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Bank Term Funding Program: Final Disclosure of Transaction Data Pursuant to 11(s) of the Federal Reserve Act
No full textThe Effect of Education Policy on Crime: An Intergenerational Perspective
No full textWe examine the intergenerational effect of education policy on crime. Using administrative data that links outcomes across generations with crime records, we show that the Swedish comprehensive school reform, gradually implemented between 1949 and 1962, reduced conviction rates for both the generation directly affected by the reform and their sons. The reduction in conviction rates occurred in several types of crime. Mediation analysis suggests that key channels include increased parental educational attainment and household income, as well as reduced criminal behavior among fathers
Decomposing Trends in the Gender Gap for Highly Educated Workers
No full textThis paper examines the gender gap in log earnings among full-time, college-educated workers born between 1931 and 1984. Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates and other sources, we decompose the gender earnings gap across birth cohorts into three components: (i) gender differences in the relative returns to undergraduate and graduate fields, (ii) gender-specific trends in undergraduate field, graduate degree attainment, and graduate field, and (iii) a cohortspecific “residual component” that shifts the gender gap uniformly across all college graduates. We have three main findings. First, when holding the relative returns to fields constant, changes in fields of study contribute 0.128 to the decline in the gender gap. However, this decline is partially offset by cohort trends in the relative returns to specific fields that favored men over women, reducing the contribution of field-of-study changes to the decline to 0.055. Second, gender differences in the relative returns to undergraduate and graduate fields of study contribute to the earnings gap, but they play a limited role in explaining its decline over time. Third, much of the convergence in earnings between the 1931 and 1950 cohorts is due to a declining “residual component.” The residual component remains stable for cohorts born between 1951 and the late 1970s, after which it resumes its decline
Live Wires: The Angelus Temple and the Timbre of Power
No full textThis article is a media history and contemporary case study of The Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, founded by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1923. My analysis of the Angelus insists upon the centrality of a hyperaudible paradigm of worship that uses media to maximize the legibility of a Christian message, and, more than this, imagines that media itself as a living soul in need of redemption. Many contemporary megachurches employ savvy applications of sound and sound transmission as instruments of belonging as well as action, and these rely on high-budget investments in church infrastructure, software and personnel. I argue that churches make such large investments because it is specifically sacrotechnotimbre, or, the timbral grain of expensive audiovisual infrastructure and labor, that aligns megachurches’ theology of “growth”—the church’s and the individual’s—with their dual ambitions of local resonance and global relevance, and their perceived obligation to save as many souls as possible. I show how Foursquare continues to negotiate the worldliness of audiovisual media and recruit it as part of the transformative power of Christian worship. This article theorizes sacrotechnotimbre to mean a range of sound qualities that indicate the embrace and professional implementation of state-of-the-art audiovisual technologies and techniques—from architectural design, to sound processing software, to in-ear monitors, to trained performance—in the service of sacred worship. The coinage is meant to evoke the unresolved tensions that persist between the “sacro” and the “techno,” and suggest the ongoing theological and political economic negotiations churches make to bridge them. It is also meant to suggest that media studies and religious studies scholarship, and beyond, would benefit from thinking of these two seemingly distinct realms as related, if not mutually-reliant, and might do so through studies of sound and music
Between Sound and Theology: Timbral Performativity in Brazilian Religious Musicking
No full textThis article explores the performativity of timbre, summarizing key perspectives from the English-language scholarship on the topic and setting them in conversation with Latin American perspectives on timbre. In addition, it examines a performance of “500 Graus” (500 degrees), a song performed by Brazilian Pentecostal artists Cassiane and Shirley Carvalhaes, to demonstrate how the performativity of timbre unfolds within a particular expression of Latin American religious musicking. In doing so, it investigates the phenomenon of timbre between music and sound studies, and theology and church music studies, providing insights relevant to the study of timbre and the study of religious musicking
Optimization via Strategic Law of Large Numbers
