Courts Caught in the Web: Fixing a Failed System with Factors Designed for Sentencing Child Pornography Offenders

This Article introduces a Study, compiling data of 238 internet crimes against children occurring between 2008-2012, and concludes there is no correlation between presentence risk assessment scores and the subsequent sentences imposed by Northeast Ohio judges. The current risk assessment tools are insufficient and should be replaced by a comprehensive multi-factor approach that assesses relevant factors and identifies an offender’s placement on the “Spiral of Abuse” to aid Northeast Ohio judges in crafting fair, just, and consistent sentences for CPOs

Courts Caught in the Web: Fixing a Failed System with Factors Designed for Sentencing Child Pornography Offenders

This Article introduces a Study, compiling data of 238 internet crimes against children occurring between 2008-2012, and concludes there is no correlation between presentence risk assessment scores and the subsequent sentences imposed by Northeast Ohio judges. The current risk assessment tools are insufficient and should be replaced by a comprehensive multi-factor approach that assesses relevant factors and identifies an offender’s placement on the “Spiral of Abuse” to aid Northeast Ohio judges in crafting fair, just, and consistent sentences for CPOs

Imposing Hierarchy on a Graph

This paper investigates a way of imposing a hierarchy on a graph in order to explore relationships between elements of data. Imposing a hierarchy is equivalent to clustering. First a tree structure is imposed on the initial graph, then a k-partite structure is imposed on each previously obtained cluster. Imposing a tree exposes the hierarchical structure of the graph as well as providing an abstraction of the data. In this study three kinds of merge operations are considered and their composition is shown to yield a tree with a maximal number of vertices in which vertices in the tree are associated with disjoint connected subgraphs. These subgraphs are subsequently transformed into k-partite graphs using similar merge operations. These merges also ensure that the obtained tree is proper with respect to the hierarchy imposed on the data. A detailed example of the techniqueâs application in exposing the structure of protein interaction networks is described. The example focuses on the MAPK cell signalling pathway. The merge operations help expose where signal regulation occurs within the pathway and from other signalling pathways within the cell

Castro\u27s Shifters: Locating Variation in Political Discourse

In his trademark speeches, Fidel Castro casts himself in a variety of roles: supreme leader, member of government, revolutionary, worker, member of the Cuban populace, and the embodiment of the Cuban nation. Transcripts of Castro’s major speeches provide a rich data set that spans five decades (1959-present). Initial readings reveal his prominent use of the first person plural nosotros , which suggests an intriguing discourse of inclusiveness for this long-time authoritarian leader. In this poster, we identify Castro’s variable discursive referents for nosotros verbs in relation to era and topic of speech (i.e., history of the revolution, national goals and progress, or trouble talk). Variable rule analysis shows that in Castro’s earlier speeches, use of the royal we variant is favored: Llamábamos al Partido por la noche, y le preguntábamos si había llovido o no ( We called the Party the other night, and we asked if it had rained or not ). In contrast, the use of what we term the collective we is favored most heavily in speeches after the fall of the Soviet Union: No estamos produciendo para los burgueses, estamos produciendo para el pueblo ( We’re not producing for the bourgeoisie, we’re producing for the people ). The variation we encounter reflects Castro’s positioning of self relative to the people he is addressing. Castro, as leader of the perpetual revolutionary state, ostensibly erases the possibility of a public sphere existing apart from the government by constructing what the public thinks/expresses/wants as what the government [naturally] does. This is as we might expect in a Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat. Castro, however, achieves this conflation of public sphere and public authority in two ways in his speeches: first, he relocates public authority outside of the immediate social context, so that the role played by the Cuban public and the revolutionary government is one and the same when viewed in opposition to Yankee imperialism or memories of the Batista regime, for example. Second, by including himself in nosotros talk about workers and revolutionaries while standing over and addressing the Cuban public, Castro projects himself into the crowd. The effect of such talk is to offer an answer to the question, Who mediates between the private sphere and the government in a socialist society where each one is identified with the other? Castro proposes himself as the answer; he, not any autonomous, Habermasian sphere of rational debate, mediates between people’s private lives and the actions of state authority. Thus, what we term a personal public sphere provides a context for understanding the pattern of variation we observe in Castro’s speeches

