cometadata/datacite-titles-descriptions-related-identifiers huggingface dataset:
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-318999
title: Essays on the economics of health insurance

description: Health insurance is arguably the most important feature that sets the health care market apart from markets for other goods. Many countries—both developed and developing—provide health insurance to their citizens to protect them against the financial risk of expensive and uncertain medical expenditure. In the US, there have been two important developments in health insurance markets over the past few years: the rapid growth of high deductible health plans (HDHPs), and the implementation of the Health Insurance Marketplace with the passage of Patient Protect and Affordable Care ACT (ACA). HDHP enrollment has increased by over seven times, from 4% in 2006 to 29% in 2016. Beginning in 2014, individuals and small groups could purchase health plans in the Health Insurance Marketplaces. This dissertation focuses on these two developments. ❧ The first two papers investigate the effects of HDHPs on consumers. The goal of CDHPs is to encourage value-based decisions, such as price shopping for providers or reducing use of unnecessary services. However, while HDHPs do reduce costs, whether or not HDHPs could lead consumers to make value-based decisions remains unclear. It is also unclear how HDHPs affect the financial burden of using health care. In this dissertation, paper 1 investigates whether HDHP enrollment leads consumers to choose lower-priced providers; paper 2 investigates the impact of HDHP enrollment on the financial burden of using health care. Paper 1 finds that consumers with HDHPs are not price shopping for office visits; however, the enrollment of HDHPs leads consumers to choose lower cost providers for lab tests. Paper 2 finds that HDHP enrollment led to a significant increase in out-of-pocket costs. HDHPs have considerably larger impacts on the financial burden for the lower-income population and the population with chronic conditions. ❧ Paper 3 focuses on the Health Insurance Marketplace and how the Marketplace can be made more efficient and stable. To protect against adverse selection, the ACA creates a risk adjustment model that is used to compensate the health plans with a higher-risk population in the Health Insurance Marketplaces. However, the current algorithm undercompensates health plans for patients without any condition. In paper 3, we investigate whether prescription information can be used to improve the risk adjustment model. We find that certain drug classes can be used to improve the predictive accuracy of the risk adjustment model for patients without a condition; however, further research is needed to ascertain the proper use of these drug classes in the risk adjustment model—diagnosis imputation or severity indication or both—to ensure that incorporating the use of prescription drug claims does not result in unintended adverse consequences.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-386764
title: A comparison of two earthquake events in the City of Downey: the Puente Hills and Whittier faults at 7.0 and 6.8 magnitudes

description: Earthquakes have produced losses of over $60 billion since 1971. Of these, California has suffered the highest losses nationally. These losses include building and bridge damage, destruction of building contents and business interruption. The risk factors (as they pertain to loss from earthquake damage) are large stocks of old buildings and bridges; many high-tech and hazardous materials facilities; extensive sewer, water, and natural gas pipelines; earth dams; petroleum pipelines; other critical facilities; and private property. The secondary earthquake hazards (which include liquefaction, ground shaking, amplification, and earthquake-induced landslides) can be just as devastating as the earthquake itself. Damage caused by an earthquake depends on the quality of the buildings’ construction, the density of the area, the pattern of intense shaking, and many other factors. Should an earthquake occur in a densely populated area with older buildings, loss of life and damage to infrastructure would be much higher. ❧ This study performs and evaluates two potential earthquake scenarios for the City of Downey utilizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) HAZards U.S., Multi-Hazard (HAZUS) Earthquake Model. According to the Downey General Plan, there is a 50% probability that a major earthquake will occur within the next 30 years along the Whittier-Elsinore Fault, which is 40 miles northeast of Downey. In addition, the Anaheim, Puente Hills, Elysian and Newport-Inglewood Faults are within or near Downey’s city limit and those faults are all active or potentially active faults. For this reason, the Whittier and Puente Hills faults with Magnitude (M) 6.8 and 7.0 respectively were chosen to run in the scenarios. HAZUS, which runs on an ArcGIS platform, along with Comprehensive Data Management System (CDMS) was used to ingest updated data, model the earthquakes and create output maps. Essential Facilities data were updated via data provided from the City of Downey Water Work Department into the CDMS. United States Geological Survey (USGS) ShakeMaps were ingested via the Data tool into HAZUS. Based on the updated data, two earthquake scenarios were modeled and the results were used for mitigation planning.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-386854
title: Evaluating the stability of decision tree algorithms

