The Palaces of Comfort, Consolation and Distraction - The Pie and Mash shop as a performative space of a contested London working class memory

This thesis seeks to interrogate and clarify the history and culture of London’s traditional but fading and largely forgotten eel, pie and mash shops. In doing so the work examines their cultural conduit, the adjacent and evolving identity of the cockney whose contested memoryscapes have, I suggest, great contemporary political and cultural relevance in an age of populism and Brexit. The work excavates a tracing around the shops’ absences in historical literature. It situates their establishment within the dying breath of an older, popular street culture and the birth of a new London working class, centred around unofficial street markets and in a synchronous dance with the ideological accession of the bourgeoisie. The thesis employs the biological notion of a taxon to illustrate the shops’ evolution largely defined by the class-demotion of their clientele that mirrored the changing cartography of the city. By the late nineteenth century, this work argues, the eel and pie shops had become a pillar of a respectable London working class culture whose hyper-local solidarities revolved around micro-class divisions of work and negotiated bourgeois codes of propriety as part of a ‘culture of consolation’ that has remained largely impenetrable to outsiders. The study explores this concomitant cockney identity which became, partly through bourgeois theatrical ventriloquising, a figure of imperial incorporation. This eventually came to represent a particular type of ‘ordinariness’, subsequently reconfigured around the gains of a Welfare State and a national economy that continues to be periodically valorised according its usefulness to capital at times of political stress. Utilising sensory ethnography and memory studies the work explores the landscape and territoriality of the contemporary eel, pie and mash shop. It interrogates the rituals and complex, often competing and polyphonic memory inscriptions which memorialise a largely post-colonial nostalgic melancholia around the loss of fantasy of a British omnipotence. The thesis argues that the shops and their simulacra-like reincarnations amongst the cockney diaspora in the Essex new towns offer an insight into the changing notions of taste and class within the convivialities of a unique but broadly closed heritage of proletarian culture as a zone of resistance in the neoliberal city

Engineering comprehensible youth interrogation rights

Although youth in many Western countries have been afforded enhanced legal protections when facing police interrogations, the effectiveness of these protections may be limited by youth’s inability to comprehend them. The ability to increase the comprehension of Canadian interrogation rights among youth through the simplification of waiver forms was assessed. High school students (N = 367) in grades 9, 10, and 11 were presented with one of three waiver forms that varied in level of complexity. Comprehension of the information in the forms was assessed using free recall and multiple-choice questions. Results showed that comprehension levels increased as waiver form complexity decreased and comprehension levels increased as the age of the youth increased. The implications of these findings for the development of comprehensible youth interrogation rights are discussed

Active teacher selection for reinforcement learning from human feedback

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) enables machine learning systems to learn objectives from human feedback. A core limitation of these systems is their assumption that all feedback comes from a single human teacher, despite querying a range of distinct teachers. We propose the Hidden Utility Bandit (HUB) framework to model differences in teacher rationality, expertise, and costliness, formalizing the problem of learning from multiple teachers. We develop a variety of solution algorithms and apply them to two real-world domains: paper recommendation systems and COVID-19 vaccine testing. We find that the Active Teacher Selection (ATS) algorithm outperforms baseline algorithms by actively selecting when and which teacher to query. The HUB framework and ATS algorithm demonstrate the importance of leveraging differences between teachers to learn accurate reward models, facilitating future research on active teacher selection for robust reward modeling

Correction: A simple method for analyzing data from a randomized trial with a missing binary outcome

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Nuclear Physics Neutrino PreTown Meeting: Summary and Recommendations

In preparation for the nuclear physics Long Range Plan exercise, a group of 104 neutrino physicists met in Seattle September 21-23 to discuss both the present state of the field and the new opportunities of the next decade. This report summarizes the conclusions of that meeting and presents its recommendations. Further information is available at the workshop's web site. This report will be further reviewed at the upcoming Oakland Town Meeting.Comment: Latex, 31 pages. This version has been updated to include final Comments from the working group

Selecting patients for randomized trials: a systematic approach based on risk group

