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Social Impact Bonds to Address Phoenix Homelessness

Description

Social impact bonds (SIBs) are a multi-year contract between social service providers, the government, and private investors. The three parties agree on a specific outcome for a societal issue. Investors provide capital required for the service provider to operate the project. The service provider then delivers the service to the…

Social impact bonds (SIBs) are a multi-year contract between social service providers, the government, and private investors. The three parties agree on a specific outcome for a societal issue. Investors provide capital required for the service provider to operate the project. The service provider then delivers the service to the target population. The success of the project is evaluated by outside party. If the target outcome is met, the government repays the investors at a premium. Nonprofit service providers can only serve a small community as they lack the funding to scale their programs and their reliance on government funding and philanthropy leads to a lot of time focused on raising money in the short-term and inhibits them from evolving their programs and projects for long-term strategic success. Government budgets decline but social problems persist. These contracts share risk between the government and the investors and allow governments to test out programs and alleviate taxpayer burdens from unsuccessful social service programs. Arizona has a severe homelessness problem. Nightly, 6000 people are homeless in Maricopa County. In a given year, over 32,000 individuals were homeless, composed of single adults, families, children, and veterans. Homelessness is not only a debilitating and difficult experience for those who experience it, but also has considerable economic costs on society. Homeless individuals use a number of government programs beyond emergency shelters, and these can cost taxpayers billions of dollars per year. Rapid rehousing was a successful intervention model that the state has been heavily investing in the last few years. This thesis aimed to survey the Arizona climate and determine what barriers were present for enacting an SIB for homelessness. The findings showed that although there are many competent stakeholder groups, lack of interest and overall knowledge of SIBs prevented groups from taking responsibility as the anchor for such a project. Additionally, the government and nonprofits had good partnerships, but lacked relationships with the business community and investors that could propel an SIB. Finally, although rapid rehousing can be used as a successful intervention model, there are not enough years of proven success to justify the spending on an SIB. Additionally, data collection for homelessness programming needs to be standardized between all relevant partners. The framework for an SIB exists in Arizona, but needs a few more years of development before it can be considered.

ContributorsAhmed, Fabeeha (Author) / Desouza, Kevin (Thesis director) / Lucio, Joanna (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)

Created2016-05

Using Bag of Words Approach for Classifying Native Arizona Snakes in Images as Venomous or Non-Venomous

Description

Uninformed people frequently kill snakes without knowing whether they are venomous or harmless, fearing for their safety. To prevent unnecessary killings and to encourage people to be safe around venomous snakes, a proper identification is important. This work seeks to preserve wild native Arizona snakes and promote a general interest…

Uninformed people frequently kill snakes without knowing whether they are venomous or harmless, fearing for their safety. To prevent unnecessary killings and to encourage people to be safe around venomous snakes, a proper identification is important. This work seeks to preserve wild native Arizona snakes and promote a general interest in them by using a bag of features approach for classifying native Arizona snakes in images as venomous or non-venomous. The image category classifier was implemented in MATLAB and trained on a set of 245 images of native Arizona snakes (171 non-venomous, 74 venomous). To test this approach, 10-fold cross-validation was performed and the average accuracy was 0.7772. While this approach is functional, the results could be improved, ideally with a higher average accuracy, in order to be reliable. In false positives, the features may have been associated with the color or pattern, which is similar between venomous and non-venomous snakes due to mimicry. Polymorphic traits, color morphs, variation, and juveniles that may exhibit different colors can cause false negatives and misclassification. Future work involves pre-training image processing such as improving the brightness and contrast or converting to grayscale, interactively specifying or generating regions of interest for feature detection, and targeting reducing the false negative rate and improve the true positive rate. Further study is needed with a larger and balanced image set to evaluate its performance. This work may potentially serve as a tool for herpetologists to assist in their field research and to classify large image sets.

