Legal Complaint Against Dole

This legal complaint was filed by the Conrad & Scherer law firm on April 28, 2009 in California state court in Los Angeles against the Dole Corporation. The suit alleges that the company made illegal payments to right-wing paramilitary groups to intimidate workers from joining unions. The plaintiffs are 51 men allegedly murder by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) for union organizing or attempting to prevent Dole from taking their land. The complaint contains description of the circumstances under which each of the plaintiffs was murdered

Effects of n-butanol and filipin on membrane permeability of developing wheat endosperm with different sterol phenotypes.

Sterols are considered structural components of higher plant membranes on the basis of their presence in membrane-containing subcellular fractions [1—3], their effect on plant membrane permeability when added exogenously [4,5] and the sensitivity of plant cells to the polyene antibiotic filipin [6—8], which action is known to depend on the presence of sterols in the membrane (see [8]). Our recent finding of a gene that controls the free sterol level of developing wheat endosperm [9—11 ] allows to investígate whether endogenous sterol modifies membrane permeability in the same way as that added externally. We report here on the effect of «-butanol and filipin on the leakage properties of developing wheat endosperms with different genetically determined free sterol levéis

Shannon Information and Kolmogorov Complexity

We compare the elementary theories of Shannon information and Kolmogorov complexity, the extent to which they have a common purpose, and where they are fundamentally different. We discuss and relate the basic notions of both theories: Shannon entropy versus Kolmogorov complexity, the relation of both to universal coding, Shannon mutual information versus Kolmogorov (`algorithmic') mutual information, probabilistic sufficient statistic versus algorithmic sufficient statistic (related to lossy compression in the Shannon theory versus meaningful information in the Kolmogorov theory), and rate distortion theory versus Kolmogorov's structure function. Part of the material has appeared in print before, scattered through various publications, but this is the first comprehensive systematic comparison. The last mentioned relations are new.Comment: Survey, LaTeX 54 pages, 3 figures, Submitted to IEEE Trans Information Theor

The Wandering Officer

“Wandering officers” are law-enforcement officers fired by one department, sometimes for serious misconduct, who then find work at another agency. Policing experts hold disparate views about the extent and character of the wandering-officer phenomenon. Some insist that wandering officers are everywhere—possibly increasingly so—and that they’re dangerous. Others, however, maintain that critics cherry-pick rare and egregious anecdotes that distort broader realities. In the absence of systematic data, we simply do not know how common wandering officers are or how much of a threat they pose, nor can we know whether and how to address the issue through policy reform. In this Article, we conduct the first systematic investigation of wandering officers and possibly the largest quantitative study of police misconduct of any kind. We introduce a novel data set of all 98,000 full-time law-enforcement officers employed by almost 500 different agencies in the State of Florida over a thirty-year period. We report three principal findings. First, in any given year during our study, an average of just under 1,100 officers who were previously fired—three percent of all officers in the State—worked for Florida agencies. Second, officers who were fired from their last job seem to face difficulty finding work. When they do, it takes them a long time, and they tend to move to smaller agencies with fewer resources in areas with slightly larger communities of color. Interestingly, though, this pattern does not hold for officers who were fired earlier in their careers. Third, wandering officers are more likely than both officers hired as rookies and those hired as veterans who have never been fired to be fired from their next job or to receive a complaint for a “moral character violation.” Although we cannot determine the precise reasons for the firings, these results suggest that wandering officers may pose serious risks, particularly given how difficult it is to fire a police officer. We consider several plausible explanations for why departments nonetheless hire wandering officers and suggest potential policy responses to each

Decriminalizing Delinquency: The Effect of Raising the Age of Majority on Juvenile Recidivism

In the last decade, a number of states have expanded the jurisdiction of their juvenile courts by increasing the maximum age to 18. Proponents argue that these expansions reduce crime by increasing access to the beneficial features of the juvenile justice system. Critics counter that the expansions risk increasing crime by reducing deterrence. In 2010, Illinois raised the maximum age for juvenile court for offenders who commit a misdemeanor. By examining the effect of this law on juvenile offenders in Chicago, this paper provides the first empirical estimates of the consequences of recent legislative activity to raise the age of criminal majority. Applying a difference-in-differences design with multiple control groups, we find little evidence of an effect. Our results suggest that—contrary to the expectations of both advocates and opponents— increasing the maximum age for juvenile court does not affect juvenile recidivism

Unidirectional decomposition method for obtaining exact localized waves solutions totally free of backward components

In this paper we use a unidirectional decomposition capable of furnishing localized wave pulses, with luminal and superluminal peak velocities, in exact form and totally free of backward components, which have been a chronic problem for such wave solutions. This decomposition is powerful enough for yielding not only ideal nondiffracting pulses but also their finite energy versions still in exact analytical closed form. Another advantage of the present approach is that, since the backward spectral components are absent, the frequency spectra of the pulses do not need to possess ultra-widebands, as it is required by the usual localized waves (LWs) solutions obtained by other methods. Finally, the present results bring the LW theory nearer to the real experimental possibilities of usual laboratories.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figure