A More Inclusive Democracy: Challenging Felon Jury Exclusion in New York

New York excludes all individuals who have ever been convicted of a felony from its jury pool except in the most extraordinary circumstances.This practice undermines the representativeness of juries, their inclusiveness, as well as public confidence in the courts. It leaves whole communities underrepresented in one of the foundations of democracy. It also compromises an individual’s constitutional rights. People with felony conviction histories are included in the jury pools of nearly half of United States jurisdictions, yet the effectiveness of judicial systems in those jurisdictions has not been compromised. The mechanisms for insuring that juries are competent and unbiased—voir dire, peremptory challenges and challenges for cause—all work in those jurisdictions without alienating a segment of the population from the mechanisms of civic participation. The citizens of New York deserve no less

From Open Data to Open Space: Translating Public Information Into Collective Action

Regular New Yorkers with access to accurate information, in context, provided together with support from a small, nimble and experienced staff, can and do organize collectively to create tangible results and real change in their neighborhoods. Together, they inspire grassroots change well beyond the boundaries of neighborhood vacant lots

Stewarding the City as Commons: Parks Conservancies and Community Land Trusts

Urban land is one of the commons most in danger of enclosure in the present era. “Commons” emerge out of and are enacted through sustained patterns of local use, through collective actions that give life to and re-assign the roles of spaces, and through individual investments of time, love, and energy. Creating commons—or commoning—makes place out of space, while asserting the “right to not be excluded” from the use of that place. Commoners have a right to be part of the decision-making for the distribution of shared assets. Management of commons should be voluntary, adaptive, inclusive, and available to all. As Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione explain, “what the commons can do, both legally and conceptually, is to stake out the claim that at least some socially produced common goods are as essential to communities as are water and air and thus should be similarly protected.” Sheila Foster & Christian Iaione, The City as a Commons, 34 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev 281, 310 (2016). This paper considers efforts by Community Land Trusts (CLTs) to steward affordable housing and by conservancies to steward public parks over the long term as elements of the city as commons against the background of Elinor Ostrom’s “design principles” for the governance of common pool resources, focusing on New York City from the 1980s until today

Prevalence of ‘pouch failure’ of the ileoanal pouch in ulcerative colitis: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Background and aims The ileoanal pouch (IPAA) provides patients with ulcerative colitis (UC) that have not responded to medical therapy an option to retain bowel continuity and defecate without the need for a long-term stoma. Despite good functional outcomes, some pouches fail, requiring permanent diversion, pouchectomy, or a redo pouch. The incidence of pouch failure ranges between 2 and 15% in the literature. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis aiming to define the prevalence of pouch failure in patients with UC who have undergone IPAA using population-based studies. Methods We searched Embase, Embase classic and PubMed from 1978 to 31st of May 2021 to identify cross-sectional studies that reported the prevalence of pouch failure in adults (≥ 18 years of age) who underwent IPAA for UC. Results Twenty-six studies comprising 23,389 patients were analysed. With < 5 years of follow-up, the prevalence of pouch failure was 5% (95%CI 3–10%). With ≥ 5 but < 10 years of follow-up, the prevalence was 5% (95%CI 4–7%). This increased to 9% (95%CI 7–16%) with ≥ 10 years of follow-up. The overall prevalence of pouch failure was 6% (95%CI 5–8%). Conclusions The overall prevalence of pouch failure in patients over the age of 18 who have undergone restorative proctocolectomy in UC is 6%. These data are important for counselling patients considering this operation. Importantly, for those patients with UC being considered for a pouch, their disease course has often resulted in both physical and psychological morbidity and hence providing accurate expectations for these patients is vital

The Rhetorics of Health and Medicine: Inventional Possibilities for Scholarship and Engaged Practice

This essay argues that rhetoricians of health of medicine should continue to carve out an expansive focus on the exigencies, functions, and impacts of health-related discourse; attend to the movement, surrounding networks, and ecologies of this discourse; and work with other scholars/researchers, both inside and outside disciplinary rhetorical studies, toward a variety of goals

Transition amplitudes and sewing properties for bosons on the Riemann sphere

We consider scalar quantum fields on the sphere, both massive and massless. In the massive case we show that the correlation functions define amplitudes which are trace class operators between tensor products of a fixed Hilbert space. We also establish certain sewing properties between these operators. In the massless case we consider exponential fields and have a conformal field theory. In this case the amplitudes are only bilinear forms but still we establish sewing properties. Our results are obtained in a functional integral framework.Comment: 33 page

A Compact Microchip-Based Atomic Clock Based on Ultracold Trapped Rb Atoms

We propose a compact atomic clock based on ultracold Rb atoms that are magnetically trapped near the surface of an atom microchip. An interrogation scheme that combines electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) with Ramsey's method of separated oscillatory fields can achieve atomic shot-noise level performance of 10^{-13}/sqrt(tau) for 10^6 atoms. The EIT signal can be detected with a heterodyne technique that provides noiseless gain; with this technique the optical phase shift of a 100 pW probe beam can be detected at the photon shot-noise level. Numerical calculations of the density matrix equations are used to identify realistic operating parameters at which AC Stark shifts are eliminated. By considering fluctuations in these parameters, we estimate that AC Stark shifts can be canceled to a level better than 2*10^{-14}. An overview of the apparatus is presented with estimates of duty cycle and power consumption.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, 5 table

Singular operators on boson fields as forms on spaces of entire functions on Hilbert space

AbstractInvariant scales of entire analytic functions on Hilbert space are introduced and applied. Singular operators represented by sesquilinear forms on spaces of regular vectors are given explicit integral representations via kernels that are entire functions on the direct sum of the Hilbert space with its dual. The Weyl (or, exponentiated boson field) operators act smoothly and irreducibly on corresponding spaces of entire functions. Arbitrary symplectic operators on a single-particle Hilbert space are shown to be implementable on the corresponding boson field by appropriate generalized operators

Some Conceptual and Scaling Evaluations of Snowmelt Events Forced by Warm Soil

Snowfall occasionally occurs over bare soil with high thermal storage in its upper layer. Quantification and generalization of the potential impact of the thermal storage on episodic snowmelt is evaluated using a scaling approach and assuming negligible net thermal flux at the snow cover top. Soil thermal flux contribution to snowmelt is found to be affected significantly by the level of soil wetness. It is shown that, for a soil temperature of 10°C prior to the snowfall, the contribution of wet soil thermal flux is significant within the first 12 h when compared with intense surface moist enthalpy flux or solar radiation. Implications of these results to modeling of snowmelt using coupled soil–atmosphere models are elaborated