18,176 research outputs found
Caught in the Seamless Web: Does the Internet's Global Reach Justify Less Freedom of Speech?
A federal appellate court will decide this year whether French anti-discrimination law can restrict freedom of speech on U.S.-based websites that are accessible in France. A Paris court ruled in 2000 that the Yahoo! website violated French law because its users offered for sale certain Nazi artifacts. However, to force compliance with the order, French plaintiffs must seek enforcement from a U.S. court. In response, Yahoo! sought a declaratory ruling and a federal district court held that enforcing the French order would violate the First Amendment. The matter is now on appeal. The Yahoo! case presents the question of whether the Internet should be governed by myriad local censorship laws from around the world. U.S. courts have held uniformly that the Internet should receive the highest degree of First Amendment protection. They have been influenced profoundly by the medium's global reach and have invalidated most restrictions so as not to interrupt the "never-ending worldwide conversation" that the Internet makes possible. A contrary result in the Yahoo! case would embrace a very different philosophy -- that Internet speakers must "show their papers" at each nation's borders to ensure that their speech is acceptable to local authorities. Other nations may treat their citizens as fragile children if they wish, or worse, as enemies of the state. But U.S. courts should not permit the seeds of foreign censorship to be planted on U.S. soil by finding that such restrictions are enforceable here
On general flux backgrounds with localized sources
We derive new consistency conditions for string compactifications with
generic fluxes (RR, NSNS, geometrical) and localized sources (D-branes,
NS-branes, KK-monopoles). The constraints are all related by string dualities
and share a common origin in M-theory. We also find new sources of
instabilities. We discuss the importance of these conditions for the
consistency of the effective action and for the study of interpolating
solutions between vacua.Comment: 29 pages, 2 figures, v2: published versio
Canonical bifurcation in higher derivative, higher spin, theories
We present a non-perturbative canonical analysis of the D=3
quadratic-curvature, yet ghost-free, model to exemplify a novel, "constraint
bifurcation", effect. Consequences include a jump in excitation count: a
linearized level gauge variable is promoted to a dynamical one in the full
theory. We illustrate these results with their concrete perturbative
counterparts. They are of course mutually consistent, as are perturbative
findings in related models. A geometrical interpretation in terms of
propagating torsion reveals the model's relation to an (improved) version of
Einstein-Weyl gravity at the linearized level. Finally, we list some necessary
conditions for triggering the bifurcation phenomenon in general interacting
gauge systems.Comment: 10 pages, v2: typos corrected, v3: new title to reflect greatly
expanded version, to appear in special issue of J Phys A (eds, M Vasiliev & M
Gaberdiel
Lecture Notes on Topological Crystalline Insulators
We give an introduction to topological crystalline insulators, that is,
gapped ground states of quantum matter that are not adiabatically connected to
an atomic limit without breaking symmetries that include spatial
transformations, like mirror or rotational symmetries. To deduce the
topological properties, we use non-Abelian Wilson loops. We also discuss in
detail higher-order topological insulators with hinge and corner states, and in
particular present interacting bosonic models for the latter class of systems.Comment: Lectures given at the San Sebasti\'an Topological Matter School 2017,
published in "Topological Matter. Springer Series in Solid-State Sciences,
vol 190. Springer, Cham
Forgery in Cyberspace: The Spoof Could Be on You!
Spoofing is one of the newest forms of cyber-attack, a technological methodology adapted to mask the identity of spammers who have faced hostile reaction in response to bulk, unsolicited, electronic mail messages.[1] Sending Spam, however, is no longer the only reason for deception, as crackers have taken pleasure in the challenge of manipulating computer systems and, additionally, find recreational enjoyment in doing so. In this legal Note, the author’s intent is to show that criminal, rather than civil liability is the best way to effectively deter and punish the spoofer. The injury that results when a computer system’s technological safety measures fail to adequately safeguard the system affects not only the owner of the hijacked e-mail address, but also the Internet Service Provider, and the Network as a whole. Current Anti-Spam Legislation is arguably ineffective at targeting these particular types of malicious attacks, and a different legal approach is suggested
Chiral fermions and anomaly cancellation on orbifolds with Wilson lines and flux
We consider six-dimensional supergravity compactified on orbifolds with
Wilson lines and bulk flux. Torus Wilson lines are decomposed into Wilson lines
around the orbifold fixed points, and twisted boundary conditions of matter
fields are related to fractional localized flux. Both, orbifold singularities
and flux lead to chiral fermions in four dimensions. We show that in addition
to the standard bulk and fixed point anomalies the Green-Schwarz term also
cancels the four-dimensional anomaly induced by the flux background. The two
axions contained in the antisymmetric tensor field both contribute to the
cancellation of the four-dimensional anomaly and the generation of a vector
boson mass via the Stueckelberg mechanism. An orthogonal linear combination of
the axions remains massless and couples to the gauge field in the standard way.
Furthermore, we construct convenient expressions for the wave functions of the
zero modes and relate their multiplicity and behavior at the fixed points to
the bulk flux quanta and the Wilson lines.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, clarifying remarks adde
Breaking and restoring symmetries within the nuclear energy density functional method
We review the notion of symmetry breaking and restoration within the frame of
nuclear energy density functional methods. We focus on key differences between
wave-function- and energy-functional-based methods. In particular, we point to
difficulties to formulate the restoration of symmetries within the energy
functional framework. The problems tackled recently in connection with
particle-number restoration serve as a baseline to the present discussion.
Reaching out to angular-momentum restoration, we identify an exact mathematical
property of the energy density that could be used to
constrain energy density functional kernels. Consequently, we suggest possible
routes towards a better formulation of symmetry restorations within energy
density functional methods.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, contribution to the "Focus issue on Open
Problems in Nuclear Structure", Journal of Physics
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