Children Sentenced to Die in Prison: Why a Lifetime Behind Bars is No Longer Justified for Juvenile Offenders

Brett Jones turned fifteen years old the summer before he was set to start high school. Twenty-three days later, he was arrested and charged as an adult. Now, he will spend the rest of his life behind bars. In the United States, a fifteen-year-old child cannot legally vote, drink alcohol, or – in most states – drive a car without adult supervision. That same fifteen-year-old, however, who is not considered responsible enough to buy a ticket to an R-rated movie, may be sentenced to life in prison without the opportunity for parole (“LWOP”). Not only is the United States the only nation which permits LWOP sentences for fifteen-year-olds, but the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Brett Jones’s case makes it clear that a sentencing judge does not even need to find that juveniles like Jones are “irreparably corrupt” or incapable of reform before imposing the harshest sentence available

Upper bound on the characters of the symmetric groups for balanced Young diagrams and a generalized Frobenius formula

We study asymptotics of an irreducible representation of the symmetric group Sn corresponding to a balanced Young diagram λ (a Young diagram with at most View the MathML source rows and columns for some fixed constant C) in the limit as n tends to infinity

Testing Enabling Technologies for Safe UAS Urban Operations

A set of more than 100 flight operations were conducted at NASA Langley Research Center using small UAS (sUAS) to demonstrate, test, and evaluate a set of technologies and an overarching air-ground system concept aimed at enabling safety. The research vehicle was tracked continuously during nominal traversal of planned flight paths while autonomously operating over moderately populated land. For selected flights, off-nominal risks were introduced, including vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) encounters. Three contingency maneuvers were demonstrated that provide safe responses. These maneuvers made use of an integrated air/ground platform and two on-board autonomous capabilities. Flight data was monitored and recorded with multiple ground systems and was forwarded in real time to a UAS traffic management (UTM) server for airspace coordination and supervision

On the universal structure of human lexical semantics

How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition. Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides direct access to the underlying conceptual structure, but meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize. Here we provide an empirical measure of semantic proximity between concepts using cross-linguistic dictionaries. Across languages carefully selected from a phylogenetically and geographically stratified sample of genera, translations of words reveal cases where a particular language uses a single polysemous word to express concepts represented by distinct words in another. We use the frequency of polysemies linking two concepts as a measure of their semantic proximity, and represent the pattern of such linkages by a weighted network. This network is highly uneven and fragmented: certain concepts are far more prone to polysemy than others, and there emerge naturally interpretable clusters loosely connected to each other. Statistical analysis shows such structural properties are consistent across different language groups, largely independent of geography, environment, and literacy. It is therefore possible to conclude the conceptual structure connecting basic vocabulary studied is primarily due to universal features of human cognition and language use.Comment: Press embargo in place until publicatio

Systematic scoping review of frameworks used to develop rehabilitation interventions for older adults

Objectives: Rehabilitation interventions for older adults are complex as they involve a number of interacting components, have multiple outcomes of interest and are influenced by a number of contextual factors. The importance of rigorous intervention development prior to formal evaluation has been acknowledged and a number of frameworks have been developed. This review explored which frameworks have been used to guide the development of rehabilitation interventions for older adults.Design: Systematic scoping review.Setting: Studies were not limited for inclusion based on setting.Participants: Studies were included that featured older adults (>65 years of age).Interventions: Studies were included that reported the development of a rehabilitation intervention.Primary and secondary outcome measures: Data was extracted on study population, setting, type of intervention developed and frameworks used. The primary outcome of interest was the type of intervention development framework.Results: Thirty-five studies were included. There was a range of underlying medical conditions including mild cognitive impairment and dementia (n=5), cardiac (n=4), stroke (n=3), falls (n=3), hip fracture (n=2), diabetes (n=2), breast cancer (n=1), Parkinson’s disease (n=1), depression (n=1), chronic health problems (n=1), osteoarthritis (n=1), leg ulcer (n=1), neck pain (n=1) and foot problems (n=1). The intervention types being developed included multicomponent, support-based, cognitive, physical activities, nursing-led, falls prevention and occupational therapy-led. Twelve studies (34%) did not report using a framework. Five frameworks were reported with the Medical Research Council (MRC) Framework for Developing and Evaluating Complex Interventions being the most frequently cited(77%, n=17).Conclusion: At present the MRC Framework is the most popular for developing rehabilitation interventions for older adults. Many studies do not report using a framework. Further, specific guidance to assist this complex field of rehabilitation research is required