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Osmosis - Spring 2019
Get PDFOsmosis is a student read, led, and written publication from the University of Richmond, focusing on all aspects of healthcare and science
Tuberculosis and Poor Health Among Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers in the United States
Get PDFThe following paper will explore the prevalence of TB among migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the United States, and the systemic forces that contribute to that prevalence. Cyclical of poverty, dangerous working conditions, and barriers to healthcare overall have all led to increased risk of TB infection for farmworkers and their families. Moreover, structural violence traps these farmworkers in conditions of increased risk that have a major impact on their general health. Thus, the issue of TB is not a single issue, but one that relates to a range of social, economic, and political factors. Improving TB outcomes for farmworkers will require a dramatic reimagining of our agricultural labor system, and increased investment in the wellbeing of these essential workers
Transformation of the American Legal System: Permanent Measures from COVID-19
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic upended virtually every aspect of everyday life, from grocery stores to judicial procedures. The American judicial process is a unique adversarial system that guarantees the right to confront, often before a live jury. Yet, the necessities of social distancing and protecting public health means that these once unshakeable tenets of the United States justice system have been forced to undergo watershed transformation throughout the pandemic. The word transformation is carefully chosen, as certain measures are no longer temporary. Rather, a fundamental shift in the formerly concrete facets of judicial procedure has occurred – almost certainly never to be fully reversed. In the article, I describe the potential benefits of the unprecedented shift, while comparing both the original design and social perceptions of the American court system and judicial procedure. While great potential presents for virtual hearings and trials to continue to provide justice throughout this chaotic period, there are many serious nuances to the untested digital shift that must be acknowledged and accounted for in creating new and permanent change
Mixed-Effects Nonhomogeneous Poisson Process Model for Multiple Repairable Systems.
No full textThe nonhomogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) has become a useful approach for modeling failure patterns of recurrent failure data revealed by minimal repairs from an individual repairable system. Sometimes, multiple repairable systems may present system-to-system variability owing to operation environments or working intensities of individual systems. In this paper, we go over the application of generalized mixed-effects models to recurrent failure data from multiple repairable systems based on the NHPP. The generalized mixed-effects models explicitly involve between-system variation through random effects, along with a common baseline for all the systems through fixed-effects for non-normal data. Details on estimation of the parameters of the mixed-effects NHPP models and construction of their confidence intervals are examined. An applicative example shows prominent proof of the mixed-effects NHPP models for the purpose of reliability analysis
The Technicity of Blackness: On Failures and Fissures in the Art of Sondra Perry.”
No full text“Sondra’s body type was not an accessible preexisting template.” A self-aware avatar archly delivers this fact as it stares out from a glowing chroma key blue screen in Graft and Ash for a Three-Monitor Workstation (2016).1 To view the work we must sit awkwardly on a bright orange, modified work bike, gazing up at a digital, not-quite–Sondra Perry addressing us from the monitors affixed to the machine. Bald and appearing only from the throat up, the avatar informs us that it was animated from an image of the artist taken with a Sony RX100 camera under the presumably harsh glow of fluorescent studio light. “We were rendered to Sondra’s fullest ability,” the avatar tells us, using the first-person plural to emphasize the work’s status as an integrative whole, “but she could not replicate her fatness in the software that was used to make us.” This failure of imaging—which emerges from a critical failure of imagining—is omnipresent in Sondra Perry’s practice. Digital rendering programs reject undisciplined bodies. Blue chroma keys aim to solve the “problem” of darkness. Visual technologies fail to render the Black subject, fail to see blackness as subject.2 But even as Perry’s self-described “not-all-that-representative” art object meditates on the condition of its own production, no technological solution appears. There is no perfect tool with which the representation of Perry’s unruly Black body can finally be achieved. Instead, Perry’s practice draws attention to the connection between this violence of invisibility and the parallel violence of hypervisibility
Entrenched Racial Hierarchy: Educational Inequality from the Cradle to the LSAT
Get PDFFor my contribution to this special issue of the Minnesota Law Review, I will attempt to situate the problem of black underrepresentation at America’s law schools within the broader context of racial hierarchy in American society. The former has generated an extensive body of legal scholarship and commentary, centering primarily on the racial impact of law schools’ admissions criteria and procedures, particularly the substantial weight placed upon the Law School Admissions Test (“LSAT”). This focus is understandable: given the substantial racial disparities in LSAT performance and the test’s relatively limited value in predicting academic and professional outcomes, it makes sense that efforts to increase black representation in law school would start here.
But in focusing primarily on the inequities of law school admissions, the existing discourse to some extent has unduly isolated the issue of black law school underrepresentation from the broader context of American racial inequality. The law school admissions process is but the final stage in a long chain of events that determines whether an individual becomes a law student. The vast majority of black students effectively are prevented from attending law school by conditions that they encounter before they even apply.
Accordingly, in this article I offer a broader account of the underrepresentation of black law students, one that focuses on the conditions of entrenched racial hierarchy that impede black Americans’ educational trajectories and limit their mobility into high-status occupations, including the practice of law
Patents as Signals of Quality in Crowdfunding
Get PDFPatents and crowdfunding both attempt to foster early stage innova-tions. In theory, patents signal quality and value to attract investment and buyers and ultimately facilitate commercialization. Crowdfunding allows multiple individuals to make small contributions to finance start-up ven-tures. This Article reports on two related studies investigating the interac-tion between these two innovation tools by determining the impact of a crowdfunding campaign’s patent status on the campaign’s success and de-livery. The first study examines 9,184 Kickstarter campaigns in patent-eli-gible categories to determine whether patented or patent-pending labeled projects are more likely to reach their funding goal and in turn achieve actual, on-time delivery when compared to non-patented projects. This studyfinds, perhaps surprisingly, that patented projects are not more likely to obtain funding compared to non-patented ones. In contrast, patent-pend-ing projects are more successful in getting funded. The second study con-firms this preference for patent-pending projects but not patented ones through a series of laboratory experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk (“MTurk”). The MTurk results also indicate that patent-pending status, as compared to patented status, is more likely to be noticed by potential back-ers and an identified reason for such backers to invest and buy crowdfunded products. These results provide insight into whether patents (1) act as sig-nals to attract funding and buyers,and (2) assist in commercialization in the crowdfunding context. These results also inform the proper focus of pa-tent marking statute
The TikTok Generation Takes to the Streets of Jerusalem
No full textFor the past decade, the organization Grassroots Al-Quds has been a hub of Palestinian organizing in Jerusalem (also known by its Arabic name, Al-Quds). The group supports local Palestinian communities in their struggles to resist their ongoing violent displacement by the state; it also studies the history of the city’s varied Palestinian neighborhoods and offers tours and research aids to the public. Besides this on-the-ground work, the group has played a crucial role in communicating with organizers across and beyond the Arab world about the struggles of Palestinians in Jerusalem. Grassroots Al-Quds members have taken part in many of the protests that swelled in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood earlier this month in response to the attempted expulsion of Palestinian families from their homes, and have been an important source of information about conditions on the ground. A few days before the current ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, I spoke with Fayrouz Sharqawi, the director of Grassroots Al-Quds, about the group’s work and the events of the past few weeks