The Workflow of Data Analysis Using Stata

The Workflow of Data Analysis Using Stata, by J. Scott Long, is a productivity tool for data analysts. Long guides you toward streamlining your workflow, because a good workflow is essential for replicating your work, and replication is essential for good science. A workflow of data analysis is a process for managing all aspects of data analysis. Planning, documenting, and organizing your work; cleaning the data; creating, renaming, and verifying variables; performing and presenting statistical analyses; producing replicable results; and archiving what you have done are all integral parts of your workflow. Long shows how to design and implement efficient workflows for both one-person projects and team projects.Stata, data management, workflow

Family, Unvalued: Discrimination, Denial, and the Fate of Binational Same-Sex Couples under U.S. Law

"Family, Unvalued" documents the crippling barriers same-sex binational couples face in pursuing a goal enshrined in America's founding document -- happiness. One fact sets them apart from other binational families. A heterosexual couple where one partner is foreign, one a U.S. citizen, can claim the right to enter the U.S. with a few strokes of a pen. But a lesbian or gay couple's relationship -- even if they have lived together for decades, even if their commitment is incontrovertible--is irrelevant. Instead they face a long limbo of legal indifference, harassment, and fear. Delays, bureaucracy, inconsistency, and injustice make the U.S. immigration system a nightmare for millions. Debate over that system is intensifying. Family, Unvalued shows how its failures affect, and sometimes destroy, families which prejudice has deprived of any legal protection. This report reveals how today's discrimination grows from a long history of anti-immigrant campaigns. Most of all, Family, Unvalued lets the reader hear the sometimes horrifying, always enlightening testimony of lesbian and gay families: people simply seeking to build a better future ... together

Characterizing Effects and Benefits of Beam Defocus on High Energy Laser Performance under Thermal Blooming and Turbulence Conditions for Air-to-Ground Engagements

This dissertation makes contributions towards knowledge of optimizing of laser weapon performance when operating in the air-to-ground (ATG) regime in thermal blooming conditions. Wave optics modeling techniques were used to represent laser weapon performance in a high fidelity sense to allow progress to be made toward improving lower-fidelity scaling laws that can be used in systems level analysis which has need for better representations of thermal blooming. Chemical-oxygen iodine laser (COIL) based weapon systems that operate near the ground will experience thermal blooming due to atmospheric absorption if output power is sufficiently high. The thermal lens in the ATG case is predominantly in the far-field of the optical system which puts the problem outside the envelope for most classical phase correction techniques. Focusing the laser beyond the target (defocus) in the air-to-ground regime is shown to improve irradiance at the target and can be thought of as reducing the thermal blooming distortion number, ND, rather than phase correction. Improvement is shown in a baseline scenario presented and all variations from it explored herein. The Breaux ND is examined for potential use in a defocus scaling law, and a correction factor due to Smith (1977), developed for a different context, is proposed to address deficiencies. Optimal defocus settings and expected improvement are presented as a function of Breaux ND. Also, the generally negative interaction between turbulence and thermal blooming is investigated and shown to further limit performance potential of ATG laser weapons. This negative interaction can impact the weapon design trade space and operational methods for minimizing the interaction and thermal blooming are explored in a case study

Developing Trust in a Cross-Functional Workgroup: Assessing the Effectiveness of a Communication Intervention

Business organizations increasingly understand the benefits of forming cross-functional teams, which include collaborative efforts on new initiatives and solving for current issues in the organization. Putting together a group of people from different disciplines, however, is not enough to obtain the results businesses are looking to achieve. To be effective, groups must form into a team. There are two distinct differences between a group and a team. To build a team, a group must coalesce around a unifying mission, understanding, and agreement on the purpose of the team and what they need to accomplish to be successful. The second qualifying factor in the formation of a team is members of the group must trust each other. I created an intervention based on developing communication techniques in a small group to build trust in a cross-functional workgroup. The purpose of this study was to (a) examine the potential effectiveness of an intervention I created using specifically designed communication techniques to build trust in a cross-functional workgroup, (b) determine which techniques were useful, and (c) assess where improvements could be made. What the study revealed is that a cross-functional workgroup can increase the level of trust group members have with each other and the group by enhanced communication training, including empathic listening and sharing experiences

Reproducible Results and the Workflow of Data Analysis

Dr. Long is Distinguished Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology and Statistics at Indiana University.Many disciplines are paying increasing attention to "reproducible results". This is the idea other scientists should have access to your data so that they can reproduce the results from your published work. Producing reproducible results is critically important and highly dependent on your workflow of data analysis. This workflow encompasses the entire process of scientific research: Planning, documenting, and organizing your work; creating, labeling, naming, and verifying variables; performing and presenting statistical analyses; preserving your work; and (perhaps, most important) producing replicable results. Most of our work in statistics classes focuses on estimating and interpreting models. In most “real world” research projects, these activities involve less than 10% of the total work. Professor Long’s talk is about the other 90% of the work. An efficient workflow saves time, introduces greater reliability into the steps of the analysis, and generates reproducible results

Church District Fissioning and Watershed Boundaries among Holmes County, Ohio, Amish

Upon reaching 40 households, an Amish church district typically divides into two smaller, relatively equally sized districts. This article analyzes the relationship between Amish church divisions and topographic demarcation lines within Clark Township, Holmes County, Ohio, from 1930 to 2010. In findings, divisions often follow physical geography boundaries, such as ridges that outline the edge of a watershed, or rivers and streams that essentially define topography within a watershed. Further, Amish leaders divide churches with objectives based on several socioreligious factors, from the maintenance of the faith community to the goal of preserving Amish neighborhoods and rural identity, while also facilitating the continuation of traditional agricultural practices

Screening for antibiotic-producers in soil from a garden

Multidrug-resistant pathogens are the leading cause of nosocomial infection, which killed more than 30,000 people in the United States every year. Among these, ESKAPE strains bugs, which comprise six highly drug-resistant bacteria, pose the greatest challenge to the healthcare system. In order to fight the antibiotic-resistant crises, novel antibiotic-producers must be discovered. This project is a collaboration with the Tiny Earth Project Initiative (TEPI), which is a global network of educators and students focused on student sourcing antibiotic discovery from the soil. Pseudomonas was revealed to produce a zone of inhibition against Bacillus subtilis on LB media. The next step will be isolating the active antibiotic compounds and studying their mode of action