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Teaching with Data in the Social Sciences at the University of Richmond
Get PDFFrom Spring 2020 through Fall 2021, a team from UR participated in a multi-site study called “Teaching with Data in the Social Sciences” led by Ithaka S+R, a research and strategy organization that focuses on scholarly communication and libraries in higher education. Samantha Guss (Boatwright Library) and Ryan Brazell (Faculty Hub) interviewed 14 UR faculty, all of whom teach in social sciences disciplines or use social data, to learn more about faculty needs as they help their students build data literacy skills. The primary objective for participating in this study was to better understand UR faculty needs so that the Library and Faculty Hub can better support faculty who teach with data across the curriculum. Findings are presented in four themes
Structuring Techlaw
Get PDFTechnological breakthroughs challenge core legal assumptions and generate regulatory debates. Practitioners and scholars usually tackle these questions by examining the impacts of a particular technology within conventional legal subjects — say, by considering how drones should be regulated under privacy law, property law, or the law of armed conflict. While individually useful, these siloed analyses mask the repetitive nature of the underlying questions and necessitate the regular reinvention of the regulatory wheel. An overarching framework — one which can be employed across technologies and across subjects — is needed.The fundamental challenge of tech-law is not how to best regulate novel technologies, but rather how to best address familiar forms of uncertainty in new contexts. Accordingly, we construct a three-part framework, designed to encourage a more thoughtful resolution of tech-law questions. It:(1) delineates the three types of tech-fostered legal uncertainty, which facilitates recognizing common issues;(2) requires a considered selection between permissive and precautionary approaches to technological regulation, given their differing distributive consequences; and(3) highlights tech-law-specific considerations when extending extant law, creating new law, or reassessing a legal regime.This structure emphasizes the possibility of considered and purposeful intervention in the iterative and co-constructive relationship between law and technology. By making it easier to learn from the rich history of prior dilemmas and to anticipate future issues, this framework enables policymakers, judges, and other legal actors to make more just and effective regulatory decisions going forward
Believing in the American Dream Sustains Negative Attitudes toward Those in Poverty
Get PDFA critical lever in the fight against poverty is to improve attitudes toward those living in poverty. Attempting to understand the factors that impact these attitudes, we ask: Does believing that meritocracy exists (descriptive meritocracy) sustain negative attitudes? Using cross-sectional (N = 301) and experimental (N = 439) methods, we found that belief in the United States as a meritocracy is associated with blaming people living in poverty and predicts negative attitudes toward them. Replicating and extending these findings, we experimentally manipulated beliefs in meritocracy and blame. Weakening American Dream beliefs predicted improved attitudes toward those in poverty. Understanding the nuanced role of belief systems in attitudes toward those in poverty provides strategies for promoting more positive thoughts and feelings
American bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus) diet in Uruguay compared with other invasive populations in Southern South America
Get PDFBetween 2000-2020, more than ten new populations of the invasive American bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus) have been reported in the southern cone of South America. We studied the stomach contents of 126 bullfrogs from a population at an early invasion stage in Uruguay (Acegua, Cerro Largo Department). We observed a rich diet, with extensive prey volume range (1 mm3 to more than 7 000 mm(3)); the most frequent items were Hymenoptera (19.6%), Coleoptera (16.4%), Amphipoda (13.3%), Anura (8.9%) and Heteroptera (8.7%). Despite some overlap, differences were observed in volume (chi(2) = 54.6, p \u3c0.001, d.f. = 2) and prey quantity (F = 8.1, p \u3c0.001, d.f. = 79) between males, females, and juveniles. Juveniles showed significantly higher consumption of terrestrial prey by count (82% of their total ingestion) than adults (29% for males and 32% for females) (chi(2) = 28.5, p \u3c0.001, d.f. = 2). Adults, especially females, showed a high frequency of cannibalism (33% of their total ingestion; chi(2) = 20.9, p \u3c0.001, d.f. = 2). Comparing our data with other bullfrog regional studies, we found great plasticity in trophic habits and differences in the incidence of cannibalism (higher incidence in the populations of Acegua, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina). These differences could be related to local biodiversity, but also could be affected by the invasion phase. Cannibalism frequency was higher in small bullfrog populations, where it could be favoring the establishment success. This shift in foraging strategies during the invasion process had been insufficiently evaluated in amphibians. Knowing the ecological determinants for the invasion by bullfrogs can be useful to the development of management strategies
An Open Repository of Real-Time COVID-19 Indicators.
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic presented enormous data challenges inthe United States. Policy makers, epidemiological modelers, andhealth researchers all require up-to-date data on the pandemicand relevant public behavior, ideally at fine spatial and temporalresolution. The COVIDcast API is our attempt to fill this need:Operational since April 2020, it provides open access to bothtraditional public health surveillance signals (cases, deaths, andhospitalizations) and many auxiliary indicators of COVID-19 ac-tivity, such as signals extracted from deidentified medical claimsdata, massive online surveys, cell phone mobility data, and in-ternet search trends. These are available at a fine geographicresolution (mostly at the county level) and are updated daily. TheCOVIDcast API also tracks all revisions to historical data, allowingmodelers to account for the frequent revisions and backfill that arecommon for many public health data sources. All of the data areavailable in a common format through the API and accompanyingR and Python software packages. This paper describes the datasources and signals, and provides examples demonstrating thatthe auxiliary signals in the COVIDcast API present informationrelevant to tracking COVID activity, augmenting traditional publichealth reporting and empowering research and decision-making
“Who shall be lord of the earth?” Nietzsche, Schmitt, and thinking “beyond the line”
No full textCarl Schmitt privately acknowledged that his late theory of Erd-Herrschaft (hegemony of the Earth) converged with some of Nietzsche’s thought, yet remained silent on this in his book The Nomos of the Earth. This essay reconstructs an implicit Nietzsche–Schmitt dialog, focusing on their related but distinct geopolitical and phenomenological concepts of Earth, the role of binary divisions in ethics and politics, and the nature of hegemony. Nietzsche and Schmitt both derive from a tradition of political theology that relies on the antitheses of state sovereignty and the Antichrist, but they draw opposed conclusions from this duality
Richmond Law Magazine: Winter 2021
Get PDFThe Pandemic Pivot
8 Things to Know When Suing and Defending in a Post-COVID World
The Pandemic, Students, and The Lawhttps://scholarship.richmond.edu/law-magazine/1074/thumbnail.jp
Cosmological Inflation in N-Dimensional Gaussian Random Fields with Algorithmic Data Compression
Get PDFThe leading theories of inflation are increasingly multi-dimensional. In this project, we consider a natural hypothesis that the inflaton potential, the theorized mechanism behind accelerated expansion in the early universe, is maximally random. We present a program that simulates random potentials, solves equations of motion, and catalogues predictions for observable quantities, such as perturbation spectra
“All our lives we will remember what bread is”: How young women in Soviet Leningrad documented 872 days under siege
No full textThis paper analyzes common themes found in 13 Russian-language diaries written by women age 17 to 25 during the Siege of Leningrad in WWII. The siege lasted for 2.5 years and had horrific humanitarian consequences; an estimated 40% of the city’s prewar population died, many from starvation. Some Leningraders documented, or attempted to document, the siege experience in diaries. Over the years, some of those diaries have been closely examined, including in Alexis Peri’s seminal book The War Within. However, no study has focused exclusively on diaries written by young women, despite the fact that Leningrad’s population was majority female during the siege. This project begins to fill that gap. In particular, it considers whether themes Peri identifies in The War Within were truly universal. Some themes, such as the enormous influence of food, seem ubiquitous; others, such as the importance of family to combat isolation, have been previously overlooked