Data Science Commons^™

Anti-Vaxxers: Parents Fighting Science, Katie West

Symposium of Student Scholars

Immunizing children helps protect the health of our community, especially those people who cannot be immunized. Yet, since 1996 after a study was released that linked autism to vaccinations, there has been a trend of parents refusing to vaccinate their children. What are the demographics of the parents who believe their children are better off without vaccines? By knowing where these parents live and what decisions they make for their children’s education, counties and medical professionals can provide education and address their concerns.

My research involves data on 116,141 kindergarten classes from 2000-2015 in California. The two vaccine exemption options …

On The Front Lines Of Fire: How Do We Save Their Lives?, Cathrine Jatta

Symposium of Student Scholars

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) reports that the United States depends on about 1.1 million firefighters to protect its citizens and property from fire. NIOSH adds that approximately 336,000 are career firefighters; 812,000 are volunteers; and 80 to 100 die in the line of duty each year. NIOSH investigates each fatality individually for the cause and prevention. In contrast, my research will look at a complete dataset of 2005 firefighter fatalities and see if any of the following variables may predict firefighter death: age, cause of death, property type, type of duty (e.g. on-duty, training), and …

Eradicating Zebra Mussels: What Works?, Elijah Davies

Symposium of Student Scholars

The invasion of U.S lakes and rivers by the invasive species of zebra mussels called Dreissena polymorpha has caused catastrophic harm to the local ecosystem by reproducing and outcompeting native mussel species as well as harm to pipes leading into water sources by binding to surfaces and reproducing to the point that the mussels clog pipes. In addition, recreation areas must be closed due to the sharp shells making areas unusable. In the past, research has focused on individual molluscicides and their eradication of zebra mussels, as well as their effect on native flora and fauna. My research will contrast …

An Introduction To Calling Bullshit: Learning To Think Outside The Black Box, Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

Numeracy

Bergstrom, Carl T. and Jevin D. West. 2020. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. (New York: Random House) 336 pp. ISBN 978-0525509202.

While statistical methods receive greater attention, the art of critically evaluating information in everyday life more commonly depends on thinking outside the black box of the algorithm. In this piece we introduce readers to our book and associated online teaching materials—for readers who want to more capably call “bullshit” or to teach their students to do the same.

Incorporating The 10th Edition Institute Of Traffic Engineers (Ite) Trip Generation Rates Into Virginia Department Of Transportation Guidelines, Kun Xie, Mecit Cetin, Hong Yang, Xiaomeng Dong

Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) released the Trip Generation (TG) 10th edition in 2017, which significantly updated its database, and some of its trip generation rates were substantially lower than those of earlier editions. This study aims to investigate the applicability of the TG 10th edition in various Virginia contexts and to recommend how to incorporate the TG 10th edition into state guidelines. The research team surveyed 31 state transportation agencies to obtain a clear understanding of current practices in the adoption of trip rates and trip estimation approaches. We systematically compared trip rates of TG 9th and 10th …

Be Careful! That Is Probably Bullshit! Review Of Calling Bullshit: The Art Of Skepticism In A Data-Driven World By Carl T. Bergstrom And Jevin D. West, James B. Schreiber

Numeracy

Bergstrom, C. T., & West, J. D. 2021. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. NY: Random House. 336 pp. ISBN 978-0525509189

The authors provide a journey through the numerical bullshit that surrounds our daily lives. Each chapter has multiple examples of specific types of bullshit that each of us experience on any given day. Most importantly, information on how to identify bullshit and refute it are provided so that reader finishes the book with a set of skills to be a more engaged and critical interpreter of information. The writing has a quick and lively …

Of Biodiversity, Boundaries, And Distribution: The Myxomycetes Of The Philippines And Beyond, Sittie Aisha Bustamante Macabago

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation contains a compilation of independently performed studies primarily focusing on the myxomycetes (plasmodial slime molds) from the Philippines and integrating local and worldwide data to demonstrate regional and global trends. The major themes include the following: (I) a review of the diverse group of spore-producing amoeboid protists, including the myxomycetes; (II-IV) diversity assessments in three different groups of islands in the Philippine archipelago; (V) mapping the myxomycetes found in the Philippines for databasing and analyzing the geocoded data; (VI) a study on regional boundaries, including the Philippines, using myxomycete species composition; and, (VII) creating a global species distribution …

A Configurable Social Network For Running Irb-Approved Experiments, Mihovil Mandic

