408 research outputs found
Food Access in Petersburg, Virginia: Final Report and Recommendations
The City of Petersburg has long suffered with issues of limited access to food and food insecurity. Food deserts, or areas underserved by retail food options, are prevalent throughout the City. As a result, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has ranked the city last of Virginia\u27s 133 counties in their annual health rankings.
For the Fall 2019 semester, students from Virginia Commonwealth University\u27s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, through Dr. John Accordino\u27s Urban Commercial Revitalization course, focused on planning solutions to address food deserts in commercial areas, with the City of Petersburg being one of their clients. The class assessed the potential for commercial revitalization and made five recommendations
Superluminal Signals: Causal Loop Paradoxes Revisited
Recent results demonstrating superluminal group velocities and tachyonic
dispersion relations reopen the question of superluminal signals and causal
loop paradoxes. The sense in which superluminal signals are permitted is
explained in terms of pulse reshaping, and the self-consistent behavior which
prevents causal loop paradoxes is illustrated by an explicit example.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure
Increasing Access to Food: A Comprehensive Report on Food Supply Options
Access to food is one of the most important aspects of a healthy, sustainable community. Grocery stores and other suppliers can serve as an economic anchor to provide social benefits to communities. Unfortunately, many communities do not have convenient and/or affordable access to grocery items, particularly fresh produce.
As part of Virginia Commonwealth University\u27s Fall 2019 graduate course on Urban Commercial Revitalization, class members researched 13 retail and other food access options, which are described in this report. Each chapter covers a food access option and provides basic information that will be useful to individuals, organizations, or government agencies that wish to attract and/or develop grocery operations in their communities
A 3D explainability framework to uncover learning patterns and crucial sub-regions in variable sulci recognition
Precisely identifying sulcal features in brain MRI is made challenging by the
variability of brain folding. This research introduces an innovative 3D
explainability frame-work that validates outputs from deep learning networks in
their ability to detect the paracingulate sulcus, an anatomical feature that
may or may not be present on the frontal medial surface of the human brain.
This study trained and tested two networks, amalgamating local explainability
techniques GradCam and SHAP with a dimensionality reduction method. The
explainability framework provided both localized and global explanations, along
with accuracy of classification results, revealing pertinent sub-regions
contributing to the decision process through a post-fusion transformation of
explanatory and statistical features. Leveraging the TOP-OSLO dataset of MRI
acquired from patients with schizophrenia, greater accuracies of paracingulate
sulcus detection (presence or absence) were found in the left compared to right
hemispheres with distinct, but extensive sub-regions contributing to each
classification outcome. The study also inadvertently highlighted the critical
role of an unbiased annotation protocol in maintaining network performance
fairness. Our proposed method not only offers automated, impartial annotations
of a variable sulcus but also provides insights into the broader anatomical
variations associated with its presence throughout the brain. The adoption of
this methodology holds promise for instigating further explorations and
inquiries in the field of neuroscience
The Dark Side of Transfer Pricing: Its Role in Tax Avoidance and Wealth Retentiveness
In conventional accounting literature, ?transfer pricing? is portrayed as a technique for optimal allocation of costs and revenues amongst divisions, subsidiaries and joint ventures within a group of related entities. Such representations of transfer pricing simultaneously acknowledge and occlude how it is deeply implicated in processes of wealth retentiveness that enable companies to avoid taxes and facilitate the flight of capital. A purely technical conception of transfer pricing calculations abstracts them from the politico-economic contexts of their development and use. The context is the modern corporation in an era of globalized trade and its relationship to state tax authorities, shareholders and other possible stakeholders. Transfer pricing practices are responsive to opportunities for determining values in ways that are consequential for enhancing private gains, and thereby contributing to relative social impoverishment, by avoiding the payment of public taxes. Evidence is provided by examining some of the transfer prices practices used by corporations to avoid taxes in developing and developed economies
Caspase deficiency alters the murine gut microbiome
Caspases are aspartate-specific cysteine proteases that have an essential role in apoptosis and inflammation, and contribute to the maintenance of homeostasis in the intestine. These facts, together with the knowledge that caspases are implicated in host-microbe crosstalk, prompted us to investigate the effect of caspase (Casp)1, -3 and -7 deficiency on the composition of the murine gut microbiota. We observed significant changes in the abundance of the Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes phyla, in particular the Lachnospiraceae, Porphyromonodaceae and Prevotellacea families, when comparing Casp-1, -7 and -3 knockout mice with wild-type mice. Our data point toward an intricate relationship between these caspases and the composition of the murine gut microflora
The twilight of the Liberal Social Contract? On the Reception of Rawlsian Political Liberalism
This chapter discusses the Rawlsian project of public reason, or public justification-based 'political' liberalism, and its reception. After a brief philosophical rather than philological reconstruction of the project, the chapter revolves around a distinction between idealist and realist responses to it. Focusing on political liberalism’s critical reception illuminates an overarching question: was Rawls’s revival of a contractualist approach to liberal legitimacy a fruitful move for liberalism and/or the social contract tradition? The last section contains a largely negative answer to that question. Nonetheless the chapter's conclusion shows that the research programme of political liberalism provided and continues to provide illuminating insights into the limitations of liberal contractualism, especially under conditions of persistent and radical diversity. The programme is, however, less receptive to challenges to do with the relative decline of the power of modern states
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