Theorems related to symmetric nonlinear decomposition

Decomposition methods can provide the rescue from the “curse of dimensionality”, which often prevents the successful numerical solution of large scale nonlinear mathematical programming problems. A symmetric nonlinear decomposition theory has been elaborated by T.O.M. Kronsjö (4) as an extension of a theory by the same author (3). The stringent proof of the convergence of this decomposition algorithm requires some results on necessary optimality conditions for certain mathematical programming problems. In this paper we state and prove some theorems providing these results.     

Merger—the name of the FE game

In the Australian legal environment today the overwhelming importance of laws made by Parliament is obvious, yet many first year law programmes pay insufficient attention to the coordinated teaching of statutory interpretation (SI). This project formed part of a collaborative initiative between an educational developer and the coordinator of legal research methods (LRM) to introduce statutory interpretation into a first year unit of study. Our study used a qualitative research framework – a questionnaire was administered to students at two intervals throughout the first semester. In Week 3, 160 students participated in the questionnaire and at Week 4, a keystone module on statutory interpretation using a building block approach was introduced in LRM. Since the nature of assessment in LRM is largely reflection, this unit lent itself well to investigating the language and literacy challenges of statutory interpretation, in particular, to students monitoring their own progress in this regard. The overall aim of the project was to establish a framework for students to build on their knowledge and understanding of statutory interpretation throughout their undergraduate studies, and in the interests of improved learning and teaching outcomes, for staff to be able to document the changes in student thinking. This paper focuses on the preliminary stage of our investigation into the language and literacy challenges involved in introducing statutory interpretation into a first year unit of study.

I know of only one authority which might justify the suggested method of construction. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

(Alice Through the Looking Glass, c. vi.)

After all this long discussion, the question is whether the words “If a man has” can mean “If a man thinks he has.” I am of opinion that they cannot, and that the case should be decided accordingly.

(Lord Atkin in Liversidge v Anderson [1942] AC 206)     

A further procedure for ordering an input-output matrix: some empirical evidence

In a recent paper Ghosh and Sarkar [5] have developed a model of input-output systems as spatial configurations. Roy has proposed a more efficient solution method; but computation time still increases factorially which rules out its use for large matrices. [15] This note shows that the problem they have formulated belongs to a class of discrete programming problems known as placement or assignment problems. Several natural extensions are briefly discussed. More importantly, an efficient algorithm for the quadratic assignment problem is used to compute the optimal ordering of five comparable input-output matrices (US, Norway, Japan, Italy, India). These preliminary empirical results do show rather stable assignment patterns for the industries; and certain clusters of industries are shown to emerge as hypothesized by Ghosh and Sarkar.     

Statistical Discriminant Analysis in Forensic Science

A recent paper in the Journal of the Forensic Science Society [1] described a well-known statistical method for addressing the problem of discrimination of cat and dog hairs. It used a so-called “parametric” method which assumes that the observations are Normally distributed and estimates the parameters of the distribution from the data. The present paper describes another method of statistical discrimination known as the kernel method which dispenses with the assumption of Normality. The data alone determine the form of the distribution of the data and therefore multimodal or skew distributions may be more accurately modelled. The kernel method is applied to the data given in [1] and the results obtained compare favourably with those given in that paper.     

Gang membership and criminal processing: A test of the “master status” concept

Using data on 370 criminal defendants processed in an urban court, we examine whether gang membership constitutes a master status that influences both charging and sentencing decisions. We first review various formal efforts to confront the “gang problem” in this jurisdiction, and provide a theoretical foundation for treating gang membership as a master status. After deriving hypotheses from this master status characterization of gang membership, we estimate statistical models for gang and nongang members to determine whether different factors are used in processing and adjudicating each. The results provide some support for the characterization of gang membership as a master status. We discuss alternative explanations for the findings and their implications for public policy on gang prosecution and criminal processing.     

An Improved Version of a Tool Mark Comparison Algorithm

Chumbley et al. (2010) described a statistically based algorithm for comparing pairs of tool marks. They presented empirical evidence that the algorithm produces well‐separated similarity score values for “matching” and “non‐matching” pairs of tool marks. However, the algorithm has two substantial weaknesses. First, it is “uncalibrated” in the sense that error rates can be determined only through empirical investigation. Second, it relies on a randomized test and can lead to different similarity scores when the algorithm is repeatedly applied to the same pair of tool marks. We present an improved version of the procedure, which eliminates the randomized scores and yields more consistent and predictable error rate control. This is accomplished by replacement of a random sampling step from the original algorithm with a deterministic process. We demonstrate the improved algorithm and compare its performance to the original by applying to known “matching” and “non‐matching” pairs of tool marks.     

