The ‘nightwatchman’ state is being rolled back: Do the powerful still need the police?

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has launched radical reforms of the police service, already the hardest hit of all public services. Why have the police plunged in political clout sufficiently to make the deep transformation in their resources and powers possible? The bottom line, writes Robert Reiner, is that the powerful are simply less dependent on public police protection, benefiting from bespoke services that are cheaper than extending universal guardianship to all citizens

Nonparametric Bayesian grouping methods for spatial time-series data

We describe an approach for identifying groups of dynamically similar locations in spatial time-series data based on a simple Markov transition model. We give maximum-likelihood, empirical Bayes, and fully Bayesian formulations of the model, and describe exhaustive, greedy, and MCMC-based inference methods. The approach has been employed successfully in several studies to reveal meaningful relationships between environmental patterns and disease dynamics.Comment: 11 pages, no figure

The overlapping burden of the three leading causes of disability and death in sub-Saharan African children

Despite substantial declines since 2000, lower respiratory infections (LRIs), diarrhoeal diseases, and malaria remain among the leading causes of nonfatal and fatal disease burden for children under 5 years of age (under 5), primarily in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The spatial burden of each of these diseases has been estimated subnationally across SSA, yet no prior analyses have examined the pattern of their combined burden. Here we synthesise subnational estimates of the burden of LRIs, diarrhoea, and malaria in children under-5 from 2000 to 2017 for 43 sub-Saharan countries. Some units faced a relatively equal burden from each of the three diseases, while others had one or two dominant sources of unit-level burden, with no consistent pattern geographically across the entire subcontinent. Using a subnational counterfactual analysis, we show that nearly 300 million DALYs could have been averted since 2000 by raising all units to their national average. Our findings are directly relevant for decision-makers in determining which and targeting where the most appropriate interventions are for increasing child survival

Reporting Technical Information; Designlng Technical Reports; IBM Dictionary of Computing

Book reviews of Reporting Technical Information, by Kenneth W. Houp and Thomas E. Pearsall; and Designlng Technical Reports, by J.C Mathes and Dwight W. Stevenson; IBM Dictionary of Computing (Ninth Edition), International Business Machines Corporation

Chow Rings of Matroids as Permutation Representations

Given a matroid and a group of its matroid automorphisms, we study the induced group action on the Chow ring of the matroid. This turns out to always be a permutation action. Work of Adiprasito, Huh and Katz showed that the Chow ring satisfies Poincar\'e duality and the Hard Lefschetz theorem. We lift these to statements about this permutation action, and suggest further conjectures in this vein.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure

When is a carbon price floor desirable?

The EU carbon price lies well below estimates of the social cost of carbon and “target-consistent” carbon prices needed to deliver ambitious targets such as the 40% reduction target for 2030. In light of this, the UK introduced a carbon price floor (CPF) for its electricity sector in 2013 and the new Dutch Government has recently made a similar commitment, while successive French Governments have called for an EU-wide CPF. This paper analyzes the impacts and design of a power-sector CPF, both at the EU and national level, using a political-economy approach. We find a good case for introducing such a price-based instrument into the EU ETS. We suggest that a CPF should be designed to “top up” the EUA price to €25–30/tCO2, rising annually at 3–5% above inflation, at least until 2030. We argue that the new EU Market Stability Reserve enhances the value of a CPF in terms of delivering climate benefits, and discuss the potential for a regional CPF in North-West Europe. We also review international experience with price floors (and ceilings)

Is Police culture cultural?

This paper briefly reviews the changing usage of the concept of police culture in studies of policing. It argues that what are regarded as the early classic studies in the field (which hardly used the term culture itself) analyzed the world-views of police officers are primarily shaped in a dialectical interaction with structural factors stemming from the police role. Some of these factors are intrinsic to policing in any circumstances, others vary between political economies, social and organizational forms, and general cultures