Face Off: An Examination of State Biometric Privacy Statutes & Data Harm Remedies

As biometric authentication becomes an increasingly popular method of security among consumers, only three states currently have statutes detailing how such data may be collected, used, retained, and released. The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act is the only statute of the three that enshrines a private right of action for those who fail to properly handle biometric data. Both the Texas Capture or Use Biometric Identifier Act Information Act and the Washington Biometric Privacy Act allow for state Attorneys General to bring suit on behalf of aggrieved consumers. This Note examines these three statutes in the context of data security and potential remedies for victims of data breaches or mishandled data. Ultimately, this Note makes policy proposals for future biometric privacy statutes, particularly recommending a private right of action as the most effective remedy for victims of biometric data breaches

Indivisible Goods and Fiat Money

In spite of fiat money is useless in a standard Arrow-Debreu model, in this paper we will show that this does not hold true anymore when goods are indivisible. In our setting, although fiat money yields no utility, its price will always be positive and the set of equilibrium allocations changes with the distribution of fiat money. Its role lies in the fact that it could be used to facilitate exchange. Since a Walras equilibrium does not always exist when goods are indivisible, a new equilibrium concept - called rationing equilibrium - is introduced and its existence is proven under weak assumptions on the economy. A Walras equilibrium exists generically on the distribution of fiat moneycompetitive equilibrium, indivisible goods, fiat money.

4,4'-Di-tert-butyl-2,2'-[imidazolidine-1,3-diylbis(methyl-ene)]diphenol

In the title compound, C25H36N2O2, the two tert-butyl-substituted benzene rings are inclined at an angle of 53.5 (3)° to one another. The imidazolidine ring has an envelope conformation with with one of the C atoms of the ethylene fragment as the flap. The structure displays two intra-molecular O-H⋯N hydrogen bonds that generate S(6) ring motifs. The crystal studied was a non-merohedral twin with a fractional contribution of 0.281(6) for the minor domain

The experience of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund in mainstreaming of acquisition loans to cooperative manufactured housing communities

This study aimed to provide evidence of the extent to which a financial product―land acquisition loans for manufactured home parks―performed well and was adopted by mainstream financial institutions. The study hypothesized that The New Hampshire Community Loan Fund’s effective introduction of the new loan product, coupled with excellent loan performance, led banks to adopt the loan product

4,4'-Dimethyl-2,2'-{[2,3,3a,4,5,6,7,7a-octa-hydro-1H-benzimidazole-1,3-di-yl]bis-(methyl-ene)}diphenol

The asymmetric unit of the title compound, C23H30N2O2, contains one half-mol-ecule, with a twofold axis splitting the mol-ecule in two identical halves. The structure of the racemic mixture has been reported previously [Rivera et al. (2009>) J. Chem. Crystallogr. 39, 827-830] but the enanti-omer reported here crystallized in the ortho-rhom-bic space group P21212 (Z = 2), whereas the racemate occurs in the triclinic space group P-1 (Z = 2). The observed mol-ecular conformation is stabilized by two intra-molecular O-H⋯N hydrogen bonds, which generate rings with graph-set motif S(6). In the crystal, mol-ecules are linked via non-classical C-H⋯O inter-actions, which stack the mol-ecules along the b axis

Robust Machine Learning-Based Correction on Automatic Segmentation of the Cerebellum and Brainstem.

Automated segmentation is a useful method for studying large brain structures such as the cerebellum and brainstem. However, automated segmentation may lead to inaccuracy and/or undesirable boundary. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether SegAdapter, a machine learning-based method, is useful for automatically correcting large segmentation errors and disagreement in anatomical definition. We further assessed the robustness of the method in handling size of training set, differences in head coil usage, and amount of brain atrophy. High resolution T1-weighted images were acquired from 30 healthy controls scanned with either an 8-channel or 32-channel head coil. Ten patients, who suffered from brain atrophy because of fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome, were scanned using the 32-channel head coil. The initial segmentations of the cerebellum and brainstem were generated automatically using Freesurfer. Subsequently, Freesurfer's segmentations were both manually corrected to serve as the gold standard and automatically corrected by SegAdapter. Using only 5 scans in the training set, spatial overlap with manual segmentation in Dice coefficient improved significantly from 0.956 (for Freesurfer segmentation) to 0.978 (for SegAdapter-corrected segmentation) for the cerebellum and from 0.821 to 0.954 for the brainstem. Reducing the training set size to 2 scans only decreased the Dice coefficient ≤0.002 for the cerebellum and ≤ 0.005 for the brainstem compared to the use of training set size of 5 scans in corrective learning. The method was also robust in handling differences between the training set and the test set in head coil usage and the amount of brain atrophy, which reduced spatial overlap only by <0.01. These results suggest that the combination of automated segmentation and corrective learning provides a valuable method for accurate and efficient segmentation of the cerebellum and brainstem, particularly in large-scale neuroimaging studies, and potentially for segmenting other neural regions as well

How Expoerts Decide: Preferences or Private Assessments on a Monetary Policy Committee?

Using voting data from the Bank of England, we show that different individual assessments of the economy strongly influence votes after controlling for individual policy preferences. We estimate that internal members form more precise assessments than externals and are also more hawkish, though preference differences are very small if members vote strategically. Counterfactual analysis shows that committees add value through aggregating private assessments, but that gains to larger committees taper off quickly beyond five members. There is no evidence that externals add value through preference moderation. Since their assessments also have lower precision, mixed committees may not be optimal

Effects of Peer Recovery Coaches on Substance Abuse Treatment Engagement Among Child Welfare-Involved Parents

There is a limited, but growing body of research on the effectiveness of peer recovery coaches in promoting treatment engagement, retention, and completion among child welfare-involved parents with substance use disorders. A quasi-experimental design was employed using propensity score matching to examine treatment engagement and treatment completion among child welfare-involved substance abusing parents who were exposed to either peer recovery coach engagement services or professional, non-peer engagement services. Using propensity scoring, the comparison sample of parents that did not have peer recovery coaches was statistically matched on the presence of substance exposed newborns, parental use of methamphetamine, and other predictors of maltreatment recurrence and substance abuse treatment engagement. We examined the effect of peer recovery coaches on outreach, assessment, service initiation, and treatment completion. Participants who were exposed to peer recovery coaches engaged in treatment services at a higher rate and more rapidly despite receiving fewer outreach attempts, relative to participants who received only professional staff outreach services. Those participants who received peer recovery outreach services also demonstrated longer engagement in treatment than their counterparts exposed to professional outreach services only. Interestingly, those participants exposed to professional outreach services demonstrated higher rates of treatment completion, relative to their counterparts exposed to peer recovery coaching. Given that recovery coaches were assigned to clients for only the first 60 days, these findings suggest that peer recovery services may need to be provided for a greater length of time for improved treatment completion rates to be observed