Three Essays on the College Admissions Process.

Over the past several decades, the perceived returns to college completion have influenced both conventional wisdom and national policy. Yet there is significant heterogeneity in these returns by student and by school. This has helped to create industries and policies designed to match students to the colleges of their choice. Preparatory industries improve students’ SAT scores, automatic admissions programs extend college access to diverse populations, and merit-based scholarships funnel students toward particular colleges. Each of these presents students with unique incentives. In this dissertation, I study the impact that each has on students’ preparation for college and their enrollment choice. In my first chapter, “The Impact of Admissions Policies and Test Prep on SAT Scores,” I study how college policies impact student behavior and SAT scores. I find that when colleges cannot view how often students take the SAT, the optimal score evaluation policy is unclear depending on policymakers’ objectives. In my second chapter, “Does Student Effort Respond to Incentives? Evidence from Automatic College Admissions,” co-authored with Lindsay Daugherty, Paco Martorell, and Isaac McFarlin, Jr., I study how students respond to academic policies in high school. We use the Texas Top Ten Percent Law as a quasi-experiment to study whether students shirk if they are guaranteed admission to college, finding evidence that their grades fall slightly but their class participation does not. In my third chapter, “Iowa's National Scholars Award and the Efficiency of Merit Aid: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis,” co-authored with Stephen L. DesJardins, I study the impact that rule-based merit aid has on the probability of student enrollment at the University of Iowa. We find a jump in students’ probability of enrollment at the award cutoff. Analysis of an earlier, tiered version of the award suggests that it could be effectively targeted towards very high-achieving applicants. These chapters analyze several points of the college application process, from standardized testing to enrollment choice. There is much additional work to be done in studying this process, and it is my hope that future work on these topics will represent an important step forward in the economics of education.PHDEconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102308/1/dleeds_1.pd

Assisted auscultation : creation and visualization of high dimensional feature spaces for the detection of mitral regurgitation

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, June 2006."May 2006."Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-84).Cardiac auscultation, listening to the heart using a stethoscope, often constitutes the first step in detection of common heart problems. Unfortunately, primary care physicians, who perform this initial screening, often lack the experience to correctly evaluate what they hear. False referrals are frequent, costing hundreds of dollars and hours of time for many patients. We report on a system we have built to aid medical practitioners in diagnosing Mitral Regurgitation (MR) based on heart sounds. Our work builds on the "prototypical beat" introduced by Syed in [17] to extract two different feature sets characterizing systolic acoustic activity. One feature set is derived from current medical knowledge. The other is based on unsupervised learning of systolic shapes, using component Analysis. Our system employs self-organizing maps (SOMs) to depict the distribution of patients in each feature space as labels within a two-dimensional colored grid. A user screens new patients by viewing their projections onto the SOM, and determining whether they are closer in space, and thus more similar, to patients with or without MR. We evaluated our system on 46 patients. Using a combination of the two feature sets, SOM-based diagnosis classified patients with accuracy similar to that of a cardiologist.by Daniel Demeny Leeds.M.Eng

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Aerobic glycolysis as a marker of tumor aggressiveness: Preliminary data in high grade human brain tumors

Objectives. Glucose metabolism outside of oxidative phosphorylation, or aerobic glycolysis (AG), is a hallmark of active cancer cells that is not directly measured with standard 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET). In this study, we characterized tumor regions with elevated AG defined based on PET measurements of glucose and oxygen metabolism. Methods. Fourteen individuals with high-grade brain tumors underwent structural MR scans and PET measurements of cerebral blood flow (CBF), oxygen (CMRO2) and glucose (CMRGlu) metabolism, and AG, using 15O-labeled CO, O2 and H2O, and FDG, and were compared to a normative cohort of 20 age-matched individuals. Results. Elevated AG was observed in most high-grade brain tumors and it was associated with decreased CMRO2 and CBF, but not with significant changes in CMRGlu. Elevated AG was a dramatic and early sign of tumor growth associated with decreased survival. AG changes associated with tumor growth were differentiated from the effects of nonneoplastic processes such as epileptic seizures. Conclusions. Our findings demonstrate that high-grade brain tumors exhibit elevated AG as a marker of tumor growth and aggressiveness. AG may detect areas of active tumor growth that are not evident on conventional FDG PET

State Control and the Effects of Foreign Relations on Bilateral Trade

Do states use trade to reward and punish partners? WTO rules and the pressures of globalization restrict states’ capacity to manipulate trade policies, but we argue that governments can link political goals with economic outcomes using less direct avenues of influence over firm behavior. Where governments intervene in markets, politicization of trade is likely to occur. In this paper, we examine one important form of government control: state ownership of firms. Taking China and India as examples, we use bilateral trade data by firm ownership type, as well as measures of bilateral political relations based on diplomatic events and UN voting to estimate the effect of political relations on import and export flows. Our results support the hypothesis that imports controlled by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) exhibit stronger responsiveness to political relations than imports controlled by private enterprises. A more nuanced picture emerges for exports; while India’s exports through SOEs are more responsive to political tensions than its flows through private entities, the opposite is true for China. This research holds broader implications for how we should think about the relationship between political and economic relations going forward, especially as a number of countries with partially state-controlled economies gain strength in the global economy

Comparison of the Safety and Pharmacokinetics of ST-246® after IV Infusion or Oral Administration in Mice, Rabbits and Monkeys

ST-246® is an antiviral, orally bioavailable small molecule in clinical development for treatment of orthopoxvirus infections. An intravenous (IV) formulation may be required for some hospitalized patients who are unable to take oral medication. An IV formulation has been evaluated in three species previously used in evaluation of both efficacy and toxicology of the oral formulation. plasma concentrations. These effects were eliminated using slower IV infusions. associated toxicity. Shorter infusions at higher doses in NHP resulted in decreased clearance, suggesting saturated distribution or elimination. Elimination half-lives in all species were similar between oral and IV administration. The administration of ST-246 was well tolerated as a slow IV infusion