The Challenges of Place, Capacity, and Systems Change: The Story of Yes we can!

· Yes we can!, a comprehensive community initiative (CCI) funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, was designed to improve educational and economic outcomes within the foundation’s hometown of Battle Creek, Mich. Since 2002, Yes we can! has supported five core strategies designed to trigger the systems changes needed to reduce educational and economic inequities in Battle Creek. · Yes we can! has achieved some important wins to date; for example, more residents are involved, more neighborhoods have stronger neighborhood associations, and more organizations are engaging residents in their decision-making processes. However, the scale of wins remains small, and the targeted systemic changes have not yet emerged. · Some common CCI design elements featured in Yes we can! may have inadvertently bounded its success: a) community building efforts targeted small-scale places, restricting the scale and scope of wins; b) demands for current work competed with building capacities for future work; and c) local partners who were implementing their individual grants struggled to maintain a focus on the larger vision and collective work

Adaptive Monotone Shrinkage for Regression

We develop an adaptive monotone shrinkage estimator for regression models with the following characteristics: i) dense coefficients with small but important effects; ii) a priori ordering that indicates the probable predictive importance of the features. We capture both properties with an empirical Bayes estimator that shrinks coefficients monotonically with respect to their anticipated importance. This estimator can be rapidly computed using a version of Pool-Adjacent-Violators algorithm. We show that the proposed monotone shrinkage approach is competitive with the class of all Bayesian estimators that share the prior information. We further observe that the estimator also minimizes Stein's unbiased risk estimate. Along with our key result that the estimator mimics the oracle Bayes rule under an order assumption, we also prove that the estimator is robust. Even without the order assumption, our estimator mimics the best performance of a large family of estimators that includes the least squares estimator, constant-$\lambda$ ridge estimator, James-Stein estimator, etc. All the theoretical results are non-asymptotic. Simulation results and data analysis from a model for text processing are provided to support the theory.Comment: Appearing in Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 201

Auxin-induced growth inhibition a natural consequence of two-point attachment

It is characteristic of a great number of biologically active substances that the responses which they elicit are twofold, low concentrations of the material promoting a particular activity, and higher concentrations inhibiting it. This is the case with the auxin-induced growth responses of plants. An active auxin such as indole acetic acid (IAA) brings about and is essential to growth in length of stems, hypocotyls and other plant organs including the Avena coleoptile

ALSEP weight report

This report covers mass property information on all ALSEP Flight hardware.prepared by R. Foster.Weight -- Center of gravity location -- Requirements -- Coordinate relationshipRevision no. A

Enhancing Transparency and Control when Drawing Data-Driven Inferences about Individuals

Recent studies have shown that information disclosed on social network sites (such as Facebook) can be used to predict personal characteristics with surprisingly high accuracy. In this paper we examine a method to give online users transparency into why certain inferences are made about them by statistical models, and control to inhibit those inferences by hiding ("cloaking") certain personal information from inference. We use this method to examine whether such transparency and control would be a reasonable goal by assessing how difficult it would be for users to actually inhibit inferences. Applying the method to data from a large collection of real users on Facebook, we show that a user must cloak only a small portion of her Facebook Likes in order to inhibit inferences about their personal characteristics. However, we also show that in response a firm could change its modeling of users to make cloaking more difficult.Comment: presented at 2016 ICML Workshop on Human Interpretability in Machine Learning (WHI 2016), New York, N

ALSEP weight report

This report covers mass property information on all ALSEP Flight hardware. It includes, for the first time, actual mass property test results for both subpacks of Flight 5.prepared by R. Foster.Weight -- Center of gravity location requirement -- Requirements -- Coordinate relationshipRevision no. A

Metal etching composition

The present invention is directed to a chemical etching composition for etching metals or metallic alloys. The composition includes a solution of hydrochloric acid, phosphoric acid, ethylene glycol, and an oxidizing agent. The etching composition is particularly useful for etching metal surfaces in preparation for subsequent fluorescent penetrant inspection

The Heroic in Middle-earth

Gives examples of several types of heroism: the survival-hero, whose heroism is a reaction to a hostile environment; the destiny-hero, who has been chosen to fulfill a task beyond his normal capabilities; the honor-hero, motivated by a desire for reputation and fame; and the ethic-hero, whose self-respect demands he act when circumstances arise that require it. Describes the moral framework of Middle-earth as one that constantly presents opportunities for heroic action, which in turn influences and supports later heroic actions through providing examples to emulate, clues to effective action, or heirloom objects that assist later heroes. In this framework, all heroic actions against evil are valuable and have consequences