Indiana Public Research Articles

Indiana's Public Health Investment Holds Insights For Other States.

Indiana has a business-friendly environment, but historical underinvestment in public health has yielded poor health outcomes. In 2023, when trust in governmental public health was strained nationwide, Indiana increased public health spending by 1,500percent. In this article, we explain how Indiana achieved this unprecedented legislative victory for public health, describing the context, approach, and lessons learned. Specifically, an Indiana University report linking economic vitality and overall health sparked the creation of a governor's commission charged with exploring ways to address Indiana's shortcomings. Working with the Indiana Department of Health, the commission developed multisectoral coalitions and business and government partnerships, and it maintained consistent and coordinated communication with policy makers. Lessons learned included the value of uncoupling public health from partisan narratives, appointing diverse commission membership with strategically selected cochairs, involving local leaders, and ensuring local decision-making control. We believe that Indiana's approach holds insights for other states interested in strengthening public health funding in the current era.

The Social Economic Contributions of NIPSCO (Northern Indiana Public Service Company) to Northwestern Indiana: A Brief Economic Report Analysis

This brief economic report analysis highlights that NIPSCO is an important economic driver in Northwestern Indiana due to their high investments, including purchases of goods and services, and employing a highly skilled labor force. NIPSCO’s significant capital investments develops a modern and reliable energy generation and distribution infrastructure, and hence in turn supports the region’s economic development. In addition, both GDP and employment multipliers for NIPSCO demonstrate that due to the energy industry in Northwestern Indiana, NIPSCO creates more additional GDP and jobs in other industries in the region. In short, this brief economic report analysis shows that NIPSCO makes significant social economic contributions to the region’s economy in Northwestern Indiana.

Investigating mercury in road sediment in Michigan City, Indiana: A new type of environmental pollution record

Mercury (Hg) is well recognized as a toxic heavy metal known to detrimentally impact the health of humans and wildlife. A common source of Hg pollution is coal combustion emissions associated with energy generation. This study takes the novel approach of using road sediment to assess the presence, distribution, and concentrations of Hg in the environment. Here, the spatial distribution of Hg in road sediment is also evaluated relative to the Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) Generating Station in Michigan City, Indiana, U.S.—a coal-burning power plant. Given that NIPSCO plans to decommission the plant by 2028, this data provides a baseline for evaluating Hg concentrations in the local environment and for future assessment of environmental recovery from legacy pollution and/or impacts of pollution redistribution associated with site redevelopment. Our data reveal an average concentration of 6.8 (µg/kg) of Hg and a range from 1.5 µg/kg to 28.5 µg/kg in road sediment samples (n = 42). Across the ∼53 km2 study area, the overall distribution of Hg is patchy and irregular spatially, however, higher concentrations are more proximal to the coal plant and are generally consistent with prevailing wind directions. Other significant Hg inputs are present in the region although, specifically two major areas of steel manufacturing located to the west of Michigan City and broadening the scope of sampling may be an essential next step. However, this investigation demonstrates that road sediment may be an effective medium for investigating Hg pollution in the environment globally.

Assessing the Impact of Indiana Public Law 194 on Curbing the Concurrent Opioid Prescribing for Indiana Medicaid Enrollees

Several US states have introduced legislation to support the legitimate medical use of opioids while limiting misuse and diversion. One concern which has been addressed through legislation is preventing individuals from seeking opioid prescriptions concurrently from multiple providers. However, the impact of this legislation on the incidence of patients receiving concurrent prescriptions remains relatively unexplored. This study examines this phenomenon based on claims data from Medicaid enrollees and the enactment of legislation in Indiana. Indiana Medicaid claims data over the period of January 2014 to December 2019 were used to determine the changes in the percentage of individuals receiving opioid prescriptions from multiple providers within a 30-day period, that is, concurrent opioid prescription (COP) individuals. Indiana Medicaid enrollees with a diagnosis of opioid use disorder (OUD) receiving opioid prescriptions, that is, the OUD-group, were identified and separated from the enrollees without a diagnosis but receiving opioid prescriptions, that is, the non-OUD group. The mean percentages of COP individuals (with or without an OUD diagnosis) within the subset of individuals that received opioid prescriptions were compared before and after the passage of Indiana Public Law 194. There were 5336 who met the criteria of COP individuals, and 2050 of those were in the OUD-group. In either group, there was a significant difference in the change in percentages (slope) before and after Indiana Public Law 194 passed. In addition, there was a significant decrease in the mean percentage of COP individuals in the non-OUD group, while the difference was not significant in the OUD group. Our study suggests that Indiana Public Law 194 had a positive impact on curbing COP. This study is limited by the level of details available from claims data and suggests additional studies to evaluate prescription use and prescribing practices are warranted.

