Protecting participant privacy while maintaining content and context: Challenges in qualitative data De‐identification and sharing

The Library Assessment for Research and Scholarship Lab investigates qualitative research support across disciplines. In 2018–2019, the lab conducted 29 interviews with faculty, librarians, and doctoral students who engaged in qualitative research to understand their needs during the research lifecycle. At the conclusion of this project, the qualitative data will be deposited in a repository where it can be made available for future secondary use. The deposited data will include de‐identified versions of the complete interview transcripts. This poster supplements existing de‐identification standards, details drafting and revising protocol for de‐identification of our data, and discusses the de‐identification process we used for the qualitative data. Existing de‐identification literature and standards are limited and not widely uniform in qualitative research. In developing de‐identification protocol, our lab recognized several potential challenges in the process and created procedures to ensure future data usability. There is inherent tension between keeping privacy intact and sharing undistorted qualitative data. We aim to address some of the hazards with de‐identification best practices, demonstrating methodology for producing high quality de‐identified qualitative data. In offering up a test case with suggested methods to better protect participants’ identities, this work will lend itself to sustainable qualitative data sharing and reuse.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163391/2/pra2415_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163391/1/pra2415.pd

Exotic polarizations of D2 branes and oblique vacua of (S)YM2+1_{2+1}

We investigate the oblique vacua in the perturbed 2+1 dimensional gauge theory living on D2 branes. The string theory dual of these vacua is expected to correspond to polarizations of the D2 branes into NS5 branes with D4 brane charge. We perturb the gauge theory by adding fermions masses. In the nonsupersymmetric case, we also consider the effect of slight variations of the masses of the scalars. For certain ranges of scalar masses we find oblique vacua. We show that D4 charge is an essential ingredient in understanding D2 -> NS5 polarizations. We find that some of the polarization states which appear as metastable vacua when D4 charge is not considered are in fact unstable. They decay by acquiring D4 charge, tilting and shrinking to zero size.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, LaTe

Bekenstein entropy bound for weakly-coupled field theories on a 3-sphere

We calculate the high temperature partition functions for SU(Nc) or U(Nc) gauge theories in the deconfined phase on S^1 x S^3, with scalars, vectors, and/or fermions in an arbitrary representation, at zero 't Hooft coupling and large Nc, using analytical methods. We compare these with numerical results which are also valid in the low temperature limit and show that the Bekenstein entropy bound resulting from the partition functions for theories with any amount of massless scalar, fermionic, and/or vector matter is always satisfied when the zero-point contribution is included, while the theory is sufficiently far from a phase transition. We further consider the effect of adding massive scalar or fermionic matter and show that the Bekenstein bound is satisfied when the Casimir energy is regularized under the constraint that it vanishes in the large mass limit. These calculations can be generalized straightforwardly for the case of a different number of spatial dimensions.Comment: 32 pages, 12 figures. v2: Clarifications added. JHEP versio

Serologic Surveillance of Selected Viral and Bacterial Pathogens in South Carolina’s Feral Swine Population

