The Misplaced Trust in the DOJ\u27s Expertise on Criminal Justice Policy

As should be clear, this is less a book review and more an in-depth exploration of a key point Professor Barkow makes in Prisoners of Politics as applied to the federal criminal justice system. Sure, we need expertise in order to make data-driven criminal justice policy decisions--as Barkow puts it, “[t]he key is to create and foster an institutional framework that prioritizes data” and “expertise” so as to “create incentives for key decisionmakers to be accountable for real results” (pp. 14-15). But in creating reforms, the kindof expertise is also important. Many federal policymakers currently view the DOJ and NAAUSA as possessing the most salient expertise on all criminal justice matters. This Review, I hope, calls that premise into serious doubt. In Part I of this Review, I explain how the DOJ and NAAUSA have had a vise-like grip on federal policymakers when deciding criminal justice issues. In Part II, I detail their lobbying efforts in favor of longer sentences and against any reforms that would reduce sentences, and I explain why their claims against reform are flawed. Part III addresses the DOJ\u27s and the NAAUSA\u27s active opposition to criminal justice policies set by the presidents whom they serve because federal prosecutors seek to retain power to the exclusion of all other policy goals. If we want a federal criminal justice system that reflects the goals of public safety, fairness, and equal enforcement, then federal policymakers should give less deference to the views of federal prosecutors because they do not possess the requisite expertise or will to move our policies toward those ends

Endogenous Product Differentiation, Market Size and Prices

Recent empirical evidence suggests that prices for some goods and services are higher in larger markets. This paper provides a demand-side explanation for this phenomenon when firms can choose how much to differentiate their products in a model of monopolistic competition with horizontal product differentiation. The model proposes that consumers’ love of variety makes them more sensitive to product differentiation efforts by firms, which leads to higher prices in larger markets. At the same time, endogenous product differentiation modeled in this way can lead to a positive and concave relationship between market size and entry.Endogenous Technology; Entry; Market Size Effect; International Trade; Monopolistic Competition

Institution-Driven Comparative Advantage, Complex Goods and Organizational Choice

The theory of the firm suggests that firms can respond to poor contract enforcement by vertically integrating their production process. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether firms' integration opportunities affect the way institutions determine international trade patterns. We find that vertical integration lessens the impact of a country's ability to enforce contracts on the comparative advantage of complex goods. We also find that countries with good financial institutions export disproportionately more in sectors that produce complex goods and that have a high propensity for vertical integration. In doing so we use a new outcome-based measure of vertical integration propensity and we employ several empirical strategies: cross section, panel and event study analysis. Our results confirm the role of institutions as source of comparative advantage and suggest that this depends not only on the technological characteristics of the goods produced but also on the way firms are able to organize the production process.International Trade; Comparative Advantage; Contract Enforcement; Financial Institutions; Vertical Integration

Institution-Driven Comparative Advantage, Complex Goods and Organizational Choice

The theory of the rm suggests that firms can respond to poor contract enforcement by vertically integrating their production process. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether firms' integration opportunities affect the way institutions determine international trade patterns. We find that vertical integration lessens the impact of a country's ability to enforce contracts on the comparative advantage of complex goods. We also find that countries with good financial institutions export disproportionately more in sectors that produce complex goods and that have a high propensity for vertical integration. In doing so we use a new outcome-based measure of vertical integration propensity and we employ several empirical strategies: cross section, panel and event study analysis. Our results confirm the role of institutions as source of comparative advantage and suggest that this depends not only on the technological characteristics of the goods produced but also on the way firms are able to organize the production process.International Trade; Comparative Advantage; Contract Enforcement; Financial Institutions; Vertical Integration

Maintaining an expert system for the Hubble Space Telescope ground support

The transformation portion of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Proposal Entry Processor System converts astronomer-oriented description of a scientific observing program into a detailed description of the parameters needed for planning and scheduling. The transformation system is one of a very few rulebased expert systems that has ever entered an operational phase. The day to day operations of the system and its rulebase are no longer the responsibility of the original developer. As a result, software engineering properties of the rulebased approach become more important. Maintenance issues associated with the coupling of rules within a rulebased system are discussed and a method is offered for partitioning a rulebase so that the amount of knowledge needed to modify the rulebase is minimized. This method is also used to develop a measure of the coupling strength of the rulebase

Time-Contrastive Learning Based Deep Bottleneck Features for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification

There are a number of studies about extraction of bottleneck (BN) features from deep neural networks (DNNs)trained to discriminate speakers, pass-phrases and triphone states for improving the performance of text-dependent speaker verification (TD-SV). However, a moderate success has been achieved. A recent study [1] presented a time contrastive learning (TCL) concept to explore the non-stationarity of brain signals for classification of brain states. Speech signals have similar non-stationarity property, and TCL further has the advantage of having no need for labeled data. We therefore present a TCL based BN feature extraction method. The method uniformly partitions each speech utterance in a training dataset into a predefined number of multi-frame segments. Each segment in an utterance corresponds to one class, and class labels are shared across utterances. DNNs are then trained to discriminate all speech frames among the classes to exploit the temporal structure of speech. In addition, we propose a segment-based unsupervised clustering algorithm to re-assign class labels to the segments. TD-SV experiments were conducted on the RedDots challenge database. The TCL-DNNs were trained using speech data of fixed pass-phrases that were excluded from the TD-SV evaluation set, so the learned features can be considered phrase-independent. We compare the performance of the proposed TCL bottleneck (BN) feature with those of short-time cepstral features and BN features extracted from DNNs discriminating speakers, pass-phrases, speaker+pass-phrase, as well as monophones whose labels and boundaries are generated by three different automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Experimental results show that the proposed TCL-BN outperforms cepstral features and speaker+pass-phrase discriminant BN features, and its performance is on par with those of ASR derived BN features. Moreover,....Comment: Copyright (c) 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other work