The Unsettled Issue from Leidos, Inc. v. Indiana Public Retirement System: Should Item 303 Provide a Private Right of Action?

The Unsettled Issue from Leidos, Inc. v. Indiana Public Retirement System: Should Item 303 Provide a Private Right of Action?

Indiana Public High School Parents’ Perceptions of Interscholastic Competitive Balance

As part of the educational mission of interscholastic athletics, ensuring competitive balance is a priority of state athletic associations nationwide. Specifically, teams playing within a postseason championship tournament should have a fair and equitable chance to win. Private high schools, in particular, have been the focus of competitive balance scrutiny from public high school stakeholders due to disproportionately high success in many states. Despite much anecdotal scrutiny from public stakeholders, it is not clear how much they know about interscholastic policy or private school characteristics. Therefore, this study set to explore Indiana public high school parents’ perceptions of interscholastic competitive balance through qualitative interview data. Using thematic analysis, five themes emerged from the data influential to competitive balance (location, policy, sport culture, financial resources, and education). Each of these themes was influenced by an omnipresent private school impact, which reinforced a need for additional education of policy and private school characteristics.

A hybrid hierarchical Bayesian model for spatiotemporal surveillance data.

Due to the low signal-to-noise ratio and high-dimensional structure, spatiotemporal data analysis is challenging. In outbreak detection, the assumptions for control charts, including independence, normality, and stationarity, are often violated in syndromic surveillance data. We develop a novel hybrid hierarchical Bayesian model through the combination of the Dirichlet process and particle filters to resolve these issues. We use a modified adjacency matrix as the observation matrix in the Markovian state-space model. This methodology achieves dimension reduction and computational efficiency and enjoys a superior detection performance with the ability to incorporate online updating for data streaming applications. Our data set is derived from the Indiana Public Health Emergency Surveillance System. It consists of surveillance data on emergency room visits for influenza-like and respiratory illness from 2008 to 2010. We are able to detect the 2009 H1N1 outbreak as well as the seasonal influenza outbreaks. Numerical results show that our Dirichlet process/particle filter models improve the outbreak detection performance in both simulation and real data analysis.

Indiana's Public Health is in Jeopardy

Indiana's Public Health is in Jeopardy

Districts embrace the community to benefit all students

Moving from a traditional school district to one that embraces a community schools model requires fundamental shifts in organizational structure and practices. Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation in southern Indiana and Vancouver Public Schools in Vancouver, Wash., are two districts that have navigated this change. Leaders from those districts describe their efforts to learn from data, build community support and staff buy in, leverage assets, build infrastructure, develop policies and procedures, and plan for sustaining their initiative.

Ask Me No Questions and I Will Tell You No Lies: The Insignificance of Leidos before the United States Supreme Court

What if the Supreme Court issued an opinion and no one cared? No one cared who won or lost. No one cared how the question presented was resolved. The prevailing party wouldn’t gain a cent from its victory and the losing party wouldn’t suffer one whit from its loss. Leidos, Inc. v. Indiana Public Retirement System, now pending before the Supreme Court, could be just that sort of case. Leidos asks whether a “pure omission,” an omission that does not render an affirmative statement false or misleading, is actionable under Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5 thereunder. With so much affirmative mandatory and voluntary disclosure in the public domain it is trivially easy for plaintiffs to allege that material omissions create half-truths that are fully actionable under established precedent. Half-truths expose defendants to liability identical to that arising from corresponding pure omission claims, and it makes no meaningful difference whether pure omissions are actionable as omissions or as half-truths. Leidos itself proves the point: there, a single omission causes an affirmative statement to become misleading and is also alleged as a “pure omission.” Leidos will be remanded to resolve the half-truth claim and, on remand, the probability that Leidos will be dismissed, and the amount for which Leidos settles if not dismissed, will not be materially affected by the Supreme Court’s decision. This is not to suggest that certiorari has been improvidently granted. There is virtue in semantic consistency. A clear opinion describing the scope of liability, if any, for pure omissions will contribute to judicial efficiency by eliminating complex briefing over rhetorical distinctions that don’t move the liability needle. As for the doctrinal question presented, the better interpretation of the law is that the relevant text, history, and precedent do not support Rule 10b-5 liability for pure omissions. A decision to the contrary would create substantial tension with Supreme Court precedent and generate unnecessary confusion over the application of the most important civil liability provision of the federal securities laws. The article also examines the potential for pure omission liability arising from the Sarbanes-Oxley Section 906 certification and concludes that neither the Commission nor private parties are likely to prevail on such a claim.

