scholarly journals Discourses of Death: Extracting the Semantic Structure of Lethal Violence with Machine Learning

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alina Arseniev-Koehler ◽  
Susan Cochran ◽  
Vickie Mays ◽  
Kai-Wei Chang ◽  
Jacob G. Foster

Violent deaths — such as homicides and suicides — can be a source of "senseless suffering.'' Forensic authorities use narratives to trace events surrounding these deaths both in a search for meaning and a desire to prevent them. We examine these narratives, drawing on summaries from over 300,000 violent deaths in the U.S. Our goal is to capture the latent themes and other semantic structures that undergird violent death and its surveillance. To do so, we introduce a flexible model for the analysis of topics ("discourse atoms''), where locations in a semantic embedding space map onto distributions over words. We use this model to extract a high-level, thematic description of discourses of violent death. We identify 225 topics, discussing several in detail including topics about drug paraphernalia, financial difficulties, erratic and impaired behavior, and uncertainty. Our results offer clues into themes surrounding violent death and its administrative surveillance, and our method offers a new way to computationally model discourse.

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 736-745 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik P. Duhaime ◽  
Evan P. Apfelbaum

Scholars, politicians, and laypeople alike bemoan the high level of political polarization in the United States, but little is known about how to bring the views of liberals and conservatives closer together. Previous research finds that providing people with information regarding a contentious issue is ineffective for reducing polarization because people process such information in a biased manner. Here, we show that information can reduce political polarization below baseline levels and also that its capacity to do so is sensitive to contextual factors that make one’s relevant preferences salient. Specifically, in a nationally representative sample (Study 1) and a preregistered replication (Study 2), we find that providing a taxpayer receipt—an impartial, objective breakdown of how one’s taxes are spent that is published annually by the White House—reduces polarization regarding taxes, but not when participants are also asked to indicate how they would prefer their taxes be spent.


Author(s):  
Nina Maksimchuk

The attention of modern linguistics to the study of verbal representatives of the mental essence (both individual and collective one) of the native speakers involves an appeal to all subsystems of the national language where territorial dialects take a significant part. The analysis of dialect linguistic units possessing linguistic and cultural value is considered as a necessary way for the study of people’s worldview and perception of the world, national mentality as a whole. The ability of stable phrases (phraseological units) to preserve and express a native speaker’s attitude to the world around them is the basis for the use of the analysis of folk phraseology as a way of penetration into a speaker’s spiritual world. Volumetric representation of the external and internal peculiarities of stable phrases allows the author to get their systematization in the form of phraseosemantic field consisting of different kinds singled out in phraseosemantic groups. The article deals with stable phrases of synonymic value recorded in the Dictionary of Smolensk dialects and stable phrases forming a phraseosemantic group. These phrases are analyzed taking into account the semantic structure of the key word, the characteristics of the dependent word, and the method of forming phraseological semantics. On the example of the analysis of phrases with the key word «bit’» and a synonymic series with the semantic dominant «bezdel’nichat’», the article discusses the peculiarities of phraseological nomination in Smolensk dialects and confirms a high level of connotativity and evaluation in the folk phraseology.


2007 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen A. Zeff

In 1959, the Accounting Principles Board (APB) replaced the Committee on Accounting Procedure because the latter was unable to deal forthrightly with a series of important issues. But during the APB's first half-dozen years, its record of achievement was no more impressive than its predecessor's. The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Manuel F. Cohen, criticized the APB's slow pace and unwillingness to tackle difficult issues. This article discusses the circumstances attending the SEC's issuance of an Accounting Series Release in late 1965 to demonstrate forcefully to the APB that, when it is unable to carry out its responsibility to “narrow the areas of difference” in accounting practice, the SEC is prepared to step in and do so itself. In this sense, the article deals with the tensions between the private and public sectors in the establishment of accounting principles in the U.S. during the mid-1960s. The article makes extensive use of primary resource materials in the author's personal archive, which have not been used previously in published work.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sándor Szabó ◽  
Irene Pinedo Pascua ◽  
Daniel Puig ◽  
Magda Moner-Girona ◽  
Mario Negre ◽  
...  

AbstractLack of access to modern forms of energy hampers efforts to reduce poverty. The provision of electricity to off-grid communities is therefore a long-standing developmental goal. Yet, many off-grid electrification projects neglect mid- and long-term operation and maintenance costs. When this is the case, electricity services are unlikely to be affordable to the communities that are the project’s primary target. Here we show that, compared with diesel-powered electricity generation systems, solar photovoltaic systems are more affordable to no less than 36% of the unelectrified populations in East Asia, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. We do so by developing geo-referenced estimates of affordability at a high level of resolution (1 km2). The analysis illustrates the differences in affordability that may be found at the subnational level, which underscores that electrification investments should be informed by subnational data.