ContributorsIp, Melissa A (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis director) / Chandakkar, Parag (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)

Created2017-05

The Demographics of Polling Places

Description

Elections in the United States are highly decentralized with vast powers given to the states to control laws surrounding voter registration, primary procedures, and polling places even in elections of federal officials. There are many individual factors that predict a person's likelihood of voting including race, education, and age. Historically…

Elections in the United States are highly decentralized with vast powers given to the states to control laws surrounding voter registration, primary procedures, and polling places even in elections of federal officials. There are many individual factors that predict a person's likelihood of voting including race, education, and age. Historically disenfranchised groups are still disproportionately affected by restrictive voter registration and ID laws which can suppress their turnout. Less understood is how election-day polling place accessibility affects turnout. Absentee and early voting increase accessibility for all voters, but 47 states still rely on election-day polling places. I study how the geographic allocation of polling places and the number of voters assigned to each (polling place load) in Maricopa County, Arizona has affected turnout in primary and general elections between 2006 and 2016 while controlling for the demographics of voting precincts. This represents a significant data problem; voting precincts changed three times during the time studied and polling places themselves can change every election. To aid in analysis, I created a visualization that allows for the exploration of polling place load, precinct demographics, and polling place accessibility metrics in a map view of the county. I find through a spatial regression model that increasing the load on a polling place can decrease the election-day turnout and prohibitively large distances to the polling place have a similar effect. The effect is more pronounced during general elections and is present at varying levels during each of the 12 elections studied. Finally, I discuss how early voting options appear to have little positive effect on overall turnout and may in fact decrease it.

ContributorsHansen, Brett Joseph (Author) / Maciejewski, Ross (Thesis director) / Grubesic, Anthony (Committee member) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)

Created2017-12

Constructing a Visualization Dashboard to Improve Educational Standards in Arizona Legislative Districts

Description

Education has been at the forefront of many issues in Arizona over the past several years with concerns over lack of funding sparking the Red for Ed movement. However, despite the push for educational change, there remain many barriers to education including a lack of visibility for how Arizona schools…

Education has been at the forefront of many issues in Arizona over the past several years with concerns over lack of funding sparking the Red for Ed movement. However, despite the push for educational change, there remain many barriers to education including a lack of visibility for how Arizona schools are performing at a legislative district level. While there are sources of information released at a school district level, many of these are limited and can become obscure to legislators when such school districts lie on the boundary between 2 different legislative districts. Moreover, much of this information is in the form of raw spreadsheets and is often fragmented between government websites and educational organizations. As such, a visualization dashboard that clearly identifies schools and their relative performance within each legislative district would be an extremely valuable tool to legislative bodies and the Arizona public. Although this dashboard and research are rough drafts of a larger concept, they would ideally increase transparency regarding public information about these districts and allow legislators to utilize the dashboard as a tool for greater understanding and more effective policymaking.

ContributorsColyar, Justin Dallas (Author) / Michael, Katina (Thesis director) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Tate, Luke (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)

Created2021-05

The Making of ASU Biodesign Clinical Testing Laboratory (ABCTL): Information Technology

Description

As much as SARS-CoV-2 has altered the way humans live since the beginning of 2020, this virus's deadly nature has required clinical testing to meet 2020's demands of higher throughput, higher accuracy and higher efficiency. Information technology has allowed institutions, like Arizona State University (ASU), to make strategic and operational changes to combat the…

As much as SARS-CoV-2 has altered the way humans live since the beginning of 2020, this virus's deadly nature has required clinical testing to meet 2020's demands of higher throughput, higher accuracy and higher efficiency. Information technology has allowed institutions, like Arizona State University (ASU), to make strategic and operational changes to combat the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. At ASU, information technology was one of the six facets identified in the ongoing review of the ASU Biodesign Clinical Testing Laboratory (ABCTL) among business, communications, management/training, law, and clinical analysis. The first chapter of this manuscript covers the background of clinical laboratory automation and details the automated laboratory workflow to perform ABCTL’s COVID-19 diagnostic testing. The second chapter discusses the usability and efficiency of key information technology systems of the ABCTL. The third chapter explains the role of quality control and data management within ABCTL’s use of information technology. The fourth chapter highlights the importance of data modeling and 10 best practices when responding to future public health emergencies.

ContributorsKandan, Mani (Co-author) / Leung, Michael (Co-author) / Woo, Sabrina (Co-author) / Knox, Garrett (Co-author) / Compton, Carolyn (Thesis director) / Dudley, Sean (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)

Created2021-05