Brief of Professors at Law and Business Schools As Amicus Curiae in Support of Respondents, Leidos, Inc., fka SAIC, Inc., Petitioners, v. Indiana Public Retirement System, Indiana State Teacherss Retirement Fund, and Indiana Public Employeess Retirement Fund, Respondents, No. 16-581 (S. Ct. Sept. 7, 2017)

This Amicus Brief was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of nearly 50 law and business faculty in the United States and Canada who have a common interest in ensuring a proper interpretation of the statutory securities regulation framework put in place by the U.S. Congress. Specifically, all amici agree that Item 303 of the Securities and Exchange Commission's Regulation S-K creates a duty to disclose for purposes of Rule 10b-5(b) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The Court’s affirmation of a duty to disclose would have little effect on existing practice. Under the current state of the law, investors can and do bring fraud claims for nondisclosure of required information by public companies. Thus, affirming the existence of a duty to disclose will not significantly alter existing practices or create a new avenue for litigants that will lead to “massive liability” or widespread enforcement of “technical reporting violations.” At the same time, the failure to find a duty to disclose in these circumstances will hinder enforcement of the system of mandatory reporting applicable to public companies and weaken compliance. Reversal of the lower court would reduce incentives to comply with the requirements mandated by the system of periodic reporting. Enforcement under Section 10(b) of and Rule 10b-5(b) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 by investors in the case of nondisclosure will effectively be eliminated. Reversal would likewise reduce the tools available to the Securities and Exchange Commission to ensure compliance with the system of periodic reporting. In an environment of diminished enforcement, reporting companies could perceive their disclosure obligations less as a mandate than as a series of options. Required disclosure would more often become a matter of strategy, with issuers weighing the obligation to disclose against the likelihood of detection and the reduced risk of enforcement. Under this approach, investors would not make investment decisions on the basis of “true and accurate corporate reporting. . . .” They would operate under the “predictable inference” that reports included the disclosure mandated by the rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Particularly where officers certified the accuracy and completeness of the information provided in the reports, investors would have an explicit basis for the assumption. They would therefore believe that omitted transactions, uncertainties, and trends otherwise required to be disclosed had not occurred or did not exist. Trust in the integrity of the public disclosure system would decline. The lower court correctly recognized that the mandatory disclosure requirements contained in Item 303 gave rise to a duty to disclose and that the omission of material trends and uncertainties could mislead investors. The decision below should be affirmed.

Leidos and MD&A: Seeing MD&A through the Eyes of the SEC

The Supreme Court has never agreed to decide whether an item in Regulation S-K, like MD&A, creates a duty to disclose that is actionable under Rule 10b-5. By taking cert on Leidos, Inc. v. Indiana Public Retirement System, the Court may be doing just that. If the Court decides that a violation of Item 303 of Regulation S-K creates an independent cause of action for private plaintiffs under Rule 10b-5, the Court must then decide whether violating Item 303 leads “automatically” to a violation of Rule 10b-5 or if additional factors are required. These factors may include the materiality of any omitted disclosure, scienter or the ability of the company to predict the outcome of a trend or uncertainty at the time the omitted disclosure should have been made. Contrary to the Second Circuit’s decision, the Third and Ninth Circuits held that Item 303 does not create a cause of action under Rule 10b-5 in part because of the different materiality standard the SEC has applied to Item 303 in 1989 as compared to the materiality standard articulated in Basic v. Levinson in 1988. In resolving this conflict between the circuits, the Court is not just deciding a discrete and limited issue under Item 303, but may also be determining whether a violation of every one of the SEC’s disclosure rules creates an independent cause of action under Rule 10b-5. Deciding that Item 303 creates a duty to disclose that is actionable under Rule 10b-5 could lead to an implied right of action under Rule 10b-5 with respect to the rules adopted under Sections 13(a) and 15(d) and perhaps Section 14(a)of the Exchange Act. Creating a duty to speak would increase the likelihood of private actions under Rule 10b-5 alleging omitted disclosure in periodic reports against public companies which previously were not subject to Rule 10b-5 liability that did not cause a statement made to be materially misleading. A decision affirming Leidos could have a number of adverse effects: The SEC may need to revisit the trade-off made in 1980 of giving companies a general and flexible rule to foster the exercise of management judgment in providing meaningful disclosure in MDA Companies drafting defensive MDA Defensive disclosure can defeat the SEC’s ongoing effort to make documents readable and make already lengthy documents even longer and more forbidding to read; Voluminous defensive MDA MDA Faced with increased liability exposure and costs of compliance, the trend of companies ceasing to report to the SEC and going private may accelerate. Companies that would have made initial public offerings may decide to stay private.

