Selective Admission Research Articles

Analysis of selective neurocritical care admission costs following elective endovascular treatment of unruptured intracranial aneurysms.

No consensus exists on the necessity of neurocritical care unit (NCU)-level care following unruptured intracranial aneurysm (UIA) treatment. We aim to identify patients requiring NCU-level care post-treatment and determine potential cost savings utilizing a selective NCU admission protocol. A retrospective analysis of all UIA patients who underwent endovascular treatment at a single center from 2017-2022 was conducted. Data on demographics, preprocedural variables, radiographic features, procedural techniques, intra/postoperative events, and length of stay (LOS) were collected. Multivariable analysis was performed to identify patients requiring NCU-level care post-treatment. Cost analysis using hospital cost data (not charges/reimbursement) was performed using simulated step-down and floor protocols for patients without NCU indications following a hypothetical six-hour post-anesthesia care unit observation period. Of 209 patients, 179 were discharged within 24 h and 30 had prolonged LOS. In our analysis, intra- and postoperative events independently predicted prolonged LOS. In our subanalysis, 47 patients demonstrated NCU needs: 24 with intraoperative indications, 18 with postoperative indications, and five with both. Of the 23 with postoperative indications, 20 were identified within six hours, while three were identified within six to 24 h. The median variable cost per patient for the current NCU protocol was $31,505 (IQR, $26,331-$37,053) vs. stepdown protocol $29,514 (IQR, $24,746-$35,011;p = 0.061) vs. floor protocol $26,768 (IQR, $22,214-$34,107;p < 0.001). Total variable costs were $6,211,497 for the current NCU protocol vs. $5,921,912 for the step-down protocol (4.89% savings) and $5,509,052 for the floor protocol (12.75% savings). Most patients requiring NCU-level care following UIA treatment were identified within a six-hour postoperative window. Thus, selective NCU admission for this cohort following a six-hour observation period may be a logical avenue for cost reduction. Our analysis demonstrated 5% and 13% savings for uncomplicated patients using step-down and floor admission protocols, respectively.

Cutting in line ahead of us: the role of group relative deprivation in shaping gatekeeping attitudes across different immigrant integration contexts in Europe

ABSTRACT Although research shows that anti-immigrant sentiments are generally lower in liberal integration policy contexts, popular backlash against immigrants become salient in many pro-immigration and inclusive integration policy contexts in Europe today. Developing a contextualized mediation model, this research suggests that feelings of deprivation vis-à-vis immigrants influence attitudes toward selective immigrant admission in Europe. From a cross-country analysis of the 2014–2015 European Social Survey through multigroup structural equation modeling, our findings reveal that sentiments of group relative deprivation translate into stronger gatekeeping attitudes throughout Europe by developing threat perceptions from immigration. Relative deprivation-driven threat perceptions influence gatekeeping attitudes more potently in countries where integration policies grant immigrants more comprehensive and equal rights, while they remain relatively dormant in countries with exclusionary integration policies. These findings contribute to our understanding of how and to what extent relative deprivation sentiments vis-à-vis immigrants shape gatekeeping attitudes while shedding light on the unintended impacts of liberal integration policies on public opinion regarding immigration.

Beach Clubs and Tourist Gaze: A Critical Inquiry into the Construction of Social Distinction

This study explores the growing concerns about socioeconomic accessibility, inclusivity, and exclusionary practices of beach clubs as ostensibly public spaces in the tourism destination of Çeşme. The thematic analysis of Google Maps online reviews has provided critical insights into beach clubs’ selective admission practices and has elucidated the factors influencing customer perspectives and driving high demand for these clubs. Also, the findings revealed a relationship between customer expenditure and favorable entrance experiences; guests with lesser spending reported dissatisfaction and reluctance to revisit. Eight beach clubs with ratings deviating from the weighted average were examined to ensure diverse representation. The findings strongly encourage us to take urgent policy action to address the call for the need to create more inclusive beaches that should not be solely open to certain people with privileges. In the case of beach clubs, the adherence to specific dress codes and the emphasis on Instagram followers as a measure of social status reflect the doxa of conspicuous consumption and social hierarchies. This perpetuates a system where the privileged and affluent are more likely to gain access, while others may feel excluded or marginalized. Drawing on the solid theoretical frameworks of Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory and John Urry’s “tourist gaze,” this paper outlines the socio-economic barriers that distort ideals of public space and leisure and invites a reassessment of inclusivity in tourist destinations and luxury tourism.

