Dan Larremore

Clauset and Larremore Lab research discussed in "A handful of universities may control flow of ideas, people in academia"

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 18:41:19 +0000

Clauset and Larremore Lab research discussed in "A handful of universities may control flow of ideas, people in academia" Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/11/2024 - 12:41

Just five U.S. universities have trained 1-in-8 tenure-track faculty members serving at the nation’s institutions of higher learning, according to new �� Boulder research.

The study, published Sept. 21 in the journal Nature, takes the most exhaustive look yet at the structure of the American professoriate—capturing data on nearly 300,000 tenure-track faculty (including where they received their own graduate degrees) at more than 10,000 university departments at 368 PhD-granting institutions from 2011 to 2020.

The study reveals that in all fields of academia, most professors come from a small number of institutions.

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Utah Aims To Test 10,000 Residents In Ambitious COVID-19 Study

Anonymous — Tue, 26 May 2020 22:36:42 +0000

Utah Aims To Test 10,000 Residents In Ambitious COVID-19 Study Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/26/2020 - 16:36

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Gov. Polis, Mayor Hancock unveil massive coronavirus testing site at Pepsi Center

Anonymous — Tue, 26 May 2020 22:33:36 +0000

Gov. Polis, Mayor Hancock unveil massive coronavirus testing site at Pepsi Center Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/26/2020 - 16:33

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Dan Larremore Joins Nationwide Study Seeking to Use Social Media Data to Better Understand the Growth of Coronavirus Cases

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 23:23:03 +0000

Dan Larremore Joins Nationwide Study Seeking to Use Social Media Data to Better Understand the Growth of Coronavirus Cases Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/07/2020 - 17:23

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Control of excitable systems is optimal near criticality

Anonymous — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 17:53:21 +0000

Control of excitable systems is optimal near criticality Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/31/2019 - 10:53

Experiments suggest that cerebral cortex gains several functional advantages by operating in a dynamical regime near the critical point of a phase transition. However, a long-standing criticism of this hypothesis is that critical dynamics are rather noisy, which might be detrimental to aspects of brain function that require precision. If the cortex does operate near criticality, how might it mitigate the noisy fluctuations? One possibility is that other parts of the brain may act to control the fluctuations and reduce cortical noise. To better understand this possibility, here we numerically and analytically study a network of binary neurons. We determine how efficacy of controlling the population firing rate depends on proximity to criticality as well as different structural properties of the network. We found that control is most effective - errors are minimal for the widest range of target firing rates - near criticality. Optimal control is slightly away from criticality for networks with heterogeneous degree distributions. Thus, while criticality is the noisiest dynamical regime, it is also the regime that is easiest to control, which may offer a way to mitigate the noise.

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Dynamics of beneficial epidemics

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 18:04:45 +0000

Dynamics of beneficial epidemics Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/03/2019 - 11:04

Pathogens can spread epidemically through populations. Beneficial contagions, such as viruses that enhance host survival or technological innovations that improve quality of life, also have the potential to spread epidemically. How do the dynamics of beneficial biological and social epidemics differ from those of detrimental epidemics? We investigate this question using a breadth-first modeling approach involving three distinct theoretical models. First, in the context of population genetics, we show that a horizontally-transmissible element that increases fitness, such as viral DNA, spreads superexponentially through a population, more quickly than a beneficial mutation. Second, in the context of behavioral epidemiology, we show that infections that cause increased connectivity lead to superexponential fixation in the population. Third, in the context of dynamic social networks, we find that preferences for increased global infection accelerate spread and produce superexponential fixation, but preferences for local assortativity halt epidemics by disconnecting the infected from the susceptible. We conclude that the dynamics of beneficial biological and social epidemics are characterized by the rapid spread of beneficial elements, which is facilitated in biological systems by horizontal transmission and in social systems by active spreading behavior of infected individuals.

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Bayes-optimal estimation of overlap between populations of fixed size

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 17:34:48 +0000

Bayes-optimal estimation of overlap between populations of fixed size Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/23/2019 - 11:34

Measuring the overlap between two populations is, in principle, straightforward. Upon fully sampling both populations, the number of shared objects—species, taxonomical units, or gene variants, depending on the context—can be directly counted. In practice, however, only a fraction of each population’s objects are likely to be sampled due to stochastic data collection or sequencing techniques. Although methods exists for quantifying population overlap under subsampled conditions, their bias is well documented and the uncertainty of their estimates cannot be quantified. Here we derive and validate a method to rigorously estimate the population overlap from incomplete samples when the total number of objects, species, or genes in each population is known, a special case of the more general β-diversity problem that is particularly relevant in the ecology and genomic epidemiology of malaria. By solving a Bayesian inference problem, this method takes into account the rates of subsampling and produces unbiased and Bayes-optimal estimates of overlap. In addition, it provides a natural framework for computing the uncertainty of its estimates, and can be used prospectively in study planning by quantifying the tradeoff between sampling effort and uncertainty.

