Book Review

Review of the Book African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources, edited by Molefi K. Assante and Abu S. Abarry

Understanding Shifting Dynamics of Power in State Governments through Social Networks

We use social network analysis to better understand historic data on the administration of local governments. Despite advances in e-government applications, the public sector lags behind in analytics because information is locked in legacy data formats. Can e-government researchers bridge the gap between legacy data and analytics? We argue that computational analytic methods can explain patterns that have gone unquestioned in previous research on government. We consider how state government authority can be explained using a network perspective. We investigate methodological challenges in building a weighted network to confirm existing measures for calculating the power of the state governor. This project reports on the initial step in a broader study to cover all 50 states across multiple years and agencies. We explain where the power shifted across states and time. Computational analysis of existing government data matches findings from previous studies as well as adding additional explanatory power

Practical Hidden Voice Attacks against Speech and Speaker Recognition Systems

Voice Processing Systems (VPSes), now widely deployed, have been made significantly more accurate through the application of recent advances in machine learning. However, adversarial machine learning has similarly advanced and has been used to demonstrate that VPSes are vulnerable to the injection of hidden commands - audio obscured by noise that is correctly recognized by a VPS but not by human beings. Such attacks, though, are often highly dependent on white-box knowledge of a specific machine learning model and limited to specific microphones and speakers, making their use across different acoustic hardware platforms (and thus their practicality) limited. In this paper, we break these dependencies and make hidden command attacks more practical through model-agnostic (blackbox) attacks, which exploit knowledge of the signal processing algorithms commonly used by VPSes to generate the data fed into machine learning systems. Specifically, we exploit the fact that multiple source audio samples have similar feature vectors when transformed by acoustic feature extraction algorithms (e.g., FFTs). We develop four classes of perturbations that create unintelligible audio and test them against 12 machine learning models, including 7 proprietary models (e.g., Google Speech API, Bing Speech API, IBM Speech API, Azure Speaker API, etc), and demonstrate successful attacks against all targets. Moreover, we successfully use our maliciously generated audio samples in multiple hardware configurations, demonstrating effectiveness across both models and real systems. In so doing, we demonstrate that domain-specific knowledge of audio signal processing represents a practical means of generating successful hidden voice command attacks

Creative Technologies and the Arts of Resilience in Miami: An Interactive Dialogue

Discuss art and technology in Miami with creative technologists Kevin Arrow and Barron Sherer, co-founders of the picture and film archive Obsolete Media Miami, and Willie Avendano, co-founder of Wynwood education lab 01. Arrow, Sherer, and Avendano will present new ways to think about how technology such as virtual reality, 3D design, and retro media can be wielded to foster collaboration and education. Danni Washington, co-founder of the arts and media-based ocean conservation initiative The Big Blue & You will moderate this interactive small-group dialogue on community resilience. Converse with other Miami residents and embrace a space to test new ideas

Environmental enteric dysfunction and the fecal microbiota in malawian children

Environmental enteric dysfunction (EED) is often measured with a dual sugar absorption test and implicated as a causative factor in childhood stunting. Disturbances in the gut microbiota are hypothesized to be a mechanism by which EED is exacerbated, although this supposition lacks support. We performed 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing of fecal samples from 81 rural Malawian children with varying degrees of EED to determine which bacterial taxa were associated with EED. At the phyla level, Proteobacteria abundance is reduced with severe EED. Among bacterial genera, Megasphaera, Mitsuokella, and Sutterella were higher in EED and Succinivibrio, Klebsiella, and Clostridium_XI were lower in EED. Bacterial diversity did not vary with the extent of EED. Though EED is a condition that is typically believed to affect the proximal small bowel, and our focus was on stool, our data do suggest that there are intraluminal microbial differences that reflect, or plausibly lead to, EED

School-Based Relationships Among Children with or at Risk for Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

We investigated the influence of a teacher’s perceived emotional state (e.g., feeling emotionally exhausted; feeling accomplished) on the association between parent-teacher relationships and teacher-child conflict among young children. We used pretest data from a pilot study examining the efficacy of a socio-emotional learning intervention for children with or at risk for emotional or behavioral disorders (EBD). Twenty-six teachers and 45 children (Mean age= 7.46 years; SD = 1.21) participated in the intervention. Teachers rated their relationships with children and their parents using the Parent-Teacher Relationship Scale and Student-Teacher Relationship Scale. Multilevel models showed that teachers with a higher sense of personal accomplishment evidenced a negative association between parent-teacher relationships and teacher-child conflict. However, for teachers who felt emotionally exhausted or those who had a lower sense of personal achievement, the association between parent-teacher relationships and teacher-child conflict either remained unchanged or was positive. We conclude by discussing findings in relation to the importance of increasing teacher efficacy, reducing teacher burnout, and strengthening parent-teacher relationships in schools to improve teacher-child relationships and children’s psychosocial outcomes

The MHISTREET: Barbershop Embedded Education Initiative

The United States (US) is in the midst of a mental health crisis. More than one in four (26.2%) adults experience a diagnosable mental health disorder each year, and 46% of the population will do so in their lifetime. Collectively, mental health disorders are a leading cause of disability and account for one-third of all years lived with disability and premature mortality. Black Americans constitute about 12% of the US population, but they make up more than 18% of the population affected by mental disorders. Black men are 30% more likely than non-Hispanic white men to report having a mental illness but are less likely to receive proper diagnosis and treatment. Black adults are 20% more likely to report serious psychological distress than white adults. Despite this, many Black people do not seek mental health care for various reasons. Causes of higher morbidity and non-care seeking behavior in Black people and Black men in particular include racism, discrimination, stigma, and distrust of the healthcare system. Across the District of Columbia (DC), Black Americans are twice as likely as other ethnicities to report a serious mental disorder, especially if they live in poverty and did not complete high school. In the project service area of Ward 8 in Southeast DC, 92% of the population is Black, 30.7% live in poverty, and only 85% of the population age 25+ completed high school. Evidence shows common mental health disorders are distributed according to a gradient of economic disadvantage across society; the poor and disadvantaged suffer disproportionately from common mental health disorders. In Southeast DC, this negative impact on mental health is compounded by the geographic concentration of underemployment, lack of economic opportunity, poverty, and underutilization of mental health services. Improving mental health literacy is a non-systemic intervention shown to increase mental health care-seeking behaviors. Mental health literacy is the knowledge of, attitude about, and behavior toward mental health issues and mental health services. The goal of the Mental Health Improvement through Study, Teaching, Rebranding, Embedded Education, and Technology or (MHISTREET) initiative is to improve mental health in Black men through embedded education in non-traditional spaces such as barbershops

Gliese 581g as a scaled-up version of Earth: atmospheric circulation simulations

We use three-dimensional simulations to study the atmospheric circulation on the first Earth-sized exoplanet discovered in the habitable zone of an M star. We treat Gliese 581g as a scaled-up version of Earth by considering increased values for the exoplanetary radius and surface gravity, while retaining terrestrial values for parameters which are unconstrained by current observations. We examine the long-term, global temperature and wind maps near the surface of the exoplanet --- the climate. The specific locations for habitability on Gliese 581g depend on whether the exoplanet is tidally-locked and how fast radiative cooling occurs on a global scale. Independent of whether the existence of Gliese 581g is confirmed, our study highlights the use of general circulation models to quantify the atmospheric circulation on potentially habitable, Earth-sized exoplanets, which will be the prime targets of exoplanet discovery and characterization campaigns in the next decade.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS. 15 pages, 13 figures. Sample movies of simulations are available at http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~kheng/fms