A New Societal Self-Defense Theory of Punishment—The Rights-Protection Theory

In this paper, I propose a new self-defense theory of punishment, the rights-protection theory. By appealing to the interest theory of right, I show that what we call “the right of self-defense” is actually composed of the right to protect our basic rights. The right of self-defense is not a single, self-standing right but a group of derivative rights justified by their contribution to the protection of the core, basic rights. Thus, these rights of self-defense are both justified and constrained by the basic rights they are supposed to protect. I then explain how this theory responds to a common objection. Opponents argue that, to exercise the right of self-defense, some threat must be present. However, in the context of punishment, the threat has already taken effect or is already gone. Thus, the right of self-defense becomes irrelevant when we punish an offender. I show that this objection is based on an implausibly narrow conception of self-defense. A reasonable conception would allow us to exercise our right of self-defense when there is a present definite threat, a future definite threat, or a potential threat. Thus, we may still exercise our right of self-defense in the context of punishment

The Instrumental Value Arguments for National Self-Determination

David Miller argues that national identity is indispensable for the successful functioning of a liberal democracy. National identity makes important contributions to liberal democratic institutions, including creating incentives for the fulfilment of civic duties, facilitating deliberative democracy, and consolidating representative democracy. Thus, a shared identity is indispensable for liberal democracy and grounds a good claim for self-determination. Because Miller’s arguments appeal to the instrumental values of a national culture, I call his argument ‘instrumental value’ arguments. In this paper, I examine the instrumental value arguments and show that they fail to justify a group’s right to self-determination

Kinematic and Spatial Substructure in NGC 2264

We present an expanded kinematic study of the young cluster NGC 2264 based upon optical radial velocities measured using multi-fiber echelle spectroscopy at the 6.5 meter MMT and Magellan telescopes. We report radial velocities for 695 stars, of which approximately 407 stars are confirmed or very likely members. Our results more than double the number of members with radial velocities from F{\H u}r{\'e}sz et al., resulting in a much better defined kinematic relationship between the stellar population and the associated molecular gas. In particular, we find that there is a significant subset of stars that are systematically blueshifted with respect to the molecular ($^{13}$CO) gas. The detection of Lithium absorption and/or infrared excesses in this blue-shifted population suggests that at least some of these stars are cluster members; we suggest some speculative scenarios to explain their kinematics. Our results also more clearly define the redshifted population of stars in the northern end of the cluster; we suggest that the stellar and gas kinematics of this region are the result of a bubble driven by the wind from O7 star S Mon. Our results emphasize the complexity of the spatial and kinematic structure of NGC 2264, important for eventually building up a comprehensive picture of cluster formation.Comment: Accepted to AJ. 38 pages, 5 Figures 3 Table

Dynamically Iterative MapReduce

[[abstract]]MapReduce is a distributed and parallel computing model for data-intensive tasks with features of optimized scheduling, flexibility, high availability, and high manageability. MapReduce can work on various platforms; however, MapReduce is not suitable for iterative programs because the performance may be lowered by frequent disk I/O operations. In order to improve system performance and resource utilization, we propose a novel MapReduce framework named Dynamically Iterative MapReduce (DIMR) to reduce numbers of disk I/O operations and the consumption of network bandwidth by means of using dynamic task allocation and memory management mechanism. We show that DIMR is promising with detail discussions in this paper.[[notice]]補正完畢[[incitationindex]]SCI[[incitationindex]]EI[[booktype]]紙本[[booktype]]電子

The metabolomics of psoriatic disease.

Metabolomics is an emerging new "omics" field involving the systematic analysis of the metabolites in a biologic system. These metabolites provide a molecular snapshot of cellular activity and are thus important for understanding the functional changes in metabolic pathways that drive disease. Recently, metabolomics has been used to study the local and systemic metabolic changes in psoriasis and its cardiometabolic comorbidities. Such studies have revealed novel insights into disease pathogenesis and suggest new biochemical signatures that may be used as a marker of psoriatic disease. This review will discuss common strategies in metabolomics analysis, current findings in the metabolomics of psoriasis, and emerging trends in psoriatic metabolomics

Ant colony optimization for capacitated vehicle routing problem.

Problem statement: The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem which is concerned with the distribution of goods between the depot and customers. It is of economic importance to businesses as approximately 10-20% of the final cost of the goods is contributed by the transportation process. Approach: This problem was tackled using an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) combined with heuristic approaches that act as the route improvement strategies. The proposed ACO utilized a pheromone evaporation procedure of standard ant algorithm in order to introduce an evaporation rate that depends on the solutions found by the artificial ants. Results: Computational experiments were conducted on benchmark data set and the results obtained from the proposed algorithms shown that the application of combination of two different heuristics in the ACO had the capability to improve the ants' solutions better than ACO embedded with only one heuristic. Conclusion: ACO with swap and 3-opt heuristic has the capability to tackle the CVRP with satisfactory solution quality and run time. It is a viable alternative for solving the CVRP

Structural study in Highly Compressed BiFeO3 Epitaxial Thin Films on YAlO3

We report a study on the thermodynamic stability and structure analysis of the epitaxial BiFeO3 (BFO) thin films grown on YAlO3 (YAO) substrate. First we observe a phase transition of MC-MA-T occurs in thin sample (<60 nm) with an utter tetragonal-like phase (denoted as MII here) with a large c/a ratio (~1.23). Specifically, MII phase transition process refers to the structural evolution from a monoclinic MC structure at room temperature to a monoclinic MA at higher temperature (150oC) and eventually to a presence of nearly tetragonal structure above 275oC. This phase transition is further confirmed by the piezoforce microscopy measurement, which shows the rotation of polarization axis during the phase transition. A systematic study on structural evolution with thickness to elucidate the impact of strain state is performed. We note that the YAO substrate can serve as a felicitous base for growing T-like BFO because this phase stably exists in very thick film. Thick BFO films grown on YAO substrate exhibit a typical "morphotropic-phase-boundary"-like feature with coexisting multiple phases (MII, MI, and R) and a periodic stripe-like topography. A discrepancy of arrayed stripe morphology in different direction on YAO substrate due to the anisotropic strain suggests a possibility to tune the MPB-like region. Our study provides more insights to understand the strain mediated phase co-existence in multiferroic BFO system.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Journal of Applied Physic