Dude, Where’s My Data? A Legislative Band-Aid for Data Brokers’ Bullet Hole in Consumer Privacy Protection

The development and proliferation of the Internet, GPS, cell phones, social media, and the associated data that support these now ubiquitous technologies have created a new ecosystem of information making up a person’s digital identity. Our digital footprints have traditionally been subject to different levels of privacy protection depending upon the kind of data at issue. Over time, court decisions have revealed tensions and a lack of consistency on the question of how the protections guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment apply to an individual’s digital footprint and their reasonable expectations of privacy over it. This Comment will examine the gaps in the current landscape of U.S. privacy protections in the absence of federally explicit legislative protections. First, it will examine current federal statutory privacy law and the piecemeal approach through which certain areas of information or categories of individuals are protected. Next, it will examine the development of the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence as applied to individual privacy rights. It will then analyze the gaps in privacy protection in both statutory and case law and recommend a unified federal statutory approach to ensure that currently legal uses of data do not, when aggregated, yield an impermissibly intrusive infringement of the privacy rights of U.S. citizens in violation of the spirit of the Fourth Amendment’s protections. It will recommend a legislative solution to fill those gaps, provide a clear expression of how certain kinds of data can and cannot be used, and ensure these critical protections are applied equally to all, regardless of the state in which any individual lives

A quantitative approach for measuring the reservoir of latent HIV-1 proviruses.

A stable latent reservoir for HIV-1 in resting CD4+ T cells is the principal barrier to a cure1-3. Curative strategies that target the reservoir are being tested4,5 and require accurate, scalable reservoir assays. The reservoir was defined with quantitative viral outgrowth assays for cells that release infectious virus after one round of T cell activation1. However, these quantitative outgrowth assays and newer assays for cells that produce viral RNA after activation6 may underestimate the reservoir size because one round of activation does not induce all proviruses7. Many studies rely on simple assays based on polymerase chain reaction to detect proviral DNA regardless of transcriptional status, but the clinical relevance of these assays is unclear, as the vast majority of proviruses are defective7-9. Here we describe a more accurate method of measuring the HIV-1 reservoir that separately quantifies intact and defective proviruses. We show that the dynamics of cells that carry intact and defective proviruses are different in vitro and in vivo. These findings have implications for targeting the intact proviruses that are a barrier to curing HIV infection

Detecting substance-related problems in narrative investigation summaries of child abuse and neglect using text mining and machine learning

Background State child welfare agencies collect, store, and manage vast amounts of data. However, they often do not have the right data, or the data is problematic or difficult to inform strategies to improve services and system processes. Considerable resources are required to read and code these text data. Data science and text mining offer potentially efficient and cost-effective strategies for maximizing the value of these data. Objective The current study tests the feasibility of using text mining for extracting information from unstructured text to better understand substance-related problems among families investigated for abuse or neglect. Method A state child welfare agency provided written summaries from investigations of child abuse and neglect. Expert human reviewers coded 2956 investigation summaries based on whether the caseworker observed a substance-related problem. These coded documents were used to develop, train, and validate computer models that could perform the coding on an automated basis. Results A set of computer models achieved greater than 90% accuracy when judged against expert human reviewers. Fleiss kappa estimates among computer models and expert human reviewers exceeded .80, indicating that expert human reviewer ratings are exchangeable with the computer models. Conclusion These results provide compelling evidence that text mining procedures can be a cost-effective and efficient solution for extracting meaningful insights from unstructured text data. Additional research is necessary to understand how to extract the actionable insights from these under-utilized stores of data in child welfare

Disordered Microbial Communities in the Upper Respiratory Tract of Cigarette Smokers

Cigarette smokers have an increased risk of infectious diseases involving the respiratory tract. Some effects of smoking on specific respiratory tract bacteria have been described, but the consequences for global airway microbial community composition have not been determined. Here, we used culture-independent high-density sequencing to analyze the microbiota from the right and left nasopharynx and oropharynx of 29 smoking and 33 nonsmoking healthy asymptomatic adults to assess microbial composition and effects of cigarette smoking. Bacterial communities were profiled using 454 pyrosequencing of 16S sequence tags (803,391 total reads), aligned to 16S rRNA databases, and communities compared using the UniFrac distance metric. A Random Forest machine-learning algorithm was used to predict smoking status and identify taxa that best distinguished between smokers and nonsmokers. Community composition was primarily determined by airway site, with individuals exhibiting minimal side-of-body or temporal variation. Within airway habitats, microbiota from smokers were significantly more diverse than nonsmokers and clustered separately. The distributions of several genera were systematically altered by smoking in both the oro- and nasopharynx, and there was an enrichment of anaerobic lineages associated with periodontal disease in the oropharynx. These results indicate that distinct regions of the human upper respiratory tract contain characteristic microbial communities that exhibit disordered patterns in cigarette smokers, both in individual components and global structure, which may contribute to the prevalence of respiratory tract complications in this population

