Centering High Risk Pregnancies Interprofessionaly (CHRPI) to Reduce Racial Disparities in Pregnancy Outcomes

Background: Despite the steady rise in use of prenatal care, significant racial disparities exist in pregnancy-related outcomes. This calls for innovative prenatal care to improve pregnancy outcomes in racial minorities. CHRPI is an innovative prenatal care model designed to address risk factors and manageable conditions particularly prevalent in African Americans that threaten their course of pregnancy. Methods: CHRPI is an outpatient model (Fig. 1) that will accept pregnant moms with risk-factors outlined by the ACOG. They are initially evaluated by a Maternal Fetal Medicine physician where management is outlined. Then, patients are placed in groups of 4 according to their expected course of pregnancy, social, and medical needs. Between medical appointments, patients will attend sessions facilitated by a multidisciplinary team to receive education on nutrition, insulin management, alarming symptoms and more. Additionally, patients will have opportunity to address individual social and medical needs with licensed clinical social workers and mid-level providers outside of groups. Lastly, CHRPI’s care extends as far as 6 months postpartum to reassess newly diagnosed conditions or risk-factors to protect future pregnancies and establish primary care upon exiting the program. Results: Compared to traditional care of high-risk patients (Fig. 2), proposed CHRPI model is expected to decrease rate of maternal and infant mortality, pre-term birth, NICU admissions, and patient satisfaction. Conclusion: CHRPI aims to reduce racial disparities in maternal and infant mortalities associated with high-risk pregnancies by utilizing an innovative multidisciplinary group approach with significant emphasis on nutrition, education, and primary care to protect future pregnancies.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/gradposters/1100/thumbnail.jp

Federal Forum Provisions and the Internal Affairs Doctrine

A key question at the intersection of state and federal law is whether corporations can use their charters or bylaws to restrict securities litigation to federal court. In December 2018, the Delaware Chancery Court answered this question in the negative in the landmark decision Sciabacucchi v. Salzberg. The court invalidated “federal forum provisions” (“FFPs”) that allow companies to select federal district courts as the exclusive venue for claims brought under the Securities Act of 1933 (“1933 Act”). The decision held that the internal affairs doctrine, which is the bedrock of U.S. corporate law, does not permit charter and bylaw provisions that restrict rights under federal law. In March 2020, the Delaware Supreme Court overturned the Chancery’s decision in Salzberg v. Sciabacucchi, holding, among others, that in addition to “internal” affairs, charters and bylaws can regulate “intra-corporate” affairs, including choosing the forum for Securities Act claims. This Article presents the first empirical analysis of federal forum provisions. Using a hand-collected data set, we examine the patterns of adoption of such provisions and the characteristics of adopting firms. We show that adoption rates are higher for firms with characteristics, such as belonging to a particular industry, that make them more vulnerable to claims under the 1933 Act. We also show that adoption rates substantially increased after the Supreme Court case Cyan Inc. v. Beaver County Employees Retirement Fund, which validated concurrent jurisdiction for both federal and state courts for 1933 Act claims. We also find that the firms that adopt FFPs at the initial public offering (“IPO”) stage tend to share characteristics that have been associated with relatively good corporate governance. To assess the impact of the Sciabacucchi decision, we also conduct an event study. We find that the decision is associated with a large negative stock price effect for companies that had FFPs in their charters or bylaws. The effect is robust even for firms that had better governance features, that underpriced their stock at the IPOs, and whose stock price traded at or above the IPO price prior to the Sciabacucchi decision. In light of the empirical findings suggesting that federal forum provisions may serve shareholders’ interests by mitigating excessive 1933 Act litigation, we consider alternative legal theories for validating federal forum provisions in corporate charters and bylaws. We suggest two possible approaches: (1) allowing corporate charters and bylaws to address matters that are technically external but deal with the “affairs” of the corporation; and (2) adopting a more “flexible” internal affairs doctrine that could view 1933 Act claims as being “internal” to a corporation’s affairs. The Delaware Supreme Court’s decision can be viewed as being more consistent with the first, rather than the second, approach. We examine the possible implications of adopting either approach, particularly with respect to the existing Delaware statute on exclusive forum provisions and to mandatory arbitration provisions

