Buying Private Data without Verification

We consider the problem of designing a survey to aggregate non-verifiable information from a privacy-sensitive population: an analyst wants to compute some aggregate statistic from the private bits held by each member of a population, but cannot verify the correctness of the bits reported by participants in his survey. Individuals in the population are strategic agents with a cost for privacy, \ie, they not only account for the payments they expect to receive from the mechanism, but also their privacy costs from any information revealed about them by the mechanism's outcome---the computed statistic as well as the payments---to determine their utilities. How can the analyst design payments to obtain an accurate estimate of the population statistic when individuals strategically decide both whether to participate and whether to truthfully report their sensitive information? We design a differentially private peer-prediction mechanism that supports accurate estimation of the population statistic as a Bayes-Nash equilibrium in settings where agents have explicit preferences for privacy. The mechanism requires knowledge of the marginal prior distribution on bits $b_i$, but does not need full knowledge of the marginal distribution on the costs $c_i$, instead requiring only an approximate upper bound. Our mechanism guarantees $\epsilon$-differential privacy to each agent $i$ against any adversary who can observe the statistical estimate output by the mechanism, as well as the payments made to the $n-1$ other agents $j\neq i$. Finally, we show that with slightly more structured assumptions on the privacy cost functions of each agent, the cost of running the survey goes to $0$ as the number of agents diverges.Comment: Appears in EC 201

Planting ‘Italian Gusto’ in ‘a Gothick country’: The influence of Filippo Juvarra on William Kent

After a lacklustre attempt to become a painter,William Kent (1685–1748) developed a career as a garden designer, working mainly for Lord Burlington and other patrons in his circle. His gardens represent some of the earliest gardens of a style that became known as the ‘English Landscape Garden’, exemplified by Stourhead in Wiltshire, Rousham in Oxfordshire and Stowe in Buckinghamshire; so named in part because, in the past, scholars have pointed to landscape painting as the primary influence on the creation of this new style. In this paper, therefore, I shall present a way of approaching Kent’s garden designs that focuses on his experiences in Rome and his subsequent position within the musical and theatrical milieu of Lord Burlington. I shall explore the influence of Italian set design upon the garden style that Kent introduced to England in the 1720s, and go from there to the wider question of the ‘theatricality’ of the English Baroque garden

The Bosco Parrasio as a site of pleasure and of sadness

This paper considers the way in which the garden, the « Bosco Parrasio », in which members of Rome’s Arcadian Academy met was not only a place of pleasurable escapism, but also a place of longing and mourning. This can be seen in the design of physical spaces – each real site that hosted the « Bosco Parrasio » was required to display the lapidi di memoria – memorials to departed Arcadians, and often included funerary imagery. It is also found in the poetry written to be performed at those garden meetings, which often memorialised departed members, friends, or family. And, it is threaded through Crescimbeni’s poetic imaging of the Academy and its activities in his 1708 book L’Arcadia. This paper will explore those depictions of the Arcadian garden as a site of melancholy, mourning and nostalgia and explore the idea that the evocation of this ‘timeless’ landscape as a space for melancholy is an example of nostalgia not as stultifying (as we often read it), but, as a necessary ingredient in cultural change

The Gardens of Lucca

The city of Lucca was never limited to the urban area within the walls. Autumn and winter would be lived in the city palazzo, with life concentrating upon commercial activities enlivened by entertainments such as music and theatre. In spring and summer life was relocated en masse to the villa. This article outlines the essentials of Lucchese garden design during the Baroque period. It also discusses the role of these gardens in the cultural life of 17th and 18th century Lucca

Performances of Power - the site of public debate

In 2009 the protests against election result in Iran began to play out not just on the streets of the capital (check) but online. Shortly after the protests Time magazine described Twitter (at that point the platform was only three years old) as 'ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control.’ Over ten years later the latter seems true, but the idea that it is serving the ‘average citizen’ is now less convincing. The potential for online social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc to be subject to manipulation and used for the spread of misinformation and abuse has been in the spotlight in recent years. The examples for this chapter are drawn from several key moments that continue to have resonance for us in the twenty-first century when we think about changing power structures and the physical places that house them. The first are the public fora of ancient Greece and Rome, spaces for the voicing of public opinion existed in both societies and continue to be closely linked with our modern ideas of democracy, governance and the ideals of civil society. Taking ideas and decisions to the people was regarded as a cornerstone of these democratic societies, yet we also know that these gatherings of the crowd were exploited and manipulated for power by politicians and generals. The second example is to look at the shift in the use of public space in 16th and 17th century Europe. As many cities and states in Europe transitioned from republics to dukedoms and absolutist monarchies, public and semi-public spaces were used as stages to perform newly imposed social hierarchies. The crowd was invited to participate but was also carefully controlled; a reflection of their changing status. These events exploited new technologies and culture as tools to refashion society in a new image and resonates strongly with our contemporary moment where new digital technologies are also doing this.

