61 research outputs found
The Predisposed Agency of Genomic Fiction
No full textHamner's essay analyzes Richard Powers's novel Generosity: An Enhancement as an example of genomic fiction, a genre-bending science fiction subgenre focused on relationships between biology and identity. Prefacing this study with brief readings of novels by Michael Crichton and evangelical author Angela Hunt, the essay reflects extensively on the metaphors and mythologies involved in contemporary genomics. Here Powers has the distinct advantage of being one of only eight individuals, as of 2008, to have had his entire genome sequenced. Hamner interweaves essays about such experiences from Powers and others with questions about the extent to which genomics can be expected to yield new self-understanding. The essay's broadest argument is that by juxtaposing fictional creativity and genomic modification, Generosity effectively illustrates the need for bridge-building across science-religion, religion-humanities, and humanities-science divides. Specifically, Powers reveals the extent to which genes are gaining sacrosanct status in U.S. culture, and in response offers a postsecular, metanarratival science fiction that contextualizes some of the more inflated rhetoric. Defending scientific research but denouncing its metamorphosis into techno-transcendent spectacle, Powers's work aligns fiction and evolution as processes of painfully slow, bottom-up “compositing,” wherein complexity emerges from simplicity, purpose appears in apparent randomness, and agency persists in tension with both inherited and environmental determinants. Ultimately, Hamner's essay shows that beneath questions about genomic identity lie even more profound ones about the nature and purposes of narrative.</jats:p
Nanda-Hamner curves show huge latitudinal variation but no circadian components in Drosophila montana photoperiodism
No full textAbstractInsect species with a wide distribution offer a great opportunity to trace latitudinal variation in the photoperiodic regulation of traits important in reproduction and stress tolerances. We measured this variation in the photoperiodic time-measuring system underlying reproductive diapause in Drosophila montana, using a Nanda-Hamner (NH) protocol. None of the study strains showed diel rhythmicity in female diapause proportions under a constant day length (12 h) and varying night lengths in photoperiods ranging from 16 to 84 h at 16°C. In the northernmost strains (above 55°N), nearly all females entered diapause under all photoperiods and about half of them even in continuous darkness, while the females of the southern strains showed high diapause proportions only in the circadian 24 h photoperiod. Significant correlation between the strains’ mean diapause proportions in ≥ 24 h photoperiods and critical day length (CDL; half of the females enter diapause) suggests at least partial causal connection between the traits. Interestingly, females of the northern strains entered diapause even in ≤ 24 h photoperiods, where the night length was shorter than their critical night length (24 h — CDL), but where the females experienced a higher number of Light:Dark cycles than in 24 h photoperiods. NH experiments, performed on the control and selection lines in our previous selection experiment, and completed here, gave similar results and confirmed that selection for shorter, southern-type CDL decreases female diapausing rate in non-circadian photoperiods. Overall, our study shows that D. montana females measure night length quantitatively, that the photoperiodic counter may play a prominent but slightly different role in extra short and extra long photoperiods and that northern strains show high stability against perturbations in the photoperiod length and in the presence of LD cycles. These features are best explained by the quantitative versions of the damped external coincidence model.Abstract
Insect species with a wide distribution offer a great opportunity to trace latitudinal variation in the photoperiodic regulation of traits important in reproduction and stress tolerances. We measured this variation in the photoperiodic time-measuring system underlying reproductive diapause in Drosophila montana, using a Nanda-Hamner (NH) protocol. None of the study strains showed diel rhythmicity in female diapause proportions under a constant day length (12 h) and varying night lengths in photoperiods ranging from 16 to 84 h at 16°C. In the northernmost strains (above 55°N), nearly all females entered diapause under all photoperiods and about half of them even in continuous darkness, while the females of the southern strains showed high diapause proportions only in the circadian 24 h photoperiod. Significant correlation between the strains’ mean diapause proportions in ≥ 24 h photoperiods and critical day length (CDL; half of the females enter diapause) suggests at least partial causal connection between the traits. Interestingly, females of the northern strains entered diapause even in ≤ 24 h photoperiods, where the night length was shorter than their critical night length (24 h — CDL), but where the females experienced a higher number of Light:Dark cycles than in 24 h photoperiods. NH experiments, performed on the control and selection lines in our previous selection experiment, and completed here, gave similar results and confirmed that selection for shorter, southern-type CDL decreases female diapausing rate in non-circadian photoperiods. Overall, our study shows that D. montana females measure night length quantitatively, that the photoperiodic counter may play a prominent but slightly different role in extra short and extra long photoperiods and that northern strains show high stability against perturbations in the photoperiod length and in the presence of LD cycles. These features are best explained by the quantitative versions of the damped external coincidence model
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Critique of Mark D. Shermis & Ben Hamner, 'Contrasting State-of-the-Art Automated Scoring of Essays: Analysis'