The Meme Stock Frenzy: Origins and Implications

In 2021, several publicly traded companies, such as GameStop and AMC, became “meme stocks,” experiencing a sharp rise in their stock prices through a dramatic influx of retail investors into their shareholder base. Analyses of the meme stock surge and its implications for corporate governance have focused on the idiosyncratic creation of online communities around particular stocks during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this Article, we argue that the emergence of meme stocks is part of longer-running digital transformations in trading, investing, and governance. On the trading front, the sudden abolition of commissions by major online brokerages in 2019 reduced entry costs for retail investors. Zero-commission trading represents a modification of the payment for order flow (PFOF) system, which is itself a product of technological disruptions in the financial markets in the 1980s. With respect to investing, the emergence of social media communication amplified retail investors’ pre-existing dependence on social networks to make decisions regarding stock market entry and portfolio construction. It also allowed them to coordinate their investing activities and affect the market price while expressing their non-financial interests. Finally, while some startups have attempted to bring the shareholder experience into the digital age and help retail investors participate in governance, these developments have been relatively modest. After tracing the meme stock phenomenon, we sketch a research agenda for law and finance scholars to explore the concrete effects of meme investing on corporate governance outcomes. First, we ask whether retail traders can transform into enthusiastic retail shareholders engaged in corporate governance. Second, we propose a broader metric for “meme-ness”: future scholarship can use modern advances in data science to better identify which companies are vulnerable to meme surges and social media-driven investing unrelated to their financial fundamentals

Design of an Autonomous Agriculture Robot for Real Time Weed Detection using CNN

Agriculture has always remained an integral part of the world. As the human population keeps on rising, the demand for food also increases, and so is the dependency on the agriculture industry. But in today's scenario, because of low yield, less rainfall, etc., a dearth of manpower is created in this agricultural sector, and people are moving to live in the cities, and villages are becoming more and more urbanized. On the other hand, the field of robotics has seen tremendous development in the past few years. The concepts like Deep Learning (DL), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) are being incorporated with robotics to create autonomous systems for various sectors like automotive, agriculture, assembly line management, etc. Deploying such autonomous systems in the agricultural sector help in many aspects like reducing manpower, better yield, and nutritional quality of crops. So, in this paper, the system design of an autonomous agricultural robot which primarily focuses on weed detection is described. A modified deep-learning model for the purpose of weed detection is also proposed. The primary objective of this robot is the detection of weed on a real-time basis without any human involvement, but it can also be extended to design robots in various other applications involved in farming like weed removal, plowing, harvesting, etc., in turn making the farming industry more efficient. Source code and other details can be found at https://github.com/Dhruv2012/Autonomous-Farm-RobotComment: Published at the AVES 2021 conference. Source code and other details can be found at https://github.com/Dhruv2012/Autonomous-Farm-Robo

