Eavesdropping on the past: An oral history exploration of English and Spanish in contact in Texas\u27 Rio Grande Valley, 1904-1945

This thesis investigates the interaction of English and Spanish L1 communities in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas from 1904 to 1945 (an era of mass English L1 migration from the Northern United States and Canada to this historically Spanish-speaking region) via analysis of oral interviews that record both language communities’ memories of the era’s social structures. Collectively, the interviews tell the story of the region’s sociocultural and sociolinguistic environment with a view to exploring how members of each community reacted to the presence of the other language during the first years of significant English/Spanish language contact in previously linguistically isolated areas of the Rio Grande Valley. The primary goals of this project are to (1) to explore how the early 1900s South Texan social setting affected speakers of English, Spanish, or both; and in so doing, to (2) pilot a narrative-based model for future historical sociolinguistics research

Genetic studies of population structure and evolutionary history on the house fly Musca domestica L

DNA sequences at mitochondrial gene COI were surveyed in 29 house fly samples from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Western Pacific. Fifty-two haplotypes were detected, of which one was ubiquitous, and 35 (67%) were confined to a single zoogeographical region. Nei\u27s gene diversity index (H[subscript S]) was 0.47 and was greater in Old World regions than in New World regions. Haplotype diversity was the greatest in the Palearctic region. The Nearctic region displayed the least haplotypic diversity. Hierarchical partitioning of the total diversity among regions (Nei\u27s G[subscript RT]=0.36) indicated only a small proportion was shared. The differentiation of populations within regions (G[subscript PR]) was 0.30. All pairwise estimates of gene flow between zoogeographical regions were less than 0.69 reproducing females per generation (mean 0.49). Nested clade analysis inferred the isolation by distance model for 55% of the significant associations found between geographic and genetic distance, contiguous range expansion was inferred for 36%, and NCA could not discriminate between isolation by distance and range expansion for the remaining 9% of the associations between geographic and genetic distance. I conclude that housefly populations are highly structured even though the flies are mobile and easily capable of passive transport by ship and air, and that the New World was colonized by house flies from the Old World

The Strange Case of Privacy in Equilibrium Models

We study how privacy technologies affect user and advertiser behavior in a simple economic model of targeted advertising. In our model, a consumer first decides whether or not to buy a good, and then an advertiser chooses an advertisement to show the consumer. The consumer's value for the good is correlated with her type, which determines which ad the advertiser would prefer to show to her---and hence, the advertiser would like to use information about the consumer's purchase decision to target the ad that he shows. In our model, the advertiser is given only a differentially private signal about the consumer's behavior---which can range from no signal at all to a perfect signal, as we vary the differential privacy parameter. This allows us to study equilibrium behavior as a function of the level of privacy provided to the consumer. We show that this behavior can be highly counter-intuitive, and that the effect of adding privacy in equilibrium can be completely different from what we would expect if we ignored equilibrium incentives. Specifically, we show that increasing the level of privacy can actually increase the amount of information about the consumer's type contained in the signal the advertiser receives, lead to decreased utility for the consumer, and increased profit for the advertiser, and that generally these quantities can be non-monotonic and even discontinuous in the privacy level of the signal

Online Learning and Profit Maximization from Revealed Preferences

We consider the problem of learning from revealed preferences in an online setting. In our framework, each period a consumer buys an optimal bundle of goods from a merchant according to her (linear) utility function and current prices, subject to a budget constraint. The merchant observes only the purchased goods, and seeks to adapt prices to optimize his profits. We give an efficient algorithm for the merchant's problem that consists of a learning phase in which the consumer's utility function is (perhaps partially) inferred, followed by a price optimization step. We also consider an alternative online learning algorithm for the setting where prices are set exogenously, but the merchant would still like to predict the bundle that will be bought by the consumer for purposes of inventory or supply chain management. In contrast with most prior work on the revealed preferences problem, we demonstrate that by making stronger assumptions on the form of utility functions, efficient algorithms for both learning and profit maximization are possible, even in adaptive, online settings

UR-379 Combatting Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning

The growing concern in data privacy has led to new paradigms in Machine Learning primarily focused around keep data safe and secure. In our research project, we studied Federated Learning, specifically utilizing knowledge distillation and an autoencoder in an attempt to create a sustainable model that could be used in a field such as Heathcare. We propose a Federated Model using the Flower framework, trained on the MedMNIST2D dataset (Organ(A/C/S)MNIST), using Knowledge Distillation as a method of sharing the global model, and a Variational Autoencoder to deal with the problem of Data Heterogeneity that can arise on a distributed network. Our results on a cumulative model are tentative but hope to prove that the idea can be utilized in networks with varying sizes of edge device, usage, and types.

