DETECTING EVIDENCE OF NON-COMPLIANCE IN SELF-REPORTED POLLUTION EMISSIONS DATA: AN APPLICATION OF BENFORD'S LAW

The paper introduces Digital Frequency Analysis (DFA) based on Benford's Law as a new technique for detecting non-compliance in self-reported pollution emissions data. Public accounting firms are currently adopting DFA to detect fraud in financial data. We argue that DFA can be employed by environmental regulators to detect fraud in self-reported pollution emissions data. The theory of Benford's Law is reviewed, and statistical justifications for its potentially widespread applicability are presented. Several common DFA tests are described and applied to North Carolina air pollution emissions data in an empirical example.Benford, digital frequency analysis, pollution monitoring, pollution regulation, enforcement, Environmental Economics and Policy, Q25, Q28,

The School Massacres in the United States

Despite the widespread occurrence of violence in the U.S., school massacres are a quite recent phenomenon. It has led to an enormous spread of security technologies, handbooks on violence prevention and safety seminars in American schools. In some public schools security staff almost seems to „own” the school while teachers are more or less reduced to the status of „tenants.” The author argues on behalf of a broader perspective of cultural criticism, since the recent massacres are part of postmodern culture of unleashed capitalism which thwarts from the outset all attempts to legislate restrictions on the possession of guns and aggressive video games

PLANNING FOR A FUTURE: A DEVELOPMENTAL BLUEPRINT TOWARDS SUCCESS AMONG CURRENT AND FORMER FOSTER YOUTH

Over 425,000 youth currently reside in the U.S. foster care system. Youth enter the foster care system for the many reasons, including but not limited to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, neglect, incarceration of a parent, abandonment, and death of a family member. Once in the foster care system, many youth remain until they reach adulthood. The purpose of this study is to examine the perspectives of current and former foster youth who remained in foster care into their adulthood and who participated in the Independent Living Program (ILP), a program designed to help foster youth transition to adulthood and independence. The study used in-depth, qualitative interviews to examine former foster youths’ perceptions of the role ILP played in their transitions to adulthood. This study examines the difficult transitions to independence many foster youth experience and the corresponding skills and behaviors ILP addresses. Several themes emerged from the data. Current and former foster youth with negative outcomes reported that staff assigned to them did not support them in correlation to ILP service deliverance and the transition into adulthood. The second major theme found was inconsistent participation in ILP. The third major theme was communication with clients so that they can be informed of upcoming events, workshops, and resources. The fourth major theme was participants’ suggestions on improvements for ILP. The findings from this study have implications for ILP programs and for social work practice. These implications and recommendations are discussed

Developing Functional Standards as a Means to Greater Accessibility in NFA-LD

A consistent theme of debate league innovation and alternatives has been the attempt at an increased focus on substantive argument along with increased accessibility to the activity. The National Forensic Association\u27s Lincoln-Douglas Debate (NFA-LD) is one of the more recent responses to the desire for an event which promotes topic specific argumentation, at a reasonable rate of delivery, which is accessible to students with no formal debate experience. NFA-LD\u27s approach provides a reference point for examining the interaction of the league and event structure in the context of the desire for less speed, more substance, and, more accessibility. The argument I will pursue is, first, defining a specific paradigm for judging was an excellent first step toward the above mentioned goals. And, second, there is still a need for a league-wide forum to specify and disseminate this paradigm. This development, in the specific situation of NFA-LD as well as debate leagues in general, shifts paradigmatic argumentation to the organizational level, at which it belongs. The pressure to speed is reduced. And, finally, accessibility is increased as both debaters and judges are not required to argue procedural, or paradigmatic, theory in rounds. I will trace this progression through three scenarios--a no-holds-barred format, the NFA-LD model and a modified version of NFA-LD, incorporating a league-wide forum on procedural/paradigmatic definition. At each step, paradigmatic argumentation is moved further away from individual rounds and closer to league-wide consideration

Red Sea, White Tides, and Blue Horizons

Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory of Karl Marx, who declared in the preface to the First German Edition to Capital Volume I, that “As in the 18th century, the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so that in the 19th century, the American Civil War sounded it for the European working class.” The death of slavery in the United States was not a inevitability, but the result of intense political struggle that emerged from a foundational material contradiction of North American settler colonialism and subsequent capitalist development which dramatically reshaped the transnational ideological dialectic between the forces for and against the rule of the masses

LiDAR: A Multi-Application Management Tool

The amount of information contained within LiDAR is enormous as to its potential. Applications and management objectives that a single LiDAR dataset can address span everything from natural resources to fire research to archaeology. This presentation will discuss the LiDAR acquired for Mammoth Cave National Park, initial processing methods and derived products (to date). Different algorithms were deployed depending on the intent of the management objective. Natural Resources wanted to expand their polygon vegetation dataset, creating a 3-D vegetation map. Fire Management wanted to quantify the fuel loading across the park; therefore a baseline fuels map was developed. Cultural Resources wanted to identify areas with potential historic anthropogenic remnants; therefore an extensive Digital Elevation Model (DEM) was developed. When one dataset was discussed and developed, more questions were asked of the data. Tools, models, and algorithms exist, facilitating one LiDAR dataset to meet multiple management objectives

Contributors to the March Issue/Notes

Notes by Nicholas T. Tsiolis, Robert B. Devine, John A. Berry, John L. Towne, John H. Logan, Jr., August P. Petrillo, Richard A. Molique, and J. Frederick Meister