A Survey of the Aquatic Macrobenthos of Waller Creek

This report characterizes the mouth of Waller Creek, while also providing the results of a 10 month research period focusing on macrobenthic life. 876 individuals were collected, and details regarding their collection are included inside the report.Waller Creek Working Grou

The Seesaw app: Providing differentiated assessment opportunities

I discovered the Seesaw app, which allows students to create drawings, videos, and pictures that become part of an online portfolio. Although it is not THE answer to assessment, it has become one of my (and my students’) favorites

The Identification of Unknown Bacteria

A major activity of most college level introductory microbiology courses is the identification of one or more unknown bacterial species. The ways suggested in many lab manuals for identifying bacteria are often unorganized and difficult to follow. In addition, the huge volume of information often required to make a diagnosis may overwhelm beginning microbiology students who are largely incapable of weighing the importance of many of the tests in trying to decide how to best proceed with the identification. Microbiology manuals too often overlook the fact that identification is an orderly process of moving from general characteristics to more specific differences between closely related organisms

The Feeding Behavior of the Giant Waterbug

Ethology, the study of animal behavior; is a branch of biology too often overlooked in beginning biology courses. This is unfortunate since studying the behavior of living animals not only captures the interest and imagination of students more easily than other kinds of laboratory exercises but can also help to develop the skills of observation and description so fundamental to the art of science

Erasure of Unaligned Attributes from Neural Representations

We present the Assignment-Maximization Spectral Attribute removaL (AMSAL) algorithm, which erases information from neural representations when the information to be erased is implicit rather than directly being aligned to each input example. Our algorithm works by alternating between two steps. In one, it finds an assignment of the input representations to the information to be erased, and in the other, it creates projections of both the input representations and the information to be erased into a joint latent space. We test our algorithm on an extensive array of datasets, including a Twitter dataset with multiple guarded attributes, the BiasBios dataset and the BiasBench benchmark. The last benchmark includes four datasets with various types of protected attributes. Our results demonstrate that bias can often be removed in our setup. We also discuss the limitations of our approach when there is a strong entanglement between the main task and the information to be erased.Comment: Accepted to Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 22 pages (pre-MIT Press publication version

Cognitive leisure activities and future risk of cognitive impairment and dementia: systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: As life expectancies continue to rise, modifiable lifestyle factors that may prevent cognitive decline and dementia in later life become increasingly important in order to maintain quality of life in old age. METHODS: Five meta-analyses were conducted on data from papers identified in a systematic review. Studies were grouped according to outcomes (dementia, cognitive impairment including amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and cognitive decline) and output (risk (RR), odds (OR), or hazard ratios (HR)). RESULTS: Nineteen studies met our inclusion criteria and quality assessments. Four of five meta-analyses showed significant associations between participation in cognitive leisure activities and reduced risk of cognitive impairment (OR = 0.69, 95% CI: 0.56-0.85) and dementia (HR = 0.58, 95% CI: 0.46-0.74; RR = 0.61, 95% CI: 0.42-0.90; OR = 0.78, 95% CI: 0.67-0.90). However, one pooled analysis of cognitive impairment studies did not reach significance (HR = 0.85, 95% CI: 0.71-1.02). Mentally stimulating leisure activities were significantly associated with later life cognition (β = 0.11, p = 0.05), better memory (β = 0.20, 95% CI: 0.11-0.29), speed of processing (β = 0.37, 95% CI: 0.29-0.45), and executive functioning (β = 0.23, 95% CI: 0.15-0.29), and less decline in overall cognition (β = -0.23, p < 0.01), language (β = -0.11, p < 0.05), and executive functioning (β = -0.13, p < 0.05). Activities were also shown to reduce rate of cognitive decline (estimate = 0.03, SE = 0.01, p = 0.00). CONCLUSIONS: There is increasing evidence that participation in cognitively stimulating leisure activities may contribute to a reduction of risk of dementia and cognitive impairment in later life. Promoting involvement in such activities across lifespan could be an important focus for primary prevention strategies for governments and health services

Motivation to change, therapeutic alliance, and treatment adherence in the inpatient treatment of patients with anorexia nervosa

PatientInnen mit Anorexia nervosa (AN) zeigen häufig eine ausgeprägte Behandlungsambivalenz, weshalb internationale Leitlinien bei schweren Krankheitsverläufen multidisziplinäre stationäre Behandlungsintervalle empfehlen. Trotz starker Bemühungen die PatientInnen bei der Gewichtszunahme und Verbesserung psychopathologischer Merkmale zu unterstützen, ist die Effektivität der stationären Behandlung nach wie vor unzureichend und die Abbruchquoten sind hoch. Motivationsfördernde Methoden sind daher im Fokus neuerer Ansätze, auch wenn noch ein großer Mangel an Wissen über ihre Effekte herrscht. Das vorliegende Dissertationsprojekt leistet in drei Teilprojekten einen Beitrag zur Verbesserung multimodaler stationärer Behandlungskonzepte, indem Aspekte externaler und internaler Veränderungsmotivation bei PatientInnen mit AN untersucht und in eine im Rahmen des Dissertationsprojektes neu entwickelte, Intervention integriert werden

A Joint Matrix Factorization Analysis of Multilingual Representations

We present an analysis tool based on joint matrix factorization for comparing latent representations of multilingual and monolingual models. An alternative to probing, this tool allows us to analyze multiple sets of representations in a joint manner. Using this tool, we study to what extent and how morphosyntactic features are reflected in the representations learned by multilingual pre-trained models. We conduct a large-scale empirical study of over 33 languages and 17 morphosyntactic categories. Our findings demonstrate variations in the encoding of morphosyntactic information across upper and lower layers, with category-specific differences influenced by language properties. Hierarchical clustering of the factorization outputs yields a tree structure that is related to phylogenetic trees manually crafted by linguists. Moreover, we find the factorization outputs exhibit strong associations with performance observed across different cross-lingual tasks. We release our code to facilitate future research.Comment: Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 202