Michele Cadigan, UW Sociology
12:30pm-2:00pm • Smith Hall, Room 306, UW Seattle

Abstract: Research on court-imposed monetary sanctions has not fully examined how processes used to  manage court debt impact individuals lives. Drawing from both interviews and ethnographic data across Illinois and Washington State, we examine how labor market experiences are shaped by the court’s management of justice-related debt. We conceptualize these processes as procedural pressure points or moments embedded within these management systems that strain individuals’ ability to access and maintain stable employment. As a result, courts undermine their own goal of recouping costs and trap individuals in an cycle of court surveillance.

Format: Cadigan’s paper will be circulated to registered attendees a week in advance of the workshare.  Participants are expected to read the paper before the meeting and be prepared for a discussion. Please feel free to bring your lunch.  Coffee and cookies will be served.

RSVP:  To register for the workshare and receive the paper, please e-mail hbcls@uw.edu .

Wednesday, 13 March | 12:30–1:30pm | Savery (SAV) 409

Finite mixture of regression modeling for exchange market pressures during the financial crisis: A robust Bayesian approach to variable selection

Yi-Chi Chen

Professor, Departments of Economics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, https://researchoutput.ncku.edu.tw/en/persons/yi-chi-chen

We present a novel methodology to perform Bayesian variable selection in finite mixture model of linear regressions, particularly in the presence of heavy-tailed distributions. The new method considers the observations come from a heterogeneous population which is a mixture of a finite number of sub-populations. Within each sub-population, the response variable can be explained by a linear regression on the predictor variables. Moreover, we explore to identify different subsets of variables that are correlated to the response in each sub-population and are robust to outliers in the data. Inference is performed via Markov chain Monte Carlo—a Gibbs sampler with Metropolis-Hastings steps for a class of parameters. Simulated studies highlight the performance of this approach when covariates are highly correlated with various selection criteria. Examples with exchange market pressures during the recent global financial crisis are presented and an extension to mixture models with an unknown number of components is introduced and discussed.

Time & Location

Wednesday Mar. 13, 4:00-5:00 pm, WRF Data Science Studio, 6th Floor of the Physics/Astronomy Tower

Speaker

Cal Biruk – Oberlin College

Title

Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World

Abstract

This talk is based on my recently published book, Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (2018, Duke University Press). Drawing on long term ethnography with demographic survey research projects in rural Malawi, the book tells the life story of quantitative health data, tracking and analyzing their transformation from pencil marks recorded on a survey page into statistics consumed by policy makers, researchers and the public. In this talk, I trace how demographers’ scientific investments in pure, clean data—symbolically represented in surveys that act as a recipe for data collection—are made and unmade by Malawian fieldworkers’ practices and processes on the ground. First, through close analysis of everyday data collection practices, I illustrate how frictions between epistemological metrics for data and the particularities of everyday fieldwork produce—and come to validate—the numerical evidence we use to understand the AIDS epidemic in Malawi. I focus, in particular, on the cultural translation of survey concepts such as probability, the techniques used by fieldworkers to uncover the truth of rural Malawian social realities, and researchers’ efforts to harmonize encounters between fieldworkers and research participants. Standards of data collection, I show, make stability and fixity in numerical representation possible, not despite but because of, their customization by fieldworkers in the field (here, I counter racialized suspicions that fieldworkers are liabilities and center their indispensability to making good numbers). I conclude by gesturing toward connections between my past and present research and reflecting on what anthropology might contribute to critical data studies in the age of Big (and small) Data.

Bio

Cal Biruk is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Oberlin College. Cal is the author of Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (Duke U Press, 2018) and numerous articles in venues such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Journal of Modern African Studies, Critical Public Health and Critical African Studies. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersection of medical anthropology, critical data studies and global health studies. Her second book project, Fake Gays: Metrics, Ethics and Authenticity in African Aid Economies, draws on long term ethnographic work with an LGBT-rights NGO in Malawi to capture the relations and transactions that constitute diverse political, identity, and economic projects that play out within aid geographies in the global South. Fake Gays melds insights from queer theory and critical data studies to show how numbers and quantification become unlikely resources in queer projects on the ground.

Please submit proposals directly to your Divisional Dean by Monday, April 29, 5:00pm. The Dean’s Office needs a short lead time to review and rank A&S proposals and submit them to OR by 5/1/19.

Purpose

The Bridge Funding program provides bridge funding to support faculty to span a temporary funding gap in critical research programs.

Funding Available

Maximum of $50,000 may be applied for through the Provost; all funding requests must be matched 1:1 by the applicant’s college/school.  A total of $500,000 is available for each round of awards.

Goal

Bridge Funding awards are typically used to support on-going research programs that have lost funding, although these funds may also be used to support new research directions, at the discretion of the recipient.

Are you a UW graduate student in the final stages of your capstone, thesis or dissertation project? Apply to compete in Three Minute Thesis, where you’ll have the opportunity to present your research in just three minutes for cash prizes totaling $2,500. The 2019 UW Three Minute Thesis (UW 3MT®) Competition is open to all eligible graduate students from Bothell, Tacoma, and Seattle campuses.

