A Review of Eviction Protections in Dallas, Texas

The Institute for Urban Policy Research partnered with the Texas Tenants Union to better understand the impact of eviction remediation programs on the plight of tenants in the City of Dallas. In Dallas, roughly three of every five households rent their home; programs aimed at preventing eviction are pertinent to most of Dallas's population (U. S. Census Bureau, 2020). Financial impacts of the Coronavirus pandemic threatened many households in Dallas and the early days of the pandemic saw multiple policy and procedure interventions, including court closures and the CARES Act. Dallas City Council was among the first localities to act, pass an eviction ordinance to protect renters from losing their homes.In this study, we pursue a mixed-methods approach, embracing both qualitative and quantitative research tools. Working with Dallas County, whose Justice of the Peace courts are the courts of original jurisdictions for evictions in Texas, we secured case filing data for January through June of 2019 and 2020. This data was used to perform a series of regression analyses comparing the volume of evictions in Dallas and surrounding cities. Next, we randomly sampled cases filed in one Dallas County Justice of the Peace court, including portions of Dallas and surrounding communities. We conducted a systematic record review of the entire case file for each of the randomly sampled cases. Finally, we engaged a purposive sample of local government and non-profit leaders, as well as affected tenants, in a focus group setting to understand their experiences with eviction in Dallas.While the quantitative results do suggest some impact of these policy responses, the findings are not encouraging. First, the milieu of policies enacted offered no universal protection to any broad segment of renting households. Second, many of those protected by these policies did not know their status, and efforts to educate them were not universally deployed. Finally, even when protected tenants were aware of their protection, their attempts to assert their rights were met by a system often confused on how to respect them

ODIN: Where Do Lyman-alpha Blobs Live? Contextualizing Blob Environments within the Large-Scale Structure

While many Lyman-alpha Blobs (LABs) are found in and around several well-known protoclusters at high redshift, how they trace the underlying large-scale structure is still poorly understood. In this work, we utilize 5,352 Lyman-alpha emitters (LAEs) and 129 LABs at z=3.1 identified over a $\sim$ 9.5 sq. degree area in early data from the ongoing One-hundred-deg$^2$ DECam Imaging in Narrowbands (ODIN) survey to investigate this question. Using LAEs as tracers of the underlying matter distribution, we identify overdense structures as galaxy groups, protoclusters, and filaments of the cosmic web. We find that LABs preferentially reside in regions of higher-than-average density and are located in closer proximity to overdense structures, which represent the sites of protoclusters and their substructures. Moreover, protoclusters hosting one or more LABs tend to have a higher descendant mass than those which do not. Blobs are also strongly associated with filaments of the cosmic web, with $\sim$ 70% of the population being within a projected distance of 2.4 pMpc from a filament. We show that the proximity of LABs to protoclusters is naturally explained by their association with filaments as large cosmic structures are where many filaments converge. The contiguous wide-field coverage of the ODIN survey allows us for the first time to firmly establish a connection between LABs as a population and their environment.Comment: 24 pages, 17 figures; submitted to Ap

HETDEX Public Source Catalog 1: 220K Sources Including Over 50K Lyman Alpha Emitters from an Untargeted Wide-area Spectroscopic Survey

We present the first publicly released catalog of sources obtained from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). HETDEX is an integral field spectroscopic survey designed to measure the Hubble expansion parameter and angular diameter distance at 1.88<z<3.52 by using the spatial distribution of more than a million Ly-alpha-emitting galaxies over a total target area of 540 deg^2. The catalog comes from contiguous fiber spectra coverage of 25 deg^2 of sky from January 2017 through June 2020, where object detection is performed through two complementary detection methods: one designed to search for line emission and the other a search for continuum emission. The HETDEX public release catalog is dominated by emission-line galaxies and includes 51,863 Ly{\alpha}-emitting galaxy (LAE) identifications and 123,891 OII-emitting galaxies at z<0.5. Also included in the catalog are 37,916 stars, 5274 low-redshift (z<0.5) galaxies without emission lines, and 4976 active galactic nuclei. The catalog provides sky coordinates, redshifts, line identifications, classification information, line fluxes, OII and Ly-alpha line luminosities where applicable, and spectra for all identified sources processed by the HETDEX detection pipeline. Extensive testing demonstrates that HETDEX redshifts agree to within deltaz < 0.02, 96.1% of the time to those in external spectroscopic catalogs. We measure the photometric counterpart fraction in deep ancillary Hyper Suprime-Cam imaging and find that only 55.5% of the LAE sample has an r-band continuum counterpart down to a limiting magnitude of r~26.2 mag (AB) indicating that an LAE search of similar sensitivity with photometric pre-selection would miss nearly half of the HETDEX LAE catalog sample. Data access and details about the catalog can be found online at http://hetdex.org/.Comment: 38 pages, 20 figures. Data access and details about the catalog can be found online at http://hetdex.org/. A copy of the catalogs presented in this work (Version 3.2) is available to download at Zenodo doi:10.5281/zenodo.744850

