Announcements

QSS research on fake news in the age of COVID presented at Pre-Union

Like so much of life in the summer of 2020, reunions at Dartmouth this year were virtual.  Even so, Dartmouth faculty have presented their research to alumni who are gathering in online forums.  The virtual Pre-Union recently heard from Vignesh Chockalingam '20, who majored in Quantitative Social Science (QSS) and was a member of a Spring 2020 class on Experiments in Politics taught by Prof. Brendan Nyhan.  Prof. Nyhan is on the QSS Steering Committee, and his spring quarter class on experiments was cross-listed between QSS and the Department of Government.

This spring, Prof. Nyhan and his students carried out an experiment on the effectiveness of different approaches to correcting misinformation about COVID-19 and other health and science topics. They found little evidence that messages emphasizing a scientific consensus of the sort typically used on climate change were more effective than standard corrections. The class participants and Prof. Nyhan are currently preparing a paper for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.

Research is a key aspect of the QSS curriculum, and the Experiments in Politics course exemplifies the program's connection between education and research. Students in Professor Costa's Fall 2018 Experiments course conducted a survey experiment examining how people evaluate politicians accused of sexual misconduct. They find evidence that partisanship, sexist attitudes, and the severity of the allegations strongly influence voter reactions to #MeToo allegations. The collaborative manuscript that was produced by the class is forthcoming in the academic journal Research & Politics.

Vignesh completed an independent QSS research project this past winter quarter, and his project investigated the impact of hate crimes on academic achievement.  He found that hate crimes may worsen K-12 academic outcomes at the county level, especially in rural areas and during President Trump's prominence in American politics.  Now that he has finished up at Dartmouth, Vignesh is planning on joining Bain and Company as an Associate Consultant in Boston this fall.

To see Vignesh and Professor Nyhan present their research at the Pre-Union, click here.

Research Computing supports QSS during coronavirus pandemic

The sudden shift to online teaching has presented numerous challenges for Dartmouth students and for Dartmouth College itself.  Research Computing, a unit within Information, Technology & Consulting (ITC) that provides advanced computing resources to the Dartmouth Community, has responded to the exigencies imposed by the pandemic by stepping up to help the Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS).

QSS offers its students an introductory statistics course known as QSS 15.  James Lo, a postdoctoral fellow in QSS and an assistant professor of political science at the University of Southern California, is teaching QSS 15 in Spring 2020.

QSS 15 is an introductory course in data analysis, and it uses the popular statistical computing environment RStudio.  Many QSS classes use RStudio as well, and one goal of QSS 15 is familiarize students with RStudio and introduce basic statistical programming techniques.

Under normal circumstances, students in QSS 15 are required to install RStudio on their own computers. This spring quarter, to help support the class Research Computing has operated an RStudio server for QSS 15 students. This allowed students to run RStudio in the cloud through the convenience of a web browser.

Having access to an RStudio server in an introductory data analysis course has vastly simplified teaching QSS 15. When setting up RStudio on their own computers, students confronting programming for the first time often run into difficulties; many students, for example, are not familiar with directory structures. The RStudio server set up by ITC has simplified the QSS 15 teaching process considerably by ensuring that all students in the course have access to all data files under the same directory structure. It also made it much easier for Professor Lo to diagnose computing problems when they arose. When, for example, one student in the course encountered a faulty installation of an auxiliary RStudio package, it was easy for Professor Lo to identify and fix this problem.  Once he addressed it, the solution was immediately accessible to all students in QSS 15 and shared with everyone in the course.

Bill Hamblen and Arnold Song, Senior Research Engineer and Assistant Director of the Advanced Computing Lab (ACL) of Research Computing at ITC, respectively, were instrumental in setting up the RStudio server.  According to Arnold, the ability for the ACL to quickly stand up the online RStudio environment was enhanced by the use of cloud services and the approach could be easily extended to expanded offerings for QSS and across the campus.  Once it became clear that QSS 15 needed an online solution, the QSS faculty and the ACL worked closely to quickly deliver RStudio in a manner that minimized disruption to the students' virtual learning.  Arnold writes, "This was a fruitful collaboration between QSS and the ACL that will likely continue and grow as we adjust to delivering an enhanced online learning environment."

