Multimodal Classification of Urban Micro-Events

In this paper we seek methods to effectively detect urban micro-events. Urban micro-events are events which occur in cities, have limited geographical coverage and typically affect only a small group of citizens. Because of their scale these are difficult to identify in most data sources. However, by using citizen sensing to gather data, detecting them becomes feasible. The data gathered by citizen sensing is often multimodal and, as a consequence, the information required to detect urban micro-events is distributed over multiple modalities. This makes it essential to have a classifier capable of combining them. In this paper we explore several methods of creating such a classifier, including early, late, hybrid fusion and representation learning using multimodal graphs. We evaluate performance on a real world dataset obtained from a live citizen reporting system. We show that a multimodal approach yields higher performance than unimodal alternatives. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our hybrid combination of early and late fusion with multimodal embeddings performs best in classification of urban micro-events

An Analysis of Race and Ethnicity Patterns in Boston Police Department Field Interrogation, Observation, Frisk, and/or Search Reports

The report, authored by researchers from Columbia, Rutgers and the University of Massachusetts, analyzed 200,000+ encounters between BPD officers and civilians from 2007–2010. It is intended to provide a factual basis to assess the implementation of proactive policing in Boston and how it affects Boston's diverse neighborhoods. It found racial disparities in the Boston Police Department's stop-and-frisks that could not be explained by crime or other non-race factors. Blacks during that period were the subjects of 63.3% of police-civilian encounters, although less than a quarter of the city's population is Black.

Pollution charges, community pressure, and abatement cost of industrial pollution in China

The author evaluates the strength of the effect that community pressure and pollution charges have on industrial pollution control in China, and estimates the marginal cost of pollution abatement. He examines a well-documented set of plant-level data, combined with community-level data, to assess the impact of pollution charges and community pressure on industrial behavior in China. He constructs and estimates an industrial organic water pollution discharge model for plants that violate standards for pollution discharge, pay pollution charges, and are constantly under community pressure to further abate pollution. He creates a model and estimates implicit prices for pollutiondischarges from community pressure, which are determined jointly by the explicit price, the pollution levy. He finds that the implicit discharge price is at least as high as the explicit price. In other words, community pressure not only exists, but may be as strong an incentive as the pollution charge is for industrial firms to control pollution in China. The author's modeling approach also provides a way to estimate the marginal cost of pollution abatement. The empirical results show that the current marginal cost of abatement is about twice the effective charge rate in China.Pollution Management&Control,Water and Industry,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water Conservation,Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water Conservation,Pollution Management&Control,Water Resources Assessment,Water and Industry

Resolving Special Education Disputes in California

Examines the use of mediation and due process hearings in resolving disputes between parents and school districts over identifying disabilities and designing individualized programs. Analyzes trends in and predictors of higher rates of hearing requests

Structural Change and Competition in Seven U.S. Food Markets

Recent trends in mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. food sector food manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers raise concerns about market power. In the presence of market power, farmers may receive lower than competitive farm prices, and consumers may pay higher than competitive retail prices. This study presents empirical tests of market power at the national level for seven food categories: beef, pork, poultry, eggs, dairy, fresh fruit, and fresh vegetables. At the national level, our tests provide evidence of competitive conduct in both the sale of final food products and the purchase of farm ingredients.retail food and farm prices, market power, structural change, cointegration, Agribusiness, Industrial Organization,

Trend Topic Analysis using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) (Study Case: Denpasar People’s Complaints Online Website)

According to the publication of the Central Bureau of Statistics 2017, the population of Denpasar people has increased to 914,300 people. The Increasing number of the population raises various problems that must be faced by the Denpasar’s Government. The variety of problems is in line with the increase in complaints data posted through Denpasar people’s complaints online website, which made it difficult to know the main topics of the problems. The purpose of this research is to find the main topics of complaints Denpasar residents quickly and efficiently. The method used to achieve the objective of the research is Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic models with Gibbs sampling parameter estimation. The number of topics obtained through the highest log-likelihood value -42,528.84, the value is in the number of topics 19. The trending topic was based on the highest topic probability, topic 4, with a topic probability value 0.055. Based on these results, the trend of a topic is on topic 4 which can be interpreted that many residents of Denpasar complained about damaged roads and requested to fix the roads

Stops and Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance, and Race in the New Policing

The use of proactive tactics to disrupt criminal activities, such as Terry street stops and concentrated misdemeanor arrests, are essential to the “new policing.” This model applies complex metrics, strong management, and aggressive enforcement and surveillance to focus policing on high crime risk persons and places. The tactics endemic to the “new policing” gave rise in the 1990s to popular, legal, political and social science concerns about disparate treatment of minority groups in their everyday encounters with law enforcement. Empirical evidence showed that minorities were indeed stopped and arrested more frequently than similarly situated whites, even when controlling for local social and crime conditions. In this article, we examine racial disparities under a unique configuration of the street stop prong of the “new policing” – the inclusion of non-contact observations (or surveillances) in the field interrogation (or investigative stop) activity of Boston Police Department officers. We show that Boston Police officers focus significant portions of their field investigation activity in two areas: suspected and actual gang members, and the city’s high crime areas. Minority neighborhoods experience higher levels of field interrogation and surveillance activity net of crime and other social factors. Relative to white suspects, Black suspects are more likely to be observed, interrogated, and frisked or searched controlling for gang membership and prior arrest history. Moreover, relative to their black counterparts, white police officers conduct high numbers of field investigations and are more likely to frisk/search subjects of all races. We distinguish between preference-based and statistical discrimination by comparing stops by officer-suspect racial pairs. If officer activity is independent of officer race, we would infer that disproportionate stops of minorities reflect statistical discrimination. We show instead that officers seem more likely to investigate and frisk or search a minority suspect if officer and suspect race differ. We locate these results in the broader tensions of racial profiling that pose recurring social and constitutional concerns in the “new policing.”

Explore the Complaint Towards Street Vendors in Manhattan: Discussion About Distribution and Influential Factors

The informal economy, represented by the street vendors, is not a recent trend. Although there are a lot of advantages of the street vendors, conflicts exist. This research explores the complaints towards street vendors in Manhattan and discusses their distribution and influential factors. Through the analysis, governments and city planners have a general understanding of the conflicts and guideline for the future design and regulation. It mainly uses the quantitative method, by a mix of data, to explore the complaints towards street vendors. This includes the spatial analysis using GIS and the linear regression model. The results show that the more diverse that the land use is, the more conflicts between the street vendors and the city. The larger the income unevenness, the more complaints. And the area with more street connectivity has more complaints towards street vendors. The results reevaluate the mixed land use in urban planning and the current regulation

Environmental citizen complaints

Citizen complaints feature prominently in public oversight contexts. The nature and effects of complaints, however, are controversial and poorly understood. We first investigate attitudes about citizen complaints using a nationally representative survey. We document that the public believes complaints promote open, efficient, and equitable governance. We then exploit novel administrative data on over 130,000 complaints in Texas to investigate their observed dynamic effects on regulator behavior. Empirically, complaints are associated with sharp increases in regulator monitoring and enforcement. Complaints uncover more, and more severe violations, than more standard monitoring approaches. Overall, our findings are consistent with complaints enhancing regulatory efficiency