Preschoolers’ Physical, Social, and Engineering Play Behaviors: Differences in Gender and Play Environment

This study explored gender differences in the occurrence of 66 preschoolers\u27 (ages 3-to-5; 29 girls, 37 boys) physical, social, and engineering thinking play behaviors across three play environments: the traditional playground, the dramatic play area, and an environment in which children played with large, manipulable, loose parts. Previous research has indicated that young children are not engaging in enough physical play to maintain healthy lifestyles. Play may also have benefits for social competency and cognitive development. Observations of children\u27s engagement with a new and engaging play material, Imagination Playground TM blocks, which are designed to foster imaginative and creative constructive play, were used to understand more about preschoolers\u27 physical activity, social behaviors, and engineering thinking play, a recently developed construct that focuses on early design- and construction-related thinking and behavior. The engineering thinking play observation measure was used as an index of the types of behaviors in which preschoolers are engaging that parallel thought-processes and behaviors associated with the engineering process (e.g., explanations of how things are built, construction, and generation of innovative and creative ideas). Results indicated no gender difference in the frequency of occurrence of early engineering thinking play, suggesting that research is needed exploring processes underlying boys\u27 and girls\u27 early cognition, and girls\u27 subsequent disinterest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-related (STEM) careers, compared to boys. Additionally, children\u27s play with large, manipulable, loose parts was associated with three times the frequency of engineering thinking play than occurred in the traditional outdoor playground. Large loose parts play also included high levels of gross motor and fine motor physical activity, and positive social play behaviors. These observations suggested that play with loose parts and other manipulable materials may benefit children\u27s development in multiple domains

Design and Implementation of Environmental DNA Metabarcoding Methods for Monitoring the Southern California Marine Protected Area Network

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are important tools for maintaining biodiversity and abundance of marine species. However, key to the effectiveness of MPAs is monitoring of marine communities. Current monitoring methods rely heavily on SCUBA-based visual observations that are costly and time consuming, limiting the scope of MPA monitoring. Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is a promising cost effective, rapid, and automatable alternative for marine ecosystem monitoring. However, as a developing tool, the utility of eDNA metabarcoding requires improved bioinformatic techniques and reference barcode databases. Furthermore, it is important to understand how eDNA metabarcoding performs relative to visual surveys to better understand the strengths and limitations of each approach. This thesis improves eDNA metabarcoding approaches to survey the nearshore rocky reef and kelp forest ecosystems within the Southern California MPA network. It then tests the effectiveness of eDNA metabarcoding against visual surveys conducted by the Channel Islands National Park Service Kelp Forest Monitoring Program and Reef Check California. In Chapter 1, I develop FishCARD, a 12S reference barcode database specific to fishes of the California Current ecosystem. FishCARD improves eDNA metabarcoding taxonomic assignments, resulting in the identification of a broader array of marine vertebrate diversity, including invasive, endangered, and mobile species frequently missed by visual surveys. In Chapter 2, I compare eDNA metabarcoding and visual underwater survey methods inside, on the edge of, and outside the Scorpion State Marine Reserve off Santa Cruz Island. We demonstrate that eDNA captures a broader range of fish taxa than visual surveys and detects fine-scale spatial differences in fish communities. In Chapter 3, I demonstrate that eDNA metabarcoding and visual underwater surveys capture similar biogeographic patterns of fish communities across 44 sites within the Southern California Bight. Importantly, eDNA methods distinguished fish communities inside and outside of Southern California MPAs, finding a greater abundance of target species inside MPAs matching patterns observed through visual surveys. These results built off the collaborative development of the Anacapa Toolkit metabarcoding pipeline. Together I demonstrate the utility of eDNA metabarcoding for monitoring MPAs, providing an important complementary tool to visual methods, helping expand MPA monitoring across space, time, and depth

Robots Welcome? Ethical and Legal Considerations for Web Crawling and Scraping

Web crawlers are widely used software programs designed to automatically search the online universe to find and collect information. The data that crawlers provide help make sense of the vast and often chaotic nature of the Web. Crawlers find websites and content that power search engines and online marketplaces. As people and organizations put an ever-increasing amount of information online, tech companies and researchers deploy more advanced algorithms that feed on that data. Even governments and law enforcement now use crawlers to carry out their missions. Despite the ubiquity of crawlers, their use is ambiguously regulated largely by online social norms whereby webpage headers signal whether automated “robots” are welcome to crawl their sites. As courts take on the issues raised by web crawlers, user privacy hangs in the balance. In August 2017, the Northern District of California granted a preliminary injunction in such a case, deciding that LinkedIn’s website must be open to such crawlers. In March 2018, the District Court for the District of Columbia granted standing for an as-applied challenge to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to a group of academic researchers and a news organization. The Court allowed them to proceed with a case in which they now allege the law’s making a violation of website Terms of Service a crime effectively prohibits web crawling and infringes on their First Amendment Rights. In addition, news media is inundated with stories like Cambridge Analytica wherein web crawlers were used to scrape data from millions of Facebook accounts for political purposes. This paper discusses the history of web crawlers in courts as well as the uses of such programs by a wide array of actors. It addresses ethical and legal issues surrounding the crawling and scraping of data posted online for uses not intended by the original poster or by the website on which the information is hosted. The article further suggests that stronger rules are necessary to protect the users’ initial expectations about how their data would be used, as well as their privacy

