Quantifying Reasonable Doubt: A Proposed Solution to an Equal Protection Problem

In this article we present the case that the Reasonable Doubt standard is in urgent need of repair. Our research reveals that a previously-recognized phenomenon arising from vagueness of the standard is more consequential than thus far realized and creates a serious equal protection problem. We show that the only legally feasible solution to this problem is to quantify the definition of the standard. While others have examined quantified standards, we make a direct case for it and overcome previous objections to it by offering a way to make it practical and workable. The solution we envision will require new legislation – we show that the problem is unlikely to be corrected within the judicial branch. However, we also show that legal flexibility exists at the U.S. Supreme Court level to permit such a change, and furthermore that flexibility probably exists to prevent undue chaos in the system by allowing past verdicts to be “grandfathered.

Some behavioral and demographic characteristics of a bobwhite quail (Colinus virginianus) population

The study area was a 578-acre-tract within a quail management area on the Ames Plantation in West Tennessee. A total of 234 quail were trapped in 1971 and 410 quail were trapped in 1972. Seven quail (five unmated males and one mated pair) were radiotracked. Quail were very sedentary during the breeding season (99 percent moved less than 1/2 mile). The average home range area of unmated males during the breeding season was 17.0 acres. Quail showed little inclination to switch areas used from season to season. Little change occurred in range used from spring to summer (98 percent moved less than 1/2 mile), summer to fall (97 percent moved less than 1/2 mile), and breeding season to breeding season (100 percent moved less than 1/2 mile). Ninety-six percent of the observations of color-marked birds were within 1/2 mile of their marking point. Daily activity patterns suggest a minor morning activity peak of short duration and a major, more lengthy, afternoon activity peak. Unmated males, though, were responsive to the call of an unmated female at any time of the day. At least a limited amount of mate interchange occurred during the study. Population estimates derived from a Lincoln index and from trapping records suggest that approximately 700 quail (1.2 quail per acre) used the area early in the 1972 breeding season. A population estimate based on a count of whistling cocks yielded a lower estimate - suggesting that not all unmated males whistle on any given morning. The number of different males whistling and the total number of whistles heard were greater during the period of sunrise to 40 minutes after sunrise than they were during the period of 40 to 75 minutes after sunrise

Approximate calculations of the net economic impact of global warming mitigation targets under heightened damage estimates

Efforts to mitigate global warming are often justified through calculations of the economic damages that may occur absent mitigation. The earliest such damage estimates were speculative mathematical representations, but some more recent studies provide empirical estimates of damages on economic growth that accumulate over time and result in larger damages than those estimated previously. These heightened damage estimates have been used to suggest that limiting global warming this century to 1.5 °C avoids tens of trillions of 2010 US$in damage to gross world product relative to limiting global warming to 2.0 °C. However, in order to estimate the net effect on gross world product, mitigation costs associated with decarbonizing the world\u27s energy systems must be subtracted from the benefits of avoided damages. Here, we follow previous work to parameterize the aforementioned heightened damage estimates into a schematic global climate-economy model (DICE) so that they can be weighed against mainstream estimates of mitigation costs in a unified framework. We investigate the net effect of mitigation on gross world product through finite time horizons under a spectrum of exogenously defined levels of mitigation stringency. We find that even under heightened damage estimates, the additional mitigation costs of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C (relative to 2.0 °C) are higher than the additional avoided damages this century under most parameter combinations considered. Specifically, using our central parameter values, limiting global warming to 1.5 °C results in a net loss of gross world product of roughly forty trillion US$ relative to 2 °C and achieving either 1.5 °C or 2.0 °C require a net sacrifice of gross world product, relative to a no-mitigation case, though 2100 with a 3%/ year discount rate. However, the benefits of more stringent mitigation accumulate over time and our calculations indicate that stabilizing warming at 1.5 °C or 2.0 °C by 2100 would eventually confer net benefits of thousands of trillions of US$ in gross world product by 2300. The results emphasize the temporal asymmetry between the costs of mitigation and benefits of avoided damages from climate change and thus the long timeframe for which climate change mitigation investment pays off

Nanometer-scale GaAs clusters from organometallic precursors

We report the synthesis of crystalline nanometer-scale GaAs clusters by homogeneous vapor-phase nucleation from organometallic precursors. Cluster synthesis is performed in a hot wall organometallic vapor-phase epitaxy reactor at atmospheric pressure. High resolution transmission electron microscopy studies reveal that the aerosol produced is composed of highly faceted single crystal GaAs particles in the 10–20 nm range. The influence of growth temperature and reactant concentration on cluster morphology is discussed

Vapor phase synthesis of crystalline nanometer-scale GaAs clusters

We report the synthesis of crystalline nanometer-scale GaAs clusters in the 5-10 nm size regime. The clusters are formed by the homogeneous nucleation of a nonequilibrium vapor created by the explosive vaporization of a bulk GaAs sample in an inert atmosphere. High resolution electron microscopy and diffraction show that the clusters have zincblende crystal structure and are faceted. Optical measurements on the particles are suggestive of quantum confinement effects

Gloss Alignment Using Word Embeddings

Capturing and annotating Sign language datasets is a time consuming and costly process. Current datasets are orders of magnitude too small to successfully train unconstrained \acf{slt} models. As a result, research has turned to TV broadcast content as a source of large-scale training data, consisting of both the sign language interpreter and the associated audio subtitle. However, lack of sign language annotation limits the usability of this data and has led to the development of automatic annotation techniques such as sign spotting. These spottings are aligned to the video rather than the subtitle, which often results in a misalignment between the subtitle and spotted signs. In this paper we propose a method for aligning spottings with their corresponding subtitles using large spoken language models. Using a single modality means our method is computationally inexpensive and can be utilized in conjunction with existing alignment techniques. We quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the \acf{mdgs} and \acf{bobsl} datasets, recovering up to a 33.22 BLEU-1 score in word alignment.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Workshops (ICASSPW

Measurement of thin liquid film drainage using a novel high-speed impedance analyzer

This work describes the design and implementation of a new instrument, called the thin film impedance analyzer, which measures the rate of drainage of thin oil films. The instrument forms an oil film by elevating a planar oil–water interface into a water drop hanging from a stainless steel capillary tube immersed in the oil. The instrument measures the magnitude of the impedance of the matter between the capillary tube and a screen electrode immersed in the lower water phase. Under appropriate conditions, the capacitance of the oil film dominates the impedance. The instrument records the increase in the magnitude of the admittance associated with the draining and thinning of the oil film. The features of the drainage curves vary considerably with the type, amount, and location of surfactants in the oil and water phases, as well as with user-specified values of drop volume, drop equilibration time, and extent of drop compression. For this reason, the instrument has utility as a screening tool for selecting surfactants for emulsion formulations. Potential future uses include accelerated prediction of emulsion stability and extraction of oil–water interfacial rheological parameters