Author(s):  
Hannes Mohrschladt ◽  
Judith C. Schneider

AbstractWe establish a direct link between sophisticated investors in the option market, private stock market investors, and the idiosyncratic volatility (IVol) puzzle. To do so, we employ three option-based volatility spreads and attention data from Google Trends. In line with the IVol puzzle, the volatility spreads indicate that sophisticated investors indeed consider high-IVol stocks as being overvalued. Moreover, the option measures help to distinguish overpriced from fairly priced high-IVol stocks. Thus, these measures are able to predict the IVol puzzle’s magnitude in the cross-section of stock returns. Further, we link the origin of the IVol puzzle to the trading activity of irrational private investors as the return predictability only exists among stocks that receive a high level of private investor attention. Overall, our joint examination of option and stock markets sheds light on the behavior of different investor groups and their contribution to the IVol puzzle. Thereby, our analyses support the intuitive idea that noise trading leads to mispricing, which is identified by sophisticated investors and exploited in the option market.


1985 ◽  
Vol 1 (04) ◽  
pp. 266-287
Author(s):  
Thomas Lamb

Zone construction has been proposed as the way for the U.S. shipbuilding industry to improve its productivity and survive the current hard times. Obviously as the production requirements for zone construction are different from traditional ship construction, so are the engineering requirements. While production could perform zone construction from traditionally prepared engineering, it would do so inefficiently and after waiting a long time for most of the engineering to be completed before they could start, thus defeating one of the goals of zone construction. The production department in a shipyard changing to zone construction will probably reorganize into major zone sections. To obtain maximum benefits from zone construction it is necessary for the engineering department to be like-organized and managed. The paper therefore discusses engineering aspects that are influenced by the change to zone construction


1877 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Dakyns

In the summer of 1872 I visited Norway, and wrote the following brief notice of certain high-level terraces immediately on my return to England, but kept it back that I might first consult some papers on Norwegian terraces that had appeared in the closing numbers of “Scientific Opinion”; these I was not able to meet with for so long a time that I gave up the idea of sending my notice to the press. I am now induced to do so, because I see that the subject of the parallel roads of Glenroy still occupies the attention of geologists, and it may induce some one next summer to examine minutely the Dovre terraces and sand-heaps and their relation to the physical geography of the district. I was merely able to make a flying visit to them, which I delayed my party to do, because they caught my eye so forcibly, as we were driving along the valley.


2015 ◽  
Vol 109 (4) ◽  
pp. 735-749 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA VALENTINI

In late 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of the U.S., causing much suffering and devastation. Those who could have easily helped Sandy's victims had a duty to do so. But was this a rightfully enforceable duty of justice, or a nonenforceable duty of beneficence? The answer to this question is often thought to depend on the kind of help offered: the provision of immediate bodily services is not enforceable; the transfer of material resources is. I argue that this double standard is unjustified, and defend a version of what I call “social samaritanism.” On this view, within political communities, the duty to help the needy—whether via bodily services or resource transfers—is always an enforceable demand of justice, except when the needy are reckless; across independent political communities, it is always a matter of beneficence. I defend this alternative double standard, and consider its implications for the case of Sandy.


Mathematics ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 138
Author(s):  
Alyaa A. Al-Qarni ◽  
Huda O. Bakodah ◽  
Aisha A. Alshaery ◽  
Anjan Biswas ◽  
Yakup Yıldırım ◽  
...  

The current manuscript displays elegant numerical results for cubic-quartic optical solitons associated with the perturbed Fokas–Lenells equations. To do so, we devise a generalized iterative method for the model using the improved Adomian decomposition method (ADM) and further seek validation from certain well-known results in the literature. As proven, the proposed scheme is efficient and possess a high level of accuracy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (025) ◽  
pp. 1-59
Author(s):  
Leland D. Crane ◽  
◽  
Ryan A. Decker ◽  
Aaron Flaaen ◽  
Adrian Hamins-Puertolas ◽  
...  

Lags in official data releases have forced economists and policymakers to leverage "alternative" or "non-traditional" data to measure business exit resulting from the COVID- 19 pandemic. We first review official data on business exit in recent decades to place the alternative measures of exit within historical context. For the U.S., business exit is countercyclical and fairly common, with about 7.5 percent of firms exiting annually in recent years. Both the high level and the cyclicality of exit are driven by very small firms and establishments. We then explore a range of alternative measures of business exit, including novel measures based on paycheck issuance and phone-tracking data, which indicate exit was elevated in certain sectors during the first year of the pandemic. The evidence is mixed, however; many industries have likely seen lower-than-usual exit rates, and exiting businesses do not appear to represent a large share of U.S. employment. Actual exit is likely to have been lower than widespread expectations from early in the pandemic. Moreover, businesses have recently exhibited notable optimism about their survival prospects.


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