Clean Slate Research Articles

The Sinclair Zone Caesium Deposit. Pioneer Dome, WA

During 2017 Pioneer intersected Australia’s first significant intersection of pollucite in RC drilling, resulting in the definition of the Sinclair Zone caesium deposit, within 1 of 7 identified pegmatite suites with LCT mineral affinities that occur along the Eastern margin of the Pioneer Dome, Western Australia.At the start of 2017, the Pioneer Dome was a clean slate in respect of LCT pegmatite knowledge. Using first principals, soil sampling and mapping, successive LCT pegmatites were identified and are now drill-ready.The Company has been at the forefront of using modern techniques such as pXRF, SWIR and RAMAN to assist in its exploration advances.

The Second Chances Gap

Over the last decade, all fifty states and the federal government have enacted “second chance” reforms that increase the eligibility of individuals arrested, charged, or convicted of crimes to shorten their sentences, clear their criminal records, and/or regain the right to vote. While much fanfare has accompa- nied the increasing availability of “second chances,” little attention has been paid to their delivery. This study introduces the concept of the “second chance gap,” which it defines as the difference between eligibility and delivery of second chance relief; explores its causes; and approximates the size of the gap in connection with several second chance laws and initiatives. Using administrative and other data, it finds that among a host of petition-based second chance opportunities, to shorten sentences, restore one’s vote, and clear one’s criminal convictions, only a small fraction (less than 10 percent) of those eligible for relief actually received it. Extrapolating based on a novel analysis of around sixty thousand criminal histories of persons primarily seeking gig- economy work and of the expungement laws governing nonconvictions of all fifty states, this study estimates that at least twenty to thirty million American adults, or 30–40 percent of those with criminal records, fall into the “second chance expungement gap,” living burdened with criminal records that persist despite appearing to be partially or fully clearable under existing law. These findings suggest that tens of millions of American are stuck in a paper prison, held back by deficiencies in the administration of second chances that have left them incarcerated, disenfranchised, or burdened by convictions beyond what the law requires. Some of the barriers to relief are structural and related to debt, overburdened bureaucracies, and the contested nature of second chance rules that unwind past judgments and policies. But others are harder to see and stem from administrative failures like unworkable standards, missing and incomplete criminal justice information (“dirty data”), a lack of awareness of second chance opportunities, and costly and complex processes. Addressing them—by moving administrative burdens from the defendant and onto the state and algorithms through automation, standardization, and ruthless iteration—can narrow the second chance relief gap. Leveraging them, “Clean Slate” initiatives to automatically clear eligible criminal records can have the potential to help the millions of Americans in the second chance expungement gap. However, the ability of such second chance initiatives to improve outcomes depends on how they are implement- ed. Debt-related barriers and dirty data can contribute to incomplete automation, leading to “second second chance gaps.” In the realm of expungement, application of the expungement criteria to minor but not major offenses can also have the effect of exacerbating, not narrowing, existing racial disparities within the population of people with records, while improving them within the general population. Further research is needed to under- stand the impact of automated clearance under different scenarios, such as when the defendant is not notified of the relief received or there is a risk of statistical discrimination making things worse, not better. Overall, however, though other hurdles may remain, automation can remove the unfair collateral punishments, not steel bars, holding back tens of millions of Americans.

Third-party support for retribution, rehabilitation, and giving an offender a clean slate.

When crimes occur, there is third-party support for retributive justice, but is there also support for the idea that punishments should give offenders clean slates? In addition, how might support for rehabilitation compare with support for retribution, and with support for giving a clean slate? Two

CONSTITUENT POWER: THE THEORY AN D PRACTICE OF ITS IMPLEMENTATION IN UKRAINE

The article researches the phenomenon of constituent power as a theoretical concept and the practice of its implementation in Ukraine. Constituent power is associated with the process of adopting a constitution and making amendments to it. A distinction is made between primary and institutional constituent powers. The constituent nature of the Constitution of Ukraine in the interpretation of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine is analyzed. The reasons why the Law “On an All-Ukrainian Referendum” was held invalid with regard to the constituent power of the people is considered. There is an inconsistency in the primary and institutional constituent powers’ interpretation of amendments to the Constitution of Ukraine. The constitutional reform of 2004, the interference with this reform by the Constitutional Court of Ukraine in 2010 and its return by the parliament in 2014 are examined from the standpoint of the constituent power concept. It is concluded that a new constitutional reform, which would provide a clean slate, could be an acceptable solution in Ukraine. In the future, the text of the reformed Constitution should provide for clear mechanisms for amending the Constitution of Ukraine and the adoption of a new Constitution, which would necessarily include procedures for popular legitimacy.