San Francisco Bay Area KIPP Schools: A Study of Early Implementation

Measures how well five San Francisco Bay Area schools have implemented the goals of the Knowledge Is Power Program during the first year of a three-year initiative to prepare underserved urban youth for college

Understanding and Exploiting Phage–Host Interactions

peer-reviewedInitially described a century ago by William Twort and Felix d’Herelle, bacteriophages are bacterial viruses found ubiquitously in nature, located wherever their host cells are present. Translated literally, bacteriophage (phage) means ‘bacteria eater’. Phages interact and infect specific bacteria while not affecting other bacteria or cell lines of other organisms. Due to the specificity of these phage–host interactions, the relationship between phages and their host cells has been the topic of much research. The advances in phage biology research have led to the exploitation of these phage–host interactions and the application of phages in the agricultural and food industry. Phages may provide an alternative to the use of antibiotics, as it is well known that the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections has become an epidemic in clinical settings. In agriculture, pre-harvest and/or post-harvest application of phages to crops may prevent the colonisation of bacteria that are detrimental to plant or human health. In addition, the abundance of data generated from genome sequencing has allowed the development of phage-derived bacterial detection systems of foodborne pathogens. This review aims to outline the specific interactions between phages and their host and how these interactions may be exploited and applied in the food industry

Students as Collaborators: a digital humanities and GLAM sector collaboration to produce new web-based content through student led projects

This paper shares the success of research-led teaching and GLAM sector collaborations developed as part of the Digital Humanities (DH) teaching program at the Australian National University. This collaborative project offered a shared solution to two distinct problems. For teaching in DH we found that students, while fascinated by the GLAM and DH crossover space, struggled to evaluate the challenges and affordances of digital resources developed for collection-based research and engagement when studied in the abstract. The students were unfamiliar with the pragmatics and realities involved in working with materials from the GLAM sector as they came from diverse academic backgrounds (computer science, linguistics, engineering). For our GLAM partners, project deadlines, organisational structures, and, most importantly, budgets constrained innovative work with digitised collections. The pilot program ran across two courses in DH, one with the National Museum of Australia that focused on development of web-based educational resources, and one with the British Library Labs where students could develop a project focused on any of the following: Research, Artistic, Community, and, Teaching/Learning. This pilot program has now become a permanent fixture of our teaching. It has offered a productive way for a small research centre to engage with a range of GLAM partners, and offered them the chance to see how to use collections in the digital space, from marketing to games to advanced research projects. Meanwhile, students in DH from diverse backgrounds are shown the opportunities for future work pathways in GLAM, and exposed to not just the technical challenges of digital project development, but the social and institutional ones as well

Deficiency in the mouse mitochondrial adenine nucleotide translocator isoform 2 gene is associated with cardiac noncompaction.

The mouse fetal and adult hearts express two adenine nucleotide translocator (ANT) isoform genes. The predominant isoform is the heart-muscle-brain ANT-isoform gene 1 (Ant1) while the other is the systemic Ant2 gene. Genetic inactivation of the Ant1 gene does not impair fetal development but results in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in postnatal mice. Using a knockin X-linked Ant2 allele in which exons 3 and 4 are flanked by loxP sites combined in males with a protamine 1 promoter driven Cre recombinase we created females heterozygous for a null Ant2 allele. Crossing the heterozygous females with the Ant2(fl), PrmCre(+) males resulted in male and female ANT2-null embryos. These fetuses proved to be embryonic lethal by day E14.5 in association with cardiac developmental failure, immature cardiomyocytes having swollen mitochondria, cardiomyocyte hyperproliferation, and cardiac failure due to hypertrabeculation/noncompaction. ANTs have two main functions, mitochondrial-cytosol ATP/ADP exchange and modulation of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mtPTP). Previous studies imply that ANT2 biases the mtPTP toward closed while ANT1 biases the mtPTP toward open. It has been reported that immature cardiomyocytes have a constitutively opened mtPTP, the closure of which signals the maturation of cardiomyocytes. Therefore, we hypothesize that the developmental toxicity of the Ant2 null mutation may be the result of biasing the cardiomyocyte mtPTP to remain open thus impairing cardiomyocyte maturation and resulting in cardiomyocyte hyperproliferation and failure of trabecular maturation. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled 'EBEC 2016: 19th European Bioenergetics Conference, Riva del Garda, Italy, July 2-6, 2016', edited by Prof. Paolo Bernardi

Amphotericin forms an extramembranous and fungicidal sterol sponge.

For over 50 years, amphotericin has remained the powerful but highly toxic last line of defense in treating life-threatening fungal infections in humans with minimal development of microbial resistance. Understanding how this small molecule kills yeast is thus critical for guiding development of derivatives with an improved therapeutic index and other resistance-refractory antimicrobial agents. In the widely accepted ion channel model for its mechanism of cytocidal action, amphotericin forms aggregates inside lipid bilayers that permeabilize and kill cells. In contrast, we report that amphotericin exists primarily in the form of large, extramembranous aggregates that kill yeast by extracting ergosterol from lipid bilayers. These findings reveal that extraction of a polyfunctional lipid underlies the resistance-refractory antimicrobial action of amphotericin and suggests a roadmap for separating its cytocidal and membrane-permeabilizing activities. This new mechanistic understanding is also guiding development of what are to our knowledge the first derivatives of amphotericin that kill yeast but not human cells