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webweb: a tool for creating, displaying, and sharing interactive network visualizations on the web

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 17:31:53 +0000

webweb: a tool for creating, displaying, and sharing interactive network visualizations on the web Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/23/2019 - 11:31

webweb is a package for creating interactive and portable visualizations of complex networks in the web browser that can be easily shared. With webweb, users of MATLAB, pure Python, and Python’s networkX (Aric A. Hagberg & Pieter J. Swart, 2008) are able to write complex network data directly to a dependency-free html file. When opened in a browser, this file’s embedded javascript functions render both an interactive network visualization and a lightweight user interface, allowing solo users to visualize and explore their data, or easily share their visualizations with collaborators with a single file. The style of webweb’s network visualization is called a force-directed layout, which renders each network node as a circle, each network link as a line, and uses simulated forces to spread nodes apart while keeping linked nodes near each other. Although numerous existing software packages (Bastian, Heymann, & Jacomy, 2009) (Shannon, 2003) and libraries (“Netwulf,” 2018) (Bostock, Ogievetsky, & Heer, 2011) are capable of creating such layouts, webweb fits uniquely into this space for three reasons. First, its output is a single html file, making it viewable in any OS and browser capable of rendering html and javascript, without installation of software or libraries. Second, its visualizations are dynamic, explorable, and customizable within the web browser. Third, it can be driven entirely in Python or MATLAB, and can conveniently handle many common types of network data. In addition to visualizing networks, webweb allows users to color or size a network’s nodes by metadata attributes, including scalar, boolean, and categorical values. Networks can be weighted or unweighted, and the stroke width of the network can reflect link weights via one of the html checkboxes in the interface. While all display options can be user-adjusted in the browser via the UI, all display option defaults can also be set from the Python or MATLAB code. Extensive examples and a complete list of API-accessible display options are provided on the documentation website. webweb is intended for network scientists who may or may not programmers. Its API is structured to support a wide range of inputs formats (edge lists, adjacency matrixes, vectorized and JSON-object style metadata), and it behaves intelligently when given ambiguous inputs. For scientific publications, webweb features a Save to SVG button, allowing a user to save the current display as a scalable vector graphics file, a format compatible with most browsers and editable using software such as Gimp or Illustrator. Figures created this way have been used in several publications (Larremore, Clauset, & Jacobs, 2014) (Clauset, Arbesman, & Larremore, 2015) (Larremore et al., 2015) (Liberles, 2017).

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Pedigree and Productivity

Anonymous — Thu, 02 May 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Pedigree and Productivity Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/02/2019 - 00:00

Colleen Flaherty

A 2015 study found that “social inequality” across a range of disciplines was so bad that just 25 percent of Ph.D. institutions produced 71 to 86 percent of tenured and tenure-track professors, depending on field.

The effect was more extreme the farther up the chain the researchers looked, based on their own program ranking system: the top 10 programs in each discipline produced 1.6 to three times more faculty than even the next 10 programs. The top 11 to 20 programs produced 2.3 to 5.6 times more professors than the next 10. In theory, this reflects the quality of those programs. But critics say in-group hiring is also about snobbery.

Now computer scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder who led that earlier study say academic pedigree isn’t destiny after all -- at least in terms of future productivity.

“Our results show that the prestige of faculty’s current work environment, not their training environment, drives their future scientific productivity,” says the new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Current and past locations, meanwhile, "drive prominence.”

That is, when it comes to actual research output, where one works is more important than where one trained.

For this new study, researchers looked at productivity and prominence (measured in number of published papers and scholarly citations, respectively) for 2,453 tenure-line faculty members in 205 Ph.D.-granting computer science departments. The analysis was based on a matched-pairs experimental design. As opposed to a completely randomized design, matched pairs involve one binary factor and blocks that sort the experimental units into pairs.

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Dan Larremore Receives DoD Minerva Research Initiative Award

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Dan Larremore Receives DoD Minerva Research Initiative Award Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/26/2019 - 00:00

The Department of Defense continued its history of strong support for fundamental research by selecting 12 faculty investigators for awards through the FY2018 Minerva Research Initiative.

This initiative supports basic research that focuses on topics of particular relevance to U.S. national security. Through its network of faculty investigators, the Minerva Research Initiative also strengthens the department’s connections with the social science community and helps DOD better understand and prepare for future challenges, including National Defense Strategy priorities such as great power competition.

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