Spatial Concentration of Opioid Overdose Deaths in Indianapolis: An Application of the Law of Crime Concentration at Place to a Public Health Epidemic

The law of crime concentration at place has become a criminological axiom and the foundation for one of the strongest evidence-based policing strategies to date. Using longitudinal data from three sources, emergency medical service calls, death toxicology reports from the Marion County (Indiana) Coroner’s Office, and police crime data, we provide four unique contributions to this literature. First, this study provides the first spatial concentration estimation of opioid-related deaths. Second, our findings support the spatial concentration of opioid deaths and the feasibility of this approach for public health incidents often outside the purview of traditional policing. Third, we find that opioid overdose death hot spots spatially overlap with areas of concentrated violence. Finally, we apply a recent method, corrected Gini coefficient, to best specify low-N incident concentrations and propose a novel method for improving upon a shortcoming of this approach. Implications for research and interventions are discussed

Use of an artificial neural network to predict air temperature, surface temperature, dew point and wind speed for the prediction of frost

Frost forms on bridges in Iowa about thirty times per year and presents a potentially hazardous condition for motorists. Accurate frost forecasts allow roadway maintenance personnel to make timely applications of preventative or suppressant material and minimize environmental impact from fugitive chemicals. However, accurate predictions present a challenge to forecasters due to high spatial variability of key meteorological factors leading to frost. A series of models were developed through the use of an artificial neural network to forecast the parameters (air temperature and dew point, bridge surface temperature, and winds) needed to drive an algorithm for frost deposition on bridges. The neural network was trained on model output and observations for four observation sites from three cold seasons (1995-1998). The frost model was then tested on data from the 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 cold seasons in Ames, IA. The frost forecast was developed to be issued at 18 UTC (12 PM) daily for twenty minute intervals beginning at 00 UTC (6 PM) and ending at 15 UTC (9 AM) local time. Results show that the artificial neural network forecast method produces more accurate forecasts in the short term than model output statistics derived from the 6 AM local time run of one of the National Weather Service models. Over the forecast period, the artificial neural network displayed a bias for under forecasting dew point, air temperature and surface temperature. Despite these biases, it is shown that the use of an artificial neural network as a tool for forecasting meteorological parameters is possible given the appropriate data

The romance with Melville and American literary history

textThis dissertation traces the historical emergence of what I call the romance with Melville during the postwar moment and argues that its striking endurance demands that we rethink the relationship between the discipline’s past and present. For the enduring vitality of the romance with Melville throughout the twentieth century points to deep continuities across major cuts in the discipline’s history. These continuities that the romance makes visible suggest that the discipline’s past is not so monolithically invested in masculinism, nationalism, and racism as many dominant voices have claimed it was, and also that the discipline’s present has not broken with its predecessors as completely as many had thought. I begin with a chapter that introduces the prevalence of the romance with Melville in American literary history, interrogates why Melville’s work lends itself so readily to this hermeneutic move, and articulates how the persistence of this move upsets the authoritative histories of American literary studies. My second chapter describes how Melville’s final story Billy Budd elicited a remarkably explicit transatlantic conversation about the affective and political ramifications of postwar heteronormativity. Chapter 3 examines C.L.R. James’s conversation with postwar Americanists about Moby-Dick, a conversation in which James sought to galvanize the critical community to fight the anti-democratic Cold War immigration laws under which James himself was being deported. My final chapter analyzes Ralph Ellison’s use of Moby-Dick, “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and The Confidence-Man to argue that American literature is fundamentally concerned with and informed by issues of racial injustice and inequality. In both his literary criticism and his fiction, Ellison, I argue, used Melville’s writing to criticize the racial negligence of American literary critics and to reflect on the ironies of his own abiding loyalty to white canonical writers like Melville. When one follows the various permutations of the romance with Melville in this moment and attends to the contestations it facilitated, one finds a rich, politically multivalent critical discourse that in many important but unacknowledged ways lays the groundwork for the political desires and textual attachments that continue to animate American literary studies.Englis

Rethinking PEGRAM : why ERISA health benefits administrators should have a comprehensive legal requirement of fiduciary duty

