The Michigan Community Corrections Act: Prison Diversion or Net-widening, a County Level Analysis

The Michigan Community Corrections Act, adopted on December 29, 1988, was clearly a legislative response to prison crowding. While many of its ardent supporters valued the Act for the implicit values associated with the reform-based reallocation of correctional resources, they extolled the Act for its capacity to reduce prison and jail crowding, and still provide for offender punishment in community-based settings. Supporters were so anxious for the bill to pass, after almost ten years in development, that in the later stages of the process the language of the supporters and practitioners began to change. Almost overnight, per the advice of the legislative spin doctors, the buzzwords changed from rehabilitation and humanness to new and more marketable descriptors such as community punishment and intermediate sanctions. As is the case in many public policy initiatives, the passage of the Act represented a consensus of different constituent groups with conflicting goals. The need for a response to prison crowding conditions other than prison expansion was so critical that it brought together a varied group of legislators, corrections officials and community corrections advocates.Master of Public AdministrationPublic AdministrationUniversity of Michigan-Flinthttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143487/1/Peters.pd

Visuomotor learning promotes visually evoked activity in the medial prefrontal cortex

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is necessary for executing many learned associations between stimuli and movement. It is unclear, however, how activity in the mPFC evolves across learning, and how this activity correlates with sensory stimuli and the learned movements they evoke. To address these questions, we record cortical activity with widefield calcium imaging while mice learned to associate a visual stimulus with a forelimb movement. After learning, the mPFC shows stimulus-evoked activity both during task performance and during passive viewing, when the stimulus evokes no action. This stimulus-evoked activity closely tracks behavioral performance across training, with both exhibiting a marked increase between days when mice first learn the task, followed by a steady increase with further training. Electrophysiological recordings localized this activity to the secondary motor and anterior cingulate cortex. We conclude that learning a visuomotor task promotes a route for visual information to reach the prefrontal cortex

Land Surface Emission Modeling to Support Physical Precipitation Retrievals

Land surface modeling and data assimilation can provide dynamic land surface state variables necessary to support physical precipitation retrieval algorithms over land. It is well-known that surface emission, particularly over the range of frequencies to be included in the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission (GPM), is sensitive to land surface states, including soil properties, vegetation type and greenness, soil moisture, surface temperature, and snow cover, density, and grain size. In order to investigate the robustness of both the land surface model states and the microwave emissivity and forward radiative transfer models, we have undertaken a multi-site investigation as part of the NASA Precipitation Measurement Missions (PMM) Land Surface Characterization. Working Group

A Comparison of Methods for a Priori Bias Correction in Soil Moisture Data Assimilation

Data assimilation is being increasingly used to merge remotely sensed land surface variables such as soil moisture, snow and skin temperature with estimates from land models. Its success, however, depends on unbiased model predictions and unbiased observations. Here, a suite of continental-scale, synthetic soil moisture assimilation experiments is used to compare two approaches that address typical biases in soil moisture prior to data assimilation: (i) parameter estimation to calibrate the land model to the climatology of the soil moisture observations, and (ii) scaling of the observations to the model s soil moisture climatology. To enable this research, an optimization infrastructure was added to the NASA Land Information System (LIS) that includes gradient-based optimization methods and global, heuristic search algorithms. The land model calibration eliminates the bias but does not necessarily result in more realistic model parameters. Nevertheless, the experiments confirm that model calibration yields assimilation estimates of surface and root zone soil moisture that are as skillful as those obtained through scaling of the observations to the model s climatology. Analysis of innovation diagnostics underlines the importance of addressing bias in soil moisture assimilation and confirms that both approaches adequately address the issue

Insight into Genotype-Phenotype Associations through eQTL Mapping in Multiple Cell Types in Health and Immune-Mediated Disease

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have transformed our understanding of the genetics of complex traits such as autoimmune diseases, but how risk variants contribute to pathogenesis remains largely unknown. Identifying genetic variants that affect gene expression (expression quantitative trait loci, or eQTLs) is crucial to addressing this. eQTLs vary between tissues and following in vitro cellular activation, but have not been examined in the context of human inflammatory diseases. We performed eQTL mapping in five primary immune cell types from patients with active inflammatory bowel disease (n = 91), anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibody-associated vasculitis (n = 46) and healthy controls (n = 43), revealing eQTLs present only in the context of active inflammatory disease. Moreover, we show that following treatment a proportion of these eQTLs disappear. Through joint analysis of expression data from multiple cell types, we reveal that previous estimates of eQTL immune cell-type specificity are likely to have been exaggerated. Finally, by analysing gene expression data from multiple cell types, we find eQTLs not previously identified by database mining at 34 inflammatory bowel disease-associated loci. In summary, this parallel eQTL analysis in multiple leucocyte subsets from patients with active disease provides new insights into the genetic basis of immune-mediated diseases.This research was funded by a Wellcome Trust Clinical PhD Programme Fellowship (JEP), the NIH-Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program (ACR), Wellcome Trust Grant 083650/Z/07/Z and MRC Grant MR/L19027/1 (KGCS), and the National Institute for Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre. KGCS is a National Institute for Health Research Senior Investigator. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Quantifying Uncertainties in Land Surface Microwave Emissivity Retrievals