Pistol image retrieval by shape representation

Databases have been used to record data in forensic science, such as fingerprints, shoeprints, and photos. In traditional databases, we use “text” as the “keyword” for retrieving data (text-keyword retrieval); however, in some applications, “text” is not proper to describe the searching target, and in this case, “image” plays an important role. In this paper, we use “image features” as the “keywords”, and show its potential for building up a prototype of pistol image databases.In current firearm databases of forensic science, the retrieval method is still by text-keyword retrieval. For experienced forensic examiners, this kind of databases may satisfy their requirement. However, for people who have little gun knowledge, how can they find the possible gun candidates or similar guns in the databases, if there are not any available words or marks on the gun? In this paper, we try to retrieve similar pistol images by the pistol shape instead of “text-keyword”. This method can narrow down the searching range while identifying pistols by firearm databases.There are more than 300 pistol images in our pistol image database. From the experimental results, we can retrieve the similar pistol images in top five candidates for each pistol image.     

中立与合意——两大法系鉴定证据制度的融合

鉴定证据制度是人类社会发展进步的必然产物 ,是证明方法理性和文明的标志。两大法系的鉴定证据制度围绕公正和效率的主题互相借鉴和学习过程中 ,表现出鉴定启动从“随意”到“令状”、主体选择的“合意”先于“指定”、主体地位从“依附”到“独立”、双方认同的“合意”优于“程序”的趋势。我国目前鉴定证据制度中存在鉴定启动的随意性、鉴定主体地位缺乏应有的中立、双方当事人的举证权利未受到平等对待等一系列问题 ,为实现司法公正与效率的价值目标 ,“中立与合意”是我国鉴定证据制度改革过程中的必然选择     

庶民的胜利——中国民主话语考论

民主无论作为一种意识形态还是作为现代中国的政治象征,它都与中国的现代性话语密切相关,至少是中国政治精英、知识精英“现代政治话语”的重要构成要素。而现代中国民主话语本身所不断显现出的某些特征又与早期中国人对英语的“Republic”、“Democracy”的翻译有关,与中国经典所构成的传统民主话语有关。从一定意义上讲,正是传统的民主话语与西方的“Republic”、“Democracy”的某种结合而形成了现代中国独特的民主语境。     

Primetime Dispute Resolution: Reality TV Mediation Shows in China's “Harmonious Society”

Through a case study of reality TV mediation shows, this article joins the debate about the recent promotion of formal and informal mediation by the Chinese government, what some scholars have called a “turn against law” (Minzner 2011). We identify three converging reasons for the sudden popularity of mediation shows on Chinese primetime television: (1) the desire of TV producers to commercially exploit interpersonal conflicts without fanning the flames of social instability; (2) the demands of official censors for TV programming promoting a “harmonious society”; and (3) the requirement for courts and other government institutions to publicly demonstrate their support for mediation as the most “appropriate” method for resolving interpersonal and neighborhood disputes. Cases drawn from two top‐rated mediation shows demonstrate how they privilege morality and “human feeling” (ganqing) over narrow application of the law. Such shows could be viewed merely as a form of propaganda, what Nader has called a “harmony ideology”—an attempt by the government to suppress the legitimate expression of social conflict. Yet while recognizing that further political, social, and legal reforms are necessary to address the root causes of social conflict in China, we conclude that TV mediation shows can help to educate viewers about the benefits and drawbacks of mediation for resolving certain narrow kinds of domestic and neighborhood disputes.     

Global networks and global change-induced tipping points

The existence of “tipping points” in human–environmental systems at multiple scales—such as abrupt negative changes in coral reef ecosystems, “runaway” climate change, and interacting nonlinear “planetary boundaries”—is often viewed as a substantial challenge for governance due to their inherent uncertainty, potential for rapid and large system change, and possible cascading effects on human well-being. Despite an increased scholarly and policy interest in the dynamics of these perceived “tipping points,” institutional and governance scholars have yet to make progress on how to analyze in which ways state and non-state actors attempt to anticipate, respond, and prevent the transgression of “tipping points” at large scales. In this article, we use three cases of global network responses to what we denote as global change-induced “tipping points”—ocean acidification, fisheries collapse, and infectious disease outbreaks. Based on the commonalities in several research streams, we develop four working propositions: information processing and early warning, multilevel and multinetwork responses, diversity in response capacity, and the balance between efficiency and legitimacy. We conclude by proposing a simple framework for the analysis of the interplay between perceived global change-induced “tipping points,” global networks, and international institutions.     