UFCN: a fully convolutional neural network for road extraction in RGB imagery acquired by remote sensing from an unmanned aerial vehicle

Road extraction in imagery acquired by low altitude remote sensing (LARS) carried out using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is presented. LARS is carried out using a fixed wing UAV with a high spatial resolution vision spectrum (RGB) camera as the payload. Deep learning techniques, particularly fully convolutional network (FCN), are adopted to extract roads by dense semantic segmentation. The proposed model, UFCN (U-shaped FCN) is an FCN architecture, which is comprised of a stack of convolutions followed by corresponding stack of mirrored deconvolutions with the usage of skip connections in between for preserving the local information. The limited dataset (76 images and their ground truths) is subjected to real-time data augmentation during training phase to increase the size effectively. Classification performance is evaluated using precision, recall, accuracy, F1 score, and brier score parameters. The performance is compared with support vector machine (SVM) classifier, a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) model, and a standard two-dimensional CNN (2D-CNN). The UFCN model outperforms the SVM, 1D-CNN, and 2D-CNN models across all the performance parameters. Further, the prediction time of the proposed UFCN model is comparable with SVM, 1D-CNN, and 2D-CNN models. (C) 2018 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE

Impact of Nutrition Education on Knowledge, Attitude, and Practices of School-Going Adolescents of Public and Private Schools Regarding Healthy Lifestyle

Background Nutrition plays an important role in the development of people and in the prevention of disease. Nutrition education is an essential element of health awareness. Objective The study is aimed to assess the impact of nutrition education on the lifestyle of school-age adolescents and to compare the impact of nutrition education on the lifestyle of female adolescents among private and public schools. Methodology A quasi-experimental study was conducted on 108 female adolescents by using a cluster sampling technique. 54 students of ages between 10-15 years old were selected from private school, and 54 students of ages between 10-15 years old were from government school. The study duration was 6 weeks. A self-constructed pre-test questionnaire was filled by the participants. Nutrition education was given to students in the time period of 4 weeks. Lectures and brochures were developed and delivered to the students. Quizzes were taken for the evaluation and a better understanding of the respective lecture. Visual display on different parameters of a healthy lifestyle was shown on a projector. Post-test questionnaires were filled 1 week after giving 11 lectures on a healthy lifestyle. Results Results showed that there were significant associations between knowledge, attitude, and practices of government and private school (p=0.001), (p=0.005) and (p=0.001). There was a significant association (p=0.001) between pre and post knowledge, attitudes, and practices of school students. Conclusions: Lack of knowledge was the reason for inappropriate dietary habits and poor lifestyle among school-going female adolescents. Positive modifications regarding lifestyle activities had a significant association with nutrition education among school-going female adolescents

ODIN: Where Do Lyα Blobs Live?: Contextualizing Blob Environments within Large-scale Structure

While many Lyα blobs (LABs) are found in and around several well-known protoclusters at high redshift, how they trace the underlying large-scale structure is still poorly understood. In this work, we utilize 5352 Lyα emitters (LAEs) and 129 LABs at z = 3.1 identified over a ∼9.5 deg2 area in early data from the ongoing One-hundred-deg2 DECam Imaging in Narrowbands (ODIN) survey to investigate this question. Using LAEs as tracers of the underlying matter distribution, we identify overdense structures as galaxy groups, protoclusters, and filaments of the cosmic web. We find that LABs preferentially reside in regions of higher-than-average density and are located in closer proximity to overdense structures, which represent the sites of protoclusters and their substructures. Moreover, protoclusters hosting one or more LABs tend to have a higher descendant mass than those which do not. Blobs are also strongly associated with filaments of the cosmic web, with ∼70% of the population being within a projected distance of ∼2.4 pMpc from a filament. We show that the proximity of LABs to protoclusters is naturally explained by their association with filaments as large cosmic structures are where many filaments converge. The contiguous wide-field coverage of the ODIN survey allows us to establish firmly a connection between LABs as a population and filaments of the cosmic web for the first time.Fil: Ramakrishnan, Vandana. Purdue University; Estados UnidosFil: Moon, Byeongha. Korea Astronomy And Space Science Institute; Corea del NorteFil: Im, Sang Hyeok. Seoul National University; Corea del NorteFil: Farooq, Rameen. Rutgers Universitynew Brunswick; Estados UnidosFil: Lee, Kyoung Soo. Purdue University; Estados UnidosFil: Gawiser, Eric. Rutgers Universitynew Brunswick; Estados UnidosFil: Yang, Yujin. Korea Astronomy And Space Science Institute; Corea del NorteFil: Park, Changbom. Korea Institute For Advanced Study; Corea del NorteFil: Hwang, Ho Seong. Seoul National University; Corea del NorteFil: Valdes, Francisco. National Optical Astronomy Observatory; Estados UnidosFil: Artale, Maria Celeste. Universidad Andrés Bello; Chile. Università di Padova; Italia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciónes Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio. - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio; Argentina. Purdue University; Estados UnidosFil: Ciardullo, Robin. University of Pennsylvania; Estados UnidosFil: Dey, Arjun. No especifíca;Fil: Gronwall, Caryl. University of Pennsylvania; Estados UnidosFil: Guaita, Lucia. Universidad Andrés Bello; ChileFil: Jeong, Woong Seob. Korea Astronomy And Space Science Institute; Corea del NorteFil: Padilla, Nelson David. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Astronomía Teórica y Experimental. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Observatorio Astronómico de Córdoba. Instituto de Astronomía Teórica y Experimental; ArgentinaFil: Singh, Akriti. Universidad Andrés Bello; ChileFil: Zabludoff, Ann. University of Arizona; Estados Unido

