Workshop / Seminar:QMSS Hackathon
2025-04-11 14:00 - 17:00 (America/Detroit) | Weiser 110
Join the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences (QMSS) program for our 2nd annual Hackathon! A hackathon is a fantastic opportunity to practice your data cleaning, data analysis, data visualization, and data interpretation skills & leave with a data analysis project that you can post about on a professional website, write about on your resumes, and talk about during job interviews as an example of what you know how to do. In QMSS's Hackathon, we will use real, publicly available data to answer real, socially-relevant questions so that you can see the true power of the data cleaning, analysis, visualization, and communication skills you're developing in QMSS (and other!) courses.Skills from QMSS 201 are sufficient to fully participate in the hackathon -- including students CURRENTLY taking QMSS 201! Students with more advanced skills from QMSS 301, 395, 495, and/or other data science and statistics courses will also be able to flex their data muscles, use more advanced techniques, & gain incredibly valuable experience from this event.

Other:Student Sustainability Coalition Coffee Chats
2025-04-11 14:00 - 15:00 | Michigan League
Navigating the variety of avenues to engage in sustainability work on campus can be daunting and confusing! Come talk with the Student Sustainability Coalition (SSC) to learn more about sustainability initiatives on campus and WE WILL BUY YOU A DRINK!

Coffee chats happen every Friday from 2-3p at Maizes in The League from 2-3p. Look for the "SSC: Coffee Chats" sign!
Coffee chats also happening on select Mondays at Palmer Commons from 11-12p!

SEE YOU THERE!

Workshop / Seminar:60 Minutes Around the Globe
2025-04-11 15:00 - 16:00 | International House Ann Arbor (921 Church Street)

Workshop / Seminar:AIM Seminar / MCAIM Colloquium: Identification of Interacting Neural Populations: Methods and Statistical Issues
2025-04-11 15:00 - 16:00 | East Hall - 4448
Abstract: I will discuss the primary statistics-in-neuroscience topic my trainees and I have worked on over the past eight years: it is the problem of identifying interactions among neural populations from large-scale electrophysiological recordings. I will describe statistically natural approaches we have used to document interactions among brain areas based on neural spike trains (using latent variable point process models) and oscillating field potentials (by defining an exponential family on a multidimensional torus). I will also highlight some of the high-level lessons I've learned about the nature of statistical inference in science, which suggest ways we can continue to improve the scientific process.

Contact: Danny Forger

Lecture / Discussion:HET Seminar | Renormalization Group in far-from-equilibrium states
2025-04-11 15:00 - 16:00 | Randall Laboratory - 3481
We study renormalization group flows in far-from-equilibrium states. The study is made tractable by focusing on states that are spatially homogeneous, time-independent, and scale invariant. Such states, in which mode k has occupation number $n_k = k^{-gamma}$, are well-known in nonlinear physics (going under the name of wave turbulence). RG flow in such states is qualitatively different than in the vacuum -- a positive $gamma$ decreases the dimension of an operator, turning marginal interactions into relevant interactions. We compute one loop beta functions. Depending on the sign of the beta function, backreaction may either cause a minor shift of the state in the IR, or completely change the nature of the state. Focusing on nearly marginal interactions, we construct an analog of the epsilon expansion and IR fixed points, with epsilon now set by the scaling of the interaction rather than the spacetime dimension. In the language of RG flow, critical balance scaling -- having applications in fields as varied as astrophysics and ocean waves -- corresponds to the state dynamically adjusting itself along the RG flow until the interaction becomes marginal.

Lecture / Discussion:Linguistic Anthropology Colloquium | “‘Natural’ Elites: Semiotics of Language and Personhood at a Philippine University”
2025-04-11 15:00 - 16:30 | West Hall - 411
How do people conceptualize human nature? How does it become an object of perception and experience, an entity toward which value, action, or politics can be formulated? This talk will consider nature as both a folk concept and an analytic concept in my ethnographic research on Philippine elite formations. First, I will explore how linguistic and semiotic anthropology have dealt with the question of nature, outlining three areas across the literature: naturality, naturalization, and naturalism. Then, I will draw on my fieldwork at a private university in the Philippines to explore how college student participants discussed becoming an elite “naturally,” and being a “natural” elite. My participants conceived of nature as involving reinvention, thus formulating an essence as artificial, accomplished through will or adaptation. I argue that naturalizing elites helps naturalize the political economic systems that sustain them, framing a world that can be regretted but not changed.

Angela Reyes is Professor of English and Anthropology at the City University of New York (Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center). Her research examines historical and contemporary formations of language and personhood in the U.S. and the Philippines. Her books include The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race (co-edited with H. Samy Alim and Paul Kroskrity), Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event (co-authored with Stanton Wortham), Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America (co-edited with Adrienne Lo), and Language, Identity, and Stereotype Among Southeast Asian American Youth: The Other Asian.
