Environmental Injustice/Racism in Flint, Michigan: An Analysis of the Bodily Integrity Claim in Mays v. Snyder as Compared to Other Environmental Justice Cases

This Note examines the merits of the “bodily integrity” claim that the Flint residents have alleged in Mays (but does not discuss any claims asserted in Earley, the case Mays was consolidated with on appeal), and asserts that they should be successful on this claim on remand, assuming that the facts alleged in the Flint residents’ complaint are true. This Note outlines the alleged facts and then discusses the existing case law on bodily integrity claims generally, both in the non-environmental justice and environmental justice fields. Following is an explanation of the specific bodily integrity claim the Flint residents have made and an application of the existing case law (from both the non-environmental justice and environmental justice fields) to the alleged facts. Lastly, this Note compares this federal Flint case to the parallel Flint-related state class action suit filed with the Michigan Court of Claims. Although there might be some legal hurdles that the Flint residents will have to overcome, their bodily integrity claim can be successful on remand and will likely not be precluded by federal statute if appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result, similar bodily integrity claims should be used as a remedy for contamination of other public drinking water sources across the country. The Flint residents should be able to establish that: (1) defendants’ actions occurred “under color of state law,” and (2) a constitutional right exists and was deprived. The Flint residents can best establish this by showing that defendants’ conduct was “outrageous and shocking” to the point where it “shocks the conscience” of the judiciary, as the defendants’ actions exhibited “deliberate indifference” to plaintiffs’ rights to clean water. On remand, no deference should be given to the district judge’s initial dismissal of the case because the district court made virtually no findings of fact and did not consider the merits of whether defendants actually violated the Flint residents’ established constitutional right to bodily integrity. Within the environmental justice context specifically, the magnitude of defendants’ intrusion on plaintiffs’ bodily integrity rights far outweighs the public health benefit (if there is any in this case) and its innocuous effect on the Flint residents resulting from defendants’ actions

Statistical and Computational Tradeoffs in Stochastic Composite Likelihood

Maximum likelihood estimators are often of limited practical use due to the intensive computation they require. We propose a family of alternative estimators that maximize a stochastic variation of the composite likelihood function. Each of the estimators resolve the computation-accuracy tradeoff differently, and taken together they span a continuous spectrum of computation-accuracy tradeoff resolutions. We prove the consistency of the estimators, provide formulas for their asymptotic variance, statistical robustness, and computational complexity. We discuss experimental results in the context of Boltzmann machines and conditional random fields. The theoretical and experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the estimators when the computational resources are insufficient. They also demonstrate that in some cases reduced computational complexity is associated with robustness thereby increasing statistical accuracy.Comment: 30 pages, 97 figures, 2 author

Asymptotic Analysis of Generative Semi-Supervised Learning

Semisupervised learning has emerged as a popular framework for improving modeling accuracy while controlling labeling cost. Based on an extension of stochastic composite likelihood we quantify the asymptotic accuracy of generative semi-supervised learning. In doing so, we complement distribution-free analysis by providing an alternative framework to measure the value associated with different labeling policies and resolve the fundamental question of how much data to label and in what manner. We demonstrate our approach with both simulation studies and real world experiments using naive Bayes for text classification and MRFs and CRFs for structured prediction in NLP.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure

Analytical Model for the Optical Functions of Indium Gallium Nitride with Application to Thin Film Solar Photovoltaic Cells

This paper presents the preliminary results of optical characterization using spectroscopic ellipsometry of wurtzite indium gallium nitride (InxGa1-xN) thin films with medium indium content (0.38<x<0.68) that were deposited on silicon dioxide using plasma-enhanced evaporation. A Kramers-Kronig consistent parametric analytical model using Gaussian oscillators to describe the absorption spectra has been developed to extract the real and imaginary components of the dielectric function ({\epsilon}1, {\epsilon}2) of InxGa1-xN films. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images are presented to examine film microstructure and verify film thicknesses determined from ellipsometry modelling. This fitting procedure, model, and parameters can be employed in the future to extract physical parameters from ellipsometric data from other InxGa1-xN films

A Revised Exoplanet Yield from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has a goal of detecting small planets orbiting stars bright enough for mass determination via ground-based radial velocity observations. Here we present estimates of how many exoplanets the TESS mission will detect, physical properties of the detected planets, and the properties of the stars that those planets orbit. This work uses stars drawn from the TESS Input Catalog Candidate Target List and revises yields from prior studies that were based on Galactic models. We modeled the TESS observing strategy to select approximately 200,000 stars at 2-minute cadence, while the remaining stars are observed at 30-min cadence in full-frame image data. We placed zero or more planets in orbit around each star, with physical properties following measured exoplanet occurrence rates, and used the TESS noise model to predict the derived properties of the detected exoplanets. In the TESS 2-minute cadence mode we estimate that TESS will find 1250+/-70 exoplanets (90% confidence), including 250 smaller than 2 Earth-radii. Furthermore, we predict an additional 3100 planets will be found in full-frame image data orbiting bright dwarf stars and more than 10,000 around fainter stars. We predict that TESS will find 500 planets orbiting M-dwarfs, but the majority of planets will orbit stars larger than the Sun. Our simulated sample of planets contains hundreds of small planets amenable to radial velocity follow-up, potentially more than tripling the number of planets smaller than 4 Earth-radii with mass measurements. This sample of simulated planets is available for use in planning follow-up observations and analyses.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJS. Table 2 is available in machine-readable format from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.613767