Investigating Philadelphia's Uncertified Childcare Providers

Reinvestment Fund's ChildCare Map provides information about the location, size, and quality of early childcare centers operating in Philadelphia. When ChildCare Map launched in 2014 researchers identified a large number of "uncertified providers"--childcare centers operating in Philadelphia, but not listed in the state's OCDEL database. Uncertified providers operate outside of the state's official records, and therefore very little information exists about their size, services, or quality

Jacksonville Block by Block: Our Homes, Our Neighborhoods, Our Opportunities

This study is based on what The Reinvestment Fund calls a "Market Value Analysis" -- a tool designed to help private markets, government officials and philanthropy identify and comprehend the various elements of local real estate markets.By using the analysis, public sector officials, non-profits/philanthropy and private market actors can more precisely craft intervention strategies in weak markets and support sustainable growth in stronger market segments.The Market Value Analysis looks at communities at the Census block group level to discover the variations of housing market health, stability and opportunity in neighborhoods. It is based fundamentally on local administrative data sources.The analysis focuses on residential real estate because neighborhoods are -- first and foremost -- places where people live. The analysis then overlays other elements -- transportation, jobs, etc. -- to provide a more complete picture. The analysis is done at the Census block group level because even within discreet neighborhoods there can be significant variation. By identifying pockets of opportunity or concern early, communities can effectively "draft" on market forces or act before problems expand

Bargaining Between Goals

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-70-A-0362-0003.Bargaining is a process used to modify conflicting demands on an expendable resource so that a satisfactory allocation can be made. In this paper, I consider the design of a bargaining system to handle the problem of scheduling an individual's weekly activities and appointments. The bargaining system is based on the powerful reasoning strategy of producing a simplified linear plan by considering the various constraints independently and then debugging the resulting conflicts.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agenc

Specializing for predicting obesity and its co-morbidities

AbstractWe present specializing, a method for combining classifiers for multi-class classification. Specializing trains one specialist classifier per class and utilizes each specialist to distinguish that class from all others in a one-versus-all manner. It then supplements the specialist classifiers with a catch-all classifier that performs multi-class classification across all classes. We refer to the resulting combined classifier as a specializing classifier.We develop specializing to classify 16 diseases based on discharge summaries. For each discharge summary, we aim to predict whether each disease is present, absent, or questionable in the patient, or unmentioned in the discharge summary. We treat the classification of each disease as an independent multi-class classification task. For each disease, we develop one specialist classifier for each of the present, absent, questionable, and unmentioned classes; we supplement these specialist classifiers with a catch-all classifier that encompasses all of the classes for that disease. We evaluate specializing on each of the 16 diseases and show that it improves significantly over voting and stacking when used for multi-class classification on our data

Some Projects in Automatic Programming

Work reported herein was conducted at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research program supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and monitored by the Office of Naval Research under Contract Number N00014-70-A-0362-0005.This paper proposes three research topics within the general framework of Automatic Programming. The projects are designing (1) a student programmer, (2) a robot programmer and (3) a physicist's helper. The purpose of these projects is both to explore fundamental ideas regarding the nature of programming as well as to propose practical applications of AI research. The reason for offering this discussion as a Working Paper is to suggest possible research topics which members of the laboratory may be interested in pursuing.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Understanding neighborhood change: An approach to assessing displacement risk among NYC residents

The SIAP research team has sought to develop methods to assess the complexity of rapid neighborhood change in New York and other U.S. cities. Reinvestment Fund developed an approach to identify locations in New York City where the housing market has changed in a way that residents who have been in a community for several years cannot likely be replaced by people of similar economic means. This paper discusses their method—called Displacement Risk Ratio (DRR)—for identifying areas at risk of displacement (or the inability to replace a resident population over time) based on the gap between housing costs and household income. The paper identifies six patterns in neighborhoods with significant DRR Sales increases as a preliminary typology of change: 1) transitioned from majority black or Hispanic to racially/ethnically diverse; 2) remained predominantly black or Hispanic; 3) remained predominantly white; 4) Asian immigrant neighborhoods; 5) remained diverse; and 6) high residential development areas. The conclusion reviews the potential for use of the DRR method to assess neighborhood change in New York City

