Old Hopes, New Possibilities: Next Generation Catalogues and the Centralization of Acess

Next-generation catalogues can be viewed as the latest manifestation of a tendency in library catalogue history to strive for centralization of access to collections—a single portal for the discovery of library resources. Due to an increasing volume of published materials and the explosion of online information resources during the Internet age, the library does not currently provide centralized access to its various information silos, nor does it provide a user-friendly search and retrieval experience for users whose expectations are shaped by Google and other major commercial Web sites. Searching across library resources is a complicated task, bearing high-attention “transaction costs” for the user, which discourage the use of library resources. Libraries need access systems that minimize complexity, easing discovery and delivery of resources for user populations. Here, the authors review past efforts of centralization of access, consider the potential of next-generation catalogues in the context of this historical tendency toward centralization of access, and describe what goals underlie that centralization.published or submitted for publicatio

The Structure and Limits of Criminal Law

The book The Structure and Limits of Criminal Law (Ashgate) collects and reprints classic articles on three topics: the conceptual structure of criminal law doctrine, the conduct necessary and that sufficient for criminal liability, and the offender culpability and blameworthiness necessary and that sufficient for criminal liability. The collection includes articles by H.L.A. Hart, Sanford Kadish, George Fletcher, Herbert Packer, Norval Morris, Gordon Hawkins, Andrew von Hirsch, Bernard Harcourt, Richard Wasserstrom, Andrew Simester, John Darley, Kent Greenawalt, and Paul Robinson. This essay serves as an introduction to the collection, explaining how each article fits into the larger debate and giving a brief summary of each that will orient the (primarily student) reader. Part I considers how best to construct a conceptual framework for criminal law. Under existing law, criminal law doctrine tends to operate in one of three ways: defining an offense, or defining a general defense that operates independent of the offense requirements to bar liability, or defining a doctrine of imputation that treats the actor as if he satisfies an offense requirement that he does not in fact satisfy. However, one could organize criminal law doctrines differently, around the different function that each performs: articulating ex ante the rules of conduct or adjudicating ex post the violation of those rules of conduct, to assess liability and the grade of the liability. Part II examines the debate over what conduct should be necessary for criminal liability, and what conduct should be sufficient. Harm to another is surely necessary but probably insufficient. And the harm principle has been stretched so far that it cannot now, by itself, serve as a meaningful limitation in the modern criminalization debate. On the other hand, immorality or at least condemnability of conduct is surely insufficient but probably necessary: on both philosophical and empirical grounds, there is reason to think that conduct should not be criminalized unless society regards it as morally blameworthy. Part III considers the debate over what offender culpability and blameworthiness should be necessary for criminal liability, and what should be sufficient. Despite calls by some to ignore blameworthiness in the name of prevention, the increasingly more accepted view is that criminal liability should be imposed only on the blameworthy. Indeed, many go further, arguing that also the extent of the offender\u27s liability and punishment should depend upon the extent of his blameworthiness. This means retaining the mens rea requirement, offering a full array of excuse defenses, and, in its strongest form, adopting desert as an inviolable distributive principle

The Structure and Limits of Criminal Law

The book The Structure and Limits of Criminal Law (Ashgate) collects and reprints classic articles on three topics: the conceptual structure of criminal law doctrine, the conduct necessary and that sufficient for criminal liability, and the offender culpability and blameworthiness necessary and that sufficient for criminal liability. The collection includes articles by H.L.A. Hart, Sanford Kadish, George Fletcher, Herbert Packer, Norval Morris, Gordon Hawkins, Andrew von Hirsch, Bernard Harcourt, Richard Wasserstrom, Andrew Simester, John Darley, Kent Greenawalt, and Paul Robinson. This essay serves as an introduction to the collection, explaining how each article fits into the larger debate and giving a brief summary of each that will orient the (primarily student) reader. Part I considers how best to construct a conceptual framework for criminal law. Under existing law, criminal law doctrine tends to operate in one of three ways: defining an offense, or defining a general defense that operates independent of the offense requirements to bar liability, or defining a doctrine of imputation that treats the actor as if he satisfies an offense requirement that he does not in fact satisfy. However, one could organize criminal law doctrines differently, around the different function that each performs: articulating ex ante the rules of conduct or adjudicating ex post the violation of those rules of conduct, to assess liability and the grade of the liability. Part II examines the debate over what conduct should be necessary for criminal liability, and what conduct should be sufficient. Harm to another is surely necessary but probably insufficient. And the harm principle has been stretched so far that it cannot now, by itself, serve as a meaningful limitation in the modern criminalization debate. On the other hand, immorality or at least condemnability of conduct is surely insufficient but probably necessary: on both philosophical and empirical grounds, there is reason to think that conduct should not be criminalized unless society regards it as morally blameworthy. Part III considers the debate over what offender culpability and blameworthiness should be necessary for criminal liability, and what should be sufficient. Despite calls by some to ignore blameworthiness in the name of prevention, the increasingly more accepted view is that criminal liability should be imposed only on the blameworthy. Indeed, many go further, arguing that also the extent of the offender\u27s liability and punishment should depend upon the extent of his blameworthiness. This means retaining the mens rea requirement, offering a full array of excuse defenses, and, in its strongest form, adopting desert as an inviolable distributive principle

