News from Academy Bay

Donation Made in Memory of Last Grandchild of Ecuador's First President. Deaths of CDF Board Members. Major Gift by Mrs. Louise Van Straelen-Poirier. Itasca to Galápagos. Station Research Vessel

California Permanency for Youth Project 2008 Project Evaluation

CPYP began permanency work with four pilot California counties (Alameda, Monterey, San Mateo, and Stanislaus) in January 2003. After refining the project based upon lessons learned in these four counties, in early 2006 CPYP began working with ten new counties: Contra Costa, Fresno, Humboldt, Kern, Los Angeles (Metro North Region), Orange, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, and Sonoma (the "project counties"). The information included in this report pertains to the permanency work with these ten project counties throughout 2006, 2007, and early 2008

California Permanency for Youth Project 2006 Project Evaluation

This report describes CPYP's permanency work with several California county child welfare departments. It contains final outcomes for four pilot counties (Alameda, Monterey, San Mateo and Stanislaus) and a progress report on the ten counties that commenced the implementation of the project during the second half of 2005 (Contra Costa, Fresno, Humboldt, Kern, Los Angeles, Orange, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo and Sonoma)

Crime applications and social machines: crowdsourcing sensitive data

The authors explore some issues with the United Kingdom (U.K.) crime reporting and recording systems which currently produce Open Crime Data. The availability of Open Crime Data seems to create a potential data ecosystem which would encourage crowdsourcing, or the creation of social machines, in order to counter some of these issues. While such solutions are enticing, we suggest that in fact the theoretical solution brings to light fairly compelling problems, which highlight some limitations of crowdsourcing as a means of addressing Berners-Lee’s “social constraint.” The authors present a thought experiment – a Gendankenexperiment - in order to explore the implications, both good and bad, of a social machine in such a sensitive space and suggest a Web Science perspective to pick apart the ramifications of this thought experiment as a theoretical approach to the characterisation of social machine

Giving Mom a Break: The Impact of Higher EITC Payments on Maternal Health

The 1993 expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit created the first meaningful separation in the benefit level for families based on the number of children, with families containing two or more children now receiving substantially more in benefits. If income is protective of health, we should see improvements over time in the health for mothers eligible for the EITC with two or more children compared to those with only one child. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance Survey, we find in difference-in-difference models that for low-educated mothers of two or more children, the number of days with poor mental health and the fraction reporting excellent or very good health improved relative to the mothers with only one child. Using data from the National Health Examination and Nutrition Survey, we find evidence that the probability of having risky levels of biomarkers fell for these same low-educated women impacted more by the 1993 expansions, especially biomarkers that indicate inflammation.

Estimating Heterogeneity in the Benefits of Medical Treatment Intensity

Federal and state laws passed in the late 1990 increased considerably postpartum stays for newborns. Using all births in California over the 1995-2001 period, 2SLS estimates suggest that for the average newborn impacted by the law, increased treatment intensity had modest and statistically insignificant (p-value>0.05) impacts on readmission probabilities. Allowing the treatment effect to vary by pre-existing conditions or the pre-law propensity score of being discharged early, two objective measures of medical need, demonstrates that the law had large and statistically significant impacts for those with the greatest likelihood of a readmission. These results demonstrate heterogeneity in the returns to greater treatment intensity, and the returns to the average and marginal patient vary considerably.