What is “prison culture”? Developing a theoretical and methodological foundation for understanding cultural schema in prison

What does it mean to say that a prison has a “culture?” Scholars have long emphasized the presence of a “prison code” and, more recently, a “racial code” as salient cultural domains in men's prisons. Yet, even though most people intuitively understand what is meant by “prison culture,” little progress has been made regarding the conceptualization and operationalization of culture as an analytical construct in prison scholarship. The current study makes two primary contributions to this literature. First, drawing on advances in anthropology, cultural sociology, and cognitive science, we incorporate the concept of cultural schema to provide a concrete analytical construct. Second, we test varying conceptualizations of cultural schema as either characterized by consensus or as overlapping relational structures. Using cultural consensus and correlational class analyses among a sample of 266 incarcerated men, we find little evidence of a culture of consensus for either the prison code or the racial code. Furthermore, we show evidence of heterogenous schema among these cultural domains. Our study is relevant to wider disciplinary work on culture as the problem of analytical precision we address is characteristic of much of the work in criminology and criminal justice that evokes culture as an explanatory device.     

A Bayesian approach based on Kalman filter frameworks for bullet identification

When a bullet is fired from a barrel, random imperfections in the interior surface of the barrel imprint 3-D micro structures on the bullet surface that are seen as striations. Despite being random and non-stationary in nature, these striations are known to be consistently reproduced in a unique pattern on every bullet. This is a key idea in bullet identification. Common procedures in the field of automatic bullet identification include extraction of a feature profile from bullet image, profile smoothing and comparison of profiles using normalized cross correlation. Since the cross correlation based comparison is susceptible to high-frequency noise and nonlinear baseline drift, profile smoothing is a critical step in bullet identification. In previous work, we considered bullet images as nonlinear non-stationary processes and applied ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) as a preprocessing algorithm for smoothing and feature extraction. Using EEMD, each bullet average profile was decomposed into several scales known as intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). By choosing an appropriate range of scales, the resultant smoothed profile contained less high-frequency noise and no nonlinear baseline drift. But the procedure of choosing the proper number of IMFs to reduce the high-frequency noise effect was manual. This poses a problem in comparison of bullets whose images contained less or more noise in comparison to others because their useful information may be present in the corresponding discarded IMFs. Moreover, another problem arises when the bullet type changes. In this case manual inspection is needed once more to figure out which range of IMFs contain less high-frequency noise for this particular type of bullet. In this paper, we propose a novel combination of EEMD and Bayesian Kalman filter to solve these problems. First the bullet images are rotated using Radon transform. The rotated images are averaged column-wise to acquire averaged 1-D profiles. The nonlinear baseline drifts of averaged profiles are removed using EEMD algorithm. The profiles are then processed by a Kalman filter that is designed to automatically and optimally reduce the effect of high-frequency noise. Using Expectation Maximization (EM) technique, for each averaged profile, the parameters of Kalman filter are reconfigured to optimally suppress the high-frequency noise in each averaged profile. This work is the first effort that practically implements the Kalman filter for optimal denoising of firearm image profiles. In addition, we believe that Euclidean distance metric can help the normalized cross-correlation based comparison. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a comparison metric that is invariant to start and endpoints of firearm image profiles. This metric combines the prized properties of both Euclidean and normalized cross-correlation metrics in order to improve identification results. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on a database containing 180 2-D gray-scale images acquired from bullets fired from different AK-47 assault rifles. Although the proposed method needs more calculations in comparison to conventional methods, the experiments showed that it attained better results compared with the conventional methods and the previous method based on EMD in the field of automatic bullet identification.     

The determination of sequence of crossing strokes by the “Kromekote” paper lifting process and by the scanning electron microscopic method

The authors present the results obtained while applying the “Kromekote paper” lifting process first proposed by Igoe and Reynolds in 1979 [1] and later in a modified form in 1980 and 1982 by Godown [2]. They also present the results of their research to determine the writing order of crossing strokes using the Scanning Electron Microscopic technique, research that was restarted after the publication of an article by Waeschle [3].     

Changes of Legal Scenarios in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

The superposition of artificial intelligence (AI) and non-state power has aggravated changes in state functions, and has downgraded centralism of political state. The “Intelligent Leviathan” will persist in objectifying the “individual.” The relationship mode of “human-human” being transformed into the mode of “humantechnology-human, ” is giving rise to a new social structure, while state power together with non-state power, law and the algorithm, as well as ethics and technologies, are creating a new order. The major threat to freedoms and rights is horizontal non-state power, instead of vertical state power. Going through profound changes, legal scenarios need reconstruction of “kindness” dimension for balancing the “rights priority” theory, while the “obligations standard” should be recovered in the sense of legal technology to rectify the “rights standard” and to resolve the “rights disability.”     

