Jurors\u27 Perceptions of False Confessions

This study examined the effect of mock jurors’ perceptions of a defendant’s false confession vs. no confession (false confession presence), coercive interrogation techniques vs. panic-escape (false confession reason), and expert witness testimony vs. defendant explanation vs. expert witness testimony plus defendant explanation for his false confession (source). The four hypotheses and one research question pertained to main effects and interaction effects of false confession presence, false confession reason, and source (separately) and expert witness conditions combined on five outcome variables. Outcome variables were defendant’s guilt, trustworthiness, suggestibility, susceptibility to external influences, and juror’s likelihood of changing their verdict. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), mock jurors (N = 415) were randomly assigned to one of twelve conditions, in which they read a murder trial scenario and answered questions regarding the outcome variables. Main effects of false confession were found within the defendant’s perceived guilt, trustworthiness, and suggestibility. Main effects of source were also found, such that the defendant’s perceived guilt, suggestibility, and susceptibility to external influences were significant, as was to jurors’ likelihood of changing their verdict (guilty/not guilty) but follow-up analyses yielded an inconsistent pattern. Expert witness testimony reduced perceptions of guilt and suggestibility, and decreased jurors’ openness to changing their verdict. Numerous False Confession x Reason interactions emerged pertaining to the defendant’s perceived guilt, trustworthiness, and suggestibility, as well as the jurors’ likelihood of changing their verdict (guilty/not guilty). A series of planned contrasts comparing the false confession/coercive interrogation/expert witness vs. the false confession/panic-escape/expert witness conditions; the false confession/coercive interrogation/defendant vs. false confession/panic-escape/defendant condition; and the false confession/coercive interrogation/expert witness + defendant vs. false confession/panic-escape/expert witness + defendant showed no significant differences in jurors’ perceptions of the defendant’s guilt. Keywords: jurors’ perceptions, false confession

The Lost Approach to FLSA Settlement Agreements: A Freedom-of-Contract Approach

In jurisdictions that require judicial oversight of Fair LaborStandards Act settlement agreements, a question lingers: Whatexactly should judges review? Some judges have beguncategorically striking confidentiality provisions fromsettlement agreements by pointing to the purposes and goals ofthe FLSA. The academic community lauds these courts’ effortsto prevent employers from mandating employees’ silence aboutthe terms of their settlement agreements. This Note, however,makes the counterargument: confidentiality provisions shouldbe permitted in FLSA settlements agreements as a bargainingchip for employees who bring individual suits. If higher courtsin a given jurisdiction require judicial oversight of theseagreements, then the court reviewing the settlement should lookat the process that led to the settlement agreement, instead ofits substance, when assessing the agreement’s fairness.Alongside Department of Labor enforcement actions, a process-based review would address problems that confidentialityprovisions create for the national enforcement of labor rightsand would allow the suffering employee to maximize theirrecovery

Using Geospatial Analysis for High School Environmental Science Education: A Case Study of the Jane Goodall Institute\u27s Community-Centered Conservation Approach

Given my experiences as a young conservation advocate, I saw a need to teach students the importance of interconnectedness, cultural awareness and systems-thinking skills through a spatial lens. I believe these skills are required for holistic, equitable and sustainable conservation decision-making in local and international contexts. This thesis uses geospatial tools to teach conservation ecology vocabulary and concepts from high school environmental science curriculum in two online resources. The purpose of my lesson plan is to show students how conservationists address complex conservation and land-use challenges using the Jane Goodall Institute’s community-centered conservation approach as a case-study. My hope is that these lessons empower students to become change-agents in their communities

Wildfire Risk Perception and Homeowner Mitigation: Evidence from Montana

Fire prevention managers find that homeowners often do not perform mitigation actions that could reduce the damage and spread of wildfire. There is widespread belief among these fire professionals that one of the primary reasons that homeowners do not perform mitigation actions is that homeowners misperceive the risk that wildfire poses. Thus, a significant component of fire prevention programs’ focus on increasing homeowner awareness of the risk. However, it is possible that homeowners are aware of the fire risk but choose not to mitigate because of a variety of reasons, to include the costs of mitigation, limited monetary liability that they have after they insure the property, or doubts about the benefits of mitigation. I combine survey data obtained from Montana property owners with simulated fire probabilities for their parcels to test whether homeowners who report greater concern about the risk of fire conduct more mitigation activities. Using an instrumental variable approach, I find that increased homeowner concern about the risk of wildfire causes them to conduct significantly more mitigation activities

X-ray CT Image Reconstruction on Highly-Parallel Architectures.