BACKGROUND: A key aspect of randomized trial design is the choice of risk group. Some trials include patients from the entire at-risk population, others accrue only patients deemed to be at increased risk. We present a simple statistical approach for choosing between these approaches. The method is easily adapted to determine which of several competing definitions of high risk is optimal. METHOD: We treat eligibility criteria for a trial, such as a smoking history, as a prediction rule associated with a certain sensitivity (the number of patients who have the event and who are classified as high risk divided by the total number patients who have an event) and specificity (the number of patients who do not have an event and who do not meet criteria for high risk divided by the total number of patients who do not have an event). We then derive simple formulae to determine the proportion of patients receiving intervention, and the proportion who experience an event, where either all patients or only those at high risk are treated. We assume that the relative risk associated with intervention is the same over all choices of risk group. The proportion of events and interventions are combined using a net benefit approach and net benefit compared between strategies. RESULTS: We applied our method to design a trial of adjuvant therapy after prostatectomy. We were able to demonstrate that treating a high risk group was superior to treating all patients; choose the optimal definition of high risk; test the robustness of our results by sensitivity analysis. Our results had a ready clinical interpretation that could immediately aid trial design. CONCLUSION: The choice of risk group in randomized trials is usually based on rather informal methods. Our simple method demonstrates that this decision can be informed by simple statistical analyses

On mitigating the analytical limitations of finely stratified experiments

Although attractive from a theoretical perspective, finely stratified experiments such as paired designs suffer from certain analytical limitations that are not present in block-randomized experiments with multiple treated and control individuals in each block. In short, when using a weighted difference in means to estimate the sample average treatment effect, the traditional variance estimator in a paired experiment is conservative unless the pairwise average treatment effects are constant across pairs; however, in more coarsely stratified experiments, the corresponding variance estimator is unbiased if treatment effects are constant within blocks, even if they vary across blocks. Using insights from classical least squares theory, we present an improved variance estimator that is appropriate in finely stratified experiments. The variance estimator remains conservative in expectation but is asymptotically no more conservative than the classical estimator and can be considerably less conservative. The magnitude of the improvement depends on the extent to which effect heterogeneity can be explained by observed covariates. Aided by this estimator, a new test for the null hypothesis of a constant treatment effect is proposed. These findings extend to some, but not all, superpopulation models, depending on whether the covariates are viewed as fixed across samples

Carnegie Supernova Project-II: Extending the Near-Infrared Hubble Diagram for Type Ia Supernovae to z∼0.1z\sim0.1

The Carnegie Supernova Project-II (CSP-II) was an NSF-funded, four-year program to obtain optical and near-infrared observations of a "Cosmology" sample of $\sim100$ Type Ia supernovae located in the smooth Hubble flow ($0.03 \lesssim z \lesssim 0.10$). Light curves were also obtained of a "Physics" sample composed of 90 nearby Type Ia supernovae at $z \leq 0.04$ selected for near-infrared spectroscopic time-series observations. The primary emphasis of the CSP-II is to use the combination of optical and near-infrared photometry to achieve a distance precision of better than 5%. In this paper, details of the supernova sample, the observational strategy, and the characteristics of the photometric data are provided. In a companion paper, the near-infrared spectroscopy component of the project is presented.Comment: 43 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in PAS

Vernix caseosa peritonitis – no longer rare or innocent: a case series

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Vernix Caseosa peritonitis is a rare post caesarean section complication with only 19 case reports in the literature to date. Vernix caseosa spilt at the time of caesarean section is thought to incite an inflammatory reaction, causing symptoms resembling an acute abdomen.</p> <p>Case Presentation</p> <p>We discuss three Caucasian patients (aged 32 to 43 years) who presented in our health sector in Sydney with vernix caseosa peritonitis. Each had a protracted course with significant comorbidities requiring surgical and medical intervention. This contrasts with other reports suggesting that a rapid resolution can be expected.</p> <p>This cluster may be a consequence of the rising caesarean section rate, a heightened local awareness of the condition and possibly a result of leaving material in the paracolic gutters intraoperatively.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our aim is to increase awareness among our obstetric and surgical colleagues of the characteristic clinical presentation and intra-operative findings of vernix caseosa peritonitis. We also point out that, in contrast to those presented here, not all patients require laparotomy.</p

Search for Oscillation of the Electron-Capture Decay Probability of Pm-142

We have searched for time modulation of the electron capture decay probability of 142Pm in an attempt to confirm a recent claim from a group at the Gesellschaft fur Schwerionenforschung (GSI). We produced 142Pm via the 124Sn(23Na, 5n)142Pm reaction at the Berkeley 88-Inch Cyclotron with a bombardment time short compared to the reported modulation period. Isotope selection by the Berkeley Gas-filled Separator is followed by implantation and a long period of monitoring the 142Nd K alpha x-rays from the daughter. The decay time spectrum of the x-rays is well-described by a simple exponential and the measured half-life of 40.68(53) seconds is consistent with the accepted value. We observed no oscillatory modulation at the proposed frequency at a level 31 times smaller than that reported by Litvinov (Phys. Lett. B 664 (2008) 162). A literature search for previous experiments that might have been sensitive to the reported modulation uncovered another example in 142Eu electron-capture decay. A reanalysis of the published data shows no oscillatory behavior