Western Women Supporting IS/Daesh in Syria and Iraq – An Exploration of their Motivations

AbstractThis paper explores the motivations of Western women who traveled to Syria/Iraq to support the Islamic State (IS) or Daesh. It draws on previous studies of the phenomenon, insights from practitioners and informal interviews with an individual with first-hand insights. The different motivations are categorized into three levels: macro, meso and micro. The author rebukes the intractable stereotype of the “jihadi bride” that (inadvertently) suggests that women are driven mainly by personal motivations or the prospect of marriage, and demonstrates that female Western supporters of IS/Daesh are motivated by various factors. These include ideological or religious motivations, the pull of the cause, frustration and anger over the perceived worldwide oppression of Muslims, but also the search for a purpose in life and for a sense of belonging. Women have been affected by group dynamics and experiences in their past (including sexual abuse). Some women were attracted by the prospect of a clean slate, adventure or a (religious) husband. The author underscores that, in order to tackle the phenomenon of women supporting IS/Daesh, it is essential to deepen our understanding of its appeal on women, which requires acknowledging the diversity of women who joined IS/Daesh and recognizing the complexity and multitude of their motivations.

Introduction

The collapse of Real Socialism ushered in the unification of two Europes. United Europe as a new political entity without a previous history which has formally denounced colonialism and anti-Semitism, it somehow deserves a clean slate and the right to shift ownership of its colonial histories to former colonial subjects and their national histories. On the one hand, East Europeans denounce any role in the Europe's colonial history, on the other hand, neoliberalism figures today as Europe's internal neocolonialism. In the case of the Balkans, the neoliberal normalization of the unruly Balkans failed both at the periphery and at the center. Today's economic nationalists are now euro-autocrats and the most vocal proponents of fiscal conservativism, austerity, the Protestant work-ethic and the ultimate “Europeanization.” This special issue of the neoliberal Balkans interrogates a neocolonial reconfiguration of the entire region as a massive social overhaul, which includes at once global integration and local social disintegration.

A Running Start or a Clean Slate? How a History of Cooperation Affects the Ability of Cities to Cooperate on Environmental Governance

Since 2013, the Chinese central government has pushed cooperation on environmental governance in Urban Agglomerations (UAs). In some of these UAs, cities have previously been developing environmental governance activities autonomously, in the absence of inter-city cooperation, while on others, spontaneous cooperation has previously taken place. These differences in historical context provide us with an opportunity to study, in a comparative way, how a history of cooperation influences the effectiveness of inter-city cooperation on environmental governance. Our approach to carrying out this comparison is to reconstruct the trajectories of events that describe the evolution of environmental governance in two UAs (Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Yangtze River Delta), covering the period from the early 90s to 2016. The main findings of this study are that the trajectory of environmental governance in a historical context of prior spontaneous cooperation is more effective in achieving goal intertwinement than that in a historical context of no prior cooperation; and that informal forms of cooperation, along with decentralized coordination by local actors, are critical and more influential in bringing about more effective cooperation. On the other hand, in a historical context of no prior cooperation there is an opportunity to design a cooperative structure from scratch; in this process attention should be paid to the creation of an equal playing ground, with balanced costs and benefits for all partners. By contrast, cooperation on environmental governance in a context where there is a history of spontaneous cooperation the central government can still play a role in the further facilitation of cooperation.

PC186. Are They a Clean Slate? Patient Knowledge and Information Sources When Facing Repair of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm

PC186. Are They a Clean Slate? Patient Knowledge and Information Sources When Facing Repair of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm

Conditions for the clean slate effect after success or failure

ABSTRACTThe act of physically cleaning one’s hands may reduce the impact of past experiences, termed clean-slate effect. Cleaning was found to affect negative, neutral, and mildly positive states. We extend this influence to success, a self-serving state. We manipulated success vs. failure and measured changes in optimism (Experiment 1) or self-esteem (Experiment 2). Moreover, we examined boundary conditions for the clean-slate effect. Experiment 1 indicates that the influence of performance on optimism diminishes if participants knew (compared to did not know) they were cleaning their hands. Experiment 2 indicates that the influence of performance on self-esteem diminishes if participants cleaned themselves (compared to an object). These results suggest that the clean-slate effect requires both awareness and self-reference of the cleaning act. Thus, the clean-slate effect seems to depend on both conscious inferences and automatic processes. A meta-analysis across the experiments confirms a moderate-sized clean-slate effect.

Development of a trauma system and optimal placement of trauma centers using geospatial mapping.

