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Objective, Your Honor: Exploring the Complex Interplay of Risk Assessment Instruments, Judicial Decisions, and Prediction
No full textA wide array of algorithmic risk assessment tools are used throughout the United States for the purposes of pretrial reform, promising a more objective, less disparate, and comprehensive approach to pretrial decision making. Using statistical methods on historical data, these tools aim to predict pretrial outcomes of interest such as failure to appear in court and new criminal arrest in order to determine whether to release a defendant into the community before their trial. Yet, using historical data to influence future predictions introduces its own set of biases, raising questions about the potentially disparate outcomes of these tools. This thesis looks closely at the Public Safety Assessment (PSA), one of the most commonly used pretrial risk assessment tools, as a case study to explore the validity, accuracy, and fairness of actuarial risk assessment instruments (RAIs). Previous validation studies have focused primarily on the predictive accuracy and fairness of the PSA.
This research goes beyond validation to explore how the presence of the PSA recommendation influences judicial decision-making by using data from a randomized control trial (RCT) conducted in Polk County, Iowa in 2018. Using a variety of statistical analyses including Chi-Squared tests, logistic regression, ROC curves, and fairness evaluations, we find that little to no significant correlations exist between the features used to compute the recommendation scores and the outcomes observed. We also determine that the recommendations generated by this tool have little correlation with the judges’ decisions and that the tool is significant and correlated with outcomes for majority demographics groups, but less so for others. The results of this study highlight the consequences of using historical data to inform prediction, and how even demographic-blind evaluations can lead to disparate outcomes. These results raise questions about the usage of data-driven decision making tools in the criminal justice space, and highlight the limited benefits of supposed criminal justice reform measures, providing a critical analysis of RAIs in the pretrial reform space.Computer Scienc
Trust Interrupted: How Transitional Moments Reshape Organizational Trust in the Nonprofit Sector
No full textThe Leadership Academy (“Academy”) is a national nonprofit organization that develops educational leaders committed to advancing transformational leadership in schools. As the organization entered a period of transition refreshing its strategic plan and navigating growing political polarization, questions of trust moved to the center. Despite years of investment in inclusive practices and strong relationships, staff continued to experience uncertainty about decision-making, communication, and the organization’s long-term direction. This raised an important question: How can organizational trust be strengthened and protected during moments of significant disruption?
This project aims to better understand the state of trust at the Academy and to design strategies to preserve and build trust across the organization. While strategic planning provides the structure for the work, the focus is on trust itself. Over the course of a year, the project unfolds through four phases:
• understanding the current conditions of trust
• designing and redesigning systems and practices
• engaging staff in shaping the organization’s future
• putting long-term structures in place to preserve trust over time
Key strategies include bringing together diverse staff groups to give input, creating clearer decision-making processes, offering regular updates on progress, and gathering feedback about how people were experiencing the changes.
What emerged most clearly from this work is that trust does not exist equally across an organization. Instead, trust is layered, shaped by staff members’ roles, identities, experiences, tenure, longevity, and investment in the organization. This means the same process can build trust for some while eroding it for others, particularly when cultural differences and power dynamics go unaddressed. For the Academy, the path forward requires more than improved systems. It requires a deep commitment to cultural responsiveness and the recognition that trust-building must meet people where they are, honoring the varied histories and perspectives they bring. More broadly, this project offers a call to action for education organizations: In times of uncertainty, understanding and attending to the layers of trust within a diverse staff is not optional; it is the work.Educatio
Epitaxially defined Luttinger liquids on MoS2 bicrystals
No full textA mirror twin boundary (MTB) in a transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayer can host one-dimensional electron liquid of a topological nature with tunable interactions. Unfortunately, electrical characterization of such boundaries has been challenging due to the paucity of samples with large enough size and high quality. Here, we report the conductance measurements of individual MTBs in epitaxially grown monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) bicrystals that are tens of micrometers long. These MTBs exhibit power-law behaviors of conductance as a function of temperature and bias voltage up to room temperature, consistent with electrons tunneling into a Luttinger liquid. Transport measurements of two distinct types of MTBs reveal the critical role of the atomic-scale defects. This study demonstrates that MTBs in TMD monolayers provide an exciting new platform for studying the interplay between electronic interactions and topology.Chemistry and Chemical BiologyPhysicsAccepted Manuscrip
