Mellon Information Literacy Initiative Grant Report (2000-2003)

In 2000 Carleton received a three-year Mellon grant. We wanted to integrate information literacy into the curriculum, focusing on the discipline major. Our call for participants resulted in five departments agreeing to participate. The departments are Classical Languages (including Hebrew), Economics, English, Geology, and History. The initiative offered the library and the departments a wonderful opportunity to focus on information literacy within these disciplines

The EDAM Project: Mining Atmospheric Aerosol Datasets

Data mining has been a very active area of research in the database, machine learning, and mathematical programming communities in recent years. EDAM (Exploratory Data Analysis and Management) is a joint project between researchers in Atmospheric Chemistry and Computer Science at Carleton College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison that aims to develop data mining techniques for advancing the state of the art in analyzing atmospheric aerosol datasets. There is a great need to better understand the sources, dynamics, and compositions of atmospheric aerosols. The traditional approach for particle measurement, which is the collection of bulk samples of particulates on filters, is not adequate for studying particle dynamics and real-time correlations. This has led to the development of a new generation of real-time instruments that provide continuous or semi-continuous streams of data about certain aerosol properties. However, these instruments have added a significant level of complexity to atmospheric aerosol data, and dramatically increased the amounts of data to be collected, managed, and analyzed. Our abilit y to integrate the data from all of these new and complex instruments now lags far behind our data-collection capabilities, and severely limits our ability to understand the data and act upon it in a timely manner. In this paper, we present an overview of the EDAM project. The goal of the project, which is in its early stages, is to develop novel data mining algorithms and approaches to managing and monitoring multiple complex data streams. An important objective is data quality assurance, and real-time data mining offers great potential. The approach that we take should also provide good techniques to deal with gas-phase and semi-volatile data. While atmospheric aerosol analysis is an important and challenging domain that motivates us with real problems and serves as a concrete test of our results, our objective is to develop techniques that have broader applicability, and to explore some fundamental challenges in data mining that are not specific to any given application domain

From Data to Creation of Meaning Part II: Data Librarian as Translator

While institutions, methodology and geography all present barriers for communication and development of infrastructure, sometimes the greatest barriers may be in reaching not across the world but across the hallway. Engaging in the work of unified infrastructure requires finding language that bridges modes of inquiry and meaning, so that all participants see their place in the whole. This work of finding shared language involves translation at many levels. Data librarians know that not everyone means the same thing by ‘data’ and increasingly they seek language that spans the practices of social science, sciences, humanities, and performing arts. This paper aims to highlight some of the ways in which data professionals are already adept at translation. Drawing on examples from work as a subject librarian and data professional at an undergraduate institution, I will elaborate on ways in which translation permeates the daily work of data librarians, from helping new researchers learn the language and methods of a field, to supporting faculty as they expand their teaching and research across disciplines. Additionally, librarians’ role as semi-outsiders within the institution situates them well to help drive conversations spanning disciplinary modes of thinking, in which faculty may also find themselves as semi-outsiders

Research Practices Survey 2015-16

2015 marks the first year of Carleton\u27s participation in the Research Practices Survey sponsored by the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium (HEDS). The HEDS Consortium is comprised of a nationwide group of private colleges and universities, who collaboratively collect and share data institutional data. The HEDS Research Practices Survey is uses the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) competency standards in information literacy to assess student information literacy as well as student research experience. The five-section survey takes roughly fifteen minutes to complete. Entering first year students were asked to take this survey at the beginning of fall term, and will be asked to take the survey again at the end of spring term to assess the changes in their research experiences and level of information literacy

Sensitization and Extraordinary Persistence

We propose a behavioral model in which an agent’s attitude toward loss is affected by memories of prior losses. Due to the availability heuristic, memories of prior loss sensitize the agent and increase the weight assigned to prospective losses. Because memories of firsttime experiences exhibit multi-decade persistence in recall, our model helps explain recent empirical findings that major events can have multi-decade effects on choices. We further demonstrate consistency with stochastic dominance, so that sensitized individuals will prefer distributions demonstrating first- and second-order stochastic dominance. In an overlapping generations version of Tirole’s (2006) liquidity-scale framework, our model generates procyclical investment

THE OTHER AMERICA: Inequality, Taxes, and the Very Rich

Effective tax rates are lower than statutory rates for wealthy people because they receive much income from capital, capital income receives preferential treatment, and recognition of capital income is often voluntary. I calculate taxes paid as a percentage of wealth using linked estate- income data. Single itemizers with wealth of at least $2 million in 2007 paid less than 3 percent of wealth in annual taxes, with the richest paying the smallest fraction. Changes enacted in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 favor those at the top. The estate tax remains one tool that may curb extreme wealth accumulation

Nonmonotonicity in the quantum-classical transition: chaos induced by quantum effects

The classical-quantum transition for chaotic systems is understood to be accompanied by the suppression of chaotic effects as the relative h is increased. We show evidence to the contrary in the behavior of the quantum trajectory dynamics of a dissipative quantum chaotic system, the double-well Duffing oscillator. The classical limit in the case considered has regular behavior, but as the effective h is increased we see chaotic behavior. This chaos then disappears deeper into the quantum regime, which means that the quantum-classical transition in this case is nonmonotonic in h

Local Entities as Mechanisms for Global Climate Governance

This paper considers the role of local government entities as actors in global climate governance regimes. The authors review traditional state-based climate governance efforts and existing attempts to engage municipal and local actors through transnational municipal networks (TMNs). Arguing for the importance of TMNs to effective and time-sensitive climate action, the authors then show how and why TMNs are crucial to future efforts to address climate mitigation as part of multi-level, holistic plans for global climate governance