Micah Altman

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A firm seeks to analyze a dataset and to release the results. The dataset contains information about individual people, and the firm is subject to some regulation that forbids the release of the dataset itself. The regulation also imposes conditions on the release of the results. What properties should the regulation satisfy? We restrict our attent...

Earth’s per capita energy use continues to grow, despite technological advances and widespread calls for reduction in energy consumption. The negative environmental consequences are well known: resource depletion, pollution, and global warming. However many remain reluctant to cut energy consumption because of the widespread, although, implicit, be...

Identifying Grand Challenges A global and multidisciplinary community of stakeholders came together in March 2018 to identify, scope, and prioritize a common vision for specific grand research challenges related to the fields of information science and scholarly communications. The participants included domain researchers in academia, practitioners...

This chapter is designed generally to introduce information professionals and researchers to the topic of VR, to characterize its potential to enhance human experiences, and to identify the concepts that are critical to its application. The chapter is also intended specifically for professional librarians and applied library information science res...

In this article, we recognize the profound effects that algorithmic decision making can have on people’s lives and propose a harm-reduction framework for algorithmic fairness. We argue that any evaluation of algorithmic fairness must take into account the foreseeable effects that algorithmic design, implementation, and use have on the well-being of...

Governments and businesses are increasingly collecting, analysing, and sharing detailed information about individuals over long periods of time. Vast quantities of data from new sources and novel methods for large-scale data analysis promise to yield deeper understanding of human characteristics, behaviour, and relationships and advance the state o...

Differential privacy is a formal mathematical framework for quantifying and managing privacy risks. It provides provable privacy protection against a wide range of potential attacks, including those currently unforeseen. Differential privacy is primarily studied in the context of the collection, analysis, and release of aggregate statistics. These...

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in attention from the scholarly communications and research community to open access (OA) and open data practices. These are potentially related because journal publication policies and practices both signal disciplinary norms and provide direct incentives for data sharing and citation. However, there is...

Research and practice in digital preservation requires a solid foundation of evidence of what is being protected and what practices are being used. The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) storage survey provides a rare opportunity to examine the practices of most major US memory institutions. The repeated, longitudinal design of the NDSA s...

We extend the estimation of the components of partisan bias—i.e., undue advantage conferred to some party in the conversion of votes into legislative seats—to single-member district systems in the presence of multiple parties. Extant methods to estimate the contributions to partisan bias from malapportionment, boundary delimitations, and turnout ar...

Emerging large-scale data sources hold tremendous potential for new scientific research into human biology, behaviors, and relationships. At the same time, big data research presents privacy and ethical challenges that the current regulatory framework is ill-suited to address. In light of the immense value of large-scale research data, the central...

Governments are under increasing pressure to publicly release collected data in order to promote transparency, accountability, and innovation. Because much of the data they release pertains to individuals, agencies rely on various standards and interventions to protect privacy interests while supporting a range of beneficial uses of the data. Howev...

In general, the growth of big data sources have changed the threat landscape of privacy and statistics in at least three major ways. First, when surveys were initially founded as the principal source of statistical information, whether one participated in a survey was largely unknown. Now, as government record systems and corporate big data sources...

The increasing volume and complexity of research, scholarly publication, and research information puts an added strain on traditional methods of scholarly communication and evaluation. Information goods and networks are not standard market goods-and so we should not rely on markets alone to develop new forms of scholarly publishing. The affordances...

• As the number of authors on scientific publications increases, ordered lists of author names are proving inadequate for the purposes of attribution and credit. • A multi-stakeholder group has produced a contributor role taxonomy for use in scientific publications. • Identifying specific contributions to published research will lead to appropriate...

EDITOR'S SUMMARY While the conventions of bibliographic citation have been long established, the sole focus is on reference to other scholarly works. Access to the data serving as the basis for scholarly work has been limited. Data citation extends important access to material that has been largely unavailable for sharing, verification and reuse. T...

On September 24-25, 2013, the Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data project at Harvard University held a workshop titled "Integrating Approaches to Privacy across the Research Data Lifecycle." Over forty leading experts in computer science, statistics, law, policy, and social science research convened to discuss the state of the art in data priva...

Broad new sources of information have the potential to bring increased granularity, detail and timeliness to the next generation of official statistics -- while reducing survey burden.The next generation of official statistics will utilize broad sources of information, potentially linked together, to provide increasing granularity, detail, and time...

Liz Allen, Amy Brand, Jo Scott, Micah Altman and Marjorie Hlava are trialling digital taxonomies to help researchers to identify their contributions to collaborative projects.

On September 24-25, 2013, the Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data project at Harvard University held a workshop titled "Integrating Approaches to Privacy across the Research Data Lifecycle." Over forty leading experts in computer science, statistics, law, policy, and social science research convened to discuss the state of the art in data priva...

PREFACE The growth in the capacity of the research community to collect and distribute data presents huge opportunities. It is already transforming old methods of scientific research and permitting the creation of new ones. However, the exploitation of these opportunities depends upon more than computing power, storage, and network connectivity. Am...

The structure and design of digital storage systems is a cornerstone of digital preservation. To better understand ongoing storage practices of organizations committed to digital preservation, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance conducted a survey of member organizations. This article reports on the findings of the survey. The results of the...

