1,736 research outputs found

    Should the Dead Bind the Living? Perhaps Ask the People: An Examination of the Debates Over Constitutional Convention Referendums in State Constitutional Conventions

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    Should the United States of America have a constitutional convention? Thomas Jefferson would maintain that one is long overdue; James Madison would argue the contrary. These two luminaries of American constitutional thought took sides in a stirring debate on a fundamental question in constitutionalism: should the dead bind the living? Jefferson advocated for recurrent recourse to the people by holding constitutional conventions in each generation. James Madison disagreed, arguing that stability and constitutional veneration, among other factors, were paramount. Most recall Madison as having won the debate. But at least 18 states throughout American history have adopted a Jeffersonian model of recurrent recourse to the people on the question of whether to hold a constitutional convention. Many of these states debated the issue in their own constitutional conventions throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. No scholar has yet mined this rich trove of convention records for all that they contribute to the fundamental debate spurred by Jefferson and Madison and continued by many distinguished scholars since. Here, I begin the project of adding to that debate the many insights from countless statesmen who contributed thought to this issue on the floors of state constitutional conventions throughout American history. These statesmen took up the arguments of Jefferson and Madison and provided novel insights and nuance, as well as raised new and interesting issues that previous statesmen and scholars have not considered since. Their insights are vital to this fundamental question of constitutionalism

    Novel Correspondence-based Approach for Consistent Human Skeleton Extraction

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    This paper presents a novel base-points-driven shape correspondence (BSC) approach to extract skeletons of articulated objects from 3D mesh shapes. The skeleton extraction based on BSC approach is more accurate than the traditional direct skeleton extraction methods. Since 3D shapes provide more geometric information, BSC offers the consistent information between the source shape and the target shapes. In this paper, we first extract the skeleton from a template shape such as the source shape automatically. Then, the skeletons of the target shapes of different poses are generated based on the correspondence relationship with source shape. The accuracy of the proposed method is demonstrated by presenting a comprehensive performance evaluation on multiple benchmark datasets. The results of the proposed approach can be applied to various applications such as skeleton-driven animation, shape segmentation and human motion analysis

    The higher education impact agenda, scientific realism and policy change: the case of electoral integrity in Britain

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    Pressures have increasingly been put upon social scientists to prove their economic, cultural and social value through ‘impact agendas’ in higher education. There has been little conceptual and empirical discussion of the challenges involved in achieving impact and the dangers of evaluating it, however. This article argues that a critical realist approach to social science can help to identify some of these key challenges and the institutional incompatibilities between impact regimes and university research in free societies. These incompatibilities are brought out through an autobiographical ‘insider-account’ of trying to achieve impact in the field of electoral integrity in Britain. The article argues that there is a more complex relationship between research and the real world which means that the nature of knowledge might change as it becomes known by reflexive agents. Secondly, the researchers are joined into social relations with a variety of actors, including those who might be the object of study in their research. Researchers are often weakly positioned in these relations. Some forms of impact, such as achieving policy change, are therefore exceptionally difficult as they are dependent on other actors. Strategies for trying to achieve impact are drawn out such as collaborating with civil society groups and parliamentarians to lobby for policy change

    Co-skeletons:Consistent curve skeletons for shape families

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    We present co-skeletons, a new method that computes consistent curve skeletons for 3D shapes from a given family. We compute co-skeletons in terms of sampling density and semantic relevance, while preserving the desired characteristics of traditional, per-shape curve skeletonization approaches. We take the curve skeletons extracted by traditional approaches for all shapes from a family as input, and compute semantic correlation information of individual skeleton branches to guide an edge-pruning process via skeleton-based descriptors, clustering, and a voting algorithm. Our approach achieves more concise and family-consistent skeletons when compared to traditional per-shape methods. We show the utility of our method by using co-skeletons for shape segmentation and shape blending on real-world data

    French deputies, their assistants and the uses of staff appropriations: A sociology of political work

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    This analysis focuses on how members of Parliament in France organize their staff. The way deputies distribute the tasks among their assistants suggests that the organization and division of labor should be understood mainly in relation to the pressures generated by MPs in their home district, since a seat in the National Assembly very much depends on providing services to constituents. The staff under the use of the single member district system is so involved in solving voters’ “personal” problems of various sorts that assistants are forced to devise strategies for regulating demand and providing often token responses. Developing relations with constituents even affects their legislative duties. For deputies, it is a way of reducing the “occupational” risks inherent in elective office. They must adapt to a voting system that incites them to adopt a conception of representation closer to that of spokesperson for the residents of their district than of representative of the Nation

    French deputies, their assistants and the uses of staff appropriations: A sociology of political work

    Get PDF
    This analysis focuses on how members of Parliament in France organize their staff. The way deputies distribute the tasks among their assistants suggests that the organization and division of labor should be understood mainly in relation to the pressures generated by MPs in their home district, since a seat in the National Assembly very much depends on providing services to constituents. The staff under the use of the single member district system is so involved in solving voters’ “personal” problems of various sorts that assistants are forced to devise strategies for regulating demand and providing often token responses. Developing relations with constituents even affects their legislative duties. For deputies, it is a way of reducing the “occupational” risks inherent in elective office. They must adapt to a voting system that incites them to adopt a conception of representation closer to that of spokesperson for the residents of their district than of representative of the Nation

    Creating the Disabled Citizen: How Massachusetts Disenfranchised People Under Guardianship

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    Albuquerque Evening Citizen, 03-31-1906

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    https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/abq_citizen_news/4244/thumbnail.jp
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