Betting Against the Odds: The Mysterious Case of the Clinical Override in Risk Assessment of Adult Convicted Offenders

Various tools were designed to guide practitioners in the risk assessment of offenders, including the Level of Service and Case Management Inventory (LS/CMI). This instrument is based on risk assessment principles prioritizing the actuarial approach to clinical judgment. However, the tool’s architects allowed subjective judgment from the practitioners—referred to as clinical override—to modify an offender’s risk category under certain circumstances. Few studies, however, have examined these circumstances. Therefore, the current study used decision tree analyses among a quasi-population of Quebec offenders ( n = 15,744) to identify whether there are offenders more likely to be subjected to this discretion based on their characteristics. The results suggest that, although the override is rare, it occurred under few specific combinations of circumstances. More precisely, these findings propose that the utilization of the clinical override stems from a perceived discrepancy between risk prediction and management.

Parameter Choice, Stability and Validity for Robust Cluster Weighted Modeling

Statistical inference based on the cluster weighted model often requires some subjective judgment from the modeler. Many features influence the final solution, such as the number of mixture components, the shape of the clusters in the explanatory variables, and the degree of heteroscedasticity of the errors around the regression lines. Moreover, to deal with outliers and contamination that may appear in the data, hyper-parameter values ensuring robust estimation are also needed. In principle, this freedom gives rise to a variety of “legitimate” solutions, each derived by a specific set of choices and their implications in modeling. Here we introduce a method for identifying a “set of good models” to cluster a dataset, considering the whole panorama of choices. In this way, we enable the practitioner, or the scientist who needs to cluster the data, to make an educated choice. They will be able to identify the most appropriate solutions for the purposes of their own analysis, in light of their stability and validity.

Space Syntax Guide to Optimize Shopping Mall

The shopping mall is a facility for profit-making with a complex spatial configuration that prioritizes the effectiveness in any aspects. The spatial configuration of a shopping mall needs more than a rule of thumb or a subjective judgment to optimize it. Many researchers have conducted studies of shopping mall spatial configuration by the theory and method of space syntax. But, the complexity of space syntax turns it hard to understand or apply in practical use. Due to the complexity of both shopping mall and space syntax, a guide is needed for practical directions to optimize shopping mall. This article review combines and synthesizes the findings of space syntax precedent studies. The scope of the study is on the building configuration scale (mesoscale). As the result, the optimization of a shopping mall can be measure by space syntax through measurement of connectivity, depth, integration, choice, and intelligibility. Each measurement has a different purpose. The most used measurement in shopping mall study is integration. The spatial configuration of the mall can be represented by the axial map, convex map, isovist map, VGA map, and agent-based in space syntax analyses. The most suitable map for shopping mall analysis is the VGA map because it shows the visual quality is vital in shopping mall design. There are several aspects of the shopping mall that can be adjusted or modified to optimize the shopping mall. Those aspects are pedestrian flows, horizontal complexity, vertical complexity, tenant type allocation, visual quality, retail placement, and anchor placement.

Assessment of Surgical Complications With Respect to the Surgical Indication: Proposal for a Novel Index

Introduction: The Clavien–Dindo classification is a broadly accepted surgical complications classification system, grading complications by the extent of therapy necessary to resolve them. A drawback of the method is that it does not consider why the patient was operated on primarily.Methods: We designed a novel index based on Clavien–Dindo but with respect to the surgical indication. We surveyed an international panel of otolaryngologists who filled out a questionnaire with 32 real case-inspired scenarios. Each case was graded for the surgical complication, surgical indication, and a subjective rating whether the complication was acceptable or not.Results: Seventy-seven otolaryngologists responded to the survey. Mean subjective rating and surgical complication grading for each scenario showed an inverse correlation (r2 = 0.147, p = 0.044). When grading the surgical complication with respect to the surgical indication, the correlation with the subjective rating increased dramatically (r2 = 0.307, p = 0.0022).Conclusion: We describe a novel index grading surgical complications with respect to the surgical indication. In our survey, most respondents judged a complication as acceptable or not according to its grade but kept in mind the surgical indication. This subjective judgment could be quantified with our novel index.

Pre-stimulus alpha activities predict the confidence in subjective judgment by modulating post-stimulus theta oscillation

Even when making arbitrary decisions, people tend to feel varying levels of confidence, which is associated with the pre-stimulus neural oscillation of the brain. We investigated varying confidence in a pure subjective judgment task, and how this confidence was predicted by pre-stimulus alpha oscillations. Participants made pure subjective judgments where their prior experience seems to be helpful but actually useless, and their fluctuating confidence was related to the choice boundary process rather than the evidence accumulation process, suggesting participants underwent varying confidence resulting from the internal signals. With EEG and MEG analyses, we not only revealed the linkage between confidence and pre-stimulus alpha activities, but also successfully located this linkage onto decision-making relevant brain areas, i.e. MCC/PCC and SMA. Moreover, we unveiled a specific pathway underlying such linkage, that is, the influence of pre-stimulus alpha activities on decision confidence was fulfilled through modulating post-stimulus theta activities of SMA.

