Academic literature on the topic 'Chicago Field Office'

The Sears Tower in Chicago is the tallest office building in the world. About 1.3 million people visit the Sears Tower Skydeck each year to view the spectacular Chicago skyline. The Skydeck is located on the 103d floor, 1353 feet above the streets of Chicago. A visitor can reach the Skydeck by an express elevator that travels 1600 feet per minute or can choose to walk approximately 2100 steps. From the Skydeck, observers can see the major buildings and landmarks in downtown Chicago, including Soldier Field, Wrigley Field, Comiskey Park, the John Hancock Building, Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, and the Amoco Building. If visiting the Skydeck on a clear day, the view extends approximately fifty miles in all directions.

Commander Zeita Merchant, PhD, is currently the Commanding Officer of the Coast Guard Marine Safety Unit Chicago and has served on active duty in the Coast Guard for more than 20 years. She was previously Special Assistant to the Vice Commandant of the Coast Guard, and has also held the positions of Executive Officer of Marine Safety Unit Texas City, Supervisor, Port of Miami Field Office, and Chief of Port Operations at US Coast Guard Sector Miami. From 2010 to 2012, Commander Merchant served as a Congressional Fellow in the US House of Representatives. She graduated with honors from Tougaloo College with a Bachelor of Science in Biology, and received her Master of Quality Systems Management from the National Graduate School in 2003, her Master of Public Administration from the Trachtenberg School in 2010, and her Doctorate in Business Administration from the National Graduate School in 2011. Commander Merchant has been honored with many professional, academic, and community service awards throughout her career, including no less than eleven medals for her service in the Coast Guard, and is a recognized authority in the field of Marine Safety, Emergency, and Environmental Management.

“His views have had as much, if not more, impact on the way we think about monetary policy and many other important economic issues as those of any person in the last half of the twentieth century.” These words in praise of Milton Friedman are from economist and Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan. They are spoken from a vantage point of experience and knowledge of what really matters for policy decisions in the real world. And they are no exaggeration. Many would say they do not go far enough.It is a rare monetary policy conference today in which Milton Friedman's ideas do not come up. It is a rare paper in macroeconomics in which some economic, mathematical, or statistical idea cannot be traced to Milton Friedman's early work. It is a rare student of macroeconomics who has not been impressed by reading Milton Friedman's crystal-clear expositions. It is a rare democrat from a formerly communist country who was not inspired by Milton Friedman's defense of a market economy written in the heydays of central planning. And it is a rare day that some popular newspaper or magazine around the world does not mention Milton Friedman as the originator of a seminal idea or point of view.Any one of his many contributions to macroeconomics (or rather to monetary theory, for he detests the term macroeconomics) would be an extraordinary achievement. Taken together they are daunting:[bull ] permanent income theory;[bull ] natural rate theory;[bull ] the case for floating exchange rates;[bull ] money growth rules;[bull ] the optimal quantity of money;[bull ] the monetary history of the United States, especially the Fed in the Great Depression, not to mention contributions to mathematical statistics on rank-order tests, sequential sampling, and risk aversion, and a host of novel government reform proposals from the negative income tax, to school vouchers, to the flat-rate tax, to the legalization of drugs.Milton Friedman is an economist's economist who laid out a specific methodology of positive economic research. Economic experts know that many current ideas and policies—from monetary policy rules to the earned-income tax credit—can be traced to his original proposals. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976 for “his achievements in the field of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.” Preferring to stay away from formal policy-making jobs, he has been asked for his advice by presidents, prime ministers, and top economic officials for many years. It is in the nature of Milton Friedman's unequivocally stated views that many disagree with at least some of them, and he has engaged in heated debates since graduate school days at the University of Chicago. He is an awesome debater. He is also gracious and friendly.Born in 1912, he grew up in Rahway, New Jersey, where he attended local public schools. He graduated from Rutgers University in the midst of the Great Depression in 1932. He then went to study economics at the University of Chicago, where he met fellow graduate student Rose Director whom he later married. For nearly 10 years after he left Chicago, he worked at government agencies and research institutes (with one year visiting at the University of Wisconsin and one year at the University of Minnesota) before taking a faculty position at the University of Chicago in 1946. He remained at Chicago until he retired in 1977 at the age of 65, and he then moved to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.I have always found Milton and Rose to be gregarious, energetic people, who genuinely enjoy interacting with others, and who enjoy life in all its dimensions, from walks near the Pacific Ocean to surfs on the World Wide Web. The day of this interview was no exception. It took place on May 2, 2000, in Milton's office in their San Francisco apartment. The interview lasted for two-and-a-half hours. A tape recorder and some economic charts were on the desk between us. Behind Milton was a floor-to-ceiling picture window with beautiful panoramic views of the San Francisco hills and skyline. Behind me were his bookcases stuffed with his books, papers, and mementos.The interview began in a rather unplanned way. When we walked into his office Milton started talking enthusiastically about the charts that were on his desk. The charts—which he had recently prepared from data he had downloaded from the Internet—raised questions about some remarks that I had given at a conference several weeks before—which he had read about on the Internet.As we began talking about the charts, I asked if I could turn on the tape recorder, since one of the topics for the interview was to be about how he formulated his ideas—and a conversation about the ideas he was formulating right then and there seemed like an excellent way to begin the interview. So I turned on the tape recorder, and the interview began. Soon we segued into the series of questions that I had planned in advance (but had not shown Milton in advance). We took one break for a very pleasant lunch and (unrecorded) conversation with his wife Rose before going back to “work.” After the interview, the tapes were transcribed and the transcript was edited by me and Milton. The questions and answers were rearranged slightly to fit into the following broad topic areas:[bull ] money growth, thermostats, and Alan Greenspan;[bull ] causes of the great inflation and its end;[bull ] early interest in economics;[bull ] graduate school and early “on-the-job” training;[bull ] permanent income theory;[bull ] return of monetary economics;[bull ] fiscal and monetary policy rules;[bull ] use of models in monetary economics;[bull ] use of time-series methods;[bull ] real business-cycle models, calibration, and detrending;[bull ] natural rate hypothesis;[bull ] role of debates in monetary economics;[bull ] capitalism and freedom today;[bull ] monetary unions and flexible exchange rates.