The Sumida Transcripts: Imagination Projected
No full textThe thesis transcribes a methodology to design with artifacts of cultural landscapes. This methodological experiment unfolds in three episodes—deconstruction, reconstruction, and projection. It begins with Picture Book Sumida River A Glance of Both Shores, a series of Hokusai’s woodblock prints along the Sumida River. Mass-produced in the early 19th century, the prints reflected and cultivated the public imagination of the river. Upon them, the thesis executes a series of acts to produce interventions in the contemporary landscapes. The serial actions allow the project to oscillate between reality and images. The resulting street painting interventions aim to pivot the external perception of the river, which became obscured during modern urbanization, with optical harmony and dissonance. In doing so, the thesis contributes to the discourse around design methodology, representation, and public imagination.Department of Landscape Architectur
A neural control system promoting vigorous tracking behavior
No full textTo track or pursue a moving visual object, the brain needs to generate motor commands that continuously steer the object toward the midline of the visual field via feedback control. In any feedback system, low feedback gain produces slow error correction, but high feedback gain risks instability; thus, the choice of feedback gain should ideally adapt to current circumstances1–6. Here we investigate mechanisms that produce adaptive feedback gain, focusing on the visual-locomotor pursuit system that flies use to chase one another7–12. As predicted by classic behavioral observations in houseflies7, we show that the Drosophila pursuit system is divided into two main parallel pathways, which are recruited in response to small and large errors, respectively. Arousal onset preferentially recruits the small-error pathway, and we show this pathway selectively corrects for object motion near the midline. The small-error pathway is specialized for lower gain, higher direction selectivity, and higher sensitivity to the fly’s forward speed. Modeling shows how the different specializations of these two pathways can improve performance: while the large-error pathway enables fast correction of large errors, the small-error pathway avoids oscillations that can result from over-correction of small errors. Together, these results show how specialized parallel pathways for driving the same action can produce adaptive control in neural systems.Medical Science
New considerations for representing moisture in indoor thermal conditions: Associations between enthalpy, cognitive performance, and thermal sensations
No full textMotivated by limitations with the use of temperature and thermal comfort models in relation to occupant health outcomes, this work investigates numerous characterizations of thermal conditions and associations among these thermal variables, cognitive performance, and thermal perceptions. Measurements of classroom dry-bulb temperature and relative humidity were used to calculate a suite of eleven thermal variables, which were paired with thermal sensation votes and cognitive test responses from graduate students attending classes in these monitored spaces, resulting in an analysis dataset of 273 observations from 54 participants. Results from Spearman Rank correlation coefficients, factor analysis, and principal component analysis suggest that the eleven thermal variables cluster into three groups that reflect variations in indoor temperature, indoor relative humidity, and indoor-outdoor differences. While several variables appear to reflect variations in only air temperature (e.g., PMV estimates) or moisture, indoor enthalpy appears to reflect variations in temperature and RH in the most balanced manner. A series of mixed effects statistical models suggest that higher values of indoor enthalpy appear to be associated with improved cognitive test scores and warm sensations, and warm sensations appear to be associated with improved cognitive test scores. The collective results posit new considerations for the importance of indoor moisture with respect to occupant outcomes and how commonly used modelling approaches may not reflect this. Additional research that incorporates diverse populations, varied built environments, and causal methods could help further our understanding of the effects of air temperature and moisture on occupant outcomes in varied built environment settings.Version of Recor
Association Between Surgery and 5-year Survival for Patients Diagnosed with Stage I Bladder Adenocarcinoma
No full textBackground: Bladder cancer (BC) comprises of various subtypes, each with unique demographic and clinical characteristics. This study leverages the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) data to investigate whether surgical intervention is associated with 5-year mortality for patients with stage I bladder adenocarcinoma (BA).
Methods: 209 patients met BA eligibility criteria, which included complete demographic data and clinical information. A multivariable logistic regression adjusting for age, ethnicity, gender, and neoadjuvant chemotherapy was used to interrogate the association between surgery versus no surgery on 5-year mortality.
