What Makes A Court Problem-Solving: Universal Performance Indicators for Problem-Solving Justice

This report identifies a set of universal performance indicators for specialized "problem-solving courts" and related experiments in problem-solving justice. Traditional performance indicators related to caseload and processing efficiency can assist court managers in monitoring case flow, assigning cases to judges, and adhering to budgetary and statutory due process guidelines. Yet, these indicators are ultimately limited in scope. Faced with the recent explosion of problem solving courts and other experiments seeking to address the underlying problems of litigants, victims, and communities, there is an urgent need to complement traditional court performance indicators with ones of a problem-solving nature. With funding from the State Justice Institute (SJI), the Center for Court Innovation conducted an investigation designed to achieve three purposes. The first was to establish a set of universal performance indicators against which to judge the effectiveness of specialized problem-solving courts, of which there are currently more than 3,000 nationwide. The second purpose was to develop performance indicators specific to each of the four major problem-solving court models: drug, mental health, domestic violence, and community courts. The third purpose was to assist traditional court managers by establishing a more limited set of indicators, designed to capture problem-solving activity throughout the courthouse, not only within a specialized court context

Combining hardware and software instrumentation to classify program executions

Several research efforts have studied ways to infer properties of software systems from program spectra gathered from the running systems, usually with software-level instrumentation. While these efforts appear to produce accurate classifications, detailed understanding of their costs and potential cost-benefit tradeoffs is lacking. In this work we present a hybrid instrumentation approach which uses hardware performance counters to gather program spectra at very low cost. This underlying data is further augmented with data captured by minimal amounts of software-level instrumentation. We also evaluate this hybrid approach by comparing it to other existing approaches. We conclude that these hybrid spectra can reliably distinguish failed executions from successful executions at a fraction of the runtime overhead cost of using software-based execution data

Satanic but not Satan: Signs of the Devilish in Contemporary Cinema

Scholars have paid much attention to identifying and analyzing Jesus and Christ-type characters in film. The parallel cases for Satan and satanic characters have been less studied. Some attention has been paid to examining Satan/Lucifer/the Devil as a character (akin to movies about Jesus), but I could find no systematic typology of satanic traits, that would parallel the well-developed Christ-typologies. This article examines six films to begin the process of describing what makes a character satanic without being Satan

& surface

I synthesize nature, night clubs, computer screens and sexual fantasies into an experience that interrupts desire and longing. Fractured elements culled from pornographic magazines, mediation from digital media, and surface tension enable optical and phenomenological effects that make the visible and invisible co-exist together. Moire patterns, strobing lights, iridescent paint, prismatic and flickering bits of visual information pull the picture plane apart. A dialectic process that cannibalizes all content and material, sparing nothing from revision. The nature of material, imbued with it’s own history and beauty is transformed, yielding a surface that holds an image and after-image all at once - to be both explicit in it’s material nature, confusingly layered, and pictorially problematic. I collage these disparate sources and elements together, seeking a sense of beauty that aims to be both sublime and phenomenological

The Book of Eli

This is a review of The Book of Eli (2010)

Satanic Humans: Using Satanic Tropes To Guide And Misguide The Audience

One of the differences between Christ and Satan is that the former is clearly described in the Gospels, but the latter is not. Rather, a large number of different stories grew up around the character of Satan over the last 2000 years. Authors and artists can dip into the pool of Satan myths and find different versions of the character they can adapt for their own purposes. I am interested in identifying what satanic symbols have become popular in Hollywood films, so in 2013 I wrote an essay that analyzed several films featuring super-human characters and identified several traits beyond “evilness” that seem to come out of the traditions about Satan. This essay continues this analysis by examining five films featuring purely human characters who exhibit a similar set of satanic traits. In the entirely mundane realm, these traits have been diminished and rationalized, but they are still evident. The other noteworthy difference from the super-hero films is that those films include a Christ-figure who defeats the satanic villains. These films exhibit a similarly conservative theological position, especially evident in those films where the satanic villain escapes: one cannot help wonder whether a Christ-figure would have prevented the antagonist’s victory

Feedback driven adaptive combinatorial testing

The configuration spaces of modern software systems are too large to test exhaustively. Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) approaches, such as covering arrays, systematically sample the configuration space and test only the selected configurations. The basic justification for CIT approaches is that they can cost-effectively exercise all system behaviors caused by the settings of t or fewer options. We conjecture, however, that in practice many such behaviors are not actually tested because of masking effects – failures that perturb execution so as to prevent some behaviors from being exercised. In this work we present a feedback-driven, adaptive, combinatorial testing approach aimed at detecting and working around masking effects. At each iteration we detect potential masking effects, heuristically isolate their likely causes, and then generate new covering arrays that allow previously masked combinations to be tested in the subsequent iteration. We empirically assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach on two large widely used open source software systems. Our results suggest that masking effects do exist and that our approach provides a promising and efficient way to work around them