Danger Ahead: Risk Assessment and the Future of Bail Reform

In the last five years, legislators in all fifty states have made changes to their pretrial justice systems. Reform efforts aim to shrink jails by incarcerating fewer people—particularly poor, low-risk defendants and racial minorities. Many jurisdictions are embracing pretrial risk assessment instruments—statistical tools that use historical data to forecast which defendants can safely be released—as a centerpiece of reform. Now, many are questioning the extent to which pretrial risk assessment instruments actually serve reform goals. Existing scholarship and debate centers on how the instruments themselves may reinforce racial disparities and on how their opaque algorithms may frustrate due process interests. This Article highlights three underlying challenges that have yet to receive the attention they require. First, today’s risk assessment tools lead to what we term “zombie predictions.” That is, predictive models trained on data from older bail regimes are blind to the risk-reducing benefits of recent bail reforms. This may cause predictions that systematically overestimate risk. Second, “decision-making frameworks” that mediate the court system’s use of risk estimates embody crucial moral judgments, yet currently escape appropriate public scrutiny. Third, in the long-term, these tools risk giving an imprimatur of scientific objectivity to ill-defined concepts of “dangerousness,” may entrench the Supreme Court’s historically recent blessing of preventive detention for dangerousness, and could pave the way for an increase in preventive detention. Pretrial risk assessment instruments, as they are currently built and used, cannot safely be assumed to support reformist goals of reducing incarceration and addressing racial and poverty-based inequities. This Article contends that system stakeholders who share those goals are best off focusing their reformist energies on other steps that can more directly promote decarceral changes and greater equity in pretrial justice. Where pretrial risk assessments remain in use, this Article proposes two vital steps that should be seen as minimally necessary to address the challenges surfaced. First, where they choose to embrace risk assessment, jurisdictions must carefully define what they wish to predict, gather and use local, recent data, and continuously update and calibrate any model on which they choose to rely, investing in a robust data infrastructure where necessary to meet these goals. Second, instruments and frameworks must be subject to strong, inclusive governance

Generalized invariant variational problems

In Lankford, B. A.; Mahoo, H. F. (Eds.). Proceedings of East Africa Integrated River Basin Management Conference, Sokoine University of Agriculture, Morogoro, Tanzania, 7 ? 9 March 2005. Theme five: water economics and livelihoods. Morogoro, Tanzania: Soil-Water Management Research Group, Sokoine University of AgricultureThe need to achieve efficient, equitable and sustainable use of water resources to meet water demands of different sectors is pressing, particularly in areas where water resources are dwindling. Along with this is the quest for a good understanding of the value of water in its different uses. Using the Change in Net Income method, this paper presents an assessment of the value of water in irrigated paddy and hydroelectric power (HEP) generation in the Great Ruaha (GR) Catchment in Tanzania. The average values of water for irrigated paddy were estimated at $0.01 and 0.04 per m3 for abstracted and consumed water respectively. For HEP, the values were relatively higher ($ 0.06-0.21 per m3 for gross and consumed water respectively). Yet irrigated paddy also contributes much: it supports the livelihoods of about 30,000 agrarian families in Usangu with average annual gross income of about US $ 911.90 per annum per family and the GR paddy contributes about 14-24% to national paddy production. Understanding these benefits is key to fostering informed debate on water management and allocation, identifying the base for making ?agreeable? trade-offs, the potential for improvement, and creating linkages with water allocation options

Complementarity of a Low Energy Photon Collider and LHC Physics

We discuss the complementarity between the LHC and a low energy photon collider. We mostly consider the scenario, where the first linear collider is a photon collider based on dual beam technology like CLIC.Comment: 29 pages, 37 figure, LP-200

Using a System Identification Approach to Investigate Subtask Control during Human Locomotion