description: Decision Trees (DT), one method falling under the umbrella of Exploratory Data Mining (EDM; McArdle & Ritschard, 2013), has seen an increasing amount of use in psychological research. This can be attributed to its easily interpretable tree structure, along with its propensity to automatically capture interactions among predictors. However, the creation of tree structures comes at the expense of generalizability—namely that slight perturbations in the sample can result in dramatically different results. The purpose of this paper was to investigate this instability and to provide metrics to quantify the propensity for the results to generalize. This was examined across five studies using multiple DT algorithms and datasets to determine whether there were differences in stability, and what factors accounted for these differences. There were large differences in both stability and predictive performance across algorithms, with some favoring simplistic, stable trees, and others large, unstable, but highly predictive models. The addition of simulated missingness and the testing of both imputation and surrogate splits resulted in mixed results. Single imputation did not add enough variability to the imputed values, whereas surrogate splits worked well. Finally, this comparison was applied to an empirical example—predicting dementia with various cognitive scales and demographic factors. In this, none of the DT algorithms produced highly stable results, and had lower accuracy than both multinomial regression and random forests. In sum, these results demonstrate that measuring the stability of DT algorithms has utility in comparing multiple algorithms and methods, providing additional information to researchers as to both the viability and usefulness of using DT algorithms in their research.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-414670
title: TRPM8-mediated inhibition of pain and itch

description: Cooling and menthol are sensory stimuli that have been used to treat itch and pain for centuries. However, the downstream mediators of these therapeutic effects are still not clear. The somatosensory nervous system detects thermal, chemical, and mechanical changes in its environment using stimulus specific molecular sensors and cellular pathways. These pathways interact with each other at the spinal cord, thus allowing one stimulus modality to modulate the perception of others. The transient receptor potential (TRP) ion channel TRPM8 is a molecular sensor for cold and cold-mimetic compounds like menthol and icilin. This channel is located on C and Aδ fiber primary sensory neurons that represent a cold-sensing pathway. Therefore, TRPM8 and TRPM8 expressing neurons may be mediating the analgesic and anti-pruritic effects of cooling and menthol. Here, I have detailed experiments using wildtype, trpm8-/- and TRPM8-neuron ablated mice that test this hypothesis. I found that mild cooling inhibits mechanical and heat pain in mouse models of inflammation (CFA) and neuropathy (CCI), but noxious cold temperatures were not analgesic. TRPM8-channels mediated the analgesic effects of cooling on neuropathic pain, but they also mediated cold-hypersensitivity that can be blocked with a TRPM8-antagonist. Selective uptake of the charged lidocaine derivative QX-314 in TRPM8-neurons can also be used to acutely and selectively block cold-pain. Heterologously expressed TRPM8-channels were stimulated in vitro to induce uptake of large dyes and the charged lidocaine derivative QX-314. I have laid the groundwork for using this technique in vivo to acutely silence cold transduction. In addition to pain, responses to multiple puritogens and scratching in the dry skin model of itch were decreased by a range of cold temperatures and menthol. Moreover, I found a role for TRPM8- and TRPM8-neurons in the inhibition of acute itch by cold and cold-mimetics. These experiments have revealed a novel molecular and cellular pathway required for cooling- and cold-mimetic induced analgesia and itch relief. The Knowledge of this pathway has broadened our understanding of how the somatosensory system works, and offers a potential therapeutic target to develop new and improved therapies for itch and pain
DOI: 10.25549/lachs-c76-1479
title: LACHS newsletter, v. [33], n. 4 (2012-11)
title: Los Angeles City Historical Society newsletter, vol. 45 [sic, i.e. 33], no. 4 (2012-11)

description: Los Angeles City Historical Society newsletter, vol. 45 [sic, i.e. 33], no. 4 (2012 November).
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-634076
title: Queer in translation: paradoxes of westernization and sexual others in the Turkish nation

