Political Motive and Bail: The Effect of Prosecutorial Strategies on Pretrial Decisions in Federal Terrorism Trials

The purpose of this study is to understand how prosecutorial strategies affect pretrial decisions in U.S. terrorism trials and how pretrial decisions in turn affect the disposition of those trials. This research builds off of the work of Smith and Damphousse (1996) which compared terrorism indictees to traditional federal offenders. They found that the use of explicit politicality as a prosecution strategy was a significant predictor of both disposition and the sentence length in terrorism trials. This study focuses on the question of whether the use of an explicitly political prosecution strategy impacts pretrial decisions in terrorism cases and whether the pretrial decisions impact the guilty plea rates in those cases. This study addresses this issue through a structural-contextual theoretical framework by looking at the prosecutorial strategy of explicit politicality. The reason for this research is to see whether defendants in more heavily politicized cases are less likely to receive pretrial release and if the pretrial detention of the defendants affects the disposition of the trial. Using available data from the American Terrorism Study database, this study looks at data collected for 480 individuals indicted from the years 1980-2006 to investigate whether the prosecutorial strategy used had an effect on pretrial detention decisions. Rather than comparing terrorism indictees with traditional criminals, this study looks at indictees who have been indicted in federal terrorism trials, but were either prosecuted as traditional offenders or had their cases politicized by the prosecution. The study uses bivariate and multivariate analyses to measure the strength of the relationships between prosecution strategy, pretrial decisions, and trial disposition for both traditional and politicized terrorism trials. In regards to pretrial release, this analysis has shown that defendants with less than high school education are less likely to receive pretrial release and that crime severity and community ties have significant roles in pretrial bail decisions. Surprisingly, race was also significant with white defendants being less likely to be released on bail. However, failure to secure pretrial release was not found to have any significant relationship with case dispositions

Keep Calm and Carry On: Infant Carrying Practices and Motor Development

Increasingly, infants in the post-industrialized west are being diagnosed with conditions such as plagiocephaly or torticollis – which are postural deformities that can be corrected with positioning behavior. While a handful of studies have cursorily explored infant carrying practices, here I provide the first comprehensive cross-cultural literature review that aims to make connections between infant transport style and the timing of infant development in the emergence of sitting, crawling, and walking .Such a synthesis is important, not only in terms of contributing to cross-cultural research, but also for parents in the cultural west to aid in the better understanding of how infant transport and securing devices used in post-industrial cultures (e.g. swings, strollers, car seats) can not only exacerbate postural deformities, but also how altering infant resting or sleeping positions can mitigate some of the symptoms of such conditions

Is the Galactic bulge devoid of planets?

Considering a sample of 31 exoplanetary systems detected by gravitational microlensing, we investigate whether or not the estimated distances to these systems conform to the Galactic distribution of planets expected from models. We derive the expected distribution of distances and relative proper motions from a simulated microlensing survey, correcting for the dominant selection effects that affect the planet detection sensitivity as a function of distance, and compare it to the observed distribution using Anderson-Darling (AD) hypothesis testing. Taking the relative abundance of planets in the bulge to that in the disk, $f_{\rm bulge}$, as a model parameter, we find that our model is only consistent with the observed distribution for $f_{\rm bulge}<0.54$ (for a $p$-value threshold of 0.01) implying that the bulge may be devoid of planets relative to the disk. Allowing for a dependence of planet abundance on metallicity and host mass, or an additional dependence of planet sensitivity on event timescale does not restore consistency for $f_{\rm bulge}=1$. We examine the distance estimates of some events in detail, and conclude that some parallax-based distance estimates could be significantly in error. Only by combining the removal of one problematic event from our sample and the inclusion of strong dependences of planet abundance or detection sensitivity on host mass, metallicity and event timescale are we able to find consistency with the hypothesis that the bulge and disk have equal planet abundance.Comment: Revised following referee's report. 12 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl

Development of an Autonomous Wheelchair System

This paper introduces the development of an electric wheelchair that provides an autonomous driving, obstacle avoiding, wall following, and line following. The objective of this project is for the wheelchair to be able to travel autonomously through an area safely and detect objects within 50 inches of collision. Based on a manual electric wheelchair, 3D printed structures are created as a kit, and the electric system consists of a Raspberry Pi 4B microprocessor, 2 ultrasonic sensors, and a Raspberry Pi cam. A Raspberry pi cam is connected to a Raspberry pi 4 to detect follow lines and obstacles in its path. A touchscreen is implemented for a Graphic User Interface while an Arduino is used for motion controls based on ultrasonic sensor data. The ultrasonic sensors detect objects as well as measure a distance from the wall to keep the wheelchair within 10 inches of that distance. The developed wheelchair successfully navigated autonomously for 50 feet at an average moving rate of 3 mph without running into objects or people. The weight balance of the wheelchair needs to be studied as a future improvement. The wheelchair has much greater weight on the back due to the added sensors and battery. As a testbed, the wheelchair supports more advanced implementations. Future implementation includes using the Robot Operating System (ROS) environment, implementing mapping with autonomous path planning, and driving