Many police jurisdictions have recently expanded their Taser arsenals with a goal of reducing officer-involved shootings. We analyze substitution between Tasers and firearms by means of an event study made possible by a policy change at the Chicago Police Department. Before March 2010, only sergeants and field training officers had access to Tasers; after that date, they were made available to patrol officers. We find that the change in Taser policy led to a large increase in Taser use, but not to a decrease in the use of firearms.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the spatial influence of features of the physical environment on the risk of aggression toward law enforcement. Design/methodology/approach – The spatial analytic technique, risk terrain modeling was performed on felonious battery data provided by the Chicago Police Department. Findings – Out of the 991 batteries against law enforcement officers (LEOs) in Chicago, 11 features of the physical environment were identified as presenting a statistically significant spatial risk of battery to LEOs. Calls for service within three blocks of foreclosures and/or within a dense area of problem buildings pose as much as two times greater risk of battery to police officers than what is presented by other significant spatial factors in the model. Originality/value – An abundance of existing research on aggression toward law enforcement is situated from the perspective of characteristics of the suspect or officer. The research advances the field of violence studies by illustrating the importance of incorporating physical features of the environment into empirical studies of aggression.

This study applies the growing field of network science to explore whether police violence is associated with characteristics of an officer’s social networks and his or her placement within those networks. To do this, we re-create the network of police misconduct for the Chicago Police Department using more than 38,442 complaints filed against police officers between 2000 and 2003. Our statistical models reveal that officers who shoot at civilians are often “brokers” within the social networks of policing, occupying important positions between other actors in the network and often connecting otherwise disconnected parts of the social structure between other officers within larger networks of misconduct. This finding holds, even net measures of officer activity, career movement, and sociodemographic background. Our finding suggest that policies and interventions aimed at curbing police shootings should include not only individual assessments of risk but also an understanding of officers’ positions within larger social networks.