description: In my dissertation, through looking at contemporary urban queer formations and politics, I theorize about the complex ways in which power and abjection operates in the context of Turkey's post-Empire, Westernizing nation-state formation. I argue that queer formations, subjects and subcultures are particularly fruitful places from which to understand how power operates in Turkey, as they have been historically cast to a particular space between state regulation and state negligence. While queers have not been cast as the civilizational Others of the modernizing Turkish nation, or as a threat to national unity or identity, there has been a quiet, national imposition of monogamous, adult reproductive heterosexuality as the norm for the new Republic. ❧ Using four case studies that emerged from my fieldwork in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey, based on ethnographic methods, as well as in-depth interviews and analysis of popular/media discourses, I analyze what these sites reveal about the mechanisms of abjection of the modern westernizing nation-state, especially the roles played by processes of sexualization, racialization, secularization, criminalization and gendering of citizen subjects within the context of national aspirations for ""civilization."" I lay out how systems of justice and other forces of the state work to mark certain bodies as criminal, or simply push them outside of juridicial and political subjectivity and citizenship, how Western knowledges and discourses of gender and sexuality and human rights travel and get articulated and mobilized in ways that can and do contribute to divisions among queers and among larger groups ""Others"" of the secular Turkish nation-state, and about the uneasy relationship the secular nation-state has to other structures, such as feudal kinship systems, and religion that have the power to produce alternative regimes of truth, and deploy military/police functions. I provide these analyses through putting both the sexual, and the social at the heart of my critical inquiry, which I argue is essential for transnational and interdisciplinary queer studies.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-669147
title: Dependence analysis for distributed event-based systems

description: In recent years, distributed event-based (DEB) systems that have been developed using message-oriented middleware platforms have become widespread.  In DEB systems, a software component does not directly call other software components via explicit references, but instead implicitly invokes other software components by publishing messages.  Consequently, DEB components are highly decoupled and enable highly scalable, easy-to-evolve, concurrent, distributed, heterogeneous applications. ❧ At the same time, implicit invocations render more difficult the analysis of the impact of a particular change to a system.  Software engineers who perform impact analysis investigate a software system's dependencies, in order to determine how a proposed change to a component affects other components.  In the absence of explicit references between DEB components, an engineer has to assume that any component in the system may potentially interact with, and thus depend on, any other component.  Thus, investigating the impact of proposed changes in DEB systems becomes especially hard and time-consuming. ❧ Existing automated dependence analysis techniques inadequately facilitate impact analysis of DEB systems because the dependencies that these techniques extract are too imprecise and incomplete.  Therefore, the research of this dissertation devises techniques that extract more precise dependencies with a significantly higher degree of completeness from the implementations of DEB systems. ❧ The results of this dissertation research are the identification of the specific obstacles that make dependence analysis challenging for DEB systems, and the development of two novel dependence analysis techniques, named Message Dependency Analyzer (MDA) and Rapid Message Dependency Analyzer (RMDA), that extract more precise and complete dependencies from DEB system than existing techniques.  MDA and RMDA analyze the source code of a DEB system, in order to identify the types of messages each component may consume and publish, as well as how published and consumed messages depend on each other.  The two techniques make different tradeoffs between speed, precision, completeness, and applicability.  While MDA is aimed at extracting control-flow-based dependencies from a broad range of existing implemented DEB systems, RMDA defines a set of implementation constraints and extracts control-flow-based and data-flow-based dependencies only from DEB systems that are compliant to these constraints.  RMDA's implementation constraints enable RMDA to extract significantly faster precise and complete dependencies than MDA.  The dissertation evaluates the degree of precision and completeness that MDA and RMDA achieve in the analysis of existing DEB systems.  Overall, the evaluation demonstrates that MDA and RMDA extract more precise and complete dependencies from DEB systems than existing techniques.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-134511
title: A study of social action and direct service volunteers at the Los Angeles Rape Crisis Center
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-134794
title: Group approaches to mental health programming in Los Angeles synagogues
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-320405
title: A simulation of long-term health outcomes in adults with hemophilia