Confidential genetic testing and electronic health records: A survey of current practices among Huntington disease testing centers

BACKGROUND: Clinical care teams providing presymptomatic genetic testing often employ advanced confidentiality practices for documentation and result storage. However, patient requests for increased confidentiality may be in conflict with the legal obligations of medical providers to document patient care activities in the electronic health record (EHR). Huntington disease presents a representative case study for investigating the ways centers currently balance the requirements of EHRs with the privacy demands of patients seeking presymptomatic genetic testing. METHODS: We surveyed 23 HD centers (53% response rate) regarding their use of the EHR for presymptomatic HD testing. RESULTS: Our survey revealed that clinical care teams and laboratories have each developed their own practices, which are cumbersome and often include EHR avoidance. We found that a majority of HD care teams record appointments in the EHR (91%), often using vague notes. Approximately half of the care teams (52%) keep presymptomatic results of out of the EHR. CONCLUSION: As genetic knowledge grows, linking more genes to late-onset conditions, institutions will benefit from having professional recommendations to guide development of policies for EHR documentation of presymptomatic genetic results. Policies must be sensitive to the ethical differences and patient demands for presymptomatic genetic testing compared to those undergoing confirmatory genetic testing

Corrective Critiques and Measuring Social Life: Social Capital in Political Communitarianism and Academia

Over the past quarter of a century social capital has grown from a relatively obscure concept to one routinely applied in a variety of literatures ranging from academic disciplines to international development programmes. Whilst the concept has been the subject of several critiques, these have largely been from a political economic perspective and have primarily discredited the concept by constructing it as having a basis and origins in economics. This thesis aims to offer an alternative analysis of social capital. By drawing on the work of French pragmatism, I treat social capital as a complex, heterogeneous object whose meaning and basis shifts as it has been employed in the enactment of different realities. Whilst retaining this sensibility, I argue that insight can be gained into political uses of social capital by conceptualising it as part of various corrective critiques of economic liberalism. From a communitarian perspective, liberal policy is deficient because of its individualistic, and economic, foci. The incorporation of these, and other critiques, has resulted in the recent emergence of a ‘holistic’ approach that identifies human ‘wellbeing’ as the goal of policy. Social capital, with its promise to make the benefits of social life measurable and calculable, has helped to incorporate the communitarian critique into policy and political discourse both in New Zealand and internationally. However, social capital’s relationship to critique within policy and politics has varied. Some authors have constructed it as existing in a reciprocal relationship with existing liberal economic policies, from this perspective both economic growth and social capital are required to improve human wellbeing. For others, however, social capital and wellbeing are damaged by economic growth, and so economic policy requires modification in order to prevent damage to social capital. When the former construction is used, social capital is part of an expansionary critique of policy. From the latter perspective, social capital forms part of a reformist critique of policy. These arguments are built on an analysis of social capital in texts from a variety of political and scholarly fields. My exploration of social capital in two academic fields, public health and management studies demonstrates that social capital often lacks an evident economic basis, and highlights the variability in the concept’s construction. I also explore the history of the concept in New Zealand political and policy texts, discussing its use in the New Zealand Institute of Policy Studies and by Prime Minister Jim Bolger in the 1990s, and how this changed as the concept was more thoroughly incorporated into policy during the Fifth Labour Government in the early 2000s. Furthermore, I offer an explanation of social capital’s current and central role in national accounting frameworks published by international and national government organisations, which provide the most clearly articulated attempts to measure social life via social capital. As well as building on the existing critical and analytical literature around social capital, and offering an analysis of the concept within New Zealand, my approach demonstrates the advantages offered by adopting the sensibility of French pragmatic sociology. My analysis supports the argument that texts are a suitable topic of interest from a French pragmatic perspective, and shows the critical insight that can be gained from a more empirically-orientated and less dismissive approach to the concept of social capital

