State Sentencing Guidelines: Profiles and Continuum

Describes twenty-one state sentencing commissions; highlights key attributes of each state's sentencing guidelines and the composition of each commission; and compares guideline systems along a continuum from "more voluntary" to "more mandatory.

The Robertson v. Princeton Case: Too Important to Be Left to the Lawyers

Offers comments from eleven contributors on the Robertson family's donor rights suit against the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs for violation of donor intent. Explores its effects on and implications for the nonprofit sector

Polarisation structuring of broadband light

Spatial structuring of the intensity, phase and polarisation of light is useful in a wide variety of modern applications, from microscopy to optical communications. This shaping is most commonly achieved using liquid crystal spatial light modulators (LC-SLMs). However, the inherent chromatic dispersion of LC-SLMs when used as diffractive elements presents a challenge to the extension of such techniques from monochromatic to broadband light. In this work we demonstrate a method of generating broadband vector beams with dynamically tunable intensity, phase and polarisation over a bandwidth of 100 nm. We use our system to generate radially and azimuthally polarised vector vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum, and beams whose polarisation states span the majority of the Poincaré sphere. We characterise these broadband vector beams using spatially and spectrally resolved Stokes measurements, and detail the technical and fundamental limitations of our technique, including beam generation fidelity and efficiency. The broadband vector beam shaper that we demonstrate here may find use in applications such as ultrafast beam shaping and white light microscopy

Orienting Graphs to Optimize Reachability

The paper focuses on two problems: (i) how to orient the edges of an undirected graph in order to maximize the number of ordered vertex pairs (x,y) such that there is a directed path from x to y, and (ii) how to orient the edges so as to minimize the number of such pairs. The paper describes a quadratic-time algorithm for the first problem, and a proof that the second problem is NP-hard to approximate within some constant 1+epsilon > 1. The latter proof also shows that the second problem is equivalent to ``comparability graph completion''; neither problem was previously known to be NP-hard

Health benefits and control costs of tightening particulate matter emissions standards for coal power plants - The case of Northeast Brazil.

Exposure to ambient particulate matter (PM) caused an estimated 4.2 million deaths worldwide in 2015. However, PM emission standards for power plants vary widely. To explore if the current levels of these standards are sufficiently stringent in a simple cost-benefit framework, we compared the health benefits (avoided monetized health costs) with the control costs of tightening PM emission standards for coal-fired power plants in Northeast (NE) Brazil, where ambient PM concentrations are below World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. We considered three Brazilian PM10 (PMx refers to PM with a diameter under x micrometers) emission standards and a stricter U.S. EPA standard for recent power plants. Our integrated methodology simulates hourly electricity grid dispatch from utility-scale power plants, disperses the resulting PM2.5, and estimates selected human health impacts from PM2.5 exposure using the latest integrated exposure-response model. Since the emissions inventories required to model secondary PM are not available in our study area, we modeled only primary PM so our benefit estimates are conservative. We found that tightening existing PM10 emission standards yields health benefits that are over 60 times greater than emissions control costs in all the scenarios we considered. The monetary value of avoided hospital admissions alone is at least four times as large as the corresponding control costs. These results provide strong arguments for considering tightening PM emission standards for coal-fired power plants worldwide, including in regions that meet WHO guidelines and in developing countries