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Our world has never been more connected, and the size of the social media landscape draws a great deal of attention from academia. However, social networks are also a growing challenge for the Institutional Review Boards concerned with the subjects’ privacy. These networks contain a monumental variety of personal information of almost 4 billion people, allow for precise social profiling, and serve as a primary news source for many users. They are perfect environments for influence operations that are becoming difficult to defend against. Motivated to study online social influence via IRB-approved experiments, we designed and implemented a flexible, scalable, …

Improving Existing Methods For Calculating Embodied Carbon Emissions In Trade Through Feature Discovery: An Information Theoretic Approach, Sam Morton

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

The continued societal and ecological risks posed by climate change have spurred renewed interest in quantitative tools that can improve policy aimed at climate mitigation. In 2008, international trade accounted for up to 26\% of global anthropogenic emissions, and therefore trade has garnered increased attention from policymakers seeking carbon mitigation. The concept of embodied carbon emissions in trade (EET) quantifies overall carbon emitted in the production and transport of goods for the purposes of trade. EET in theory could prove an indispensable tool to climate-concerned policymakers, but current implementations and data availability limit EET calculation to annual snapshots that extend …

Per-Pixel Cloud Cover Classification Of Multispectral Landsat-8 Data, Salome E. Carrasco, Torrey J. Wagner, Brent T. Langhals

Faculty Publications

Random forest and neural network algorithms are applied to identify cloud cover using 10 of the wavelength bands available in Landsat 8 imagery. The methods classify each pixel into 4 different classes: clear, cloud shadow, light cloud, or cloud. The first method is based on a fully connected neural network with ten input neurons, two hidden layers of 8 and 10 neurons respectively, and a single-neuron output for each class. This type of model is considered with and without L2 regularization applied to the kernel weighting. The final model type is a random forest classifier created from an ensemble of …

Reporting Of Eating Disorder Deaths, Katherine Mobley, Amy Hord

Symposium of Student Scholars

Those affected by eating disorders experience disturbances in eating behaviors which are often related to underlying psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, or obsessive-compulsive disorder (Parekh, 2017, Drieberg et al., 1998 p.53). The duplicitous nature of the disorder makes it difficult to diagnose, and the tole it takes on an individual’s physical health makes its mortality rate the second highest among psychiatric disorders (Guinhut et al., 2021 p.130). Even if the correct education and resources are accessible to certain individuals, negative stigmatization about the disorder can make sufferers unlikely to seek help (Becker et al., 2010). Findings from analysis of …

Using Machine Learning Methods To Predict The Movement Trajectories Of The Louisiana Black Bear, Daniel Clark, David Shaw, Armando Vela, Shane Weinstock, John Santerre, Joseph D. Clark

SMU Data Science Review

In 1992, the Louisiana black bear (Ursus americanus luteolus) was placed on the U.S. Endangered Species List. This was due to bear populations in Louisiana being small and isolated enough where their populations couldn’t intersect with other populations to grow. Interchange of individuals between subpopulations of bears in Louisiana is critical to maintain genetic diversity and avoid inbreeding effects. Utilizing GPS (Global Positioning System) data gathered from 31 radio-collared bears from 2010 through 2012, this research will investigate how bears traverse the landscape, which has implications for gene exchange. This paper will leverage machine learning tools to improve upon existing …

Analysis Of Individual Player Performances And Their Effect On Winning In College Soccer, Angelo Bravo, Thomas Karba, Sean Mcwhirter, Billy Nayden

SMU Data Science Review

This study describes the process of modernizing the approach of the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Men's Soccer coaching staff through the use of location and tracking data from their matches in the 2019 season. This study utilizes a variety of modeling and analysis techniques to explore and categorize the data and use it to evaluate the types of plays that are most often correlated with victories. This study's contribution to college soccer analytics includes the implementation of a model to determine individual players' performance, the production of team-level metrics, and visualizations to increase the efficiency of the coaching staff's efforts. …

The Social Market Economy As A Formula For Peace, Prosperity, And Sustainability, Almuth D. Merkel

Doctor of International Conflict Management Dissertations

The social market economy was developed in Germany during the interwar period amidst political and economic turmoil. With clear demarcation lines differentiating it from socialism and laissez-faire capitalism, the social market economy became a formula for peace and prosperity for post WWII Germany. Since then, the success of the social market economy has inspired many other countries to adopt its principles. Drawing on evidence from economic history and the history of economic thought, this thesis first reviews the evolution of the fundamental principles that form the foundation of social-market economic thought. Blending the micro-economic utility maximization framework with traditional growth …

Using Large Pre-Trained Language Models To Track Emotions Of Cancer Patients On Twitter, Will Baker