description: Hemophilia is a rare, inherited bleeding disorder characterized by spontaneous bleeding into joint and muscles, leading to chronic hemophilic arthropathy, which is associated with joint pain and motion limitation. Persons with hemophilia may experience impaired health-related quality of life (HRQoL). The management of hemophilia can be costly because it needs life-time intravenous infusion of clotting factors, which places substantial economic burden on patients, their families and healthcare system. ❧ Understanding how health status is influenced by socio-demographic and clinical characteristics over a prolonged period may help researchers and healthcare providers identify factors mediating health outcomes in patients with hemophilia. This would allow providers or policy decision maker tailor patient education and management strategies, allowing for better care management both at the individual patient and disease population level. ❧ However, studies for hemophilia has been limited by small sample size, variety of health state utilities across HRQoL measurements, lack of long-term QoL assessment and lack of indirect cost estimation. In this dissertation we used a hidden Markov model (HMM) to analyze a multivariate, longitudinal, patient-reported quality of life dataset. Instead of describing a net increase or decrease in QoL scores, using the health state modelling approach, we described the changes in health status in terms of moving from one health state to another over time. Such a model makes it possible to distinguish subtler differences between subgroups that may be hidden when only examine means. It also allows us to predict the long-term outcomes using data from studies of a finite duration. ❧ HMM provides a very flexible way to fit the data. The distribution of the mixture components can be chosen by the modeler, rather than assuming a normal distribution. It also allows the assignment of an individual to a cluster to depend on the cluster that a person belonged to in the previous time period. Thus, the interactions between varies dimensions of health, longitudinal effects in QoL scores, as well as missing observation points are all accounted for in the model. The first chapter represents detailed description of the methodology and describes the characteristics of the four health clusters. ❧ The second chapter examines the direct and indirect cost among adult hemophilia population, and investigates the association between costs, factor usage, bleeding frequency, and health outcomes. Health outcomes, represented in health clusters (categorical variable) instead of continuous quality of life scores, allow a better understanding of the potential non-linear relationship between variables of interest. This is a longitudinal data analysis. ❧ The third chapter is a reinforcement of the second study to assess the health status change patterns among this population, and examines the relationships between outcomes of interest on patient level.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-322179
title: All together now: the neural basis of social development in music training

description: To a considerable degree, playing music in an ensemble setting requires that the performer recognizes and matches the emotional states of others, an ability that can be described as social acuity. Because of this, one would have expected the relationships between socio-emotional abilities, music education, and brain function to have been substantially explored. But that is not the case. Here, we attempt to address this gap in the literature with a study designed to investigate the behavioral and neural correlates of socio-emotional processing in children with varying degrees of formal music training. Violinists between the ages of 8-12 were scanned using fMRI while performing two tasks, one musical and one non-musical, that involved inferring the emotional states of others. In the music task, the participant either watched (video condition) or listened to (audio condition) a musical performance of a violinist and had to identify which of four emotions the performer was conveying. In the non-music task, the participant was presented with a face and had to identify either emotion or judge the intensity of the facial expression. We found that amount of musical training was positively correlated with accurately naming the emotion of the musical performance in the audio condition only and marginally with accurately naming the emotion of the faces. The fMRI results showed that the task conditions differentially activated regions known to be involved in processing emotions, including the insula, precuneus, and middle frontal gyrus. Furthermore, in the audio condition of the music task, children with more music training had a greater difference in BOLD signal between positive and negative valence emotion trials in the right parietal cortex (superior parietal lobule and post-central gyrus) and the prefrontal cortex (superior and middle frontal gyri). These regions belong to the action observation network, which underlies our ability to infer the intentions of other’s actions. The results therefore suggest that in the absence of visual cues, children with more musical training are engaging part of this action observation network in order to accurately distinguish between emotions with different valence. Such results may provide support for the notion that music education has social and emotional benefits in that it can affect the way in which we come to understand the emotions of others. The findings may also suggest a possible route by which to improve the lives of children and adults with neurodevelopment disorders characterized by impaired emotional processing.
DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c40-338688
title: Examining data sources and classification methods used in food access studies: investigating volunteered geographic information as an adjunct to traditional data

description: This thesis performs a comparative analysis of traditional models of food access and a proposed model of food access that uses volunteered geographic information (VGI). Moreover, food businesses are often manually classified, which limits the number of businesses used for a given study. This thesis explores VGI as a potential improvement in the classification of food businesses. Field research was conducted in a subset of the selected facilities in order to determine the actual quality of the data retrieved from the experimental sources. The goal is to create a more nuanced and accurate representation of food access for a given person in a given place. Finally, data is compared for areas with different socio-economic conditions. Median income, car access, and percent minority from the 2010-2014 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates were used to define contrasting study areas. Two census tracts in Los Angeles were selected for the study area using these criteria: (1) an affluent area near La Cañada; and (2) a less affluent area in South Los Angeles. This thesis explores the quality and completeness of three data sets for census tracts with contrasting socio-economic conditions in order to identify whether or not problems exist with traditional methods and data. Furthermore, this thesis compares the data from census tracts with contrasting socio-economic conditions in order to determine whether or not the data varies based on the community served. The results of this thesis indicate that VGI does not represent a significant addition to commercial data because so few of the businesses are represented in the VGI data set. Moreover, the use of North American industry classification standard (NAICS) codes to classify businesses proved to be problematic. Specifically, numerous businesses that were classified as super markets or grocery stores were in fact smaller than convenience stores and sold fewer items. Finally, sentiment analysis of reviews will require a larger data set and specifically trained models in order to be evaluated further.