How Ideas Go Viral in Academia

Is Double Blind Peer Review the Answer?

Boulder, Colorado – November 6, 2018 -- How ideas move through academia may depend on where those ideas come from—whether from big-name universities or less prestigious institutions—as much as their quality, a recent study from CU Boulder suggests. 

The new research borrows a page from epidemiology, exploring how ideas might flow from university to university, almost like a disease. The findings from CU Boulder’s Allison Morgan and her colleagues suggest that the way that universities hire new faculty members may give elite schools an edge in spreading their research to others.

In particular, the team simulated how ideas might spread out faster from highly-ranked schools than from those at the bottom of the pile—even when the ideas weren’t that good. The results suggest that academia may not function like the meritocracy that some claim, said Morgan, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science. 

She and her colleagues began by drawing on a dataset, originally published in 2015, that described the hiring histories of more than 5,000 faculty members in 205 computer science programs in the U.S. and Canada. 

That dataset revealed what might be a major power imbalance in the field—with a small number of universities training the majority of tenure track faculty across both countries. 

“This paper was really about investigating the implications of the imbalance,” Morgan said. “What does it mean if the elite institutions are producing the majority of the faculty who are, in turn, training the future teachers in the field?”

Academic roadmap

To answer that question, the researchers turned the 2015 dataset into a network of connected universities. If a university placed one of its Ph.D. students in a job at another school, then those two schools were linked. The resulting “roadmap” showed how faculty might carry ideas from their graduate schools to the universities that hired them.

The researchers then ran thousands of simulations on that network, allowing ideas that began at one school to percolate down to others. The team adjusted for the quality of ideas by making some more likely to shift between nodes than others.

The findings, published in October in the journal EPJ Data Science, show that it matters where an idea gets started. When mid-level ideas began at less prestigious schools, they tended to stall, not reaching the full network. The same wasn’t true for so-so thinking from major universities.  

“If you start a medium- or low-quality idea at a prestigious university, it goes much farther in the network and can infect more nodes than an idea starting at a less prestigious university,” Morgan said. 

That pattern held up even when the researchers introduced a bit of randomness to the mix—allowing ideas to pop from one end of the network to another by chance. That simulated how university departments might learn about an idea through factors other than hiring, such as journals, conferences or word of mouth. 

Diverse departments

The results seem to paint a dim picture of academia, said study coauthor Samuel Way, a postdoctoral research associate in computer science. He explained that recent sociological research demonstrates that workplaces benefit by having a lot of diversity—whether in gender, race or in how employees are trained. 

“If you have five people who all have the exact same training and look at the world through the same lens, and you give them a problem that stumps one of them, it might stump all of them,” Way said.

He added that it may be possible for the academic world to blunt the impact of the sorts of biases the team revealed, including by adopting practices like double-blind peer review—in which the reviewers of a study can’t see the names or affiliations of the authors. 

“In a setting like science where it’s incredibly difficult to come up with an objective measure of the quality of an idea, double-blind peer review may be the best you can do,” Way said.

The study did, however, contain a bit of good news: The bias toward big-name universities mattered a lot less for high-quality ideas. In other words, great thinking can still catch fire in academia, no matter where it comes from.

“I think it’s heartwarming in a way,” Morgan said. “We see that if you have a high-quality idea, and you’re from the bottom of the hierarchy, you have as good a chance of sending that idea across the network, as if it came from the top.”

Other coauthors on the study included graduate student Dimitrios Economou and Associate Professor Aaron Clauset, both in computer science.

https://www.colorado.edu/today/2018/11/06/how-ideas-go-viral-academia

Cooler Tokamak Plasma

Inside Job: A new Way to Cool a Fusion Reactor
A potentially game-changing approach could safely keep a fusion reactor from getting too hot

PORTLAND, Ore.—November 5, 2018 -- Fusion offers the potential of near limitless energy by heating a gas trapped in a magnetic field to incredibly high temperatures where atoms are so energetic that they fuse together when they collide. But if that hot gas, called a plasma, breaks free from the magnetic field, it must be safely put back in place to avoid damaging the fusion device--this problem has been one of the great challenges of magnetically confined fusion.

During these so-called disruptions, the rapid release of the energy in the plasma can damage the fusion device: Intense heat can vaporize or melt the walls, large electrical currents can generate damaging forces, and high-energy "runaway" electron beams can cause intense localized damage.

Making disruptions less disruptive involves injecting material into the plasma that evenly radiates away the plasma energy. One challenge is that the material has difficulty reaching the middle of the plasma before a disruption occurs. Researchers hope that getting material into the middle can provide "inside-out" cooling of the plasma, preventing the disruption and the production of runaway electrons.

Researchers at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility have demonstrated a revolutionary new technique to achieve this "inside-out" cooling before a disruption occurs. A thin-walled diamond-shelled pellet carries a payload of boron dust deep into the plasma (Figure 1). The experiments show that shell pellets fired into the core at around 450 miles per hour can deposit boron dust deep in the plasma where it is most effective. The diamond shells gradually disintegrate in the plasma before releasing the dust near the center of the plasma.

