The promise of asset-development policies

What are asset-development policies? What programs are underway to explore such policies? Larry Beeferman of the Asset Development Institute describes the movement and his views on why asset-development policies are vital to economic equality.Saving and investment ; Individual development accounts

Text Segmentation Using Exponential Models

This paper introduces a new statistical approach to partitioning text automatically into coherent segments. Our approach enlists both short-range and long-range language models to help it sniff out likely sites of topic changes in text. To aid its search, the system consults a set of simple lexical hints it has learned to associate with the presence of boundaries through inspection of a large corpus of annotated data. We also propose a new probabilistically motivated error metric for use by the natural language processing and information retrieval communities, intended to supersede precision and recall for appraising segmentation algorithms. Qualitative assessment of our algorithm as well as evaluation using this new metric demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in two very different domains, Wall Street Journal articles and the TDT Corpus, a collection of newswire articles and broadcast news transcripts.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX source and postscript figures for EMNLP-2 pape

Suppression of Supergravity Anomalies in Conformal Sequestering

We show that the anomaly-mediated supersymmetry breaking via the Kahler and sigma-model anomalies is suppressed by conformal dynamics in the supersymmetry breaking sector.Comment: 8 page

FeedbackMap: a tool for making sense of open-ended survey responses

Analyzing open-ended survey responses is a crucial yet challenging task for social scientists, non-profit organizations, and educational institutions, as they often face the trade-off between obtaining rich data and the burden of reading and coding textual responses. This demo introduces FeedbackMap, a web-based tool that uses natural language processing techniques to facilitate the analysis of open-ended survey responses. FeedbackMap lets researchers generate summaries at multiple levels, identify interesting response examples, and visualize the response space through embeddings. We discuss the importance of examining survey results from multiple perspectives and the potential biases introduced by summarization methods, emphasizing the need for critical evaluation of the representation and omission of respondent voices.Comment: Demo at CSCW 202

RadioTalk: a large-scale corpus of talk radio transcripts

We introduce RadioTalk, a corpus of speech recognition transcripts sampled from talk radio broadcasts in the United States between October of 2018 and March of 2019. The corpus is intended for use by researchers in the fields of natural language processing, conversational analysis, and the social sciences. The corpus encompasses approximately 2.8 billion words of automatically transcribed speech from 284,000 hours of radio, together with metadata about the speech, such as geographical location, speaker turn boundaries, gender, and radio program information. In this paper we summarize why and how we prepared the corpus, give some descriptive statistics on stations, shows and speakers, and carry out a few high-level analyses.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted by Interspeech 201

JOURNEYS INTO THE UNKNOWN: A SERIES OF SCIENCE ARCHITECTURE TASKS AND EVENTS, SPACE-BOUND EXPLORATIONS AND FAR-TRAVELS, DISCOVERIES AND MISSES (NEAR AND FAR), IMAGINATIVE SPACE-GAZING AND RELATED INVESTIGATIONS, OBSERVATIONS, ORBITS, AND OTHER REPETITIOUS MONITORING TASKS

This thesis expansively and inclusively puts forth the imaginings, research, processes and experiences behind my two thesis exhibitions, Journeys into the unknown: a series of science architecture tasks and events, space-bound explorations and far-travels, discoveries and misses (near and far), imaginative space-gazing and related investigations, observations, orbits, and other repetitious monitoring tasks and Timed travel: asystematic accounts of regular and geometrical timekeeping, orbital flight, repetitive rotations and other journeys into actual time and slow space. It begins with an abstract interpretation of the dial: a tool not limited to scientific measurement but, instead, a gauge of an object’s overall position and general status. Equal parts scientific information, abstracted and fictionalized instruments and facts, and the personal experiences which provided these concrete informational elements with psychological and metaphorical meaning, this document is as much a record of time as it is an elucidation of my artistic practice and methodology

