A Gateway for Everyone to Believe: Identity, Disaster, and Football in New Orleans

The purpose of this research is to analyze the dynamic processes of collective identity by examining the relationship between New Orleans and its professional football team, the Saints, after Hurricane Katrina. Much of the discourse written on American professional sports focuses on economic transactions between player and franchise or franchise and city. This study explores sports from a cultural perspective to understand the perceived social values provided to the host community. This case study spans the years from 2006 to 2013 and discusses several major events, including the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the reopening of the Superdome, the Saints winning a league championship and subsequent cheating scandal, and the city’s hosting of Super Bowl XLVII. Using a mixed-method approach of content analysis, in-person interviews, and participant observation, this research demonstrates how post-Hurricane Katrina events altered the collective identity in New Orleans. Additionally, it explores how the interaction of sports, identity, and ritual served to create a civic religion in New Orleans. Finally, the research examines the impact of this religious devotion on New Orleans’ tourist economy

Signaling under the Security Dilemma: An Experimental Analysis

One of the most intractable debates in IR revolves around the severity and frequency of the security dilemma. Offensive realists argue that states are compelled to make worst-case assumptions about each other's intentions, which yields inexorable competition and conflict even between mutually-benign actors. Yet others have argued that rational benign states should always be able to find cooperative signals that are costly enough to be credible, but not too costly to risk sending. If true, this should alleviate the security dilemma and facilitate cooperation, even under high initial distrust. However, there is little empirical work on interstate reassurance and the conditions under which mutually-benign actors can build trust. We address this gap using laboratory experiments to test Andrew Kydd's canonical model of the security dilemma. We find strong support for the directional effects of the hypothesized signaling mechanisms. However, the frequency of cooperation is significantly lower than the model predicts, and the feasibility of reassurance is highly sensitive to the degree of prior trust. This implies that although reassurance can mitigate the security dilemma, offensive realism may still capture important psychological mechanisms that impede interstate cooperation.This research was funded by the Centre for Asia and Globalization in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore (Grant no. R-603-000-285-651)

EQUI-VOCAL: Synthesizing Queries for Compositional Video Events from Limited User Interactions [Technical Report]

We introduce EQUI-VOCAL: a new system that automatically synthesizes queries over videos from limited user interactions. The user only provides a handful of positive and negative examples of what they are looking for. EQUI-VOCAL utilizes these initial examples and additional ones collected through active learning to efficiently synthesize complex user queries. Our approach enables users to find events without database expertise, with limited labeling effort, and without declarative specifications or sketches. Core to EQUI-VOCAL's design is the use of spatio-temporal scene graphs in its data model and query language and a novel query synthesis approach that works on large and noisy video data. Our system outperforms two baseline systems -- in terms of F1 score, synthesis time, and robustness to noise -- and can flexibly synthesize complex queries that the baselines do not support.Comment: This is an extended technical report for the following paper: "Enhao Zhang, Maureen Daum, Dong He, Brandon Haynes, Ranjay Krishna, and Magdalena Balazinska. EQUI-VOCAL: Synthesizing Queries for Compositional Video Events from Limited User Interactions. PVLDB, 16(11): 2714-2727, 2023. doi:10.14778/3611479.3611482

VOCALExplore: Pay-as-You-Go Video Data Exploration and Model Building [Technical Report]

We introduce VOCALExplore, a system designed to support users in building domain-specific models over video datasets. VOCALExplore supports interactive labeling sessions and trains models using user-supplied labels. VOCALExplore maximizes model quality by automatically deciding how to select samples based on observed skew in the collected labels. It also selects the optimal video representations to use when training models by casting feature selection as a rising bandit problem. Finally, VOCALExplore implements optimizations to achieve low latency without sacrificing model performance. We demonstrate that VOCALExplore achieves close to the best possible model quality given candidate acquisition functions and feature extractors, and it does so with low visible latency (~1 second per iteration) and no expensive preprocessing

Impact of Outpatient vs Inpatient ABSSSI Treatment on Outcomes: A Retrospective Observational Analysis of Medical Charts Across US Emergency Departments

Background The objective of this study was to characterize treatment of patients with acute bacterial skin and skin structure infections (ABSSSIs) and describe the association between hospital admission and emergency department (ED) visits or readmissions within 30 days after initial episode of care (IEC). Methods This was a retrospective, observational, cohort study of adults with ABSSSI who presented to an ED between July 1, 2012, and June 30, 2013. Patient, health care facility, and treatment characteristics, including unplanned ED visits or readmissions, were obtained through manual chart review and abstraction. Adjusted logistic regression analysis examined likelihood of all-cause unplanned ED visits or readmissions between admitted and nonadmitted patients. Results Records from 1527 ED visits for ABSSSI from 40 centers were reviewed (admitted, n = 578 [38%]; nonadmitted, n = 949 [62%]). Admitted patients were typically older (mean age, 52.2 years vs 43.0 years), more likely to be morbidly obese (body mass index \u3e 40 kg/m2; 17.3% vs 9.1%), and had more comorbidities (Charlson Comorbidity Index ≥ 4; 24.4% vs 6.8%) compared with those not admitted. In the primary analysis, adjusted logistic regression, controlling for comorbidities and severity of illness, demonstrated that there was a similar likelihood of all-cause unplanned ED visits or readmissions between admitted and nonadmitted patients (odds ratio, 1.03; 95% confidence interval, 0.74–1.43; P = .87). Conclusions ABSSSI treatment pathways leveraging outpatient treatment vs hospital admission support similar likelihood of unplanned 30-day ED visits or readmissions, an important clinical outcome and quality metric at US hospitals. Further research regarding the decision criteria around hospital admission to avoid potentially unnecessary hospitalizations is warranted

Identifying and Responding to Child Neglect: Exploring the Professional Experiences of Primary School Teachers and Family Support Workers

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This study aimed to explore primary school teachers' and family support workers' experiences of working with families and children with suspected or confirmed child neglect. Two in-depth, semi-structured focus groups with four primary school teachers and six family support workers explored the experiences of the two separate professions. Two hypothetical vignettes describing emotional and physical neglect were used to aid discussion. A qualitative, inductive thematic analysis was used to analyse the focus group data. Despite professionals wanting to act when neglect is first identified (early intervention), this was often not common practice. Professionals highlighted that child neglect, in particular emotional neglect, was often not deemed ‘serious enough’ to report, and would not be reported until a bigger ‘jigsaw puzzle’ of evidence had been collated. Professionals struggled with policies and funding that impact on their ability to respond in every case of child neglect as well as multiagency working difficulties, including perceived confidence in their roles and how other professionals view their work and professional opinions. Child neglect, especially emotional neglect, must be rated as equally serious as other forms of child maltreatment necessitating intervention, and professionals must be given support and funding to achieve this. ‘Explore[s] primary school teachers' and family support workers' experiences of working with families and children with suspected or confirmed child neglect’. Key Practitioner Messages: The consequences of prolonged child neglect should be better understood and recognised. Resources and support provided early may prevent long-term serious harm. Training on sensitively discussing with parents how to provide appropriate care for their children and how to challenge appropriately other professionals may help enhance professionals' confidence in speaking up and taking action. Innovative use of universal provisions such as breakfast or after-school clubs may be welcomed more by parents