Mass Incarceration and Children's Outcomes: Criminal Justice Policy is Education Policy

Parental incarceration leads to an array of cognitive and noncognitive outcomes known to affect children's performance in school. Therefore, the discriminatory incarceration of African American parents makes an important contribution to the racial achievement gap. Educators hoping to narrow the achievement gap should make criminal justice reform a policy priority

Strongly stable ideals and Hilbert polynomials

The \texttt{StronglyStableIdeals} package for \textit{Macaulay2} provides a method to compute all saturated strongly stable ideals in a given polynomial ring with a fixed Hilbert polynomial. A description of the main method and auxiliary tools is given.Comment: Source code available as an ancillary file. Final versio

Evolutionary Neural Gas (ENG): A Model of Self Organizing Network from Input Categorization

Despite their claimed biological plausibility, most self organizing networks have strict topological constraints and consequently they cannot take into account a wide range of external stimuli. Furthermore their evolution is conditioned by deterministic laws which often are not correlated with the structural parameters and the global status of the network, as it should happen in a real biological system. In nature the environmental inputs are noise affected and fuzzy. Which thing sets the problem to investigate the possibility of emergent behaviour in a not strictly constrained net and subjected to different inputs. It is here presented a new model of Evolutionary Neural Gas (ENG) with any topological constraints, trained by probabilistic laws depending on the local distortion errors and the network dimension. The network is considered as a population of nodes that coexist in an ecosystem sharing local and global resources. Those particular features allow the network to quickly adapt to the environment, according to its dimensions. The ENG model analysis shows that the net evolves as a scale-free graph, and justifies in a deeply physical sense- the term gas here used.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

A Borel open cover of the Hilbert scheme

Let $p(t)$ be an admissible Hilbert polynomial in \PP^n of degree $d$. The Hilbert scheme \hilb^n_p(t) can be realized as a closed subscheme of a suitable Grassmannian $\mathbb G$, hence it could be globally defined by homogeneous equations in the Plucker coordinates of $\mathbb G$ and covered by open subsets given by the non-vanishing of a Plucker coordinate, each embedded as a closed subscheme of the affine space $A^D$, $D=\dim(\mathbb G)$. However, the number $E$ of Plucker coordinates is so large that effective computations in this setting are practically impossible. In this paper, taking advantage of the symmetries of \hilb^n_p(t), we exhibit a new open cover, consisting of marked schemes over Borel-fixed ideals, whose number is significantly smaller than $E$. Exploiting the properties of marked schemes, we prove that these open subsets are defined by equations of degree $\leq d+2$ in their natural embedding in \Af^D. Furthermore we find new embeddings in affine spaces of far lower dimension than $D$, and characterize those that are still defined by equations of degree $\leq d+2$. The proofs are constructive and use a polynomial reduction process, similar to the one for Grobner bases, but are term order free. In this new setting, we can achieve explicit computations in many non-trivial cases.Comment: 17 pages. This version contains and extends the first part of version 2 (arXiv:0909.2184v2[math.AG]). A new extended version of the second part, with some new results, is posed at arxiv:1110.0698v3[math.AC]. The title is slightly changed. Final version accepted for publicatio

A combinatorial description of finite O-sequences and aCM genera

The goal of this paper is to explicitly detect all the arithmetic genera of arithmetically Cohen-Macaulay projective curves with a given degree $d$. It is well-known that the arithmetic genus $g$ of a curve $C$ can be easily deduced from the $h$-vector of the curve; in the case where $C$ is arithmetically Cohen-Macaulay of degree $d$, $g$ must belong to the range of integers $\big\{0,\ldots,\binom{d-1}{2}\big\}$. We develop an algorithmic procedure that allows one to avoid constructing most of the possible $h$-vectors of $C$. The essential tools are a combinatorial description of the finite O-sequences of multiplicity $d$, and a sort of continuity result regarding the generation of the genera. The efficiency of our method is supported by computational evidence. As a consequence, we single out the minimal possible Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of a curve with Cohen-Macaulay postulation and given degree and genus.Comment: Final versio

The maximum likelihood degree of Fermat hypersurfaces

We study the critical points of the likelihood function over the Fermat hypersurface. This problem is related to one of the main problems in statistical optimization: maximum likelihood estimation. The number of critical points over a projective variety is a topological invariant of the variety and is called maximum likelihood degree. We provide closed formulas for the maximum likelihood degree of any Fermat curve in the projective plane and of Fermat hypersurfaces of degree 2 in any projective space. Algorithmic methods to compute the ML degree of a generic Fermat hypersurface are developed throughout the paper. Such algorithms heavily exploit the symmetries of the varieties we are considering. A computational comparison of the different methods and a list of the maximum likelihood degrees of several Fermat hypersurfaces are available in the last section.Comment: Final version. Accepted for publication on Journal of Algebraic Statistic