Capital and Punishment: Resource Scarcity Increases Endorsement of the Death Penalty

Faced with punishing severe offenders, why do some prefer imprisonment whereas others impose death? Previous research exploring death penalty attitudes has primarily focused on individual and cultural factors. Adopting a functional perspective, we propose that environmental features may also shape our punishment strategies. Individuals are attuned to the availability of resources within their environments. Due to heightened concerns with the costliness of repeated offending, we hypothesize that individuals tend toward elimination-focused punishments during times of perceived scarcity. Using global and United States data sets (studies 1 and 2), we find that indicators of resource scarcity predict the presence of capital punishment. In two experiments (studies 3 and 4), we find that activating concerns about scarcity causes people to increase their endorsement for capital punishment, and this effect is statistically mediated by a reduced willingness to risk repeated offenses. Perceived resource scarcity shapes our punishment preferences, with important policy implications

Discussion on the Paper by Neumann, Evett and Skerrett

Neumann, Evett, and Skerrett have made a major contribution to the art and science of fingerprint identification. This is an important—perhaps historic—step forward in the intellectual history of fingerprint identification and perhaps other fields of pattern matching forensic science. Their work deals ingeniously with the elusive problem of placing forensic identification on an empirically sound, quantitative foundation

Discussion on the Paper by Neumann, Evett and Skerrett

Neumann, Evett, and Skerrett have made a major contribution to the art and science of fingerprint identification. This is an important—perhaps historic—step forward in the intellectual history of fingerprint identification and perhaps other fields of pattern matching forensic science. Their work deals ingeniously with the elusive problem of placing forensic identification on an empirically sound, quantitative foundation

Effects of ionizing radiation on charge-coupled imagers

The effects of ionizing radiation on three different charge coupled imagers have been investigated. Device performance was evaluated as a function of total gamma ray dose. The principal failure mechanisms have been identified for each particular device structure. The clock and bias voltages required for high total dose operation of the devices are presented

Histological Chages of Testis and Caput Epididymis in the Goat after Cannulation of the Rete Testis

雄ヤギ5頭を用い, 精巣網カテーテル装着手術後の精巣および精巣上体頭の組織構造を観察するとともに精巣静脈血中のテストステロン濃度を調べた。カテーテル装着手術後の精巣は, いずれも萎縮し, 正常な精子形成過程が観察される精細管は少なかった。また, ライディヒ細胞の形態や染色性には異常は認められなかった。一方, 精巣上体頭では, 精巣上体管が萎縮し, 主細胞の高さは無傷のものよりも有意に減少した。同様の組織構造の変化は, 精巣輸出管を切除した場合の精巣および精巣上体頭でも認められた。精巣静脈血中のテストステロン濃度は無傷の場合94.4ng/mlであり, カテーテル装着手術後では86.5∿342.8ng/mlであった。 / The testis and caput epididymis of the goat after cannulation of the rete testis or efferentiectomy were examined histologically. The concentration of testosterone in testicular venous blood collected from the same animals was also measured by radioimmunoassay. After cannulation, seminiferous tubules showed a sign of degeneration, although no morphological change of Leydig cells was observed. Epididymal ducts were severely atrophied and the height of principal epithelial cells was significantly decreased. A similar damage was observed in the testis and epididymis after efferentiectomy. When the efferent duct bundle had been incompletely ligated at cannulation, or rete testis catheter was kept in place until sampling time, damages in the testis were less severe. And in the former case the epididymis was impaired less severely. The concentration of testosterone in testicular venous blood collected from an intact animal was 94.4ng/ml, while that obtained after cannulation was 86.5-342.8ng/ml. These results suggest that degeneration of germ cells in seminiferous tubules observed after cannulation of the rete testis or efferentiectomy may be caused by stagnation of rete testicular fluid in the tubules, and that testosterone in the fluid plays important roles in the maintenance of morphology and function of the principal cells in the caput epididymis

Pseudorandomness for Regular Branching Programs via Fourier Analysis

We present an explicit pseudorandom generator for oblivious, read-once, permutation branching programs of constant width that can read their input bits in any order. The seed length is $O(\log^2 n)$, where $n$ is the length of the branching program. The previous best seed length known for this model was $n^{1/2+o(1)}$, which follows as a special case of a generator due to Impagliazzo, Meka, and Zuckerman (FOCS 2012) (which gives a seed length of $s^{1/2+o(1)}$ for arbitrary branching programs of size $s$). Our techniques also give seed length $n^{1/2+o(1)}$ for general oblivious, read-once branching programs of width $2^{n^{o(1)}}$, which is incomparable to the results of Impagliazzo et al.Our pseudorandom generator is similar to the one used by Gopalan et al. (FOCS 2012) for read-once CNFs, but the analysis is quite different; ours is based on Fourier analysis of branching programs. In particular, we show that an oblivious, read-once, regular branching program of width $w$ has Fourier mass at most $(2w^2)^k$ at level $k$, independent of the length of the program.Comment: RANDOM 201

Phase space quantization and Loop Quantum Cosmology: A Wigner function for the Bohr-compactified real line

We give a definition for the Wigner function for quantum mechanics on the Bohr compactification of the real line and prove a number of simple consequences of this definition. We then discuss how this formalism can be applied to loop quantum cosmology. As an example, we use the Wigner function to give a new quantization of an important building block of the Hamiltonian constraint.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figure

Extension of Yeast Chronological Lifespan by Methylamine

Background: Chronological aging of yeast cells is commonly used as a model for aging of human post-mitotic cells. The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae grown on glucose in the presence of ammonium sulphate is mainly used in yeast aging research. We have analyzed chronological aging of the yeast Hansenula polymorpha grown at conditions that require primary peroxisome metabolism for growth. Methodology/Principal Findings: The chronological lifespan of H. polymorpha is strongly enhanced when cells are grown on methanol or ethanol, metabolized by peroxisome enzymes, relative to growth on glucose that does not require peroxisomes. The short lifespan of H. polymorpha on glucose is mainly due to medium acidification, whereas most likely ROS do not play an important role. Growth of cells on methanol/methylamine instead of methanol/ammonium sulphate resulted in further lifespan enhancement. This was unrelated to medium acidification. We show that oxidation of methylamine by peroxisomal amine oxidase at carbon starvation conditions is responsible for lifespan extension. The methylamine oxidation product formaldehyde is further oxidized resulting in NADH generation, which contributes to increased ATP generation and reduction of ROS levels in the stationary phase. Conclusion/Significance: We conclude that primary peroxisome metabolism enhanced chronological lifespan of H. polymorpha. Moreover, the possibility to generate NADH at carbon starvation conditions by an organic nitrogen source supports further extension of the lifespan of the cell. Consequently, the interpretation of CLS analyses in yeast should include possible effects on the energy status of the cell.

Isolated oxygen defects in 3C- and 4H-SiC: A theoretical study

Ab initio calculations in the local-density approximation have been carried out in SiC to determine the possible configurations of the isolated oxygen impurity. Equilibrium geometry and occupation levels were calculated. Substitutional oxygen in 3C-SiC is a relatively shallow effective mass like double donor on the carbon site (O-C) and a hyperdeep double donor on the Si site (O-Si). In 4H-SiC O-C is still a double donor but with a more localized electron state. In 3C-SiC O-C is substantially more stable under any condition than O-Si or interstitial oxygen (O-i). In 4H-SiC O-C is also the most stable one except for heavy n-type doping. We propose that O-C is at the core of the electrically active oxygen-related defect family found by deep level transient spectroscopy in 4H-SiC. The consequences of the site preference of oxygen on the SiC/SiO2 interface are discussed