Abstract Objectives Companies are looking to support their employees with healthier and more sustainable food options. Here, we test if appealing dish names could influence food choices at corporate cafes. We hypothesized that menu items accompanied by appealing food names would be selected more compared to when accompanied by basic names. Methods The study had a quasi experimental design and was conducted in buffetera-style cafes in four corporate offices across the world (Sydney, Chicago, Singapore & Sao Paulo) where food is complementary. The seated head count at these offices is ∼850–2500 employees. Three plant-based menu items including entrees, side dishes, composed salads and/or soups were tested at each site. Appealing names were generated through a creative workshop and emphasized the dish ingredients, origin, flavor and/or the eating experience. Each menu item appeared 4 to 6 times across repeated menu cycles, 4 weeks apart one from another, with the dish name alternating between basic and appealing across dish repetitions. For each dish, we weighed the overall food take and divided it by the plate count to estimate food taken per plate in the cafe. Data was analysed using the lme4 package in R and are presented as median (Q1, Q3). Results Overall, appealing dish names increased the food amount taken per plate by 35% when compared to the basic dish names [23.5 (12.7, 40.7) vs. 17.3 (10.7, 37.6) g/plate, respectively] with the effect being marginally significant [b = 2.90, SE = 1.6, t(46.25) = 1.80, P = 0.078]. Conclusions The findings indicate that making dish names more appealing has the potential to cause an uplift in the dishes; making this a promising strategy to shift food choices towards more plant-based options. This relatively easy change could help foodservice providers to support more sustainable and healthier food choices. Funding Sources The study was funded by Google Inc.

This interview was completed in May 2004, well before Stan Fischer had any idea he would become Governor of the Bank of Israel, a position he took up in May 2005. The interview took place in April 2004 in my office at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, where I was spending a sabbatical year. We completed it while running together in Central Park during the following weeks.Our meeting at Russell Sage was just like the many meetings we have had over the years. I was not sitting with a Master of the Universe, a world VIP, but with the same Stan Fischer I had first met in 1973 when he was a young associate professor, freshly imported from Chicago. There was the same ability to listen carefully, the same ability to talk and to explain simply and straightforwardly. In addition, there was the accumulated wisdom of a professional life spent developing and applying macroeconomics to the very real world.When I arrived as a PhD student at MIT in 1973, it was clear that Stan would quickly play a central role in the department. Within a few years, he was one of the most popular teachers, and one of the most popular thesis advisers. We flocked to his office, and I suspect that the only time for research he had was during the night. What we admired most were his technical skills (he knew how to use stochastic calculus)—, and his ability to take on big questions and to simplify them to the point where the answer, ex post, looked obvious. When Rudi Dornbusch joined him in 1975, macro and international quickly became the most exciting fields at MIT. Imitation is the sincerest form of admiration, and this is very much what we all did.When I came back to MIT in 1982, this time as a faculty member, Stan had acquired near-guru status. Teaching the advanced macro courses with him, and writing “Lectures on Macroeconomics,” which we finished in 1988, was one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of my life. We both felt that there was a new macroeconomics, more micro-founded and full of promises and that we understood its architecture and its usefulness. Although we had not thought of it as a textbook, it quickly became one, and it is nice to know that it still sells surprisingly well today.As the years had passed, Stan had taken more and more interest in applying theory to the real world, working with Rudi on hyperinflation, being involved in the economics of peace with George Shultz in the Middle East. In 1988, he decided to jump from academia to the real world, and became Chief Economist of the World Bank. After a brief return to MIT, he then returned to Washington in 1994 to become First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, where he remained until 2001. That part of his life has been well documented in newspapers and magazines: While at the IMF, he was on the front lines during the Mexican crisis, the Russian crisis, the Asian crises, and many others. From the peeks I got of him during those times, what strikes me most is how he remained the same as he had been at MIT: calm, careful about the facts, analytical, using macroeconomic theory even in the middle of the most intense fires. Many thought and hoped that he would become the managing director of the IMF. Antiquated rules and country politics prevented it from happening. The IMF's loss turned out to be the private sector's gain. In 2002, Stan joined Citigroup, where he is the President of Citigroup International. He is still active in macro policy debates and remains one of the wise men of our profession.

