Volume renormalization for complete Einstein--K\"ahler metrics

For a strictly pseudoconvex domain in a complex manifold we define a renormalized volume with respect to the approximately Einstein complete K\"ahler metric of Fefferman. We compute the conformal anomaly in complex dimension two and apply the result to derive a renormalized Chern--Gauss--Bonnet formula. Relations between renormalized volume and the CR $Q$-curvature are also investigated.Comment: Minor corrections to the statements and proofs of the main theorem and corollary. Included the example of the Bergman metric on the ball. To appear in Differential Geometry and Its Application

On Nurowski's conformal structure associated to a generic rank two distribution in dimension five

For a generic distribution of rank two on a manifold $M$ of dimension five, we introduce the notion of a generalized contact form. To such a form we associate a generalized Reeb field and a partial connection. From these data, we explicitly constructed a pseudo--Riemannian metric on $M$ of split signature. We prove that a change of the generalized contact form only leads to a conformal rescaling of this metric, so the corresponding conformal class is intrinsic to the distribution. In the second part of the article, we relate this conformal class to the canonical Cartan connection associated to the distribution. This is used to prove that it coincides with the conformal class constructed by Nurowski.Comment: AMSLaTeX, 23 page

They sacrificed...for us, we need to give them a helping hand now : Local reasoning in Combat Veteran\u27s Court

This study focuses on local reasoning in Combat Veteran’s Court in terms of its combat veteran clientele. The perceived nature of the client-defendants as victim/offenders who have paid a great price to protect us all and whose combat service is directly related to their criminality significantly alters the moral calculus in the court. This altered moral calculus finds its way into the institutional encounters ad hoc, in the local relevancies, particulars, and contingencies of the case-at-hand, and in the prospects for ‘what can happen’, given what has already occurred. Combat Veteran’s Court is working out the fundamental terms of moral identity ad hoc, in the circumstantiality of the case as it presents itself now. This work moves social control away from the punitive approach of traditional criminal courts, or the abstinence-or-punishment approach of most other problem-solving courts, and toward an approach that is unique to combat veterans. The court’s accomplishment of its unique operation is an analyzable achievement, and Garfinkel’s ‘unique adequacy requirement of methods’ is fleshed out in relation to the materials under investigation

Lawyers’ Work in the Menendez Brothers Murder Trial

This research addresses the interactional work by which lawyers interrogate witnesses at trial. In particular, the study examines some videotaped segments of interrogation interchange in the first Menendez brothers\u27 murder trial and analyzes lawyer\u27s work in attempting the impeachment of an adverse witness. The paper finds a lived orderliness of the courtroom that resides in the locally organized material detail of real-time interrogation interchange and practices

Religion and Party Realignment: Are Catholics Realigning into the Republican Party?

This thesis examines the influence of religion on party realignment in the United States focusing on Catholic voting behavior. A statistical analysis utilizing bivariate analysis and logistical regressions examines if religion and party realignment is an ecumenical trend expanding beyond Evangelicals to Catholics. It measures scientifically the party trends of the Catholic voter. With data pooled from the National Election Studies from 1960 to 2004, it tests the hypothesis that church attending Catholics are realigning over time into the Republican Party both in vote choice and party identification, because of their pro-life position on abortion. The analysis shows that church attending Catholics have dealigned from the Democratic Party over time because of their pro-life position on abortion. The thesis is a model for examining the religion and party realignment question for other traditional Democratic religious denominations such as African-American Evangelicals and Jews

Doing Justice and Demonstrating Fairness in Small Claims Arbitration (Japanese Translation)

