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High school graduation and dropout rates have long been used as indicators of educational system productivity and effectiveness and of social and economic well being. While determining these rates may seem like a straightforward task, their calculation is in fact quite complicated. How does one count a student who leaves a regular high school but later completes a GED? How does one count a student who spends most of his/her high school years at one school and then transfers to another? If the student graduates, which school should receive credit? If the student drops out, which school should take responsibility? This book addresses these issues and to examine (1) the strengths, limitations, accuracy, and utility of the available dropout and completion measures; (2) the state of the art with respect to longitudinal data systems; and (3) ways that dropout and completion rates can be used to improve policy and practice.--Publisher's description.

About the Authors: Matthew Zook * E-mail: zook@uky.edu Affiliation: Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, United States of America Solon Barocas Affiliation: Microsoft Research, New York, New York, United States of America danah boyd Affiliations Microsoft Research, New York, New York, United States of America, Data & Society, New York, New York, United States of America Kate Crawford Affiliations Microsoft Research, New York, New York, United States of America, Information Law Institute, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America Emily Keller Affiliation: Data & Society, New York, New York, United States of America ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9189-0421 Seeta Peña Gangadharan Affiliation: Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1955-3874 Alyssa Goodman Affiliation: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America Rachelle Hollander Affiliation: Center for Engineering Ethics and Society, National Academy of Engineering, Washington, DC, United States of America Barbara A. Koenig Affiliation: Institute for Health Aging, University of California-San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America Jacob Metcalf Affiliation: Ethical Resolve, Santa Cruz, California, United States of America ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2803-6625 Arvind Narayanan Affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America Alondra Nelson Affiliation: Department of Sociology, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America Frank Pasquale Affiliation: Carey School of Law, University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of AmericaCitation: Zook M, Barocas S, boyd d, Crawford K, Keller E, Gangadharan SP, et al. PLoS Comput...

Being able to evaluate the accuracy of an informant is essential to communication. Three experiments explored preschoolers' (N = 119) understanding that, in cases of conflict, information from reliable informants is preferable to information from unreliable informants. In Experiment 1, children were presented with previously accurate and inaccurate informants who presented conflicting names for novel objects. 4-year-olds-but not 3-year-olds-predicted whether an informant would be accurate in the future, sought, and endorsed information from the accurate over the inaccurate informant. In Experiment 2, both age groups displayed trust in knowledgeable over ignorant speakers. In Experiment 3, children extended selective trust when learning both verbal and nonverbal information. These experiments demonstrate that preschoolers have a key strategy for assessing the reliability of information.

Public health newborn screening (NBS) programs provide population-scale ascertainment of rare, treatable conditions that require urgent intervention. Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is currently used to screen newborns for a panel of rare inborn errors of metabolism (IEMs) 1 – 4 . The NBSeq project evaluated whole-exome sequencing (WES) as an innovative methodology for NBS. We obtained archived residual dried blood spots and data for nearly all IEM cases from the 4.5 million infants born in California between mid-2005 and 2013 and from some infants who screened positive by MS/MS, but were unaffected upon follow-up testing. WES had an overall sensitivity of 88% and specificity of 98.4%, compared to 99.0% and 99.8%, respectively for MS/MS, although effectiveness varied among individual IEMs. Thus, WES alone was insufficiently sensitive or specific to be a primary screen for most NBS IEMs. However, as a secondary test for infants with abnormal MS/MS screens, WES could reduce false-positive results, facilitate timely case resolution and in some instances even suggest more appropriate or specific diagnosis than that initially obtained. This study represents the largest, to date, sequencing effort of an entire population of IEM-affected cases, allowing unbiased assessment of current capabilities of WES as a tool for population screening. Whole-exome sequencing is not sensitive or specific enough to replace the gold standard of tandem mass spectrometry screening of rare inborn errors of metabolism, but can help to reduce false positives and facilitate the timely resolution of ambiguous cases.

Do children expect an expert in one domain to also be an expert in an unrelated domain? In Study 1, 32 threeand four-year-olds learned that one informant was an expert about dogs relative to another informant. When presented with pictures of new dogs or of artifacts, children who could remember which informant was the dog expert preferred her over the novice as an informant about the names of dogs, but they had no preference when the informants presented artifact labels. In Study 2, 32 children learned that one informant was incompetent about dogs whereas another was neutral. In this case, children preferred the neutral speaker over the incompetent one about both dogs and artifacts. Taken together, these results suggest that for children, expertise is not subject to a \"halo effect,\" but incompetence may be subject to a \"pitchfork effect.\"

Many adult beliefs are based on the testimony provided by other people rather than on firsthand observation. Children also learn from other people's testimony. For example, they learn that mental processes depend on the brain, that the earth is spherical, and that hidden bodily organs constrain life and death. Such learning might indicate that other people's testimony simply amplifies children's access to empirical data. However, children's understanding of God's special powers and the afterlife shows that their acceptance of others' testimony extends beyond the empirical domain. Thus, children appear to conceptualize unobservable scientific and religious entities similarly. Nevertheless, some children distinguish between the 2 domains, arguably because a different pattern of discourse surrounds scientific as compared to religious entities.