The present article involves a qualitative study of the framing of dementia in ‘Alzheimer’s and Dementia’, the Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, published in 2016. The aim of this study is to elucidate how dementia is framed qualitatively in the corpus consisting of scientific articles involving dementia published in ‘Alzheimer’s and Dementia’. The results of the qualitative analysis indicate that dementia is represented in ‘Alzheimer’s and Dementia’ in 2016 as the frames associated with gender, age, costs, caregiver and care-recipients, disability and death, health policy, spatial orientation, medical condition, and ethnic groups. These findings are further discussed in the article. References Andrews, J. (2011). We need to talk about dementia. Journal of Research in Nursing, 16(5),397–399. Aronowitz, R. (2008). Framing Disease: An Underappreciated Mechanism for the SocialPatterning Health. Social Science & Medicine, 67, 1–9. Bayles, K. A. (1982). Language function in senile dementia. Brain and language, 16(2),265–280. Bednarek, M. A. (2005). Construing the world: conceptual metaphors and event construals innews stories. Metaphorik.de, 9, 1–27. Brookmeyer, R., Kawas, C. H., Abdallah, N., Paganini-Hill, A., Kim, R. C., & M.M. Corrada(2016). Impact of interventions to reduce Alzheimer’s disease pathology on the prevalence ofdementia in the oldest-old. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12(3), 225–232. Burgers, C., Konijn, E., & G. Steen. (2016). Figurative Framing: Shaping Public DiscourseThrough Metaphor, Hyperbole, and Irony. Communication Theory, 26(4)410–430. Carolan, J. (2016). Using a Framing Analysis to Elucidate Learning from a Pedagogy ofStudent-Constructed Representations in Science. In Using Multimodal Representations toSupport Learning in the Science Classroom. Switzerland: Springer. Chen, J. C., Espeland, M. A., Brunner, R. L., Lovato, L. C., Wallace, R. B., Leng, X., Phillips,L.S., Robinson, J.G., Kotchen, J.M., Johnson, K.C., Manson, J. E., Stefanick, M.L., Sato, G.E.,& W.J. Mysiw (2016). Sleep duration, cognitive decline, and dementia risk in older women.Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12(1), 21–33. Cornejo, R., Brewer, R., Edasis, C., & A.M. Piper (2016). Vulnerability, Sharing, and Privacy:Analyzing Art Therapy for Older Adults with Dementia. In Proceedings of the 19th ACMConference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 1572–1583).ACM. Davis, D. H. (2004). Dementia: sociological and philosophical constructions. Social Science &Medicine, 58(2), 369–378. Delva, F., Touraine, C., Joly, P., Edjolo, A., Amieva, H., Berr, C., Helmer, C., Rouaud, O.,Peres, K., & J. F. Dartigues (2016). ADL disability and death in dementia in a Frenchpopulation-based cohort: New insights with an illness-death model. Alzheimer’s & Dementia,12 (8), 909–916. Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal ofCommunication, 43(4), 51–58. Entman, R. M. (2004). Projections of power: Framing news, public opinion, and US foreignpolicy. University of Chicago Press. Entman, R. M. (2007). Framing bias: Media in the distribution of power. Journal ofcommunication, 57(1), 163–173. Gao, S., Ogunniyi, A., Hall, K. S., Baiyewu, O., Unverzagt, F. W., Lane, K. A., Murrell, J. R.,Gureje, O., Hake, A. M., & H. C. Hendrie (2016). Dementia incidence declined in AfricanAmericans but not in Yoruba. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12(3), 244–251. Gauthier, S., Albert, M., Fox, N., Goedert, M., Kivipelto, M., Mestre-Ferrandiz, J., &L. T. Middleton (2016). Why has therapy development for dementia failed in the last twodecades?. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12(1), 60–64. Gilmour, J. A., & Brannelly, T. (2010). Representations of people with dementia–subaltern,person, citizen. Nursing inquiry, 17(3), 240–247. Green, C. & Zhang, S. (2016). Predicting the progression of Alzheimer’s disease dementia:A multimodal health policy model. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12, 776–785. Giudice, D. L., Smith, K., Fenner, S., Hyde, Z., Atkinson, D., Skeaf, L., Malay, R., &L. Flicker (2016). Incidence and predictors of cognitive impairment and dementia in AboriginalAustralians: A follow-up study of 5 years. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12(3), 252–261. Górska, S., Forsyth, K., & Maciver, D. (2017). Living With Dementia: A Meta-synthesis ofQualitative Research on the Lived Experience. The Gerontologist, 0, 1–17. Innes, A. (2002). The social and political context of formal dementia care provision. Ageingand Society, 22(04), 483–499. Jensen-Dahm, C., Gasse, C., Astrup, A., Mortensen, P. B., & G. Waldemar (2015). Frequentuse of opioids in patients with dementia and nursing home residents: A study of the entireelderly population of Denmark. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 11(6), 691–699. Joris, W., d’Haenens, L., & B. Van Gorp. (2014). The euro crisis in metaphors and frames.Focus on the press in the Low Countries. European Journal of Communication, 29(5),608–617. Kapranov, O. (2016). The Framing of Serbia’s EU Accession by the British Foreign Office onTwitter. Tekst i Dyskurs. Text und Diskurs, 9, 67–80. Kaufman, S. R. (1994). Old age, disease, and the discourse on risk: Geriatric assessment in UShealth care. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 8(4), 430–447. Kunutsor, S., & Laukkanen, J. (2016). Gamma glutamyltranserase and risk of future dementiain middle-aged to older Finnish men: A new prospective cohort study. Alzheimer’s &Dementia, 12, 931–941. Lawless, M., & Augoustinos, M. (2017). Brain health advice in the news: managing notions ofindividual responsibility in media discourse on cognitive decline and dementia. QualitativeResearch in Psychology, 14(1), 62–80. Llorens, F., Schmitz, M., Karch, A., Cramm, M., Lange, P., Gherib, K., Varges, D., Schmidt,C., Zerr, I., & K. Stoeck (2016). Comparative analysis of cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers in thedifferential diagnosis of neurodegenerative dementia. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12(5),577–589. Mayeda, E. R., Glymour, M. M., Quesenberry, C. P., & R.A. Whitmer (2016). Inequalities indementia incidence between six racial and ethnic groups over 14 years. Alzheimer’s &Dementia, 12(3), 216–224. Paradis, C. (2010). Good, better and superb antonyms: a conceptual construal approach. Theannual texts by foreign guest professors, 3, 385–402. Parker, J. (2001). Interrogating person-centred dementia care in social work and social carepractice. Journal of Social Work, 1(3), 329–345. Peel, E. (2014). ‘The living death of Alzheimer’s’ versus ‘Take a walk to keep dementia atbay’: representations of dementia in print media and carer discourse. Sociology of health &illness, 36(6), 885–901. Ramirez, J., McNeely, A. A., Scott, C. J., Masellis, M., & S. E. Black (2016). White matterhyperintensity burden in elderly cohort studies: The Sunnybrook Dementia Study, Alzheimer’sThe Framing of Dementia in Scientific Articles Published in Alzheimer’ Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, and Three-City Study. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12(2),203–210. Rattinger, G., Fauth, E., Behrens, S., Sanders, C., Schwartz, S., Norton, M. C., Corcoran, C.,Mullins, C. D., Lyketsos, C., & J. T. Tschanz (2016). Closer caregiver and care-recipientrelationships predict lower informal costs of dementia care: The Cache County DementiaProgression Study. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12, 917–924. Shash, D., Kurth, T., Bertrand, M., Dufouil, C., Barberger-Gateau, P., Berr, C., Ritchie, K.,Dartigues, J.-F., Begaud, B., Alperovitch, A., & C. Tzourio (2016). Benzodiazepine,psychotropic medication, and dementia: A population-based cohort study. Alzheimer’s &Dementia, 12(5), 604–613. Swacha, K. Y. (2017). Older Adults as Rhetorical Agents: A Rhetorical Critique of Metaphorsfor Aging in Public Health Discourse. Rhetoric Review, 36(1), 60–72. Teipel, S., Babiloni, C., Hoey, J., Kaye, J., Kirste, T., & O.K. Burmeister (2016). Informationand communication technology solutions for outdoor navigation in dementia. Alzheimer’s &Dementia, 12(6), 695–707. Touri, M. & Koteyko, N. (2015). Using corpus linguistic software in the extraction of newsframes: towards a dynamic process of frame analysis in journalistic texts. InternationalJournal of Social Research Methodology, 18(6), 601–616. Van Gorp, B., & Vercruysse, T. (2012). Frames and counter-frames giving meaning todementia: A framing analysis of media content. Social Science & Medicine, 74(8), 1274–1281. Verlinden, V. J., van der Geest, J. N., de Bruijn, R. F., Hofman, A., Koudstaal, P. J., &M. A. Ikram (2016). Trajectories of decline in cognition and daily functioning in preclinicaldementia. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 12(2), 144–153. Wray, A. (2017). The language of dementia science and the science of dementia language:Linguistic interpretations of an interdisciplinary research field. Journal of Language andSocial Psychology, 36(1), 80–95. Wu, Y. T., Fratiglioni, L., Matthews, F. E., Lobo, A., Breteler, M. M., Skoog, I., & C. Brayne(2016). Dementia in western Europe: epidemiological evidence and implications for policymaking. The Lancet Neurology, 15(1), 116–124. Yuan, J., Zhang, Z., Wen, H., Hong, X., Hong, Z., Qu, Q., Li, H., & J.L. Cummings (2016).Incidence of dementia and subtypes: A cohort study in four regions in China. Alzheimer’s &Dementia, 12(3), 262–271. Zwijsen, S. A., van der Ploeg, E., & C.M. Hertogh (2016). Understanding the world ofdementia. How do people with dementia experience the world?. Internationalpsychogeriatrics/IPA, 1–11.