Transmission Line Resistance Compression Networks and Applications to Wireless Power Transfer

Microwave-to-dc rectification is valuable in many applications, including RF energy recovery, dc-dc conversion, and wireless power transfer. In such applications, it is desired for the microwave rectifier system to provide a constant RF input impedance. Consequently, variation in rectifier input impedance over varying incident power levels can hurt system performance. To address this challenge, we introduce multiway transmission line resistance compression networks (TLRCNs) for maintaining near-constant input impedance in RF-to-dc rectifier systems. A development of TLRCNs is presented, along with their application to RF-to-dc conversion and wireless power transfer. We derive analytical expressions for the behavior of TLRCNs, and describe two design methodologies applicable to both single and multistage implementations. A 2.45-GHz four-way TLRCN network is implemented and applied to create a 4-W resistance compressed rectifier system that has narrow-range resistive input characteristics over a 10-dB power range. It is demonstrated to improve the impedance match to mostly resistive but variable input impedance class-E rectifiers over a 10-dB power range. The resulting TLRCN plus rectifier system has >50% RF-to-dc conversion efficiency over a >10-dB input power range at 2.45 GHz (peak efficiency 70%), and standing wave ratio <;1.1 over a 7.7-dB range, despite a nonnegligible reactive component in the rectifier loads

Empirical Desert, Individual Prevention, and Limiting Retributivism: A Reply

A number of articles and empirical studies over the past decade, most by Paul Robinson and co-authors, have suggested a relationship between the extent of the criminal law\u27s reputation for being just in its distribution of criminal liability and punishment in the eyes of the community – its moral credibility – and its ability to gain that community\u27s deference and compliance through a variety of mechanisms that enhance its crime-control effectiveness. This has led to proposals to have criminal liability and punishment rules reflect lay intuitions of justice – empirical desert – as a means of enhancing the system\u27s moral credibility. In a recent article, Christopher Slobogin and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein (SBR) report seven sets of studies that they argue undermine these claims of empirical desert and moral credibility and instead support SBR\u27s proposed distributive principle of individual prevention, a view that focuses on an offender\u27s future dangerousness rather than on his perceived desert. The idea that there is a relationship between the criminal law\u27s reputation for justness and its crime-control effectiveness did not originate with Robinson and his co-authors. Rather, it has been a common theme among a wide range of punishment theory scholars for many decades. A particularly important conclusion of recent Robinson studies, however, is their confirmation that this relationship is a continuous one: even small nudges in moral credibility can produce corresponding changes in the community\u27s deference to the criminal law. This is important because it shows that even piecemeal changes or changes at the margin – as in reforming even one unjust doctrine or procedure – can have real implications for crime-control. SBR\u27s studies, rather than contradicting the crime-control power of empirical desert, in fact confirm it. Further, SBR\u27s studies do not provide support for their proposed individual prevention distributive principle, contrary to what they claim. While SBR try to associate their principle with the popular limiting retributivism adopted by the American Law Institute in its 2007 amendment of the Model Penal Code, in fact it is, in many respects, just the reverse of that principle. With limiting retributivism, the Model Code\u27s new provision sets desert as dominant, never allowing punishment to conflict with it. SBR would have punishment essentially always set according to future dangerousness; it is to be constrained by desert only when the extent of the resulting injustices or failures of justice is so egregious as to significantly delegitimize the government and its law. This ignores the fact that even minor departures from justice may have an important cumulative effect on the system as a whole. What SBR propose – essentially substituting preventive detention for criminal justice – promotes the worst of the failed policies of the 1960s, where detention decisions were made at the back-end by experts, and conflicts with the trend of the past several decades of encouraging more community involvement in criminal punishment, not less

