Announcements

Professor Yusaku Horiuchi featured in Dartmouth admissions magazine

Professor of Government and Mitsui Professor of Japanese Studies Yusaku Horiuchi is a dedicated teacher and distinguished scholar.  His deep engagement with students at Dartmouth is profiled in the August 2019 Dartmouth Admissions magazine. Professor Horiuchi serves on the Steering Committee of the Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS), and teaches its most popular course, Data Visualization.

Professor Horiuchi first taught Data Visualization in the winter term in 2015, and this course operates in a "flipped" fashion.  This means that the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Students watch video lectures (and work on other materials) as homework. Then, in regular class meetings, they work on coding exercises or work on their own data visualization projects. According to Professor Horiuchi, the advantage of a flipped classroom is that students can enjoy "experiential" and "active" learning through a variety of in-class activities with rich data and examples.

This past year, Professor Horiuchi advised two QSS honors theses. According to Jennifer Wu, one of Professor Horiuchi's 2019 advisees, "Professor Horiuchi sets a high bar for his students and dedicates a great deal of time and effort to help them meet that bar. I am lucky to have been able to take his classes and work on my undergraduate thesis with him - in all of my experiences with Professor Horiuchi, he was very responsive, as well as understanding of my circumstances while still encouraging me to aim higher than the goals I set for myself."

In the past several years, Professor Horiuchi has published numerous articles with Dartmouth undergraduates.  One example is "Has Trump Damaged the U.S. Image Abroad? Decomposing the Effects of Policy Messages on Foreign Public Opinion," a paper with Alexander Agadjanian, a class of 2018 with a QSS and Government double-major published in Political Behavior. This paper was based on the student's independent research project supervised by Horiuchi in the Spring quarter in 2017.

According to Michael Herron, Professor of Government and Chair of QSS, Professor Horiuchi's class on Data Visualization regularly causes enrollment chaos when students sign up for classes.  "So many people want to study with Professor Horiuchi, we regularly have to open up extra sections of his Data Visualization course."

Professor of Government John Carey, who serves on the QSS Steering Committee and is presently the Associate Dean for the Social Sciences, is writing a book with Professor Horiuchi on campus diversity.  One of Professor Horiuchi's great talents, notes Professor Carey, is his ability to identify where every student is on his or her personal learning curve.  This helps Professor Horiuchi propel his students forward.  Professor Carey writes, "For students who are struggling with basic concepts, Professor Horiuchi pulls them toward mastery.  For students who have command of the material and are ambitious, Professor Horiuchi welcomes them as colleagues and finds way for them to make original contributions to research.  The amount of time and care Professor Horiuchi devotes to his communications with students is tremendous, and the results speak for themselves."

Professor Brendan Nyhan publishes with undergrads

Along with 15 Dartmouth College undergraduates, Professor Brendan Nyhan recently published "Counting the Pinocchios: The effect of summary fact-checking data on perceived accuracy and favorability of politicians." The article appears in the July-September 2019 issue of Research and Politics.

"Counting the Pinocchios" was a class project from Professor Nyhan's 2016 Experiments in Politics seminar. Students in this course, which is cross-listed between Dartmouth's Program in Quantitative Social Science and Department of Government, work with Nyhan in a lab-style format to design, field, and analyze an experimental study of political misperceptions.

Professor Nyhan regularly teaches Experiments in Politics. Previously published articles from the course are, "Classified or Coverup? The Effect of Redactions on Conspiracy Theory Beliefs" and "Real Solutions for Fake News? Measuring the Effectiveness of General Warnings and Fact-Check Banners in Reducing Belief in False Stories on Social Media." Research in this seminar has been supported by Dartmouth Undergraduate Advising and Research and the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning.

Professor Nyhan serves on the QSS Steering Committee. Among the co-authors of "Counting the Pinocchios" are Alexander Agadjanian '18 (QSS / Government double major); Ray Lu '18 (QSS Minor), Annie Ma '17 (QSS Minor), and Clara Wang '17 (QSS Minor).

The abstract of "Counting the Pinocchios" is as follows:

Can the media effectively hold politicians accountable for making false claims? Journalistic fact-checking assesses the accuracy of individual public statements by public officials, but less is known about whether this process effectively imposes reputational costs on misinformation-prone politicians who repeatedly make false claims. This study therefore explores the effects of exposure to summaries of fact-check ratings, a new format that presents a more comprehensive assessment of politician statement accuracy over time. Across three survey experiments, we compared the effects of negative individual statement ratings and summary fact-checking data on favorability and perceived statement accuracy of two prominent elected officials. As predicted, summary fact-checking had a greater effect on politician perceptions than individual fact-checking. Notably, we did not observe the expected pattern of motivated reasoning: co-partisans were not consistently more resistant than supporters of the opposition party. Our findings suggest that summary fact-checking is particularly effective at holding politiciansaccountable for misstatements.

Apply for a QSS Postdoctoral Fellowship

The Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS) at Dartmouth College is pleased to announce that it is searching for postdoctoral fellows for the 2020-21 academic year. QSS is an interdisciplinary program that integrates modern statistical, computational, and mathematical tools with social science questions. Each fellow should be highly motivated, collegial, and able to work independently on a research agenda that is grounded in quantitative social science. Fellows should be interested in working with existing QSS faculty who have expertise in a diverse range of social science disciplines on campus (for more, see https://qss.dartmouth.edu/people).

During the 2020-21 academic year, QSS fellows will participate in the intellectual life of the program by interacting with each other, with QSS faculty, and with undergraduate students pursuing a minor or major in QSS.  Fellows will also attend seminars and workshops and are expected to present their own research on a regular basis.  There are many postdoctoral fellows at Dartmouth College, and QSS fellows will be part of a large community on campus. Postdoctoral fellows are guaranteed one year of funding with opportunities to extend funding for an additional year.

Applications will be reviewed starting on October 25, 2019. Interested individuals can apply at the following URL: http://apply.interfolio.com/65324.

Three QSS majors from the Class of 2019 named to Phi Beta Kappa

On June 8, 2019, 97 seniors from the Dartmouth College Class of 2019 were inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.

Among these were three majors from the Program in Quantitative Social Science.  The New Hampshire chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was established at Dartmouth in 1787.  It is the fourth-oldest chapter in the United States as described by the Dartmouth College Registrar

QSS congratulates its majors who were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa: Yihang Genna Liu, Amanda Katharine Sload, and Jennifer A. Wu.  These students exemplify the highest ideals of dedication to academic achievement.

QSS course helps graduates land dream jobs

Shane Weisberg '16 and Garrett Schirmer '16 both scored jobs in major league sports with the help of QSS 30.01 Sports Analytics. Both stress how they use knowledge gained from the course in their professions. "A lot of people come in from math or economics, but they don't have the applied side of things, which I got from this sports analytics course, so I have definitely found that to be an advantage. This one course opened my eyes to a different way of thinking about problems." Schirmer said. Read more in the Dartmouth News.