The Prosecutor and the Press: Lessons (Not) Learned from the Mike Nifong Debacle

Current projections indicate that by 2050, two in every three people will live in urban areas, and that cities will accommodate 3 billion people during this period. Cities are consuming three-quarters of the world's energy and causing three-quarters of global pollution. To reduce these impacts, new technologies have been considered in the development of smart sustainable cities, but technology has not always favoured the idea of sustainable consumption. To address this issue, we have aimed to focus on identifying the role of sustainable consumption within implementations of smart cities’ projects across Europe. We have selected a set of smart city projects in 76 cities in Europe from CONCERTO initiatives, Mapping Smart Cities in Europe, Energy Study for the Stockholm Region and Joint European Support for Sustainable Investment in City Areas and classified them according to: smart governance, smart mobility, smart living, smart environment, smart citizens and smart economy. Furthermore, we established a number of categories for the classification of the evaluated projects based on their relevance to sustainable consumption, and considered several solutions for the integration of sustainable consumption in smart sustainable cities. The results show that in 18.9% of the projects, sustainable consumption is not relevant at all. The second classification shows the percentage of the remaining categories where sustainable consumption is relevant; 8.3% consider sustainable consumption as relevant even though it was not implemented in the project. These cities aim to achieve a higher level of sustainable consumption, which is expected to be included in future projects. If they keep themselves in this category, their behavioural consumption patterns will not change and the impact of citizens on the cities will remain the same. The majority of the projects, 54.2%, implemented technology to reduce consumption but if the projects do not coincide with the behaviour of citizens, a big rebound effect will occur. 37.5% of the projects consider relevant sustainable consumption to its full potential and this can change citizen’s behaviour. In conclusion, sustainable consumption is relevant in most of the projects analysed, with new technologies available to help energy savings and reduction of our consumption. However, if there is a lack of smart consumption from the citizens, the technologies available might not be sufficient and consumption could increase. One quarter of the analysed smart cities projects still do not consider the consumption behaviour of the citizens. This can be changed through campaigns and explanations targeting the population on how to manage and reduce energy and resource consumption. To reduce the negative impact of the cities’ growth, projects considering smart sustainable cities need to integrate sustainable consumption policies that account for citizens' behaviour

Cohort postponement and period measures

We introduce a new class of models in which demographic behavior such as fertility is postponed by differing amounts depending only on cohort membership. We show how this model fits into a general framework of period and cohort postponement that includes the existing models in the literature, notably those of Bongaarts and Feeney and Kohler and Philipov. The cohort-based model shows the effects of cohort shifts on period fertility measures and provides an accompanying tempo-adjusted measure of period total fertility in the absence of observed shifts. Simulation reveals that when postponement is governed by cohorts, the cohort-based indicator outperforms the Bongaarts and Feeney model that is now in widespread use. The cohort-based model is applied to fertility in several modern populations.

How slowing senescence changes life expectancy

Mortality decline has historically been a result of reductions in the level of mortality at all ages. The slope of mortality increase with age has been remarkably stable. A number of leading researchers on aging, however, suggest that the next revolution of longevity increase will be the result of slowing down the rate of aging, lessening the rate at which mortality increases as we get older. In this paper, we show mathematically how varying the pace of senescence influences life expectancy. We provide a formula that holds for any baseline hazard function. Our result is analogous to Keyfitz's "entropy" relationship for changing the level of mortality. Interestingly, the influence of the shape of the baseline schedule on the effect of senescence changes is the complement of that found for level changes. We also provide a generalized formulation that mixes level and slope effects.

A Recipe for State Dependent Distributed Delay Differential Equations

We use the McKendrick equation with variable ageing rate and randomly distributed maturation time to derive a state dependent distributed delay differential equation. We show that the resulting delay differential equation preserves non-negativity of initial conditions and we characterise local stability of equilibria. By specifying the distribution of maturation age, we recover state dependent discrete, uniform and gamma distributed delay differential equations. We show how to reduce the uniform case to a system of state dependent discrete delay equations and the gamma distributed case to a system of ordinary differential equations. To illustrate the benefits of these reductions, we convert previously published transit compartment models into equivalent distributed delay differential equations.Comment: 28 page

