The CSI Effect and Its Potential Impact on Juror Decisions

The “CSI Effect” was first described in the media as a phenomenon resulting from viewing forensic and crime based television shows. This effect influences jurors to have unrealistic expectations of forensic science during a criminal trial and affect jurors’ decisions in the conviction or acquittal process. Research has shown the “CSI Effect” has a possible pro-defense bias, in that jurors are less likely to convict without the presence of some sort of forensic evidence. Some studies show actors in the criminal justice system are changing their tactics, as if this effect has a significant influence, causing them to request unnecessary crime lab tests and expert testimonies. One of the solutions proposed to overcome this influence is creating multimedia jury instructions, such as using photos, animations, and videos, regarding any forensic testing process applicable to the case to correct any misinformation and facilitate learning. A second solution is to develop a scale, which will assist in identifying jurors who have been influenced by these types of television shows, to eliminate them from the jury selection process before the start of a trial

Robust Inversion Methods for Aerosol Spectroscopy

The Fast Aerosol Spectrometer (FASP) is a device for spectral aerosol measurements. Its purpose is to safely monitor the atmosphere inside a reactor containment. First we describe the FASP and explain its basic physical laws. Then we introduce our reconstruction methods for aerosol particle size distributions designed for the FASP. We extend known existence results for constrained Tikhonov regularization by uniqueness criteria and use those to generate reasonable models for the size distributions. We apply a Bayesian model-selection framework on these pre-generated models. We compare our algorithm with classical inversion methods using simulated measurements. We then extend our reconstruction algorithm for two-component aerosols, so that we can simultaneously retrieve their particle-size distributions and unknown volume fractions of their two components. Finally we present the results of a numerical study for the extended algorithm.Comment: 37 pages, 3 figure

A realizability-preserving high-order kinetic scheme using WENO reconstruction for entropy-based moment closures of linear kinetic equations in slab geometry

We develop a high-order kinetic scheme for entropy-based moment models of a one-dimensional linear kinetic equation in slab geometry. High-order spatial reconstructions are achieved using the weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) method, and for time integration we use multi-step Runge-Kutta methods which are strong stability preserving and whose stages and steps can be written as convex combinations of forward Euler steps. We show that the moment vectors stay in the realizable set using these time integrators along with a maximum principle-based kinetic-level limiter, which simultaneously dampens spurious oscillations in the numerical solutions. We present numerical results both on a manufactured solution, where we perform convergence tests showing our scheme converges of the expected order up to the numerical noise from the numerical optimization, as well as on two standard benchmark problems, where we show some of the advantages of high-order solutions and the role of the key parameter in the limiter

Magnetic Charts in Antarctica and Neighboring Areas.

Data, from many available recent sources, on the magnetic field in Antarctica and neighboring areas are intercompared. Field values were computed for the spherical harmonic models of HURWITZ et al., and LEATON et al., for 1965 at intervals of 5°in latitude and 10°in longitude between 40°S and the South Pole. The rms differences were 0.76°for D, 0.43°for I and 185 gammas for H. A similar comparison between the model of CAIN for 1960 and the model of NAGATA and OGUTI for 1958.5 updated to 1960 gave rms differences of 3.0°, 0.93°and 775 gammas for D, I, and H respectively. Comparison between the 1965 models and several recent traverses indicate that the LEATON model is more accurate in this area than the HURWITZ model. Comparison between earlier traverses and the 1960 models favor the CAIN model over the NAGATA and OGUTI model, although part of this may be caused by uncertain secular change data used to bring the model up to the date of the traverses