Interdisciplinary – Page 14 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Interdisciplinary

Creative Writing & Publishing

My project is a creative writing mentorship. My mentor holds weekly workshops with me and my peers to help us improve our creative writing. Two of us, including me, focus on poetry, while the other two write fiction. In addition to workshops, the other side of the project involves researching literary journals and compiling them into a database to use as a reference for when we are ready to submit our finished works to them for potential publication. The purpose of the project is to improve my creative writing skills and potentially become a published writer.

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To Be or Not To Be (on The Platform)

Existing studies on platform competition have emphasized the importance of complementors on platform success but paid little attention to complementors’ heterogeneous decisions to collaborate with a particular platform. Building on the literature on adjustment costs, this paper examines how complementors’ organizational attributes influence their decisions to adopt an entrant platform. My preliminary results based on U.S. restaurant industry data show that restaurants that had already partnered with at least one incumbent food delivery platform were more likely to adopt an entrant platform. However, this positive relationship was weaker for complementors that had (1) a higher capacity utilization rate and (2) more than one organizational unit. This paper provides implications on how entrant platforms can establish an initial population of complementors, preparing the ground to compete with incumbent platforms.

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Continuous evaluation of instruction

The project uses mobile-eye tracking in classrooms to analyze teachers responses to misbehaviors in the classroom and find the most effective way of responding to a misbehavior. To measure this response, we have collected 52 different videos of 26 classrooms in which an expert teacher and a student teacher take turns teaching in. Each class period has various videos, an eye tracking video as well as a few stationary cameras focused on the students. The class periods last from 35 to 45 minutes long and feature 1st to 11th grade classrooms with around 20 or 30 students in them. The groups of students reflected different socioeconomic backgrounds. The mobile eye-tracking device tracks the teachers gaze, recording whether the teacher notices a student misbehaving. Trained coders watch each video and code each misbehavior and the teacher’s response. The point of the project is to code each misbehavior in the classroom and record whether the teacher sees it and how they respond. Preliminary results show that teachers are unaware of a majority of misbehaviors in their classrooms, that teachers respond fairly to misbehavior with regards to student gender, and that teachers are unresponsive to most of the misbehaviors they see. Although data originally suggested that teachers’ responses to boys and girls differ, further research shows that this is because boys and girls misbehave differently. This study allows educational psychologists to understand how and when teachers respond to misbehaviors in the classroom and allow them to evaluate any disparities in the education system.

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Continuous evaluation of instruction

We used Mobile Eye-tracking in regular class periods to investigate teacher attention to and teacher response to misbehavior in the classroom. To measure teacher attention, Mobile Eye-tracking follows a teacher’s gaze and their fixations onto a video of the classroom that reflects their personal field of vision. To measure teacher response to misbehaviors, trained coders watched 52 different videos of 26 different 1st through 11th grade classrooms, each taught by an expert teacher and a student-teacher. Class periods ranged from 35 to 45 minutes with 20 to 30 students, who reflected various socioeconomic backgrounds. Preliminary results show (1) that teachers do not see a majority of misbehavior in their classrooms, (2) that teachers do not respond to a majority of misbehaviors they see, and (3) that teachers respond fairly to misbehavior with regards to student gender. While data suggest that teachers’ responses to boys and girls are different, further analysis shows that this is due to the fact that boys and girls misbehave in different ways. This study allows us as educational psychologists to understand more about how and when teachers respond to misbehaviors in the classroom. More broadly, it allows us to evaluate one supposed disparity in the education system.

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Constructs of Race & Ethnicity and Latinx Adults’ Perceptions of Discrimination

Hate crimes and domestic terrorism have spiked during and following the 2016 US Presidential election (www.justice.gov, 2019). The current project zooms in on the US Latinx and immigrant Latino community, as a demographic perceived to be targeted by President Trump. The FBI’s annual statistics also show an increase racially motivated crimes: begging the question of the relationship between the upticks in hate crimes and the former President’s rhetoric. This study examines how the Trump presidency actually impacted Latinx/o/a community. Secondary research questions include: Is there a relation between residential location and racism, such that people of color feel pressure to assimilate to become more “ËœAmerican’? What is the nature of the Expat identity for immigrant people of color in the US, can they really ever ‘belong’? What factors contribute to the disproportionate amount of legislation targeted at immigrants from Mexico, Central, and South America? Data analysis includes statistical models (SPSS) and comparative studies, based on Garcia Coll et al. (1996)’s Integrative Model. This research will serve to educate diverse populations in the US, particularly those that may have also been impacted by the former presidential administration. We conclude with implications for the study’s findings can bring, in terms of population unity and healing.

