The Gifted Gap and Advance Placement: A Comparison of Placement and Advancement of African American Males Compared to other Ethnicities in Gifted and Advanced School Programs.

For decades systemic inequalities in advanced placement courses in education have been a continued driving force to reduce opportunities for African American males compared to other ethnicities. This research provides a statistical analysis of the Gifted Gap in school districts within the United States serving an expanding metropolitan region with limited educational opportunities to grow due to gender, racial, and socioeconomic disproportions. The purpose of this quantitative non-experimental study was to investigate the differences between African American male students compared to other ethnic male students, which may pose a Gifted Gap due to racial and gender factors in gifted and advanced school programs. Two separate archival datasets were obtained through the US Department of Education. To answer the three research questions, a series of independent samples t-tests, ANOVAs, and chi-squared tests was conducted on each of the two datasets

Data Literacy defined pro populo: To read this article, please provide a little information

Data literacy is of fundamental importance in societies that emphasize extensive use of data for information and decision-making. Yet, prior definitions for data literacy fall short of addressing the myriad ways individuals are shepherds of, and subjects to, data. This article proposes a definition to accurately reflect the individual in society, including knowledge of what data are, how they are collected, analyzed, visualized and shared, and the understanding of how data are applied for benefit or detriment, within the cultural context of security and privacy. The article concludes by proposing opportunities, strengths, limitations and directions for future research

The khmer software package: enabling efficient nucleotide sequence analysis

The khmer package is a freely available software library for working efficiently with fixed length DNA words, or k-mers. khmer provides implementations of a probabilistic k-mer counting data structure, a compressible De Bruijn graph representation, De Bruijn graph partitioning, and digital normalization. khmer is implemented in C++ and Python, and is freely available under the BSD license at https://github.com/dib-lab/khmer/

CWL Viewer:The Common Workflow Language Viewer

The Common Workflow Language (CWL) project emerged from the BOSC 2014 Codefest as a grassroots, multi-vendor working group to tackle the portability of data analysis workflows. It’s specification for describing workflows and command line tools aims to make them portable and scalable across a variety of computing platforms. At its heart CWL is a set of structured text files (YAML) with various extensibility points to the format. However, the CWL syntax and multi-file collections are not conducive to workflow browsing, exchange and understanding: for this we need a visualization suite. CWL Viewer is a richly featured CWL visualization suite that graphically presents and lists the details of CWL workflows with their inputs, outputs and steps. It also packages the CWL files into a downloadable Research Object Bundle including attribution, versioning and dependency metadata in the manifest, allowing it to be easily shared. The tool operates over any workflow held in a GitHub repository. Other features include: path visualization from parents and children nodes; nested workflows support; workflow graph download in a range of image formats; a gallery of previously submitted workflows; and support for private git repositories and public GitHub including live updates over versioned workflows. The CWL Viewer is the de facto standard CWL visualization suite and has been enthusiastically received by the CWL community. Project Website: https://view.commonwl.org/ Source Code: https://github.com/common-workflow-language/cwlviewer https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.823535 Software License: Apache License, Version 2.0 Submitted abstract: CWL Viewer: The Common Workflow Language Viewer Technical Report: Reproducible Research using Research Objects https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.823295CWL Viewer is live at https://view.commonwl.org/ Abstract peer-reviewed and accepted for poster+talk at BOSC 2017

Supercomputing with MPI meets the Common Workflow Language standards: an experience report

Use of standards-based workflows is still somewhat unusual by high-performance computing users. In this paper we describe the experience of using the Common Workflow Language (CWL) standards to describe the execution, in parallel, of MPI-parallelised applications. In particular, we motivate and describe the simple extension to the specification which was required, as well as our implementation of this within the CWL reference runner. We discuss some of the unexpected benefits, such as simple use of HPC-oriented performance measurement tools, and CWL software requirements interfacing with HPC module systems. We close with a request for comment from the community on how these features could be adopted within versions of the CWL standards.Comment: Submitted to 15th Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science (WORKS20

A phenomenological study of collaboration between a community college and selected social service agencies