A Systematic Identification and Analysis of Scientists on Twitter

Metrics derived from Twitter and other social media---often referred to as altmetrics---are increasingly used to estimate the broader social impacts of scholarship. Such efforts, however, may produce highly misleading results, as the entities that participate in conversations about science on these platforms are largely unknown. For instance, if altmetric activities are generated mainly by scientists, does it really capture broader social impacts of science? Here we present a systematic approach to identifying and analyzing scientists on Twitter. Our method can identify scientists across many disciplines, without relying on external bibliographic data, and be easily adapted to identify other stakeholder groups in science. We investigate the demographics, sharing behaviors, and interconnectivity of the identified scientists. We find that Twitter has been employed by scholars across the disciplinary spectrum, with an over-representation of social and computer and information scientists; under-representation of mathematical, physical, and life scientists; and a better representation of women compared to scholarly publishing. Analysis of the sharing of URLs reveals a distinct imprint of scholarly sites, yet only a small fraction of shared URLs are science-related. We find an assortative mixing with respect to disciplines in the networks between scientists, suggesting the maintenance of disciplinary walls in social media. Our work contributes to the literature both methodologically and conceptually---we provide new methods for disambiguating and identifying particular actors on social media and describing the behaviors of scientists, thus providing foundational information for the construction and use of indicators on the basis of social media metrics

Undue Influence: A Prosecutor's Role in Parole Proceedings

Professor Cassidy explores what it means for a prosecutor to act as a “minister of justice” in the context of parole proceedings. He argues that prosecutors should not perceive themselves as zealous advocates in what is essentially an administrative setting, and that prosecutors should not oppose release simply because they believe that the nature and circumstances of the crime warrant continued incarceration. Rather, Cassidy argues that prosecutors ordinarily should refrain from personally testifying at parole hearings, and should submit written comments to the parole board only in those rare situations where the prosecutor is in possession of otherwise unavailable information pertaining to an inmate’s post-conviction behavior that would assist the board in making an accurate legal and factual determination. Cassidy surveys the approaches taken by parole board statutes and regulations in fifty states and discusses which of those approaches properly calibrate the scope and limits of a prosecutor’s input in release decisions

“Tenure can withstand Twitter”: we need policies that promote science communication and protect those who engage

In the age of social media, the professor’s podium has expanded. Cassidy R. Sugimoto argues so too must our policies on science communication and academic freedom. Academic freedom is a right for unfettered freedom to research, but also with an obligation to disseminate that research. Twitter and other social media can be used to fulfill this obligation. What we need now are policies that promote science communication with the public and protect those who engage in this discourse

(Ad)ministering Justice: A Prosecutor\u27s Ethical Duty to Support Sentencing Reform

This article stakes out an ethical argument in favor of prosecutorial leadership on sentencing reform. Prosecutors have a duty as “ministers of justice” to go beyond seeking appropriate conviction and punishment in individual cases, and to think about the delivery of criminal justice on a systemic level ― promoting criminal justice policies that further broader societal ends. While other authors have explored the tensions between a prosecutor’s adversarial duties and “minister of justice” role in the context of specific litigation, few have explored what it means to be an “administer” of justice in the wider political arena. The author sets forth a new construct of what is required for a prosecutor to be a neutral, nonpartisan “administer of justice” in her legislative and public advocacy activities. Applying this paradigm to the ongoing national debate about sentencing reform, the author argues that a prosecutor’s administrative responsibilities as a leader in the criminal justice establishment and her fiduciary responsibilities as a representative of the sovereign should compel her to join in the effort to repeal mandatory minimum sentencing provisions for most drug and non-violent offenses. Not only are mandatory sentences in most instances unduly harsh, coercive, and inefficacious, but they allow for an arbitrary and discriminatory application that is essentially unreviewable by courts. The author distinguishes this argument against mandatory minimum penalties from the so-called “Smart on Crime” movement, by grounding a prosecutor’s duty to promote sentencing reform in ethical reasoning as opposed to pragmatic or cost-savings considerations. Even with robust political support from some of this nation’s most conscientious prosecutors, state legislatures are unlikely to repeal or cut back on all mandatory minimum sentences. Some mandatory prison terms ― for crimes such as murder, repeat offense OUI, and aggravated sexual offenses — will likely stay on the books notwithstanding the advocacy recommended above. A second question the author addresses in this article is how an ethical prosecutor should make plea bargaining decisions in the face of mandatory minimum prison terms retained by the legislature. While there has been substantial legal scholarship to date that has decried the manner in which mandatory minimum penalties have transferred sentencing discretion from judges to prosecutors, beyond that descriptive lament there has been very little attention paid to how exactly prosecutorial discretion might be more meaningfully constrained through internal self-regulation. Prosecutors can mitigate many of the harsh and unjust consequences of mandatory minimum sentences by instituting and publishing clear office policies governing when line prosecutors may dismiss or reduce charges that carry them. The author proposes specific guidelines that state prosecutors should adopt to ensure a consistent and even-handed application of mandatory minimum penalties, so that line prosecutors do not abuse the substantial discretion that has been afforded them in the plea bargaining process