Antipsychotic medication for people with first episode schizophrenia: an exploratory economic analysis of alternative treatment algorithms

Available clinical evidence suggests that the newer antipsychotics are similar to conventional antipsychotics for positive symptom control. It has been suggested that they may also be superior for negative symptoms and side effects, but the evidence for this is unclear (Duggan et al, 1999, Kennedy et al, 1999, Srisurapanont et al, 1999, Thornley et al, 1999, Tuunainen and Gilbody, 1999, Wahlbeck et al, 1999). These differences if they exist, may lead to improvements in quality of life and patient satisfaction and subsequent rates of compliance with therapy. If the latter occurs, there may also be improvements in the overall level of symptom control and rate of relapse. Economic evaluations of risperidone suggest that these differences could lead to savings in the use of hospital inpatient care compared to conventional antipsychotics (Guest et al, 1996, Glennie, 1997). The available economic evidence suggests that the use of clozapine has the potential to improve the efficient use of health and social service resources in some patients (Revicki et al, 1990, Davies & Drummond, 1993, Meltzer et al, 1993, Aitchison & Kerwin, 1997, Glennie, 1997, Rosenheck et al, 1997). All of these studies indicate that overall, clozapine is associated with lower rates of hospital inpatient admissions and lower duration of inpatient stay. These are due to earlier discharge from the index inpatient admission and lower rates of relapse. These differences in the use of inpatient care are sufficient to offset the additional costs of purchasing clozapine. However, the designs of all the economic studies raise several issues of concern, such as control for biases, sources of data and methods of data collection, measurement of outcomes, the type and dose regimes of comparator drugs. In addition, the clinical and economic data for these evaluations were collected for a patient population with a long duration of illness and/or who are treatment resistant or intolerant of typical antipsychotic therapy. It is not clear that these are applicable to people with early schizophrenia or those who have not had problems with previous antipsychotics. Patients currently categorised as treatment resistant or treatment intolerant are likely to have a long history of schizophrenia. This is partly due to historical factors, such as the limited number of antipsychotics available, concerns about the safety of clozapine and the restricted use of expensive atypical antipsychotics. These factors may be associated with a relatively poor quality of life and more intensive use of health care services in patients with a longer duration of illness. Any improvements in clinical outcome as a result of a change in antipsychotic may also result in relatively important changes in health status and intensity of ealth service utilisation, compared to those with a recent diagnosis of schizophrenia. In addition, there is some limited evidence that the use of services following entry to a clinical trial is related to the level of resource use prior to entry (Rosenheck et al, 1999). Furthermore, there is a trend to reduce reliance on inpatient or institutional care for people with acute or chronic mental illness. The total number of commissioned hospital bed days for people with mental illness decreased from 14 million to 11.5 million between 1992-3 and 1997-8 and the number of ward attendees fell from 124000 to 93000 (Department of Health, 1998a). Over the same period the number of daily available hospital beds for people with mental illness declined from 47000 to 37000, while the number of outpatient attendances rose from 1.8 million to 2.1 million (HPSS, 1998). Creed et al (1997) suggest that approximately 40% of people with acute episodes of mental illness (including schizophrenia) can be treated by attending psychiatric day hospitals rather then with hospital inpatient admissions. These factors may over estimate the likely value for money of the atypical antipsychotics, in cohorts of people with first episode schizophrenia in the current UK mental health service (Rosenheck et al, 1999). Given the constraints on health and social care budgets, purchasers and providers need to ensure that resources are used efficiently. A variety of guidelines and treatment protocols have been published, or developed for use at a local level to support decisions about the choice of antipsychotic for people with a first episode of schizophrenia. In addition, there are wide variations in the availability and use of the atypical antipsychotics in the UK. Current published literature is not sufficient to address all the economic issues of concern and there is a need for evaluation of the relative efficiency of clozapine and the new antipsychotics. The NHS R&D HTA has funded primary research to assess the relative costs and utility of typical and atypical antipsychotics for people who are resistant to or intolerant of at least two antipsychotics. However, the results of the research will not be available for at least 3 years. In addition, it is also important to assess the value of the new drugs in the context of alternative prescribing guidelines, and for people with a first episode of schizophrenia. This paper presents the results of secondary research to explore the potential economic impact of atypical antipsychotics for people in the context of current clinical guidelines.schizophrenia, QALYs

Teacher Professionalism.

Is teaching a profession? This article compares teachers with other professionals, such as medical doctors or lawyers, in professional knowledge, autonomy, and commitment to the welfare of the clientele. The implications for teacher professionalism include establishment of national/state standards for professional teachers, increased autonomy in teacher education, salary increase, and opportunities for promotion. However, there still remains a question of whether there will be a genuine improvement in the quality of education with “professional” teachers