Personal identity and the radiation argument

Sydney Shoemaker has argued that, because we can imagine a people who take themselves to survive a 'brain-state-transfer' procedure, cerebrum transplant, or the like, we ought to conclude that we could survive such a thing. I claim that the argument faces two objections, and can be defended only by depriving it any real interest

Restricting Movement or Depriving Liberty?

This judicial appeal for clarity exposes a jurisprudential problem which threatens one of our most fundamental human values; the right to liberty. For no-one really knows what it means to be “deprived” of one’s “liberty”. The extremities are straightforward. Prisoners are deprived; picnickers are not. But liberty deprivations may “take numerous other forms [whose] variety is being increased by developments in legal standards and in attitudes”. Technology, too, has played its part in such developments by introducing novel ways of restricting movement beyond the paradigmatic lock and key. The more expansive those other forms, however, the greater the risk of legal uncertainty

Verbal Sexual Harassment as Equality-Depriving Conduct

Part I of this Note argues that commentators like Browne and some courts have mischaracterized the harm of verbal sexual harassment as mere offense. Rather, the true harm of a sexually hostile environment created by words and expressive conduct extends beyond offense, emotional distress, and economic displacement; at bottom, the harm is equality-deprivation. Part II explains how a sexually hostile environment is equality-depriving by arguing that words which create a sexually hostile environment must be understood in historical and social context. Words can be used not only to communicate ideas but also to perform acts of coercion and sexual abuse. Furthermore, sexually abusive speech must be understood in its institutional context. The workplace is the dominant institution in the lives of most adult citizens. It is a community that not only provides financial sustenance but also serves an identity-forming function. How a worker is perceived and treated in the workplace is related intimately to the formation of his or her self-identity. Sexually abusive speech in the workplace proves to be equality-depriving in the sense that it creates a communally shared set of meanings, a workplace ethos, that defines a harassment victim as inferior to her opposite sex counterpart. Part III argues that the workplace should be viewed as a public sphere in which the democratic process matters. Decisions that have broad societal impact are made in the workplace. If democracy in this country is to mean more than the occasional vote for a public official, workers should have a greater role and voice in workplace governance. Affording workers a greater voice in order to democratize the workplace, however, does not entail the toleration of sexually abusive expression. Such toleration would only substitute one hierarchy, management over labor, for another, male over female, or vice versa. An employee\u27s ability to be heard in the workplace democracy must not be impeded by a workplace ethos- that devalues another employee\u27s humanity. Part IV explores why the regulation of verbal sexual harassment in the workplace meets constitutional challenges. The regulation of sexually abusive speech in private workplaces is no more problematic from a constitutional perspective than the regulation of other types of coercive speech in the traditional labor and public employee contexts. In those contexts, courts balance free speech interests, of employees against statutory and common-law interests such as industrial harmony and workplace efficiency. Following the balancing approach adopted in the labor and public employee contexts, courts concerned about encroaching on employee free speech in hostile environment cases should balance any free speech interest in the alleged verbal sexual harassment against the compelling governmental interest in ensuring sex equality. A balancing of free speech and equality interests often should favor the prohibition from the workplace of sexually stereotyped comments, epithets, propositions, and pornography. The few cases in which the Supreme Court has simultaneously addressed the First Amendment and equality interests reveal a precedent of not forsaking equality to foster an absolutist position on freedom of speech. Part IV also argues that recent Supreme Court decisions have suggested that the restriction of sexually abusive workplace speech may be legal as a content-neutral regulation of equality-depriving conduct. Hostile environment law is constitutional because it targets equality-depriving conduct generally rather than focusing on particular messages or ideas. Finally, Part V explores the sweep of hostile environment law, and illustrates that as a content-neutral regulation of equality-depriving conduct, it is neither unconstitutionally overbroad nor vague. This Note concludes that sexual harassment in the workplace is not only sexual abuse but also constitutes equality-depriving conduct. Consequently, it can be regulated without offending the First Amendment protection of free speech