No full textThis paper proposes a novel framework for the global optimization of a continuous function in a bounded rectangular domain. Specifically, we show that: (1) global optimization is equivalent to optimal strategy formation in a two-armed decision problem with known distributions, based on the Strategic Law of Large Numbers we establish; and (2) a sign-based strategy based on the solution of a parabolic PDE is asymptotically optimal. Motivated by this result, we propose a class of Strategic Monte Carlo Optimization (SMCO) algorithms, which uses a simple strategy that makes coordinate-wise two-armed decisions based on the signs of the partial gradient (or practically the first difference) of the objective function, without the need of solving PDEs. While this simple strategy is not generally optimal, it is sufficient for our SMCO algorithm to converge to a local optimizer from a single starting point, and to a global optimizer under a growing set of starting points. Numerical studies demonstrate the suitability of our SMCO algorithms for global optimization well beyond the theoretical guarantees established herein. For a wide range of test functions with challenging landscapes (multi-modal, non-differentiable and discontinuous), our SMCO algorithms perform robustly well, even in high-dimensional (d = 200 ∼ 1000) settings. In fact, our algorithms outperform many state-of-the-art global optimizers, as well as local algorithms augmented with the same set of starting points as ours
Confessions of a Failed Revolutionary Subject: Toi Derricotte and the Black Notebooks in the Archive
Full text linkIn this essay, I use black feminist methodologies to theorize archival voice as opposed to silence, drawing from Toi Derricotte’s 1997 book The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey and its drafts. I examine Derricotte’s published and unpublished writings on the psychological wounds of racism, internalized antiblackness, shame, and the racial and relational politics of being white-presenting to understand her vision of how we free ourselves from the toxic imaginaries of race. I focus on Derricotte’s use of confession and her commitment to wayward speech, or saying the unsayable, to challenge political ideology’s domination of language and harness the political possibility of painful truth, intimacy and affect. I trace intersubjectivity as it works in both my own feminist archival method and Derricotte’s relational ethics
Multidisciplinary Perspectives On Palliative Care Use In Head And Neck Cancer: Patient, Provider, Policy, And Costs
No full textHead and neck cancer (HNC) affects over 340,000 individuals worldwide annually and isassociated with significant physical, psychological, and financial burdens. Although palliative care (PC) can alleviate many of these challenges, less than 2% of patients with HNC receive PC services. This thesis examines palliative care utilization among HNC patients from multiple perspectives: patient-level, policy-level, cost-level, and provider viewpoints. Four complementary investigations were conducted. (1) Using the National Cancer Database (NCDB) from 2004–2019, we applied Andersen’s Behavioral Model (predisposing, enabling, and need factors) to identify patient- and system-level determinants of PC. (2) A separate NCDB analysis (2015–2020) explored the impact of Medicaid expansion and state-level palliative care policies on PC uptake. (3) The National Inpatient Sample (NIS, 2017–2020) was queried to compare hospital costs and aggressive end-of-life interventions versus PC in terminal HNC patients. (4) A 16-item survey of otolaryngologists, distributed via the American Head and Neck Society, assessed provider perspectives on PC referral timing and barriers. Overall, 5% of HNC patients in the NCDB received PC. Multivariable analyses revealed that younger age, advanced disease, and higher comorbidity scores predicted PC use, while private insurance and higher income had mixed associations across datasets. Medicaid expansion was associated with a modest but significant increase in PC utilization. In the NIS, PC was linked to fewer ICU admissions, less use of invasive therapies, and lower overall hospital costs. Survey responses highlighted late-stage referrals and multiple provider- and institution-level barriers, including discomfort discussing poor prognosis, lack of PC training, and limited integration of PC teams in tumor boards. Despite the substantial symptom burden in HNC, PC is underutilized. Equitable access and timely PC referrals are shaped by patient sociodemographic, health policies, and provider practices. Strengthening insurance coverage of PC, integrating PC teams into standard oncology workflows, and improving provider training and awareness are critical steps to optimizing palliative care for patients with HNC
Trends In Missing Race And Ethnicity Data In A National Surgical Database