The role of letters of recommendation in perpetuating or challenging the social stratification of American secondary schools: a quantitative analysis of admission officer assessments in highly selective college admission

Admission to highly selective institutions offers a pathway to upward social mobility, particularly for low-resource students. However, entrenched wealth disparities in the United States present serious challenges for admission officers at highly selective institutions. Utilizing individualized holistic review (IHR), including letters of recommendation (LOR), and contextual consideration, highly selective institutions aim to account for wealth inequities. This quantitative analysis, conducted at a highly selective research university, examined 95,326 applicants across 4 years to explore if admission officers’ internal assessments of LORs relate to contextual independent variables beyond students’ control. Statistical methods, including ANOVA, Two-Way ANOVA, Chi-Square, multiple linear regression, and logistic regression, were employed, controlling for standard measures of academic readiness. Findings revealed higher LOR assessments for students facing greater contextual challenge levels, underscoring the ability of the admission process to identify high achieving students from high challenge contexts. Paradoxically, elevated LOR ratings were also observed for students from private and smaller schools, indicating a nuanced interplay of factors in the admission process. Importantly, LOR assessments significantly correlated with admission outcomes, emphasizing the pivotal role of LORs in highly selective college admissions. This study reveals the nuanced role of LORs in admissions, exposing their potential to tackle inequities. It calls for improved IHR training and heightened consideration of contextual variables, offering a crucial contribution to advancing equity in highly selective institutions, fostering more informed admission practices.

DRACO: Distributed Resource-aware Admission Control for large-scale, multi-tier systems

Modern distributed systems are designed to manage overload conditions, by throttling the traffic in excess that cannot be served through overload control techniques. However, the adoption of large-scale NoSQL datastores make systems vulnerable to unbalanced overloads, where specific datastore nodes are overloaded because of hot-spot resources and hogs. In this paper, we propose DRACO, a novel overload control solution that is aware of data dependencies between the application and the datastore tiers. DRACO performs selective admission control of application requests, by only dropping the ones that map to resources on overloaded datastore nodes, while achieving high resource utilization on non-overloaded datastore nodes. We evaluate DRACO on two case studies with high availability and performance requirements, a virtualized IP Multimedia Subsystem and a distributed fileserver. Results show that the solution can achieve high performance and resource utilization even under extreme overload conditions, up to 100x the engineered capacity.

Risk predictors of glycaemic control in children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

To conduct systematic evaluation of the risk predictors of glycaemic control in children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes mellitus. Cohort studies on risk predictors of glycaemic control in children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes were retrieved from CNKI, PubMed, Web of Science, Embase databases, etc. from the construction of the repository to 3 February 2023. Literature screening was conducted according to inclusion and exclusion criteria, then data extraction of region, sample size, age, follow-up time, risk predictors, outcome indicators, etc., and quality evaluation of The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale were conducted by two researchers while the third researcher makes decisions if there are disagreements. Finally, Revman5.4 and StataMP17 were used for meta-analysis. A total of 29 studies were included, and the results showed that insulin pump [Weighed mean difference (WMD) = -.48, 95% CI (-.73, -.24), p < .01], high-frequency sensor monitoring, early use of insulin pumps, prospective follow-up male, white race, large body mass index-standardised scoring, conscientiousness, agreeableness of mothers, eicosapentaenoic acid, leucine and protein (p < .05) were beneficial for reducing HbA1c levels in children and adolescents with diabetes. Ketoacidosis [WMD = .39, 95% CI (.28, .50), p < .01], selective admission, higher HbA1c level at one time (p < .01), higher glutamate decarboxylase antibody at 1 month after diagnosis, lower socio-economic status, non-living with biological parents, non-two-parent family, family disorder, family history of diabetes and high carbohydrate intake (p < .05) increased HbA1c levels in children and adolescents with diabetes. For children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes mellitus, the use of insulin pump, high-frequency sensor monitoring, prospective follow-up, good family support and reasonable diet are conducive to blood glucose control, while selective admission and DKA are not. Disease characteristics and demographic characteristics of children are closely related to subsequent blood glucose control, and the relationship between diagnosis age and blood glucose control needs to be further explored.

Is routine admission to a critical care setting following hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy for ovarian cancer necessary?

IntroductionHyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) is increasingly being used in patients with stage III ovarian cancer undergoing interval cytoreductive surgery (CRS). It is uncertain whether routine postoperative admission to a critical care setting after CRS-HIPEC is necessary. This study aims to estimate the incidence of patients requiring critical care, and to create a prediction model to identify patients who may forego admission to a critical care setting. MethodsWe analyzed 154 patients with primary ovarian cancer undergoing interval CRS-HIPEC at two Dutch centers between 2007 and 2021. Patients were routinely admitted to a critical care setting for 12–24 h. Patients that received critical support as defined by pre-specified definitions were retrospectively identified. Logistic regression analysis with backward selection was used to predict the need for critical care and the model was validated using bootstrapping. ResultsThirty-eight percent of patients received postoperative critical care, consisting mainly of hemodynamic interventions. Independent predictors of critical care were blood loss, norepinephrine dose during surgery, and age (bootstrapped AUC = 0.76). Using a probability cut-off of 20%, one-third of patients are defined as low-risk for requiring critical care, with a negative predictive value of 0.88. ConclusionsThe majority of patients,primarily undergoing low to intermediate complexity surgeries, did not receive critical care interventions after CRS-HIPEC. Selective admission to a critical care setting may be warranted and its feasibility and safety needs to be evaluated prospectively. Our prediction model can help identify patients in whom admission to a critical care setting may be omitted. Hospital costs and burden on critical care units will benefit from patient selection.

Increasing Women's Participation in CS at Large Public Universities: Issues and Insights

Despite rapidly growing interest in Computer Science (CS), CS has the second lowest participation rate for women of all science and engineering degrees, according to a recent report by the US National Science Board [16]. The reasons for women's underrepresentation and their experiences may differ from university to university. Universities are very different in terms of types of students, student profiles, students' socio-economic status, race, number of students, admission requirements, and resources. For example, some universities can create gender balance in introductory courses through selective admission. However, typically, admission practices in large public universities are not able to achieve gender balance for CS majors. As a result, there are lower percentages of women in the CS major in large public universities than in selective schools. In addition, large public universities tend to have a larger number of CS students when compared to private universities. To understand women students' experiences and struggles in computer science at a large public university in the United States and to find ways to intervene in favor of gender equity in computer science, we conducted in-depth interviews with women students in introductory programming courses. In this article, we present women students' experiences, struggles, expectations and offer potential interventions based on the findings to encourage women to consider CS as their major and stay in the CS major. Our interview data shows there is a persistent effect of lack of prior programming experience and gender bias that leads to a negative experience for women students in introductory CS courses. This article presents the challenges faced by women in CS and provides their recommendations for attracting and retaining women students in CS at large public universities.

The Italian Society of Cardiology and Working Group on Telecardiology and Informatics 2023 updated position paper on telemedicine and artificial intelligence in cardiovascular disease

In 2015, the Italian Society of Cardiology and its Working Group on Telemedicine and Informatics issued a position paper on Telecardiology, resuming the most eminent evidence supporting the use of information and communication technology in principal areas of cardiovascular care, ranked by level of evidence. More than 5 years later and after the global shock inflicted by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, an update on the topic is warranted. Recent evidence and studies on principal areas of cardiovascular disease will be therefore reported and discussed, with particular focus on telemedicine for cardiovascular care in the COVID-19 context. Novel perspectives and opportunities disclosed by artificial intelligence and its applications in cardiovascular disease will also be discussed. Finally, modalities by which machine learning have realized remote patient monitoring and long-term care in recent years, mainly filtering critical clinical data requiring selective hospital admission, will be provided.

Do Experiences of Success and Failure Influence Beliefs about Inequality? Evidence from Selective University Admission

Previous research suggests that beliefs about inequality are often biased in ways that serve people’s own interests. By contrast, people might uphold system-justifying beliefs, such as meritocratic beliefs. We test these assumptions against real-life experience of highly selective university admission. Using panel data on German medical school applicants allows us to measure belief changes through experiences of success or failure in admission. We find support that self-serving bias in beliefs outweighs the motivation for system justification: success strengthens the belief that admission depends on effort, while failure reinforces the belief that admission depends on luck. These patterns partly manifest themselves in beliefs about societal inequality. Additionally, we argue that previous experiences (long-term experiences of social upbringing and short-term experiences in university admissions) provide a frame for new experiences, examine respective effect heterogeneity, and discuss implications of our findings of diverging paths in inequality beliefs of winners and losers for the persistence of inequality.

