Pathways into services for offenders with intellectual disabilities : childhood experience, diagnostic information and offence variables

The patterns and pathways into intellectual disability (ID) offender services were studied through case file review for 477 participants referred in one calendar year to community generic, community forensic, and low, medium, and maximum secure services. Data were gathered on referral source, demographic information, index behavior, prior problem behaviors, diagnostic information, and abuse or deprivation. Community referrers tended to refer to community services and secure service referrers to secure services. Physical and verbal violence were the most frequent index behaviors, whereas contact sexual offenses were more prominent in maximum security. Age at first incident varied with security, with the youngest in maximum secure services. Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or conduct disorder was the most frequently recorded diagnosis, and severe deprivation was the most frequent adverse developmental experience. Fire starting, theft, and road traffic offenses did not feature prominently. Generic community services accepted a number of referrals with forensic-type behavior and had higher proportions of both women and people with moderate or severe ID

Investigating Gravity Wave Characteristics and Mesospheric Temperature Variability over Antarctica

第2回極域科学シンポジウム/第35回極域宙空圏シンポジウム 11月14日（月） 国立極地研究所 2階大会議

Law, politics and the governance of English and Scottish joint-stock companies 1600-1850

This article examines the impact of law on corporate governance by means of a case study of joint-stock enterprise in England and Scotland before 1850. Based on a dataset of over 450 company constitutions together with qualitative information on governance practice, it finds little evidence to support the hypothesis that common-law regimes such as England were more supportive of economic growth than civil-law jurisdictions such as Scotland: indeed, levels of shareholder protection were slightly stronger in the civil-law zone. Other factors, such as local political institutions, played a bigger role in shaping organisational forms and business practice

Force-Extension Relations for Polymers with Sliding Links

Topological entanglements in polymers are mimicked by sliding rings (slip-links) which enforce pair contacts between monomers. We study the force-extension curve for linear polymers in which slip-links create additional loops of variable size. For a single loop in a phantom chain, we obtain exact expressions for the average end-to-end separation: The linear response to a small force is related to the properties of the unstressed chain, while for a large force the polymer backbone can be treated as a sequence of Pincus--de Gennes blobs, the constraint effecting only a single blob. Generalizing this picture, scaling arguments are used to include self-avoiding effects.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures; accepted to Phys. Rev. E (Brief Report

Cladoceran birth and death rates estimates

I. Birth and death rates of natural cladoceran populations cannot be measured directly. Estimates of these population parameters must be calculated using methods that make assumptions about the form of population growth. These methods generally assume that the population has a stable age distribution. 2. To assess the effect of variable age distributions, we tested six egg ratio methods for estimating birth and death rates with data from thirty-seven laboratory populations of Daphnia pulicaria. The populations were grown under constant conditions, but the initial age distributions and egg ratios of the populations varied. Actual death rates were virtually zero, so the difference between the estimated and actual death rates measured the error in both birth and death rate estimates. 3. The results demonstrate that unstable population structures may produce large errors in the birth and death rates estimated by any of these methods. Among the methods tested, Taylor and Slatkin's formula and Paloheimo's formula were most reliable for the experimental data. 4. Further analyses of three of the methods were made using computer simulations of growth of age-structured populations with initially unstable age distributions. These analyses show that the time interval between sampling strongly influences the reliability of birth and death rate estimates. At a sampling interval of 2.5 days (equal to the duration of the egg stage), Paloheimo's formula was most accurate. At longer intervals (7.5–10 days), Taylor and Slatkin's formula which includes information on population structure was most accurate

