Poker Faces: Seeing Behind the Mask of Convention

“Poker Faces” interrogates the category of modernity in the history and criticism of domestic architecture, examining the relationship between formal innovation — typically used as our measure of originality — and planning innovation, in which new ways of living and experiencing the home are enabled through the translation of unconventional programs into interior spaces. Two examples of houses built for women clients — William Brainerd’s Colonial Revival “SCARAB” in Wellesley, Massachusetts (1907), built as a home for Professor Katharine Lee Bates and her life partner, Professor Katharine Coman; and Richard Neutra’s Constance Perkins House, in Pasadena, California (1955) — suggest that sometimes the most radical households lie behind self-protectively diffident façades

Applying Rule Ensembles to the Search for Super-Symmetry at the Large Hadron Collider

In this note we give an example application of a recently presented predictive learning method called Rule Ensembles. The application we present is the search for super-symmetric particles at the Large Hadron Collider. In particular, we consider the problem of separating the background coming from top quark production from the signal of super-symmetric particles. The method is based on an expansion of base learners, each learner being a rule, i.e. a combination of cuts in the variable space describing signal and background. These rules are generated from an ensemble of decision trees. One of the results of the method is a set of rules (cuts) ordered according to their importance, which gives useful tools for diagnosis of the model. We also compare the method to a number of other multivariate methods, in particular Artificial Neural Networks, the likelihood method and the recently presented boosted decision tree method. We find better performance of Rule Ensembles in all cases. For example for a given significance the amount of data needed to claim SUSY discovery could be reduced by 15 % using Rule Ensembles as compared to using a likelihood method.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, replaced to match version accepted for publication in JHE

Boston Children Thrive in 5: Connecting Families, Building Community (Presentation Slides)

Presentation about the Boston Thrive in 5 program

Pathways to Family Success Final Evaluation Report

This report presents findings from the second year of the evaluation of the Pathways to Family Success Programs (PFS) funded by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (ESE) and conducted by the Center for Social Policy (CSP) for the period September 2010 through June 2011. The 2010-2011 evaluation aimed to determine the extent to which PFS activities and interventions were effective in supporting learning outcomes and goal attainment for participating families and their children, and to identify strengths and areas of growth for the PFS Programs and partners. There were four Program sites implementing the PFS indepth project during the second year evaluation period. These leading agencies for the PFS sites included the following: Cambridge Community Learning Center Greater Lawrence Community ActionCouncil, Inc. Holyoke Public Schools Berkshire Children and Families, Inc. The evaluation design involved gathering information on three different outcome levels: the first level includes outcomes for adults, children and families; the second includes outcomes at the program level, and the third focuses on outcomes for the community partnership as a whole. The evaluation utilized a mixed-method approach including both qualitative and quantitative methods and a range of data sources to answer the research questions related to the PFS indepth projects and community partnerships. The evaluation team also conducted case studies of a sample of Pathways Families by interviewing two families from each Pathways site at two points in time