THE PROS AND CONS OF PRODUCTION AND MARKETING CONTRACTS

Farm Management,

Understanding the Nature and Effects of Police-Citizen Encounters in Social Context: The Road Less Traveled

Aggressive policing tactics have been identified as contributors to declining crime rate trends in urban, culturally diverse neighborhoods. They encompass stop and frisk practices which have spawned negative public opinion that contrasts with its justification by criminal justice officials as an effective means for the control and prevention of crime. The issue, however, begs deeper questions not readily addressed: how does the nature of police-citizen suspicion-based encounters influence the attitudes and behavior of both stakeholders; and does it contribute to effective crime control and prevention? Based on an analysis of theoretical and empirical research in the field, this article argues that a sense of shame and perception of fairness or unfairness are endemic to face-to-face suspicion-based encounters between police officers and the public, and have significant implications for the experience of justice, control and prevention of crime, and policy initiatives to promote community safety

Monoids of modules and arithmetic of direct-sum decompositions

Let $R$ be a (possibly noncommutative) ring and let $\mathcal C$ be a class of finitely generated (right) $R$-modules which is closed under finite direct sums, direct summands, and isomorphisms. Then the set $\mathcal V (\mathcal C)$ of isomorphism classes of modules is a commutative semigroup with operation induced by the direct sum. This semigroup encodes all possible information about direct sum decompositions of modules in $\mathcal C$. If the endomorphism ring of each module in $\mathcal C$ is semilocal, then $\mathcal V (\mathcal C)$ is a Krull monoid. Although this fact was observed nearly a decade ago, the focus of study thus far has been on ring- and module-theoretic conditions enforcing that $\mathcal V(\mathcal C)$ is Krull. If $\mathcal V(\mathcal C)$ is Krull, its arithmetic depends only on the class group of $\mathcal V(\mathcal C)$ and the set of classes containing prime divisors. In this paper we provide the first systematic treatment to study the direct-sum decompositions of modules using methods from Factorization Theory of Krull monoids. We do this when $\mathcal C$ is the class of finitely generated torsion-free modules over certain one- and two-dimensional commutative Noetherian local rings.Comment: Pacific Journal of Mathematics, to appea

Prototype Detector for Ultrahigh Energy Neutrino Detection

Necessary technical experience is being gained from successful construction and deployment of current prototype detectors to search for UHE neutrinos in Antarctica, Lake Baikal in Russia, and the Mediterranean. The prototype detectors have also the important central purpose of determining whether or not UHE neutrinos do in fact exist in nature by observation of at least a few UHE neutrino-induced leptons with properties that are not consistent with expected backgrounds. We discuss here the criteria for a prototype detector to accomplish that purpose in a convincing way even if the UHE neutrino flux is substantially lower than predicted at present.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Astroparticle Physic

Ensemble estimation of multivariate f-divergence

f-divergence estimation is an important problem in the fields of information theory, machine learning, and statistics. While several divergence estimators exist, relatively few of their convergence rates are known. We derive the MSE convergence rate for a density plug-in estimator of f-divergence. Then by applying the theory of optimally weighted ensemble estimation, we derive a divergence estimator with a convergence rate of O(1/T) that is simple to implement and performs well in high dimensions. We validate our theoretical results with experiments.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, a condensed version of this paper was accepted to ISIT 2014, Version 2: Moved the proofs of the theorems from the main body to appendices at the en