Read the eligibility requirements.

The deadline to submit a proposal is April 5 at 11:59 p.m., and the event will be held May 9 at 4 p.m.

The theme for this year’s competition is Impact. As graduate and professional students, you are contributing to significant innovations within your respective fields and disciplines, within your communities and across local and international levels. Whether you have developed a new way of approaching a problem, unearthed an important part of history that needs to be told or created a solution or technology to address a pressing contemporary issue — we want to hear in your proposal how your thesis, capstone, or research project has potential or demonstrated impact!

Participating in 3MT is a great opportunity to:

• Learn to talk about your research without using jargon
• Prepare for job interviews. One UW 3MT winner shared that her three minute talk was useful for answering job interview questions!
• Practice your public speaking skills
• Build your network and your resume
• Receive practice session feedback from Core Programs and UW Libraries staff in a friendly and positive environment
• Compete for cash prizes!

3MT is intended for graduate students who are ready to present their capstone, thesis or dissertation work, rather than for works-in-progress. If you are at an earlier stage with your research, we encourage you to consider Scholars’ Studio events to present your work.

For more information, please visit the UW 3MT website or send questions to uw3mt@uw.edu.

 

 

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health – Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health

Deadline for applications: 15 April 2019.

A post-doctoral fellowship is available at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, focusing on the measurement of demographic trends in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

The post-doctoral fellow will contribute to a project funded by the NIH to improve estimates of adolescent and adult mortality in LMICs. This is a multi-country trial of new methods to estimate mortality and its causes in 4 countries in Africa and Asia. The project team is composed of demographers and epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins, as well as public health researchers in the 4 study countries, and statisticians at the University of Massachusetts. The fellow will analyze study data, and lead the development of research products such as peer-reviewed publications or software packages.

In addition, the successful candidate will also have the opportunity to develop his/her own research agenda, and to acquire skills in grant preparation and proposal development.

The position offers up to two years of support with competitive salary and benefits, and funds for travel to professional conferences and meetings. The starting date is July 1st 2019 or earlier if preferred. The position is located at the Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md (USA).

If you are interested, please send a CV, cover letter that describes research experience and interests, writing sample, and names and contact information for three references to Stephane Helleringer at sheller7@jhu.edu prior to April 15th, 2019.

Qualifications:

PhD in demography, epidemiology, global health or other related fields in public health; or in sociology, economics and other related fields in the social sciences. The successful applicant must have proven ability to use statistical analysis software (preferably R or Stata). Experience working in low- or middle-income settings is highly recommended.

RA POSITION OPEN: DIGITIZATION OF MEDICAL STUDY RECORDS

Qualified and interested applicants are sought for a Research Assistant to assist with digitization of paper records from a longrunning medical study, as part of an NIH-funded research project examining “Health Outcomes for Patients with Dementia without Family Caregivers.”

The project involves a secondary study of existing data from a longrunning medical study of dementia (the “Adult Changes in Thought” or ACT Study), run since the early 1990s through Group Health (now Kaiser Permanente). Our project seeks to use ACT Study data, together with health records data of participants, to answer questions about family & social support for informal caregiving, that the original medical research was not designed to address. Because of this, some materials collected by the ACT Study (such as administrative paperwork and documents prepared as part of their diagnostic protocols), that have not previously considered to be “data” at all, are rich sources of data for us. Funding has been secured to support the work of transforming these paper records into electronic format usable for research: statistical text analysis, and qualitative analysis using Atlas.ti. 

Our study sample includes 848 participants, for each of whom there exists a file containing paper records. Some documents are typed, some are handwritten, some are structured forms with handwritten entries. Once the project is completed, the resulting database will also be made available to other researchers. A scanner and laptop loaded with SimpleIndex OCR software have already been purchased; additional equipment and/or software can be purchased if necessary.

For this project we seek a graduate student conversant with the value and potential as well as the challenges of this kind of digitization project, and willing to engage with the whole “soup to nuts” process of transforming paper records into usable electronic data, making sure that they are coded with the necessary metadata, thinking about how they will be stored and processed etc. 

Job Duties will include: consulting with the PI and other researchers involved in the project; interfacing with ACT Study staff who steward the records to be digitized; researching and providing advice on SimpleIndex and/or other OCR software packages; designing a workflow; designing an architecture for metadata and file naming and storage; completing the scanning and digitization; quality-checking the resulting outputs. 

Location of work: will be primarily at the ACT Study offices on Nickerson Avenue, and/or at the main offices of the Kaiser Permanente of Washington Health Research Institute in the Denny Triangle area of Seattle. The successful candidate may need to go through an approval process to gain the necessary permissions to work with protected health information.

The position will commence: as soon as possible; contingent on good performance and funding availability, the position will likely be renewable through the summer and into the 2019-2020 academic year. 

Qualifications: previous experience with digitization of paper records; graduate-level training in information science highly desirable.

To express your interest in the position, please write to Janelle S. Taylor, Professor of Anthropology and PI on the grant, at jstaylor@uw.edu

Please include your CV or resume, and the names and contact info for several references.