So back to the basic question. What exactly is the job of someone who teaches in a college or a university? My answer is simple and follows from legal theorist Ernest Weinrib’s account of what is required if an activity is to have its own proper shape. It must present itself “as a this and not a that.” As I have already said, the job of someone who teaches in a college or a university is to (1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry they didn’t know much about before; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research should they choose to do so. Job performance should be assessed on the basis of academic virtue, not virtue in general. Teachers should show up for their classes, prepare lesson plans, teach what has been advertised, be current in the literature of the field, promptly correct assignments and papers, hold regular office hours, and give academic (not political or moral) advice. Researchers should not falsify their credentials, or make things up, or fudge the evidence, or ignore data that tells against their preferred conclusions. Those who publish should acknowledge predecessors and contributors, provide citations to their sources, and strive always to give an accurate account of the materials they present. That’s it, there’s nothing else, and nothing more. But this is no small list of professional obligations, and faculty members who are faithful to its imperatives will have little time to look around for causes and agendas to champion. A faculty committee report submitted long ago to the president of the University of Chicago declares that the university exists “only for the limited . . . purposes of teaching and research” and reasons that “since the university is a community only for those limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness” ( Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action, November 11, 1967).

This chapter narrates the James R. Chalmers's defeat for governor. It was the year 1885 in which the general election in the state of Mississippi was held for the election of governor and other state officers, district and county officials. The state was hopelessly Democratic. In view of unfavorable political conditions, many Republicans doubted the wisdom of putting a ticket in the field in opposition to the Democratic machine, but after consultation, and since the organization called Greenbackers had made some headway, it was decided to put a ticket in the field if fusion between Republicans and Greenbackers could be agreed upon, which was found to be possible. General Chalmers, who had publicly identified himself with the Republican party, was willing to accept the Republican nomination for governor, if his nomination would be endorsed by the Greenback party. After his humiliating defeat for governor, Chalmers retired to private life where he remained until the meeting of the National Republican Convention in Chicago in 1888, when he made another effort to bring himself into public notice.

