Adding Insult to Injury? The Untoward Impact of Requiring More than De Minimus Injury in an Eighth Amendment Excessive Force Case

This Note explores the conflict over whether a prisoner must suffer more than de minimis injury to sustain an Eighth Amendment excessive force claim. It examines this conflict against the backdrop of the various standards the U.S. Supreme Court adopted in its Eighth Amendment prison conditions jurisprudence between 1976 and 1992, principally focusing on the 1992 Hudson v. McMillian decision. Moreover, this Note considers the intersection of “the evolving standards of decency,” the “hands-off doctrine,” and the Eighth Amendment injury requirement. Ultimately, this Note advocates that excessive force—when meted out as punishment—violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment regardless of whether a prisoner’s injuries are more than de minimis

A reusable prepositioned ATP reaction chamber

Luminescence biometer detects presence of life by means of light-emitting chemical reaction of luciferin and luciferase with adenosine triphosphate (ATP) that occurs in all living cells. Amount of light in reaction chamber is measured to determine presence and extent of life

Circuit measures hysteresis loop areas at 30 Hz

Analog circuit measures hysteresis loop areas as a function of time during fatigue testing of specimens subjected to sinusoidal tension-compression stresses at a frequency of Hz. When the sinusoidal stress signal is multiplied by the strain signal, the dc signal is proportional to hysteresis loop area

A Good Policy Gone Bad: The Strange Case of the Non-Refundable State EITC

Twenty states and several cities have adopted their own EITC programs, typically piggy-backing on the federal EITC by offering benefits equal to some designated proportion of the federal benefits. In all but four states, the state EITC is fully refundable, just like the Federal EITC. Using the example of Delaware, which adopted a non-refundable EITC in 2006, I show the peculiar distribution effects of such a policy. Roughly the lower income half of the EITC recipient population is ineligible for the Delaware non-refundable EITC. Married couples and both single-parent and two-parent families with less than two children also often lose eligibility and/or a substantial portion of benefits. The average benefit received by Federal EITC recipients falls by almost two-thirds. It is likely that these impacts of EITC non-refundability results would hold in other states considering such a policy.EITC, Earned Income Tax Credit

"Revisiting Marshall’s Third Law: Why Does Labor’s Share Interact with the Elasticity of Substitution to Decrease the Elasticity of Labor Demand?"

The third Marshall-Hicks-Allen rule of elasticity of derived demand purports to show that labor demand is less elastic when labor is a smaller share of total costs. As Hicks, Allen, and then Bronfenbrenner showed, this rule is not quite correct, and actually is complicated by an unexpected negative relationship involving labor’s share of total costs and the elasticity of substitution. The standard intuitive explanation for the exception to the rule, due to Stigler, describes a situation rather different than the one described in the rule. In this paper, I present an example that illustrates the peculiar negative impact of labor’s share, operating via the elasticity of substitution. I then explain why the unexpected relationship between labor’s share of total cost, the elasticity of substitution, and the elasticity of labor demand holds.Labor Demand, Hicks-Marshall Rules

"Updating the Teen Miscarriage Experiment: Are the Effects of a Teen Birth Becoming More Negative?"

A reanalysis of the Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders research on the impact of a teen birth on socio-economic outcomes shows that their data set, which includes information on outcomes at older ages only for teen mothers with the earliest calendar year births, is partly responsible for their unexpected findings. Even more interestingly, I find that the impacts of a teen birth differ substantially between the teen mothers who had births in the early to mid 1970s and those who had births in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The mostly positive effects found by Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders hold only for the first group, while impacts are far more negative for the later ones. This tentatively suggests that teen birth effects, even those found using the teen miscarriage methodology, may be more negative than recently reported and also that the estimates from Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders may not be fully relevant for assessing the impact of a teen birth for today’s young women. Because these new estimates are based on smaller samples with fewer miscarriages, the findings should be interpreted cautiously.Teen, Teen Fertility

A trust-region method for stochastic variational inference with applications to streaming data

Stochastic variational inference allows for fast posterior inference in complex Bayesian models. However, the algorithm is prone to local optima which can make the quality of the posterior approximation sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters and initialization. We address this problem by replacing the natural gradient step of stochastic varitional inference with a trust-region update. We show that this leads to generally better results and reduced sensitivity to hyperparameters. We also describe a new strategy for variational inference on streaming data and show that here our trust-region method is crucial for getting good performance.Comment: in Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Machine Learning, 201