President Joe Biden’s nominations of Jessica Rosenworcel to become the full time chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Gigi Sohn to be a commissioner at the agency, would create—if they are confirmed—a solid majority at the agency that supports net neutrality rules.
Biden was urged to fill out the agency—by both naming a permanent chair and a third Democratic commissioner to fill out the five-person agency—for months, with observers noting that every month he delayed a pick, it pushed back any agenda from being rolled out.
Now, once Rosenworcel and Sohn go through the confirmation process, the FCC will have a trio of Democratic lawmakers who have been vocal about restoring the rules when coupled with Commissioner Geoffrey Starks.
Over the past two decades, partnerships between agencies primarily conducting research and those primarily administering education have been transforming both research and practice in education. Even more, the partnerships themselves are also changing with time. Often
cited as a potential mechanism to bridge the longstanding gap between education research and practice, research-practice partnerships (RPPs) also hold great promise for those interested in
disrupting power asymmetries,
centering equity, and
building new pathways for knowledge to flow. Whether and how RPPs realize these important aims are questions we regularly contend with at the
National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP), a professional learning community for RPPs of all types, models, and approaches in the education sector. Together with our 50-plus members, we have engaged in a number of critical conversations resulting in
deep reflections on the various aspects of partnership work, lessons on defining RPPs, and
new ideas about how to know whether partnership work is making a positive impact.
To tackle the question of scaling in higher education, the SFI team, which included Ryan Taylor and Xiaofan Liang, two undergraduates and co-first authors, divided institutions into categories, such as for-profit colleges, community colleges, private research universities, and public research universities. They found that institutions were optimized for their function. For instance, in accordance with their goal to offer an affordable education to students, community colleges were very efficient; as they grew in size, tuition decreased and faculty salaries grew less. The largest community colleges spent less than half as much per student as the smallest ones did.
On the other hand, as prestigious research universities grew in size, tuition increased, faculty salaries increased, while research production dramatically increased. Kempes, who co-led the project with former SFI postdoctoral fellow Marion Dumas, noted that this superlinear growth — ”everything is getting bigger, better, faster” was similar to the way cities follow scaling laws.
“Community colleges, in particular, are much more like organisms,” says West. “They emphasize efficiency, and they deliver on that and they’re mean and lean, and big universities are rich and fat and getting fatter.”
At 89-years-old Manfred Steiner is finally what he always wanted to be: a physicist. On September 15, 2021, Steiner successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, “Corrections to the Geometrical Interpretation of Bosonization” in Brown University’s Department of Physics with Professor Brad Marston serving as his adviser and Professors James Valles and Antal Jevicki serving as readers. “It’s an old dream that starts in my childhood,” says Steiner, “I always wanted to become a physicist.”
The Stanford Daily student newspaper, Matthew Turk
from
What causes psychiatric disorders, and why do patients respond so differently from one treatment to another? Former psychiatry professor Amit Etkin has been trying to get to the bottom of this question for years, grounding his observations in biological tests.
The academic sphere was not agile enough to support Etkin’s growing ambitions, he said, so despite having one of the largest laboratories in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, he took a leave of absence from his professorship to found Alto Neuroscience in 2019. The idea was to develop psychotropics and other drugs based on isolating biomarkers — signal molecules found in bodily fluids or tissues — with the aid of artificial intelligence. As of today, Etkin has stepped away from the Stanford faculty to lead his enterprise into Phase II.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst and Brigham and Women’s Hospital announced today the launch of the new Massachusetts AI and Technology Center for Connected Care in Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease (MassAITC), which seeks to improve in-home care for older adults and individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, thanks to a grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The award is expected to total approximately $20 million over five years.
San Francisco State is an exemplar of a systemwide plan to bring back as many students as possible who dropped out during the pandemic. Cal State Chancellor Joseph Castro last month named re-enrollment as one of the key pillars to meet the system’s ambitious 2025 graduation goals. He wants campuses starting in the spring to target students who stopped attending classes, with an emphasis on students of color and those who are low-income.
The system has increased its six-year graduation rates considerably — in the past six years, it’s climbed from 57% to 63%, with a goal of 70% by 2025. But COVID-era dropouts could sink those painstaking gains.
Another pillar to boost graduation rates: overhauling large vital courses where a higher percentage of low-income students and students of color receive Ds and Fs.
As accusations of inequality and test-center closures threaten the SAT’s stronghold on college admissions, Next Admit CEO and co-founder Gohar Khan says ‘intangibles’ like essays and interviews are more likely to make or break an application.
Online privacy advocates in recent years pushed Illinois lawmakers to force school districts to protect student data — but some Chicago Public Schools teachers say they were “blindsided” by the district’s enforcement of the law that’s led them to lose access to key programs used to teach thousands of students.
Gov. J.B Pritzker signed amendments to the Student Online Personal Protection Act in 2019, strengthening the law that regulates how local and state officials handle student data and giving parents greater control over their children’s personal information.
School systems had until July of this year to move into compliance. The changes spurred suburban and downstate schools to rethink their contracts with software companies to safeguard student data while finding new ways to give kids and educators access to the applications they know and need for school.
Today, the Oslo-headquartered company had over 9 million teachers host a so-called kahoot in the past year. “Kahoots” are multiple-choice quizzes that are created by a host, usually a teacher or presenter. The host shares questions on a screen and the players log their answers using individual devices such as their phones or laptops.
But according to [Morten] Versvik, the journey from his university days to what Kahoot is today was not an easy one.
[Nick] Mattei is part of a new study funded by the National Science Foundation to design more equitable algorithm recommender systems that can be applied generally to many organizations no matter what types of products or services they are recommending to users.
He is teaming up on the $930,000 study with Robin Burke and Amy Voida, professors of information science at the University of Colorado, and Kiva.org, a nonprofit lending institution geared to underserved communities around the world. Kiva.org will serve as a co-principal investigator, providing data and the ability to test the new algorithms in a live setting.
As U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland sat down for his first hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, denying a conflict of interest in his decision to investigate parents for “domestic terrorism,” there is a mother in the quiet suburb of Annandale, N.J., who found his answers lacking. And she has questions she wants asked at Garland’s hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee this Wednesday.
On a recent Saturday night, Caroline Licwinko, a mother of three, a law school student and the coach to her daughter’s cheerleading squad, sat in front of her laptop and tapped three words into an internet search engine: “Panorama. Survey. Results.”
Within three clicks, Licwinko was in an online “dashboard” created by Panorama Education Inc., a government contractor hired by school districts to gauge their students’ “social and emotional learning.” However, Panorama digs far deeper than whether students might feel depressed or lonely, raising serious public policy questions. It asks all kinds of prying questions, including gender and sexual orientation and views on racial issues.
Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, Sebastian Guidi and Nahuel Maisley
from
Pandemics have very real costs. When they hit, these costs are obvious and dramatic — people fall ill and die, businesses go bankrupt, children are kicked out of school. When they don’t, it’s very likely because we have already taken extremely costly measures to prevent them.
These costs are inevitably distributed — through act or omission — by international law. As the international community discusses a new pandemic treaty, complementary to the International Health Regulations, it bears emphasizing that any global framework that does not reckon with cost will fall short of an acceptable solution.
Data centers and other buildings could be made from materials which store carbon, instead of using carbon-emitting concrete according to research sponsored by Microsoft.
Concrete contributes eight percent of the world’s CO2 emissions, making it a worse polluter than the airline industry. But buildings could replace a lot of their concrete with natural materials which store carbon, including mushrooms, algae hemp, thatch, and plain earth, according to a research document sponsored by Microsoft and produced by the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF) at the University of Washington.
The paper looks at traditional materials and others that are at an early stage of development that could be used in floors, structure, and cladding of buildings, and concludes that the best six prospects are earthen slabs, concrete made with non-traditional cement, bricks, and panels made with purpose-grown algae or fiber, and structural tubes made from mycelium (threads produced by fungi).
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The eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program is now accepting applications for student fellows and project leads for the 2021 summer session. Fellows will work with academic researchers, data scientists and public stakeholder groups on data-intensive research projects that will leverage data science approaches to address societal challenges in areas such as public policy, environmental impacts and more. Student applications due 2/15 – learn more and apply here. DSSG is also soliciting project proposals from academic researchers, public agencies, nonprofit entities and industry who are looking for an opportunity to work closely with data science professionals and students on focused, collaborative projects to make better use of their data. Proposal submissions are due 2/22.
Carnegie Mellon University, Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon, Mingkai Deng
from
TL;DR: Evaluating natural language generation (NLG) is hard. Our general framework helps solve the difficulty by unifying the evaluation with a common central operation. Inspired metrics achieve SOTA correlations with human judgments on diverse NLG tasks. Our metrics are available as library on PyPI and GitHub.
In “GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions”, we describe GoEmotions, a human-annotated dataset of 58k Reddit comments extracted from popular English-language subreddits and labeled with 27 emotion categories . As the largest fully annotated English language fine-grained emotion dataset to date, we designed the GoEmotions taxonomy with both psychology and data applicability in mind. In contrast to the basic six emotions, which include only one positive emotion (joy), our taxonomy includes 12 positive, 11 negative, 4 ambiguous emotion categories and 1 “neutral”, making it widely suitable for conversation understanding tasks that require a subtle differentiation between emotion expressions.
