The Effect of School Quality on Residential Sales Price

This study seeks to find the extent to which various measures of public school quality are capitalized into house prices after the No Child Left Behind Act (2001). Individual residential sales in Cuyahoga County, Ohio for 2000 and 2005 are analyzed as to the effect of school quality using regression analysis with a spatial error model. Results show that while all school quality measures tested have some explanatory power, school district ratings and performance index, which are comprehensive measures of school quality, are the most appropriate measures and are readily capitalized into housing prices.

Religious Value Halos: The Effect of a Jewish Orthodox Campus on Residential Property Values

Ten years ago, there was a controversial expansion of an Orthodox Jewish religious campus in the suburb of a large Midwestern US city. This research takes a before and after approach to addressing the effects of this project on residential property values, especially within walking distance of the campus. Separate regression analyses have been run for 1997 and 2006, and the findings indicate that the campus has increased property values and prompted additional building permits. The findings show that the completion of the Jewish Orthodox campus increases residential property values between 17 percent and 20 percent within a quarter mile in the city where the facility is located.

Patient-Specific Method of Generating Parametric Maps of Patlak K(i) without Blood Sampling or Metabolite Correction: A Feasibility Study.

Currently, kinetic analyses using dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) experience very limited use despite their potential for improving quantitative accuracy in several clinical and research applications. For targeted volume applications, such as radiation treatment planning, treatment monitoring, and cerebral metabolic studies, the key to implementation of these methods is the determination of an arterial input function, which can include time-consuming analysis of blood samples for metabolite correction. Targeted kinetic applications would become practical for the clinic if blood sampling and metabolite correction could be avoided. To this end, we developed a novel method (Patlak-P) of generating parametric maps that is identical to Patlak K(i) (within a global scalar multiple) but does not require the determination of the arterial input function or metabolite correction. In this initial study, we show that Patlak-P (a) mimics Patlak K(i) images in terms of visual assessment and target-to-background (TB) ratios of regions of elevated uptake, (b) has higher visual contrast and (generally) better image quality than SUV, and (c) may have an important role in improving radiotherapy planning, therapy monitoring, and neurometabolism studies

No compromise between metabolism and behavior of decorator crabs in reduced pH conditions.

Many marine calcifiers experience metabolic costs when exposed to experimental ocean acidification conditions, potentially limiting the energy available to support regulatory processes and behaviors. Decorator crabs expend energy on decoration camouflage and may face acute trade-offs under environmental stress. We hypothesized that under reduced pH conditions, decorator crabs will be energy limited and allocate energy towards growth and calcification at the expense of decoration behavior. Decorator crabs, Pelia tumida, were exposed to ambient (8.01) and reduced (7.74) pH conditions for five weeks. Half of the animals in each treatment were given sponge to decorate with. Animals were analyzed for changes in body mass, exoskeleton mineral content (Ca and Mg), organic content (a proxy for metabolism), and decoration behavior (sponge mass and percent cover). Overall, decorator crabs showed no signs of energy limitation under reduced pH conditions. Exoskeleton mineral content, body mass, and organic content of crabs remained the same across pH and decoration treatments, with no effect of reduced pH on decoration behavior. Despite being a relatively inactive, osmoconforming species, Pelia tumida is able to maintain multiple regulatory processes and behavior when exposed to environmental pH stress, which underscores the complexity of responses within Crustacea to ocean acidification conditions

Self-tuning of threshold for a two-state system

A two-state system (TSS) under time-periodic perturbations (to be regarded as input signals) is studied in connection with self-tuning (ST) of threshold and stochastic resonance (SR). By ST, we observe the improvement of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in a weak noise region. Analytic approach to a tuning equation reveals that SNR improvement is possible also for a large noise region and this is demonstrated by Monte Carlo simulations of hopping processes in a TSS. ST and SR are discussed from a little more physical point of energy transfer (dissipation) rate, which behaves in a similar way as SNR. Finally ST is considered briefly for a double-well potential system (DWPS), which is closely related to the TSS

Democratic Policing before the Due Process Revolution

According to prevailing interpretations of the Warren Court’s Due Process Revolution, the Supreme Court constitutionalized criminal procedure to constrain the discretion of individual officers. These narratives, however, fail to account for the Court’s decisions during that revolutionary period that enabled discretionary policing. Instead of beginning with the Warren Court, this Essay looks to the legal culture before the Due Process Revolution to provide a more coherent synthesis of the Court’s criminal procedure decisions. It reconstructs that culture by analyzing the prominent criminal law scholar Jerome Hall’s public lectures, Police and Law in a Democratic Society, which he delivered in 1952 on the differences between democratic and totalitarian police forces. Hall’s definition of democratic policing appealed to self-rule, then to the rule of law, and finally, to due process, as he struggled to account for twentieth-century police forces that were not, in important ways, governed by the people or entirely constrained by law. Hall ultimately settled on the idea that in a democratic society due process meant that the police did not decide the outcome of a “fair trial”—a definition that is different from today’s understanding of due process, which emphasizes judicial review of police action. The Essay applies the methodology of cultural history to argue that during the Cold War, Hall articulated a concept of due process that was not just a legal norm but also a cultural value that rationalized discretionary policing and served to distinguish two competing systems of government that both relied on discretionary authority. The Essay concludes by exploring how Hall’s explication of due process, which was representative of midcentury views, might revise standard accounts of the Due Process Revolution. Understanding the legal culture that came before—and informed—the Warren Court’s criminal procedure decisions suggests that due process functioned as much to justify as to restrain police discretion

The New Public

By exploring the intertwined histories of the automobile, policing, criminal procedure, and the administrative state in the twentieth-century United States, this Essay argues that the growth of the police’s discretionary authority had its roots in the governance of an automotive society. To tell this history and the proliferation of procedural rights that developed as a solution to abuses of police discretion, this Essay examines the life and oeuvre of Charles Reich, an administrative-law expert in the 1960s who wrote about his own encounters with the police, particularly in his car. The Essay concludes that, in light of this regulatory history of criminal procedure, putting some limits on the police’s discretionary power may require partitioning the enforcement of traffic laws from the investigation of crime