Confronting Criminal Law’s Violence: The Possibilities of Unfinished Alternatives

Confronting criminal law’s violence calls for an openness to unfinished alternatives — a willingness to engage in partial, in process, incomplete reformist efforts that seek to displace conventional criminal law administration as a primary mechanism for social order maintenance. But despite all indications that the status quo in U.S. criminal law administration is profoundly dysfunctional — an institutional manifestation of the deepest pathologies in our society — contemporary criminal law reform efforts and scholarship focus almost exclusively on relatively limited modifications to the status quo. These modifications may well render criminal law administration more humane, but fail to substitute alternative institutions or approaches to realize social order maintenance goals. In particular, these reformist efforts continue to rely on conventional criminal regulatory approaches to a wide array of social concerns, with all of their associated violence: on criminalization, policing, arrest, prosecution, incarceration, probation, and parole. Thus, even as these reformist approaches may offer substantial benefits, they remain wed to institutions that perpetrate criminal law’s violence and to limited temporal and imaginative horizons. By contrast, this essay explores a series of criminal law reform alternatives that offer more fundamental substitutes for criminal law administration. More specifically, this essay focuses on the possibilities of alternatives to criminal case processing that substitute for the order-maintaining functions currently attempted through criminal law enforcement. These alternatives hold the potential to draw into service separate institutions and mechanisms from those typically associated with criminal law administration. Further, these alternatives enlist on more equal footing and invite feedback and input from persons subject to criminal law enforcement. Importantly, this latter subset of reform alternatives is decidedly unfinished, partial, in process. I will argue that this unfinished quality ought not to be denied as an embarrassment or flaw, but instead should be embraced as a source of critical strength and possibility. In this dimension, this essay is a preliminary call for more attention on the part of legal scholars and criminal law reform advocates to unfinished partial substitutes for the order-maintaining work performed by criminal law administration — a call to attend further to as yet incomplete reformist alternatives that may portend less violent and more self-determined ways of achieving some measure of social order and collective peace. I begin to develop this argument by drawing, in particular, on the work of the Norwegian social theorist and prison abolitionist Thomas Mathiesen

Extending DSS with Partial-Order Planning and Software Agents

The purpose of this research is to explore the use of partial-order planning (POP) and software agents as enhancements to Decision Support Systems (DSS). Current limitations in many DSS include the inability to integrate and manipulate models and a lack of automated maintenance. POP and software agents are proposed as solutions to these limitations in decision support

Relationships between satisfaction of Muslim women on financial supports after divorce and ex-husbands' compliance to the supports with post-divorce welfare

The main objective of this study was to assess the welfare of divorced women in relation to financial supports after divorce, i.e. iddah maintenance, mut’ah, arrears of maintenance, and child maintenance. The specific objectives were to determine the divorced women’s satisfaction with the amount of financial supports, the ex-husbands’ compliance to court-ordered financial supports, their satisfaction with post-divorce welfare (levels of economic strain and depression), the relationships between satisfaction with the amount of financial supports and post-divorce welfare, as well as the relationships between ex-husbands’ compliance to court-ordered financial supports and post-divorce welfare. Data were collected using a questionnaire. The sample comprised of 201 divorced women selected from the cases recorded in the year 2003 till 2005 at the Shariah Subordinate Courts of Hulu Langat and Gombak Timur, Selangor. Pearson correlation showed that two factors were negatively correlated with the economic welfare of the divorced women, i.e. the dissatisfaction with the amount of iddah maintenance, mut’ah, and child maintenance and the ex-husbands’ none or partial compliance to the court-ordered iddah maintenance, mut’ah, and child maintenance. However, on the contrary to the expectation, the divorced women’s satisfaction with the amount of all types of financial supports provided by the ex-husbands and their ex-husbands’ none or partial compliance to all types of financial supports was found to have no significant relationships with depression. The findings also indicated that the assessment of a reasonable sum of financial supports and the effective enforcement of court order were significant factors that might augment the welfare of women after divorce

RePOR: Mimicking humans on refactoring tasks. Are we there yet?

Refactoring is a maintenance activity that aims to improve design quality while preserving the behavior of a system. Several (semi)automated approaches have been proposed to support developers in this maintenance activity, based on the correction of anti-patterns, which are `poor' solutions to recurring design problems. However, little quantitative evidence exists about the impact of automatically refactored code on program comprehension, and in which context automated refactoring can be as effective as manual refactoring. Leveraging RePOR, an automated refactoring approach based on partial order reduction techniques, we performed an empirical study to investigate whether automated refactoring code structure affects the understandability of systems during comprehension tasks. (1) We surveyed 80 developers, asking them to identify from a set of 20 refactoring changes if they were generated by developers or by a tool, and to rate the refactoring changes according to their design quality; (2) we asked 30 developers to complete code comprehension tasks on 10 systems that were refactored by either a freelancer or an automated refactoring tool. To make comparison fair, for a subset of refactoring actions that introduce new code entities, only synthetic identifiers were presented to practitioners. We measured developers' performance using the NASA task load index for their effort, the time that they spent performing the tasks, and their percentages of correct answers. Our findings, despite current technology limitations, show that it is reasonable to expect a refactoring tools to match developer code