American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research

McDonald D, Hyde E, Debelius JW, et al. American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen Science Microbiome Research. mSystems. 2018;3(3):e00031-18

Dude, Where’s My Data? A Legislative Band-Aid for Data Brokers’ Bullet Hole in Consumer Privacy Protection

The development and proliferation of the Internet, GPS, cell phones, social media, and the associated data that support these now ubiquitous technologies have created a new ecosystem of information making up a person’s digital identity. Our digital footprints have traditionally been subject to different levels of privacy protection depending upon the kind of data at issue. Over time, court decisions have revealed tensions and a lack of consistency on the question of how the protections guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment apply to an individual’s digital footprint and their reasonable expectations of privacy over it. This Comment will examine the gaps in the current landscape of U.S. privacy protections in the absence of federally explicit legislative protections. First, it will examine current federal statutory privacy law and the piecemeal approach through which certain areas of information or categories of individuals are protected. Next, it will examine the development of the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence as applied to individual privacy rights. It will then analyze the gaps in privacy protection in both statutory and case law and recommend a unified federal statutory approach to ensure that currently legal uses of data do not, when aggregated, yield an impermissibly intrusive infringement of the privacy rights of U.S. citizens in violation of the spirit of the Fourth Amendment’s protections. It will recommend a legislative solution to fill those gaps, provide a clear expression of how certain kinds of data can and cannot be used, and ensure these critical protections are applied equally to all, regardless of the state in which any individual lives

Potential Shifts in the Rhetoric of al-Qaeda Central

In this paper I examine pieces of rhetoric over time to determine whether there is a shift in rhetorical strategies. The change in leadership from bin Laden to Zawahiri, the heightened United States counterterror campaigns, and the continued increase in proliferating al-Qaeda affiliated movements could be responsible for a shift in rhetorical strategy. My prediction could still have support even if the rhetoric of al-Qaeda seems only to shift slightly as opposed to an upheaval and complete change. Slight shifts in rhetorical strategies, like an addition or removal of certain rhetorical patterns, could also useful to determine the ways in which the central organization shifts its tactics in light of its strategically vulnerable position. In my research, I will to attempt to answer the questions “Does it seem that central al-Qaeda’s propaganda has shifted (pre-9/11, post-9/11, post death of Usama bin Laden and other leaders’ eliminations)? If so, How?” It seems that if there are potentially patterns of differences in the propaganda put forward by al-Qaeda, the approach to developing current tactics for countering terrorism must reflect that change. The tactics for fighting terrorism at home and abroad will change depending on how the threat of terrorism develops, and that begins with propaganda.Bachelor of Art

Weapons Sound Effect study

This study explores whether the weapons effect can be extended into the audio realm, particularly when hearing gunshots. Participants listened to NPR news stories that either included a gunshot sound, had it edited out, or were in one of two control conditions (disturbing or neutral). They then participated in a word completion task to measure aggressive cognition. Differences between military vs. non-military gunshot sounds will be explored. The role of mental imagery in the processing of gunshots will also be probed

The nature and consequences of coinfection in humans

Objective: Many fundamental patterns of coinfection (multi-species infections) are undescribed, including the relative frequency of coinfection by various pathogens, differences between single-species infections and coinfection, and the burden of coinfection on human health. We aimed to address the paucity of general knowledge on coinfection by systematically collating and analysing data from recent publications to understand the types of coinfection and their effects. Methods: From an electronic search to find all publications from 2009 on coinfection and its synonyms in humans we recorded data on i) coinfecting pathogens and their effect on ii) host health and iii) intensity of infection. Results: The most commonly reported coinfections differ from infections causing highest global mortality, with a notable lack of serious childhood infections in reported coinfections. We found that coinfection is generally reported to worsen human health (76% publications) and exacerbate infections (57% publications). Reported coinfections included all kinds of pathogens, but were most likely to contain bacteria. Conclusions: These results suggest differences between coinfected patients and those with single infections, with coinfection having serious health effects. There is a pressing need to quantify the tendency towards negative effects and to evaluate any sampling biases in the coverage of coinfection research. (C) 2011 The British Infection Association. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved