The mind on trial: mental illness and capital punishment in America's highest execution state

Mentally ill and intellectually disabled capital defendants are regularly sentenced to death in Texas, America’s highest execution state. Psycho-legal scholars argue that the reason for this phenomenon is that Texas courts rely on out-dated clinical criteria and stereotypes without scientific foundation in their mental incapacity evaluations. While existing literature offers significant insights regarding the treatment of mentally incapacitated capital defendants in this and other US jurisdictions, it provides a decontextualized view of the problem which takes for granted the underlying assumptions upon which notions of mental illness and criminal responsibility are based. Starting from the idea that such interpretations are historically contingent and socially constructed, the thesis seeks to identify the ways in which scientific developments, mental health caselaw, and shifting values and standards of behaviour have influenced expert and lay discourse on the intersection of mental illness and crime in the psycho-legal literature and in Texas courtroom interactions. To accomplish this goal, the thesis utilises a socio-historical methodology based on in-depth archival research. Specifically, the thesis analyses forensic psychiatric publications, trial records of male capital defendants who claimed insanity or asked for a mitigation of the sentence due to mental illness, and social and cultural histories of forensic psychiatry and psychology spanning the 20th century. Drawing from critical theory and cultural studies, the thesis argues that despite their claims to scientific objectivity and legal neutrality, American psycho-legal theorists and Texas expert witnesses, defence attorneys, prosecutors, and appellate courts provide morally charged descriptions of mentally ill offenders which reveal a far from dispassionate approach. Moreover, the thesis proposes that, through their arguments and opinions, psychiatrists and legal actors in Texas courts have contributed to the labelling of marginalised male offenders in a way that increases the stigma attached to particular social categories, while encouraging punitive responses amongst Texas jurors.</p

Erratum to: Sources of resistance to diseases of sugar beet in related Beta germplasm: I. Foliar diseases

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Impact of High-End Receivers in a Peer-To-Peer Cooperative Localization System

This paper introduces the concept of peer-to-peer cooperation as an aiding technique in GNSS positioning and addresses the impact of the presence of professional receivers in the network. The impact of their higher accuracy is evaluated for the cases of both GNSS-data only and hybrid data exchange. Kalman Filters are considered as the data fusion engine

Cross-Band Aided Code Acquisition in Dual-Band GNSS Receivers

none6noThe problem of fast code acquisition in dual-band Galileo receivers is tackled. The proposed techniques exploit the Galileo E1 and E5 Open Service signals structure, implementing a cross-band aiding approach that yields mutual assistance in code synchronization adopting a master/slave configuration. The schemes are analyzed in terms of mean acquisition time (MAT) introducing the procedure flow-graph and overall mean acquisition time (OMAT). Numerical evaluation shows enhanced OMAT performance w.r.t. autonomous dual-band acquisition, guaranteeing complexity reduction.mixedL. Deambrogio; F. Bastia; C. Palestini; R. Pedone; M. Villanti; G. E. CorazzaL. Deambrogio; F. Bastia; C. Palestini; R. Pedone; M. Villanti; G. E. Corazz

Sources of resistance to diseases of sugar beet in related Beta germplasm: I. Foliar diseases

Resistance to four foliar diseases of sugar beet (Beta vulgaris ssp. vulgaris), virus yellows caused by Beet mild yellowing virus (BMYV) and Beet yellows virus (BYV), powdery mildew (Erysiphe betae) and Cercospora leaf spot (Cercospora beticola), was assessed in up to 600 accessions of closely related wild and cultivated Beta species. Most accessions were from the Section Beta, a taxon containing types most closely related to, and sexually compatible with, sugar beet and therefore most valuable for use in crop improvement. Between 1\u201312% of accessions were highly resistant (resistance scores of 642 on an international standardised resistance scale of 1\u20139) to these diseases. These levels, however, underestimate the potential number of resistant sources available from this section as some accessions with intermediate mean resistance scores contained a significant proportion of highly resistant plants within segregating populations. Variation in resistance to all diseases except BYV was observed within the Section Beta. Much higher levels of resistance were observed, and more frequently, in more distantly related sections of the genus Beta. Accessions of the Section Corollinae were highly resistant to both viruses (>62% of accessions tested), but less so to Cercospora (15%) and they were very susceptible to powdery mildew. Section Procumbentes accessions were highly resistant to BMYV and Cercospora (100%) but less so to powdery mildew (50%) and BYV (20%). However, sexual incompatibility between these sections and sugar beet make utilisation of these sources impractical using conventional breeding methods

Cooperative Code Acquisition based on the P2P Paradigm

Wireless cooperation among smart devices is a very clear trend, with applications in innumerable domains. In this paper, we address in particular applications in the field of assisted navigation and positioning with emphasis on the code acquisition procedure. Indeed, the great diffusion of hybrid navigation-communication (NAV-COM) devices provides the means for developing new cooperation concepts that rely on the exploitation of the existing communication links among receivers and the exchange of assistance information. The concept of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) cooperation relies in fact on the idea that receivers belonging to the same network have positions which are correlated to each other; thereby, satellite signals are received with similar time delays. The exchange of timing information and the sharing of resources can thus become essential also for GNSS receiver initial operations as for achieving increased acquisition capabilities in very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios. In the present work an innovative Cooperative Code Acquisition (CCA) technique relying on the sharing of primary code phase information is introduced. Assuming that the peers in the network are aligned to a common time reference, the aim of this technique is to increase the probability of detection (Pd) with positive impacts on the Mean Acquisition Time (MAT). The proposed CCA algorithm is performed in two consecutive stages: a Coarse Acquisition Stage (CAS), in which each peer computes locally its autocorrelation values and a Refinement Stage (RS) in which the results obtained by several receivers in the network are combined together yielding improved performance