Alaska Results First Initiative: Progress Report & Initial Findings

This report presents the initial results of Alaska’s Results First Initiative, which is examining both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the state's adult criminal justice programs by conducting a comprehensive review of the full array of programs funded by the state. The review includes a thorough inventory of state-funded programs, determining the proportion of those programs that are evidence-based, and detailing both the costs of operating those programs, as well as the benefits derived from them via reductions in offender recidivism. The Alaska Results First Iniative is a participant in the Pew-MacArthur Results First Initiative, a "smart justice" approach to reducing recidivism under the auspices of The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, that is being led in our Alaska by the Alaska Justice Information Center (AJiC), housed in the UAA Justice Center.Jointly funded by the State of Alaska and the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority[Introduction] / Organization of Report / Key Findings / SECTION ONE: Alaska RF Initiative Program Inventory / Identifying Alaska’s Adult Criminal Justice Programs / What is a Program? / Collecting Budgetary Data for Adult Criminal Justice Programs / SECTION TWO: Matching Adult Criminal Justice Programs to the Evidence Base / SECTION THREE: NEXT STEPS — Transitioning to Entering Programs into the Benefit-Cost Model / Task #1: Estimating Per-Participant Costs for Alaska’s Programs / Task #2: Estimating Criminal Justice Resource Use and Cost Parameters / Task #3: Recidivism Cohorts and Conducting Recidivism Analyses / Task #4: Populate the Benefit-Cost Model and Conduct Analyses / SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIO

Three-Loop Calculation of the Anyonic Full Cluster Expansion

We calculate the perturbative correction to every cluster coefficient of a gas of anyons through second order in the anyon coupling constant, as described by Chern-Simons field theory.Comment: 10 pages, PlainTex with macro 'manumac', include

On Core Collapse Supernovae in Normal and in Seyfert Galaxies

This paper estimates the relative frequency of different types of core-collapse supernovae, in terms of the ratio f between the number of type Ib--Ic and of type II supernovae. We estimate f independently for all normal and Seyfert galaxies whose radial velocity is <=14000 km/s, and which had at least one supernova event recorded in the Asiago catalogue from January 1986 to August 2000. We find that the ratio f is approx. 0.23+/-0.05 in normal galaxies. This value is consistent with constant star formation rate and with a Salpeter Initial Mass Function and average binary rate approx. 50 %. On the contrary, Seyfert galaxies exceed the ratio f in normal galaxies by a factor approx. 4 at a confidence level >= 2 sigma. A caveat is that the numbers for Seyferts are still small (6 type Ib-Ic and 6 type II supernovae discovered as yet). Assumed real, this excess of type Ib and Ic with respect to type II supernovae, may indicate a burst of star formation of young age (<= 20 Myr), a high incidence of binary systems in the inner regions (r <= 0.4 R25) of Seyfert galaxies, or a top-loaded mass function.Comment: Accepted for Publication in MNRA

Decaying warm dark matter and neutrino masses

Neutrino masses may arise from spontaneous breaking of ungauged lepton number. Due to quantum gravity effects the associated Goldstone boson - the majoron - will pick up a mass. We determine the lifetime and mass required by cosmic microwave background observations so that the massive majoron provides the observed dark matter of the Universe. The majoron DDM scenario fits nicely in models where neutrino masses arise a la seesaw, and may lead to other possible cosmological implications.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Replaced to match published version. Minor changes made to address referees' comments. References adde