Since the 1960's, computers have been regularly promoted as both the salvation of redistricting and as a strong corrupting force. On one hand, computing has been proposed as a way to remove human bias from the process of drawing electoral lines through automation and to detect gerrymanders through geographical and statistical analysis. On the other...

I show herein how to develop fundable proposals to support your research. Although the proposal strategy I discuss is commonly used in successful proposals, most junior faculty (and many senior scholars) in political science and other social sciences seem to be unaware of it. I dispel myths about funding, and discuss how to find funders and target...

Accelerating technological change is one of the defining characteristics of this era. And the intersection of information, technology, and politics is a constantly changing arena. Technological change can provide the subject for political debate, such as in the controversy over electronic voting (see Tokaji 2005); affect the means by which politics...

Digital libraries are collections of digital content and services selected by a curator for use by a particular user community. Digital libraries offer direct access to the content of a wide variety of intellectual works, including text, audio, video, and data; and may offer a variety of services supporting search, access, and collaboration. In the...

Major questions remain about the extent and political significance of White racial attitudes. In this paper, we examine an alternative source of data on racial attitudes—actual voting on the purely symbolic repeal of antimiscegenation referenda. By applying cross-level (ecological) inference methods to this unique data, we find, surprisingly, that...

The articles in this special issue raise and refine questions about our understanding of the use of, state of the art in, and challenges associated with voting and election technology, broadly conceived. Although researchers have yet to achieve consensus on the broad impact of information technology on our understanding of the practice of politics,...

All statistical techniques place limitations on the types of data and the range of inferences that can be accomodated. All computional implementations of these statistical techniques impose further limitations due to algorithmic and low-level computational implementations. Failure to understand these issues can lead to gross misperceptions and seri...

the importance of understanding computational statistics a brief history: Duhem to the 21st century example: rare events counts models preview of findings in the rest of the book

JMP is the SAS institute's package for exploratory data analysis. JMP offers a plethora of features ... Exploratory data analysis with JMP is extraordinarily e asy and powerful, because of three design decisions that distinguish it from all of its competitors \^{}E [however] the module supplied for non-linear regression a nd maximum likelihood is n...

Should we trust the results of our statistical software? We evaluate number of statistical packages, and combine these evaluations with previous research by others.

The growth of OSS has gained the attention of research librarians [Frumkin, 2002] and created new opportunities for libraries. We might well ask: What distinguishes OSS from commercial software? What are the advantages and disadvantages of OSS software? Out of the thousands of packages available, which are most useful in a library environment?

One person, one vote. With this principle, the Court permanently changed representation in the United States. Equal population requirements changed the face of legislative redistricting in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court applied it to congressional districts in Wesberry v. Sanders , 376 U.S. 1 (1964), and to state legislatures in Reynolds v. Sims...

Automated redistricting has been proposed as a method for eliminating gerrymandering and promoting electoral fairness. While much optimism has been expressed about the feasibility and benefits of automated redistricting, results have fallen far short of these expectations. In this paper, I examine the benefits claimed for automated redistricting, p...

In Miller v. Johnson a five-member majority of the court declared that redistricting is presumptively unconstitutional when race has served as the predominant factor in the drawing of district lines. However; their remains significant uncertainty in how to apply this new standard and an apparent conflicts with the standards articulated in Shaw v. R...

R software pacage. Functions for sampling without replacement. (Simulated Urns).

Distributed digital preservation networks have been growing in popularity among institutions that wish to collect and preserve materials of high importance to specific communities. We describe a multi-institutional project to develop an open-source platform for distributed multi- institutional asymmetric replication of archival content. Our goal is...

How should Judge Jackson have ruled in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust case? Should search engines be liable for infringement if they link to copyrighted materials? Are the "cookies" stored in the web-browsers of government officials part of the public record? Is cryptographic software actually "speech" protected by the first amendment? Le...

Internet Voting has given rise to considerable controversy, underscored by the recent cancellation of this year’s trial of SERVE, which was to provide Internet Voting for 100,000 military personnel. Could Internet voting promote deliberative democracy? Would Internet voting increase voter participation and engagement? Would it increase the accuracy...

Scholars, journalists and judges have drawn attention to the role of computers in redistricting. Many fear that technology has made gerrymandering both easy to accomplish and nearly impossible to detect. In previous work, we conducted a survey of state redistricting authorities?? computer use in 1991 and 2001 and described patterns of in the use of...

Abstract will be provided by author.

We describe guiding principles for data citation and illustrate these through a case study of how Data Citation is implemented in the Dataverse Network

We have devised a set of principles for transparency and public participation in redistricting that are the minimum requirements to ensure the public is a full partner in the redistricting process.

The Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS) (http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ DATAPASS/) is a broad-based voluntary partnership of data archives dedicated to acquiring, cataloging, and preserving social science data, and to developing and advocating best practices in digital preservation. Collectively, the founding partne...

Participative technology has succeeded beyond our expectations. The number of legally viable, publicly submitted plans has grown by a factor of a hundred since the last decade. These plans demonstrate a qualitative difference in public participation, and have produced many examples of better ways of redistricting.

Software for creating universal numeric fingerprints. No longer supported

Statistical Packages are collections of software designed to aid in statistical analysis and data exploration. The vast majority of quantitative and statistical analysis relies upon statistical packages for their execution. An understanding of statistical packages is essential to correct and efficient application of many quantitative and statistica...