Nicholas Beauchamp

Nick Beauchamp, an associate professor of political science at Boston’s Northeastern University, said there is an opportunity now for political leaders to “start framing their critiques of the others in words that explicitly denounce violence.”

Nick Beauchamp, an associate professor of political science at Boston’s Northeastern University, said there is an opportunity now for political leaders to “start framing their critiques of the others in words that explicitly denounce violence.”

Not many academic papers start off as a joke. But Nick Beauchamp, of Northeastern University, in Massachusetts, was inspired by some light-hearted Twitter threads during the covid-19 pandemic.

Nick Beauchamp is an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University and first caught wind of the Yankee Candle theory late last year.

Based on @drewtoothpaste’s tweet, assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University, Nicholas Beauchamp set to work. He wrote a paper on the phenomenon seemingly confirming that there is in fact a clear link. It appears that an upturn in negative reviews has become a predictive indicator in signaling that a COVID surge is coming.

In his study entitled, Detecting the Effect of Covid Anosmia on Amazon Reviews Using Bayesian Vector Autoregression, Beauchamp used nearly 10,000 Yankee Candle reviews from Amazon and found that each additional 100,000 new Covid cases per week resulted in an estimated 0.25% increase in the number of “no smell” reviews.

With a grant from the Social Science Research Council and Social Science One, researchers at Northeastern University will be among the very first academics to use data from Facebook to explore how information—and misinformation—travels online.