The Leidos Mixup and the Misunderstood Duty to Disclose in Securities Law

This article concerns an upcoming Supreme Court case, Leidos, Inc. v. Indiana Public Retirement System (Leidos), and examines the broader issues that it raises for securities law. The consensus among scholars and practitioners is that Leidos presents a direct conflict among the circuit courts over a core question of securities law—when a failure to comply with the SEC’s disclosure requirements can constitute fraud under Rule 10b-5. This article provides a much different interpretation of the case. It begins by demonstrating that the circuit split which is presumed to have brought Leidos to the Supreme Court does not in fact exist. It then shows that, rather than being riddled with disagreement, the leading judicial analysis in this area of the law instead reflects a shared set of misconceptions about how the securities regulation architecture works. By unraveling the underlying sources of the Leidos mixup, this article makes three contributions. First, it identifies overlooked aspects of the disclosure rules at issue in Leidos, and provides a novel analysis of how the case should (and likely will) be decided. Second, it explains how errors in leading interpretations of the legal authorities implicated in Leidos carry over to other prominent portions of the regulatory framework, namely Sections 11 and 12 of the 1933 Securities Act. Third, it demonstrates that a central yet ill-defined securities doctrine—the duty to disclose—functions primarily to obscure rather than clarify the legal questions at issue in disclosure fraud claims. Taken together, these points suggest that Leidos is a more unusual case than has been appreciated, and stands at a remarkable confluence of legal and scholarly confusions, many of which implicate fundamental principles of securities law.

A Design Analysis of Indiana Public Library Homepages

This article describes the results of an analysis of 430 Indiana public library homepages. The authors examined each homepage for 129 total elements, such as navigation, search, content, and Web 2.0 features. Our findings reveal common trends in public library homepage design, including twenty-one elements that appear on at least half of the surveyed homepages. The results of this study provide a profile of public library homepage design in Indiana. Additionally, this study blends two preexisting library content checklists in order to provide a replicable methodology for additional libraries to apply to their homepages or websites.

Henry James and American Public Libraries, 1875–1916

This article details how American librarians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had widely varying attitudes toward Henry James’s fictions. It also shows how those librarians’ actions shaped the ways countless library patrons interacted with these works. Drawing on the expressed opinions of librarians, extensive research into the actual holdings of almost 200 American public libraries, and the borrowing records of the Muncie, Indiana Public Library, it concludes that James’s works--both from his Realist and Modernist phases--enjoyed much wider circulation and a more heterogeneous readership than previously believed.

A Bayesian spatio-temporal approach for real-time detection of disease outbreaks: a case study.

