Childhood predictors of criminal offending: results from a 19-year longitudinal epidemiological study of boys

Objective: To examine the relative contribution of hyperactivity, conduct, and emotional problems in predicting criminal offending. Method: In all, 173 boys aged 6 to 8 years (assessed for hyperactivity, conduct, and emotional problems) were followed up 19 years later by examining criminal offense histories. Results: Significant main effects for total and violent convictions were found, the strongest being for violent criminal offenses. Conduct problems predicted general offending (irrespective of the type of conviction), whereas emotional problems were the single best predictor of violent convictions. Hyperactivity was not a significant predictor in the models. Conclusion: The findings provide insight into the developmental mechanisms that mediate criminal behavior by showing that childhood emotional problems independently contribute to the risk of violent offending in later

The Ontological Basis of Strong Artificial Life

This article concerns the claim that it is possible to create living organisms, not merely models that represent organisms, simply by programming computers ("virtual" strong alife). I ask what sort of things these computer-generated organisms are supposed to be (where are they, and what are they made of?). I consider four possible answers to this question: (a) The organisms are abstract complexes of pure information; (b) they are material objects made of bits of computer hardware; (c) they are physical processes going on inside the computer; and (d) they are denizens of an entire artificial world, different from our own, that the programmer creates. I argue that (a) could not be right, that (c) collapses into (b), and that (d) would make strong alife either absurd or uninteresting. Thus, "virtual" strong alife amounts to the claim that, by programming a computer, one can literally bring bits of its hardware to life

Viscous Withdrawal of Miscible Liquid Layers

In viscous withdrawal, a converging flow imposed in an upper layer of viscous liquid entrains liquid from a lower, stably stratified layer. Using the idea that a thin tendril is entrained by a local straining flow, we propose a scaling law for the volume flux of liquid entrained from miscible liquid layers. A long-wavelength model including only local information about the withdrawal flow is degenerate, with multiple tendril solutions for one withdrawal condition. Including information about the global geometry of the withdrawal flow removes the degeneracy while introducing only a logarithmic dependence on the global flow parameters into the scaling law.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Distributed tuplespace and location management - an integrated perspective using Bluetooth

Location based or "context aware" computing is becoming increasingly recognized as a vital part of a mobile computing environment. As a consequence, the need for location-management middleware is widely recognized and actively researched. Location management is frequently offered to the application through an API where the location is given in the form of coordinates. It is the opinion of the authors that a localization API should offer localized data (e.g. direction to the nearest pharmacy) directly through a transparent and integrated API. Our proposed middleware for location and context management is built on top of Mobispace. Mobispace is a distributed tuplespace made for J2me units where replication between local replicas takes place with a central server (over GPRS) or with other mobile units (using Bluetooth). Since a Bluetooth connection indicates physical proximity to another node, a set of stationary nodes may distribute locality information over Bluetooth connections, and this information may be retrieved through the ordinary tuplespace AP

An agent-based DDM for high level architecture

The Data Distribution Management (DDM) service is one of the six services provided in the Runtime Infrastructure (RTI) of High Level Architecture (HLA). Its purpose is to perform data filtering and reduce irrelevant data communicated between federates. The two DDM schemes proposed for RTI, region based and grid based DDM, are oriented to send as little irrelevant data to subscribers as possible, but only manage to filter part of this information and some irrelevant data is still being communicated. Previously (G. Tan et al., 2000), we employed intelligent agents to perform data filtering in HLA, implemented an agent based DDM in RTI (ARTI) and compared it with the other two filtering mechanisms. The paper reports on additional experiments, results and analysis using two scenarios: the AWACS sensing aircraft simulation and the air traffic control simulation scenario. Experimental results show that compared with other mechanisms, the agent based approach communicates only relevant data and minimizes network communication, and is also comparable in terms of time efficiency. Some guidelines on when the agent based scheme can be used are also give

The Angular Size and Proper Motion of the Afterglow of GRB 030329

The bright, nearby (z=0.1685) gamma-ray burst of 29 March 2003 has presented us with the first opportunity to directly image the expansion of a GRB. This burst reached flux density levels at centimeter wavelengths more than 50 times brighter than any previously studied event. Here we present the results of a VLBI campaign using the VLBA, VLA, Green Bank, Effelsberg, Arecibo, and Westerbork telescopes that resolves the radio afterglow of GRB 030329 and constrains its rate of expansion. The size of the afterglow is found to be \~0.07 mas (0.2 pc) 25 days after the burst, and 0.17 mas (0.5 pc) 83 days after the burst, indicating an average velocity of 3-5 c. This expansion is consistent with expectations of the standard fireball model. We measure the projected proper motion of GRB 030329 in the sky to <0.3 mas in the 80 days following the burst. In observations taken 52 days after the burst we detect an additional compact component at a distance from the main component of 0.28 +/- 0.05 mas (0.80 pc). The presence of this component is not expected from the standard model.Comment: 12 pages including 2 figures, LaTeX. Accepted to ApJ Letters on May 14, 200