Transferring Juveniles To The Adult Court: A Factorial Survey Of Florida Prosecutors

Prosecutors have enormous discretion in the criminal justice system. Their decisions can ultimately impact and shape the course of the lives of the offenders whom they prosecute. This is certainly true for juvenile offenders considered for transfer to the adult court. Previous research indicates that serious, violent offenders are the most likely to be transferred to the adult court. However, very little is known on prosecutors\u27 views of the role of the juvenile court, the process of transfer or the facts that influence their decision to transfer a juvenile to the adult court. A statewide survey of 800 Florida prosecutors was implemented using factorial vignettes. The results indicate that prosecutors support the idea of transfer generally, particularly when they are making the final determination to transfer to the adult court. Further, prosecutors indicate that juvenile transfer should be used sparingly, in extreme cases that are not appropriate to the resources of the juvenile court. The data were also examined to determine the effect of juvenile offender and juvenile offense characteristics on the decision to transfer a juvenile to the adult court. Analysis revealed several significant predictors of preference for transfer: age, threat to society, presence of a violent offense, ethnicity of juvenile, presence of prior adjudications, and amenability to treatment

POTENTIAL PITFALLS IN RENEWABLE RESOURCE DECISION MAKING THAT UTILIZES CONVEX COMBINATIONS OF DISCRETE ALTERNATIVES

Decision makers in renewable resource planning are often unable to specify their objective function a priori, and are presented with a discrete set of alternatives reflecting a range of options that are actually much more continuous. It is common for the decision maker to be interested in some other alternative than those originally developed. An iterative process thus often takes place between decision maker an analyst as they search for a satisfactory alternative. This paper analyzes the economic tenability of simply interpolating (taking convex combinations of) initial alternatives to generate new alternatives in this process. It is shown that convex combinations of outputs will be producible (feasible) with the interpolated input levels, under very common conditions. In fact, the cost estimate resulting from interpolating the cost of two (or more) alternatives will generally be an overestimate. The magnitude of this overestimate is investigated in a test case. It is concluded that this cost overestimate can be rather large, and is not systematically predictable. Only when the output sets in the original alternatives are very similar are the interpolated cost estimates fairly accurate.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Future demand for long-term care, 2002 to 2041: projections of demand for long-term care for older people in England

The financing of long-term care raises a great many questions. How many older people are likely to require long-term care services in the coming decades? How much are these services likely to cost? Will the cost to public funds prove affordable? Who should pay? How should costs be divided between public expenditure and private sources of finance? In order to address these issues, reliable projections are needed of future demand for long-term care and future long-term care expenditure. This paper presents projections of demand for long-term care for older people in England to 2041 and associated future expenditure. The projections were produced using an updated and expanded version of the Personal Social Services Research Unit’s (PSSRU) long-term care projections model. The version of the model used here has a base year of 2002 and incorporates the 2004-based official population projections. The first part of the paper describes the PSSRU long-term care finance research programme and recent associated projects. The second part of the paper describes the updated and expanded PSSRU long-term care projections model, including details of the data used in this updated version. The third part presents a set of base case assumptions and the projections obtained using those assumptions. The fourth part investigates the sensitivity of the projections to changes in those assumptions. Section five discusses the findings. A final section sets out some conclusions

Enhancing learning outcomes from industry engagement in Australian engineering education