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Reviving Growth Keynesianism

At a time defined by the collapse of longstanding capitalistic systems and institutions, Keynesian economic thought began its ascent to prominence in what would kick off an era of unprecedented growth and prosperity. John Maynard Keynes revolutionized the field of macroeconomics with the publication of his general theory in 1936, yet he was hardly the only economist contributing to the profession’s shift away from traditional neoclassical ideas. Throughout the mid-20th century, Keynesianism grew intertwined with American political institutions and common economic thought, yet a changing political landscape and an adverse economic climate halted Keynesian advances shy of their full potential. As we enter a new period defined by bold proposals to combat economic injustice, an unprecedented climate crisis, and the ever-looming threat of financial crisis, Keynesianism is once again taking center stage, and it is the goal of the RGK project to rekindle this living tradition of American political economy for a prosperous 21st century.

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Residue Depth Computation

Proteins, a class of macromolecules essential to biological processes, are characterized by their structure which directly correlates to functionality. Residues are considered the building blocks of proteins and studying their positions has been crucial in understanding the role a protein plays in a biological system. This research project investigates different measures of residue depth through calculations of RSA, DPX, Residue Depth, HalfSpace Depth, and L1 depth. The L1 depth function surpasses other residue structure predictors in that it can obtain positions of residues buried under the protein surface, or nested in pockets. In addition, the function uses O(N) time complexity, making it much more efficient than the HalfSpace predictor. Values of depth have strong correlations with properties such as physiochemical propensities, flexibility and polarity. Data was obtained from CULLPDB, Phospho3D, and PLB datasets. After reading in necessary information into an IDE, residue depth of each protein in the datasets and the correlation coefficients between the means of depth values of amino acids and hydrophobicity index of amino acids were calculated through an algorithm written in C++. These results showed that the means of depth values were strongly relative with hydrophobicity of amino acids. In addition, the secondary structures of the residues are also associated with L1 depth values, as residues in sheets are deeper under the surface in comparison to residues in coils and helices.

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A software library for combining, processing and analyzing multi-omic and electronic health record data

The efficient searching of existing genomic markers is essential for expediting the analysis of key biological information and further manipulating the data in bulk to discover patterns. In particular, the Cutaneous Bioinformatics project aims to process genetic mutations, namely simple nucleotide polymorphisms and insertions-deletions, to deduce how certain mutations facilitate certain epidemiological conditions. To efficiently analyze the genomic markers, a C++ program was developed, tested, and published on GitHub that reads the data from a standard tab-separated value text format and inputs the data into a two-way hash map. The program was developed, tested, and documented by a single individual under the supervision and direction of the leaders of the Cutaneous Bioinformatics project. The software takes command-line arguments and can perform two-way lookups between the markers’ rsIDs and their chromosome, position, and allele sequence. The utilization of a hash table is ideal because it allows lookups in both directions to be performed with constant-time complexity, while manual analysis of the original, multi-gigabyte data file requires linear-time complexity for reverse lookups. The hash table creation was successfully implemented, and, upon deliberations with project supervisors, the syntax of user input for allele sequences in the reverse lookup was taken into account when determining which markers with a particular chromosome and position constitute a match. The incorporation of additional markers and data across other biological disciplines can further augment the ability of researchers to quickly analyze the data and perhaps lead to genetic discoveries.

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A software library for combining, processing and analyzing multi-omic and electronic health record data

Healthcare research involves the processing and analyzing of collected data, which can cost valuable time. The purpose of this study is to develop a software library as a resource for researchers to process and analyze genetic data. This set of scripts were all developed in the Python 3 language, with the usage of the NumPy and Pandas libraries. The first script, getLoci.py, parses through a .txt file, with each line dedicated to a chromosome, its position, significance (p-value), and other data. It uses this information to identify significant loci within the dataset, and returns a list of the positions and p-values of markers which correspond to each locus. Significance of a locus is defined by a p-value threshold and distinct loci are identified by the distance between markers. As an alternative approach, linkageDisequlibrium.py assigns markers to their loci with respect to their linkage disequilibrium. The next script, compareLoci.py, compares two different sets of loci and identifies which loci are present in each set. The user can input the maximum distance between two loci for them to be considered the same. Lastly, fishersExact.py conducts the Fishers Exact test for enrichment of genetic loci among different features (represented by BED files). These scripts have proven to be efficient, as getLoci.py used 5000MB of memory in 4 minutes with a 20 million line dataset.

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Simulating Magnetic Fields for nEDM

The Los Alamos nEDM experiment measures the electric dipole moment of a neutron, which could improve our understanding of the dominance of matter versus antimatter in the universe. For the experiment, we need to know the magnetic field and track the neutron spin along its path from the neutron source to the experiment. The magnetic field was calculated with a commercial program, which integrates currents in magnet windings. A component of the field was reverse engineered by comparing it to a map of the magnetic field of two coaxial solenoids. We altered the current, windings, lengths, and inner and outer radii for both solenoids. It was determined that a radii ratio of 0.55 and a winding ratio of 6:5 yielded an excellent match to the data. The solenoid field combined with calculations of fields produced by a combination of additional coils will be used to generate the fields over the full neutron path and used to predict the effect on the neutron spin and guide design modifications.

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