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1. Alternative punishments: How laypeople and judges impose alternative noncarceral sanctions.

   https://doi.org/10.1037/law0000420  

   Mott, Christian; Solomon, Larisa Heiphetz (August 2024, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law)

   Legal theorists have argued that incarceration and alternative sanctions are incommensurable – that is, beyond some crime severity threshold, replacing incarceration with alternative sanctions can never yield a sentence that people will view as appropriate (Kahan, 1996). To test whether laypeople hold this view, we elicited lay judgments about appropriate sentences for four common types of federal crimes in two different conditions: One in which participants could impose only a term of imprisonment and another in which they could impose imprisonment along with alternative sanctions. Laypeople imposed significantly less imprisonment in the latter condition and significant quantities of alternative, non-carceral sanctions. Consistent with the view that imprisonment is commensurable with other sanctions, and particularly with restraint-based sanctions, laypeople substituted supervised release almost one-for-one for imprisonment. In addition, they increased imprisonment and supervised release at similar rates as crime severity increased. Next, using individual-level sentencing data from similar cases in the federal courts, we found that judges’ sentencing decisions showed similar relationships between crime severity and both imprisonment and supervised release. However, laypeople imposed dramatically larger fines and more hours of community service than did federal judges, and laypeople tied the use of these alternative sanctions more directly to crime severity. These findings suggest that federal judges do not view fines and community service as commensurable with incarceration. As a result, current criminal sentencing practices deviate from community views by placing excessive emphasis on incarceration and paying insufficient attention to alternative sanctions. 

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2. Alternative plastics

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00750-2  

   Yuan, Liang; Buzoglu Kurnaz, Leman; Tang, Chuanbing (October 2021, Nature Sustainability)
3. Higher correlations and the alternative hypothesis

   https://doi.org/10.1093/qmathj/haz.043  

   Lagarias, Jeffrey C.; Rodgers, Brad (April 2020, The quarterly journal of mathematics)

   The Alternative Hypothesis (AH) concerns a hypothetical and unlikely picture of how zeros of the Riemann zeta function are spaced, which one would like to rule out. In the Alternative Hypothesis, the renormalized distance between non-trivial zeros is supposed to always lie at a half integer. It is known that the Alternative Hypothesis is compatible with what is known about the pair correlation function of zeta zeros. We ask whether what is currently known about higher correlation functionsof the zeros is sufficient to rule out the Alternative Hypothesis and show by construction of an explicit counterexample point process that it is not. A similar result was recently independently obtained by Tao, using slightly different methods. We also apply the ergodic theorem to this point process to show there exists a deterministic collection of points lying in 1/2 Z, which satisfy the Alternative Hypothesis spacing, but mimic the local statistics that are currently known about zeros of the zeta function. 

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4. Alternative Cements: Recent Developments and Future Directions

   https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784482261.035  

   Gevaudan, Juan Pablo; Osio-Norgaard, Jorge; Srubar, Wil V. (April 2019, 2019 ASCE Architectural Engineering Institute (AEI) Conference)
5. Mechanisms and drivers of alternative shrubland states

   https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.3987  

   Archer, Steven R.; Peters, Debra P. C.; Burruss, N. Dylan; Yao, Jin (April 2022, Ecosphere)

   Abstract Grassland‐to‐shrubland state change has been widespread in arid lands globally. Long‐term records at the Jornada Basin USDA‐LTER site in the North American Chihuahuan Desert document the time series of transition from grassland dominance in the 1850s to shrubland dominance in the 1990s. This broadscale change ostensibly resulted from livestock overgrazing in conjunction with periodic drought and represents the classic “grassland‐to‐shrubland” regime shift. However, finer‐scale observations reveal a more nuanced view of this state change that includes transitions from dominance by one shrub functional type to another (e.g., based on leaf habit [evergreen vs. deciduous], N₂fixation potential, and drought tolerance). We analyzed the Jornada Basin historic vegetation data using a fine‐scale grid and classified the dominant vegetation in the resulting 890 cells on each of four dates (1858, 1915, 1928, and 1998). This analysis allowed us to quantify on contrasting soil geomorphic units the rate and spatial distribution of: (1) state change from grasslands to shrublands across the Jornada Basin, (2) transitions between shrub functional groups, and (3) transitions from shrub‐to‐grass dominance. Results from our spatially explicit, decadal timescale perspective show that: (1) shrubland ecosystems developing on former grasslands were spatially and temporally more dynamic than has been generally presumed, (2) in some locations, shrublands initially developing on grasslands subsequently transitioned to ecosystems dominated by a different shrub functional type, with these changes in shrub composition likely involving changes in soil properties, and (3) some shrub‐dominated locations have reverted to grass dominance. Accordingly, traditional, broad characterizations of “grassland‐to‐shrubland” state change may be too simplistic. An accounting of these complexities and transitions from one shrub functional group to another is important for projecting state change consequences for ecosystem processes. Understanding the mechanisms, drivers, and influence of interactions between patterns and processes on transitions between shrub states defined by woody plant functional types will be germane to predicting future landscape change. 

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