Random Chance or Loaded Dice: The Politics of Judicial Designation

[Excerpt] “In the 1950s and 1960s, the southern states struggled to respond to the civil rights decisions being issued by the U.S. Supreme Court as well as the new civil rights laws being passed by Congress. The judicial battleground for this perfect storm of evasion and massive resistance was found in the “old” Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which encompassed the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. In the “old” Fifth Circuit, a minority of liberal appeals court judges—sympathetic to the civil rights movement—used all legal and administrative power at their disposal to make sure that the federal district and appeals courts were complying with the U.S. Supreme Court’s mandate in Brown v. Board of Education. In their ground-breaking book A Court Divided: The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Politics of Judicial Reform, political scientists Deborah J. Barrow and Thomas G. Walker carefully examined the political behavior of these aforementioned liberal appeals court judges and found evidence that Elbert Parr Tuttle, the Fifth Circuit’s chief judge from 1960 to 1967, was manipulating, or “gerrymandering,” the assignment of appeals court judges to both three-judge district court panels, and three-judge appellate court panels to guarantee that the panels had at least two liberal judges who would enforce the Supreme Court’s desegregation rulings.

Self-adaptive loop for external disturbance reduction in differential measurement set-up

We present a method developed to actively compensate common-mode magnetic disturbances on a multi-sensor device devoted to differential measurements. The system uses a field-programmable-gated-array card, and operates in conjunction with a high sensitivity magnetometer: compensating the common-mode of magnetic disturbances results in a relevant reduction of the difference-mode noise. The digital nature of the compensation system allows for using a numerical approach aimed at automatically adapting the feedback loop filter response. A common mode disturbance attenuation exceeding 50 dB is achieved, resulting in a final improvement of the differential noise floor by a factor of 10 over the whole spectral interval of interest.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, 26 ref

Restoring Narrow Linewidth to a Gradient-Broadened Magnetic Resonance by Inhomogeneous Dressing

We study the possibility of counteracting the line-broadening of atomic magnetic resonances due to inhomogeneities of the static magnetic field by means of spatially dependent magnetic dressing, driven by an alternating field that oscillates much faster than the Larmor precession frequency. We demonstrate that an intrinsic resonance linewidth of 25~Hz that has been broadened up to hundreds Hz by a magnetic field gradient, can be recovered by the application of an appropriate inhomogeneous dressing field. The findings of our experiments may have immediate and important implications, because they facilitate the use of atomic magnetometers as robust, high sensitivity detectors in ultra-low-field NMR imaging.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 33 refs. This is the unedited versio

Mother responsiveness and instruction strategy : joined or separate pathways to child cooperation?

Investigated the natural home interactions of 24 volunteer and 20 clinic-referred mother-child dyads during a one-hour observation. Observers coded mother instructions strategy ( Do or Don\u27t ), child compliance, child negativity, and mother responsiveness. These categories were compared through descriptive, correlational, and regression mediation analyses to assess the association between mother instruction strategy, mother responsiveness, and child compliance. As hypothesized, mother responsiveness accounted for most of the variance in child compliance and was mediated by mother\u27s use of Do instructions. Results were discussed within a theoretical framework in which the mother responsiveness construct was expanded to include her instructional strategy

Juror\u27s Perception of Recovered Memory, Type of Trauma and Adult Witness Demeanor

College students judged the testimony in a civil trial in which a childhood memory had been recovered after 20 years. Participants were 108 students (n = 79 female and 29 male) enrolled in undergraduate psychology courses. The design was a 2 X 2 X 2 between subjects factorial design which investigated effects of the type of incident (sexual abuse/hit-and-run), how the memory was recovered (therapy/wedding), and type of testimony (assertive/emotional). The study determined that mock jurors were likely to perceive the plaintiff\u27s testimony as credible when she testified she was sexually abused as a child rather than when she was a victim of a hit-and-run accident. The results also indicated that testimonial demeanor had a significant effect on mock jurors\u27 perception of the plaintiff\u27s credibility and that if a female victim testifies with a nonemotional stereotypical masculine demeanor, the jurors may react in a negative manner

Molar and Molecular Perspectives on Mothers\u27 Responsiveness to Their Clinic-Referred and Normal Children

An abundance of research has investigated the mother responsiveness construct as an aggregate measure of the degree to which mothers react sensitively to what their children say and do. While the aggregate measure has proven useful in accounting for the ways mothers and children join in dyadic harmony, there is a dearth of information regarding the aggregates’ components. Twenty clinic-referred and thirty-two volunteer mother-child dyads were observed in their home settings for 1 hour per dyad. Observers monitored mother and child responsiveness during the dyadic interactions and childrens’ neutral, positive, and negative responses were recorded. The mother’s responsive social reactions were also recorded, as well as their unresponsive social reactions to their children’s negative responses. Results showed that the aggregate measures of mother and child responsiveness differentiated the two groups in expected ways. The volunteer dyads were more responsive than their clinic-referred counterparts and the volunteer children were less negative and more neutral than were the clinic-referred children. The component measures, however, yielded unexpected similarities between groups that were obscured by the aggregate measures. Children in both groups displayed similar rates of positive behaviors and both groups of mothers reacted in synchronous ways with their children’s positive, neutral, and negative responses. The present findings suggest that measuring the components of mother and child responsiveness may prove useful in accounting for the specific ways in which children are embracing or resisting the socialization process