The Changing Relationship Between Housing and Inequality, 1980–2010

Inequality in both income and wealth has grown rapidly in the United States since the 1970s. Over the same period, homeownership rates increased in step with expansionist government policies and the development of subprime and other exotic loan products, and housing affordability challenges emerged as the most prevalent housing problem for owners and renters alike. The subprime lending and foreclosure crises of the 2000s stretched households financially, threatening the traditional economic benefits of homeownership, bringing into stark relief the ways in which housing and inequality mutually influence one another, and implicating homeownership, housing affordability, and subprime lending in the widening gap between the rich and the poor. This article examines the changing roles of homeownership, housing affordability, and subprime lending in contemporary U.S. inequality by, first, describing trends in county inequality and housing characteristics and, second, modeling inequality as a function of the previous decade's housing characteristics over the period of 1980–2010. We build upon past models of county inequality by more explicitly considering causal order, place characteristics, and state and regional fixed effects. The results confirm that homeownership, affordability, and subprime lending not only reflect existing inequalities but also perpetuate those inequalities over time. Homeownership promotes equality, affordability problems undermine it, and subprime lending has the potential to ameliorate inequality in certain contexts, but these effects shift significantly over time, particularly as a result of widespread foreclosures and economic recession. Our analysis establishes the importance of housing in explaining contemporary inequality, highlights how place characteristics and causal ordering may improve county inequality models, and provides a foundation for future studies examining inequality in light of the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis.     

Taxing Fracking: The Politics of State Severance Taxes in the Shale Era

States producing gas and oil have long levied severance taxes at the point of extraction, commonly placing most revenues into general funds. These taxes have assumed new meaning in many states amid the expansion of gas and oil production accompanying the advent of hydraulic fracturing. We reviewed all major statutes and constitutional amendments related to severance taxes that were enacted at the state level during the first decade of the “shale era” (2005–14). There have been only modest adjustments in statutory tax rates and some evidence that states have attempted to reduce these rates, possibly in response to growing national production. In turn, there is also evidence that states have begun to pursue more targeted strategies for revenue use, including some expanded focus on responding to the negative externalities linked to drilling, expanded revenue sharing with localities, and increased long‐term protection of resources through state trust funds.     

Methodologies of election forecasting: Calling the 2010 UK “hung parliament”

Election forecasting has experienced considerable growth as a subfield within political science. Research work on United Kingdom elections has been cutting edge here. The recent 2010 general election afforded the opportunity for a trial of different forecasting methodologies. These efforts are showcased in this volume, and include standard, and not-so-standard, statistical models. Overall, these models perform well, foreseeing the unprecedented outcome of a “hung parliament”, as most pollsters and pundits did not. Moreover, they achieved this accuracy with forecasts well in advance of the election itself.     

Comparative study of electrochromic enhancement of latent fingerprints with existing development techniques

To address the challenge of capturing latent fingerprint evidence from metal surfaces, a new method of latent fingerprint enhancement based on electrochromic polymer films has recently been developed. Here, we present a study comparing the development and visualization of nonvisible fingerprints on stainless steel substrates using this electrochromic enhancement approach with three classical methods (dusting, wet powder, and cyanoacrylate fuming). Two variants of the electrochromic enhancement method were utilized with polyaniline and poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) as the electrochromic materials. Fingerprint samples were taken from different donors (varying in age and gender) and were exposed to different environments for systematically varied periods of time (up to 28 days). The environments represent plausible evidential scenarios: left under ambient conditions, washed with aqueous soap solution, washed with acetone, submerged in water, and maintained at elevated temperature. The electrochromic enhancement procedure frequently outperformed the traditional methods, particularly for samples exposed to more challenging histories.     

Numerical classification of curvilinear structures for the identification of pistol barrels

This paper demonstrates a numerical pattern recognition method applied to curvilinear image structures. These structures are extracted from physical cross-sections of cast internal pistol barrel surfaces. Variations in structure arise from gun design and manufacturing method providing a basis for discrimination and identification. Binarised curvilinear land transition images are processed with fast Fourier transform on which principal component analysis is performed. One-way analysis of variance (95% confidence interval) concludes significant differentiation between 11 barrel manufacturers when calculating weighted Euclidean distance between any trio of land transitions and an average land transition for each barrel in the database. The proposed methodology is therefore a promising novel approach for the classification and identification of firearms.