Optimal patrol routes: interdicting and pursuing rhino poachers

Interdiction patrolling (also known as hot spots policing) is a proactive police operation that depends on good planning. And the pursuit of fleeing suspects is a challenging operation that all police forces engage in on a regular basis. We give software tools that improve the effectiveness of both. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our tools by applying them to the case of rhino poaching in wildlife reserves. An interdiction patrol pre-emptively seeks out poaching parties within a reserve. Upon picking up the trail of a poaching party, a pursuit team needs a pursuit strategy that optimizes their chances of an interception. Our interdiction patrol route tool identifies optimal interdiction patrol routes to walk. This tool is based on a Stackelberg game and represents different types of poachers and their utilities. These utilities are updated (learned) each time new information on poaching party routes is added to the database. Our second tool provides a real-time sequence of team member moves that maximizes the team’s chances of apprehending a pursued party. We show that our tools perform well when applied to simulated and real data.     

Democratic theorizing in Taiwan: A reconstruction

This study reconstructs Taiwan people's existing discursive structures on democracy by replicating Dryzek and Berejikian's Q methodological study of American democratic discourses. It finds that under the existing specific historical circumstances, Taiwan people's democratic attitudes manifest a complex, pluralistic and interrelated discursivity, in which at least five democratic discourses can be identified, namely democratic pragmatism, democratic communitarianism, democratic liberalism, democratic elitism and democratic populism. Yet, among these five discourses, there are a number of commonly held views. In particular, they all accept democratic pluralism, reject communism and violence, believe in the fallibility of state leaders and the necessity to limit government power, and are optimistic about the future democratic development in Taiwan. This broad consensus reflects the specific historical experience of Taiwan people's democratic pursuit on the one hand and provides a broad common ground for dialogue and interaction among the five discourses on the other. These findings should significantly enrich our understanding of the democratic theorizing in Taiwan and serve as a basis for future comparison with the American as well as other countries’ experiences.     

DNA analysis of ingested tomato and pepper seeds

Ingested food is one of the important types of forensic evidence obtained during a medicolegal autopsy. Many materials containing seeds pass through the human digestive system and are still recognizable; thus, they can be valuable for providing investigative leads. Currently, the identification of seeds relies on microscopic and morphologic examination. However this method sometimes can be problematic. For example, the microscopic appearance of the ingested tomato and pepper seeds is very similar; thus, it is not always easy to distinguish these seeds by comparing their physical characteristics. Tomato and pepper seeds were selected as a model system to assess the value of performing DNA analysis as an alternate and/or complimentary means of seed identification. Results of blind testing indicate that the deoxyribonucleic acid-amplified fragment length polymorphism (DNA-AFLP) results were able to discriminate between pepper and tomato seed samples after they passed through the digestive system.     

Opinion writing and acclimation effect

The area of judicial research previously referred to as the freshman effect has generated a substantial amount of interest among Supreme Court scholars. Until recently, however, efforts to establish the existence of this effect have met with mixed success. Hagle (1993a) contends that the mixed results of previous freshman or acclimation effect studies are primarily due to the use of the behavior of the experienced justices as a baseline to measure the behavior of the new justice. Given normal variations in the justices' behavior, using the behavior of experienced justices to determine whether a new justice experienced acclimation effects may lead to a false conclusion. In this study we examine the opinion writing behavior of 24 justices who joined the Court from the 1943 through the 1993 Terms. While controlling for the number of cases, we use each justice's own later opinion writing behavior in each of two control periods as a baseline against which to judge whether that justice experienced an acclimation effect in his or her first-term opinion writing. We also compare the opinion writing behavior of Rehnquist and the other three Chief Justices with that of the Associate Justices. Our results indicate that a substantial number of the justices (67%) manifest significant acclimation effects in their opinion writing for one or both of the two control periods. Our results also show a significant difference in Rehnquist's opinion writing behavior as he moved from Associate Justice to Chief Justice and a substantial difference between the opinion writing behavior of the Chief Justices as compared to the Associate Justices.