From the Ne’er-Do-Well to the Criminal History Category: The Refinement of the Actuarial Model in Criminal Law

Harcourt discusses three developments in 20th century criminal law: the evolution of parole board decision-making in the early 20th century, the development of fixed sentencing guidelines in the late 20th century, and the growth of criminal profiling as a formal law enforcement tool since the 1960s. In each of these case studies, he focuses on the criminal law decision-making

Component model reduction via the projection and assembly method

The problem of acquiring a simple but sufficiently accurate model of a dynamic system is made more difficult when the dynamic system of interest is a multibody system comprised of several components. A low order system model may be created by reducing the order of the component models and making use of various available multibody dynamics programs to assemble them into a system model. The difficulty is in choosing the reduced order component models to meet system level requirements. The projection and assembly method, proposed originally by Eke, solves this difficulty by forming the full order system model, performing model reduction at the the system level using system level requirements, and then projecting the desired modes onto the components for component level model reduction. The projection and assembly method is analyzed to show the conditions under which the desired modes are captured exactly; to the numerical precision of the algorithm

An attempt to obtain Bi_{4}Ti_{3}O_{12}-PVC textured ceramics-polymer composites

Bi_{4}Ti_{3}O_{12}-PVC composites were fabricated. Ceramics powders of bismuth titanate were prepared by the sol-gel method using bismuth nitrate pentahydrate Bi(NO_{3})_{3} \cdot 5H_{2}O and tetrabutyl titanate Ti(CH_{3}(CH_{2})_{3}O)_{4} as precursors. The Bi_{4}Ti_{3}O_{12}-PVC composites were fabricated from ceramics powders and polymer powders by hot-pressing method.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Interface Problems for Dispersive equations

The interface problem for the linear Schr\"odinger equation in one-dimensional piecewise homogeneous domains is examined by providing an explicit solution in each domain. The location of the interfaces is known and the continuity of the wave function and a jump in their derivative at the interface are the only conditions imposed. The problem of two semi-infinite domains and that of two finite-sized domains are examined in detail. The problem and the method considered here extend that of an earlier paper by Deconinck, Pelloni and Sheils (2014). The dispersive nature of the problem presents additional difficulties that are addressed here.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.3007, Studies in Applied Mathematics 201

Semileptonic Kaon Decay in Staggered Chiral Perturbation Theory

The determination of $\vert V_{us}\vert$ from kaon semileptonic decays requires the value of the form factor $f_+(q^2=0)$, which can be calculated precisely on the lattice. We provide the one-loop partially quenched staggered chiral perturbation theory expressions that may be employed to analyze staggered simulations of $f_+(q^2)$ with three light flavors. We consider both the case of a mixed action, where the valence and sea sectors have different staggered actions, and the standard case where these actions are the same. The momentum transfer $q^2$ of the form factor is allowed to have an arbitrary value. We give results for the generic situation where the $u$, $d$, and $s$ quark masses are all different, $N_f=1+1+1$, and for the isospin limit, $N_f=2+1$. The expression we obtain for $f_+(q^2)$ is independent of the mass of the (valence) spectator quark. In the limit of vanishing lattice spacing, our results reduce to the one-loop continuum partially quenched expression for $f_+(q^2)$, which has not previously been reported in the literature for the $N_f=1+1+1$ case. Our expressions have already been used in staggered lattice analyses of $f_+(0)$, and should prove useful in future calculations as well.Comment: 33 pages, 5 figures; v2: some referencing change

On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (A Call to Historians)

Say the words gun registration to many Americans – especially pro-gun Americans, including the 3.5 million-plus members of the National Rifle Association ( NRA ) – and you are likely to hear about Adolf Hitler, Nazi gun laws, gun confiscation, and the Holocaust. More specifically, you are likely to hear that one of the first things that Hitler did when he seized power was to impose strict gun registration requirements that enabled him to identify gun owners and then to confiscate all guns, effectively disarming his opponents and paving the way for the genocide of the Jewish population. German firearm laws and hysteria created against Jewish firearm owners played a major role in laying the groundwork for the eradication of German Jewry in the Holocaust, writes Stephen Halbrook, a pro-gun lawyer. If the Nazi experience teaches anything, Halbrook declares, it teaches that totalitarian governments will attempt to disarm their subjects so as to extinguish any ability to resist crimes against humanity. Or, as David Kopel, research director of the Independence Institute, states more succinctly: Simply put, if not for gun control, Hitler would not have been able to murder 21 million people

[Review of] Carmelo Mesa-lago, The Economy of Socialist Cuba: A Two-Decade Appraisal

It\u27s not unusual for partisans of opposing viewpoints about Cuba to spark each other to flaming argument, while those who prefer less heat and more light can easily find adventure enough just in following the course of the Western Hemisphere\u27s most important social experiment since the Mexican Revolution. Shouldn\u27t a book about twenty years of post-revolutionary Cuba be exciting, especially when it comes to us from Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Cuban native, an early supporter of the revolution and also an early emigre to the United States, and now, as Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh, one of only a handful of distinguished students of Cuba in this country? His book is a product of a good deal of effort over a long period of time. It is detailed, precise, balanced, and informative. It is easily understood, so that non-experts can profit from reading it even though its wealth of hard-to-get data makes it an indispensable reference work for professional Latin Americanists. It is all this, but it is not exciting

Scalar Meson Spectroscopy with Lattice Staggered Fermions

With sufficiently light up and down quarks the isovector ($a_0$) and isosinglet ($f_0$) scalar meson propagators are dominated at large distance by two-meson states. In the staggered fermion formulation of lattice quantum chromodynamics, taste-symmetry breaking causes a proliferation of two-meson states that further complicates the analysis of these channels. Many of them are unphysical artifacts of the lattice approximation. They are expected to disappear in the continuum limit. The staggered-fermion fourth-root procedure has its purported counterpart in rooted staggered chiral perturbation theory (rSXPT). Fortunately, the rooted theory provides a strict framework that permits the analysis of scalar meson correlators in terms of only a small number of low energy couplings. Thus the analysis of the point-to-point scalar meson correlators in this context gives a useful consistency check of the fourth-root procedure and its proposed chiral realization. Through numerical simulation we have measured correlators for both the $a_0$ and $f_0$ channels in the ``Asqtad'' improved staggered fermion formulation in a lattice ensemble with lattice spacing $a = 0.12$ fm. We analyze those correlators in the context of rSXPT and obtain values of the low energy chiral couplings that are reasonably consistent with previous determinations.Comment: 23 pp., 3 figs., submitted to Phys. Rev.