Periodic Optical Variability of Radio Detected Ultracool Dwarfs

A fraction of very low mass stars and brown dwarfs are known to be radio active, in some cases producing periodic pulses. Extensive studies of two such objects have also revealed optical periodic variability and the nature of this variability remains unclear. Here we report on multi-epoch optical photometric monitoring of six radio detected dwarfs, spanning the $\sim$M8 - L3.5 spectral range, conducted to investigate the ubiquity of periodic optical variability in radio detected ultracool dwarfs. This survey is the most sensitive ground-based study carried out to date in search of periodic optical variability from late-type dwarfs, where we obtained 250 hours of monitoring, delivering photometric precision as low as $\sim$0.15%. Five of the six targets exhibit clear periodicity, in all cases likely associated with the rotation period of the dwarf, with a marginal detection found for the sixth. Our data points to a likely association between radio and optical periodic variability in late-M/early-L dwarfs, although the underlying physical cause of this correlation remains unclear. In one case, we have multiple epochs of monitoring of the archetype of pulsing radio dwarfs, the M9 TVLM 513-46546, spanning a period of 5 years, which is sufficiently stable in phase to allow us to establish a period of 1.95958 $\pm$ 0.00005 hours. This phase stability may be associated with a large-scale stable magnetic field, further strengthening the correlation between radio activity and periodic optical variability. Finally, we find a tentative spin-orbit alignment of one component of the very low mass binary LP 349-25.Comment: Accepted to The Astrophysical Journal; 22 pages; 12 figure

Inversion in the In0.53Ga0.47As metal-oxide-semiconductor system: Impact of the In0.53Ga0.47As doping concentration

In0.53Ga0.47As metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) capacitors with an Al2O3 gate oxide and a range of n and p-type In0.53Ga0.47As epitaxial concentrations were examined. Multi-frequency capacitance-voltage and conductance-voltage characterization exhibited minority carrier responses consistent with surface inversion. The measured minimum capacitance at high frequency (1 MHz) was in excellent agreement with the theoretical minimum capacitance calculated assuming an inverted surface. Minority carrier generation lifetimes, sg, extracted from experimentally measured transition frequencies, xm, using physics based a.c. simulations, demonstrated a reduction in sg with increasing epitaxial doping concentration. The frequency scaled conductance, G/x, in strong inversion allowed the estimation of accurate Cox values for these MOS devices

Scrutinizing pre- and post-device fabrication properties of atomic layer deposition WS₂ thin films

In this work, we investigate the physical and electrical properties of WS2 thin films grown by a plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition process, both before and after device fabrication. The WS2 films were deposited on thermally oxidized silicon substrates using the W(NMe2)2(NtBu)2 precursor and a H2S plasma at 450 °C. The WS2 films were approximately 8 nm thick, measured from high-resolution cross-sectional transmission electron imaging, and generally exhibited the desired horizontal basal-plane orientation of the WS2 layers to the SiO2 surface. Hall analysis revealed a p-type behavior with a carrier concentration of 1.31 × 1017 cm−3. Temperature-dependent electrical analysis of circular transfer length method test structures, with Ni/Au contacts, yielded the activation energy (Ea) of both the specific contact resistivity and the WS2 resistivity as 100 and 91 meV, respectively. The similarity of these two values indicates that the characteristics of both are dominated by the temperature dependence of the WS2 hole concentration. Change in the material, such as in sheet resistance, due to device fabrication is attributed to the chemicals and thermal treatments associated with resist spinning and baking, ambient and UV exposure, metal deposition, and metal lift off for contact pad formation.</p