No full textAccurate data collection on race and ethnicity is critical to detecting and characterizing disparities in surgical care. This study explores the prevalence and impact of missing race and ethnicity data in the National Surgical Quality Improvement Project Pediatric (NSQIP Pediatric) database. NSQIP Pediatric from 2016-2020 was assessed for patients who were missing data for race (RM), ethnicity (EM), or both (BM). Changes in proportion of RM, EM, and BM patients were assessed with Cochran-Armitage tests. Surgical outcomes were modeled using linear mixed-effects models, treating CPT codes as random effects. Models were bootstrapped with 1000 iterations for each outcome. Of 596,571 patients, 18.0% were RM, 10.9% were EM, and 8.3% were BM. BM patients increased in proportion from 5.7% in 2016 to 12.1% in 2020 (p \u3c 0.0001). Outcomes which differed statistically significantly were worse in RM than non-RM patients. Multivariate analysis found that BM patients had longer hospital lengths-of-stay than non-BM patients (b = 0.5 days, p \u3c 0.001). BM patients also had higher odds of readmission (OR = 1.22 [1.02-1.46]) and any complication (OR = 1.27 [1.03-1.59]). NSQIP-P exhibits a systematic increase in missing race and ethnicity data that has not been previously described in other literature or database documentation. Controlling for surgery type and patient demographics, patients exhibited worse outcomes with respect to hospital lengths-of-stay and rates of both readmission and any complication. Further work is necessary to determine the cause of this missing data and provide guidance for researchers examining surgical disparities utilizing NSQIP Pediatric
Transcriptomic Insights From A Multi-Cohort Analysis Of Renal Cell Carcinoma
No full textRenal cell carcinoma (RCC) is classically considered an immunogenic tumor, with high immune cell infiltration and both historic and contemporary responses to immune-based therapies. Currently, treatment regimens involving immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are the standard of care for advanced disease, but many patients do not benefit from therapy and the molecular mechanisms influencing response to ICIs in RCC are not completely understood. Recent molecular characterization of tumors from patients with clear cell RCC enrolled in the CheckMate 009, 010, and 025 clinical trials (evaluating nivolumab, an anti-PD-1 ICI) has indicated that typical correlates of immunotherapy response across other cancer types, such as somatic mutation burden, neoantigen load, and CD8+ T cell infiltration, do not appear to predict treatment outcomes.
The R2000 project is an ongoing multi-institutional effort to perform a molecular analysis of RCC with unprecedented statistical power by aggregating and harmonizing the analysis of whole exome and RNA sequencing data from more than 2,000 patients across various clinical studies, providing new insights into RCC biology and illuminating potential mechanisms underlying therapeutic response and resistance. Initial analysis of R2000 exome data has identified 118 significantly mutated genes and 57 chromosomal regions subject to recurrent copy number changes, many of which had not been previously associated with RCC.
In this thesis, we present an exploratory analysis of tumor transcriptomes (analyzed in a rigorous, harmonized fashion starting with raw RNA-Seq read files) from 2,026 patients in the R2000 cohort, 1,155 of whom have corresponding tumor mutational and copy number profiles available from prior exome analysis. We leveraged immune deconvolution methods, pathway enrichment analysis, and machine learning-based classification of tumors into established molecular subtypes to characterize tumor biology and investigate associations between somatic variants, phenotypes, and clinical outcomes.
Our analysis revealed that tumors with 14q loss, a common genomic event in clear cell RCC and established driver of aggressive disease, had numerous changes in intratumoral immune cell populations and displayed features of CD8+ T cell exhaustion and dysfunction. Although we reproduced the finding that tumoral CD8+ T cell infiltration did not generally predict sensitivity to ICIs in the original CheckMate studies, we observed that increased CD8+ T cell populations did correlate with improved ICI response across more modern, first-line immunotherapy clinical trials; this observation suggests that, while the effects of cytotoxic T cell infiltration on ICI response are complex and heterogeneous, RCC at least somewhat aligns with the classical paradigm that infiltration potentiates response to immune checkpoint blockade. Additionally, we identified that a molecular subtype of RCC enriched for metabolic and cell cycle dysregulation was significantly associated with loss of PRDM10, a gene that was recently implicated in an extremely rare hereditary RCC syndrome but had not been previously identified as a recurrently mutated gene in sporadic RCC prior to the R2000 project. This molecular subtype was also profoundly depleted of canonical clear cell RCC drivers (including VHL mutations and 3p deletions) despite displaying clear cell histology, suggesting that it may represent a novel, variant class of RCC. These findings illuminate potential determinants of therapeutic response in RCC and highlight the power afforded by this harmonized multi-cohort analytical approach