Feral swine (Sus scrofa) are considered an invasive species that is comprised of the wild descendants of domestic swine, European wild boar, and hybrids of these two species. Feral swine were historically associated with the major river drainages in Coastal South Carolina. However, natural range expansion and human release and relocation of feral swine appear to be sources of their expansion into areas not previously occupied. Although an exact estimate of feral swine population numbers is not available, in 2006 feral swine were reported in 42 of 46 South Carolina counties, compared to 46 of 46 counties reporting feral swine activity in 2011. Feral swine can serve as reservoirs for a number of diseases including pseudorabies, swine brucellosis (Brucella spp.), porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome and porcine circovirus which may be passed to livestock and, in some cases, native wildlife and humans. The National Wildlife Disease Program within the US Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services conducted serologic surveys for pseudorabies virus, brucellosis, porcine circovirus, and porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome virus in South Carolina feral pig populations from 2007- 2012. During that period, we opportunistically sampled and collected serum from 545 feral pigs. Overall, 111 of 544 (20.40%) animals tested positive for antibodies to pseudorabies, 87 of 545 (15.96%) animals tested positive for antibodies to brucellosis, 171 of 306 (55.88%) animals tested positive for antibodies to porcine circovirus, and seven of 312 (2.24%) animals tested positive for antibodies to porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome. Positive cases of pseudorabies and brucellosis were spatially limited to populations closely associated with the major river drainages in Coastal South Carolina. These positive cases of pseudorabies and brucellosis were found in areas of long established pig populations. The seven positive cases of porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome were limited to one geographic cluster within the Congaree and Wateree river confluence and two clusters along the PeeDee River Drainage. These clusters of seropositive cases indicate a more geographically localized distribution of porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome. Interestingly, positive cases of porcine circovirus appeared to be evenly distributed across all sample locations in South Carolina. A more spatially and temporally consistent sampling strategy is recommended to investigate linear spread of pathogens along river drainages and throughout the feral swine population in South Carolina

Giant Gravitons in Conformal Field Theory

Giant gravitons in AdS_5 x S^5, and its orbifolds, have a dual field theory representation as states created by chiral primary operators. We argue that these operators are not single-trace operators in the conformal field theory, but rather are determinants and subdeterminants of scalar fields; the stringy exclusion principle applies to these operators. Evidence for this identification comes from three sources: (a) topological considerations in orbifolds, (b) computation of protected correlators using free field theory and (c) a Matrix model argument. The last argument applies to AdS_7 x S^4 and the dual (2,0) theory, where we use algebraic aspects of the fuzzy 4-sphere to compute the expectation value of a giant graviton operator along the Coulomb branch of the theory.Comment: 37 pages, LaTeX, 1 figure. v2: references and acknowledgements added, small correction

A Lovelock black hole bestiary

We revisit the study of (A)dS black holes in Lovelock theories. We present a new tool that allows to attack this problem in full generality. In analyzing maximally symmetric Lovelock black holes with non-planar horizon topologies many distinctive and interesting features are observed. Among them, the existence of maximally symmetric vacua do not supporting black holes in vast regions of the space of gravitational couplings, multi-horizon black holes, and branches of solutions that suggest the existence of a rich diagram of phase transitions. The appearance of naked singularities seems unavoidable in some cases, raising the question about the fate of the cosmic censorship conjecture in these theories. There is a preferred branch of solutions for planar black holes, as well as non-planar black holes with high enough mass or temperature. Our study clarifies the role of all branches of solutions, including asymptotically dS black holes, and whether they should be considered when studying these theories in the context of AdS/CFT.Comment: 40 pages, 16 figures; v2: references added and minor amendments; v3: title changed to improve its accuracy and general reorganization of the results to ameliorate their presentatio

Flavor from M5-branes

We study various aspects of the defect conformal field theory that arises when placing a single M5-brane probe in AdS_4 x S^7. We derive the full set of fluctuation modes and dimensions of the corresponding dual operators. We argue that the latter does not depend on the presence of a non-trivial magnetic flux on the M5-brane world-volume. Finally we give a mass to the hypermultiplet living on the defect, and compute the resulting mesonic spectrum.Comment: 19 page

When Black Holes Meet Kaluza-Klein Bubbles

We explore the physical consequences of a recently discovered class of exact solutions to five dimensional Kaluza-Klein theory. We find a number of surprising features including: (1) In the presence of a Kaluza-Klein bubble, there are arbitrarily large black holes with topology S^3. (2) In the presence of a black hole or a black string, there are expanding bubbles (with de Sitter geometry) which never reach null infinity. (3) A bubble can hold two black holes of arbitrary size in static equilibrium. In particular, two large black holes can be close together without merging to form a single black hole.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures, v2: few comments on stability modifie