“REFORM” OF THE UNITED STATES AND BRAZILIAN RETIREMENT SYSTEMS FOR FEDERAL EMPLOYEES

Recently, Brazil made changes to its retirement system as it concerned public sector workers, changes which in certain ways were similar to those which occurred for most federal workers in the United States somewhat over a quarter of a century ago. Broadly speaking it involved the conversion of a purely pay-as-you-go defined benefit plans to a hybrid of a reduced pay-as-you-go defined benefit plan with a funded defined contribution plan. In theUnited States, the latter is called the Thrift Savings Plan which now has over 4.5 million participants and nearly $400 billion in assets.This paper offers a brief history of the origins of the U.S. system up until the changes in question were made, what were among the major factors or considerations which appear to have spurred the changes, a little bit about the constituencies which seem to have driven or resisted change as the case may be, the modifications that were envisioned, and expectations as to the difference that was expected to be wrought from those alterations. It canvases the differences between the then “old” and the “new” systems in relation to what was ostensibly sought to be achieved. It then draws on what is a surprisingly thin literature to describe the outcomes of the changes more than 25 years later with an eye to hoped-for or anticipated results at the outset. We then detail important elements of the new Brazilian system – which is at an early stage – with an eye to similarities and differences between it and the one we have described with a focus on how the outcomes of the system in theU.S.might bear on thinking inBrazilas it moves forward with its own. We conclude briefly with thoughts on the nature and merits of further pursuing the comparison and inquiry

All a-board: sharing educational data science research with school districts

Educational data scientists often conduct research with the hopes of translating findings into lasting change through policy, civil society, or other channels. However, the bridge from research to practice can be fraught with sociopolitical frictions that impede, or altogether block, such translations -- especially when they are contentious or otherwise difficult to achieve. Focusing on one entrenched educational equity issue in US public schools -- racial and ethnic segregation -- we conduct randomized email outreach experiments and surveys to explore how local school districts respond to algorithmically-generated school catchment areas ("attendance boundaries") designed to foster more diverse and integrated schools. Cold email outreach to approximately 4,320 elected school board members across over 800 school districts informing them of potential boundary changes reveals a large average open rate of nearly 40%, but a relatively small click-through rate of 2.5% to an interactive dashboard depicting such changes. Board members, however, appear responsive to different messaging techniques -- particularly those that dovetail issues of racial and ethnic diversity with other top-of-mind issues (like school capacity planning). On the other hand, media coverage of the research drives more dashboard engagement, especially in more segregated districts. A small but rich set of survey responses from school board and community members across several districts identify data and operational bottlenecks to implementing boundary changes to foster more diverse schools, but also share affirmative comments on the potential viability of such changes. Together, our findings may support educational data scientists in more effectively disseminating research that aims to bridge educational inequalities through systems-level change.Comment: In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM Conference on Learning at Scale (L@S '23

Incremental Algorithms for Effective and Efficient Query Recommendation

Abstract. Query recommender systems give users hints on possible in-teresting queries relative to their information needs. Most query rec-ommenders are based on static knowledge models built on the basis of past user behaviors recorded in query logs. These models should be pe-riodically updated, or rebuilt from scratch, to keep up with the possible variations in the interests of users. We study query recommender algo-rithms that generate suggestions on the basis of models that are updated continuously, each time a new query is submitted. We extend two state-of-the-art query recommendation algorithms and evaluate the effects of continuous model updates on their effectiveness and efficiency. Tests con-ducted on an actual query log show that contrasting model aging by con-tinuously updating the recommendation model is a viable and effective solution.

Document Clustering

In a world flooded with information, document clustering is an important tool that can help categorize and extract insight from text collections. It works by grouping similar documents, while simultaneously discriminating between groups. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the principal techniques used to cluster documents, and introduce a series of novel deep-learning based methods recently designed for the document clustering task. In our overview, we point the reader to salient works that can provide a deeper understanding of the topics discussed