In the 2000 case Pegram v. Herdrich, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that administrators of health benefits plans covered by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974 do not have a fiduciary duty towards beneficiaries when making mixed decisions involving treatment and eligibility components. This thesis, Rethinking Pegram: Why ERISA Health Benefits Administrators Should Have a Comprehensive Legal Requirement of Fiduciary Duty, challenges the Court\u27s opinion on grounds of legal precedent and public health ethics. While the legal critique of Pegram is an elaboration of earlier scholarship, the public health ethics critique represents a unique contribution to the field. The problem area that this thesis seeks to address is the conflicts of interest that arise under contemporary arrangements of managed care. Various gate-keeping schemes and financial incentives put physicians in a position where they can no longer solely consider the best interests of their patients. Instead, they must balance the needs of the individual patient against the limited resources for the entire patient population. In resolving this challenge, however, physicians receive little or no guidance from traditional ethical paradigms of medical ethics and bioethics, which were developed with dyadic relationships in mind. A reversal of Pegram, or the de facto creation of a legal requirement of fiduciary duty for BRISA plans, would help to ameliorate this problem of dual agency and restore trust to the patient-physician relationship. This policy is justified along the four dimensions of public health ethics: the communitarian tradition and common good, scientific-based decision-making, social justice, and legitimate government intervention

Stable Isotopes and Climate Change

The following description of the role of the study of stable isotopes in water and carbon dioxide molecules when constructing a record of Earth’s pattern of climate change is an excerpt from: Climate Change and Society by Raymond S. Bradley & Norman E. Law (2001) Nelson Thornes, Cheltenham, UK (ISBN: 0 7487 5823 2

Selection into Mental Health Court: Distinguishing Among Eligible Defendants

How defendants are selected into mental health courts (MHC) is central to issues of fairness, efficacy, and successful program replication. Only recently has empirical research started to examine MHC selection, revealing a multi-stage process with multiple decision makers and multiple variables. In this study, we use classification and regression tree analysis (CART) to examine the variables suggested in recent research to predict selection into MHC. The analysis includes legal and diagnostic variables, treatment history, measures of treatability, motivation to change, violence risk, and symptom severity. We find that the MHC is more likely to accept defendants who did not have warrants issued for their arrest, who had diagnoses other than depression, and who did not report using illegal drugs around the time of their admission. Symptom severity and motivation to treatment also predict MHC admission, with their effects contingent on defendants’ statuses on other variables

Examining Mental Health Court Completion: A Focal Concerns Perspective

Sociologists have long-raised concern about disparate treatment in the justice system. Focal concerns have become the dominant perspective in explaining these disparities in legal processing decisions. Despite the growth of problem-solving courts, little research has examined how this perspective operates in nontraditional court settings. This article used a mixed-method approach to examine focal concerns in a mental health court (MHC). Observational findings indicate that gender and length of time in court influence the court's contextualization of noncompliance. While discussions of race were absent in observational data, competing-risk survival analysis finds that gender and race interact to predict MHC termination

Traumatic Brain Injury and Recidivism among Returning Inmates

In recent years, there has been a surge in research that examines the relationship between traumatic brain injury (TBI) and involvement in the criminal justice system. However, the bulk of this research has been largely retrospective and descriptive, comparing rates of TBI in the offending population with the rates of TBI in the general population. Although findings from these studies indicate a higher prevalence of TBI in the offending population, virtually no studies have examined whether those with TBI are more likely to recidivate. To address this gap, the present study examined rearrest post release from prison among a cohort sample of Indiana inmates who were screened using the Ohio State University Traumatic Brain Injury Identification (OSU-TBI-ID) instrument. Findings indicate that, net of control variables, those with TBI were more likely to recidivate sooner than those without TBI. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed

Exploring Stigmatization and Stigma Management in Mental Health Court: Assessing Modified Labeling Theory in a New Context

Drawing on Link and colleagues' modified labeling theory, this article examines whether the stigma management strategies defendants anticipate using after mental health court exit are associated with their reported experiences during court. Using survey data from 34 mental health court graduates, we find that respondents generally perceive the mental health court as procedurally just, did not experience stigmatizing shame, and anticipate using the inclusionary coping strategy of education over the exclusionary strategies of secrecy and withdrawal. Moreover, findings reveal that the anticipated use of stigma management strategies is associated with mental health court experiences in that procedural justice is associated with inclusionary coping strategies, while stigmatizing shame is associated with exclusionary coping strategies. We conclude by encouraging researchers to further explore the role of stigmatization and shame in specialty court contexts and to continue investigating these defendant perceptions of these courts' process