Spring 2018

DUPRI will be hosting an Introduction to Cloud Computing workshop. This workshop will provide an overview and demonstration of various cloud computing resources available within and outside of Duke. You will learn how to provision and access virtual machines using Duke's Research Toolkits (including specialized offerings for DUPRI affiliates), VCM/VM-Manage, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. The workshop will also cover basic parallelization of code for more efficient computation, with a focus on R. Some previous knowledge of R is helpful but not required.

The Hidden Information in Names

Christina Kamis looks at the long-term consquences of parental mental health, specifically how childhood stressors influence adult mental health and well-being. Jessie West discusses the impact of disability on quality of life, examining disability influence over different stages of the life course.

Kevin Lewis discusses how Big data is increasingly used to answer longstanding social scientific questions and how "digital footprints" of human interaction often provide unusually nuanced information on an unprecedented scale that often obscures as much as it illuminates. Lewis draws on the example of online dating to illustrate a few basic fallacies in how big data are often framed for social science research, and suggests some alternative (and potentially more constructive) paths moving forward.

Sex differences in human mortality and health are widely documented in both low and high income countries. In this talk, Michael Gurven assesses sex differences in adult health and physical condition among small-scale, natural fertility populations of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists like the Tisane Amerindians, looking at the effects of reproductive intensity on the female health of this population.

Maria Glymour discusses the challenges of identifying modifiable causes of dementia because of the ambiguity in the outcome definition and the long and insidious onset of disease. She posits that many of the risk factors identified in observational epidemiology are correlates of childhood development, rather than causes of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. She discusses the necessity of finding novel study designs that circumvent the measurement and confounding biases intrinsic to research on dementia.

The renewed interest by the economic literature in the effect of birth order on children's outcomes has neglected trust as a long-term output of familial environment. Duke University’s Pierligi Conzo discusses how differences in the order of birth predict heterogeneous self-reported trust levels in Britain. Conzo looks at how psychology, economics and sociology help explain the relationship between birth order and trust.

The University of Michigan's Tyler McCormick discusses his recent methodological work on verbal autopsies. He also reviews his ongoing efforts to integrate verbal autopsies in settings with partial coverage vital registration systems using an open source software platform designed to integrate with existing verbal autopsy & vital registration data infrastructures.

Colter Mitchell discusses his recent work on the biosocial correlates of social disadvantage and child development. In particular, Mitchell reviews the effects of cumulative disadvantage as well as how the timing of disadvantage exposure influences child development.

Paige Harden discusses her research on childhood executive functions (EFs) in the Texas Twin Project, an ongoing study of a child and adolescent twins and multiples in central Texas. EFs are supervisory cognitive processes that modulate goal-directed cognitive operations and include inhibition, switching, updating, and working memory abilities. She also looks at her new philosophical work on the ethical and political implications of sociogenomic research linking genetic differences between people to phenotypes, such as EFs, that are relevant for social inequality. In particular, she considers how genotypes and genetically-influenced phenotypes can be understood within the framework of the philosophy of luck, and discusses how the concept of "genetic luck" can be useful for understanding the compatibility of sociogenomic research with a broad spectrum of political values and ideologies.