Colonial Society of Massachusetts

Abstract Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) can help mitigate the spread of respiratory infections through the early detection of viruses, pathogens, and other biomarkers in human waste. The need for sample collection, shipping, and testing facilities drives up the cost of WBE and hinders its use for rapid detection and isolation in environments with small populations and in low-resource settings. Given the ubiquitousness and regular outbreaks of respiratory syncytial virus, SARS-CoV-2 and various influenza strains, there is a rising need for a low-cost and easy-to-use biosensing platform to detect these viruses locally before outbreaks can occur and monitor their progression. To this end, we have developed an easy-to-use, cost-effective, multiplexed platform able to detect viral loads in wastewater with several orders of magnitude lower limit of detection than mass spectrometry. This is enabled by wafer scale production and aptamers pre-attached with linker molecules, producing forty-four chips at once. Each chip can simultaneously detect four target analytes using twenty transistors segregated into four sets of five for each analyte to allow for immediate statistical analysis. We show our platform’s ability to rapidly detect three virus proteins (SARS-CoV-2, RSV, and Influenza A) and a population normalization molecule (caffeine) in wastewater. Going forward, turning these devices into hand-held systems would enable waste-water epidemiology in low-resource settings and be instrumental for rapid, local outbreak prevention.

Mary Darby Robinson (1758-1800) was one of the most famous actresses of her time. A notorious affair with the Prince of Wales, sparked when he saw her in David Garrick's adaptation of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, left her indelibly marked with the nickname "Perdita." While it may seem a stretch to connect the adulteress Mrs. Robinson to Shakespeare's sixteen-year-old virgin, Robinson did just that when she constructed her girlhood self in her posthumously published Memoirs. The similarities between Shakespeare's lost girl and Robinson's invented one suggest that she was using Perdita's tale to negotiate and produce her own story. Although Robinson was twenty-one, married, and a mother when she played Perdita in Garrick's adaptation, I contend that Robinson uses Shakespeare's young heroine to do two things: first, to produce herself as a sexual innocent attempting to preserve her "natural" girlhood against the demands of a culturally mandated sexual role; and second, to re-imagine the whore-making space of the theater as a stage of girlish freedom and refuge from the social and biological demands of womanhood.

Abstract This paper documents that short-term options achieve significantly lower returns during months with 4 versus 5 weeks between expiration dates. The average return differential ranges from 16 to 29 basis points per week for delta-hedged portfolios, and from 101 to 187 basis points per week for straddles, over 1996–2017. Evidence based on earnings announcements and institutional holdings suggests that investor inattention to exact expiration date rather than underlying risk exposures or transaction costs can explain the mispricing. Market makers seem to adjust prices accordingly, and tend to over-trade mispriced options against less sophisticated investors.

With faculty development programs being more present around higher education institutions worldwide, researchers question their effectiveness as how it benefits faculty members and students. For development programs to take place, effective dissemination processes must become a common practice, and be strongly encouraged by the leadership. This paper presents a case study on how dissemination of knowledge works after leaders of several Brazilian institutions that are part of a consortium attend a weeklong workshop on active learning methodologies. This study employed a mixed methods approach utilizing the review of program documentation, an online leader survey, and virtual interviews with select participants. This multi-phase study revealed several ways leaders disseminate knowledge within and outside their institutions - including internal and external communities of practice - and that in most cases the high administration is willing to invest on creating an environment which fosters the dissemination. However, some challenges still compromise the complete effectiveness of the dissemination, including the involvement of the leadership of the consortium post-program. This paper sheds light on the role of leaders in this process in addition to presenting a case study in Latin America, context that is still understudied.

We prove the consistency of the $\ell_1$ penalized negative binomial regression (NBR). A real data application about German health care demand shows that the $\ell_1$ penalized NBR produces a more concise but more accurate model, comparing to the classical NBR.

Power computations for one-level experimental designs that assume simple random samples are greatly facilitated by power tables such as those presented in Cohen’s book about statistical power analysis. However, in education and the social sciences experimental designs have naturally nested structures and multilevel models are needed to compute the power of the test of the treatment effect correctly. Such power computations may require some programming and special routines of statistical software. Alternatively, one can use the typical power tables to compute power in nested designs. This paper provides simple formulae that define expected effect sizes and sample sizes needed to compute power in nested designs using the typical power tables. Simple examples are presented to demonstrate the usefulness of the formulae. Accessed 18,608 times on https://pareonline.net from May 20, 2009 to December 31, 2019. For downloads from January 1, 2020 forward, please click on the PlumX Metrics link to the right.

This chapter aims to offer an overview of the scarce academic literature on the long-term mobility of international faculty around the world and attempts to include an institutional perspective on this phenomenon. This task is challenging for four reasons. First, the literature on academic mobility prioritizes discussions about student mobility and, to a large extent, neglects issues connected to the international mobility of faculty. Second, the academic literature on faculty mobility overwhelmingly focuses on aspects related to short-term mobility, as opposed to analyzing the realities related to long-term mobile faculty. Third, when long-term faculty mobility is addressed, the literature uses either the individual perspective of the mobile faculty themselves, in the form of personal narratives, or the system perspective, in the form of describing general push and pull factors causing the mobility of faculty. For the most part, the prioritization of the individual viewpoint and of system-level descriptions has marginalized the perspective of universities as key actors in the faculty mobility phenomenon. Finally, the relevant academic literature disproportionately focuses on ‘star’ faculty and the surge of international mobility into prestigious institutions, not the mobility of ‘worker bee’ faculty moving toward demand-driven tertiary education systems. This focus on a minority of the world’s internationally mobile faculty is due to the preeminence of discussions about university reputation and the challenges faced by institutions located at the center of the academic world within the relevant literature.

This chapter investigates how the suppression of these hairstyle choices also suppresses authenticity and therefore damages black women's ability to be fully effective in the workplace. It discusses the importance of authenticity and address how appearance norms may contribute to inauthenticity and then considers its costs. After establishing this backdrop, the author uses a Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) lens to explore how encouraging employees express their authentic identities. To be considered professional, many black women must suppress their authenticity or live in fear of negative ramifications. Rather than merely trying to avoid these negative consequences, it is more helpful to consider the benefits of encouraging authenticity in the workplace a perspective available through the POS lens. In essence, the benefits of authenticity are not limited to those who are traditionally identified as minorities. Finally, encouraging authenticity in the workplace could contribute to an organizational culture in which self-expression is valued and encouraged.