This is a study of the process of collaboration between a community college and selected social service agencies for the purpose of developing an integrative social service and education delivery system, the One-Stop Center. Particular focus is on the interpersonal dynamics among the key stakeholders involved in a collaborative partnership. The participants are a community college and four social service agencies located in southern Oregon. The social service agencies are: Adult and Family Services, Community Action, South Coast Business Employment Corporation, and AMBIT, a drug and alcohol treatment agency. A qualitative methodology was used in order to study the personal experience of collaboration. In depth interviews were conducted with a participant representing each of the collaborating organizations. A profile of the experience of each participant was developed from the interview data. Themes were synthesized from the profiles. Common themes were: sharing a culture of helping; feelings of frustration with the current social service and education system; having a sense of readiness to change; working through the process; and building and sustaining relationship. The conclusions point to the need for participants of a collaboration to have time to be together and to work through a process that builds relationship through the development of trust and respect. Also, it is important for participants to commit to a common goal or vision that will sustain them through difficult times

Report on the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2)

This technical report records and discusses the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2). The report includes a description of the alternative, experimental submission and review process, two workshop keynote presentations, a series of lightning talks, a discussion on sustainability, and five discussions from the topic areas of exploring sustainability; software development experiences; credit & incentives; reproducibility & reuse & sharing; and code testing & code review. For each topic, the report includes a list of tangible actions that were proposed and that would lead to potential change. The workshop recognized that reliance on scientific software is pervasive in all areas of world-leading research today. The workshop participants then proceeded to explore different perspectives on the concept of sustainability. Key enablers and barriers of sustainable scientific software were identified from their experiences. In addition, recommendations with new requirements such as software credit files and software prize frameworks were outlined for improving practices in sustainable software engineering. There was also broad consensus that formal training in software development or engineering was rare among the practitioners. Significant strides need to be made in building a sense of community via training in software and technical practices, on increasing their size and scope, and on better integrating them directly into graduate education programs. Finally, journals can define and publish policies to improve reproducibility, whereas reviewers can insist that authors provide sufficient information and access to data and software to allow them reproduce the results in the paper. Hence a list of criteria is compiled for journals to provide to reviewers so as to make it easier to review software submitted for publication as a “Software Paper.

CWLProv - Interoperable Retrospective Provenance capture and its challenges

<p>The automation of data analysis in the form of scientific workflows is a widely adopted practice in many fields of research nowadays. Computationally driven data-intensive experiments using workflows enable <strong>A</strong>utomation, <strong>S</strong>caling, <strong>A</strong>daption and <strong>P</strong>rovenance support (ASAP).</p> <p>However, there are still several challenges associated with the effective sharing, publication, understandability and reproducibility of such workflows due to the incomplete capture of provenance and the dependence on particular technical (software) platforms. This paper presents <strong>CWLProv</strong>, an approach for retrospective provenance capture utilizing open source community-driven standards involving application and customization of workflow-centric <a href="http://www.researchobject.org/">Research Objects</a> (ROs).</p> <p>The ROs are produced as an output of a workflow enactment defined in the <a href="http://www.commonwl.org/">Common Workflow Language</a> (CWL) using the CWL reference implementation and its data structures. The approach aggregates and annotates all the resources involved in the scientific investigation including inputs, outputs, workflow specification, command line tool specifications and input parameter settings. The resources are linked within the RO to enable re-enactment of an analysis without depending on external resources.</p> <p>The workflow provenance profile is represented in W3C recommended standard <a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-n/">PROV-N</a> and <a href="https://www.w3.org/Submission/prov-json/">PROV-JSON</a> format to capture retrospective provenance of the workflow enactment. The workflow-centric RO produced as an output of a CWL workflow enactment is expected to be interoperable, reusable, shareable and portable across different plat-<br> forms.</p> <p>This paper describes the need and motivation for <a href="https://github.com/common-workflow-language/cwltool/tree/provenance">CWLProv</a> and the lessons learned in applying it for ROs using CWL in the bioinformatics domain.</p

Channeling Community Contributions to Scientific Software: A Sprint Experience

In 2014, the khmer software project participated in a two-day global sprint coordinated by the Mozilla Science Lab. We offered a mentored experience in contributing to a scientific software project for anyone who was interested. We provided entry-level tasks and worked with contributors as they worked through our development process. The experience was successful on both a social and a technical level, bringing in 13 contributions from 9 new contributors and validating our development process. In this experience paper we describe the sprint preparation and process, relate anecdotal experiences, and draw conclusions about what other projects could do to enable a similar outcome. The khmer software is developed openly at http://github.com/dib-lab/khmer/

Capturing interoperable reproducible workflows with Common Workflow Language

We present our ongoing work on integrating Research Object practices with Common Workflow Language, capturing and describing prospective and retrospective provenance.Accepted for talk at RO2018. Web version at http://s11.no/2018/cwl.htm