Lactose intolerance: Causes, effects, diagnosis and symptom control

Lactose intolerance is a very common complaint which leads to a number of distressing gut symptoms in those affected. It can be quite easy to control by reducing milk consumption, and possibly by adding lactase to the diet. However, clinicians should be wary of over-diagnosing this condition, particularly in the indigenous white population, and thereby depriving the individual of a useful, cheap and nutritious food. If lactose intolerance is suspected, it should be carefully investigated and diagnosed, prior to the introduction of dietary management. </jats:p

Compulsory education - in schools only? : divergent developments in Germany

Germany is the focus of this paper, owing to the fact that since 1938 it has had the strictest laws on compulsory schooling worldwide. As a result, homeschooling in Germany has become virtually impossible. There are interesting divergences between policy and practice in the German setting, both in the country’s educational history and present educational problems. The Länder (federal states) have the responsibility for education, and they are taking a much stricter line against homeschoolers than a decade ago, especially by depriving parents of the custody of their homeschooled children at an early stage. The laws relied upon, however, were never intended to deal with such educational matters; they were designed to punish parents who abuse or neglect their children. The present, highly questionable legal action succeeds only because of the consent of state schools, state social welfare offices, and courts. The same laws are not used against the parents of the approximately 250,000 teens who are truant. The functioning of the legal and sociological machinery in Germany is being employed aggressively to stamp out homeschooling, while at the same time it ignores the crucial issue of parents who allow their children to skip school—thus depriving them of an adequate education at home or elsewhere. At the same time, the number of specialists in law and education, as well as politicians and governmental experts who argue in favor of homeschooling is growing, and media reports on homeschooling are much more positive than they were a decade ago

The comparative advantage of dryland soybean production in Brits, North West

The effect of policy on the South African soybean industry is analysed, using the policy analysis matrix. The absence of effective protection from cheap imports of soy-cake and -oil, as well as the ineffectiveness of the processing industry, lead to relatively low farmgate prices of soybeans in South Africa. This could result in producers using their resources for more profitable crops, thus depriving the South African feed industry to benefit from more full fat soy in feed rations.Crop Production/Industries,

Droplet: A New Denial-of-Service Attack on Low Power Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we present a new kind of Denial-of-Service attack against the PHY layer of low power wireless sensor networks. Overcoming the very limited range of jamming-based attacks, this attack can penetrate deep into a target network with high power efficiency. We term this the Droplet attack, as it attains enormous disruption by dropping small, payload-less frame headers to its victim's radio receiver, depriving the latter of bandwidth and sleep time. We demonstrate the Droplet attack's high damage rate to full duty-cycle receivers, and further show that a high frequency version of Droplet can even force nodes running on very low duty-cycle MAC protocols to drop most of their packets

Depriving Mice of Sleep also Deprives of Food.

Both sleep-wake behavior and circadian rhythms are tightly coupled to energy metabolism and food intake. Altered feeding times in mice are known to entrain clock gene rhythms in the brain and liver, and sleep-deprived humans tend to eat more and gain weight. Previous observations in mice showing that sleep deprivation (SD) changes clock gene expression might thus relate to altered food intake, and not to the loss of sleep per se. Whether SD affects food intake in the mouse and how this might affect clock gene expression is, however, unknown. We therefore quantified (i) the cortical expression of the clock genes Per1, Per2, Dbp, and Cry1 in mice that had access to food or not during a 6 h SD, and (ii) food intake during baseline, SD, and recovery sleep. We found that food deprivation did not modify the SD-incurred clock gene changes in the cortex. Moreover, we discovered that although food intake during SD did not differ from the baseline, mice lost weight and increased food intake during subsequent recovery. We conclude that SD is associated with food deprivation and that the resulting energy deficit might contribute to the effects of SD that are commonly interpreted as a response to sleep loss