No full textAlthough the unpublished study by Shermis & Hamner (2012) received substantial publicity about its claim that automated essay scoring (AES) of student essays was as accurate as scoring by human readers, a close examination of the paper's methodology demonstrates that the data and analytic procedures employed in the study do not support such a claim. The most notable shortcoming in the study is the absence of any articulated construct for writing, the variable that is being measured. Indeed, half of the writing samples used were not essays but short one-paragraph responses involving literary analysis or reading comprehension that were not evaluated on any construct involving writing. In addition, the study's methodology employed one method for calculating the reliability of human readers and a different method for calculating the reliability of machines, this difference artificially privileging the machines in half the writing samples. Moreover, many of the study's conclusions were based on impressionistic and sometimes inaccurate comparisons drawn without the performance of any statistical tests. Finally, there was no standard testing of the model as a whole for significance, which, given the large number of comparisons, allowed machine variables to occasionally surpass human readers merely through random chance. These defects in methodology and reporting should prompt the authors to consider formally retracting the study. Furthermore, because of the widespread publicity surrounding this study and because its findings may be used by states and state consortia in implementing the Common Core State Standards, the authors should make the test data publicly available for analysis
Patricia Ismond, Abandoning Old Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry
No full textShakespeare’s genius is not original in story lines or in devices never seen before. He is creative in what he does with recognizable characters, inventive in what he does to make familiar ideas and techniques obtain fresh life. Regarding Ben Jonson’s literary borrowings, John Dryden observed in ‘An Essay of Dramatic Poesy’, Jonson ‘invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets, is only victory in him’. Nevertheless, these obvious precedents have rarely discouraged c..
CB library celebrates Banned Book Week
No full textThe author discusses the Coos Bay Library\u27s policies regarding materials selection and refers to a challenge at a Gold Beach elementary school that occurred in 1994. The author mentions titles that have been challenged in the past and lists reasons why materials are typically challenged
The Gross Anatomy of the Alimentary Canal of Solubea Pugnax (Fab.) (Heteroptera, Pentatomidae)
No full textAuthor Institution: State College, Mississipp
Differences in Google Analytics between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0: A case study
No full textThis thesis is designed to study the field of Google Analytics and apply it to real-world projects—the official website of Texas Woman's University and MatrixZK. The science of Google Analytics includes storing and analyzing users' information for a specific web site. Google Analytics works completely with the official website of TWU (Web 1.0). For studying Web 2.0, the author designed and programmed MatrixZK; however, the contents category did not observe useful data. After several testing, the author added functions of Google Analytics API to MatrixZK in order to monitor visitors' actions in the Web 2.0 website
Contrasting state-of-the-art automated scoring of essays: analysis
No full textThis study compared the results from nine automated essay scoring engines on eight essay scoring prompts drawn from six states that annually administer high-stakes writing assessments.
Student essays from each state were randomly divided into three sets: a training set (used for modeling the essay prompt responses and consisting of text and ratings from two human raters along with a final or resolved score), a second test set used for a blind test of the vendor-developed model (consisting of text responses only), and a validation set that was not employed in this study.
The essays encompassed writing assessment items from three grade levels (7, 8, 10) and were evenly divided between source-based prompts (i.e., essay prompts developed on the basis of provided source material) or those drawn from traditional writing genre (i.e., narrative, descriptive, persuasive). The total sample size was N = 22,029. Six of the eight essays were transcribed from their original handwritten responses using two transcription vendors. Transcription accuracy rates were computed at 98.70% for 17,502 essays. The remaining essays were typed in by students during the actual assessment and provided in ASCII form.
Seven of the eight essays were holistically scored and one employed score assignments for two traits. Scale ranges, rubrics, and scoring adjudications for the essay sets were quite variable. Results were presented on distributional properties of the data (mean and standard deviation) along with traditional measures used in automated essay scoring: exact agreement, exact+adjacent agreement, kappa, quadratic-weighted kappa, and the Pearson r. The results demonstrated that overall, automated essay scoring was capable of producing scores similar to human scores for extended-response writing items with equal performance for both source-based and traditional writing genre
The Microsoft Academic Search challenges at KDD Cup 2013
No full textMicrosoft Academic Search is a free search engine specific to scholarly material. It currently covers more than 50 million publications and over 19 million authors across a variety of domains. One of the main challenges in correctly indexing this material is author name ambiguity and the resulting noise in author profiles. KDD Cup 2013 invited participants to tackle this problem in 2 ways: (1) by automatically determining which papers in an author profile are truly written by a given author, and (2) by identifying which author profiles need to be merged because they belong to the same author. This paper presents a brief account of the contest and the lessons learned
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