The New Era of Administrative Regularization: Controlling Prosecutorial Discretion through the Administrative Procedure Act

Beginning in 1969, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia began developing and installing, with the help of management consultants, a computerized record keeping process that came to be known as the Prosecutor\u27s Management Information System, or PROMIS. I Unlike other federal prosecutors, the U. S. Attorney in the District of Columbia is responsible for prosecuting felonies under local law and shares many of the problems of court backlog and scarcity of resources familiar to local prosecutors in other large cities. PROMIS is a computer data bank in which six kinds of information are collected and correlated with each other for every criminal case litigated by the U. S. Attorney\u27s office. The computer will report information about the defendant (such as aliases, prior arrests and convictions, age, race, sex, and employment status), the crime (such as the amount of violence and property damage, the number of persons accused of working with the defendant, and the date and place of the incident), the arrest (such as the type of arrest and the names of the arresting officers), the offense or offenses charged (such as the charges at arrest, the charges actually placed after initial screening by a prosecutor, and the reasons for any changes), the witnesses (such as name, address, evidentiary value, and assessment of whether there will be problems getting a given witness to testify), and the court history of the case (such as the date and substance of every court event from arraignment to sentencing, the cause of each event, and the names of the prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge involved at each stage). Information about the defendant and the offense of which he is accused is computed through formulae that produce a case priority rating which allows the office to single out certain cases for special attention and provides the basis for detailed supervision, through guidelines, of each Assistant U. S. Attorney\u27s discretion. While PROMIS was being developed, and in conjunction with it, the U. S. Attorney\u27s office put many of its guidelines in the form of a Papering and Screening Manual for its Superior Court Division and Guidelines for First Offender Treatment. Neither the existence nor the contents of these documents was disclosed to the public

Legislation\u27s Culture

American statutes can seem like labyrinthine mazes when compared to some countries’ legislation. French codes are admired for their intellectual elegance and clarity. Novelists and poets (Stendhal, Valéry) have considered the Code civil to be literature. Swedish legislation might be based on empirical research into problems the legislation is intended to remedy, and the drafting style, though modern today, is descended from an oral tradition of poetic narrative. Comparing these legislative cultures with our own reveals that the main problem with American legislation is not too many words. It is too many ideas — a high ratio of concepts per legislative goal. When American, French, and Swedish legislatures address similar problems, the French and Swedes draft using far fewer concepts than Americans do. In both countries, simple solutions are preferred over convoluted ones. The drafters of the Code civil thought the highest intellectual and legislative accomplishment to be simplicity. The Swedes got to approximately the same place through a cultural value that law be understandable to the public. Where the American legislative process can seem chaotic, there has been some respect for Cartesian rationality in France and for empirical evidence in Sweden. Even if American statutes were to be translated into ordinary English, they would still be labyrinths because our legislatures insist on addressing every conceivable detail that legislators can imagine. The result is excessively conceptualized legislation, imposing large numbers of duties. Statutory concepts cost money. They create issues, which must be decided by publicly funded courts and agencies with additional costs to the parties involved. Every unnecessary statutory concept wastes social and economic resources. And to the extent law seems incomprehensible to the public, it loses moral authority

Tree seedling shade tolerance arises from interactions with microbes and is mediated by functional traits

Shade tolerance is a central concept in forest ecology and strongly influences forest community dynamics. However, the plant traits and conditions conferring shade tolerance are yet to be resolved. We propose that shade tolerance is shaped not only by responses to light but also by a species’ defense and recovery functional traits, soil microbial communities, and interactions of these factors with light availability. We conducted a greenhouse experiment for three temperate species in the genus Acer that vary in shade tolerance. We grew newly germinated seedlings in two light levels (2% and 30% sun) and controlled additions of microbial filtrates using a wet-sieving technique. Microbial filtrate treatments included: <20 µm, likely dominated by pathogenic microbes; 40-250 µm, containing arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF); combination, including both filtrate sizes; and sterilized combination. We monitored survival for nine weeks and measured fine root AMF colonization, hypocotyl phenolics, stem lignin, and stem+root nonstructural carbohydrates (NSC) at three-week intervals. We found that differences in seedling survival between low and high light only occurred when microbes were present. AMF colonization, phenolics, and NSC generally increased with light. Phenolics were greater with <20 µm microbial filtrate, suggesting that soil-borne pathogens may induce phenolic production; and NSC was greater with 40-250 µm filtrate, suggesting that mycorrhizal fungi may induce NSC production. Across species, microbe treatments, and light availability, survival increased as phenolics and NSC increased. Therefore, shade tolerance may be explained by interactions among soil-borne microbes, seedling traits, and light availability, providing a more mechanistic and trait-based explanation of shade tolerance and thus forest community dynamics

