Greater data science at baccalaureate institutions

Donoho's JCGS (in press) paper is a spirited call to action for statisticians, who he points out are losing ground in the field of data science by refusing to accept that data science is its own domain. (Or, at least, a domain that is becoming distinctly defined.) He calls on writings by John Tukey, Bill Cleveland, and Leo Breiman, among others, to remind us that statisticians have been dealing with data science for years, and encourages acceptance of the direction of the field while also ensuring that statistics is tightly integrated. As faculty at baccalaureate institutions (where the growth of undergraduate statistics programs has been dramatic), we are keen to ensure statistics has a place in data science and data science education. In his paper, Donoho is primarily focused on graduate education. At our undergraduate institutions, we are considering many of the same questions.Comment: in press response to Donoho paper in Journal of Computational Graphics and Statistic

Food for Thought: Genetically Modified Seeds as De Facto Standard Essential Patents

For several years, courts have been improperly calculating damages in cases involving the unlicensed use of genetically-modified (GM) seed technology. In particular, when courts determine patent damages based on the hypothetical negotiation method, they err in exaggerating these damages to a point where no rational negotiator would agree. In response, we propose a limited affirmative defense of an implied license due to the patent’s status as a de facto standard essential patent. To be classified as a de facto standard essential patent, the farmer must prove three elements that reflect the peculiarities of GM seeds used in farming: (1) dominance, (2) impracticability, and (3) necessary to fulfill a basic need. Based on the approaches used by courts and standard setting organizations in licensing standard essential patents in technological fields such as cell phones and software, designation of some GM seeds as standard essential patents allows the courts to imply a license from patentees to farmers on reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms. Doing so shifts the case from a tort-based patent infringement suit to a breach of contract dispute and alters the damages regime from one based in compensation, deterrence, and punishment (a tort approach) to one based solely in compensation (a contractual approach). As a result of this novel proposal, the damages calculations in these suits return to economic reality

Late Quaternary Relative Sea-level Changes in Mid-latitudes

High quality relative sea-level (RSL) data from mid-latitude regions reveal spatial and temporal variations among eustatic, isostatic (glacio and hydro) and local factors since the Last Glacial Maximum. In regions of the Atlantic seaboard of North America and Europe that were once covered by the major ice sheets RSL fell by over 100m because of isostatic rebound. In contrast, the regions at the periphery and beyond of the ice sheets observations showed continually rising sea levels, at variable rates, due to the interplay between post-glacial isostatic recovery, marginal forebulge collapse and hydro-isostatic loading. The RSL observations from the Southern Hemisphere illustrated a mid-Holocene highstand of various magnitudes and timing

Tennessee\u27s Radical Army : the State Guard and its role in Reconstruction

The topic of this dissertation is the Tennessee State Guard and its activities from 1867 to 1869. The Radical (Republican) Governor William G. Brownlow used this militia organization to uphold his fledgling Reconstruction administration and provide some protection to the recently enfranchised freedmen. In the process, the State Guard policed elections, in accordance with the state\u27s controversial Franchise Acts, and operated against the ex-Confederate opposition, including the emergent Ku Klux Klan. Drawing principally on the rich, but little used, papers of the Tennessee Adjutant General\u27s Office, my thesis is that the State Guard was remarkably successful at enforcing the Recqnstruction policies of the Radical government. Although it was a partisan law enforcement body-a Radical Army in effect-the State Guard usually conducted itself with a high degree of professionalism and restraint; it was not an instrument of tyranny. When it was deployed-during the political campaigns of 1867 and under the martial law decrees of early 1869-it effectively thwarted ex-Confederate vigilantism. When it was not employed-as in 1868 when the Klan terrorized large sections of the state-the Radical party and the freedmen suffered. By not maintaining a consistent and active militia presence, the Radicals may have forfeited their best means for completing the Reconstruction of their state

Perspectives On Change: The Coeducational Transition of Saint Anselm College 1969-1979

This study examines Saint Anselm College’s transition to a fully coeducational Benedictine Catholic liberal arts college between 1969 and 1979, employing a twofold data sample comprised of archival documents and oral history interviews with early female alumnae, who experienced campus life firsthand during the 1960s and 1970s. The researcher conducted analysis of historical documents available at Saint Anselm College, including: presidential files, minutes of the monastic and Advisory Board of Trustees meetings, college yearbooks, Registrar and Dean’s Office data, college catalogues, Advancement Office data, New Hampshire College and University Council (NHCUC) data, New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) accreditation data, and correspondence between administrators at Saint Anselm College and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester and other Catholic colleges and universities in the Greater Manchester, New Hampshire area. These varied archival data samples, coupled with rich firsthand oral history interviews provided critical evidence concerning the factors that contributed to Saint Anselm College’s full transition to coeducation and the significant impacts involving campus culture and environment, resulting from the College’s decision to transition to a fully coeducational institution

The application of local and regional transfer functions to the reconstruction of Holocene sea levels, north Norfolk, England

Foraminiferal assemblages from Thornham and Brancaster marshes (Norfolk, UK) illustrate statistically significant relationship with elevation with respect to the tidal frame. We develop local (data from Thornham and Brancaster marshes) and regional (data from Thornham and Brancaster marshes combined with those from 11 other sites around the UK) predictive foraminifera-based transfer functions to reconstruct former sea levels from a Holocene sediment sequence from Holkham, north Norfolk, UK. The two transfer functions produce similar patterns of tidal elevation change during the Holocene. The vertical error ranges of the local transfer function are smaller than those of the regional transfer function, although the difference (0.09 m) is not significant when compared to other factors affecting the reconstructed elevation. The value of the reconstructed elevations also differ between the two transfer functions (by up to 0.43 m), and this is primarily due to the lack of modern analogues in the local transfer function. We conclude that the reconstructions derived from the regional transfer function are more reliable than those of the local transfer function, since the latter achieves its slight increase in precision at the expense of a significant decrease in predictive power. The regional transfer function is used to construct a relative sea-level curve from fossil assemblages within a sediment core from north Norfolk, UK. These results are consistent with existing sea-level data and geophysical model predictions, and illustrate the utility of the foraminifera-based transfer function approach

Infaunal Marsh Foraminifera From the Outer Banks, North Carolina, USA

The distribution and abundance of live (rose Bengal stained) and dead, shallow infaunal (0–1 cm depth) and deep infaunal (\u3e1 cm depth) benthic foraminifera have been documented at three locations representing different salinity settings on the fringing marshes along the Pamlico Sound and Currituck Sound coasts of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Two cores taken at each site represent the lower and higher marsh. Twenty-two taxa were recorded as live. Of these, eight taxa were found only at shallow infaunal depths; the other 14 taxa occur at deep infaunal depths in one or more cores. Only Jadammina macrescens and Tiphotrocha comprimata were recorded as living in all six cores. The distributions of the other taxa were restricted by combinations of infaunal depth, salinity regime and location on the marsh. The tests of infaunal foraminifera were generally more likely to be preserved in the lower marsh than the higher marsh at low- and intermediate-salinity sites. The opposite pattern was evident at the high-salinity site but this may be due to the low numbers of deep infaunal specimens recovered. Arenoparrella mexicana, Haplophragmoides wilberti, Jadammina macrescens and Trochammina inflata are the most resistant taxa, whereas Miliammina fusca is the species whose tests are most likely to be lost to post-mortem degradation. In five of the six cores, foraminiferal assemblages and populations do not differ significantly with depth which suggests that the foraminifera of the 0–1 cm depth interval provide an adequate model upon which paleoenvironmental (including former sea level) reconstructions can be based