The Appearance and Disappearance of Ship Tracks on Large Spatial Scales

The 1-km advanced very high resolution radiometer observations from the morning, NOAA-12, and afternoon, NOAA-11, satellite passes over the coast of California during June 1994 are used to determine the altitudes, visible optical depths, and cloud droplet effective radii for low-level clouds. Comparisons are made between the properties of clouds within 50 km of ship tracks and those farther than 200 km from the tracks in order to deduce the conditions that are conducive to the appearance of ship tracks in satellite images. The results indicate that the low-level clouds must be sufficiently close to the surface for ship tracks to form. Ship tracks rarely appear in low-level clouds having altitudes greater than 1 km. The distributions of visible optical depths and cloud droplet effective radii for ambient clouds in which ship tracks are embedded are the same as those for clouds without ship tracks. Cloud droplet sizes and liquid water paths for low-level clouds do not constrain the appearance of ship tracks in the imagery. The sensitivity of ship tracks to cloud altitude appears to explain why the majority of ship tracks observed from satellites off the coast of California are found south of 358N. A small rise in the height of low-level clouds appears to explain why numerous ship tracks appeared on one day in a particular region but disappeared on the next, even though the altitudes of the low-level clouds were generally less than 1 km and the cloud cover was the same for both days. In addition, ship tracks are frequent when lowlevel clouds at altitudes below 1 km are extensive and completely cover large areas. The frequency of imagery pixels overcast by clouds with altitudes below 1 km is greater in the morning than in the afternoon and explains why more ship tracks are observed in the morning than in the afternoon. If the occurrence of ship tracks in satellite imagery data depends on the coupling of the clouds to the underlying boundary layer, then cloud-top altitude and the area of complete cloud cover by low-level clouds may be useful indices for this coupling.This work was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research and by the National Science Foundation through the Center for Clouds, Chemistry and Climate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, an NSF Science and Technology Center

Algorithm engineering for optimal alignment of protein structure distance matrices

Protein structural alignment is an important problem in computational biology. In this paper, we present first successes on provably optimal pairwise alignment of protein inter-residue distance matrices, using the popular Dali scoring function. We introduce the structural alignment problem formally, which enables us to express a variety of scoring functions used in previous work as special cases in a unified framework. Further, we propose the first mathematical model for computing optimal structural alignments based on dense inter-residue distance matrices. We therefore reformulate the problem as a special graph problem and give a tight integer linear programming model. We then present algorithm engineering techniques to handle the huge integer linear programs of real-life distance matrix alignment problems. Applying these techniques, we can compute provably optimal Dali alignments for the very first time

Investigating an unusually large 28-day oscillation in mesospheric temperature over Antarctica using ground-based and satellite measurements

The Utah State University (USU) Advanced Mesospheric Temperature Mapper (AMTM) was deployed at the Amundsen‐Scott South Pole Station in 2010 to measure OH temperature at ~87 km as part of an international network to study the mesospheric dynamics over Antarctica. During the austral winter of 2014, an unusually large amplitude ~28‐day oscillation in mesospheric temperature was observed for ~100 days from the South Pole Station. This study investigates the characteristics and global structure of this exceptional planetary‐scale wave event utilizing ground‐based mesospheric OH temperature measurements from two Antarctic stations (South Pole and Rothera) together with satellite temperature measurements from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) on the Aura satellite, and the Solar Occultation For Ice Experiment (SOFIE) on the Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) satellite. Our analyses have revealed that this large oscillation is a winter time, high latitude phenomenon, exhibiting a coherent zonal wave #1 structure below 80 km altitude. At higher altitudes, the wave was confined in longitude between 180‐360°E. The amplitude of this oscillation reached ~15 K at 85 km and it was observed to grow with altitude as it extended from the stratosphere into the lower thermosphere in the southern hemisphere. The satellite data further established the existence of this oscillation in the northern hemisphere during the boreal winter time. The main characteristics and global structure of this event as observed in temperature are consistent with the predicted 28‐day Rossby Wave (1,4) mode

Measurement of the 6s - 7p transition probabilities in atomic cesium and a revised value for the weak charge Q_W

We have measured the 6s - 7p_{1/2,3/2} transition probabilities in atomic cesium using a direct absorption technique. We use our result plus other previously measured transition rates to derive an accurate value of the vector transition polarizability \beta and, consequently, re-evaluate the weak charge Q_W. Our derived value Q_W=-72.65(49) agrees with the prediction of the standard model to within one standard deviation.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure