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Following Kant’s view of drawing or shape as the “proper object” of aesthetic judgments in architecture, I present an interpretation of a central concept in his theory of aesthetic judgment, viz., the free play of imagination and understanding, as visual calculating in shape grammars. Calculating with identity rules formalizes Kant’s reflective judgments in free play, which he explains as imagination sustaining a “lively engagement” with form. This interpretation departs from determining judgments, which underlie twentieth-century mathematical and computational approaches to aesthetics. With this interpretation in place, I address a central issue concerning computation and aesthetic intelligence, engaging Kant’s concept of “adherent beauty”: How are we to employ computation as a practical method for value judgment while preserving free play’s reflective property that refreshes aesthetic experience, especially when creative work must meet defined functions and end-goals?

This presentation examines the correlation between R-loops and HIV-1 integration, highlighting experimental results generated in our study. The work was presented at the Behavior of HIV in Viral Environments (B-HIVE) Center Face-to-Face Meeting.

The Women20 (W20) engagement group has influenced international gender policies for a decade. This analysis tracks how W20 advocacy drives actual policy change in the world's largest economies. Through analysis of all 220 W20 policy recommendations and their translation into G20 Leaders’ Declarations and subsequent national reforms, this study shows how effectively civil society groups can influence international policies.

Daniel Kahneman, often in collaboration with Amos Tversky, developed foundational frameworks for understanding human decision-making. Building on that tradition, this article proposes that individuals’ ex ante assessments of the likelihood of good and bad outcomes serve as reference points that shape the ex post utility of lottery outcomes. In prospect theory, prior holdings act as reference points for evaluating outcomes—but probabilities themselves play no such role. This article introduces Managed Expectations Theory, which rests on two core hypotheses: 1. Reference Point Hypothesis: Ex ante probabilities serve as reference points for ex post utility. Specifically, more pessimistic expectations about uncertain outcomes enhance ex post utility, regardless of whether the outcome turns out to be good or bad. Four experiments, using a nationally representative adult sample of over 1,000 participants, strongly support this hypothesis. Lower [higher] ex ante likelihoods are associated with greater ex post utility for good [bad] outcomes. 2. Created Likelihoods Hypothesis: Recognizing that likelihood assessments act as reference points, individuals deliberately manage these assessments to be more pessimistic than an objective or statistical “outside view”—in order to boost their ex post utilities. Supporting this conjecture, the good outcomes participants labeled as “likely” occurred far more often than the bad outcomes they labeled as “likely.” These created likelihoods help explain a central feature of prospect theory’s probability weighting function: the underestimation of high-probability good events and the overestimation of low-probability bad events.

Stigma features prominently in debates about the social safety net, but empirically disentangling its role has left open many questions about whether it is a meaningful—or movable—barrier to take-up. Through four nationally representative studies (N = 11,164) and a new four-dimensional validated scale, we quantify the role that stigma plays in shaping take-up (1) directly, by impacting beneficiary behavior, and (2) indirectly, by influencing program design. We find that a one standard deviation (SD) increase in stigma is associated with a 9-19 percentage point decrease in willingness to apply for benefits among low-income respondents. It also predicts a 0.08-0.40 SD increase in society’s preferences for policies and program design features that could reduce program access. In both cases, we show that stigma explains more of the variation in policy preferences than any individual respondent characteristic, including political ideology. Notably, program design causally impacts stigma in competing ways: more expansive eligibility criteria reduce stigma, while implementation designs that would simplify access increase stigma. Together, these findings suggest that stigma should be considered both an individual and structural barrier to participation in the social safety net, where it both shapes and is shaped by policy design choices.