transcatheter Valve Therapy Registry

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services National Coverage Determination requires centers performing transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) to report clinical outcomes up to 1 year. Many sites encounter challenges in obtaining complete 1-year follow-up. We report our process to address this challenge. A multidisciplinary process involving clinical personnel, data and quality managers, and research coordinators was initiated to collect TAVI data at baseline, 30 days, and 1 year. This process included (1) planned clinical follow-up of all patients at 30 days and 1 year; (2) query of health-care system-wide integrated data warehouse (IDW) to ascertain last date of clinical contact within the system for all patients; (3) online obituary search, cross-referencing for unique patient identifiers to determine if mortality occurred in remaining unknown patients; and (4) phone calls to remaining unknown patients or patients' families. Between January 2012 and December 2016, 744 patients underwent TAVI. All 744 patients were eligible for 30-day follow-up and 546 were eligible for 1-year follow-up. At routine clinical follow-up of 22 of 744 (3%) patients at 30 days and 180 of 546 (33%) patients at 1 year had unknown survival status. The integrated data warehouse query confirmed status-alive for an additional 1 of 22 patients at 30 days (55%) and 91 of 180 patients at 1 year (51%). Obituaries were identified for 23 of 180 additional patients at 1 year (13%). Phone contact identified the remaining unknown patients at 30 days and 1 year, resulting in 100% known survival status for patients at 30 days (744 of 744) and at 1 year (546 of 546). In conclusion, using a comprehensive approach, we were able to determine survival status in 100% of patients who underwent TAVI.

Shradhanjali.com: New Address for Memories of Our Ancestors

This case is about Vivek Vyas and Vimal Popat who have conceived an idea to start an online obituary advertising platform. It describes the situation faced by Vyas and Popat who face different options for starting an online obituary advertisement platform. The purpose of this case is to provide an opportunity for stepping into the shoes of Vyas and Popat and explore the best possible option for offering an alternate solution to print obituary advertisement. The case provides the context for students to examine alternate options for the print obituary advertisement amidst lack of entrepreneurial experience of Vyas and Popat.

Ralph J. Cicerone

Ralph J. Cicerone

Shradhanjali.com: New Address for Memories of our Ancestors

This case describes a situation in which Vivek Vyas and Vimal Popat conceive an idea to start an online obituary advertising platform. Vyas and Popat then discuss the possible ways to start an online obituary advertisement platform. The purpose of this case is to provide an opportunity to step into the shoes of Vyas and Popat and explore the best possible option to offer an alternate solution to print obituary advertisement. The case provides the context for students to examine alternate options for the print obituary advertisement amidst lack of entrepreneurial experience of Vyas and Popat.

Assessment of survival in retrospective studies: The Social Security Death Index is not adequate for estimation

Assessment of survival in retrospective studies: The Social Security Death Index is not adequate for estimation

A novel web informatics approach for automated surveillance of cancer mortality trends

Cancer surveillance data are collected every year in the United States via the National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) and the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). General trends are closely monitored to measure the nation’s progress against cancer. The objective of this study was to apply a novel web informatics approach for enabling fully automated monitoring of cancer mortality trends. The approach involves automated collection and text mining of online obituaries to derive the age distribution, geospatial, and temporal trends of cancer deaths in the US. Using breast and lung cancer as examples, we mined 23,850 cancer-related and 413,024 general online obituaries spanning the timeframe 2008–2012. There was high correlation between the web-derived mortality trends and the official surveillance statistics reported by NCI with respect to the age distribution (ρ=0.981 for breast; ρ=0.994 for lung), the geospatial distribution (ρ=0.939 for breast; ρ=0.881 for lung), and the annual rates of cancer deaths (ρ=0.661 for breast; ρ=0.839 for lung). Additional experiments investigated the effect of sample size on the consistency of the web-based findings. Overall, our study findings support web informatics as a promising, cost-effective way to dynamically monitor spatiotemporal cancer mortality trends.

In Memoriam: John Henry Holland—a pioneer of complex adaptive systems research (February 2, 1929–August 9, 2015)

“The study of cas is a difficult, exciting task. The returns are likely to be proportionate to the difficulty.” Holland (2006) On August 9, 2015, cancer took Prof. John Henry Holland away from us. Prof. Holland was a pioneer of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) research and a true inspiration. He is known not only for his work on CAS, Holland (1962, 1992)—which he would fondly write as “cas”—but also for his seminal work on adaptation in natural and artificial systems leading to the creation of genetic algorithms and eventually the fields of evolutionary computation, Holland (1995) and Learning Classifier Systems, Holland and Holyoak (1989). Holland was a truly interdisciplinary academic. He had an undergraduate degree in Physics from MIT (1950), an M.A. in Mathematics (1954) and possibly the first ever PhD in Computer Science (1959), both from the University of Michigan—a place where he also subsequently served as a Professor of Psychology, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Holland leaves behind his legacy in the form of a large number of thought-provoking articles, video lectures, books, and inspired people—ranging from colleagues, fellows and students to budding complexity enthusiasts. Two of his recent books summarize his views on CAS in both a longer, Holland (2012) as well as a shorter form, Holland (2014). It is easy to foresee that these works will serve not only as a guide to CAS but also guidance for future generations. Holland will indeed be greatly missed. Links to some of his online obituaries are as follows: Melanie Mitchell http://tinyurl.com/qcj22tv National Center for Science Education http://tinyurl.com/pm7ga8y New York Times http://tinyurl.com/p5cd22u Santa Fe Institute http://tinyurl.com/qhkgtxd The Scientist http://tinyurl.com/pns6t64 University of Michigan http://tinyurl.com/obbdpx5 Washington Post http://tinyurl.com/oalp27x

The politics of mourning: The virtual memorialisation of British fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan

This article analyses the virtual memorialisation of British fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will study online obituaries published on two websites – BBC news and The Lasting Tribute. These sources are compared as examples of media-driven and community-driven memorialisation. This comparison enables us to study links between the mainstream media and the functioning of digital network communities, between public and private discourses of war memorialisation. The purpose of analysis is twofold: first, the article examines how virtual memorials represent fatalities, and, second, it discusses the political implications of virtual memorialisation. The article posits that although virtual memorials introduce professionalised and personalised accounts of the deaths of service personnel, they also enable a nationalistic discourse of war commemoration, and shape the politics of mourning in modern Britain.

Obituaries Online: New Connections with the Living—and the Dead

This study examines online obituary pages at nine major U.S. daily newspapers seeking to understand how these sites use new technologies, and how they publicly portray people's lives and deaths. These mainstream dailies provide a forum, and potentially large audiences, for mourners who send messages to the dead, express emotion, and tell stories. They also facilitate connections between readers and build new kindsof virtual communities. This represents a departure from traditional obituary content. Indeed, the "cyber obit" now allows the bereaved to help frame the death stories and build the memorials, liberated from the linear, non-interactive formats of the past. This study builds on work of bereavement scholars as well as literature in journalism and mass communication.