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"Houston, Robert"
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Material Culture and Social Practice: Archaeology and History in Understanding Europe’s ‘Celtic Fringe
In recent years there has been a rapprochement between history and archaeology in Britain and Ireland. Two formerly quite distinct disciplines have learned to appreciate how documents and artefacts together can enrich our understanding of everyday life. Always important to understandings of classical, Dark Age, and medieval society, archaeology has also opened up new horizons for appreciating domestic and industrial buildings, burial patterns, urban morphology, land use and environment, and the consumption of both food and objects in the early modern period. I look at some recent research that has enhanced our knowledge of local, regional, national and transnational identities in a sometimes poorly understood ‘fringe’ area of Europe.
Journal Article
Disaggregating education production
A particular weakness of the education production function literature is that production is measured after a long series of treatments have been administered and reflects the effects of aggregation. This study meets a need to extend the perspective of this literature to a disaggregated view. We directed our inquiry toward a traditional set of production stages: the reading assignment, the lecture, after the lecture study and preparation for the exam. Our experimental design was constructed to measure student performance before and after each stage of production. We found that production varied significantly across stages. The reading assignment and lecture stages were productive. The post lecture stage exhibited negative but insignificant productivity. The test preparation stage also exhibited negligible productivity.
Journal Article
Literacy in Early Modern Europe
The new edition of this important, wide-ranging and extremely useful textbook has been extensively re-written and expanded. Rab Houston explores the importance of education, literacy and popular culture in Europe during the period of transition from mass illiteracy to mass literacy. He draws his examples for all over the continent; and concentrates on the experience of ordinary men and women, rather than just privileged and exceptional elites.
eBook
The Long-Term Effects of the Houston Child Advocates, Inc., Program on Children and Family Outcomes
The objective of the study is to investigate the longitudinal effects of the Houston Child Advocates, Inc., program on children’s outcomes. The treatment group consisted of children in the court system that were assigned Child Advocates volunteers, and the comparison children were chosen randomly from a similar population of children. The treatment group had significantly higher scores on the protective factor and family functioning measures and received more social services than those in the comparison group. Children in the treatment group also had significantly fewer placement changes and did better academically and behaviorally in school than children in the comparison group.
Journal Article
Transformer-Enhanced Text Classification in Cybersecurity: GPT-Augmented Synthetic Data Generation, BERT-Based Semantic Encoding, and Multiclass Analysis
This research presents an examination and findings based on an investigation into the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generative and encoding tasks in the domain of cybersecurity. The work presented herein demonstrates some critical uses of transformer-derived deep learning model architectures that use Generative Pretrained Transformer Model 2 (GPT-2) to generate synthetic data to balance otherwise imbalanced data sets for multi-class classification for enhancing cybersecurity and families of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) used for word embeddings. Three factors link these research areas. First, the BERT embeddings are derived from a synthetically balanced dataset produced by GPT-2 generative capabilities. Second, both BERT and GPT-2 models are pretrained models that are subsequently fine-tuned using each minority class of the data set. Finally, BERT and GPT-2 are derived from the transformers model introduced by the seminal paper, Attention Is All You Need (Vaswani et al., 2017). In this research, synthetic data sets and the embedding models produced using transformer models are evaluated using various traditional Machine Learning (ML) models using a novel weighted aggregation of F1 score developed to account for the disparate risk inherent with different classification classes for cybersecurity applications.Another aspect of this research centers on using publicly licensed models with open-source base-training weights. The objective here is to analyze lightweight LLMs that are both deployable in computationally constrained environments and available for use in secure environments with no need to pass data to public cloud enclaves via commercial API calls to monetized foundational models.This research addresses essential needs relevant to using AI models in cybersecurity applications. The primary goals address the need for balanced, high-quality training data sets and semantically aware Natural Language Processing (NLP) vectorization methods for ML models. As a backdrop, there is an emphasis on the use of lightweight democratized models that are not monetized and are widely publicly available with open-source model weights.
