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Various experimental groups have reported observation of both integer and fractional giant Shapiro steps in the I‐V curves of N×M arrays of superconducting‐normal metal‐superconducting (SNS) Josephson junctions. The size of these steps have been investigated both experimentally and theoretically as a function of temperature, external magnetic field, and rf current. In this report, we investigate the possibility of controlling the size of these giant Shapiro steps by an external gate voltage by considering arrays of superconductor‐semiconductor‐superconductor junctions. We show that giant Shapiro steps of different orders can be quenched over different gate voltage ranges in these arrays.

Homelessness has many causes and also is stigmatized in the United States, leading to much misunderstanding of its causes and what policy solutions may ameliorate the problem. The problem is of course getting worse and impacting many communities far removed from the West Coast cities the authors examine in this study. This analysis examines the socioeconomic variables influencing homelessness on the West Coast in recent years. The authors utilize a panel fixed effects model that explicitly includes measures of healthcare access and availability to account for the additional health risks faced by individuals who lack shelter. The authors estimate a spatial error model (SEM) in order to better understand the impacts that systemic shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have on a variety of factors that directly influence productivity and other measures of welfare such as income inequality, housing supply, healthcare investment, and homelessness.

Reports a new method for preparing a product structure analysis to improve the effectiveness of the master scheduling function for products that are manufactured on an assemble‐to‐order basis. This methodology for conducting product structure analysis uses relational database management software to identify common and unique material in a product structure. Highlights example results of the application of methodology.

The purpose of the present analysis is to test the relative impact of trust in police, social cohesion, and fear of crime on neighborhood‐level rates of concealed pistol license (CPL) holding. The dynamics of both formal and informal social control are hypothesized to affect neighborhood CPL concentrations.

Data were neighborhood‐level and came from a city survey and the state Department of Licensing. A path model was estimated.

Police service level had a negative indirect effect on neighborhood CPL concentrations through fear of crime, but had a strong positive direct effect. Social cohesion also had a strong positive direct effect on CPL rates.

The study suggests that lawful concealed hand‐gun carrying should be viewed as a way in which neighborhoods exercise informal social control. People in socially cohesive areas may carry concealed hand‐guns not only because they fear for their own safety, but also because they feel a sense of responsibility to their fellow neighborhood residents.

Police who encourage citizens to engage in private forms of self‐protection should be aware that citizens in cohesive areas may choose to do this via hand‐gun carrying. Police should be sure that citizens in these neighborhoods have ready access to safety training and devices. Most importantly, police should emphasize to citizens in these areas that hand‐gun carrying has not been shown conclusively to reduce crime, and that there are other private crime‐prevention techniques that carry more promise of keeping communities safer from crime.

There are few studies attempting to determine the precursors to concealed hand‐gun carrying. The paper seeks a better understanding of the reasons why some neighborhoods evince higher levels of CPLs than others. Additionally, most prior studies have used suboptimal levels of aggregation. The study uses neighborhood‐level data, which allows for an examination of ecological phenomena without the confounding effects of between‐jurisdiction heterogeneity that a higher level of aggregation would produce.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction of enforcement and adjudication for general deterrence of drunk-driving. The authors present a triangular feedback model between three domains: police, courts and drunk-driving events. The authors’ deductive approach imposes no structural assumptions beyond the core of general deterrence theory.

Using a largely untapped data set for California’s 58 counties from 1990 to 2010, the authors estimate a series of heterogeneous panel Granger non-causality tests. This empirically based evidence is re-organized per the proposed triangular feedback model to objectively categorize local criminal justice systems as active, responsive or reactive (with respect to drunk-driving).

Our results suggest that state-level analyses obscure useful variations that empirical panel methods can now handle. The authors provide evidence that research based on empirically derived groupings, rather than inductively based preconceptions, is key to understanding enforcement and compliance. The authors provide a less confounded picture of the relationship between drunk-driving enforcement and adjudication.

Our study addresses one offense for a particular state in the USA. It is an exploratory analysis. This analytical and empirical approach is new.

Our approach imposes very few a priori assumptions and requires a minimum of data series to be executed. The method can be broadly applied to a range of topics and observational units.

The authors aim to expand identification of local systems’ effectiveness (or not) and mechanisms of for general deterrence of drunk-driving. The offense is one that can be committed easily and unintentionally; it does not presume anomie. The authors address general communities, not anomalies. Knowing how enforcement and compliance operate is essential to an array of behavioral externalities.

This is a new empirically based approach for analyzing social systems. It is a marriage of new macroeconomic time-series techniques with an old question, most often addressed by microeconomic research. This study uses an underutilized data source to construct a unique panel data set.