The care of patients at individual trauma centers (TCs) has been carefully optimized, but not the placement of TCs within the trauma systems. We sought to objectively determine the optimal placement of trauma centers in Pennsylvania using geospatial mapping. We used the Pennsylvania Trauma Systems Foundation (PTSF) and Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4) registries for adult (age ≥15) trauma between 2003 and 2015 (n = 377,540 and n = 255,263). TCs and zip codes outside of PA were included to account for edge effects with trauma cases aggregated to the Zip Code Tabulation Area centroid of residence. Model assumptions included no previous TCs (clean slate); travel time intervals of 45, 60, 90, and 120 minutes; TC capacity based on trauma cases per bed size; and candidate hospitals ≥200 beds. We used Network Analyst Location-Allocation function in ArcGIS Desktop to generate models optimally placing 1 to 27 TCs (27 current PA TCs) and assessed model outcomes. At a travel time of 60 minutes and 27 sites, optimally placed models for PTSF and PHC4 covered 95.6% and 96.8% of trauma cases in comparison with the existing network reaching 92.3% or 90.6% of trauma cases based on PTSF or PHC4 inclusion. When controlled for existing coverage, the optimal numbers of TCs for PTSF and PHC4 were determined to be 22 and 16, respectively. The clean slate model clearly demonstrates that the optimal trauma system for the state of Pennsylvania differs significantly from the existing system. Geospatial mapping should be considered as a tool for informed decision-making when organizing a statewide trauma system. Epidemiological study/Care management, level III.

A Clean Slate for Texas Foster Youth

This Article will compare how Texas and other states implement this federal law differently and then discuss how Texas can improve its flawed system to better protect children negatively affected by identity theft. Section II of this Article will introduce and explain M.D. v. Abbott and the changes in Texas foster care on the horizon as a result of this case. Section III will introduce and delve into the issue of identity theft in foster youth as a whole, and it will tell the story of one foster youth who faced the results of identity theft. Finally, the Section breaks down how identity theft occurs and what the lasting effects are. Section III will discuss the federal legislation created as a response. Section III also includes a case study on California’s pilot project response that was initiated prior to the federal legislation, and looks into how Texas applies federal legislation and partners it with state legislation. This Section looks at both the strengths and weaknesses of state and federal responses to child identity theft. Section IV will introduce four state-level policy recommendations to assist Texas in resolving identity theft issues for youth in foster care. By implementing a holistic, multi-step approach beginning when the child initially enters foster care, particularly in light of the major foster care reform posed by M.D. v. Abbott, Texas will lead the country and serve as an example to other states in resolving this pressing issue. Section V will include conclusions from the content discussed in this Article.

V erified FT

Dynamic data race detectors are valuable tools for testing and validating concurrent software, but to achieve good performance they are typically implemented using sophisticated concurrent algorithms. Thus, they are ironically prone to the exact same kind of concurrency bugs they are designed to detect. To address these problems, we have developed V erified FT, a clean slate redesign of the F ast T rack race detector [19]. The V erified FT analysis provides the same precision guarantee as F ast T rack , but is simpler to implement correctly and efficiently, enabling us to mechanically verify an implementation of its core algorithm using CIVL [27]. Moreover, V erified FT provides these correctness guarantees without sacrificing any performance over current state-of-the-art (but complex and unverified) F ast T rack implementations for Java.

No Excess Baggage: New Life Starts with a Clean Slate

A new mechanism for clearing protein damage from maturing oocytes has been described in a recent study by Bohnert and Kenyon (2017), who demonstrated that sperm-secreted hormones activate a vascular H+-ATPase pump that acidifies lysosomes and thus restores protein homeostasis.

Enhancing Security and Trust in Named Data Networking using Hierarchical Identity Based Cryptography

Named data networking (NDN) represents a promising clean slate for future internet architecture. It adopts the information-centric networking (ICN) approach that treats named data as the central element, leverages in-network caching, and uses a data-centric security model. This model is built mainly in the addition of a signature to each of the recovered data. However, the signature verification requires the appropriate public key. To trust this key, multiple models were proposed. In this article, the authors analyze security and trust in NDN, to deduct the limits of the already proposed solutions. They propose a security extension that strengthens security and builds trust in used keys. The main idea of this extension is the derivation of these keys from data name, by using hierarchical identity-based cryptography (HIBC). To confirm the safety of the new proposal, a formal security analysis is provided. To evaluate its efficiency, a performance evaluation is performed. It proves that by adopting the proposed extension, performance is comparable, even better in some cases than plain NDN.

A Clean Slate Case Study of Community Lawyering

A Clean Slate Case Study of Community Lawyering

‘When the Reservoir Comes’: Drowned Villages, Community and Nostalgia in Contemporary British Fiction

A ‘drowned’ or flooded village describes the destruction of a settlement or community to make way for a reservoir; as a practice, it most commonly occurred in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the need for fresh water in growing industrial cities was at its height. This essay will explore three different representations of the ‘drowned village’ in contemporary British fiction. Reginald Hill’s On Beulah Height (1992), Hilary Mantel’s short story ‘The Clean Slate’ (2001) and Sarah Hall’s Haweswater (2002) will all be considered in terms of how the drowned village is presented and described, and what this representation suggests about the ways nostalgia, ritual and ruin impact upon notions of community and place.

