The New Era of Administrative Regularization: Controlling Prosecutorial Discretion through the Administrative Procedure Act

Beginning in 1969, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia began developing and installing, with the help of management consultants, a computerized record keeping process that came to be known as the Prosecutor\u27s Management Information System, or PROMIS. I Unlike other federal prosecutors, the U. S. Attorney in the District of Columbia is responsible for prosecuting felonies under local law and shares many of the problems of court backlog and scarcity of resources familiar to local prosecutors in other large cities. PROMIS is a computer data bank in which six kinds of information are collected and correlated with each other for every criminal case litigated by the U. S. Attorney\u27s office. The computer will report information about the defendant (such as aliases, prior arrests and convictions, age, race, sex, and employment status), the crime (such as the amount of violence and property damage, the number of persons accused of working with the defendant, and the date and place of the incident), the arrest (such as the type of arrest and the names of the arresting officers), the offense or offenses charged (such as the charges at arrest, the charges actually placed after initial screening by a prosecutor, and the reasons for any changes), the witnesses (such as name, address, evidentiary value, and assessment of whether there will be problems getting a given witness to testify), and the court history of the case (such as the date and substance of every court event from arraignment to sentencing, the cause of each event, and the names of the prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge involved at each stage). Information about the defendant and the offense of which he is accused is computed through formulae that produce a case priority rating which allows the office to single out certain cases for special attention and provides the basis for detailed supervision, through guidelines, of each Assistant U. S. Attorney\u27s discretion. While PROMIS was being developed, and in conjunction with it, the U. S. Attorney\u27s office put many of its guidelines in the form of a Papering and Screening Manual for its Superior Court Division and Guidelines for First Offender Treatment. Neither the existence nor the contents of these documents was disclosed to the public

Legislation\u27s Culture

American statutes can seem like labyrinthine mazes when compared to some countries’ legislation. French codes are admired for their intellectual elegance and clarity. Novelists and poets (Stendhal, Valéry) have considered the Code civil to be literature. Swedish legislation might be based on empirical research into problems the legislation is intended to remedy, and the drafting style, though modern today, is descended from an oral tradition of poetic narrative. Comparing these legislative cultures with our own reveals that the main problem with American legislation is not too many words. It is too many ideas — a high ratio of concepts per legislative goal. When American, French, and Swedish legislatures address similar problems, the French and Swedes draft using far fewer concepts than Americans do. In both countries, simple solutions are preferred over convoluted ones. The drafters of the Code civil thought the highest intellectual and legislative accomplishment to be simplicity. The Swedes got to approximately the same place through a cultural value that law be understandable to the public. Where the American legislative process can seem chaotic, there has been some respect for Cartesian rationality in France and for empirical evidence in Sweden. Even if American statutes were to be translated into ordinary English, they would still be labyrinths because our legislatures insist on addressing every conceivable detail that legislators can imagine. The result is excessively conceptualized legislation, imposing large numbers of duties. Statutory concepts cost money. They create issues, which must be decided by publicly funded courts and agencies with additional costs to the parties involved. Every unnecessary statutory concept wastes social and economic resources. And to the extent law seems incomprehensible to the public, it loses moral authority

Spin chain from membrane and the Neumann-Rosochatius integrable system

We find membrane configurations in AdS_4 x S^7, which correspond to the continuous limit of the SU(2) integrable spin chain, considered as a limit of the SU(3) spin chain, arising in N=4 SYM in four dimensions, dual to strings in AdS_5 x S^5. We also discuss the relationship with the Neumann-Rosochatius integrable system at the level of Lagrangians, comparing the string and membrane cases.Comment: LaTeX, 16 pages, no figures; v2: 17 pages, title changed, explanations and references added; v3: more explanations added; v4: typos fixed, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Towards a Semantic Gas Source Localization under Uncertainty

Towards a Semantic Gas Source Localization under Uncertainty.Communications in Computer and Information Science book series (CCIS, volume 855), doi:10.1007/978-3-319-91479-4_42This work addresses the problem of efficiently and coherently locating a gas source in a domestic environment with a mobile robot, meaning efficiently the coverage of the shortest distance as possible and coherently the consideration of different gas sources explaining the gas presence. The main contribution is the exploitation, for the first time, of semantic relationships between the gases detected and the objects present in the environment to face this challenging issue. Our proposal also takes into account both the uncertainty inherent in the gas classification and object recognition processes. These uncertainties are combined through a probabilistic Bayesian framework to provide a priority-ordered list of (previously observed) objects to check. Moreover the proximity of the different candidates to the current robot location is also considered by a cost function, which output is used for planning the robot inspection path. We have conducted an initial demonstration of the suitability of our gas source localization approach by simulating this task within domestic environments for a variable number of objects, and comparing it with an greedy approach.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Koopman-von Neumann Formulation of Classical Yang-Mills Theories: I

In this paper we present the Koopman-von Neumann (KvN) formulation of classical non-Abelian gauge field theories. In particular we shall explore the functional (or classical path integral) counterpart of the KvN method. In the quantum path integral quantization of Yang-Mills theories concepts like gauge-fixing and Faddeev-Popov determinant appear in a quite natural way. We will prove that these same objects are needed also in this classical path integral formulation for Yang-Mills theories. We shall also explore the classical path integral counterpart of the BFV formalism and build all the associated universal and gauge charges. These last are quite different from the analog quantum ones and we shall show the relation between the two. This paper lays the foundation of this formalism which, due to the many auxiliary fields present, is rather heavy. Applications to specific topics outlined in the paper will appear in later publications.Comment: 46 pages, Late

Reconstruction of Defects by Ultrasonic Testing Using Synthetic Aperture Procedures

The three methods ALOK (Amplitude Time Locus Curves), PHASED ARRAY and LSAFT (Line-Synthetic-Aperture-Focussing-Technique) use the method of synthesizing a large aperture by moving a probe. The result is a high lateral resolution and the capability to focus into the farfield of the probe. As pointed out in Fig.1, a focal probe focusses only in one depth within the near field length. The PHASED ARRAY probe allows to change this focal distance within the near field length electronically. The SAFT-method allows to focus in all depths simultaneously within the near field length which is given not by the probe diameter D but by the synthetic aperture D’