The new approach transforms prospects for fusion energy by potentially solving three major problems--efficiently radiating away the plasma's heat, reducing forces by the plasma on the fusion device, and preventing the formation of energetic electron beams.

As DIII-D Science Director, Richard Buttery, comments, "Shell pellets offer the potential of dealing with all three facets of the challenge, eliminating risk of device harm."

Future work is aimed at creating more sophisticated shell designs that can carry larger payloads and penetrate reactor-class plasmas.

Another technique being explored at DIII-D is known as shattered pellet injection. In this approach, solid frozen pellets made of a heavy isotope of hydrogen and neon or argon are fired toward the plasma at high speed. They shatter into small fragments before hitting the edge of the plasma. Researchers performed experiments and extrapolated the results to the large fusion device, ITER, being developed in France. They believe this technique will be effective in ITER.

"The best way to reliably prevent disruptions remains an open question," said researcher Nick Eidietis, who works at the DIII-D fusion device in San Diego and will be presenting his research at the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics meeting in Portland, Oregon. "But we are making significant progress in developing the understanding and techniques necessary to achieve fusion power. If this new shell technique fulfills its initial promise, it will transform prospects for reliable fusion power plant operation."

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/aps-ija110318.php

Genetic Risk Factor for CTE Detected

Findings may offer insight into how the disease occurs

(Boston University School of Medicine) -- November 3, 2018 -- Researchers have identified a genetic variation that may influence chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) disease severity.

TMEM106B is one of the first genes to be implicated in CTE. It may partially explain why some athletes present with severe CTE symptoms while others are less affected despite similar levels of head trauma.

The study provides preliminary evidence that this genetic variation might help predict which individuals are at greater risk to develop severe CTE pathology and dementia, according to the researchers. It also provides insight into the disease mechanism underlying CTE, which could aid in the development of biomarkers for diagnosis during life and in the identification of targets for treatments.

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and the VA Boston Healthcare System (VABHS) studied 86 former contact-sport athletes whose brains were donated to the VA-BU-CLF brain bank and found to have evidence of CTE, but no other pathology. The athlete brains were examined for genetic variation in TMEM106B, a gene thought to be involved in the brain's inflammation system. Overall, the genetic variation was not different in those with CTE compared to those without. "However, among the athletes with CTE, variation did predict increased CTE pathology and brain inflammation. Additionally, the risk allele increased the likelihood of developing dementia by 2.5 times suggesting the variant might predict an increased risk for developing the symptoms of CTE," explained first author Jonathan Cherry, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in neurology at BUSM.

"These findings may help explain why some individuals experience more severe CTE related outcomes while others are spared despite similar exposure to contact sports. By better understanding why some individuals are more at risk for CTE, we can identify novel therapeutic targets to help treat all with the disease," said corresponding author Thor Stein, MD, PhD, neuropathologist at VA Boston Healthcare System and assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at BUSM.

The researchers caution that it is still unclear what variation in TMEM106B means on an individual level for people at risk for CTE. Therefore, genetic testing for clinical care is not currently recommended.

The study appears in the journal Acta Neuropathologica Communications.

Jesse Mez, MD, MS, assistant professor of neurology at BUSM is the study's co-first author. Ann McKee, MD, Chief of Neuropathology, VA Boston Healthcare Syste, and Director of the BU CTE Center is the co-senior author.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/buso-grf110118.php

Chatbots Use Artificial Empathy

Empathetic machines favored by skeptics but might creep out believers

Penn State – November 1. 2018 -- Most people would appreciate a chatbot that offers sympathetic or empathetic responses, according to a team of researchers, but they added that reaction may rely on how comfortable the person is with the idea of a feeling machine.

In a study, the researchers reported that people preferred receiving sympathetic and empathetic responses from a chatbot -- a machine programmed to simulate a conversation -- than receiving a response from a machine without emotions, said S. Shyam Sundar, James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory. People express sympathy when they feel compassion for a person, whereas they express empathy when they are actually feeling the same emotions of the other person, said Sundar.

As healthcare providers look for ways to cut costs and improve service, he added these findings could help developers create conversational technologies that encourage people to share information about their physical and mental health states, for example.

"Increasingly, as we have more and more chatbots and more AI-driven conversational agents in our midst," said Sundar. "And, as more people begin to turn to their smart speaker or chatbot on a health forum for advice, or for social and emotional support, the question becomes: To what extent should these chatbots and smart speakers express human-like emotions?"

While machines today cannot truly feel either sympathy or empathy, developers could program these cues into current chatbot and voice assistant technology, according to the researchers who report their findings in the current issue of Cyberpsychology, Behavior & Social Networking.

