Social Equity and COVID-19: The Case of African Americans

Emerging statistics demonstrate that COVID-19 disproportionately affects African Americans. The effects of COVID-19 for this population are inextricably linked to areas of systemic oppression and disenfranchisement, which are further exacerbated by COVID-19: (1) healthcare inequality; (2) segregation, overall health, and food insecurity; (3) underrepresentation in government and the medical profession; and (4) inequalities in participatory democracy and public engagement. Following a discussion of these issues, this article shares early and preliminary lessons and strategies on how public administration scholars and practitioners can lead in crafting equitable responses to this global pandemic to uplift the African American community

Study of Mesoscale Exchange Processes Utilizing LANDSAT Air Mass Cloud Imagery

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Study of mesocale exchange processes utilizing LANDSAT air mass cloud imagery

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Study of Mesoscale Exchange Processes Utilizing Landsat Air Mass Cloud Imagery

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Meeting of the American Physical Society

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Triaxial Black-Hole Nuclei

We demonstrate that the nuclei of galaxies containing supermassive black holes can be triaxial in shape. Schwarzschild's method was first used to construct self-consistent orbital superpositions representing nuclei with axis ratios of 1:0.79:0.5 and containing a central point mass representing a black hole. Two different density laws were considered, with power-law slopes of -1 and -2. We constructed two solutions for each power law: one containing only regular orbits and the other containing both regular and chaotic orbits. Monte-Carlo realizations of the models were then advanced in time using an N-body code to verify their stability. All four models were found to retain their triaxial shapes for many crossing times. The possibility that galactic nuclei may be triaxial complicates the interpretation of stellar-kinematical data from the centers of galaxies and may alter the inferred interaction rates between stars and supermassive black holes.Comment: 4 pages, 4 postscript figures, uses emulateapj.st

Bottom-Rung Appeals

There are haves and have-nots in the federal appellate courts, and the haves get more attention. For decades the courts have used a triage regime where they distribute judicial attention selectively: some appeals receive a lot of judicial attention, some appeals receive barely any. What this work unearths is that this triage system produces demonstrably unequal results depending on the circuit handling the appeal and whether the appellant has counsel or not. Together, these two factors produce dramatic disparities: in one circuit, for example, an unrepresented appellant receives, on average, a decision less than a tenth the length of a similarly situated represented appellant in another circuit. Compounding that, in most federal circuits thousands of decisions issued annually in unrepresented appeals—especially those involving prisoners—are not available on free court websites, rendering them functionally unusable by those facing the greatest barriers to accessing justice in federal court.This Article both unearths these systemic inequities and calls for greater attention to their consequences. These disparities threaten dignitary harm to litigants, but they also risk a disparate impact on the development of the law. The courts and Congress, if need be, should realign the existing triage regime to prioritize procedural justice values alongside efficiency. At a minimum, this Article argues for transparency reforms to better assess the effect of the federal appellate triage regime on marginalized litigants. More controversially, it also argues that Congress should establish minimum and uniform standards for federal appellate decision-making

Downright Indifference : Examining Unpublished Decisions in the Federal Courts of Appeals

Nearly 90 percent of the work of the federal courts of appeals looks nothing like the opinions law students read in casebooks. Over the last fifty years, the so-called “unpublished decision” has overtaken the federal appellate courts in response to a caseload volume “crisis.” These are often short, perfunctory decisions that make no law; they are, one federal judge said, “not safe for human consumption.” The creation of the inferior unpublished decision also has created an inferior track of appellate justice for a class of appellants: indigent litigants. The federal appellate courts routinely shunt indigent appeals to a second-tier appellate process in which judicial staff attorneys resolve appeals without oral argument or meaningful judicial oversight. For the system’s most vulnerable participants, the promise of an appeal as of right often becomes a rubber stamp: “You lose.” This work examines the product of that second-class appellate justice system by filling two critical gaps in the existing literature. First, it compiles comprehensive data on the use of unpublished decisions across the circuits over the last twenty years. The data reveal, for the first time, that the courts’ continued—and increasing—reliance on unpublished decisions has no correlation to overall caseload volume. Second, it examines the output of the second-tier appellate justice system from the perspective of the litigants themselves. Relying on a procedural justice framework, this work develops a taxonomy of unpublished decisions and argues for minimum standards for reason-giving in most unpublished decisions

Bottom-Rung Appeals

There are haves and have-nots in the federal appellate courts, and the haves get more attention. For decades the courts have used a triage regime where they distribute judicial attention selectively: some appeals receive a lot of judicial attention, some appeals receive barely any. What this work unearths is that this triage system produces demonstrably unequal results depending on the circuit handling the appeal and whether the appellant has counsel or not. Together, these two factors produce dramatic disparities: in one circuit, for example, an unrepresented appellant receives, on average, a decision less than a tenth the length of a similarly situated represented appellant in another circuit. Compounding that, in most federal circuits thousands of decisions issued annually in unrepresented appeals—especially those involving prisoners—are not available on free court websites, rendering them functionally unusable by those facing the greatest barriers to accessing justice in federal court.This Article both unearths these systemic inequities and calls for greater attention to their consequences. These disparities threaten dignitary harm to litigants, but they also risk a disparate impact on the development of the law. The courts and Congress, if need be, should realign the existing triage regime to prioritize procedural justice values alongside efficiency. At a minimum, this Article argues for transparency reforms to better assess the effect of the federal appellate triage regime on marginalized litigants. More controversially, it also argues that Congress should establish minimum and uniform standards for federal appellate decision-making

Direct reduction of zinc sulfide under vacuum

The present work is a continuation of the previous investigations of Gross and Warrington and Liu in which the effect of various reducing agents on the vacuum reduction of zinc sulfide was studied. The author became interested in this topic while reading the papers by these investigators in which they recommended that further work be performed in an attempt to prevent zinc sulfide from distilling over during reduction, thereby contaminating the zinc condensate. The original plan was to perform a few runs for the purpose of duplicating the results that were reported by Liu, and from this point carry on the work using reducing agents other than iron. Soon after the work had been started, it was found that the results of Liu for the reduction of zinc sulfide could not be duplicated, particularly at the lower reaction temperatures; therefore, the previously reported results were cast aside and a considerable amount of work was performed for two purposes: (1) to determine the reasons for the lack of agreement, and (2) to investigate thoroughly several of the operational variables in order that this work might be given more justification for being acceptable than the previous work by Liu. In addition to using several other reducing agents at various reaction temperatures and for specified times at temperature, experiments were made to determine the effect, if any, of the crucible shape and the degree of charge compaction on the recovery of metallic zinc. The latter phase of the work was concerned with an attempt to improve the zinc condensates that were produced in previous iron reduction runs by redistilling a carefully selected composite charge for various times at certain temperatures. It shall be seen that certain reducing agents were very effective in reducing zinc sulfide directly to metallic zinc; however, a portion of the sulfur in the charge also distilled into the condensing region as zinc sulfide. Moreover, the majority of the condensates that were produced were extracted either as a loose powder or as thin brittle sheets. Sometimes a suitable metallic sheet was produced, but only if a high reaction temperature was used. Therefore, the purpose for redistilling the condensates as a composite charge was twofold: (1) to improve the physical characteristics of the condensates by attempting to produce zinc as strong metallic sheets, and (2) to determine the extent of evaporation of sulfur as zinc sulfide from the composite and its effect on the purity of the resulting condensate --Introduction, pages 2-4