Stops and Stares: Street Stops, Surveillance, and Race in the New Policing

The use of proactive tactics to disrupt criminal activities, such as Terry street stops and concentrated misdemeanor arrests, are essential to the “new policing.” This model applies complex metrics, strong management, and aggressive enforcement and surveillance to focus policing on high crime risk persons and places. The tactics endemic to the “new policing” gave rise in the 1990s to popular, legal, political and social science concerns about disparate treatment of minority groups in their everyday encounters with law enforcement. Empirical evidence showed that minorities were indeed stopped and arrested more frequently than similarly situated whites, even when controlling for local social and crime conditions. In this article, we examine racial disparities under a unique configuration of the street stop prong of the “new policing” – the inclusion of non-contact observations (or surveillances) in the field interrogation (or investigative stop) activity of Boston Police Department officers. We show that Boston Police officers focus significant portions of their field investigation activity in two areas: suspected and actual gang members, and the city’s high crime areas. Minority neighborhoods experience higher levels of field interrogation and surveillance activity net of crime and other social factors. Relative to white suspects, Black suspects are more likely to be observed, interrogated, and frisked or searched controlling for gang membership and prior arrest history. Moreover, relative to their black counterparts, white police officers conduct high numbers of field investigations and are more likely to frisk/search subjects of all races. We distinguish between preference-based and statistical discrimination by comparing stops by officer-suspect racial pairs. If officer activity is independent of officer race, we would infer that disproportionate stops of minorities reflect statistical discrimination. We show instead that officers seem more likely to investigate and frisk or search a minority suspect if officer and suspect race differ. We locate these results in the broader tensions of racial profiling that pose recurring social and constitutional concerns in the “new policing.”

An Analysis of Race and Ethnicity Patterns in Boston Police Department Field Interrogation, Observation, Frisk, and/or Search Reports

The report, authored by researchers from Columbia, Rutgers and the University of Massachusetts, analyzed 200,000+ encounters between BPD officers and civilians from 2007–2010. It is intended to provide a factual basis to assess the implementation of proactive policing in Boston and how it affects Boston's diverse neighborhoods. It found racial disparities in the Boston Police Department's stop-and-frisks that could not be explained by crime or other non-race factors. Blacks during that period were the subjects of 63.3% of police-civilian encounters, although less than a quarter of the city's population is Black.

Synchronization of a WDM Packet-Switched Slotted Ring

In this paper, we present two different strategies of slot synchronization in wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) packet-switched slotted-ring networks. Emphasis is given to the architecture behind the WDM Optical Network Demonstrator over Rings (WONDER) project, which is based on tunable transmitters and fixed receivers. The WONDER experimental prototype is currently being developed at the laboratories of Politecnico di Torino. In the former strategy, a slotsynchronization signal is transmitted by the master station on a dedicated control wavelength; in the latter, slave nodes achieve slot synchronization aligning on data packets that are received from the master. The performance of both synchronization strategies, particularly in terms of packet-collision probability, was evaluated by simulation. The technique based on transmitting a timing signal on a dedicated control wavelength achieves better performance, although it is more expensive due to the need for an additional wavelength. However, the technique based on aligning data packets that are received from the master, despite attaining lower timing stability, still deserves further study, particularly if limiting the number of wavelengths and receivers is a major requirement. Some experimental results, which were measured on the WONDER prototype, are also shown. Measurement results, together with theoretical findings, demonstrate the good synchronization performance of the prototype

Cost-Efficient Data Backup for Data Center Networks against {\epsilon}-Time Early Warning Disaster

Data backup in data center networks (DCNs) is critical to minimize the data loss under disaster. This paper considers the cost-efficient data backup for DCNs against a disaster with $\varepsilon$ early warning time. Given geo-distributed DCNs and such a $\varepsilon$-time early warning disaster, we investigate the issue of how to back up the data in DCN nodes under risk to other safe DCN nodes within the $\varepsilon$ early warning time constraint, which is significant because it is an emergency data protection scheme against a predictable disaster and also help DCN operators to build a complete backup scheme, i.e., regular backup and emergency backup. Specifically, an Integer Linear Program (ILP)-based theoretical framework is proposed to identify the optimal selections of backup DCN nodes and data transmission paths, such that the overall data backup cost is minimized. Extensive numerical results are also provided to illustrate the proposed framework for DCN data backup

Power consumption evaluation of circuit-switched versus packet-switched optical backbone networks

While telecommunication networks have historically been dominated by a circuit-switched paradigm, the last decades have seen a clear trend towards packet-switched networks. In this paper we evaluate how both paradigms perform in optical backbone networks from a power consumption point of view, and whether the general agreement of circuit switching being more power-efficient holds. We consider artificially generated topologies of various sizes, mesh degrees and not yet previously explored in this context transport linerates. We cross-validate our findings with a number of realistic topologies. Our results show that, as a generalization, packet switching can become preferable when the traffic demands are lower than half the transport linerate. We find that an increase in the network node count does not consistently increase the energy savings of circuit switching over packet switching, but is heavily influenced by the mesh degree and (to a minor extent) by the average link length