Picking Your Patients: Selective Admissions in the Nursing Home Industry

Do healthcare providers pick their patients? This paper uses patient-level administrative data on skilled nursing facilities in California to estimate a structural model of selective admission practices in the nursing home industry. I exploit within-facility covariation between occupancy and admitted patient characteristics to distinguish admission patterns attributable to selective admission practices from those attributable to heterogeneous patient preferences. In spite of anti-discrimination laws, I find strong evidence of selective admission practices that disproportionately harm Medicaid-eligible patients with lengthy anticipated stays. Counterfactual simulations show that enforcing a prohibition on selective admissions would increase access for these residents at the cost of crowding out short-stay non-Medicaid patients from their preferred facilities. I simulate two additional policies intended to mitigate selective admissions: raising the Medicaid reimbursement rate and expanding capacity. I find the latter to be less costly and more effective than the former.

Assessing applicants in context? School profiles and their implications for equity in the selective college admission process.

Assessing applicants in context? School profiles and their implications for equity in the selective college admission process.

The Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence and Clinical Success at the Completion of One Year of Courses for Diagnostic Medical Sonography or Radiography Students

Objective: Since most health care programs have competitive entry and selective admission procedures, it is essential for colleges to select proper admissions tools to ensure student success in the health care programs. The purpose of the study was to determine what relationship exists between emotional intelligence (EI) and clinical success for diagnostic medical sonography (DMS) or radiography (RT) students. The main goal of this work was to explore if an EI model such as the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue) can be potentially used as one of the criteria in the admission selection process for DMS and RT programs in the future. Materials and Methods: The participants of this study were 26 imaging students. The convenient sample included 10 DMS and 16 RT students, enrolled in an Associate Degree in Applied Sciences program, within a community college. The study was conducted by administering the TEIQue questionnaire that collected EI data and demographic data of the participants in both programs. These data were gathered at the beginning of each respective program and 1 calendar year later. The clinical student success was examined over a period of 2 clinical semesters. Results: The analysis of the findings determined that a significant relationship existed between all EI variables such a global EI, 4 factors and 3 subscales of trait EI for both groups of students. The findings of this study did not show a significant relationship between clinical success and global EI as well as 3 subscales of trait EI for DMS or RT students. Nevertheless, a statistically significant increase was observed among 1 of the 4 EI factors, well-being, among RT students. Interestingly, DMS students did not show the same outcome. Conclusion: The results of this study provide limited empirical evidence that a strong relationship may exist between 1 of the 4 trait EI factors, well-being, among RT students and clinical success in this RT student cohort. This is an important finding that may support the use of the TEIQue questionnaire, as part of the admissions process for other RT programs. The DMS students did not exhibit the same results. However, the findings with the RT students demonstrate the need for further research.

The association between macrovascular complications and intensive care admission, invasive mechanical ventilation, and mortality in people with diabetes hospitalized for coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19)

BackgroundIt is not clear whether pre-existing macrovascular complications (ischemic heart disease, stroke or peripheral artery disease) are associated with health outcomes in people with diabetes mellitus hospitalized for COVID-19.MethodsWe conducted cohort studies of adults with pre-existing diabetes hospitalized for COVID-19 infection in the UK, France, and Spain during the early phase of the pandemic (between March 2020—October 2020). Logistic regression models adjusted for demographic factors and other comorbidities were used to determine associations between previous macrovascular disease and relevant clinical outcomes: mortality, intensive care unit (ICU) admission and use of invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV) during the hospitalization. Output from individual logistic regression models for each cohort was combined in a meta-analysis.ResultsComplete data were available for 4,106 (60.4%) individuals. Of these, 1,652 (40.2%) had any prior macrovascular disease of whom 28.5% of patients died. Mortality was higher for people with compared to those without previous macrovascular disease (37.7% vs 22.4%). The combined crude odds ratio (OR) for previous macrovascular disease and mortality for all four cohorts was 2.12 (95% CI 1.83–2.45 with an I2 of 60%, reduced after adjustments for age, sex, type of diabetes, hypertension, microvascular disease, ethnicity, and BMI to adjusted OR 1.53 [95% CI 1.29–1.81]) for the three cohorts. Further analysis revealed that ischemic heart disease and cerebrovascular disease were the main contributors of adverse outcomes. However, proportions of people admitted to ICU (adjOR 0.48 [95% CI 0.31–0.75], I2 60%) and the use of IMV during hospitalization (adjOR 0.52 [95% CI 0.40–0.68], I2 37%) were significantly lower for people with previous macrovascular disease.ConclusionsThis large multinational study of people with diabetes mellitus hospitalized for COVID-19 demonstrates that previous macrovascular disease is associated with higher mortality and lower proportions admitted to ICU and treated with IMV during hospitalization suggesting selective admission criteria. Our findings highlight the importance correctly assess the prognosis and intensive monitoring in this high-risk group of patients and emphasize the need to design specific public health programs aimed to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection in this subgroup.