Investing in Community Change: An Evaluation of a Decade of Data-Driven Grantmaking

The Wells Fargo Regional Foundation has a well-established continuum of grantmaking and technical-assistance programs designed to improve the quality of life for children and families living in low-income communities in eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. The foundation’s decade long focus on neighborhood revitalization has helped to shape a resident-driven, collaborative, long-term, and data-informed approach designed to make neighborhoods more attractive for large-scale investment. In 2014, the foundation engaged The Reinvestment Fund and Success Measures at NeighborWorks America to jointly evaluate the impact of its grantmaking and related programs from 2003 to 2013, to determine if practices in its approach could be transferred to other regions, and to assess its influence in the field. The evaluation examined lessons from 140 grants, totaling $41.69 million, that enabled hundreds of projects in the region and leveraged$231.5 million in direct and indirect neighborhood investment. Based on the findings of the evaluation, the foundation reaffirmed its mission, revised certain aspects of its Neighborhood Grants Program, and in a new strategic plan further defined and enhanced its opportunities for collaboration and shared learning within the funding community

Sternoclavicular joint arthropathy mimicking radiculopathy in a patient with concurrent C4-5 disc herniation

Background Patients with sternoclavicular joint arthropathy, which can result from septic arthritis, often present with localized sternoclavicular pain as well as shoulder pain. Such pain may be similar to the presenting symptoms of cervical intervertebral disc herniation. Clinical presentation A 47-year-old female presented with 1 month of significant pain in the neck as well as right anterior chest and deltoid. The patient was found to have reduced strength in the right deltoid muscle on physical examination. MRI revealed a C4-C5 herniated nucleus pulposus. The patient underwent successful C4-C5 anterior cervical discectomy, but subsequently developed painful swelling in the region of the right sternoclavicular joint with limited motor strength in the right shoulder and arm. A needle biopsy of the mass yielded negative results, but her erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) and C-reactive protein (CRP) numbers did respond to antibiotics, consistent with infection of the sternoclavicular joint. A follow-up CT scan (6.5 months postoperatively) revealed apparent resolution right sternoclavicular joint arthropathy, thought the patient continued to experience pain. 15 months postoperatively, the patient was prescribed methotrexate due to persistent pain and mild weakness arising from a possible rheumatologic inflammation. 19 months postoperatively, the patient had full strength of the right shoulder and arm and visible decrease in swelling at the sternoclavicular joint. More than three years postoperatively, the patient was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, which was appropriately treated. At follow-up four years postoperatively, the patient had an MRI showing new C6-C7 herniated nucleus pulposus, but no longer had any right shoulder or chest pain or associated weakness. Conclusion This case demonstrates that sternoclavicular joint arthropathy results in symptoms that can mimic the presenting symptoms of shoulder or cervical spine pathology, such as shoulder and neck pain, necessitating careful diagnosis and management

Concurrence of Danish Dementia and Cataract: Insights from the Interactions of Dementia Associated Peptides with Eye Lens α-Crystallin

Familial Danish Dementia (FDD) is an autosomal disease, which is distinguished by gradual loss of vision, deafness, progressive ataxia and dementia. Cataract is the first manifestation of the disease. In this article, we demonstrate a specific correlation between the poisoning of the chaperone activity of the rat eye lens α-crystallins, loss of lens transparency in organ culture by the pathogenic form of the Danish dementia peptide, i.e. the reduced Danish dementia peptide (redADan peptide), by a combination of ex vivo, in vitro, biophysical and biochemical techniques. The interaction of redADan peptide and lens crystallins are very specific when compared with another chaperone, HSP-70, underscoring the specificity of the pathogenic form of Danish dementia peptide, redADan, for the early onset of cataract in this disease