Much progress has been made in public opinion regarding drug prohibition. The policy has been an utter failure, very expensive, and increasingly disliked by people around the world. As a result, several states have passed drug reform legislation that reduces penalties for the production, distribution, and consumption of previously prohibited substances such as narcotics and marijuana. Other states have placed more resources in drug treatment programs (demand reduction) instead of drug interdiction efforts (supply reduction). In North America, several states in the US and Canada have passed medical marijuana legislation to take advantage of the well-known medical benefits of marijuana (Piper, Matthew, Katherine, & Rebecca, 2003).

Mises (1949[1963], p. 692) explains that market-failure justifications for state actions, such as economic regulation “ascribe to the state not only the best intentions but also omniscience.” He then points out that neither assumption is valid: government is not benevolent since both, those who are employed by the state and those who demand state actions, have subjective self-interests, and it is not all knowing since knowledge is widely dispersed and the cost of coordination is infinitely high, particularly without market profits and prices as coordinating mechanisms. Furthermore, Mises suggests that dropping either assumption undermines the conclusions that state intervention is necessarily desirable even if some sort of market failure is actually identified. Austrian economists in the Mises tradition have tended to focus on the knowledge problem in their challenges to regulation, however. Many Austrians obviously recognize the interest problem, of course, but they often assume it away in order to illustrate that government interference with markets is not desirable even if it is well intended. In contrast, public-choice analysis tends to focus on the interest problem as source of government failure, although some public-choice analysts also obviously recognize the knowledge problem. Indeed, this difference in perspective is so pronounced that Ikeda (1997, p. 240) explicitly distinguishes between Public Choice and Austrian political economy by suggesting that the Austrian approach assumes benevolence on the part of government officials, while the public-choice approach assume narrow interests.¹ Ikeda (1997, p. 150) also suggests that the separation of these two approaches is justified because “Austrian political economy and public choice are each capable of standing on their own [so] public-theorists…find it optimal simply to continue to pursue their research along the line of either the former or the latter approaches.” The following presentation questions this assertion. Instead, both assumptions should be dropped, and the resulting integrated Austrian-public-choice model should be expanded to include assumptions about the relationships between regulations, property rights security, and both market and political behavior.²

The advent of recession at the beginning of twenty-first century forced many organizations worldwide to reduce cost and to be more responsive to customer demands. Lean Manufacturing (LM) has been widely perceived by industry as an answer to these requirements because LM reduces waste without additional requirements of resources. This led to a spurt in LM research across the globe mostly through empirical and exploratory studies which resulted in a plethora of LM definitions with divergent scopes, objectives, performance indicators, tools/techniques/methodologies, and concepts/elements. The purpose of this paper is to review LM literature and report these divergent definitions, scopes, objectives, and tools/techniques/methodologies.

This paper highlights various definitions by various researchers and practitioners. A total of 209 research papers have been reviewed for the research contribution, research methodology adopted, tools/techniques/methodologies used, type of industry, author profile, country of research, and year of publication.

There are plethora of LM definitions with divergent objectives and scope. Theory verification through empirical and exploratory studies has been the focus of research in LM. Automotive industry has been the focus of LM research but LM has also been adopted by other types of industries also. One of the critical implementation factors of LM is simultaneous adoption of leanness in supply chain. LM has become an integrated system composed of highly integrated elements and a wide variety of management practices. There is lack of standard LM implementation process/framework.

The paper reviews 209 research papers for their research contribution, research methodology, author profile, type of industry, and tools/techniques/methodology used. Various characteristics of LM definitions are also reviewed.

This paper aims to develop a climbing robot to help people inspect lamps of high-mast lighting.

The robot consists of driving mechanism, suspension mechanism and compression mechanism. The driving mechanism is realized by link chains and sprockets, which are arranged opposite to each other, to form a dual caterpillar mechanism. The compression mechanism squeezes the caterpillar, and rubber feet “grasps” the steel rope to generate enough adhesion forces. The suspension mechanism is used to compensate the contraction or extension of the chains. The robot is equipped with a DC motor with a rated power of 250 W and a wireless module to communicate with the operator’s console. The dynamic model of the robot and the control strategy is derived, and the stability of the controller is proofed.

The payload experiment shows the robot can afford up to 3.7 times payload versus its own weight. Even when the payload is 30 kg, the robot can maintain a speed of the 1 m/s. The experiments also show that the tracking error of the robot reaches zero.

The proposed moving mechanism has a high load/weight ratio, which is a verified solution for the cable inspection purpose.

A rope climbing robot for high mast lighting inspection is proposed. The developed mechanism can reach a speed of 1 m/s with the payload of 30 kg, while its own weight is only 15.6 kg. The payload/weight ratio of the robot is 2.24; this value is rather good in many climbing robots reported in other renowned journal.