Industry engagement, commonly implemented as a 12 week industry placement during a vacation towards the end of the degree, has traditionally been a provider-mandated component of externally accredited professional engineering degrees in Australia. Such placements are intended to bridge knowledge and capability gaps between academic study and engineering employment and contextualise the final phase of academic study. Changes in the composition of Australia’s engineering industries have made it progressively harder to source such placements. In-curriculum exposure to engineering practice has also been expected, but has been delivered with considerable variability. In 2014 the authors completed a national project, led by the Australian Council of Engineering Deans (ACED), with peak industry bodies and several partner universities, funded from the Commonwealth Department of Industry Workplace Innovation Program, to explore how improving industry engagement could contribute further to engineering graduates’ learning outcomes and employability. The data collected from the engineering students and employers, reported in this paper, can now be regarded as baseline data on industry engagement, against which subsequent developments can be referenced. For the first time, students’ ratings of the value of different methods for industry engagement are shown to be related to their ‘authenticity’. Several industry-inspired in-curriculum interventions were also trialled at partner universities. Guidelines for good practice were developed from melding the experiential findings with theoretical perspectives. In the years since completing the project, the accreditation body, Engineers Australia, has updated and intensified its focus on engagement with practice (including changing its language from ‘exposure’ to ‘engagement’), and many engineering faculties have significantly enhanced their models and requirements for work integrated learning and industry engagement. This paper outlines these changes and examples of new implementations, including virtual and electronically-mediated methods that also reflect ongoing changes in engineering industry practice.  &nbsp

Vampires, Slashers, Or Zombies: Opening Weekends Favorite Box Office Monster

This paper examines the determinants of opening weekend box office revenue of movies from the horror genre.  The sample consists of 225 films released during 1978-2010.  Regression results indicate the primary determinants of opening weekend box office revenue for horror movies are number of theatres showing the movie during the opening weekend of release, holiday release, critical rating, sequels, restricted rating, production budget, and theme.  Specific results include the observation that within the horror movie genre, the vampire and slasher themes add approximately four to eleven million dollars to opening weekend box office revenue, while the comedic theme stalls at the box office with earnings totaling as much as four million dollars less than other movies in the genre.  Nudity and the zombie theme are not statistically significant determinants

To Preserve the Mountains and the Community: Indigenous Ecotourism as a Sustainable Development Strategy

This research explores the role of community control, various community characteristics, and inter-community coalitions in facilitating the viability of ecotourism projects. The goal is to generate a model that can guide future research efforts about ecotourism projects in Indigenous communities. Results from two communities in Oaxaca, Mexico show that in addition to community control, factors increasing accessibility (infrastructure), visibility (public relations) and connectivity (collaboration with other organizations) are important for project success. Community controlled ecotourism may have a positive impact on the community itself, including resource development, decreased migration, and control over cultural and environmental exploitation

Hippocampal Volume and Auditory Attention on a Verbal Memory Task with Adult Survivors of Pediatric Brain Tumor

Objective: We examined the nature of verbal memory deficits and the possible hippocampal underpinnings in long-term adult survivors of childhood brain tumor. Method: 35 survivors (M=24.10±4.93 years at testing; 54% female), on average 15 years post-diagnosis, and 59 typically developing adults (M=22.40±4.35 years, 54% female) participated. Automated FMRIB Software Library (FSL) tools were used to measure hippocampal, putamen, and whole brain volumes. The California Verbal Learning Test – Second Edition (CVLT-II) was used to assess verbal memory. Results: Hippocampal (F(1,91)=4.06, ηp2=.04), putamen (F(1,91)=11.18, ηp2=.11), and whole brain (F(1,92)=18.51, ηp2=.17) volumes were significantly lower for survivors than controls (pr=.62, pr=.09; r=.08), for survivors and controls. Verbal memory indices of auditory attention list span (Trial 1) (F (1,92)=12.70, η2=.12) and final list learning (Trial 5) (F (1,92)=6.01, η2=.06) were significantly lower for survivors (pr=.43, p=.01) with auditory attention, but none of the other CVLT-II indices. Secondary analyses for the effect of treatment factors are presented. Conclusion: Volumetric differences between survivors and controls exist for the whole brain and for subcortical structures on average 15 years post-diagnosis. Treatment factors seem to have a unique effect on subcortical structures. Memory differences between survivors and controls are largely contingent upon auditory attention list span. Only hippocampal volume is associated with the auditory attention list span component of verbal memory. These findings are particularly robust for survivors treated with radiation