However, chatbots may become too personal for some people, said Bingjie Liu, a doctoral candidate in mass communications, who worked with Sundar on the study. She said that study participants who were leery of conscious machines indicated they were impressed by the chatbots that were programmed to deliver statements of sympathy and empathy.

"The majority of people in our sample did not really believe in machine emotion, so, in our interpretation, they took those expressions of empathy and sympathy as courtesies," said Liu. "When we looked at people who have different beliefs, however, we found that people who think it's possible that machines could have emotions had negative reactions to these expressions of sympathy and empathy from the chatbots."

The researchers recruited 88 volunteers from a university and Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online task platform. The volunteers were asked to interact with one of four different online health service chatbots programmed to deliver responses specific to one of four conditions set up by the researchers: sympathy, two different types of empathy -- cognitive empathy and affective empathy -- or, an advice-only control condition.

In the sympathetic version, the chatbot responded with a statement, such as, "I am sorry to hear that." The chatbot programmed for cognitive empathy, which acknowledged the user's feelings, might say, "That issue can be quite disturbing." A chatbot that expressed affective empathy might respond with a sentence that showed the machine understood how and why a user felt the way they did, such as, "I understand your anxiety about the situation."

The researchers said that affective empathy and sympathy worked the best.

"We found that the cognitive empathy -- where the response is somewhat detached and it's approaching the problem from a thoughtful, but almost antiseptic way -- did not quite work," said Sundar." Of course, chatbots and robots do that quite well, but that is also the stereotype of machines. And it doesn't seem to be as effective. What seems to work best is affective empathy, or an expression of sympathy."

In a previous study, the researchers asked participants to just read the script of the conversation between a human subject and a machine. They found similar effects on the use of sympathy and empathy in messages.

The researchers said that future research could examine how the sympathetic and empathetic interactions work for different issues beyond health and sexuality, as well as investigate how people feel if humanlike machines and robots deliver those types of responses.

"We want to see if this is a consistent pattern in how humans react to machine emotions," said Liu.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Penn State. Original written by Matt Swayne. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181101085240.htm

Dedicated: Largest Statue Ever

The Statue of Unity is a statue of Indian statesman and founding father Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875–1950) in the Narmada district of Gujarat, India. It is the world's tallest statue, with a height of 182 metres (597 ft) or about two times as tall as the Statue of Liberty (excluding the pedestal). Patel was one of the most prominent leaders of the Indian independence movement, the first Deputy Prime Minister of India, and responsible for the unification of hundreds of princely states to form the modern political boundary of India. The statue is on a river-island facing the Narmada Dam (also called the Sardar Sarovar dam) near Rajpipla, 100 kilometres (62 mi) southeast of the city of Vadodara.

The monument and its surroundings occupy more than 2 hectares (4.9 acres), and are surrounded by a 12 km² (4.6 sq mi; 3,000 acres) artificial lake. It was built by Larsen & Toubro, who received the contract for ₹2,989 crore (US$420 million) for the design, construction, and maintenance in October 2014. The construction was started on 31 October 2014 and completed in mid-October 2018. It was designed by Indian sculptor Ram V. Sutar, and was dedicated by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 31 October 2018, the 143rd anniversary of Patel's birth.

Construction

A consortium comprising Turner Construction (project manager of Burj Khalifa), Michael Graves and Associates and Meinhardt Group supervised the project. It took 56 months to complete – 15 months for planning, 40 months for construction and two months for handing over by the consortium. The total cost of the project was estimated to be about ₹20.63 billion (US$290 million) by the government. The tender bids for the first phase were invited in October 2013 and were closed in November 2013.

Narendra Modi, then serving as Chief Minister of Gujarat, laid the statue's foundation stone on 31 October 2013, the 138th anniversary Patel's birth.

Indian infrastructure company Larsen & Toubro won the contract on 27 October 2014 for its lowest bid of ₹29.89 billion (US$420 million) for the design, construction and maintenance. They commenced the construction on 31 October 2014. In the first phase of the project, ₹13.47 billion were for the main statue, ₹2.35 billion for the exhibition hall and convention centre, ₹830 million for the bridge connecting the memorial to the mainland and ₹6.57 billion for the maintenance of the structure for 15 years after its completion. Accenture provides digital media outreach program,

The statue was completed in 33 months. The foundation was laid down in 2013; construction was completed in mid-October 2018; and the inaugural ceremony was held on 31 October 2018, presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The statue has been described as a tribute to Indian engineering skills.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Unity

Coming: A Universal Flu Vaccine?

Toward a universal flu vaccine – llama antibodies.  See https://www.realclearscience.com/quick_and_clear_science/2018/11/01/llamas_could_lead_us_to_a_universal_flu_vaccine.html

Physics and "137"

One out of 137 (actually 1/137.03599913 or 0.007297351) is the “Fine Structure Constant” in Physics, yet no one yet knows why this figure is so prominent and definitive.  It’s been called a “magic number” by famous physicists.  See:  https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/why-the-number-137-is-one-of-the-greatest-mysteries-in-physics