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The Impacts of the St. Louis Guaranteed Basic Income Program on Quality of Life
No full textHow does guaranteed basic income influence recipients’ quality of life?
In late 2023, the City of St Louis launched a pilot program providing $500 a month for 18 months to more than 500 low-income St. Louis households with children. Researchers from the Center for Social Development and the Brown School Evaluation Center conducted a mixed-methods evaluation of the program, tracking recipients’ journeys over the pilot’s duration. This brief presents findings on the effects of the St. Louis Guaranteed Basic Income Program on participants’ quality of life, including the ability to meet daily living expenses, the well-being of participants and their children, and the quality of their relationships. The brief also reports findings on participants’ feelings about the program and its effects in their lives
Climate Change and Population Aging
No full textGlaciers are shrinking, river and lake ice is melting earlier, plant and animal habitat ranges are changing, and trees and flowers are blooming earlier. Additionally, longer and more severe heat waves are occurring. Droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall are happening at a faster rate than previously predicted by scientists
Preventing, Delaying, and Managing Chronic Disease
No full textWe are living longer. Today, men and women who reach age 65 will live another 17 to 20 years, on average. As the human body ages, normal biological changes increase vulnerability to illness, and the risk of developing disease increases. At the same time, advances in public health, medicine, and health care have reduced deaths from acute conditions, like infection and accidents, and have increased our chances of living longer into the human life span. Thus, we now have greater chances of developing one or more chronic diseases. Most (75%) adults in the U.S. live with at least one chronic condition; with 50% having two or more. When we reach age 65, those numbers rise to 93% having one and 79% having two chronic conditions
A Liberty-Balancing Approach to Crime
No full textAt its core, the criminal legal system is an ecosystem of institutions that seek to balance liberty interests. The insightful theories and complex practices of crime policy coalesce around questions on how crime impacts the liberties of individuals and communities to be safe, and how this correlates with the deprivation of liberty from offenders through our punishment system. But modern criminal policy, most often associated with the problems of overcriminalization and mass incarceration, has wholly abandoned any such delicate and nuanced balancing. Instead, the system thrives on sacrificing the liberties of offenders in a perverse and ineffective regime that leads to a net loss of liberty for all. This Article argues for a new theoretical framework that prioritizes the liberty-balancing function rooted in criminal punishment. This Liberty-Balancing Approach incorporates contributions from constitutional and political theory to argue that substantive criminal laws should be conceptualized as a political exercise that defines and protects a narrow set of individual liberties. In turn, protecting these individual liberties must be contextualized within broader community interests of public safety and building public trust. Finally, these criminal laws and ultimately their punishments must be properly balanced with depriving only as much liberty from the offender as is necessary and legitimate to achieving these social outcomes. This return to first principles in criminal law also explores the practical impacts of the Liberty-Balancing Approach, including rethinking victimless proxy crimes, crimes against organizations, and the liberty impacts on communities of color
Grading Machines: Can AI Exam-Grading Replace Law Professors?
No full textIn the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant technical advances, such that legal-advocacy organizations are increasingly adopting them as complements to—or substitutes for—lawyers and other human experts. Several studies have examined LLMs\u27 performance in taking law school exams, finding mixed results. Yet there have been no published studies systematically analyzing LLMs\u27 competence at one of law professors\u27 chief responsibilities: grading law school exams. This paper presents results of an analysis of how LLMs perform in evaluating student responses to legal analysis questions of the kind typically administered in law school exams. The underlying data come from exams in four subjects administered at top-30 U.S. law schools. Unlike some projects in computer or data science, our goal is not to design a new LLM that minimizes error or maximizes agreement with human graders. Rather, we seek to determine whether existing models—which can be straightforwardly applied by most professors and students—are already suitable for the task of law exam evaluation. We find that, when provided with a detailed rubric, the LLM grades correlate with the human grader at Pearson correlation coefficients of up to 0.93. Our findings suggest that, even if they do not fully replace humans in the near future, LLMs could soon be put to valuable tasks by law school professors, such as reviewing and validating professor grading, providing substantive feedback on ungraded midterms, and providing students feedback on self-administered practice exams
Emotions and narrative in Sophocles\u27 fragmentary tragedies Tyro (A’ and B’) and Tereus
No full textThe purpose of this master’s thesis is to explore the possibility of gaining a better understanding of Sophocles’ fragmentary tragedies by taking emotions into consideration. I focus on three of those plays, Tereus, and Tyro A’ and B’, and put them in relation to the mythological narratives from which they derived, as well as other examples of reception. By considering the basic narrative patterns of the myth and their rendering in different media alongside emotional scripts, we can support or challenge existing hypotheses about these fragmentary plays. At the conclusion of this study, I demonstrate that emotions have a significant influence on the construction of Sophocles’ plots and, consequently, are key to gaining a deeper understanding of his works
Correcting Sampling Bias with Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Data: Inference Stability under the DA-MI Framework
No full textWith the rapid advancement into the Data Age, synthetic data has emerged as a promising avenue for sharing scientific information while protecting the original data. While existing research has primarily focused on generating synthetic data to accurately replicate the characteristics of observed data, we explore the potential of synthetic data to adjust for unrepresentative sampling. This study explores how sampling bias—specifically unbalanced subsets—impacts statistical inference, and whether synthetic data can help correct such bias. Using a Data Augmentation–Multiple Imputation (DA–MI) framework, we generate synthetic datasets from biased samples and evaluate parameter recovery under different correction strategies. Simulations under a Missing at Random (MAR) mechanism show that synthetic data can achieve bias reduction and variance stability comparable to inverse probability weighting (IPW). Applying this method to the American Trends Panel survey conducted by Pew Research Center in 2022, we observe that unrepresentative subsamples may lead to attenuated estimates of the key effects, such as gender and income. Bias-corrected synthetic data restores these effects and aligns more closely with full-sample benchmarks. Moreover, by masking and perturbing individual-level data during the synthetic data generation process, this approach also facilitates privacy preservation, enabling the development of bias-aware and shareable data products
MEMS 4110: DBF Deployable Banner
No full textCreate a device that stores a banner in an RC aircraft that can be remotely deployed to be towed and released upon command
MEMS 4110: Air Cannon Launcher Demo
No full textFor our senior design class (MEMS 4110) at Washington University in St. Louis, we were tasked with creating a demonstration for the St. Louis Science Center that demonstrated an engineering principle or concept. The Science Center functions as a science-oriented museum and saw more than 600,000 visitors in 2024. For our demonstration, we wanted to showcase the principles of kinematic motion. Kinematic motion is study of the motion of objects without considering applied forces. Additionally, when the acceleration of an object is either zero or held constant, the trajectory path that the object follows can be described by a few simple equations known as the kinematic equations. A baseball flying through the air can be described using the kinematic equations as it feels a constant acceleration from the force of gravity