Category Archives: Uncategorized

Heidi Larson | November 19, 2016

Donald Trump could be the biggest single threat to vaccine confidence ever faced.

…

The confidence levels required to maintain vaccination at a sufficient level to ensure herd immunity are high. Currently 83% of Americans think that vaccines are safe – but, only a small drop in that number could lower vaccine confidence and uptake to unacceptable levels and risk disease outbreaks. In Texas, Wakefield’s current home state, the trend in vaccine exemptions is already accelerating with the number of exemptions up to 44,716 in 2016, from only 2,314 in 2003.

http://www.vaccineconfidence.org/dangerous-liaisons

May I suggest that the term “herd immunity” should be replaced? To me, it sounds disrespectful to the children the vaccines are intended to protect. I think “group immunity” could be an alternative amenable to the editor’s find-and-replace feature.

Interesting email from SCISIP mailing list: Re: [scisip] Looking for statistics about state of interdisciplinary research
Tue 11/22/2016 8:10 AM

Hi, all:

Thank you to those who helped me pull some numbers on the status interdisciplinary research. Here is what I found just from these two listservs. It’s simply a summary of the replies I received, not a comprehensive literature review. Hope it’s helpful. Full references are below my signature.

Interdisciplinary Research (IDR) Statistics
Funding:
• Bethany Laursen (22 November 2016) did a keyword search for “interdisciplinary” of the active, forecasted, closed, and archived grants posted at http://www.grants.gov. This search returned $15.6 trillion earmarked for IDR and programs from 2007-2019 by all US agencies. Active and forecasted grants from this search total nearly $1.3 trillion.

Publications:
Authorship
• Porter and Rafols (2009) reported an approximately 75% increase in the number of co-authors across 6 topic domains from 1975-2005
• The National Research Council publication Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science (2015, p.1) reported that 90% of all publications are now authored by two or more people.

Topics/Subject Matter
• Van Noorden (2015) illustrated a slight increase in the % of papers citing other disciplines over recent decades, and a slight decrease in the % of papers citing the same discipline
• Porter and Rafols (2009) report an approximately 50% increase in the # of cited disciplines per article across 6 topic domains from 1975-2005.
• Porter and Rafols (2009) also report that the disciplines that are cited tend to be near each other (i.e., narrow IDR). However, this might be due to the dominance of the quantity of articles coming from the USA in 1975-2005. A report from Elsevier (2015) showed that USA articles tend to be narrowly interdisciplinary. Interestingly, as of 2013, China now produces as many (perhaps more) IDR articles as the USA, and their articles are much more broadly interdisciplinary.

Citation Impact
• Van Noorden (2015) showed that in the short term (3 years post-publication) the more interdisciplinary an article is, the fewer citations it gets compared to other articles. However, that trend reverses over the long term (13 years post-publication).

Titles of Articles
• Van Noorden (2015) showed there has been a dramatic increase in the number of social science and humanities articles that include the word “interdisciplin*” in their titles over recent decades. This increase has been less dramatic for the natural sciences and engineering.

Dissertations:
• Bowman et al (2014) demonstrate that 2.3 million dissertations in ProQuest are better classified by topic than by subject category, indicating an emerging “post-disciplinary” research space.

How to Measure IDR:
• Wagner et al (2010) discuss principles for choosing measures of IDR
• Sugimoto and Weingart (2015) clearly and comprehensively review how the word “discipline” developed across the world and how we now operationalize it in terms of journals, founding “great men,” and other social phenomena.
• Porter and Rafols (2009) describe and apply the Rao-Stirling diversity index
• Guevara et al (2016) demonstrate a new method for mapping the “research space” in terms of fields in which the same author publishes.

Thanks, all! Hope to see many of you at SciTS next year.

Bethany

______________
Bethany Laursen
Ph.D. student, Community Sustainability
M.A. student, Philosophy
Michigan State University

References
Bowman, T. D., Tsou, A., Ni, C., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2014). Post-interdisciplinary frames of reference: exploring permeability and perceptions of disciplinarity in the social sciences. Scientometrics, 101(3), 1695–1714. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1338-z

Elsevier. (2015). A Review of the UK’s Interdisciplinary Research Using a Citation-Based Approach (pp. 1–102).

Guevara, M. R., Hartmann, D., Aristarán, M., Mendoza, M., & Hidalgo, C. A. (2016). The research space: using career paths to predict the evolution of the research output of individuals, institutions, and nations. Scientometrics, 1–22. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2125-9

National Research Council. (2015). Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science. (N. J. Cooke & M. L. Hilton, Eds.) (pp. 1–256). Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. http://doi.org/10.17226/19007

Porter, A. L., & Rafols, I. (2009). Is science becoming more interdisciplinary? Measuring and mapping six research fields over time. Scientometrics, 81(3), 719–745. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-008-2197-2

Sugimoto, C. R., & Weingart, S. (2015). The kaleidoscope of disciplinarity. Journal of Documentation, 71(4), 775–794. http://doi.org/10.1108/JD-06-2014-0082

Van Noorden, R. (2015). Interdisciplinary research by the numbers. Nature, 525(7569), 306–307. http://doi.org/10.1038/525306a

Wagner, C. S., Roessner, J. D., Bobb, K., Klein, J. T., Boyack, K. W., Keyton, J., et al. (2011). Approaches to understanding and measuring interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR): A review of the literature. Journal of Informetrics, 5(1), 14–26. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2010.06.004

On Nov 11, 2016, at 10:38 AM, Bethany Laursen wrote:

Hi, everyone:

My work in this field tends to be qualitative and philosophical. Does anyone have some recent statistics that might summarize the state of interdisciplinary research, in the USA or beyond? For example,

• $$ spent on interdisciplinary research annually by NSF, NIH
• Trending average # of fields per publication per the Web of Science taxonomy
• Trend in # of interdisciplinary journals
• etc.