Defining the knowledge base of our profession: a look at agricultural and extension education in the 21st century

The profession of agricultural and extension education has increased in complexity in response to the demands of the changing field of agriculture and the need for educators who are responsive to those demands. A standardization of the knowledge base of the profession is seen as necessary in light of geographic mobility, the nationwide emphasis on assessment, and the need for a public relations tool that clearly articulates the concepts forming the framework of agricultural and extension education. In this study a panel of experts consisting of agricultural and extension education leaders nationwide, responded to open-ended and Likert-type surveys online as part of a Delphi technique to establish the knowledge base for agricultural and extension education. Three rounds of the Delphi technique were used. A minimum of 13 of the 24 panel members were required to respond to each round. Ninety-five statements were initially generated by 16 panel members in response to an open-ended statement in Round I which asked the participants ??What are the articulated understandings, skills, and judgments that serve as the foundation of knowledge (??the body??) for professionals in agricultural and extension education??? These statements were presented to the panel members in Round II. Two-thirds of the panelists had to ??Strongly Agree?? or ??Agree?? with each item for it to be retained for Round III. Based on the responses of 14 panelists in Round II, 67 items were retained for Round III, and one item was added based on panel input. After Round III, three items were eliminated due to lack of twothirds achievement of ??Strongly Agree?? and ??Agree?? ratings by 17 respondents. Thus, 65 statements established the knowledge base of agricultural and extension education in this study. Among the knowledge base are concepts related to traits of effective educators; management issues; environmental impacts on instruction; curriculum development; learner-based contextual, applied pedagogical strategies; leadership development; communications; assessment strategies; community and collegial connections; integration of technology; critical thinking and problem solving; and teaching as a changing process grounded in sound theory

Coordination Complexity: Small Information Coordinating Large Populations

We initiate the study of a quantity that we call coordination complexity. In a distributed optimization problem, the information defining a problem instance is distributed among n parties, who need to each choose an action, which jointly will form a solution to the optimization problem. The coordination complexity represents the minimal amount of information that a centralized coordinator, who has full knowledge of the problem instance, needs to broadcast in order to coordinate the n parties to play a nearly optimal solution. We show that upper bounds on the coordination complexity of a problem imply the existence of good jointly differentially private algorithms for solving that problem, which in turn are known to upper bound the price of anarchy in certain games with dynamically changing populations. We show several results. We fully characterize the coordination complexity for the problem of computing a many-to-one matching in a bipartite graph. Our upper bound in fact extends much more generally to the problem of solving a linearly separable convex program. We also give a different upper bound technique, which we use to bound the coordination complexity of coordinating a Nash equilibrium in a routing game, and of computing a stable matching

Methodological Differences Cannot Explain Associations Between Health, Anthropometrics, and Excess Resting Metabolic Rate

We appreciate Ocobock\u27s interest in methodological rigor. We largely agree with her commentary, which suggests that departures from standard protocols might have contributed to the high resting metabolic rate (RMR) measured for Tsimane. Indeed, our paper acknowledges many of the key departures from gold-standard indirect calorimetry methods of RMR assessment and attempts to adjust for several of these (Gurven et al., 2016). Bringing standard clinical methods into remote field settings often involves certain compromises, especially in our case, where RMR measurement was just one component of a large-scale health and aging project (Gurven et al., 2017). RMR data collection was from 2012 to 2014, and where we to measure RMR again for focused follow up, we would consider new available technologies, improve our protocol to the extent possible, and compare against our published estimates

Alzheimer\u27s Disease Drug Development Pipeline: 2019

Introduction Alzheimer\u27s disease (AD) has few available treatments, and there is a high rate of failure in AD drug development programs. Study of the AD drug development pipeline can provide insight into the evolution of drug development and how best to optimize development practices. Methods We reviewed clinicaltrials.gov and identified all pharmacologic AD trials of all agents currently being developed for treatment of AD. Results There are 132 agents in clinical trials for the treatment of AD. Twenty-eight agents are in 42 phase 3 trials; 74 agents are in 83 phase 2 trials; and 30 agents are in 31 phase 1 trials. There is an increase in the number of agents in each phase compared with that in the 2018 pipeline. Nineteen agents in trials target cognitive enhancement, and 14 are intended to treat neuropsychiatric and behavioral symptoms. There are 96 agents in disease modification trials; of these, 38 (40%) have amyloid as the primary target or as one of several effects. Eighteen of the antiamyloid agents are small molecules, and 20 are monoclonal antibodies or biological therapies. Seven small molecules and ten biologics have tau as a primary or combination target (18%). Amyloid is the most common specific target in phase 3 and phase 2 disease modification trials. Novel biomarkers (e.g., neurofilament light), new outcomes (e.g., AD Composite Score [ADCOMS]), enrollment of earlier populations, and innovative trial designs (e.g., Bayesian adaptive designs) are new features in recent clinical trials. Discussion Drug development continues robustly at all phases despite setbacks in several programs in the recent past. Continuing unmet needs require a commitment to growing and accelerating the pipeline