Policing Chicago Public Schools: A Gateway to the School-to-Prison Pipeline

"Policing Chicago Public Schools: A Gateway to the School-to-Prison Pipeline" relies on data from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to show (for the first time in seven years) the type of offenses and the demographics (gender, age and race) of the juveniles arrested on CPS properties in calendar year 2010

Reasonableness, Murder, and Modern Science

Originally titled “Is It Murder in Tennessee to Kill a Chimpanzee,” this article argues in some detail that typical legal definitions of “murder” as involving the intentional killing of “a reasonable being” would require classifying the intentional killing of chimpanzees as murder

States which have harsher incarceration and less generous welfare policies tend to place more children in foster care.

Across the Unites States, the number of children taken into foster care every year varies greatly. In new research, Frank Edwards take a close look at how this number is influenced by states’ criminal justice, welfare, and child protection regimes. He finds that states with more punitive criminal justice systems are likely to put 4.9 children per 1,000 into foster care annually. States with generous welfare programs, on the other hand, are likely to put only 3.7 per 1,000 into foster care every year

Fiscal Pressures, the Great Recession, and Monetary Sanctions in Washington Courts of Limited Jurisdiction

Many municipal governments have come to depend heavily on fines and fees generated by the criminal justice system.  This essay uses data from all courts of limited jurisdiction (municipal and district courts) in Washington State between 2000 and 2014 to evaluate the relationships between local government finances, the Great Recession, and the imposition of debt through the criminal justice system.  I find that municipalities issued more criminal justice debt during and after the recession across Washington, but that government finances as measured by tax receipts and expenditures per capita were weakly related to sentencing practices.  These findings suggest that macroeconomic fiscal pressures may be drivers of enforcement and prosecutorial practices through increasing case volumes, but that macroeconomic pressures and local fiscal pressures did not appear to shift court sentencing practices in Washington during the Great Recession

Non-Universality of Density and Disorder in Jammed Sphere Packings

We show for the first time that collectively jammed disordered packings of three-dimensional monodisperse frictionless hard spheres can be produced and tuned using a novel numerical protocol with packing density $\phi$ as low as 0.6. This is well below the value of 0.64 associated with the maximally random jammed state and entirely unrelated to the ill-defined ``random loose packing'' state density. Specifically, collectively jammed packings are generated with a very narrow distribution centered at any density $\phi$ over a wide density range $\phi \in [0.6,~0.74048\ldots]$ with variable disorder. Our results support the view that there is no universal jamming point that is distinguishable based on the packing density and frequency of occurence. Our jammed packings are mapped onto a density-order-metric plane, which provides a broader characterization of packings than density alone. Other packing characteristics, such as the pair correlation function, average contact number and fraction of rattlers are quantified and discussed.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Good Interdepartmental Relationships: The Foundations of a Solid Emergency Department

“No man is an island” said the English poet, John Donne, and nowhere can that statement be better appreciated than in a modern emergency department (ED). As emergency physicians, we work in the setting of a close knit team involving nurses, technicians, consultants, clerks, security guards and many more. On a macroscopic level as well, the ED itself needs productive relationships with every other department in the hospital. Back when the ED was staffed by physicians-in-training, general practitioners and moonlighting specialists, the care of patients was jealously divided between the long-entrenched traditional specialties. Anesthesiologists handled difficult airways; Surgeons took care of trauma; Radiologists did the ultrasounds and read all the films, and so forth. Emergency medicine—a specialty that encompassed parts of many disciplines—was initially met with skepticism and resistance from the traditional fields.   I have been in practice long enough to remember when anesthesiologists fought against emergency physicians doing RSI and how they tried to stop us from using propofol or ketamine for procedural sedation. Orthopedists wanted to be consulted before we reduced a shoulder. Surgeons got angry if you gave morphine to a belly pain patient. In the early 1990’s at the University of Rochester, my colleague, Dr. Steve White, had to sneak into the ED with his own portable ultrasound device (with its postage stamp sized screen), because to have done so openly would have brought down the wrath of radiologists who believed that ultrasonography belonged to their department alone. These turf battles are mostly a thing of the past, thanks to clinical studies conducted by our specialty that proved what we can and should do. But challenges regarding interdepartmental relationships still remain. In the following discussion we will look at current friction points between the ED and other departments, including radiology, anesthesia, surgery, obstetrics/gynecology, cardiology, and the internal medicine admitting services

The African American Family\u27s Influence on Academic Achievement of Urban Secondary Students

One of the most unyielding challenges of the American Educational System todate has been determining the unique factors that African American families have on the academic achievement of urban high school students. The purpose of this qualitative study was to determine: (1) what effect does the African American Family’s influence have on urban secondary students achievement; (2) what impact does academic achievement have on the life of an urban African-American student; and (3) what contributing factors stimulate academic achievement in urban secondary students. The African-American family and its influence on student achievement included the following themes: family and familial membership beliefs on the importance of education, parental roles and parenting styles. Themes that encompassed the factors leading to positive student achievement included: academic journey from elementary school to the current placement in the secondary level; students recognizing the importance of education; and teacher’s impact on student achievement. Themes concerning student resiliency factors were also discussed. Factors contributing to studentinternal locus of control themes included: influential persons relating to studentachievement, student motivation towards academic achievement, student perception of success, stereotypes of urban students, and African American history of educational inequality and segregation. Finally, themes related to the influence of urban community on student academic achievement included: the urban neighborhood, overcoming negative experience impact of participating in extracurricular activities, and influence of religion or spirituality practices. The findings from this study suggests that despite being exposed to insurmountable risk from urban living, students are able to achieve academically with the assistance, support, and guidance of their families. In addition, students having experienced teachers who are caring, and who have high expectations promote high academic achievement. Moreover, student thoughts and beliefs regardingtheir ability to achieve also play a role in their academic success. Student who are resilient and/or have an internal locus of control are able to cope with stressful situations. This ability to deal with stressful situations as a result of an internal locus of control manifests itself in learning experiences and/or motivation to achieve

Natural selection maximizes Fisher information

In biology, information flows from the environment to the genome by the process of natural selection. But it has not been clear precisely what sort of information metric properly describes natural selection. Here, I show that Fisher information arises as the intrinsic metric of natural selection and evolutionary dynamics. Maximizing the amount of Fisher information about the environment captured by the population leads to Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, the most profound statement about how natural selection influences evolutionary dynamics. I also show a relation between Fisher information and Shannon information (entropy) that may help to unify the correspondence between information and dynamics. Finally, I discuss possible connections between the fundamental role of Fisher information in statistics, biology, and other fields of science.Comment: Published version freely available at DOI listed her