Results: Between 1975 and 2021, 115 patients (55%) received a surgical intervention as the primary treatment for stage I BA. Multivariable adjustment for neoadjuvant chemotherapy, ethnicity, age and sex demonstrated that surgery was associated with 64 percent lower likelihood of death (odds ratio [OR] 0.36, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.11 – 0.62, p = 0.02). Further analysis revealed a nonsignificant interaction between surgery and neoadjuvant chemotherapy (p-interaction = 0.07), indicating that the association of surgery with death did not significantly differ based on whether patients received neoadjuvant chemotherapy or not.
Conclusion: This study suggests that tumor resection may be effective in treating stage I BA, highlighting an observed survival pattern for patients that received a surgery.Medical Scienc
Observation of the Yamaji effect in a cuprate and FL* theory of the pseudogap
No full textPhysicsVersion of Recor
Physician's Casebook, Boston 1832: An American Auscultation-Percussion Discussion
No full textAuthor's Origina
Association Between Inflammatory Diet and Oral Diseases: Results from the 2015-2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey
No full textObjective
The link between diet and oral health is well-established, yet the role of inflammation in this relationship has been underexplored. This study investigates the association between the energy-adjusted Dietary Inflammatory Index (E-DII) and various oral health outcomes including caries prevalence, missing teeth, and overall caries experience, while accounting for demographic and behavioral factors using data from the 2015–2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
Materials and Methods
Dental outcomes assessed included active untreated caries, measured as the number and prevalence of: coronal and root caries; and number of missing teeth due to caries or periodontal disease complete edentulism; and overall caries experience measured by the DMFT index, which quantifies decayed, missing, and filled teeth. Logistic regression and Poisson regression models were used to evaluate associations between E-DII and oral health outcomes, adjusting for age, race, gender, education, income, smoking status, and time since last dental visit. Sensitivity analyses were conducted to assess the robustness of the findings by modifying the E-DII and applying different analytical approaches.
Results
The analysis included 8,131 U.S. adults aged 20 years or older who had completed dental examinations and two-day dietary recalls, representing a weighted population of approximately 231 million adults. Participants were categorized into quartiles based on their E-DII score, with higher scores indicating a more pro-inflammatory diet.
The distribution of E-DII quartiles varied by demographic factors. Higher E-DII scores were associated with lower education and income levels. More than one-third of non-Hispanic Black adults (34.4%) were in the highest E-DII quartile, whereas 43.2% of non-Hispanic Asians were in the lowest quartile. A higher proportion of current smokers and individuals without recent dental visits were also in the highest E-DII quartile.
Higher E-DII quartiles were significantly associated with poorer oral health outcomes. Individuals in the highest E-DII quartile had greater odds of experiencing coronal caries (adjusted OR: 2.17, 95% CI: 1.62–2.91), root caries (adjusted OR: 2.10, 95% CI: 1.37–3.22), and missing teeth (adjusted OR: 1.53, 95% CI: 1.13–2.06) compared to those in the lowest quartile. The mean number of decayed teeth increased progressively with higher E-DII quartiles, with an adjusted mean ratio of 1.79 (95% CI: 1.29–2.47) for the highest quartile. Sensitivity analyses, including a modified E-DII that excluded carbohydrates and alcohol, confirmed these associations. Further analysis using a binary classification of E-DII and continuous modeling supported the relationship between pro-inflammatory diets and poor oral health. Each unit increase in continuous E-DII was associated with increased odds of coronal caries (adjusted OR: 1.30, 95% CI: 1.16–1.44) and missing teeth (adjusted OR: 1.16, 95% CI: 1.05–1.27).
Conclusion
This study highlights the significant impact of pro-inflammatory diets on oral health. A higher E-DII, indicating a more inflammatory diet, was consistently associated with worse oral health outcomes, including greater odds of coronal and root caries, missing teeth, and a higher number of decayed teeth. These findings suggest that dietary modifications could serve as a potential strategy for preventing oral diseases and improving overall oral health.Dental Public Healt