Forensic metrology: its importance and evolution

Measurements play a fundamental role in nowadays forensic activities, especially in criminal justice. Guilt or innocence and the severity of a sentence do often depend upon the results of measurements. On the other hand, it is well-known that measurement results are always affected by uncertainty, so that any decision based on measurement results carries an implicit risk of being wrong: uncertainty helps in estimating this risk. If this concept is translated into the juridical world, it is quite immediate to recognize that uncertainty may quantify how reasonable is the doubt with which a verdict is rendered by the trier of facts. Unfortunately, forensic disciplines are still largely unaware of the basic, fundamental concepts of metrology. This paper is aimed at showing how forensic metrology is developing in different countries and reporting a few cases where metrology played a key role

A model of political enterprise.

Political organizations engaged in long-term operations are viewed as firms that sell promises: their output is the expectation of a reorganization of society. Because benefits will accrue to the organization's customers and rewards will be paid out to its workers only if and when the goal is achieved, the workers are volunteers in the sense that they engage in unpaid effort today in exchange for a probabilistic reward tomorrow. Because a market for promises is the ideal ground for reciprocal cheating, some mechanisms to ensure reciprocal trust must be devised if exchange is to take place at all. Three problems of reciprocal trust are discussed: the firm's credibility vis-a' -vis its workers, workers' shirking, and the firm's credibility vis-a' -vis its customers. It is shown that a viable solution to these problems in effect turns the political firm into a kind of producer cooperative. It is then shown that the intrinsic inefficiency of a market made up of producer cooperatives makes merger likely, until a single firm remains. Then it is argued that these trust problems are further lessened if the firm undertakes commercial production on the side, with important consequences for its behavior: this is analyzed with a formal model of a two-product cooperative. These features of the political enterprise and industry are finally shown to account for a variety of observed facts of political life.

Optical Phase Locking techniques: an overview and a novel method based on Single Side Sub-Carrier modulation

A short overview on Optical Phase locking techniques and a detailed description of the Phase Locking technique based on Sub-Carriers modulation is presented. Furthermore, a novel Single Side Sub-Carrierbased Optical Phase Locked Loop (SS-SC-OPLL), with off the shelf optical components, is also presented and experimentally demonstrated. Our new method, based on continuous wave semiconductor lasers and optical single side sub-carrier modulation using QPSK LiNbO3 modulator, allows a practical implementation with better performance with respect to the previously proposed OPLL circuits, and permits an easy use in real time WDM signal coherent demodulation

Almgren-type monotonicity methods for the classification of behavior at corners of solutions to semilinear elliptic equations

A monotonicity approach to the study of the asymptotic behavior near corners of solutions to semilinear elliptic equations in domains with a conical boundary point is discussed. The presence of logarithms in the first term of the asymptotic expansion is excluded for boundary profiles sufficiently close to straight conical surfaces