Reframing Human Trafficking: From a Criminal Justice Problem to a Social Justice Issue

Laws addressing human trafficking have been passed in all 50 U.S. states as well as at the federal level. Although laws serve an important function in establishing social norms against a behavior, they can also create a belief that it is the responsibility of law enforcement to curb that behavior. Law enforcement and other actors in the criminal justice system have a critical role to play in addressing the problem of human trafficking, but this is not a problem that they can solve alone. A multipronged strategy engaging the fields of public health, medicine, social work, and criminal justice as well as the general public would be more effective in successfully identifying and responding to instances of human trafficking. Implications of the misperception that human trafficking is a criminal justice issue are discussed

Open Knowledge Resources for Higher Education: Scholarly Publications, Course Materials, Academic Software

This paper will explain why electronic knowledge resources in academia cannot only be regarded as private commodities, but also as public goods. After sketching a concept of public goods for a postnational, global society, three types of electronic knowledge resources are distinguished: scholarly publications, course materials and academic software. With the help of practical examples, similarities between these resources are developed. Finally, it will be explained what advantages the status of public good for knowledge resources would have and how it could be achieved by the academic community

Bayesian Information Extraction Network

Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) offer an elegant way to integrate various aspects of language in one model. Many existing algorithms developed for learning and inference in DBNs are applicable to probabilistic language modeling. To demonstrate the potential of DBNs for natural language processing, we employ a DBN in an information extraction task. We show how to assemble wealth of emerging linguistic instruments for shallow parsing, syntactic and semantic tagging, morphological decomposition, named entity recognition etc. in order to incrementally build a robust information extraction system. Our method outperforms previously published results on an established benchmark domain.Comment: 6 page

Spin-flip reflection of electrons from a potential barrier in heterostructures

Spin-conserving and spin-flip opaque reflections of electrons from a potential barrier in heterostructures are described. An electric field of the barrier is considered to be the only source of energy spin splitting in the presence of spin-orbit interaction and its form is calculated in the three-level {\kp} model for a nontrival case of unbound electrons. Reflection angles and amplitudes are calculated for oblique incoming directions. It is shown that the system can serve as a source or filter of spin-polarized electron beams. Two unexpected possibilities are pointed out: a) non attenuated electron propagation in the barrier whose height exceeds the energies of incoming electrons, b) total reflection of electrons whose energies exceed barrier's height.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Resolving economic deadlock

In the introductory chapter a novel economic policy is proposed which consists of a) 'virtualizing' debt (putting it on the Central Bank balance sheet) and b) reduce the money-multiplier by an implementation of a strong minimum reserving policy. The main part shows exposes a flaw in the concept of capital in neoclassical thinking, with special reference to Tobin's q-theory. This has the implication that neoclassical thinking - Keynesian and 'classical' - overstates investment activity and the tendency to full employment. The last two chapters - on China and the Nazi-Recovery - are empirical illustrations.Keynesianism; deficit spending; public debt; capital theory; monetary theory and policy;