Empirical Desert, Individual Prevention, and Limiting Retributivism: A Reply

A number of articles and empirical studies over the past decade, most by Paul Robinson and co-authors, have suggested a relationship between the extent of the criminal law\u27s reputation for being just in its distribution of criminal liability and punishment in the eyes of the community – its moral credibility – and its ability to gain that community\u27s deference and compliance through a variety of mechanisms that enhance its crime-control effectiveness. This has led to proposals to have criminal liability and punishment rules reflect lay intuitions of justice – empirical desert – as a means of enhancing the system\u27s moral credibility. In a recent article, Christopher Slobogin and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein (SBR) report seven sets of studies that they argue undermine these claims of empirical desert and moral credibility and instead support SBR\u27s proposed distributive principle of individual prevention, a view that focuses on an offender\u27s future dangerousness rather than on his perceived desert. The idea that there is a relationship between the criminal law\u27s reputation for justness and its crime-control effectiveness did not originate with Robinson and his co-authors. Rather, it has been a common theme among a wide range of punishment theory scholars for many decades. A particularly important conclusion of recent Robinson studies, however, is their confirmation that this relationship is a continuous one: even small nudges in moral credibility can produce corresponding changes in the community\u27s deference to the criminal law. This is important because it shows that even piecemeal changes or changes at the margin – as in reforming even one unjust doctrine or procedure – can have real implications for crime-control. SBR\u27s studies, rather than contradicting the crime-control power of empirical desert, in fact confirm it. Further, SBR\u27s studies do not provide support for their proposed individual prevention distributive principle, contrary to what they claim. While SBR try to associate their principle with the popular limiting retributivism adopted by the American Law Institute in its 2007 amendment of the Model Penal Code, in fact it is, in many respects, just the reverse of that principle. With limiting retributivism, the Model Code\u27s new provision sets desert as dominant, never allowing punishment to conflict with it. SBR would have punishment essentially always set according to future dangerousness; it is to be constrained by desert only when the extent of the resulting injustices or failures of justice is so egregious as to significantly delegitimize the government and its law. This ignores the fact that even minor departures from justice may have an important cumulative effect on the system as a whole. What SBR propose – essentially substituting preventive detention for criminal justice – promotes the worst of the failed policies of the 1960s, where detention decisions were made at the back-end by experts, and conflicts with the trend of the past several decades of encouraging more community involvement in criminal punishment, not less

Seasonal Variations of Relative Neutral Densities between 45 and 90 km Determined from USU Rayleigh Lidar Observations

A Rayleigh-scatter lidar operated at the Atmospheric Lidar Observatory (ALO; 41.7°N, 111.8°W), part of Center for Atmospheric and Space Sciences (CASS) on the campus of Utah State University (USU), collected extensive data between 1993 and 2004. From the Rayleigh lidar photon-count profiles, relative densities were determined throughout the mesosphere, from 45 to 90 km. Using these relative densities three climatologies were derived, each using a different density normalization at 45 km. The first normalized the relative densities to a constant; the second to the NRL-MSISe00 empirical model which has a strong annual component; and the third to the CPC analyses model, which is similar to MSIS in that it has a strong annual oscillation. In each case the density profile for every night of a composite year was found by averaging the nighttime density profiles over a 31-day by 11-year window centered on that day. For each of the cases, the average annual density profile was found by averaging all the days. Then the daily percent differences were found relative to the annual density profile. Despite the different normalizations at 45 km, many common features were found in the seasonal behavior of the density profiles, a large seasonal variation maximizing in June at ~70 km, Another above 80 km is a large shift in the maximum to earlier in the year, and lastly sharp density fall off at almost all altitudes in early October. While these density normalizations provide initial information about mesospheric behavior, the current lidar upgrade will enable us to add an absolute scale to the density profiles

Mesospheric Density Climatologies Determined at Midlatitudes Using Rayleigh Lidar

The original Rayleigh-scatter lidar that operated at the Atmospheric Lidar Observatory (ALO; 41.7°N, 111.8°W) in the Center for Atmospheric and Space Sciences (CASS) on the campus of Utah State University (USU), collected 11 years of data between 1993 and 2004. From Rayleigh lidar photon-count returns, relative densities throughout the mesosphere, from 45 to 90 km, were determined. Using these relative densities, three climatologies are derived, each using a different density normalization method at 45 km: the first method normalized the relative densities to a constant; the second normalized them to the NRLMSISe00 empirical model; and the third normalized them to the CPC analyses, a first principles, assimilative, meteorological model. From there, the average density profile for each night of the composite year is found by averaging the nighttime density profiles in a multi-year, 31-day window centered on that particular night. From these three density climatologies, some different and many common features in the mesospheric densities are evident. In the future, with improvements to the lidar, it will be possible to provide an absolute normalization for the density profiles