Are immigrants in Massachusetts accessing welfare? : an exploratory study of families in Boston and the Merrimack Valley

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-55).A survey was conducted of forty four immigrant heads of households in Boston and the Merrimack Valley to ascertain the employment status of household heads and the use of public benefits by immigrant headed families. The study surveyed Spanish and Portuguese speaking individuals at 300% or below of the poverty level with children under the age of 18. The survey measured demographic and employment characteristics of respondents, use of public benefits among all family members, and barriers individuals faced in accessing benefits for their families. The researcher hypothesized that immigrants with lower educational status and poor English proficiency would earn lower wages than individuals with higher educational status and better English proficiency. Additionally, it was also hypothesized that families headed by undocumented immigrants, despite the presence of citizen children, would be the least likely of all groups of immigrant headed households to access public benefits. Findings revealed that immigrants with low educational status and poor English proficiency indeed earned lower wages than individuals with higher educational status and better English proficiency. Results regarding benefits use among families revealed interesting patterns of benefits use. As hypothesized, families headed by undocumented immigrants had low rates of health benefits, food stamps, and cash aid usage. However, families headed by permanent residents and temporary visa holders also had low rates of welfare usage. Proposed reasons for these low rates of public benefits usage include linguistic barriers, fears of deportation among undocumented immigrants, confusion about eligibility criteria, and bureaucratic responses towards immigrant families. The conclusion includes policy recommendations for addressing these issues and suggestions for further research.by Reshma Shamasunder.M.C.P

Community-Based Health and Exposure Study around Urban Oil Developments in South Los Angeles.

Oilfield-adjacent communities often report symptoms such as headaches and/or asthma. Yet, little data exists on health experiences and exposures in urban environments with oil and gas development. In partnership with Promotoras de Salud (community health workers), we gathered household surveys nearby two oil production sites in Los Angeles. We tested the capacity of low-cost sensors for localized exposure estimates. Bilingual surveys of 205 randomly sampled residences were collected within two 1500 ft. buffer areas (West Adams and University Park) surrounding oil development sites. We used a one-sample proportion test, comparing overall rates from the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) of Service Planning Area 6 (SPA6) and Los Angeles County for variables of interest such as asthma. Field calibrated low-cost sensors recorded methane emissions. Physician diagnosed asthma rates were reported to be higher within both buffers than in SPA6 or LA County. Asthma prevalence in West Adams but not University Park was significantly higher than in Los Angeles County. Respondents with diagnosed asthma reported rates of emergency room visits in the previous 12 months similar to SPA6. 45% of respondents were unaware of oil development; 63% of residents would not know how to contact local regulatory authorities. Residents often seek information about their health and site-related activities. Low-cost sensors may be useful in highlighting differences between sites or recording larger emission events and can provide localized data alongside resident-reported symptoms. Regulatory officials should help clarify information to the community on methods for reporting health symptoms. Our community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnership supports efforts to answer community questions as residents seek a safety buffer between sensitive land uses and active oil development

Bridging Bays, Bridging Borders: Global Justice and Community Organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area

We offer this document as our own effort to build the inclusion and understandings that will help both communities and leaders recognize the grassroots wisdom and issues that could help us realize the positive impacts from globalization and minimize the negative aspects that have concerned us all. Another world is possible, but it is up to us to build it

You are the only possible oracle: Effective test selection for end users of interactive machine learning systems

How do you test a program when only a single user, with no expertise in software testing, is able to determine if the program is performing correctly? Such programs are common today in the form of machine-learned classifiers. We consider the problem of testing this common kind of machine-generated program when the only oracle is an end user: e.g., only you can determine if your email is properly filed. We present test selection methods that provide very good failure rates even for small test suites, and show that these methods work in both large-scale random experiments using a “gold standard” and in studies with real users. Our methods are inexpensive and largely algorithm-independent. Key to our methods is an exploitation of properties of classifiers that is not possible in traditional software testing. Our results suggest that it is plausible for time-pressured end users to interactively detect failures—even very hard-to-find failures—without wading through a large number of successful (and thus less useful) tests. We additionally show that some methods are able to find the arguably most difficult-to-detect faults of classifiers: cases where machine learning algorithms have high confidence in an incorrect result