Music discovery in everyday situations has been facilitated in recent years by audio content recognition services such as Shazam. The widespread use of such services has produced a wealth of user data, specifying where and when a global audience takes action to learn more about music playing around them. Here, we analyze a large collection of Shazam queries of popular songs to study the relationship between the timing of queries and corresponding musical content. Our results reveal that the distribution of queries varies over the course of a song, and that salient musical events drive an increase in queries during a song. Furthermore, we find that the distribution of queries at the time of a song's release differs from the distribution following a song's peak and subsequent decline in popularity, possibly reflecting an evolution of user intent over the “life cycle” of a song. Finally, we derive insights into the data size needed to achieve consistent query distributions for individual songs. The combined findings of this study suggest that music discovery behavior, and other facets of the human experience of music, can be studied quantitatively using large-scale industrial data.

Although the vast majority of people with mental illness (PWMI) are not violent, Americans tend to think they are more dangerous than the general population. Because negative media portrayals may contribute to stigma, we used time-series analyses to examine changes in the public’s perceived dangerousness of PWMI around six mass shootings whose perpetrators were reported to have a mental illness. From 2011 to 2019, 38,094 U.S. participants completed an online study assessing implicit and explicit perceived dangerousness of PWMI. There were large, upward spikes in perceived dangerousness the week of the Sandy Hook mass shooting that were relatively short-lived. However, there was not a consistent pattern of effects for other events analyzed, and any other spikes observed were smaller. Effects tended to be larger for explicit versus implicit perceived dangerousness. Sandy Hook seemed to temporarily worsen perceived dangerousness of PWMI, but this pattern was not observed for other mass shootings.

During Britain's transition to war against Revolutionary France in 1793, the administration of William Pitt expanded Britain's traditional military embargoes on enemy commerce to include grain-a policy that redefi ned "military stores" to include foods alongside other materials required for warfare. Th e goal of this blockade was to use starvation as a political weapon for ending the war by forcing France's National Convention to decide between feeding its civilian population and feeding its armies. Th e policy never received full support in London, however, and the National Convention in France prioritized feeding its soldiers over its people. Although the British eff ort to manipulate Europe's international food system to serve Britain's diplomatic and military ends was largely a failure, the redefi nition of grain as military material reshaped the signifi cance of food and agricultural geography in European military strategy at the turn of the nineteenth century.

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