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Storage and Processing of Information Under Nonequilibrium Conditions in Associative Memory Systems and Generative Diffusion Models
Get PDFMost processes in nature take place out of equilibrium. Storage and processing of information is an important process in many contexts starting from the brains of living organisms to the storage of genetic information in our cells. These biochemical processes consume energy and function far away from equilibrium. During my PhD, I explored how one could improve the information processing capability of such systems by taking them out of equilibrium. I primarily explored it in the context of associative memory and generative diffusion models
NCES National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS)
No full textThe National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) is a system of related questionnaires that provide descriptive data on the context of elementary and secondary education while also giving policymakers a variety of statistics on the condition of education in the United States.
The NTPS is a redesign of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), which the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducted from 1987 to 2011. The design of the NTPS is a product of three key goals coming out of the SASS program: flexibility, timeliness, and integration with other Department of Education collections. The NTPS collects data on core topics including teacher and principal preparation, classes taught, school characteristics, and demographics of the teacher and principal labor force every two to three years. In addition, each administration of NTPS contains rotating modules on important education topics such as: professional development, working conditions, and evaluation. This approach allows policy makers and researchers to assess trends on both stable and dynamic topics. The NTPS utilizes primarily internet and paper data collection instruments.
The NTPS is a large sample survey of America's public and private elementary and secondary schools. Charter schools are included in the study.
The NTPS consists of four questionnaires:
A Teacher Listing Form to obtain a list of teachers from each school. To reduce burden, a sample of teachers is selected from this list of all teachers at the school;
A School Questionnaire that obtains information on the characteristics of the school;
A Principal Questionnaire that collects information on the principal;
A Teacher Questionnaire that collects information on the sampled teacher.
The NTPS design produces estimates at the national level and is designed to support analysis of a variety of subgroups including: elementary, middle, high, and combined; federal free or reduced-price lunch program; urban, suburban, rural, and town; and traditional public and public charter school types
The Red New Deal: North Dakota’s Carbon Sequestration and How It May Shape National Policy
No full textWhile most emission reduction initiatives in the U.S. have been halted by partisan gridlock, geologic carbon sequestration has expanded over the past 8 years in North Dakota, a state historically dominated by the interests of the emission-driving coal and oil industries. In this paper, I aim to deploy a scientific analysis of geologic sequestration and a policy evaluation of the administrative changes that led to sequestration’s growth in North Dakota in order to explain its expansion in one of the last places emission-reduction policy would be expected. Using government documents, scientific analyses, and stakeholder perspectives, I find that geologic sequestration’s unique ability to simultaneously increase corporate profit through federal tax breaks and spur oil recovery at exhausted wells drove this expansion, which was made possible by a streamlined permitting process in North Dakota. This streamlining both shortened the site evaluation process to a potentially dangerous extent and sparked an anti-sequestration political shift in neighboring states due to controversial CO2 pipeline projects. Despite these flaws, geologic sequestration’s qualities have poised it as a bipartisan emission-reduction solution with the potential for a rapid nationwide expansion now that Doug Burgum, the architect of North Dakota’s sequestration boom, heads the department charged with permitting sequestration on federal lands
Of Rodents and Researchers: How Including Female Rats Affects Neuroscience Knowledge and Culture
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The Qara’ul in the Mongol Empire
Get PDFDespite being arguably the most important institution in the Mongol Empire, there is still much that remains unknown about the Mongol military. One such component is the qara’ul. This contribution will explore this military unit and discuss its actual use and difference from other units that have often had overlapping functions, as well as its connections with other similar military formations
Āṣaf ibn Barakhyā in the Mongol and Mamluk Realms: Between Vizier and Magic
Get PDFĀṣaf ibn Barakhyā (Hebrew: Asaph ben Berechiah) is an enigmatic figure. An obscure biblical character (also connected in the Jewish tradition to Asaph the Physician, author of an early Hebrew medical text), in Muslim lore Āṣaf appears mainly in connection to the king and prophet Sulaymān ibn Dāwūd. This study reviews Āṣaf’s main images in the Jewish and Muslim realms and then focuses on his representation in Mamluk, Chaghadaid, and Ilkhanid sources. It argues that the Mongol period gave a major boost to Āṣaf’s image as the embodiment of an ideal vizier in the Iranian-Turkish realm, and seeks to explain why he became such a prevalent political symbol in the Mongol and post-Mongol domains while never gaining similar function among the neighboring Mamluks
Pinpointing the Onset of Water Harvesting in Reticular Frameworks from Structure
Get PDFCovalent organic frameworks (COFs) have emerged as promising atmospheric water harvesters, offering a potential solution to the pressing global issue of water scarcity, which threatens millions of lives worldwide. This study presents a series of 2D COFs, including HCOF-3, HCOF-2, and a newly developed structure named COF-309, designed for optimized water harvesting performance with a high working capacity at low relative humidity. To elucidate their water sorption behavior, we introduce a hydrophilicity index directly linked to intrinsic properties, such as the strength and spatial density of adsorptive sites. This index is mathematically correlated to the step of water adsorption isotherms. Our correlation provides a predictive tool that extends to other microporous COFs and metal–organic frameworks, significantly enhancing the ability to predict their onset positions of water adsorption isotherms based on structural characteristics. This advancement holds the potential to guide the development of more efficient materials for atmospheric water harvesting
ENSO impacts child undernutrition in the global tropics
Get PDFThe El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a principal component of global climate variability known to influence a host of social and economic outcomes, but its systematic effects on human health remain poorly understood. We estimate ENSO’s association with child nutrition at global scale by combining variation in ENSO intensity from 1986-2018 with children’s height and weight from 186 surveys conducted in 51 teleconnected countries, containing 48% of the world’s under-5 population. Warmer El Niño conditions predict worse child undernutrition in most of the developing world, but better outcomes in the small number of areas where precipitation is positively affected by warmer ENSO. ENSO’s contemporaneous effects on child weight loss are detectable years later as decreases in height. This relationship looks similar at both global and regional scale, and has not appreciably weakened over the last four decades. Results imply that almost 6 million additional children were underweight during the 2015 El Niño compared to a counterfactual of neutral ENSO conditions in 2015. This demonstrates a pathway through which human well-being remains subject to predictable climatic processes
Diverse climate actors show limited coordination in a large-scale text analysis of strategy documents
Get PDFNetworks of non-state actors and subnational governments have proliferated since the Paris Agreement formally recognized their contributions to global climate change governance. Understanding the ways these actors are taking action and how they align with each other and national governments is critical given the need for coordinated actions to achieve ambitious global climate goals. Here, we present a large analysis (n = 9,326), applying large-scale natural language processing methods and social network analysis to the climate strategy documents of countries, regions, cities and companies. We find that climate mitigation in employee travel and office operations, green building standards, and municipal and citizen actions are common themes in climate actions across companies and city and regional governments, whereas approaches to setting targets in specific sectors and emissions scopes are more diverse. We also find links between the strategies of regions and countries, whereas companies are disconnected. Gaps in climate action for most actors include adaptation and consumption/supply-chain emission reduction efforts. We suggest that although actors may appear to be self-organizing and allocating climate actions in a mutually beneficial and synergistic way, there may also be missed opportunities for deeper coordination that could result in more ambitious action
Persuasion via Weak Institutions
Get PDFA sender commissions a study to persuade a receiver but influences the report with some probability. We show that increasing this probability can benefit the receiver and can lead to a discontinuous drop in the sender’s payoffs. To derive our results, we geometrically characterize the sender’s highest equilibrium payoff, which is based on the concavification of a capped value function