Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Environmental Racism In Baltimore: A Geographical Study Into The Connections Between Environmental Toxins And Public Health, Genevieve Block

Honors Theses

An investigation into the relationship between environmental toxins and environmental racism in Baltimore City, Maryland.

Bridging Act-R And Project Malmo, Developing Models Of Behavior In Complex Environments, David M. Schwartz

Honors Theses

Cognitive architectures such as ACT-R provide a system for simulating the mind and human behavior. On their own they model decision making of an isolated agent. However, applying a cognitive architecture to a complex environment yields more interesting results about how people make decisions in more realistic scenarios. Furthermore, cognitive architectures enable researchers to study human behavior in dangerous tasks which cannot be tested because they would harm participants. Nonetheless, these architectures aren’t commonly applied to such environments as they don’t come with one. It is left to the researcher to develop a task environment for their model. The difficulty …

Behavioral Economics And Physician Behavior, Allyssa S. Ward

Honors Theses

This study seeks to answer whether the availability heuristic leads physicians to utilize more medical care than is economically efficient. Do rare, salient events alter physicians' perceptions about the probability of patient harm? Do these events lead physicians to overutilize certain medical procedures? This study uses Pennsylvania inpatient hospital admissions data from 2009 aggregated at the physician level to investigate these questions. The data come from the 2009 Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4).

The study is divided into two parts. In Part I, we examine whether bad outcomes during childbirth (defined as maternal mortality, an obstetric fistula or …