Keeping commitments to others can be difficult, and we know that people sometimes fail to keep them. How does a speaker's ability to keep commitments affect children's practical decisions to trust and their epistemic decisions to learn? An amassing body of research documents children's trust in testimonial learning decisions, which can be moved in the face of epistemic and moral evidence about an agent. However, other bases for trust go largely unexplored in this literature, such as interpersonal reasons to trust. Here, we investigated how direct bids for interpersonal trust in the form of making commitments, or obligations to the listener, influence a range of decisions toward that agent. We found that 3- and 4-year-olds' (N = 75) practical decisions to wait and to share were moved as a function of a person's commitment-keeping ability, but epistemic decisions to learn were not. Keeping one's commitments may provide children with interpersonal reasons to trust, reasons that may function in ways distinct from the considerations that bear on accepting a claim.

•We find that the cardiac hemodynamic phase function is time shifted locally.•We find that the respiratory hemodynamic phase function has single form across the brain.•We propose automatic physiologic signal detection without the external physiologic signal measures and its correction method in resting state-fMRI data.•We compare the efficacy of the proposed method to RETROICOR. Hemodynamic cardiac and respiratory-cycle fluctuations are a source of unwanted non-neuronal signal components, often called physiologic noise, in resting state (rs-) fMRI studies. Here, we use image-based retrospective correction of physiological motion (RETROICOR) with externally measured physiologic signals to investigate cardiac and respiratory hemodynamic phase functions reflected in rs-fMRI data. We find that the cardiac phase function is time shifted locally, while the respiratory phase function is described as single, fixed phase form across the brain. In light of these findings, we propose an update to Physiologic EStimation by Temporal ICA (PESTICA), our publically available software package that estimates physiologic signals when external physiologic measures are not available. This update incorporates: 1) auto-selection of slicewise physiologic regressors and generation of physiologic fixed phase regressors with total slices/TR sampling rate, 2) Fourier series expansion of the cardiac fixed phase regressor to account for time delayed cardiac noise 3) removal of cardiac and respiratory noise in imaging data. We compare the efficacy of the updated method to RETROICOR. [Display omitted]

Social insects face many threats from predators and parasites, and so have evolved a diversity of behavioral defense strategies to evade and combat enemies. Previous research has focused extensively on the evolution of front-line defense strategies that allow social groups to successfully avoid detection by enemies, defeat them during an attack, or mitigate fitness losses upon successful invasion. However, in the case of social insects, we must also consider how colonies have evolved to alter their behavior when they survive attacks. During an attack, colony fitness can be negatively affected while the colony itself survives. There may be selective pressure for surviving individuals to respond strategically to decrease the risks of future attacks by the same enemy. In this study, we tested whether colonies of Temnothorax longispinosus acorn ants emigrate when they experience a raid by the obligate social parasite T. americanus . We found that T. longispinosus colonies that experienced a raid moved to a different nest of equal quality significantly more than genetically matched colonies that had not experienced a raid event. We also found that raided colonies moved significantly more than we would expect by random chance. This result suggests that emigration may be an induced defense against re-raiding in this host-parasite system.

Many scientists and doctors hope that affordable genome sequencing will lead to more personalized medical care and improve public health in ways that will benefit children, families, and society more broadly. One hope in particular is that all newborns could be sequenced at birth, thereby setting the stage for a lifetime of medical care and self‐directed preventive actions tailored to each child's genome. Indeed, commentators often suggest that universal genome sequencing is inevitable. Such optimism can come with the presumption that discussing the potential limits, cost, and downsides of widespread application of genomic technologies is pointless, excessively pessimistic, or overly cautious. We disagree. Given the pragmatic challenges associated with determining what sequencing data mean for the health of individuals, the economic costs associated with interpreting and acting on such data, and the psychosocial costs of predicting one's own or one's child's future life plans based on uncertain testing results, we think this hope and optimism deserve to be tempered. In the analysis that follows, we distinguish between two reasons for using sequencing: to diagnose individual infants who have been identified as sick and to screen populations of infants who appear to be healthy. We also distinguish among three contexts in which sequencing for either diagnosis or screening could be deployed: in clinical medicine, in public health programs, and as a direct‐to‐consumer service. Each of these contexts comes with different professional norms, policy considerations, and public expectations. Finally, we distinguish between two main types of genome sequencing: targeted sequencing, where only specific genes are sequenced or analyzed, and whole‐exome or whole‐genome sequencing, where all the DNA or all the coding segments of all genes are sequenced and analyzed. In a symptomatic newborn, targeted or genome‐wide sequencing can help guide other tests for diagnosis or for specific treatment that is urgently needed. Clinicians use the infant's symptoms (or phenotype) to interrogate the sequencing data. These same complexities and uncertainties, however, limit the usefulness of genome‐wide sequencing as a population screening tool. While we recognize considerable benefit in using targeted sequencing to screen for or detect specific conditions that meet the criteria for inclusion in newborn screening panels, use of genome‐wide sequencing as a sole screening tool for newborns is at best premature. We conclude that sequencing technology can be beneficially used in newborns when that use is nuanced and attentive to context.