The One-hundred-deg2 DECam Imaging in Narrowbands (ODIN): Survey Design and Science Goals

We describe the survey design and science goals for One-hundred-deg2 DECam Imaging in Narrowbands (ODIN), a NOIRLab survey using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to obtain deep (AB ∼ 25.7) narrowband images over an unprecedented area of sky. The three custom-built narrowband filters, N419, N501, and N673, have central wavelengths of 419, 501, and 673 nm and respective FWHM of 7.5, 7.6, and 10.0 nm, corresponding to Lyα at z = 2.4, 3.1, and 4.5 and cosmic times of 2.8, 2.1, and 1.4 Gyr, respectively. When combined with even deeper, public broadband data from the Hyper Suprime-Cam, DECam, and in the future, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, the ODIN narrowband images will enable the selection of over 100,000 Lyα-emitting (LAE) galaxies at these epochs. ODIN-selected LAEs will identify protoclusters as galaxy overdensities, and the deep narrowband images enable detection of highly extended Lyα blobs (LABs). Primary science goals include measuring the clustering strength and dark matter halo connection of LAEs, LABs, and protoclusters, and their respective relationship to filaments in the cosmic web. The three epochs allow for the redshift evolution of these properties to be determined during the period known as Cosmic Noon, where star formation was at its peak. The narrowband filter wavelengths are designed to enable interloper rejection and further scientific studies by revealing [O ii] and [O iii] at z = 0.34, Lyα and He ii 1640 at z = 3.1, and Lyman continuum plus Lyα at z = 4.5. Ancillary science includes similar studies of the lower-redshift emission-line galaxy samples and investigations of nearby star-forming galaxies resolved into numerous [O iii] and [S ii] emitting regions

HETDEX Public Source Catalog 1: 220 K Sources Including Over 50 K Lyα Emitters from an Untargeted Wide-area Spectroscopic Survey* * Based on observations obtained with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, which is a joint project of the University of Texas at Austin, the Pennsylvania State University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. The HET is named in honor of its principal benefactors, William P. Hobby and Robert E. Eberly.

We present the first publicly released catalog of sources obtained from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). HETDEX is an integral field spectroscopic survey designed to measure the Hubble expansion parameter and angular diameter distance at 1.88 &lt; z &lt; 3.52 by using the spatial distribution of more than a million Lyα-emitting galaxies over a total target area of 540 deg2. The catalog comes from contiguous fiber spectra coverage of 25 deg2 of sky from 2017 January through 2020 June, where object detection is performed through two complementary detection methods: one designed to search for line emission and the other a search for continuum emission. The HETDEX public release catalog is dominated by emission-line galaxies and includes 51,863 Lyα-emitting galaxy (LAE) identifications and 123,891 [O ii]-emitting galaxies at z &lt; 0.5. Also included in the catalog are 37,916 stars, 5274 low-redshift (z &lt; 0.5) galaxies without emission lines, and 4976 active galactic nuclei. The catalog provides sky coordinates, redshifts, line identifications, classification information, line fluxes, [O ii] and Lyα line luminosities where applicable, and spectra for all identified sources processed by the HETDEX detection pipeline. Extensive testing demonstrates that HETDEX redshifts agree to within Δz &lt; 0.02, 96.1% of the time to those in external spectroscopic catalogs. We measure the photometric counterpart fraction in deep ancillary Hyper Suprime-Cam imaging and find that only 55.5% of the LAE sample has an r-band continuum counterpart down to a limiting magnitude of r ∼ 26.2 mag (AB) indicating that an LAE search of similar sensitivity to HETDEX with photometric preselection would miss nearly half of the HETDEX LAE catalog sample. Data access and details about the catalog can be found online at http://hetdex.org/. A copy of the catalogs presented in this work (Version 3.2) is available to download at Zenodo doi:10.5281/zenodo.7448504