Multi-stage switching networks for waveguide optical technology

Multi-stage switching is very suitable for implementing interconnection systems operating at different physical scale (from rack-to-rack to on-chip) and with several technologies (either photonics or electronics). Several multistage architectures have been proposed to design these systems in a highly modular and efficient way. Since these proposals are general and applicable to a vast range of technologies, optimizations are possible once a specific technology is considered. In this work, we aim at optimizing multi-stage banyan and EGS architectures in case of optical waveguide technology implementation. We propose a method to decrease the number of waveguide crossovers, while avoiding an excessive increase of waveguide bends

An innovative technique for the investigation of the 4-fold forbidden beta-decay of 50^{50}V

For the first time a Vanadium-based crystal was operated as cryogenic particle detector. The scintillating low temperature calorimetric technique was used for the characterization of a 22 g YVO$_4$ crystal aiming at the investigation of the 4-fold forbidden non-unique $\beta^-$ decay of $^{50}$V. The excellent bolometric performance of the compound together with high light output of the crystal makes it an outstanding technique for the study of such elusive rate process. The internal radioactive contaminations of the crystal are also investigated showing that an improvement on the current status of material selection and purification are needed, $^{235/238}$U and $^{232}$Th are measured at the level of 28 mBq/kg, 1.3 Bq/kg and 28 mBq/kg, respectively. In this work, we also discuss a future upgrade of the experimental set-up which may pave the road for the detection of the rare $^{50}$V $\beta^-$ decay

RES-NOVA: A new neutrino observatory based on archaeological lead

We propose the RES-NOVA project which will hunt neutrinos from core-collapse supernovae (SN) via coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE$\nu$NS) using an array of archaeological lead (Pb) based cryogenic detectors. The high CE$\nu$NS cross-section on Pb and the ultra-high radiopurity of archaeological Pb enable the operation of a high statistics experiment equally sensitive to all neutrino flavors with reduced detector dimensions in comparison with existing Neutrino Observatories, and easy scalability to larger detector volumes. RES-NOVA is planned to operate according to three phases with increasing detector volumes: (60 cm)$^3$, (140 cm)$^3$, and ultimately 15$\times$(140 cm)$^3$. It will be sensitive to SN bursts up to Andromeda with 5$\sigma$ sensitivity with already existing technologies and will have excellent energy resolution with $1$ keV threshold. Within our Galaxy, it will be possible to discriminate core-collapse SNe from black hole forming collapses with no ambiguity even in the first phase of RES-NOVA. The average neutrino energy of all flavors, the SN neutrino light curve, and the total energy emitted in neutrinos can potentially be constrained with a precision of few $\%$ in the final detector phase. RES-NOVA will be sensitive to flavor-blind neutrinos from the diffuse SN neutrino background with an exposure of $620$ ton $\cdot$ y. The proposed RES-NOVA project has the potential to lay down the foundations for a new generation of neutrino telescopes, while relying on a very simple technological setu

Cryogenic light detectors with enhanced performance for rare events physics

We have developed and tested a new way of coupling bolometric light detectors to scintillating crystal bolometers based upon simply resting the light detector on the crystal surface, held in position only by gravity. This straightforward mounting results in three important improvements: (1) it decreases the amount of non-active materials needed to assemble the detector, (2) it substantially increases the light collection efficiency by minimizing the light losses induced by the mounting structure, and (3) it enhances the thermal signal induced in the light detector thanks to the extremely weak thermal link to the thermal bath. We tested this new technique with a 16 cm$^2$ Ge light detector with thermistor readout sitting on the surface of a large TeO$_2$ bolometer. The light collection efficiency was increased by greater than 50\% compared to previously tested alternative mountings. We obtained a baseline energy resolution on the light detector of 20~eV RMS that, together with increased light collection, enabled us to obtain the best $\alpha$ vs $\beta/\gamma$ discrimination ever obtained with massive TeO$_2$ crystals. At the same time we achieved rise and decay times of 0.8 and 1.6 ms, respectively. This superb performance meets all of the requirements for the CUPID (CUORE Upgrade with Particle IDentification) experiment, which is a 1-ton scintillating bolometer follow up to CUORE.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Energy-Efficient VoD content delivery and replication in integrated metro/access networks

Today's growth in the demand for access bandwidth is driven by the success of the Video-on-Demand (VoD) bandwidth-consuming service. At the current pace at which network operators increase the end users' access bandwidth, and with the current network infrastructure, a large amount of video traffic is expected to flood the core/metro segments of the network in the near future, with the consequent risk of congestion and network disruption. There is a growing body of research studying the migration of content towards the users. Further, the current trend towards the integration of metro and access segments of the network makes it possible to deploy Metro Servers (MSes) that may serve video content directly from the novel integrated metro/access segment to keep the VoD traffic as local as possible. This paper investigates a potential risk of this solution, which is the increase in the overall network energy consumption. First, we identify a detailed power model for network equipment and MSes, accounting for fixed and load-proportional contributions. Then, we define a novel strategy for controlling whether to switch MSes and network interfaces on and off so as to strike a balance between the energy consumption for content transport through the network and the energy consumption for processing and storage in the MSes. By means of simulations and taking into account real values for the equipment power consumption, we show that our strategy is effective in providing the least energy consumption for any given traffic load