How the Justice System Responds to Juvenile Victims: A Comprehensive Model.

The justice system handles thousands of cases involving juvenile victims each year. These victims are served by a complex set of agencies and institutions, including police, prosecutors, courts, and child protection agencies. Despite the many cases involving juvenile victims and the structure in place for responding to them, the juvenile victim justice system model presented in this Bulletin is a new concept. Although the juvenile victim justice system has a distinct structure and sequence, its operation is not very well understood. Unlike the more familiar juvenile offender justice system, the juvenile victim justice system has not been conceptualized as a whole or implemented by a common set of statutes. This Bulletin identifies the major elements of the juvenile victim justice system by delineating how cases move through the system. It reviews each step in the case flow process for the child protection and criminal justice systems and describes the interaction of the agencies an individuals involved. Recognizing how the juvenile victim justice system works can inform policy decisions and improve outcomes for juvenile victims. Acknowledging the existence of the system has important implications for system integration, information sharing, and data collection—all of which play a key role in ensuring the safety and well-being of juvenile victims

The Value of Terroir: Hedonic Estimation of Vineyard Sale Prices

We examine the value of terroir, which refers to the special characteristics of a place that impart unique qualities to the wine produced. We do this by conducting a hedonic analysis of vineyard sales in the Willamette Valley of Oregon to ascertain whether site attributes, such as slope, aspect, elevation, and soil types, or designated appellations are more important determinants of price. We find that prices are strongly determined by sub-AVA appellation designations, but not by specific site attributes. These results indicate that the concept of terroir matters economically, although the reality of terroir--as proxied for by locational attributes--is not significant.

Designing novel applications for emerging multimedia technology

Current R&D in media technologies such as Multimedia, Semantic Web and Sensor Web technologies are advancing in a fierce rate and will sure to become part of our important regular items in a 'conventional' technology inventory in near future. While the R&D nature of these technologies means their accuracy, reliability and robustness are not sufficient enough to be used in real world yet, we want to envision now the near-future where these technologies will have matured and used in real applications in order to explore and start shaping many possible new ways these novel technologies could be utilised. In this talk, some of this effort in designing novel applications that incorporate various media technologies as their backend will be presented. Examples include novel scenarios of LifeLogging application that incorporate automatic structuring of millions of photos passively captured from a SenseCam (wearable digital camera that automatically takes photos triggered by environmental sensors) and an interactive TV application incorporating a number of multimedia tools yet extremely simple and easy to use with a remote control in a lean-back position. The talk will conclude with remarks on how the design of novel applications that have no precedence or existing user base should require somewhat different approach from those suggested and practiced in conventional usability engineering methodology

Dynamics and Steady States in excitable mobile agent systems

We study the spreading of excitations in 2D systems of mobile agents where the excitation is transmitted when a quiescent agent keeps contact with an excited one during a non-vanishing time. We show that the steady states strongly depend on the spatial agent dynamics. Moreover, the coupling between exposition time ($\omega$) and agent-agent contact rate (CR) becomes crucial to understand the excitation dynamics, which exhibits three regimes with CR: no excitation for low CR, an excited regime in which the number of quiescent agents (S) is inversely proportional to CR, and for high CR, a novel third regime, model dependent, here S scales with an exponent $\xi -1$, with $\xi$ being the scaling exponent of $\omega$ with CR

Exploring the planetary-mass population in the Upper Scorpius association

We aim at identifying very low-mass isolated planetary-mass member candidates in the nearest OB association to the Sun, Upper Scorpius (145 pc; 5-10 Myr), to constrain the form and shape of the luminosity function and mass spectrum in this regime. We conducted a deep multi-band ($Y$=21.2, $J$=20.5, $Z$=22.0 mag) photometric survey of six square degrees in the central region of Upper Scorpius. We extend the current sequence of astrometric and spectroscopic members by about two magnitudes in $Y$ and one magnitude in $J$, reaching potentially T-type free-floating members in the association with predicted masses below 5 Jupiter masses, well into the planetary-mass regime. We extracted a sample of 57 candidates in this area and present infrared spectroscopy confirming two of them as young L-type members with characteristic spectral features of 10 Myr-old brown dwarfs. Among the 57 candidates, we highlight 10 new candidates fainter than the coolest members previously confirmed spectroscopically. We do not see any obvious sign of decrease in the mass spectrum of the association, suggesting that star processes can form substellar objects with masses down to 4-5 Jupiter masses.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, 1 appendix with 3 tables that will be public through Vizier at CDS, accepted by MNRA

On robust regression analysis as a means of exploring environmental and operational conditions for SHM data

In the data-based approach to structural health monitoring (SHM), the absence of data from damaged structures in many cases forces a dependence on novelty detection as a means of diagnosis. Unfortunately, this means that benign variations in the operating or environmental conditions of the structure must be handled very carefully, lest they lead to false alarms. If novelty detection is implemented in terms of outlier detection, the outliers may arise in the data as the result of both benign and malign causes and it is important to understand their sources. Comparatively recent developments in the field of robust regression have the potential to provide ways of exploring and visualising SHM data as a means of shedding light on the different origins of outliers. The current paper will illustrate the use of robust regression for SHM data analysis through experimental data acquired from the Z24 and Tamar Bridges, although the methods are general and not restricted to SHM or civil infrastructure