On the Herbrand content of LK

We present a structural representation of the Herbrand content of LK-proofs with cuts of complexity prenex Sigma-2/Pi-2. The representation takes the form of a typed non-deterministic tree grammar of order 2 which generates a finite language of first-order terms that appear in the Herbrand expansions obtained through cut-elimination. In particular, for every Gentzen-style reduction between LK-proofs we study the induced grammars and classify the cases in which language equality and inclusion hold.Comment: In Proceedings CL&C 2016, arXiv:1606.0582

There Goes the Neighborhood? Estimates of the Impact of Crime Risk on Property Values From Megan's Laws

We combine data from the housing market with data from the North Carolina Sex Offender Registry to estimate how individuals value living in close proximity to a convicted criminal. We use the exact location of sex offenders to exploit variation in the threat of crime within small homogenous groupings of homes, and we use the timing of sex offenders' arrivals to control for baseline property values in the area. We find statistically and economically significant negative effects of sex offenders' locations that are extremely localized. Houses within a one-tenth mile area around the home of a sex offender fall by 4 percent on average (about $5,500). We also find evidence that the effect varies with distance within this range -- houses next to an offender sell for about 12 percent less while those a tenth of a mile away or more show no decline. We combine our willingness-to-pay estimates with data on sexual crimes against neighbors to estimate the costs to victims of sexual offenses. We estimate costs of over$1 million per victim -- far in excess of estimates taken from the criminal justice literature. However, we cannot reject the alternative hypotheses that individuals overestimate the risk posed by offenders or view living near an offender as having costs exclusive of crime risk.

The Power of the Puff: Mary Robinson’s Celebrity and the Success of Walsingham

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Safe Is Not Enough: Better Schools for LGBTQ Students

Citation: Fine, L. E. (2017). Safe Is Not Enough: Better Schools for LGBTQ Students. American Journal of Education, 123(3), 517-521. Retrieved from ://WOS:000399665200007The preponderance of literature related to LGBTQ youth prior to the mid-2000s tended to focus on the ways in which claiming a minority sexual or gender identity led to persistent disadvantage in American society. Schools in particular were found to be spaces where homophobia and transphobia were omnipresent, leaving queer young people with low self-esteem, high levels of fear, and numerous reports of vicitimization (D’Augelli et al. 2001; van Wormer and McKinney 2003). Since the mid-2000s, though, a new stream of literature has begun to explore the ways in which LGBTQ youth are resilient and in what contexts they thrive (McCormack 2012; Savin-Williams 2005). Michael Sadowski’s book Safe Is Not Enough: Better Schools for LGBTQ Students is an important contribution to the latter tradition

The influence of early questions on learning from text

In this research we explored the use of short-answer questions to improve learning from chapter-like texts (3395 words). Experiment 1 investigated the influence of pre-questions on recall from a text passage when tested a week later; two question sets were counterbalanced within the experimental group. Participants with pre-questions scored higher both overall (d = 3.6, 95%CI [2.4, 4.8]) and on novel questions (d = 2.0 [1.6, 2.4]). In Experiment 2, questions were made available immediately after studying the text either alongside the text, open-book, or closed-book with the opportunity to check answers, or not at all with additional study time. Learning was tested after a week. Although the immediate test scores were substantially higher for open- than closed-book tests, week-delayed performance on the same items was much worse for open-book tests and was moderately improved for closed-book tests. For seen questions, closed-book tests led to better delayed recall than did open-book tests, d = 0.7 [0.02, 1.5]. For novel questions, observed differences were small; ds = .2 [-0.6, 0.9] for both comparisons

Big Data and Analysis of Data Transfers for International Research Networks Using NetSage

Modern science is increasingly data-driven and collaborative in nature. Many scientific disciplines, including genomics, high-energy physics, astronomy, and atmospheric science, produce petabytes of data that must be shared with collaborators all over the world. The National Science Foundation-supported International Research Network Connection (IRNC) links have been essential to enabling this collaboration, but as data sharing has increased, so has the amount of information being collected to understand network performance. New capabilities to measure and analyze the performance of international wide-area networks are essential to ensure end-users are able to take full advantage of such infrastructure for their big data applications. NetSage is a project to develop a unified, open, privacy-aware network measurement, and visualization service to address the needs of monitoring today's high-speed international research networks. NetSage collects data on both backbone links and exchange points, which can be as much as 1Tb per month. This puts a significant strain on hardware, not only in terms storage needs to hold multi-year historical data, but also in terms of processor and memory needs to analyze the data to understand network behaviors. This paper addresses the basic NetSage architecture, its current data collection and archiving approach, and details the constraints of dealing with this big data problem of handling vast amounts of monitoring data, while providing useful, extensible visualization to end users

Listening in on the Conversations: An Overview of Digital Humanities Pedagogy

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On closure ordinals for the modal mu-calculus

The closure ordinal of a formula of modal mu-calculus mu X phi is the least ordinal kappa, if it exists, such that the denotation of the formula and the kappa-th iteration of the monotone operator induced by phi coincide across all transition systems (finite and infinite). It is known that for every alpha < omega^2 there is a formula phi of modal logic such that mu X phi has closure ordinal alpha (Czarnecki 2010). We prove that the closure ordinals arising from the alternation-free fragment of modal mu-calculus (the syntactic class capturing Sigma_2 cap Pi_2) are bounded by omega^2. In this logic satisfaction can be characterised in terms of the existence of tableaux, trees generated by systematically breaking down formulae into their constituents according to the semantics of the calculus. To obtain optimal upper bounds we utilise the connection between closure ordinals of formulae and embedded order-types of the corresponding tableaux