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Selecting a cohort from a set of candidates is a common task within and beyond academia. Admitting students, awarding grants, and choosing speakers for a conference are situations where human biases may affect the selection of any particular candidate, and, thereby the composition of the final cohort. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, entrofy, designed to be part of a human-in-the-loop decision making strategy aimed at making cohort selection as just, transparent, and accountable as possible. We suggest embedding entrofy in a two-step selection procedure. During a merit review, the committee selects all applicants, submissions, or other entities that meet their merit-based criteria. This often yields a cohort larger than the admissible number. In the second stage, the target cohort can be chosen from this meritorious pool via a new algorithm and software tool called entrofy. entrofy optimizes differences across an assignable set of categories selected by the human committee. Criteria could include academic discipline, home country, experience with certain technologies, or other quantifiable characteristics. The entrofy algorithm then yields the approximation of pre-defined target proportions for each category by solving the tie-breaking problem with provable performance guarantees. We show how entrofy selects cohorts according to pre-determined characteristics in simulated sets of applications and demonstrate its use in a case study of Astro Hack Week. This two stage candidate and cohort selection process allows human judgment and debate to guide the assessment of candidates' merit in step 1. Then the human committee defines relevant diversity criteria which will be used as computational parameters in entrofy. Once the parameters are defined, the set of candidates who meet the minimum threshold for merit are passed through the entrofy cohort selection procedure in step 2 which yields a cohort of a composition as close as possible to the computational parameters defined by the committee. This process has the benefit of separating the meritorious assessment of candidates from certain elements of their diversity and from some considerations around cohort composition. It also increases the transparency and auditability of the process, which enables, but does not guarantee, fairness. Splitting merit and diversity considerations into their own assessment stages makes it easier to explain why a given candidate was selected or rejected, though it does not eliminate the possibility of objectionable bias.

View \"Public Restrooms\": A Photo Gallery in The Atlantic Monthly.So much happens in the public toilet that we never talk about. Finding the right door, waiting in line, and using the facilities are often undertaken with trepidation. Don't touch anything. Try not to smell. Avoid eye contact. And for men, don't look down or let your eyes stray. Even washing one's hands are tied to anxieties of disgust and humiliation. And yet other things also happen in these spaces: babies are changed, conversations are had, make-up is applied, and notes are scrawled for posterity.Beyond these private issues, there are also real public concerns: problems of public access, ecological waste, and - in many parts of the world--sanitation crises. At public events, why are women constantly waiting in long lines but not men? Where do the homeless go when cities decide to close public sites? Should bathrooms become standardized to accommodate the disabled? Is it possible to create a unisex bathroom for transgendered people?In Toilet, noted sociologist Harvey Molotch and Laura Noren bring together twelve essays by urbanists, historians and cultural analysts (among others) to shed light on the public restroom. These noted scholars offer an assessment of our historical and contemporary practices, showing us the intricate mechanisms through which even the physical design of restrooms - the configurations of stalls, the number of urinals, the placement of sinks, and the continuing segregation of women's and men's bathrooms - reflect and sustain our cultural attitudes towards gender, class, and disability. Based on a broad range of conceptual, political, and down-to-earth viewpoints, the original essays in this volume show how the bathroom - as a practical matter--reveals competing visions of pollution, danger and distinction.Although what happens in the toilet usually stays in the toilet, this brilliant, revelatory, and often funny book aims to bring it all out into the open, proving that profound and meaningful history can be made even in the can.Contributors: Ruth Barcan, Irus Braverman, Mary Ann Case, Olga Gershenson, Clara Greed, Zena Kamash,Terry Kogan, Harvey Molotch, Laura Noren, Barbara Penner, Brian Reynolds, and David Serlin.

Creative workers are workers whose products begin with ideas for making something new or different. Social and technological inertia quietly pressures creative workers to conform to existing norms, standards, forms and practices (Becker, 1982). Previous research demonstrates the social structure of creative work but has not fully incorporated the technological aspects of creative collaboration. The sociotechnical framework characterized by tools and technologies in conjunction with organizational and field-specific practices is a key determinant in the way creative groups enact collaboration. This project asks how the tools and technologies fold into organizational structure to shape creative workers' collaborations and give rise to a multiplicative reward structure that includes earnings as well as non-monetary goods like reputation enhancement and creative achievement. Results are based on ethnographic observation and interviews at four field sites: chamber music rehearsals, fine dining kitchens, a graphic design studio and an electric vehicle design lab. The findings suggest that technologies emphasizing individual accountability – like time stamps and personal input trails - thwart the emergence of shared rhythms and collective experience that underpin collective understanding and productive iteration. This is in contrast to tools-in-hand that invite empathic mimicry, ongoing team cohesion, and create conditions for a sense of collective accomplishment. Where technological pressure to work autonomously is present, it is tempered by the importance of social capital in speedy, project-based creative fields. Further, avenues for receiving non-monetary rewards complicate the relationship between social capital and earnings, creating a tastemaker's dilemma in which completing good work is pitted against maximizing revenue. Understanding sociotechnical influences in creative collaborations has implications for the way organizations facilitate and structure creative processes.

In the 21st Century, research is increasingly data- and computation-driven. Researchers, funders, and the larger community today emphasize the traits of openness and reproducibility. In March 2017, 13 mostly early-career research leaders who are building their careers around these traits came together with ten university leaders (presidents, vice presidents, and vice provosts), representatives from four funding agencies, and eleven organizers and other stakeholders in an NIH- and NSF-funded one-day, invitation-only workshop titled \"Imagining Tomorrow's University.\" Workshop attendees were charged with launching a new dialog around open research - the current status, opportunities for advancement, and challenges that limit sharing. The workshop examined how the internet-enabled research world has changed, and how universities need to change to adapt commensurately, aiming to understand how universities can and should make themselves competitive and attract the best students, staff, and faculty in this new world. During the workshop, the participants re-imagined scholarship, education, and institutions for an open, networked era, to uncover new opportunities for universities to create value and serve society. They expressed the results of these deliberations as a set of 22 principles of tomorrow's university across six areas: credit and attribution, communities, outreach and engagement, education, preservation and reproducibility, and technologies. Activities that follow on from workshop results take one of three forms. First, since the workshop, a number of workshop authors have further developed and published their white papers to make their reflections and recommendations more concrete. These authors are also conducting efforts to implement these ideas, and to make changes in the university system.  Second, we plan to organise a follow-up workshop that focuses on how these principles could be implemented. Third, we believe that the outcomes of this workshop support and are connected with recent theoretical work on the position and future of open knowledge institutions.

For new yorkers whose work sites are unplumbed, and mobile taxi drivers in particular, having no place to go presents a daily struggle to maintain health, dignity, and a clean criminal record. The diminishing number of public restrooms in the city is a failure of provisioning whose consequences are strengthened by prohibition policies—being without a bathroom is bad enough, but what’s worse is being summoned to court and fined for resorting to public relief. Five city departments (the Department of Sanitation, the Department of Parks and Recreation, the Metro Transit Authority, the New York City Police Department, and the

By The public restroom, with its demand that we do something private near colleagues or strangers, provokes all sorts of fears: fear of germs, fear of bodily functions, fear of others thinking we are gross, fear of finding ourselves to be gross, fear of not fitting in and, perhaps the most politically challenging, fear of the other.

The public restroom, with its demand that we do something private near colleagues or strangers, provokes all sorts of fears: fear of germs, fear of bodily functions, fear of others thinking we are gross, fear of finding ourselves to be gross, fear of not fitting in and, perhaps the most politically challenging, fear of the other.