Uncertainties in the retrievals of microwave land surface emissivities were quantified over two types of land surfaces: desert and tropical rainforest. Retrievals from satellite-based microwave imagers, including SSM/I, TMI and AMSR-E, were studied. Our results show that there are considerable differences between the retrievals from different sensors and from different groups over these two land surface types. In addition, the mean emissivity values show different spectral behavior across the frequencies. With the true emissivity assumed largely constant over both of the two sites throughout the study period, the differences are largely attributed to the systematic and random errors in the retrievals. Generally these retrievals tend to agree better at lower frequencies than at higher ones, with systematic differences ranging 1~4% (3~12 K) over desert and 1~7% (3~20 K) over rainforest. The random errors within each retrieval dataset are in the range of 0.5~2% (2~6 K). In particular, at 85.0/89.0 GHz, there are very large differences between the different retrieval datasets, and within each retrieval dataset itself. Further investigation reveals that these differences are mostly likely caused by rain/cloud contamination, which can lead to random errors up to 10~17 K under the most severe conditions

UV Spectropolarimetry with Polstar: Massive Star Binary Colliding Winds

The winds of massive stars are important for their direct impact on the interstellar medium, and for their influence on the final state of a star prior to it exploding as a supernova. However, the dynamics of these winds is understood primarily via their illumination from a single central source. The Doppler shift seen in resonance lines is a useful tool for inferring these dynamics, but the mapping from that Doppler shift to the radial distance from the source is ambiguous. Binary systems can reduce this ambiguity by providing a second light source at a known radius in the wind, seen from orbitally modulated directions. From the nature of the collision between the winds, a massive companion also provides unique additional information about wind momentum fluxes. Since massive stars are strong ultraviolet (UV) sources, and UV resonance line opacity in the wind is strong, UV instruments with a high resolution spectroscopic capability are essential for extracting this dynamical information. Polarimetric capability also helps to further resolve ambiguities in aspects of the wind geometry that are not axisymmetric about the line of sight, because of its unique access to scattering direction information. We review how the proposed MIDEX-scale mission Polstar can use UV spectropolarimetric observations to critically constrain the physics of colliding winds, and hence radiatively-driven winds in general. We propose a sample of 20 binary targets, capitalizing on this unique combination of illumination by companion starlight, and collision with a companion wind, to probe wind attributes over a range in wind strengths. Of particular interest is the hypothesis that the radial distribution of the wind acceleration is altered significantly, when the radiative transfer within the winds becomes optically thick to resonance scattering in multiple overlapping UV lines.Comment: 26 pages, 12 figures, Review in a topical collection series of Astrophysics and Space Sciences on the proposed Polstar satellite. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2111.1155

WARNING: Physics Envy May Be Hazardous To Your Wealth!

The quantitative aspirations of economists and financial analysts have for many years been based on the belief that it should be possible to build models of economic systems - and financial markets in particular - that are as predictive as those in physics. While this perspective has led to a number of important breakthroughs in economics, "physics envy" has also created a false sense of mathematical precision in some cases. We speculate on the origins of physics envy, and then describe an alternate perspective of economic behavior based on a new taxonomy of uncertainty. We illustrate the relevance of this taxonomy with two concrete examples: the classical harmonic oscillator with some new twists that make physics look more like economics, and a quantitative equity market-neutral strategy. We conclude by offering a new interpretation of tail events, proposing an "uncertainty checklist" with which our taxonomy can be implemented, and considering the role that quants played in the current financial crisis.Comment: v3 adds 2 reference

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2023/24:Nuclear hormone receptors

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2023/24 is the sixth in this series of biennial publications. The Concise Guide provides concise overviews, mostly in tabular format, of the key properties of approximately 1800 drug targets, and nearly 6000 interactions with about 3900 ligands. There is an emphasis on selective pharmacology (where available), plus links to the open access knowledgebase source of drug targets and their ligands (https://www.guidetopharmacology.org/), which provides more detailed views of target and ligand properties. Although the Concise Guide constitutes almost 500 pages, the material presented is substantially reduced compared to information and links presented on the website. It provides a permanent, citable, point-in-time record that will survive database updates. The full contents of this section can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bph.16179. Nuclear hormone receptors are one of the six major pharmacological targets into which the Guide is divided, with the others being: G protein-coupled receptors, catalytic receptors, enzymes and transporters. These are presented with nomenclature guidance and summary information on the best available pharmacological tools, alongside key references and suggestions for further reading. The landscape format of the Concise Guide is designed to facilitate comparison of related targets from material contemporary to mid-2023, and supersedes data presented in the 2021/22, 2019/20, 2017/18, 2015/16 and 2013/14 Concise Guides and previous Guides to Receptors and Channels. It is produced in close conjunction with the Nomenclature and Standards Committee of the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (NC-IUPHAR), therefore, providing official IUPHAR classification and nomenclature for human drug targets, where appropriate.</p