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Twitter is a microblogging website where any user can publicly release a message, called a tweet, expressing their feelings about current events or their own lives. This candid, unfiltered feedback is valuable in the spaces of healthcare and public health communications, where it may be difficult for cancer patients to divulge personal information to healthcare teams, and randomly selected patients may decline participation in surveys about their experiences. In this thesis, BERTweet, a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) model, was used to predict sentiment and emotion labels for cancer-related tweets collected in 2019 and 2020. In longitudinal plots, trends in …

A Smarter Way To Manage Mass Transit In A Smart City: Rail Network Management At Singapore’S Land Transport Authority, Steven M. Miller, Thomas H. Davenport

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is no widely agreed upon definition of a supposed “Smart City.” Yet, when you see city employees — in this case city-state employees — working in what are obviously smarter ways, “you know it when you see it.” One such example of a smarter way to work in a smart city setting is the way that employees of the Land Transport Authority (LTA) in Singapore are using a new generation of data driven, AI-enabled support systems to manage the city’s urban rail network. We spoke to LTA officers Kong Wai, Ho (Director of Integrated Operations and Planning) and Chris …

Implementing A Registry Federation For Materials Science Data Discovery, Raymond L. Plante, Chandler A. Becker, Andrea Medina-Smith, Kevin Brady, Alden Dima, Benjamin Long, Laura M. Bartolo, James A. Warren, Robert J. Hanisch

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

As a result of a number of national initiatives, we are seeing rapid growth in the data important to materials science that are available over the web. Consequently, it is becoming increasingly difficult for researchers to learn what data are available and how to access them. To address this problem, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Working Group for International Materials Science Registries (IMRR) was established to bring together materials science and information technology experts to develop an international federation of registries that can be used for global discovery of data resources for materials science. A resource registry collects high-level metadata …

Using Data Visualization To Analyze Big Data In Social Networks, Tracey J. Hayes

Communication & Leadership Faculty Scholarship

Today social networks allow protests to develop using complex components and strategies; furthermore, new tools for digital analysis allow scholars to study patterns and connections in those social movements analyzing online protests and the complex rhetorical work and connections occurring within an online protest (Hayes, 2016). The tools and programs available to study social media in many ways make the process easier, in regards to the amount and type of data available. Nonetheless, this increase in available data presents challenges as data must be collected, sorted, selected, and analyzed. The options present many difficult choices as much of this is …

The Impact Of Twitter On The National Hockey League And Its Players, Benjamin Strauss

Honors Projects in Data Science

This study offers a new perspective on collecting and analyzing Twitter data surrounding the National Hockey League (NHL) to identify any trends or relationships between the data and overall performance during the 2021 abbreviated season. This paper provides and in-depth analysis by studying a sample of sixty of the top NHL players, specifically those who are typically top performers in the league, spanning over all thirty-one teams and all positions, this study was able to identify a deeper and broader perspective of what implications can be drawn from analyzing data from Twitter to both predict and reflect both individual player …

Mass Incarceration In Nebraska: Data And Historical Analysis Of Inmates From 1980-2020, Anna Krause

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This study examines Nebraska Department of Corrections inmate data from 1980-2020, looking specifically at inmate demographics and offense trends. State-of-the-art data analysis is conducted to collect, modify, and visualize the data sources. Inmates are organized by each decade they were incarcerated within. The current active prison population is also examined in their own research group. The demographic and offense trends are compared with previous local and national research. Historical context is given for evolving trends in offenses. Solutions for Nebraska prison overcrowding are presented from various interest groups. This study aims to enlighten all interested Nebraskans on who inhabits their …

A Consent Framework For The Internet Of Things In The Gdpr Era, Gerald Chikukwa

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an environment of connected physical devices and objects that communicate amongst themselves over the internet. The IoT is based on the notion of always-connected customers, which allows businesses to collect large volumes of customer data to give them a competitive edge. Most of the data collected by these IoT devices include personal information, preferences, and behaviors. However, constant connectivity and sharing of data create security and privacy concerns. Laws and regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of 2016 ensure that customers are protected by providing privacy and security guidelines to businesses. Data …

Introduction To The Mathematical Analysis Of Data Ams 450, Harrison Dekker

Library Impact Statements

No abstract provided.

Big Data: Ethics, Resources, And Potential Collaboration, Matthew Zook

Geography Presentations

This presentation goes over 10 simple rules for responsible big data research.