Publishing and sharing multi-dimensional image data with OMERO

Imaging data are used in the life and biomedical sciences to measure the molecular and structural composition and dynamics of cells, tissues, and organisms. Datasets range in size from megabytes to terabytes and usually contain a combination of binary pixel data and metadata that describe the acquisition process and any derived results. The OMERO image data management platform allows users to securely share image datasets according to specific permissions levels: data can be held privately, shared with a set of colleagues, or made available via a public URL. Users control access by assigning data to specific Groups with defined membership and access rights. OMERO’s Permission system supports simple data sharing in a lab, collaborative data analysis, and even teaching environments. OMERO software is open source and released by the OME Consortium at www.openmicroscopy.org

The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods

A recent workshop entitled The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods was held in Paris in December 2010, sponsored by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and by the journal Human Biology. This workshop was intended to foster a debate on questions related to the family names and to compare different multidisciplinary approaches involving geneticists, historians, geographers, sociologists and social anthropologists. This collective paper presents a collection of selected communications

Is High Blood Pressure Self-Protection for the Brain?

Rationale: Data from animal models of hypertension indicate that high blood pressure may develop as a vital mechanism to maintain adequate blood flow to the brain. We propose that congenital vascular abnormalities of the posterior cerebral circulation and cerebral hypoperfusion could partially explain the etiology of essential hypertension, which remains enigmatic in 95% of patients. Objective: To evaluate the role of the cerebral circulation in the pathophysiology of hypertension. Methods and Results: We completed a series of retrospective and mechanistic case-control magnetic resonance imaging and physiological studies, in normotensive and hypertensive humans (n=259). Interestingly, in humans with hypertension, we report a higher prevalence of congenital cerebrovascular variants; vertebral artery hypoplasia and an incomplete posterior circle of Willis, which were coupled with increased cerebral vascular resistance, reduced cerebral blood flow and a higher incidence of lacunar type infarcts. Causally, cerebral vascular resistance was elevated before the onset of hypertension and elevated sympathetic nerve activity (n=126). Interestingly, untreated hypertensive patients (n=20) had a cerebral blood flow similar to age-matched controls (n=28). However, participants receiving anti-hypertensive therapy (with blood pressure controlled below target levels) had reduced cerebral perfusion (n=19). Finally, elevated cerebral vascular resistance was a predictor of hypertension suggesting it may be a novel prognostic and/or diagnostic marker (n=126). < Conclusions: Our data indicate that congenital cerebrovascular variants in the posterior circulation and the associated cerebral hypoperfusion may be a factor in triggering hypertension. Therefore lowering blood pressure may worsen cerebral perfusion in susceptible individuals

Landscape science: a Russian geographical tradition

The Russian geographical tradition of landscape science (landshaftovedenie) is analyzed with particular reference to its initiator, Lev Semenovich Berg (1876-1950). The differences between prevailing Russian and Western concepts of landscape in geography are discussed, and their common origins in German geographical thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are delineated. It is argued that the principal differences are accounted for by a number of factors, of which Russia's own distinctive tradition in environmental science deriving from the work of V. V. Dokuchaev (1846-1903), the activities of certain key individuals (such as Berg and C. O. Sauer), and the very different social and political circumstances in different parts of the world appear to be the most significant. At the same time it is noted that neither in Russia nor in the West have geographers succeeded in specifying an agreed and unproblematic understanding of landscape, or more broadly in promoting a common geographical conception of human-environment relationships. In light of such uncertainties, the latter part of the article argues for closer international links between the variant landscape traditions in geography as an important contribution to the quest for sustainability