A New Admission System in Chile and Its Foreseen Moderate Impact on Access for Low-Income Students

Chile is known for universal school choice policies and a high level of economic segregation. In part, segregation has been linked to selective school admission policies. Chile implemented a centralized school admission system (New School Admission System), where PK–12 schools must accept any applicant, and lottery assignment is used for oversubscription. We exploit a natural experiment due to the phased implementation across grades and regions to attempt to detect any effects of this policy on access for and representation of low-income students using grade-within-school and year fixed effects. Eliminating admissions barriers may contribute to increased educational opportunity, but the impact may be limited by the multiple structural factors shaping inequality in Chile. We find little short-term change in access for low-income students.

The Relationship Between Cognitive Variables for Academic and Clinical Success After the Completion of One Year of Courses for Diagnostic Medical Sonography and Radiography Students

Objective: Most health care programs have competitive entry and selective admission procedures. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between cognitive variables such as the Test of Essential Academic Skills (TEAS) composite scores, the preprogram academic grade point average (GPA), as well as clinical GPA for diagnostic medical sonography (DMS) or radiography (RT) students. Materials and Methods: The participants of this study were 26 imaging students. The convenient sample included 10 DMS and 16 RT students, enrolled in an Associate Degree in Applied Sciences program, within a community college. The student’s program success was examined over a period of one academic year. Results: The analysis of the findings determined that a significant relationship existed between some of the cognitive variables such as the TEAS composite scores, academics, as well as the clinical success for the DMS students. However, these RT students did not show the same outcome. In addition, there was no significant relationship between preprogram GPA and academic as well as clinical success, for either educational program. Conclusion: The results of this study provide empirical evidence that a strong relationship may exist between the TEAS composite scores, academics, as well as clinical success for the DMS students. This is an important finding that may support the use of the TEAS test, as part of the admission process, for other DMS programs.

Rethinking Routine Intensive Care After Cytoreductive Surgery With Heated Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy: The Fiscal Argument

Patients undergoing cytoreductive surgery (CRS) with hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) are frequently admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) for mitigation of potential complications, although ICU length of stay (LOS) is a significant driver of cost. This study asked whether a fiscal argument could be made for the selective avoidance of ICU admission after CRS/HIPEC. Prospective data for select low-risk patients (e.g., lower peritoneal cancer index [PCI]) admitted to the intermediate care unit (IMC) instead of the ICU after CRS/HIPEC were matched with a historic cohort routinely admitted to the ICU. Cohort comparisons and the impact of the intervention on cost were assessed. The study matched 81 CRS/HIPEC procedures to form a cohort of 49 pre- and 15 post-intervention procedures for patients with similar disease burdens (mean PCI, 8 ± 6.7 vs. 7 ± 5.1). The pre-intervention patients stayed a median of 1 day longer in the ICU (1 day [IQR, 1-1 day] vs. 0 days [IQR, 0-0 days]) and had a longer LOS (8 days [IQR, 7-11 days] vs. 6 days [IQR, 5.5-9 days]). Complications and complication severity did not differ statistically. The median total hospital cost was lower after intervention ($30,845 [IQR, $30,181-$37,725] vs. $41,477 [IQR, $33,303-$51,838]), driven by decreased indirect fixed cost ($8984 [IQR, $8643-$11,286] vs. $14,314 [IQR, $12,206-$18,266]). In a weighted multiple variable linear regression analysis, the intervention was associated with a savings of $2208.68 per patient. Selective admission to the IMC after CRS/HIPEC was associated with $2208.68 in savings per patient without added risk. In this era of cost-conscious practice of medicine, these data highlight an opportunity to decrease cost by more than 5% for patients undergoing CRS/HIPEC.