Supervising Offline Partial Evaluation of Logic Programs using Online Techniques

A major impediment for more widespread use of offline partial evaluation is the difficulty of obtaining and maintaining annotations for larger, realistic programs. Existing automatic binding-time analyses still only have limited applicability and annotations often have to be created or improved and maintained by hand, leading to errors. We present a technique to help overcome this problem by using online control techniques which supervise the specialisation process in order to help the development and maintenance of correct annotations by identifying errors. We discuss an implementation in the Logen system and show on a series of examples that this approach is effective: very few false alarms were raised while infinite loops were detected quickly. We also present the integration of this technique into a web interface, which highlights problematic annotations directly in the source code. A method to automatically fix incorrect annotations is presented, allowing the approach to be also used as a pragmatic binding time analysis. Finally we show how our method can be used for efficiently locating built-in errors in Prolog source code

Location of Partial Discharges within a Transformer Winding Using Principal Component Analysis

Partial discharge (PD) may occur in a transformer winding due to ageing processes or defects introduced during manufacture. A partial discharge is defined as a localised electric discharge that only partially bridges the dielectric insulator between conductors when the electric field exceeds a critical value. The presence of PD does not necessarily indicate imminent failure of the transformer but it is a serious degradation and ageing mechanism which can be considered as a precursor of transformer failure. PD might occur anywhere along the transformer winding and the discharge signal can propagate along the winding to the bushing and neutral to earth connections. As far as maintenance and replacement processes are concerned, it is important to identify the location of PD activity so any repair or replace decision is assured to be cost effective. Therefore, identification of a PD source as well as its location along the transformer winding is of great interest to both manufacturers and system operators. The wavelet transform is a mathematical function that can be used to decompose a PD signal into detail levels and an approximation. Wavelet filtering is often used to improve signal to noise ratio (SNR) of measured signals, but in this case it is used to identify the distribution of signal energies in both the time and frequency domains. This method produces a feature vector for each captured discharge signal. The use of principle component analysis (PCA) can compress this data into three dimensions, to aid visualisation. Data captured by sensors over hundreds of cycles of applied voltage can be analysed using this approach. An experiment (Figure 1) has been developed that can be used to create PD data in order to investigate the feasibility of using PCA analysis to identify PD source location

Partial Discharge Location within a Transformer Winding using Principal Component Analysis

Partial discharge (PD) may occur in a transformer winding due to ageing processes, operational over stressing or defects introduced during manufacture. The presence of PD does not necessarily indicate imminent failure of the transformer but it will lead to serious degradation and ageing mechanisms which can be considered as a precursor of transformer failure. A necessary step is required in order to prevent degradation due to PD activity which may ultimately lead to failure. PD might occur anywhere along the transformer winding, the discharge signal can propagate along the winding to the bushing and neutral to earth connections. As far as maintenance and replacement processes are concerned, it is important to identify the location of PD activity so any repair or replace decision is assured to be cost effective. Therefore, identification of a PD source as well as its location along the transformer winding is of great interest to both manufacturers and system operators. The proposed method for locating PD sources in windings is based on wavelet filtering and principal component analysis. An experiment has been developed based on a high voltage winding section that has been used to produce PD measurement data and to investigate the feasibility of the proposed approach

Analysis of design alternatives on using dynamic and partial reconfiguration in a space application

Some of the biggest concerns in space systems are power consumption and reliability due to the limited power generated by the system's energy harvesters and the fact that once deployed, it is almost impossible to perform maintenance or repairs. Another consideration is that during deployment, the high exposure to electromagnetic radiation can cause single event damage effects including SEUs, SEFIs, SETs and others. In order to mitigate these problems inherent to the space environment, a system with dynamic and partial reconfiguration capabilities is proposed. This approach provide s the flexibility to reconfigure parts of the FPGA while still in operation, thus making the system more flexible, fault tolerant and less power-consuming. In this paper, several partial reconfiguration approaches are proposed and compared in terms of device occupation, power consumption, reconfiguration speed and size of memory footprints

The Effects of Electoral Institutions in Rwanda: Why Proportional Representation Supports the Authoritarian Regime

While much has been written about the special design of Rwanda’s judiciary in order to handle the aftermath of the genocide in 1994, other institutional actions resulting from the 2003 constitution have rarely been addressed in research. However, the second (partial) par-liamentary elections in September 2008 revealed some of the implications which the care-fully designed electoral system has for Rwanda’s political development. As a starting point, the paper emphasises the need to link the debates on institutional design in divided societies with elections in authoritarian regimes. Under different regime types, “institutional engi-neers” may pursue different goals. The paper concludes that in the case of Rwanda propor-tional representation (PR) has been implemented to support undemocratic goals. PR limits the local accountability of politicians in a political environment in which the government is not controlled by a democratic opposition. Thus, Rwanda’s current PR system facilitates the maintenance of authoritarian power in the country, whereas small constituencies would es-tablish closer links between the local populations and their representatives.Rwanda, electoral authoritarianism, electoral system, parliament, constituency size