Meme Corporate Governance

Can retail investors revolutionize corporate governance and make public companies more responsive to social concerns? The U.S. stock market offered an unusual experiment to test the impact of retail investors in 2021, when there was a dramatic influx of retail investors into the shareholder base of companies such as GameStop and AMC. The meme surge phenomenon elicited a variety of reactions from scholars and practitioners. While some worried that affected companies’ share prices were becoming disjointed from their financial fundamentals, others predicted that retail shareholders will reduce the power of large institutional investors and democratize corporate governance. This Article presents the first empirical analysis of the impact of retail investors on the governance of companies affected by the “meme stock surge.” The Article presents three principal findings. First, we show how the “meme stock” frenzy was affected by the introduction of the commission-free trading platform, such as Robinhood, in 2019. We show that the meme stock companies experienced higher abnormal stock returns when commission-free trading was widely introduced, and saw elevated trading volumes afterward. Second, we examine how the influx of retail shareholders has directly affected the governance outcomes at the meme stock companies. Notwithstanding the promise of a more active retail shareholder base, we show that meme stock companies have experienced a significant decrease in participation by their shareholders with respect to voting. Shareholder proposals under Rule 14a-8 have also been extremely limited, with most meme firms seeing no proposals brought after the rapid increase in retail ownership. Third, we examine whether the increase in retail shareholder base had any indirect effect on corporate governance and performance. While board gender diversity at these firms is broadly unchanged, their ESG scores have gotten worse subsequent to the meme surge. Examining meme firms’ use of corporate funds, we find decreases in research and development and capital expenditures after the meme surge. Collectively, our findings suggest that the influx of retail shareholders at these companies have not translated into more “democratic” governance regimes or reduced agency costs, even at firms the scholarly and popular commentary had highlighted as the cynosure of the retail investor storm

ASSESSING RISK INTRODUCED THROUGH A CODE CHANGE

Techniques are presented herein that shift the risk assessment focus during a software development process, away from the traditional end-of-process review (when a new feature is delivered, or an application is deployed) to earlier in the process when developers are actively at work. Such an approach allows a developer to assess the risk that a candidate software change is about to introduce prior to the developer committing that change, providing the developer with time (during the early portion of the process) to revisit the software and eliminate the identified risk. Aspects of the presented techniques leverage elements of a continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) facility, the results that are available from existing unit and end-to-end tests, and the collection and analysis of OpenTelemetry (OTEL)-based metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) data to deliver security insights

IDENTIFYING ENTERPRISE RISK BASED ON BUSINESS CONTEXT WITH THREAT INTELLIGENCE

Presented herein are techniques that facilitate prioritizing risk mitigation efforts for business-critical services and transactions through the incorporation of a business context into threat intelligence scoring. Under aspects of the presented techniques, traditional threat intelligence tools may be employed to evaluate the risk that is associated with an enterprise asset; the results of such an evaluation may then be augmented with an enterprise-assigned business value for the asset to derive the asset’s business risk; and such a business risk may be leveraged to prioritize risk mitigation efforts, may be combined with other business risks, etc. The above-described process may be referred to herein as Business Risk Management (BRM)

Circulation and Stirring in the Southeast Pacific Ocean and the Scotia Sea Sectors of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current

The large-scale middepth circulation and eddy diffusivities in the southeast Pacific Ocean and Scotia Sea sectors between 110° and 45°W of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) are described based on a subsurface quasi-isobaric RAFOS-float-based Lagrangian dataset. These RAFOS float data were collected during the Diapycnal and Isopycnal Mixing Experiment in the Southern Ocean (DIMES). The mean flow, adjusted to a common 1400-m depth, shows the presence of jets in the time-averaged sense with speeds of 6 cm s⁻¹ in the southeast Pacific Ocean and upward of 13 cm s−¹ in the Scotia Sea. These jets appear to be locked to topography in the Scotia Sea but, aside from negotiating a seamount chain, are mostly free of local topographic constraints in the southeast Pacific Ocean. The eddy kinetic energy (EKE) is higher than the mean kinetic energy everywhere in the sampled domain by about 50%. The magnitude of the EKE increases drastically (by a factor of 2 or more) as the current crosses over the Hero and Shackleton fracture zones into the Scotia Sea. The meridional isopycnal stirring shows lateral and vertical variations with local eddy diffusivities as high as 2800 ± 600 m2 s⁻¹ at 700 m decreasing to 990 ± 200 m² s⁻¹ at 1800 m in the southeast Pacific Ocean. However, the cross-ACC diffusivity in the southeast Pacific Ocean is significantly lower, with values of 690 ± 150 and 1000 ± 200 m² s⁻¹ at shallow and deep levels, respectively, due to the action of jets. The cross-ACC diffusivity in the Scotia Sea is about 1200 ± 500 m² s⁻¹