Dynamic Allocation of Medical Resources During the Outbreak of Epidemics

During the outbreak of epidemics such as coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the local hospitals often withstand a sharp increase of patient influx, which renders the healthcare system on the verge of collapse. To alleviate the situation, the effective allocation of scarce medical resources during the pandemic plays a vital role. The essence of the healthcare system in time of emergency is to stay functional, and to be able to diagnose and hospitalize as many patients as possible. Fangcang shelter hospital, as a novel way to temporarily increase the capacity of the local healthcare system, is proven to be effective against the COVID-19 pandemic. To improve the performance of the healthcare system with Fangcang, many practical factors need to be taken into account, such as the patient deterioration during waiting to be admitted, the referral mechanism according to the severity of the patients, and the selective admission regulations. To address the high volatility and time-varying feature of the COVID-19, a multistage and multi-type medical service network model is established, and a dynamic allocation strategy of the medical resources at each stage is proposed based on a stochastic optimization problem, which is then solved via the fluid queueing approximation. Combined with the real data collected from Wuhan, it is revealed that the proposed algorithm could help with the allocation of medical resources during the outbreak of epidemics. Even with limited medical resources available, the method could still maintain a guaranteed service level while keeping the healthcare system operational. Furthermore, the simulation analysis validates that our method can effectively allocate medical resources at each stage, so as to stabilize the system performance and fulfill the medical demand for multiple types of patients. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</i> —To fend off the outbreak of epidemics, the lessons have to be learned from the past. The successful control of the spread of COVID-19 in Wuhan (China) is a classical example of applying modern medical practices and management tools. In the present article, the treating procedure of COVID-19 in Wuhan is modeled as a multistage decision problem, which includes the screening with nucleic acid testing, the further testing, the treatment of patients with mild/severe symptoms, or even critical patients. The introduction of Fangcang shelter hospital is crucial for winning the battle against COVID-19. The current study attempts to determine the timing of introducing the Fangcang shelter hospital during the outbreak of a major epidemic, and helps allocate the medical resources needed to contain the spread of the virus. It is discovered that the actual number of beds in the Fangcang shelter hospital is far more than what is necessary, and it would be better to have built the Fangcang some time in advance. In the meantime, the number of designated hospitals for COVID-19 is in line with the results obtained via the optimal staffing strategy proposed here, but it is also noticeable that these hospitals should be released of duty sooner to fight against not only COVID-19 but also other diseases in reality.

Graph-based sparse bayesian broad learning system for semi-supervised learning

During the past decades, semi-supervised learning in classification has been regarded as one of the most active research area due to the increasing physical demand. Generally, the semi-supervised learning model believes the unlabeled data could potential be helpful to achieve higher performance as long as scare labeled samples under either cluster assumption or manifold assumption. However, most of the semi-supervised classifiers directly incorporate all the unlabeled data without any selective admission, which contains unfavorable features and noise diminishing performance while resulting in inability to large-scale data. In this paper, we propose a graph-based semi-supervised learning algorithm named GSB2LS within Bayesian framework for classification. The algorithm can explore unlabeled data effectively by adopting the compound prior that consists of unlabeled manifold information and sparse Bayesian inference to the broad structure. In particular, GSB2LS takes advantage of the broad structure to search for more potential associations of features, the manifold regularization to capture beneficial interdependence of unlabeled samples, the Bayesian framework to maintain the universal sparsity, the fast marginal likelihood maximization to update the relevance set based on the defined contribution, which leads to the feasibility to process large-scale data in the inductive way. Moreover, the algorithm is capable of outputting the probabilistic estimation of prediction for further decision analysis. Extensive empirical results verifies the excellent performance of our algorithm with clearly superior efficiency and generalization compared to other state-of-the-art semi-supervised classifiers.

The Personal Statement as a Marginalizing Rhetorical Device: Merit and Racism in College Access

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; font-size: medium; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">This paper is a literature review on the personal statement, merit, race, and racism through the application of colorblind and race-neutral policies. In an attempt to avoid racist admission policies, higher education place overwhelming emphasis on objective merits, such as grades. However, during the personal statement writing process, minoritized applicants’ expression of merit may be affected by racial inequities, experiences, and educational preparation, both consciously and unconsciously. Therefore, by excluding race, colorblind merit policies may contribute to unexpected and unintentional racism in admissions. In this paper, college-choice theory (CCT), critical race theory (CRT), and critical literacy theory (CLT) are used to interrogate colorblind merit in higher education to suggest why race is an important feature of applicants’ narratives in the personal statement context. If race is significant to applicants’ identities, then their narratives would be incomplete without it. There is a need to centralize both merit and race in personal statement research to allow education professionals to appropriately assess applicants’ statements. Reintegrating race in assessments could improve our understanding of selective college admission processes and inform recommendations to refine instruction and evaluation of applicants’ personal statement writing.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span>