Behavioral and neural mechanisms by which prior experience impacts subsequent learning.

Memory is often thought about in terms of its ability to recollect and store information about the past, but its function likely rests with the fact that it permits adaptation to ongoing and future experience. Thus, the brain circuitry that encodes memory must act as if stored information is likely to be modified by subsequent experience. Considerable progress has been made in identifying the behavioral and neural mechanisms supporting the acquisition and consolidation of memories, but this knowledge comes largely from studies in laboratory animals in which the training experience is presented in isolation from prior experimentally-controlled events. Given that memories are unlikely to be formed upon a clean slate, there is a clear need to understand how learning occurs upon the background of prior experience. This article reviews recent studies from an emerging body of work on metaplasticity, memory allocation, and synaptic tagging and capture, all of which demonstrate that prior experience can have a profound effect on subsequent learning. Special attention will be given to discussion of the neural mechanisms that allow past experience to affect future learning and to the time course by which past learning events can alter subsequent learning. Finally, consideration will be given to the possible significance of a non-synaptic component of the memory trace, which in some cases is likely responsible for the priming of subsequent learning and may be involved in the recovery from amnestic treatments in which the synaptic mechanisms of memory have been impaired.

Banking union: the disadvantages of opportunism

The EU’s approach to what it describes as “banking union” is not what one would design with a clean slate. It reflects the political constraints and the path of history. This paper compares the institutional and operational structure of “banking union” that has been decided upon with a complete structure. It focuses on the distortions caused by a system based on the euro area, which excludes Europe’s most important financial market. It considers the difficulties posed for the Single Resolution arrangements and the European Deposit Insurance System by the continuing problem of the relation between weak banks and over-indebted sovereigns.

Microbial Populations of Stony Meteorites: Substrate Controls on First Colonizers.

Finding fresh, sterilized rocks provides ecologists with a clean slate to test ideas about first colonization and the evolution of soils de novo. Lava has been used previously in first colonizer studies due to the sterilizing heat required for its formation. However, fresh lava typically falls upon older volcanic successions of similar chemistry and modal mineral abundance. Given enough time, this results in the development of similar microbial communities in the newly erupted lava due to a lack of contrast between the new and old substrates. Meteorites, which are sterile when they fall to Earth, provide such contrast because their reduced and mafic chemistry commonly differs to the surfaces on which they land; thus allowing investigation of how community membership and structure respond to this new substrate over time. We conducted 16S rRNA gene analysis on meteorites and soil from the Nullarbor Plain, Australia. We found that the meteorites have low species richness and evenness compared to soil sampled from directly beneath each meteorite. Despite the meteorites being found kilometers apart, the community structure of each meteorite bore more similarity to those of other meteorites (of similar composition) than to the community structure of the soil on which it resided. Meteorites were dominated by sequences that affiliated with the Actinobacteria with the major Operational Taxonomic Unit (OTU) classified as Rubrobacter radiotolerans. Proteobacteria and Bacteroidetes were the next most abundant phyla. The soils were also dominated by Actinobacteria but to a lesser extent than the meteorites. We also found OTUs affiliated with iron/sulfur cycling organisms Geobacter spp. and Desulfovibrio spp. This is an important finding as meteorites contain abundant metal and sulfur for use as energy sources. These ecological findings demonstrate that the structure of the microbial community in these meteorites is controlled by the substrate, and will not reach homeostasis with the Nullarbor community, even after ca. 35,000 years. Our findings show that meteorites provide a unique, sterile substrate with which to test ideas relating to first-colonizers. Although meteorites are colonized by microorganisms, the microbial population is unlikely to match the community of the surrounding soil on which they fall.

Precedent and doctrine in organisational decision-making: the power of informal institutional rules in the United Nations Security Council’s activities on terrorism

We examine how and under what conditions informal institutional constraints, such as precedent and doctrine, are likely to affect collective choice within international organisations even in the absence of powerful bureaucratic agents. With a particular focus on the United Nations Security Council, we first develop a theoretical account of why such informal constraints might affect collective decisions even of powerful and strategically behaving actors. We show that precedents provide focal points that allow adopting collective decisions in coordination situations despite diverging preferences. Reliance on previous cases creates tacitly evolving doctrine that may develop incrementally. Council decision-making is also likely to be facilitated by an institutional logic of escalation driven by institutional constraints following from the typically staged response to crisis situations. We explore the usefulness of our theoretical argument with evidence from the Council doctrine on terrorism that has evolved since 1985. The key decisions studied include the 1992 sanctions resolution against Libya and the 2001 Council response to the 9/11 attacks. We conclude that, even within intergovernmentally structured international organisations, member states do not operate on a clean slate, but in a highly institutionalised environment that shapes their opportunities for action.