This chapter explores how, when John Roy Lynch came to Chicago, whether or not he should take an active part in politics was one of the first questions that occurred to him. He had no intention of actively participating politically in local matters, but it occurred to him that like some other retired army officers, he could, with propriety, take an active part in national matters. But after going over the field very carefully, Lynch found that conditions nationally, as well as locally, were not such as would justify him in doing so. In fact, beginning with the unfortunate administration of President William Howard Taft, the colored American had no standing with either of the two major parties. The Democratic party, nationally, was still a white man's party and, beginning with the Taft administration, the Republican party was no longer a champion of human rights. In fact, the policy inaugurated by President Taft was equivalent to transforming the Republican party, as far as it was in the power of an administration to do so, into a race proscriptive party. In other words, racial identity regardless of merit was made a bar to official recognition.

Over the last thirty years, much research has been done on the development and application of failure event databases, NDE databases, and material property databases for pressure vessels and piping, as reported in two recent symposia: (1) ASME 2007 PVP Symposium (in honor of the late Dr. Spencer Bush), San Antonio, Texas, on “Engineering Safety, Applied Mechanics, and Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE).” (2) ASME 2008 PVP Symposium, Chicago, Illinois, on “Failure Prevention via Robust Design and Continuous NDE Monitoring.” The two symposia concluded that those three types of databases, if properly documented and maintained on a worldwide basis, could hold the key to the continued safe and reliable operation of numerous aging nuclear power or petrochemical processing plants. During the 2008 symposium, four uncertainty categories associated with causing uncertainty in fatigue life estimates were identified, namely, (1) Uncertainty-1 in failure event databases, (2) Uncertainty-2 in NDE databases, (3) Uncertainty-3 in material property databases, and (4) Uncertainty-M in crack-growth and damage modeling. In this paper, which is one of a series of four to address all those four uncertainty categories, we address Uncertainty-2 in NDE databases by developing a Web-based Uncertainty Plug-In (WUPI), which automates the uncertainty estimation algorithms of flaw sizing, fracture toughness, and crack growth vs. ΔK data such that NDE data from the field can be acted on by office engineers with a reduced feedback time for maintenance decision making.

Over the last thirty years, much research has been done on the development and application of failure event databases, NDE databases, and materials property databases for pressure vessels and piping, as reported in two recent symposia: (1) ASME 2007 PVP Symposium (in honor of the late Dr. Spencer Bush), San Antonio, Texas, on “Engineering Safety, Applied Mechanics, and Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE).” (2) ASME 2008 PVP Symposium, Chicago, Illinois, on “Failure Prevention via Robust Design and Continuous NDE Monitoring.” The two symposia concluded that those three types of databases, if properly documented and maintained on a worldwide basis, could hold the key to the continued safe and reliable operation of numerous aging structures including nuclear power or petro-chemical processing plants. During the 2008 symposium, four uncertainty categories associated with causing uncertainty in fatigue life estimates were identified, namely, (1) Uncertainty-1 in failure event databases, (2) Uncertainty-2 in NDE databases, (3) Uncertainty-3 in materials property databases, and (4) Uncertainty-M in crack-growth and damage modeling. In this paper, which is one of a series of four to address all those four uncertainty categories, we address Uncertainty-3 in materials property databases by developing a Dataplot-Python-ANLAP (DPA) plug-in, which automates the uncertainty estimation algorithms of material property test data such that those data can be combined with field NDE data by office engineers to speed up the process of probabilistic damage assessment and remaining life estimation. To illustrate this approach, we describe an example application where several mechanical property data sets of a U.S.-made low-carbon steel (A36) and a proprietary high-strength steel (Class 590 MPa) from Japan, are first computed with uncertainty estimates, and then compared with a traditional calculation without uncertainty for deterministic modeling. Significance of the development of computer plug-ins to facilitate data mining of materials property databases and to assist risk-informed analysis is discussed.