Targeting the terrorists: A legal proposal for assassinating terrorists as a preemptive strike

Recently, Sam Nunn, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, stated to a gathering of weapons scientists and military planners at Los Alamos National Laboratory that, although the Cold War is over, “this is a world of regional wars, of spreading ethnic, religious and tribal warfare” in which more countries are acquiring the capability to unleash mass death. In January, 1994, then‐Defense Secretary Les Aspin wrote in his annual report to the President and Congress that “[t]he danger that [weapons of mass destruction] might be used against U.S. forces in some conflict is not, unfortunately, theoretical.” In July, 1994, during a visit to Moscow, FBI Director Louis Freeh commented that the efforts of organized crime to steal or buy weapons‐grade nuclear material is “the greatest long‐term threat to the security of the United States.” Later that month, “credible threats” were received by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence sources of an impending bombing of Israeli targets throughout the United States. While targeting Israeli interests is not uncommon, the fact that such targets were in the U.S. is somewhat alarming.

These statements and other episodes emphasize the ever‐increasing threat that confronts the United States. Terrorists, by nature, are continuously modifying their tactics to thwart defensive/protective measures placed before them by many nations. Therefore, it is contingent upon these nations to develop new strategies and remain one step ahead of the potential nuclear attackers. One such strategy is assassinating the terrorist before he strikes. While many commentators and politicians summarily dismiss this idea, it remains a viable, yet unexplored, option. This article details the historical and current perspectives on assassination as well as its legal significance and justification. While this author is not advocating a national policy of assassination, this argument is submitted strictly as an academic exercise for consideration and debate.     

The canary in the data mine

The present article aims at portraying the type of profile best required to fulfil the function of a Data Protection Officer (DPO) within the EU public sector. The article proposes the idiom of the “canary in a coal mine” as best positioned to describe the multidisciplinary role of DPOs. Due to the particularity and sensitivity of their function, Data Protection Officers act as early indicators of data protection incompliance within their respective area of expertise. Only when being functionally independent, Data Protection Officers could master the role of “canaries in the data mine” thus preventing possible data protection breaches and violations.     

Youth Gangs: A 1990s Perspective

The juvenile gang in the 1990s differs in many significant ways from the gangs described in the “classical” gang studies of the 1950s and 1960s. Juvenile justice professionals should be aware of the changes in the nature, organization, motivation, and activities of gangs and plan intervention strategies accordingly. One important issue in gang research—one which has great implications for public policy—is defining “gang” and “gang-related crime.” The existence of a “gang problem” in a community may be more related to the definition of “gang” and “gang-related” than to the objective issue of whether, or not, a gang problem exists. Further issues relating to the gang of the 1990s involve changing age and sex distribution of gang members, increasing violence by gangs, and deeper involvement with drug distribution. Implications for public policy are discussed.     

Reentry to What? Theorizing Prisoner Reentry in the Jobless Future

Academic research on “prisoner reentry” has been heavily focused upon experimental design and program evaluation rather than broader shifts in race and class relations or underlying economic change. Deeper theoretical attention to the subaltern context of prisoner reentry would offer a more balanced and comprehensive assessment of the challenges facing the highly-marginalized populations of former prisoners now increasingly the objects of “reentry” programming. This paper employs a sociology of punishment perspective to foreground recent scholarship on the prisoner reentry movement and to document the still nascent implementation of a “prisoner reentry” agenda, despite nearly two decades of effort. The paper argues that long-neglected needs of subaltern populations incarcerated over the past several decades in the United States should become a more central focus of prisoner reentry research. The paper highlights the work of several theorists to summarize three theoretical perspectives to help balance the “reentry” research agenda: prisoner reentry as neoliberal punishment; prisoner reentry as peculiar institution; and prisoner reentry as criminological scientism.     

OBA2: An Onion approach to Binary code Authorship Attribution

A critical aspect of malware forensics is authorship analysis. The successful outcome of such analysis is usually determined by the reverse engineer's skills and by the volume and complexity of the code under analysis. To assist reverse engineers in such a tedious and error-prone task, it is desirable to develop reliable and automated tools for supporting the practice of malware authorship attribution. In a recent work, machine learning was used to rank and select syntax-based features such as n-grams and flow graphs. The experimental results showed that the top ranked features were unique for each author, which was regarded as an evidence that those features capture the author's programming styles. In this paper, however, we show that the uniqueness of features does not necessarily correspond to authorship. Specifically, our analysis demonstrates that many “unique” features selected using this method are clearly unrelated to the authors' programming styles, for example, unique IDs or random but unique function names generated by the compiler; furthermore, the overall accuracy is generally unsatisfactory. Motivated by this discovery, we propose a layered Onion Approach for Binary Authorship Attribution called OBA2. The novelty of our approach lies in the three complementary layers: preprocessing, syntax-based attribution, and semantic-based attribution. Experiments show that our method produces results that not only are more accurate but have a meaningful connection to the authors' styles.