George Morris, Associate CIO of Information, Tehcnology, and Consulting at Dartmouth College, has seen his organization involved in a variety of new initiatives since the coronavirus pandemic erupted.  According to George, "We have witnessed an acceleration of demand to infuse advanced technologies in research and teaching that began with the first wave of interest in data sciences.  Our teams have partnered with faculty and students from all over Dartmouth to quickly innovate and integrate solutions in ways we could not have anticipated before the pandemic.  It has been a terrific collaboration to ensure the Dartmouth experience is carried over online."

QSS Honors Thesis presentation schedule 2020

Monday, May 18, 2020

3:00 – 4:30 - Kevin Hu, Oscillating Replicator Dynamics with Attractor Arcs: A Game-Theoretical Exploration of Technology, Policy and Market Influences on Gig Economy Labor Strategies (Fu/Sirianni) https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/9299618042

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

1:30 – 3:00 – Jenna Salvay, Can student activists differentiate themselves from other climate change communicators? A study on the role of messaging and messengers in the era of climate change (Howarth, Wu) https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/9299618042

3:30 – 5:00 – Sunny Drescher, The Effects of Gender Cues on Support for Policy (Horiuchi, Wu) https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/9299618042

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

9:00 – 10:30 – Grace Sherrill, What impacts support for public long-term care and its beneficiaries in the U.S.? (Lacy, Wu) https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/9299618042

12:00 – 1:30 - Sarishka Desai, Variation in Opioid Prescription Response to Physician Targeted-Marketing (Herron/Skinner, Wu) https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/9299618042

Friday, May 22, 2020

11:00 - 12:30 – Kate Shiber, Not-So-Fairways? The Impact of Golf Course Water Run-Off on Local Cancer Rates (Chipman, Renshaw) https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/9299618042

2:00 – 3:30 – Aidan Sheinberg, Building Blocks of Opportunity? The Effect of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits on Intergenerational Mobility (Houle, Wu) https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/9299618042

Monday, June 1, 2020

4:30 – 6:00 – Andrea Sedlacek, Interactions of Structure and Culture in Collaborative Groups (Rogers, Wu) https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/9299618042

QSS and biology major Jenny Chen publishes in The Lancet Digital Health

Jenny Chen '21, who is majoring in Quantitative Social Science (QSS) and Biology, has been working at the Fogarty International Center, a unit in the National Institutes of Health, since January.  At the Fogarty Center, Jenny has been involved with a variety of COVID-19 related projects, including exploring crowdsourced data from a Chinese physician website, looking at excess mortality across the United States, and predicting the outbreak of COVID-19 in places like South Africa and Pakistan. Jenny has drawn heavily on her experiences in QSS 17 Data Visualization, a course she took at Dartmouth in Summer 2019.  QSS 17, one of the core classes in the QSS curriculum, is an R-based computing course that focuses on data cleaning, manipulation, and visualization.

As a member of the Fogarty Center's Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies, Jenny has recently published an article in The Lancet Digital Health titled, "Early epidemiological analysis of the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak based on crowdsourced data: a population-level observational study," and co-authored with a senior research scientist and postdoctoral fellow. This article revealed important demographic information for 288 COVID-19 patients diagnosed in January as well as hospitalization and reporting lags by location. 

Jenny is currently working with her co-authors at the Fogarty Center and participating in their collaborations with The Washington Post and other countries' COVID-19 surveillances system. She will continue interning at Fogarty until the end of the summer and hopes to expand on her NIH research as part of her QSS culminating project. After graduation, Jenny will be attending the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City.

Professor Brendan Nyhan on "Social Media, Scientific Uncertainty, and Political Polarization—COVID 19's Misinformation Storm"

Brendan Nyhan, Professor of Government and member of the Steering Committee of the Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS), recently spoke with Dr. Colleen Barry, chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on the "Public Health on Call" podcast. In the podcast, which is produced by the Bloomberg School, Professor Nyhan discussed his research on the politics of misinformation and how his work informs our understanding of both the human cost of misinformation during the coronavirus epidemic and the extent to which social media and politics are affecting our view of COVID-19.

At Dartmouth College, Professor Nyhan teaches a course on experiments in politics.  This spring quarter, students in GOVT 83.21/QSS 30.03 are currently working under Nyhan's supervision to design, field, and analyze an experimental study of COVID-19 misformation and misperceptions. To listen to the podcast episode on which Professor Nyhan was featured, click here for the Johns Hopkins podcast "Public Health on Call."