Partial funding for Open Access provided by the UMD Libraries' Open Access Publishing Fund.Here we apply a control theoretic view of movement to the behavior of human locomotion with the goal of using perturbations to learn about subtask control. Controlling one’s speed and maintaining upright posture are two critical subtasks, or underlying functions, of human locomotion. How the nervous system simultaneously controls these two subtasks was investigated in this study. Continuous visual and mechanical perturbations were applied concurrently to subjects (n=20) as probes to investigate these two subtasks during treadmill walking. Novel application of harmonic transfer function (HTF) analysis to human motor behavior was used, and these HTFs were converted to the time-domain based representation of phase-dependent impulse response functions (_IRFs). These _IRFs were used to identify the mapping from perturbation inputs to kinematic and electromyographic (EMG) outputs throughout the phases of the gait cycle. Mechanical perturbations caused an initial, passive change in trunk orientation and, at some phases of stimulus presentation, a corrective trunk EMG and orientation response. Visual perturbations elicited a trunk EMG response prior to a trunk orientation response, which was subsequently followed by an anterior-posterior displacement response. This finding supports the notion that there is a temporal hierarchy of functional subtasks during locomotion in which the control of upper-body posture precedes other subtasks. Moreover, the novel analysis we apply has the potential to probe a broad range of rhythmic behaviors to better understand their neural control

Integrative genomic analysis of CREB defines a critical role for transcription factor networks in mediating the fed/fasted switch in liver

BACKGROUND: Metabolic homeostasis in mammals critically depends on the regulation of fasting-induced genes by CREB in the liver. Previous genome-wide analysis has shown that only a small percentage of CREB target genes are induced in response to fasting-associated signaling pathways. The precise molecular mechanisms by which CREB specifically targets these genes in response to alternating hormonal cues remain to be elucidated. RESULTS: We performed chromatin immunoprecipitation coupled to high-throughput sequencing of CREB in livers from both fasted and re-fed mice. In order to quantitatively compare the extent of CREB-DNA interactions genome-wide between these two physiological conditions we developed a novel, robust analysis method, termed the ‘single sample independence’ (SSI) test that greatly reduced the number of false-positive peaks. We found that CREB remains constitutively bound to its target genes in the liver regardless of the metabolic state. Integration of the CREB cistrome with expression microarrays of fasted and re-fed mouse livers and ChIP-seq data for additional transcription factors revealed that the gene expression switches between the two metabolic states are associated with co-localization of additional transcription factors at CREB sites. CONCLUSIONS: Our results support a model in which CREB is constitutively bound to thousands of target genes, and combinatorial interactions between DNA-binding factors are necessary to achieve the specific transcriptional response of the liver to fasting. Furthermore, our genome-wide analysis identifies thousands of novel CREB target genes in liver, and suggests a previously unknown role for CREB in regulating ER stress genes in response to nutrient influx

Identification and Characterization of the Unique N-Linked Glycan Common to the Flagellins and S-layer Glycoprotein of Methanococcus voltae*

The flagellum of Methanococcus voltae is composed of four structural flagellin proteins FlaA, FlaB1, FlaB2, and FlaB3. These proteins possess a total of 15 potential N-linked sequons (NX(S/T)) and show a mass shift on an SDS-polyacrylamide gel indicating significant post-translational modification. We describe here the structural characterization of the flagellin glycan from M. voltae using mass spectrometry to examine the proteolytic digests of the flagellin proteins in combination with NMR analysis of the purified glycan using a sensitive, cryogenically cooled probe. Nano-liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry analysis of the proteolytic digests of the flagellin proteins revealed that they are post-translationally modified with a novel N-linked trisaccharide of mass 779 Da that is composed of three sugar residues with masses of 318, 258, and 203 Da, respectively. In every instance the glycan is attached to the peptide through the asparagine residue of a typical N-linked sequon. The glycan modification has been observed on 14 of the 15 sequon sites present on the four flagellin structural proteins. The novel glycan structure elucidated by NMR analysis was shown to be a trisaccharide composed of beta-ManpNAcA6Thr-(1-4)-beta-Glc-pNAc3NAcA-(1-3)-beta-GlcpNAc linked to Asn. In addition, the same trisaccharide was identified on a tryptic peptide of the S-layer protein from this organism implicating a common N-linked glycosylation pathway