1,367 research outputs found
The Modern Irrationalities of American Criminal Codes: An Empirical Study of Offense Grading
The Model Penal Code made great advances in clarity and legality, moving most of the states from a mix of common law and ad hoc statutes to the modern American form of a comprehensive, succinct code that has served as a model around the world. Yet the decades since the wave of Model Code-based codifications have seen a steady degradation of American codes brought on by a relentless and accelerating rate of criminal law amendments that ignore the style, format, and content of the existing codes. The most damaging aspect of this trend is the exponentially increasing number of offense grading irrationalities found in most modern American codes. This Article documents the practical and prudential importance of getting offense grading right – that is, having the grade of each offense or suboffense reflect its relative seriousness in relation to all other offenses – then illustrates just how wrong things have gone, using a case study of offense grading in Pennsylvania, one of the better modern American codes. The critique of Pennsylvania, and its conclusions, does not rely upon the value judgments of the authors but rather upon an empirical study of the judgments of Pennsylvania residents regarding the relative seriousness of more than a hundred existing Pennsylvania offenses. The results suggest a startling conflict between the law\u27s grading judgments and those of the community it governs, as well as a variety of kinds of logical irrationalities and internal inconsistencies. The process by which these grading irrationalities have been and continue to be created is examined, and solutions for fixing and, perhaps, avoiding these problems in the future, are explored
Bounding the first exit from the basin : Independence times and finite-time basin stability
9 pages, 3 figuresPeer reviewedPublisher PD
Machine Learning Prediction of Critical Cooling Rate for Metallic Glasses From Expanded Datasets and Elemental Features
We use a random forest model to predict the critical cooling rate (RC) for
glass formation of various alloys from features of their constituent elements.
The random forest model was trained on a database that integrates multiple
sources of direct and indirect RC data for metallic glasses to expand the
directly measured RC database of less than 100 values to a training set of over
2,000 values. The model error on 5-fold cross validation is 0.66 orders of
magnitude in K/s. The error on leave out one group cross validation on alloy
system groups is 0.59 log units in K/s when the target alloy constituents
appear more than 500 times in training data. Using this model, we make
predictions for the set of compositions with melt-spun glasses in the database,
and for the full set of quaternary alloys that have constituents which appear
more than 500 times in training data. These predictions identify a number of
potential new bulk metallic glass (BMG) systems for future study, but the model
is most useful for identification of alloy systems likely to contain good glass
formers, rather than detailed discovery of bulk glass composition regions
within known glassy systems
Ibrutinib Unmasks Critical Role of Bruton Tyrosine Kinase in Primary CNS Lymphoma.
Bruton tyrosine kinase (BTK) links the B-cell antigen receptor (BCR) and Toll-like receptors with NF-κB. The role of BTK in primary central nervous system (CNS) lymphoma (PCNSL) is unknown. We performed a phase I clinical trial with ibrutinib, the first-in-class BTK inhibitor, for patients with relapsed or refractory CNS lymphoma. Clinical responses to ibrutinib occurred in 10 of 13 (77%) patients with PCNSL, including five complete responses. The only PCNSL with complete ibrutinib resistance harbored a mutation within the coiled-coil domain of CARD11, a known ibrutinib resistance mechanism. Incomplete tumor responses were associated with mutations in the B-cell antigen receptor-associated protein CD79B
Mechanisms explaining transitions between tonic and phasic firing in neuronal populations as predicted by a low dimensional firing rate model
Several firing patterns experimentally observed in neural populations have
been successfully correlated to animal behavior. Population bursting, hereby
regarded as a period of high firing rate followed by a period of quiescence, is
typically observed in groups of neurons during behavior. Biophysical
membrane-potential models of single cell bursting involve at least three
equations. Extending such models to study the collective behavior of neural
populations involves thousands of equations and can be very expensive
computationally. For this reason, low dimensional population models that
capture biophysical aspects of networks are needed.
\noindent The present paper uses a firing-rate model to study mechanisms that
trigger and stop transitions between tonic and phasic population firing. These
mechanisms are captured through a two-dimensional system, which can potentially
be extended to include interactions between different areas of the nervous
system with a small number of equations. The typical behavior of midbrain
dopaminergic neurons in the rodent is used as an example to illustrate and
interpret our results.
\noindent The model presented here can be used as a building block to study
interactions between networks of neurons. This theoretical approach may help
contextualize and understand the factors involved in regulating burst firing in
populations and how it may modulate distinct aspects of behavior.Comment: 25 pages (including references and appendices); 12 figures uploaded
as separate file
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