Dissertation
Effects of the Length of Tenure of Child Care Center Teachers on their Instructional Practices
This study examined the effects of the length of tenure in child care centers and the instructional strategies used by teachers. Data were collected on twelve child care centers in high poverty areas during the past seven years. The program has been externally studied since its beginning, with extensive data collected including demographic composition of centers and individuals, student achievement, annual observation of all classrooms using the Infants and Toddlers Environmental Rating Scale, Revised (ITERS-R) and the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale (ECERS-R), nationally standardized instruments, interviews with about one-half of staff and all directors, staff length of employment, reaction to professional development, annual perceptions of directors, staff, and parents, and general outcomes of the program. This report specifically examined the effect of the staff’s length of tenure and their change in teaching strategies. The length of tenure of nearly 200 teachers was significantly related to the quality of classroom instruction as measured through classroom observations.
Journal Article
Scotland : a very short introduction
This Very Short Introduction explores the key themes from more than 1,000 years of Scotland's fascinating history. Covering everything from the Jacobites to devolution to the modern economy, this concise account presents a fully-integrated picture of what Scottish society, culture, politics and religion look like, and why. - ;Since Devolution in 1999 Scotland has become a focus of intense interest both within Britain and throughout the wider world. In this Very Short Introduction, Rab Houston explores how an independent Scottish nation emerged in the Middle Ages, how it was irrevocably altered by Reformation, links with England and economic change, and how Scotland influenced the development of the modern world. Examining politics, law, society, religion, education, migration, and culture, he. examines how the nation's history has made it distinct from England, both before and after Union, how it overcame internal tensions between Highland and Lowland society, and how it has today arrived at a political, social and culture watershed. Authoritative, lucid, and ranging widely over issues of environment, people, and identity, this is Scotland's story without myths: an ideal introduction for those interested in the Scots, but also a balanced yet refreshing challenge to those who already feel at home in Scotland past and present. - ;Houston's survey is clear and certainly concise. - Clare Beck, The Scotsman;A whistle-stop tour through the history of Scotland's politics, religion, education, economy and culture...both complex and rich. - Clare Beck, The Scotsman.
eBook
Paraneoplastic syndromes are associated with adverse prognosis among patients with renal cell carcinoma undergoing nephrectomy
Objectives
To analyze the association of paraneoplastic syndromes (PNS) with progression-free (PFS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS) among patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC) undergoing nephrectomy.
Methods
We performed a retrospective analysis of 2865 patients undergoing nephrectomy for localized RCC at Mayo Clinic from 1990 to 2010. PNS analyzed were anemia, polycythemia, hypercalcemia, recent-onset hypertension, and liver dysfunction. PFS and CSS were estimated using Kaplan–Meier method and compared with Cox proportional hazard models, unadjusted and adjusted for clinicopathologic features.
Results
A total of 661 (23 %) patients had anemia, 37 (1 %) had polycythemia, 177 (9 %) had hypercalcemia, 51 (2 %) had recent-onset hypertension, and 224 (10 %) had liver dysfunction at time of nephrectomy. Patients with PNS were more likely to have high-grade tumors and advanced disease stages. A total of 675 (24 %) patients developed progression and 1171 (41 %) died of RCC, over a median follow-up of 8.2 years. On univariable analysis, the presence of any PNS was associated with inferior CSS [hazard ratio (HR) = 1.86,
p
= 0.007] and a trend toward shorter PFS (HR = 1.33,
p
= 0.07) compared with patients without PNS. Specifically, anemia, polycythemia, hypercalcemia, and liver dysfunction were each associated with inferior CSS and PFS (all
p
< 0.05). However, on multivariable analysis PNS (overall or each individual syndrome) did not remain independently associated with CSS or PFS.
Conclusions
Patients with RCC undergoing nephrectomy presenting with PNS have worse oncologic outcome than those with incidentally found tumors. However, the adverse outcome among PNS patients seems to be largely explained by adverse pathologic features of these tumors.
Journal Article