Final Report: Paths to QUALITY Evaluation

Paths to QUALITY Evaluation—Phase 2 Final Report to the Indiana Office of Early Childhood and Out of School Learning Family and Social Services Administration March, 201

ranacapa: An R package and Shiny web app to explore environmental DNA data with exploratory statistics and interactive visualizations.

Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is becoming a core tool in ecology and conservation biology, and is being used in a growing number of education, biodiversity monitoring, and public outreach programs in which professional research scientists engage community partners in primary research. Results from eDNA analyses can engage and educate natural resource managers, students, community scientists, and naturalists, but without significant training in bioinformatics, it can be difficult for this diverse audience to interact with eDNA results. Here we present the R package ranacapa, at the core of which is a Shiny web app that helps perform exploratory biodiversity analyses and visualizations of eDNA results. The app requires a taxonomy-by-sample matrix and a simple metadata file with descriptive information about each sample. The app enables users to explore the data with interactive figures and presents results from simple community ecology analyses. We demonstrate the value of ranacapa to two groups of community partners engaging with eDNA metabarcoding results

Characterizing Industrial and Artisanal Fishing Vessel Catch Composition Using Environmental DNA and Satellite-Based Tracking Data

The decline in wild-caught fisheries paired with increasing global seafood demand is pushing the need for seafood sustainability to the forefront of national and regional priorities. Validation of species identity is a crucial early step, yet conventional monitoring and surveillance tools are limited in their effectiveness because they are extremely time-consuming and require expertise in fish identification. DNA barcoding methods are a versatile tool for the genetic monitoring of wildlife products; however, they are also limited by requiring individual tissue samples from target specimens which may not always be possible given the speed and scale of seafood operations. To circumvent the need to individually sample organisms, we pilot an approach that uses forensic environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding to profile fish species composition from the meltwater in fish holds on industrial and artisanal fishing vessels in Ecuador. Fish identified genetically as present were compared to target species reported by each vessel’s crew. Additionally, we contrasted the geographic range of identified species against the satellite-based fishing route data of industrial vessels to determine if identified species could be reasonably expected in the catch.publishedVersio

Strategy-dependent effects of working-memory limitations on human perceptual decision-making

Deliberative decisions based on an accumulation of evidence over time depend on working memory, and working memory has limitations, but how these limitations affect deliberative decision-making is not understood. We used human psychophysics to assess the impact of working-memory limitations on the fidelity of a continuous decision variable. Participants decided the average location of multiple visual targets. This computed, continuous decision variable degraded with time and capacity in a manner that depended critically on the strategy used to form the decision variable. This dependence reflected whether the decision variable was computed either: (1) immediately upon observing the evidence, and thus stored as a single value in memory; or (2) at the time of the report, and thus stored as multiple values in memory. These results provide important constraints on how the brain computes and maintains temporally dynamic decision variables. &nbsp;</p

Suboptimal human inference can invert the bias-variance trade-off for decisions with asymmetric evidence

Solutions to challenging inference problems are often subject to a fundamental trade-off between: 1) bias (being systematically wrong) that is minimized with complex inference strategies, and 2) variance (being oversensitive to uncertain observations) that is minimized with simple inference strategies. However, this trade-off is based on the assumption that the strategies being considered are optimal for their given complexity and thus has unclear relevance to forms of inference based on suboptimal strategies. We examined inference problems applied to rare, asymmetrically available evidence, which a large population of human subjects solved using a diverse set of strategies that varied in form and complexity. In general, subjects using more complex strategies tended to have lower bias and variance, but with a dependence on the form of strategy that reflected an inversion of the classic bias-variance trade-off: subjects who used more complex, but imperfect, Bayesian-like strategies tended to have lower variance but higher bias because of incorrect tuning to latent task features, whereas subjects who used simpler heuristic strategies tended to have higher variance because they operated more directly on the observed samples but lower, near-normative bias. Our results help define new principles that govern individual differences in behavior that depends on rare-event inference and, more generally, about the information-processing trade-offs that can be sensitive to not just the complexity, but also the optimality, of the inference process. &nbsp;</p