This paper examines the intersection of technical law and common sense reasoning in small claims arbitration, a distinctive and increasingly prevalent kind of legal work. Following (Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology\u27s program: Working out Durkheim\u27s aphorism, 2002), the study explores the reform of technical reason and what a just outcome means by focusing on the arbitration of actual small claims cases and how technical-legal and non-technical/informal resources are brought into alignment to produce dispute resolution. The arbitrator elicits discussions that establish consensual and commonplace formulations of the case, formulations that foreshadow its disposition as technical matters of law. The research demonstrates how formal structures of equity, evenhandedness, and decisions without bias have their production in vivo, and how a just and fair course becomes a just outcome

Tough Love: Nurturing and Coercing Responsibility and Recovery in California Drug Courts

This article considers the activities of the participants in California drug treatment courts and their differences from more traditional criminal courts. The article focuses on how drug court judges and defendants interact to construct the defendant as a personally responsible and rehabilitatively changed recovering person, or, alternatively, as an essentially addicted and deficient self. The research also explores broader links between the ways drug courts operate and the potential complications involved in mixing coerced treatment and voluntary participation. The study finds that certain kinds of defendants may be discovered to be unsuitable for participation in the program; that clients negotiate with the judge over the nature of their (numerous) infractions; and that clients proceeding through the program may be terminated, move backward in treatment stages, have their treatment extended, or be advanced forward and on to the next stage of treatment. The article argues that, while drug court provides offenders the chance to avoid imprisonment and permanent stigmatization by participating in the discourse of aid and treatment, offenders in drug court also submit to a combination of penal and therapeutic aims. In practice, this means that judges are likely to exercise enhanced supervision, monitoring, and control over their lives because they are being rehabilitated

Development of a New Data Tool for Computing Launch and Landing Availability with Respect to Surface Weather

The Marshall Space Flight Center Natural Environments Branch has a long history of expertise in the modeling and computation of statistical launch availabilities with respect to weather conditions. Their existing data analysis product, the Atmospheric Parametric Risk Assessment (APRA) tool, computes launch availability given an input set of vehicle hardware and/or operational weather constraints by calculating the climatological probability of exceeding the specified constraint limits, APRA has been used extensively to provide the Space Shuttle program the ability to estimate impacts that various proposed design modifications would have to overall launch availability. The model accounts for both seasonal and diurnal variability at a single geographic location and provides output probabilities for a single arbitrary launch attempt. Recently, the Shuttle program has shown interest in having additional capabilities added to the APRA model, including analysis of humidity parameters, inclusion of landing site weather to produce landing availability, and concurrent analysis of multiple sites, to assist in operational landing site selection. In addition, the Constellation program has also expressed interest in the APRA tool, and has requested several additional capabilities to address some Constellation-specific issues, both in the specification and verification of design requirements and in the development of operations concepts. The combined scope of the requested capability enhancements suggests an evolution of the model beyond a simple revision process. Development has begun for a new data analysis tool that will satisfy the requests of both programs. This new tool, Probabilities of Atmospheric Conditions and Environmental Risk (PACER), will provide greater flexibility and significantly enhanced functionality compared to the currently existing tool

Latent rank change detection for analysis of splice-junction microarrays with nonlinear effects

Alternative splicing of gene transcripts greatly expands the functional capacity of the genome, and certain splice isoforms may indicate specific disease states such as cancer. Splice junction microarrays interrogate thousands of splice junctions, but data analysis is difficult and error prone because of the increased complexity compared to differential gene expression analysis. We present Rank Change Detection (RCD) as a method to identify differential splicing events based upon a straightforward probabilistic model comparing the over- or underrepresentation of two or more competing isoforms. RCD has advantages over commonly used methods because it is robust to false positive errors due to nonlinear trends in microarray measurements. Further, RCD does not depend on prior knowledge of splice isoforms, yet it takes advantage of the inherent structure of mutually exclusive junctions, and it is conceptually generalizable to other types of splicing arrays or RNA-Seq. RCD specifically identifies the biologically important cases when a splice junction becomes more or less prevalent compared to other mutually exclusive junctions. The example data is from different cell lines of glioblastoma tumors assayed with Agilent microarrays.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS389 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org