Thanks in advance for filling in a gap in my knowledge!

Bethany

______________
Bethany Laursen
Ph.D. student, Community Sustainability
M.A. student, Philosophy
Michigan State University

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This may be just what I needed:

Dear Abraham,

I am pleased to announce that Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning (www.nowpublishers.com/mal) has published the following issue:

Volume 9, Issue 2-3
Patterns of Scalable Bayesian Inference
By Elaine Angelino (University of California, Berkeley, USA), Matthew James Johnson (Harvard University, USA) and
Ryan P. Adams (Harvard University and Twitter, USA)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/2200000052

The link will take you to the article abstract. If your library has a subscription, you will be able to download the PDF of the article.
If you do not have access, download the free preview here: http://www.nowpublishers.com/article/DownloadSummary/MAL-052

To purchase the book version of this issue, go to the secure Order Form:
http://www.nowpublishers.com/Order/BuyBook?isbn=978-1-68083-218-1
You will receive the alert member discount price of $40 (includes shipping) by quoting the Promotion Code: 318306

This issue is also available for purchase at this year’s NIPS conference. Visit our booth to view all of the latest FnT ML titles.

Best Regards,

Tanya Capawana
now publishers

A children’s book on women in STEM led me to this gem:

[get nytimes screenshot, possibly tell story about using privilege, and the sooner the better[

Preparing for the release of our paper of leading causes of death in US counties led me to review the origins of a quote often attribute to Stalin: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/

Lots to unpack there. The important thing for me is remember that there are individual human tragedies behind the 80 million data points in our study. Respect.

Abett is my former colleague Mike Hanlon’s new startup, and its advice app is now publicly available.

I remember fondly the days I spent working with Mike, who has a wealth of stories from has time as employee #7 at Amazon. He was in the cruicble as AMZN formed, stormed, and normed, and I got a lot of insight into what IHME’s fast growth could look like from his battle tales.

He has lofty goals for Abett as well, to use “big data”, in this case meaning user trace data, to help _people_ instead of advertisers. I’m 100% for that.

From http://www.abett.com/:

There is no advertising on our service, and never will be. We don’t care which products you buy, or if you buy any at all. We want you to make the right decision for you. Advertising would bias that objectivity, and thus we don’t accept it.

For more: http://www.abett.com/blog/2016/10/31/hello-world/

I’m lecturing Python II for a Software Carpentry Bootcamp in Jan, and I thought I’d find a little example of a funny fact I’ve heard: IEEE floating point addition does not obey the associative law.

I must be spending too much time with doctors, because I didn’t try to make an example myself and started by looking it up in Google. The first example I found put it cleanly: http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=5380

>>> x=(0.1+0.2)+0.3
>>> y=0.1+(0.2+0.3)
>>> x==y
False
>>> print('%.17f' %x)
0.60000000000000009
>>> print('%.17f' %y)
0.59999999999999998

This shows the rumor is true: addition is not associative. It does not seem like a big deal, though, since I usually round my numbers to one or two significant digits, and I know how to test with `np.allclose`.

The second example I found makes the problem clearer, though: http://cass-mt.pnnl.gov/docs/pubs/pnnleffects_of_floating-pointpaper.pdf

x = (17 + 1e32) - 1e32
y = 17 + (1e32 - 1e32)

Can’t `np.allclose` that, unless you know what “close” means…

Additional reading: http://www.macaulay.ac.uk/fearlus/floating-point/

The stream of content for the last week was all pre-scheduled. Here is something I wrote more recently, to my colleagues on the Diversity Committee in UW Dept. of Global Health:

From: Abraham D. Flaxman
Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2016 12:06 PM
To: dghdiversity
Subject: Reflecting on Recent Events in American Politics

Dear DGH Diversity Committee,

It has taken a week for me to start writing a response to the recent turn in US politics. I’m barely ready to start now, but I also can’t wait to say something.

I don’t know who among us voted, or how, but in our department and in our work, it is important to remember that we don’t all have the same views. We don’t all have the same access or power, either. Many of our colleagues are not able to vote in US elections, despite how dramatically the results will affect them. This is profoundly unfair.

Many of those who are allowed to vote chose not to. My brother estimated that around 50% of voting-age citizens did not vote for Clinton or Trump last week. https://github.com/flaxter/us2016

Time will tell which of President-Elect Trump’s campaign promises were serious and which were “opening bids for negotiation”. Regardless, something is different this week. The extremist views put forth by Trump during the worst moments of this campaign have been validated by our electoral process. I hoped that when the votes were counted it would repudiate xenophobia and racism, reject sexual assault, and basically just stand up against bullying. Far from hope.

Instead, our nastiest tendencies are now elevated. It may seem that we have license to act worse towards each other than last week. As a diversity committee, department, and world, we must work to counter this. In ourselves, in our colleagues, and in our students.

Hugs,
–Abie

> Victoria Stodden gave a talk on “Implementing Reproducibility in Computational Science” at the SIAM Annual meeting this summer — audio and slides are available at
https://www.pathlms.com/siam/courses/3028/sections/4128/video_presentations/31361

http://r4ds.had.co.nz/data-visualisation.html