Confirmation Bias: The Pitfall of Forensic Science

As it stands, forensic science and its practitioners are held in high regard in criminal court proceedings due to their ability to discover irrefutable facts that would otherwise go unnoticed. Nevertheless, forensic scientists can fall victim to natural logical fallacies. More specifically, confirmation bias is “a proclivity to search for or interpret additional information to confirm beliefs and to steer clear of information that may disagree with those prior beliefs” (Budlowe et al., 2009, p. 803). To restore the integrity of the forensic sciences, the sources of confirmation bias need to be identified and eliminated. Accordingly, empirical studies have given substance to a subject that is intangible and thus difficult to recognize. Inherent and external sources of confirmation bias include the dependence and association of crime labs upon police agencies and the amount of extraneous information made available to verifying examiners. Potentially effective solutions offered to minimize its influence upon the conclusions made by forensic scientists include the privatization of crime labs, the establishment of educational requirements for forensic examiners, the separation of testing and interpretation, and the institution of double blind testing. This effort must be undertaken as the justice system relies on forensic sciences to provide meaningful evidence that can play a prominent role in the fate of those who stand trial

DOWNSTREAM RESOURCE ALLOCATION IN DOCSIS 3.0 CHANNEL BONDED NETWORKS

Modern broadband internet access cable systems follow the Data Over Cable System Interface Specification (DOCSIS) for data transfer between the individual cable modem (CM) and the Internet. The newest version of DOCSIS, version 3.0, provides an abstraction referred to as bonding groups to help manage bandwidth and to increase bandwidth to each user beyond that available within a single 6MHz. television channel. Channel bonding allows more than one channel to be used by a CM to provide a virtual channel of much greater bandwidth. This combining of channels into bonding groups, especially when channels overlap between more than one bonding group, complicates the resource allocation problem within these networks. The goal of resource allocation in this research is twofold, to provide for fairness among users while at the same time making maximum possible utilization of the available system bandwidth. The problem of resource allocation in computer networks has been widely studied by the academic community. Past work has studied resource allocation in many network types, however application in a DOCSIS channel bonded network has not been explored. This research begins by first developing a definition of fairness in a channel bonded system. After providing a theoretical definition of fairness we implement simulations of different scheduling disciplines and evaluate their performance against this theoretical ideal. The complexity caused by overlapped channels requires even the simplest scheduling algorithms to be modified to work correctly. We then develop an algorithm to maximize the use of the available system bandwidth. The approach involves using competitive analysis techniques and an online algorithm to dynamically reassign flows among the available channels. Bandwidth usage and demand requests are monitored for bandwidth that is underutilized, and demand that is unsatisfied, and real time changes are made to the flow-to-channel mappings to improve the utilization of the total available bandwidth. The contribution of this research is to provide a working definition of fairness in a channel bonded environment, the implementation of several scheduling disciplines and evaluation of their adherence to that definition, and development of an algorithm to improve overall bandwidth utilization of the system

The Back Road to Murfreesboro

This project was conceived as a multi-form, multi-media piece in which each work of fiction, poetry, or photography is fully intended to both stand on its own and contribute to an overall feeling for the entire collection. It is in the juxtaposition of these various works that the audience can gain a greater appreciation for the entire collection as well as for each individual piece contained within. This collection explores the dissatisfaction and alienation of contemporary life, and depicts characters, objects, and settings that are all in some way disconnected or empty. The overall stance is negative, of frustrated desire, in the hope that it may serve as a warning call against what is shown

Assessing differences in legislators’ revealed preferences: a case study on the 107th U.S. Senate

Roll call data are widely used to assess legislators’ preferences and ideology, as well as test theories of legislative behavior. In particular, roll call data is often used to determine whether the revealed preferences of legislators are affected by outside forces such as party pressure, minority status or procedural rules. This paper describes a Bayesian hierarchical model that extends existing spatial voting models to test sharp hypotheses about differences in preferences using posterior probabilities associated with such hypotheses. We use our model to investigate the effect of the change of party majority status during the 107th U.S. Senate on the revealed preferences of senators. This analysis provides evidence that change in party affiliation might affect the revealed preferences of legislators, but provides no evidence about the effect of majority status on the revealed preferences of legislators

Multiple Ideal Points: Revealed Preferences in Different Domains

We extend classical ideal point estimation to allow voters to have different preferences when voting in different domains—for example, when voting on agricultural policy than when voting on defense policy. Our scaling procedure results in estimated ideal points on a common scale. As a result, we are able to directly compare a member’s revealed preferences across different domains of voting (different sets of motions) to assess if, for example, a member votes more conservatively on agriculture motions than on defense. In doing so, we are able to assess the extent to which voting behavior of an individual voter is consistent with a uni-dimensional spatial model—if a member has the same preferences in all domains. The key novelty is to estimate rather than assume the identity of “stayers”—voters whose revealed preference is constant across votes. Our approach offers methodology for investigating the relationship between the basic space and issue space in legislative voting (Poole 2007). There are several methodological advantages to our approach. First, our model allows for testing sharp hypotheses. Second, the methodology developed can be understood as a kind of partial-pooling model for item response theory scaling, resulting in less uncertainty of estimates. Related, our estimation method provides a principled and unified approach to the issue of “granularity” (i.e., the level of aggregation) in the analysis of roll-call data (Crespin and Rohde 2010; Roberts et al. 2016). We illustrate the model by estimating U.S. House of Representatives members’ revealed preferences in different policy domains, and identify several other potential applications of the model including: studying the relationship between committee and floor voting behavior; and investigating constituency influence and representation

Walking and Jogging for Fitness (GHC)

This Grants Collection for Walking and Jogging for Fitness was created under a Round Seven ALG Textbook Transformation Grant. Affordable Learning Georgia Grants Collections are intended to provide faculty with the frameworks to quickly implement or revise the same materials as a Textbook Transformation Grants team, along with the aims and lessons learned from project teams during the implementation process. Documents are in .pdf format, with a separate .docx (Word) version available for download. Each collection contains the following materials: Linked Syllabus Initial Proposal Final Reporthttps://oer.galileo.usg.edu/health-collections/1006/thumbnail.jp