Model-based image reconstruction (MBIR) methods for X-ray CT use accurate models of the CT acquisition process, the statistics of the noisy measurements, and noise-reducing regularization to produce potentially higher quality images than conventional methods even at reduced X-ray doses. They do this by minimizing a statistically motivated high-dimensional cost function; the high computational cost of numerically minimizing this function has prevented MBIR methods from reaching ubiquity in the clinic. Modern highly-parallel hardware like graphics processing units (GPUs) may offer the computational resources to solve these reconstruction problems quickly, but simply "translating" existing algorithms designed for conventional processors to the GPU may not fully exploit the hardware's capabilities. This thesis proposes GPU-specialized image denoising and image reconstruction algorithms. The proposed image denoising algorithm uses group coordinate descent with carefully structured groups. The algorithm converges very rapidly: in one experiment, it denoises a 65 megapixel image in about 1.5 seconds, while the popular Chambolle-Pock primal-dual algorithm running on the same hardware takes over a minute to reach the same level of accuracy. For X-ray CT reconstruction, this thesis uses duality and group coordinate ascent to propose an alternative to the popular ordered subsets (OS) method. Similar to OS, the proposed method can use a subset of the data to update the image. Unlike OS, the proposed method is convergent. In one helical CT reconstruction experiment, an implementation of the proposed algorithm using one GPU converges more quickly than a state-of-the-art algorithm converges using four GPUs. Using four GPUs, the proposed algorithm reaches near convergence of a wide-cone axial reconstruction problem with over 220 million voxels in only 11 minutes.PhDElectrical Engineering: SystemsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113551/1/mcgaffin_1.pd

The Effect of Teacher-Child Interaction Training (TCIT) on Kindergarten Student\u27s Classroom Behavior and Student-Teacher Relationships

Teachers and researchers alike have long debated the most effective strategy for managing children’s classroom behavior. While many methods exist, the most common, and yet most debated, approach in the U.S. remains to be exclusionary discipline, such as suspension and expulsion. However, research has consistently shown this method to be ineffective and even harmful for both students and teachers, as well as incredibly inequitable (Emmer et al., 2015; American Psychological Association, 2008; Tobin et al., 1996 as cited in Emmer et al., 2015). These clear detriments highlight the need for different, more effective classroom management strategies. The current proposed study will address one such alternative, Teacher-Child Interaction Training (TCIT). It will delve into the effects of a TCIT intervention on kindergarten- aged children’s classroom behavior, as well as the intervention’s impact on student-teacher relationships. Over the course of a semester, four classrooms (consisting of a total of 88 kindergarten students and 4 kindergarten teachers) will be randomly assigned to either a TCIT or control condition. Given past research, it is expected that children who receive the TCIT intervention will show increased prosocial behaviors, decreased emotional dysregulation, and decreased aggressive/disruptive behaviors over time in comparison to children in the control group. Additionally, at the end of the intervention (T3), positive student-teacher relationships are projected to be more equitably distributed across student racial groups in the experimental group than in the control group

The paradox of isochrony in the evolution of human rhythm

Isochrony is crucial to the rhythm of human music. Some neural, behavioral and anatomical traits underlying rhythm perception and production are shared with a broad range of species. These may either have a common evolutionary origin, or have evolved into similar traits under different evolutionary pressures. Other traits underlying rhythm are rare across species, only found in humans and few other animals. Isochrony, or stable periodicity, is common to most human music, but isochronous behaviors are also found in many species. It appears paradoxical that humans are particularly good at producing and perceiving isochronous patterns, although this ability does not conceivably confer any evolutionary advantage to modern humans. This article will attempt to solve this conundrum. To this end, we define the concept of isochrony from the present functional perspective of physiology, cognitive neuroscience, signal processing, and interactive behavior, and review available evidence on isochrony in the signals of humans and other animals. We then attempt to resolve the paradox of isochrony by expanding an evolutionary hypothesis about the function that isochronous behavior may have had in early hominids. Finally, we propose avenues for empirical research to examine this hypothesis and to understand the evolutionary origin of isochrony in general

Measuring ground reaction force and quantifying variability in jumping and bobbing actions

This paper investigates variability in bobbing and jumping actions, including variations within a population of eight test subjects (intersubject variability) and variability on a cycle-by-cycle basis for each individual (intrasubject variability). A motion-capture system and a force plate were employed to characterize the peak ground reaction force, frequency of the activity, range of body movement, and dynamic loading factors for at least first three harmonics. In addition, contact ratios were also measured for jumping activity. It is confirmed that most parameters are frequency dependent and vary significantly between individuals. Moreover, the study provides a rare insight into intrasubject variations, revealing that it is more difficult to perform bobbing in a consistent way. The paper demonstrates that the vibration response of a structure is sensitive to cycle-by-cycle variations in the forcing parameters, with highest sensitivity to variations in the activity frequency. In addition, this paper investigates whether accurate monitoring of the ground reaction force is possible by recording the kinematics of a single point on the human body. It is concluded that monitoring the C7th vertebrae at the base of the neck is appropriate for recording frequency content of up to 4 Hz for bobbing and 5 Hz for jumping. The results from this study are expected to contribute to the development of stochastic models of human actions on assembly structures. The proposed simplified measurements of the forcing function have potential to be used for monitoring groups and crowds of people on structures that host sports and music events and characterizing human-structure and human-human interaction effects