Income Imputation and the Analysis of Expenditure Data in the Consumer Expenditure Survey

The Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey began imputing income in its 2004 data. Imputation predicts income for households that reported receiving income but failed to report a specific value. In this study, I examine how income imputation affects analysis of the CE expenditure data. Most importantly, research that uses both income and expenditures from 2004 on will not have to restrict the sample to households that reported income. The expenditure results most sensitive to the introduction of income imputation are statistics that focus on households with low levels of expenditures.Income Imputation, Expenditures, Poverty

Outcomes Assessment and Health Care Reform

Argues for the use of outcomes assessment in measuring cost-effectiveness and quality to capture the overall impact of multi-dimensional treatment strategies and to identify healthcare systems that both adopt appropriate technologies and perform well

Overtaxing criminal law

The criminal law took a giant leap into the dark when the corporate facilitation of tax evasion offences came into force on 30 September 2017. Previously, where a company employee assisted a customer or supplier to evade tax, the employee would be criminally liable but the company would not. Now, both the employee and the company will be held criminally liable

CRYSTAL: Inducing a Conceptual Dictionary

One of the central knowledge sources of an information extraction system is a dictionary of linguistic patterns that can be used to identify the conceptual content of a text. This paper describes CRYSTAL, a system which automatically induces a dictionary of "concept-node definitions" sufficient to identify relevant information from a training corpus. Each of these concept-node definitions is generalized as far as possible without producing errors, so that a minimum number of dictionary entries cover the positive training instances. Because it tests the accuracy of each proposed definition, CRYSTAL can often surpass human intuitions in creating reliable extraction rules.Comment: 6 pages, Postscript, IJCAI-95 http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/info/psfiles/tepubs/tepubs.htm

“Fair” in the Future? Long-Term Limitations of the Supreme Court’s Use of Incrementalism in Fair Use Jurisprudence

April 2021 marked the most recent instance of the Supreme Court discussing copyright law, and more specifically fair use, in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. The April 2021 decision notably resolved the case solely on fair use grounds, avoiding a difficult question as to the copyrightability of computer code that generates software user interfaces. By resolving this specific case in this manner, the Supreme Court’s actions seemingly confirm a pattern among fair use cases in which rulings made “narrowly” on the unique factual predicate often produce unclear applications within the “broader” context of fair use. Given the flexible, judge-made origins of the doctrine, each case acts as a guidepost within the “broader” doctrine. This Comment explores how the “narrow” rulings, likely made to account for the Court’s institutional ideals, including incrementalism, may lead to these later fair use limitations. By exploring three fair use cases, this Comment aims to opine on the purported pattern of limitations by highlighting both the soundness of the rulings at their then-present decisions, and within more modern contexts. This Comment also proposes how a conscious shift in an opinion’s scope to include more information on how to apply the then-present case as “broader” guideposts within fair use may solve the limitation issues. This Comment finally evaluates this expanding scope against other possible mechanisms of understanding both application of legal principles to novel scenarios and to other potential fair use solutions

Serotonergic Signaling Pathways that Suppress Amyloid Beta in Mouse Models of AD

A diagnosis of Alzheimer\u27s disease is one of the most devastating things one can hear. This terrible disease robs people of their ability to remember cherished events as their brains become riddled with beta amyloid plaques. Alzheimer\u27s is especially terrifying because there currently are no effective treatments for slowing or stopping the disease. However, recent research has shown that plaque formation is correlated to concentrations of amyloid beta. This discovery suggests that limiting amyloid beta production could potentially halt the disease. One promising avenue for slowing amyloid beta production is serotonergic signaling. This dissertation presents evidence for a direct sequence of signaling events from serotonin receptors to reduction of amyloid beta by alpha-secretase. Two serotonin receptors, 5-HT4R and 5-HT7R, reduce amyloid beta levels in the brains of transgenic mice that model Alzheimer\u27s disease. These receptors are linked to activation of PKA, and blocking PKA activity increases amyloid levels in mice. PKA leads to activation of ERK, a kinase which acts in both the nucleus and the cytoplasm. We show SSRI antidepressant treatment fails to produce changes in gene expression which suggests ERK acts within the cytoplasm to reduce amyloid beta. Finally, we show that selective inhibition of ADAM10, the primary alpha-secretase, is unable to block the beneficial effects of SSRI antidepressants in transgenic mice. These discoveries explain the mechanisms regulating amyloid beta reduction by serotonin activity and also offer a more selective therapy for Alzheimer\u27s disease

Do predator exclusion, position, and plant architecture influence hydrilla-dwelling macroinvertebrate communities?

Hydrilla verticillata invaded south central Louisiana during the 1970s subsequently becoming the dominant submerged macrophyte in floodplain habitats of the Atchafalaya River Basin. The effects of hydrilla on littoral habitat structure, water quality, fish, and macroinvertebrates have been pervasive, and I hypothesized that dense hydrilla stands would also impact vertebrate predation on resident macroinvertebrates, although predation effects would likely be mediated by bed position. During 2003 and 2004, I conducted exclosure experiments in the Atchafalaya River Basin with artificial substrates to test for variations in hydrilla bed macroinvertebrate communities caused by predation, plant architecture, and bed position. To determine invertebrates consumed by fishes, I also examined stomach contents of potentially invertivorous fishes inhabiting these beds. Results indicate that position and predation are important in structuring macroinvertebrate communities, whereas plant architecture had little effect. My diet analyses indicate that the fishes sampled fall into three categories: 1) those that do not feed on macroinvertebrates; 2) those that feed on small invertebrates (e.g., dipterans); and 3) those that feed on large invertebrates (e.g., decapods) and poeciliid fishes. Further, the diets of the invertivorous fishes coincide with the distributions found in the macroinvertebrate community and, in general, those macroinvertebrates most commonly found in fish diets occurred in greater densities within the bed interior