Automatic Detection of Linear Thermal Bridges from Infrared Thermal Images Using Neural Network

Detecting thermal bridges in building envelopes should be a priority to improve the thermal performance of buildings. Recently, thermographic surveys are being used to detect thermal bridges. However, conventional methods of detecting thermal bridges from thermal images rely on the subjective judgment of audits. Research has been conducted to automatically detect thermal bridges from thermal images to improve problems caused by such subjective judgment, but most of these studies are still in the early stage. Therefore, this study proposes a linear thermal bridge detection method based on image processing and machine learning. The proposed method includes thermal anomaly area clustering, feature extraction, and an artificial-neural-network-based thermal bridge detection. The proposed method was validated by detecting the thermal bridges in actual buildings. As a result, the average precision, recall, and F-score were 89.29%, 87.29, and 87.63%, respectively.

Vaginal Secretions Epithelial Cells and Bacteria Recognition Based on Computer Vision

The examination of vaginal secretions epithelial is of great importance to female reproductive health. The results of manual detection will be affected by subjective judgment and fatigue. In this paper, an identification method based on computer vision is proposed to identify vaginal secretions epithelial cells and some bacteria. The experimental results demonstrate that the method can significantly distinguish the vaginal secretions epithelial cells from the bacteria and virus.

From Trash to Treasure

The paper, based on an ongoing research project conducted in Finland, examines voluntary dumpster diving as a practice of valuation. Its main questions are: How is voluntary dumpster diving intertwined with the question of value? And, conversely, what can dumpster diving teach us about practices of valuation more generally? The article proceeds via three steps. First, in order to emphasize the creative side of dumpster diving as a practice of valuation, we draw on Georg Simmel’s theory of value, supplementing it with the concepts of actuality and virtuality, as elaborated by Gilles Deleuze. Second, we look more closely into the practicalities of valuation evident in dumpster diving. It involves a particular orientation to the urban environment that we call the scavenger gaze. Third, the informants also value the practice itself in relation to its societal relevance. They think about dumpster diving as a way of doing good and as part of an ecologically sound form of life. All in all, as value does not reside inherently in waste or would simply be merely the product of subjective judgment, the analyst must attend to multiple modes of valuation evident in the practice, among which there is no self-evident hierarchy.

Estimating disease onset from change points of markers measured with error

Summary Huntington disease is an autosomal dominant, neurodegenerative disease without clearly identified biomarkers for when motor-onset occurs. Current standards to determine motor-onset rely on a clinician’s subjective judgment that a patient’s extrapyramidal signs are unequivocally associated with Huntington disease. This subjectivity can lead to error which could be overcome using an objective, data-driven metric that determines motor-onset. Recent studies of motor-sign decline—the longitudinal degeneration of motor-ability in patients—have revealed that motor-onset is closely related to an inflection point in its longitudinal trajectory. We propose a nonlinear location-shift marker model that captures this motor-sign decline and assesses how its inflection point is linked to other markers of Huntington disease progression. We propose two estimating procedures to estimate this model and its inflection point: one is a parametric method using nonlinear mixed effects model and the other one is a multi-stage nonparametric approach, which we developed. In an empirical study, the parametric approach was sensitive to correct specification of the mean structure of the longitudinal data. In contrast, our multi-stage nonparametric procedure consistently produced unbiased estimates regardless of the true mean structure. Applying our multi-stage nonparametric estimator to Neurobiological Predictors of Huntington Disease, a large observational study of Huntington disease, leads to earlier prediction of motor-onset compared to the clinician’s subjective judgment.

Cesare Zavattini’s Poetics of Objectivity

Cesare Zavattini was an acclaimed neorealist screenwriter and a theorist of neorealism. He has played a pivotal role in the critical rethinking of the new postwar Italian cinema although many of his concepts were considered avant-garde for that period. He stood for a direct, spontaneous, and immediate cinema with real people and real events. Despite his desire to eliminate all that was fictional from his films, Zavattini’s concept of new realist cinema cannot simply be described as a documentary approach. He was not so much interested in making documentary films but in making documentary-like fictions. He believed in the potential of cinema to reach a wide audience and in its capacity to be aesthetically subversive. The aspiration for an avant-garde cinema that would reach the masses was a naïve attempt that was too radical for the Italian cinema at the time. Most of his ideas were not accepted in Italy, but he was admired by young filmmakers all over the world. Some of his ideas were realized a few decades later in the works of the famous cinéma vérité and independent avant-garde filmmakers. Throughout his career, Zavattini argued that cinema should be socially committed art. He believed that neorealist films should direct the viewer’s gaze toward specific social issues and voice a subjective judgment on it. In neorealist films, fictional style and documentary rhetoric make the illusion that the experience of characters stands for the experience of the audience.