Unsupervised Data Mining Technique For Clustering Library In Indonesia, Robbi Rahim, Joseph Teguh Santoso, Sri Jumini, Gita Widi Bhawika, Daniel Susilo, Danny Wibowo

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Organizing school libraries not only keeps library materials, but helps students and teachers in completing tasks in the teaching process so that national development goals are in order to improve community welfare by producing quality and competitive human resources. The purpose of this study is to analyze the Unsupervised Learning technique in conducting cluster mapping of the number of libraries at education levels in Indonesia. The data source was obtained from the Ministry of Education and Culture which was processed by the Central Statistics Agency (abbreviated as BPS) with url: bps.go.id/. The data consisted of 34 records where the attribute …

Exploring Media Portrayals Of People With Mental Disorders Using Nlp, Swapna Gottipati, Mark Chong, Andrew Wei Kiat Lim, Benny Haryanto Kawidiredjo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Media plays an important role in creating an impact in society. Several studies show that news media and entertainment channels, at times may create overwhelming images of the mental illness that emphasize criminality and dangerousness. The consequences of such negative impact may impact the audience with stigma and on the other hand, they impair the self-esteem and help-seeking behavior of the people with mental disorders. This is the first study to examine the Singapore media’s portrayal of persons with mental disorders (MDs) using text analytics and natural language processing. To date, most studies on media portrayal of people with MDs …

Delineating Knowledge Domains In Scientific Domains In Scientific Literature Using Machine Learning (Ml), Abhay Maurya, Smarajit Paul Choudhury Mr., Kshitij Jaiswal Mr.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The recent years have witnessed an upsurge in the number of published documents. Organizations are showing an increased interest in text classification for effective use of the information. Manual procedures for text classification can be fruitful for a handful of documents, but the same lack in credibility when the number of documents increases besides being laborious and time-consuming. Text mining techniques facilitate assigning text strings to categories rendering the process of classification fast, accurate, and hence reliable. This paper classifies chemistry documents using machine learning and statistical methods. The procedure of text classification has been described in chronological order like …

Challenges When Identifying Migration From Geo-Located Twitter Data, Caitrin Armstrong, Ate Poorthuis, Matthew Zook, Derek Ruths, Thomas Soehl

Geography Faculty Publications

Given the challenges in collecting up-to-date, comparable data on migrant populations the potential of digital trace data to study migration and migrants has sparked considerable interest among researchers and policy makers. In this paper we assess the reliability of one such data source that is heavily used within the research community: geolocated tweets. We assess strategies used in previous work to identify migrants based on their geolocation histories. We apply these approaches to infer the travel history of a set of Twitter users who regularly posted geolocated tweets between July 2012 and June 2015. In a second step we hand-code …

The State Of #Digitalentrepreneurship: A Big Data Leximancer Analysis Of Social Media Activity, Violetta Wilk, Helen Cripps, Alexandru Capatina, Adrian Micu, Angela-Eliza Micu

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper examined online sentiment, key themes and patterns evident in social media activity about digital entrepreneurship. It provides a snapshot-in-time, visual-first perspective on social media user-generated-content (UGC) to better understand the topic of digital entrepreneurship. Global data consisting of 31,017 publicly available UGC which used the #digitalentrepreneurship (hashtag) and the keywords ‘digital entrepreneurship’ were collected. A computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS), Leximancer, was used for an automated text-mining analysis. There is positive online sentiment surrounding digital entrepreneurship technology, ecosystem and industry, and one which promotes women transformation of digital entrepreneurship globally. Negative sentiment pointed out that future …

Modelling Acoustics In Ancient Maya Cities: Moving Towards A Synesthetic Experience Using Gis & 3d Simulation, Graham Goodwin, Heather Richards-Rissetto

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Archaeological analyses have successfully employed 2D and 3D tools to measure vision and movement within cityscapes; however, built environments are often designed to invoke synesthetic experiences. GIS and Virtual Reality (VR) now enable archaeologists to also measure the acoustics of ancient spaces. To move toward an understanding of synesthetic experience in ancient Maya cities, we employ GIS and 3D modelling to measure sound propagation and reverberation using the main civic-ceremonial complex in ancient Copán as a case study. For the ancient Maya, sight and sound worked in concert to create ritually-charged atmospheres and architecture served to shape these experiences. Together …

Maritime Surveillance In The Gulf Of Suez : Identifying Opportunities For Future Improvements, Esslam Hassan, Dimitrios Dalaklis

Conference Papers

The Gulf of Suez (GOS) is one of the most important waterways in the world. Furthermore, issues like maritime safety, avoidance of accidents and effective conduct of navigation, as well as protection of the marine environment in the GOS are always among the highest priorities of Egyptian legislators. As a result, maritime surveillance in the area under discussion is facilitated by a technologically advanced Vessel Traffic Management System (VTMS) that has been established by the competent authority as a cost-effective measure to reduce and mitigate risks in accordance with international standards and guidelines. The main aim of this paper is …