BackgroundFor researchers and public health agencies, the complexity of high‐dimensional spatio‐temporal data in surveillance for large reporting networks presents numerous challenges, which include low signal‐to‐noise ratios, spatial and temporal dependencies, and the need to characterize uncertainties. Central to the problem in the context of disease outbreaks is a decision structure that requires trading off false positives for delayed detections.MethodsIn this paper we apply a previously developed Bayesian hierarchical model to a data set from the Indiana Public Health Emergency Surveillance System (PHESS) containing three years of emergency department visits for influenza‐like illness and respiratory illness. Among issues requiring attention were selection of the underlying network (Too few nodes attenuate important structure, while too many nodes impose barriers to both modeling and computation.); ensuring that confidentiality protections in the data do not impede important modeling day of week effects; and evaluating the performance of the model.ResultsOur results show that the model captures salient spatio‐temporal dynamics that are present in public health surveillance data sets, and that it appears to detect both “annual” and “atypical” outbreaks in a timely, accurate manner. We present maps that help make model output accessible and comprehensible to public health authorities. We use an illustrative family of decision rules to show how output from the model can be used to inform false positive–delayed detection tradeoffs.ConclusionsThe advantages of our methodology for addressing the complicated issues of real world surveillance data applications are three‐fold. We can easily incorporate additional covariate information and spatio‐temporal dynamics in the data. Second, we furnish a unified framework to provide uncertainties associated with each parameter. Third, we are able to handle multiplicity issues by using a Bayesian approach. The urgent need to quickly and effectively monitor the health of the public makes our methodology a potentially plausible and useful surveillance approach for health professionals.

Public Health/Health Information Exchange Collaborative: A Model for Advancing Public Health Practice

Public Health/Health Information Exchange Collaborative: A Model for Advancing Public Health Practice

Pandemic Influenza and the Duty to Treat: The Importance of Solidarity and Loyalty

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size The views expressed are the author's and may not represent the views of the Indiana Public Health Association.

Trends of Indiana Public Opinion about Condom use for HIV Prevention—1993, 1998, and 2003

This study identified the trends of Indiana public opinion about condom promotion and condom use for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention via statewide telephone probability surveys repeated in five-year intervals since 1993. There were 645 participants in 1993, 491 in 1998, and 496 in 2003. Results showed that many Indiana residents were still supportive of condom promotion. Their support for condom availability to and correct condom use instruction for teenagers has remained virtually the same with the vast majority being supportive. Public opinion in Indiana was consistent over the years regarding their agreement on the federal government's role in promoting condom use and their disagreement on viewing condom promotion as promoting sex. However, the public became less favorable to television networks airing condom commercials to help prevent the spread of HIV. Lastly, the public's disagreement about a person carrying a condom being viewed as having casual sex and agreement about the effectiveness of condoms in HIV prevention has steadily increased. In conclusion, public opinion about condom use for HIV prevention in Indiana has somewhat changed over time, which may subsequently impact condom education, condom promotion, and public health. Therefore, the trends should be continuously monitored with a view toward preventing HIV transmission.

Biomass cofiring: the technology, the experience, the combustion consequences

Cofiring, the practice of supplementing a base fuel with a dissimilar fuel, is an extension of fuel blending practices common to the solid fuels community. Recently, there has been considerable emphasis on cofiring biomass opportunity fuels with coal in pulverized coal (PC) and cyclone boilers owned and operated by electricity generating utilities in order to address such issues as potential portfolio standards, voluntary actions to reduce fossil CO 2 emissions, customer service, and the generation of green power within the context of deregulation. Biomass fuels considered for cofiring include wood waste, short rotation woody crops, short rotation herbaceous crops (e.g., switchgrass), alfalfa stems, various types of manure, landfill gas and wastewater treatment gas. Of these, the solid biofuels such as sawdust, urban wood waste and switchgrass have received the most attention. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), along with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), GPU Genco, Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO), Central and South West Utilities (C&SW), Southern Company, Madison Gas & Electric (MG&E), New York State Electric and Gas (NYSEG) and others developed a concerted effort to commercialize direct combustion cofiring of biomass with coal. The USDOE joined the program with a cooperative agreement between the Federal Energy Technology Center (FETC) — now the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and EPRI; this agreement was extensively supported by the energy efficiency and renewable energy (EERE) element of USDOE. European cofiring programs also have been extensive and include gasification-based cofiring in Lahti, Finland and straw cofiring in Denmark. Three general techniques comprise the cofiring technology family: blending the biomass and coal in the fuel handling system and feeding that blend to the boiler; preparing the biomass fuel separately from coal, and injecting it into the boiler without impacting the conventional coal delivery system; and gasifying the biomass with subsequent combustion of the producer gas in either a boiler or a combined cycle combustion turbine (CCCT) generating plant. Commercialization has proceeded on the direct combustion approaches to cofiring, beginning with engineering and economic studies, parametric testing and the construction of demonstration projects. The direct combustion cofiring techniques are now ready for commercial deployment. This paper reviews the key projects, and details some of the influences of cofiring on the combustion process.