Open Data, Grey Data, and Stewardship: Universities at the Privacy Frontier

As universities recognize the inherent value in the data they collect and hold, they encounter unforeseen challenges in stewarding those data in ways that balance accountability, transparency, and protection of privacy, academic freedom, and intellectual property. Two parallel developments in academic data collection are converging: (1) open access requirements, whereby researchers must provide access to their data as a condition of obtaining grant funding or publishing results in journals; and (2) the vast accumulation of 'grey data' about individuals in their daily activities of research, teaching, learning, services, and administration. The boundaries between research and grey data are blurring, making it more difficult to assess the risks and responsibilities associated with any data collection. Many sets of data, both research and grey, fall outside privacy regulations such as HIPAA, FERPA, and PII. Universities are exploiting these data for research, learning analytics, faculty evaluation, strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities are besieging universities with requests for access to data or for partnerships to mine them. The privacy frontier facing research universities spans open access practices, uses and misuses of data, public records requests, cyber risk, and curating data for privacy protection. This paper explores the competing values inherent in data stewardship and makes recommendations for practice, drawing on the pioneering work of the University of California in privacy and information security, data governance, and cyber risk.Comment: Final published version, Sept 30, 201

The politics of new technology

A recent article explains how one of the most militant workforces in the country, car workers at British Leyland's Longbridge plant, came to have its spirit of resistance broken. There are several reasons: the failure to mobilise members in response to the sacking of the union convenor late in 1979, the aggressive management tactics of Michael Edwardes, mass unemployment, the combativity of the Thatcher government. However, what the authors of this New Society piece single out as 'the real turning point' was the introduction of new technology which forced on the unions 'flexibility' by deskilling jobs, massively increasing output, and introducing an electronic information network called Machine Monitoring System that resulted in much greater surveillance of individual employees

Blind children's understanding of vision

This thesis explores the effects of congenital blindness upon the development of understanding of vision, and draws on the theoretical frameworks of understanding of aspectuality and visual perspective-taking. Six studies investigated how blind children demonstrated their understanding of vision. Where appropriate, their performance was compared to a control group of sighted children. The views of parents and educators of congenitally blind children were sought in order to gain insight into social influences upon the development of blind children’s understanding of vision. Sixteen congenitally blind children aged from 3;6 to 14;8, 168 typically developing sighted children aged from 3;6 to 14;8 and 58 sighted adults took part in the studies. There were three main findings. First, the associative stage in understanding of the aspectuality of knowledge for blind children may be manifest in the relationship between touching and knowing. Second, when utilising a more naturalistic setting than has commonly been used, blind children aged between three and 11 years were able to hide successfully, raising questions about the position that Level 1 perspective-taking is not present in blind children until the age of at least six or seven years, and possibly not until ten years. Third, blind participants demonstrated an understanding of mind earlier than has been found in other studies, suggesting that the development of theory of mind in congenitally blind children may not be as delayed as was previously thought. Several educational issues were raised, including the manner in which blind children are taught about vision, and their placement in ability-groups in mainstream classrooms

The 'work' of visually impaired people: emplotting the self in order to transform others

This thesis outlines how blind and partially sighted people in an English metropolis therapeutically emplot, i.e. narratively reframe their lives in the face of sight loss, whether adventitious or congenital. It shows how such emplotment, which often leads them to incorporate their disability into their lives, requires multiple forms of narrative ‘work’: joining the visually impaired community, finding a new meaning in one’s life and, importantly, in one’s professional life are all consuming but ultimately rewarding activities in the transformational journeys of people with sight loss. I argue that my participants’ therapeutic emplotment, which is always precarious, is strengthened by the fact that it can function as a model for other people’s emplotment and that it is co-constructed. By demonstrating what they have achieved in their lives in spite of, or even thanks to, their sensory loss, visually impaired people can spread to others the same wish for self-improvement. Crucially, seeing the positive repercussions their spoken or unspoken narratives have on others reinforces the newly recrafted personal stories by which they orient their lives. This thesis offers an alternative voice to the medical anthropology literature that couples disability with reduced employability and distress. It also develops the concept of therapeutic emplotment by suggesting that it can be co-constructed and that it can have an influence on other people’s narrativization of their own lives

Some like it cold: the relationship between thermal tolerance and mitochondrial genotype in an invasive population of the European green crab, Carcinus maenas

Hybrid zones provide natural laboratories to study how specific genes, and interactions among genes, may influence fitness. On the east coast of North America, two separate populations of the European green crab (Carcinus maenas) have been introduced in the last two centuries. An early invasion from Southern Europe colonized New England around 1800, and was followed by a second invasion from Northern Europe to Nova Scotia in the early 1980s (Roman 2006). As these populations hybridize, new combinations of genes potentially adapted to different ends of a thermal spectrum are created in a hybrid zone. To test the hypothesis that mitochondrial and nuclear genes have effects on thermal tolerance, I measured response to cold stress in crabs collected from locations between southern Maine and northern Nova Scotia, and then genotyped the mitochondrial CO1 gene and two nuclear SNPs. Three mitochondrial haplotypes, originally from Northern Europe, had a strong effect on the ability of crabs to right themselves at a temperature of 4.5ºC. Crabs carrying these three haplotypes were 20% more likely to right compared to crabs carrying the haplotype from Southern Europe. The two nuclear SNPs, which were derived from transcriptome sequencing and were strong outliers between Northern and Southern European C. maenas populations, had no effect on righting response at low temperature. These results add C. maenas to the short list of ectotherms in which mitochondrial variation affects thermal tolerance, and suggests that natural selection is shaping the structure of the hybrid zone between the northern and southern populations This discovery of linkage between mitochondrial genotype and thermal tolerance also provides potential insight into the patterns of expansion for invasive populations of C. maenas around the world

2018 Student Center for Science Engagement Research Symposium Program

Welcome everyone to the 10th Annual Research Symposium of the Student Center for Science Engagement (SCSE), co-sponsored with the NIH MARC NU-STAR Program! All of us in the SCSE are excited about the research and collaborations that were part of the summer program, both at NEIU and at other institutions. The SCSE Summer Research Program has continued to flourish, with 44 students and 26 faculty involved in 19 different research groups. These projects represented all of the STEM disciplines, with many interdisciplinary collaborations. These partnerships extended outside of the NEIU campus with students working with the scientists at the Field Museum, Lafayette College, Northern Illinois University, the University of Chicago, Michigan State University, the USDA National Soil Erosion Research Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Iowa, Ithaca College, Centro de Investigación Científica de Yucatán, and the Pennsylvania State University. Whether projects were done at NEIU or elsewhere, they are only possible with the support and efforts of faculty mentors and students working together to form strong and authentic research communities. Vital support also came from the College of Arts and Sciences, Academic Affairs, the SCSE Executive Board, and the contributions from grant programs secured by the NEIU community, including the NSF Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, the U.S. Department of Education Hispanic Serving Institutions Title III program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the NIH MARC U-STAR Program, and the NIH Chicago-CHEC program. It is also important to recognize the work of the SCSE staff in supporting all of the work that went into supporting students and faculty, as well as this Symposium. Since I am relatively new in the position of Director, I also need to recognize the extensive efforts of Dr. Joel Olfelt, who was in the position of Director prior to my start in August of this year. Finally, I want to emphasize not just the excellent work that was done over the summer, but also the building of a culture and community at NEIU that values and emphasizes these research experiences for our students, faculty, and staff. This is the result of all those involved, especially the talents, abilities, dedication, enthusiasm, and determination of our students