Voices of Moderation: Southern Whites Respond to Brown v. Board of Education

At the shining apex of racial reform in the civil rights era stands the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Recently passing its fiftieth anniversary, the ruling struck down legal school segregation which had been upheld by the same court some fifty-eight years earlier in the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. Brown is highly revered today as a sacred document and cornerstone of American race-relations, but the ruling initially garnered widespread shock, outrage, and defiance in the bedrock of segregation, the deep South. At least that is what we have been told. A closer analysis of southern public opinion regarding Brown reveals a multitude of views ranging from pure racist condemnation to praised acceptance and affirmation of racial equality. There were indeed voices of moderation in the South. In the summer of 1954, reaction and response to Brown v. Board of Education in the deep South was not unanimous; there were clear voices of racial moderation that called for a calm rational response, compliance and respect for the ruling, and eager acceptance of integrated education

Detecting signatures of balancing selection to identify targets of anti-parasite immunity.

Parasite antigen genes might evolve under frequency-dependent immune selection. The distinctive patterns of polymorphism that result can be detected using population genetic methods that test for signatures of balancing selection, allowing genes encoding important targets of immunity to be identified. Analyses can be complicated by population structures, histories and features of a parasite's genome. However, new sequencing technologies facilitate scans of polymorphism throughout parasite genomes to identify the most exceptional gene specific signatures. We focus on malaria parasites to illustrate challenges and opportunities for detecting targets of frequency-dependent immune selection to discover new potential vaccine candidates

Tax fraud by firms and optimal auditing

Abstract Tax fraud is an issue of increasing importance in China. One particularly signi…cant fraud involves excessive claims for the rebate of VAT on exported goods. This fraud has two interesting features. First, it requires the collusion of an intermediary to supply the false documentation that supports a rebate application. Second, the punishment schedule is convex -with capital punishment used in major fraud cases. These features ensure that the payo¤ function of a …rm engaging in fraud is strictly concave in the level of fraud. This gives a well-de…ned optimization without the need to appeal to risk aversion. We show that the existence of fraud does not a¤ect the real output decision of the …rm nor the tax policy of the government. Audit resources can be used to detect …rms engaged in fraud as well as the intermediaries who supply false documents. Under reasonable assumptions it is shown that resources should be focused on detecting …rms and not intermediaries. Finally, if the government must take action on fraud a convex punishment scheme is shown to be optimal

Growth and public infrastructure

The paper analyzes a multicountry extension of the Barro model of productive public expenditure. In the presence of positive infrastructural externalities between countries, the provision of infrastructure will be inefficiently low if countries do not coordinate. This provides a role for a supranational body, such as the European Union, to coordinate the policies of the individual governments. It is shown how intervention by a supranational body can raise welfare by internalizing the infrastructural externality. Infrastructural externalities increase the importance of tax policy in the growth process and distribute the benefits of taxation across countries

Comparison of Optimal Control Solutions in a Labor Market Model

In this paper a variety of computational optimal control techniques are compared on a complicated nonlinear discrete-time model. We use a labor market model with the objective of trying to obtain an unemployment rate objective, using an active labor market program as a control. In reality the control is constrained as only limited proportion of the unemployment can attend the labor market program. A variety of computational optimal control techniques are applied. The techniques include numerically linearizing the model and using standard linear quadratic optimal control and applying this to the nonlinear model; model based predictive control; and stacking the model over time and using optimisation techniquesLabour market policies; Optimal Control.

Growth and Public Infrastructure

The paper analyzes a multi-country extension of the Barro model of productive public expenditure. In the presence of infrastructural externalities between countries the provision of infrastructure will be inefficiently low if countries do not coordinate. This provides a role for a supra-national body, such as the EU, to coordinate the policies of the individual governments. It is shown how the supranational body can ensure the efficient level of infrastructure provision and, as a result, obtain an increased rate of growth. The results of the paper also show how capital flows between countries act to equalize growth rates. This can help explain why there is limited empirical evidence for tax rates causing a difference in growth rates between countries. This is not the same as saying taxation does not affect growth: if production requires public infrastructure then taxation is needed for growth. The flow of capital acts to distribute the benefit of this across countries.

Encoding of low-quality DNA profiles as genotype probability matrices for improved profile comparisons, relatedness evaluation and database searches

Many DNA profiles recovered from crime scene samples are of a quality that does not allow them to be searched against, nor entered into, databases. We propose a method for the comparison of profiles arising from two DNA samples, one or both of which can have multiple donors and be affected by low DNA template or degraded DNA. We compute likelihood ratios to evaluate the hypothesis that the two samples have a common DNA donor, and hypotheses specifying the relatedness of two donors. Our method uses a probability distribution for the genotype of the donor of interest in each sample. This distribution can be obtained from a statistical model, or we can exploit the ability of trained human experts to assess genotype probabilities, thus extracting much information that would be discarded by standard interpretation rules. Our method is compatible with established methods in simple settings, but is more widely applicable and can make better use of information than many current methods for the analysis of mixed-source, low-template DNA profiles. It can accommodate uncertainty arising from relatedness instead of or in addition to uncertainty arising from noisy genotyping. We describe a computer program GPMDNA, available under an open source license, to calculate LRs using the method presented in this paper.Comment: 28 pages. Accepted for publication 2-Sep-2016 - Forensic Science International: Genetic

Straight Round the Twist: Frustration and Chirality in Smectics-A

Frustration is a powerful mechanism in condensed matter systems, driving both order and co plexity. In smectics, the frustration between macroscopic chirality and equally spaced layers generates textures characterised by a proliferation of defects. In this article, we study several different ground states of the chiral Landau-de Gennes free energy for a smectic liquid crystal. The standard theory finds the twist grain boundary (TGB) phase to be the ground state for chiral type II smectics. However, for very highly chiral systems, the hierarchical helical nanofilament (HN) phase can form and is stable over the TGB.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, submitted to J. Interface Focu