The New Federalism, the Spending Power, and Federal Criminal Law

It is difficult in constitutional-law circles to avoid the observation that we are living through a revival of federalism. Certainly, the Rehnquist Court has brought back to the public-law table the notion that the Constitution is a charter for a government of limited and enumerated powers, one that is constrained both by that charter\u27s text and by the structure of the government it creates. This allegedly revolutionary Court seems little inclined, however, to revise or revisit its Spending Power doctrine, and it remains settled law that Congress may disburse funds in pursuit of ends not authorized explicitly in Article I and may promote policy goals that might lie beyond the reach of its enumerated powers merely by attaching conditions to the money it spends. Thus, talk of revolution notwithstanding, the Spending Power continues to provide practically limitless opportunities for the national government to shape policy at the state and local levels of life and government. This Article considers whether and to what extent Congress may use its Spending Power - standing alone, or in conjunction with the Necessary and Proper, or Sweeping, Clause - to create, prosecute, and punish federal crimes. In particular, it examines the challenges to a particular federal anti-corruption statute, and concludes that, even if the Commerce Clause is understood to convey to Congress almost plenary regulatory authority, the power of the purse is not the power to police. That is, a generally applicable federal criminal statute cannot be regarded as a spending condition, and not even the Sweeping Clause is a license for hungry dog criminal jurisdiction. What\u27s more, the expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction through spending is inconsistent with the structures explicitly created and reasonably implied by our Constitution, with the values these structures were designed to advance, and with the liberties they were intended to protect. The Article\u27s doctrinal claims cohere well with leading themes in contemporary constitutional law. There are, for example, rich connections between the Article\u27s arguments about conditional spending, the Sweeping Clause, and criminalization, on the one hand, and contemporary debates in First Amendment law relating to government speech, forum analysis, and expressive association, on the other. In addition, the understanding of the Spending Power defended in the Article serves not only as a complement to, but a crucial component of, the renewed emphasis on mediating institutions and civil society that has been provocatively identified by Professor John McGinnis as the enduring legacy of the Rehnquist Court. The Article closes with the suggestion that whatever formalism might be found lurking in its arguments has a worthy pedagogical function as it helps to instill, perhaps, what the settled disposition on the part of the people in favor of local diversity and prerogative and the disciplined love of liberty that transcends the desire for immediate gratification, both of which are required for a truly robust federalism

Probabilistic and deterministic aspects of linear estimation in geodesy

Recent advances in observational techniques related to geodetic work (VLBI, laser ranging) make it imperative that more consideration should be given to modeling problems. Uncertainties in the effect of atmospheric refraction, polar motion and precession-nutation parameters, cannot be dispensed with in the context of centimeter level geodesy. Even physical processes that have generally been previously altogether neglected (station motions) must now be taken into consideration. The problem of modeling functions of time or space, or at least their values at observation points (epochs) is explored. When the nature of the function to be modeled is unknown. The need to include a limited number of terms and to a priori decide upon a specific form may result in a representation which fails to sufficiently approximate the unknown function. An alternative approach of increasing application is the modeling of unknown functions as stochastic processes

VI Workshop on Computational Data Analysis and Numerical Methods: Book of Abstracts

The VI Workshop on Computational Data Analysis and Numerical Methods (WCDANM) is going to be held on June 27-29, 2019, in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Beira Interior (UBI), Covilhã, Portugal and it is a unique opportunity to disseminate scientific research related to the areas of Mathematics in general, with particular relevance to the areas of Computational Data Analysis and Numerical Methods in theoretical and/or practical field, using new techniques, giving especial emphasis to applications in Medicine, Biology, Biotechnology, Engineering, Industry, Environmental Sciences, Finance, Insurance, Management and Administration. The meeting will provide a forum for discussion and debate of ideas with interest to the scientific community in general. With this meeting new scientific collaborations among colleagues, namely new collaborations in Masters and PhD projects are expected. The event is open to the entire scientific community (with or without communication/poster)

Harmonic Analysis as the Exploitation of Symmetry- A Historical Survey

Paper by George W. Macke

Metaontology

The Ontological Question 'What exists?' dates back over two thousand five hundred years to the dawn of Western philosophy, and attempts to answer it define the province of ontology. The history of the Western philosophical tradition itself has been one of the differentiation and separation of the various sciences from the primordial stuff of ancient philosophy. Physics was first to break away from the tutelage of philosophy and established its independence in the seventeenth century. The other sciences followed suit fairly rapidly, with perhaps psychology being the last to separate. The results for modern philosophy - of this breakup of what was once a great empire over human reason - have been mixed. An inevitable result has been that questions considered in ancient times to belong to philosophy have fallen within the ambit of other disciplines. So speculations about the material composition and genesis of the universe that interested Thales, Heraclitus and Leucippus, are continued by contemporary cosmologists in well equipped research laboratories, and not by philosophers. However ontology, unlike cosmology, has not broken away from its parent discipline and the Ontological Question as to what exists is still argued by philosophers today. That ontology has failed to make the separation that cosmology has, is a reflection on the weakness of the methodology for settling ontological arguments. Unlike their great Rationalist predecessors, most modern philosophers do not believe that logic alone is sufficient to provide an answer as to what is. But neither do observation or experiment, in any direct way, seem to help us in deciding, for example, whether sets or intentions should be admitted to exist or not. In consequence, the status of ontology as an area of serious study has to depend on the devising of a methodology within which the Ontological Question can be tackled. The pursuit of such a methodology is the concern of metaontology and is also the concern of this thesis

Phantoms of Old Forms: The Gothic Mode in the Dramatic Verse of Tennyson and Browning

My dissertation, “Phantoms of Old Forms: The Gothic Mode in the Dramatic Verse of Tennyson and Browning” situates Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning within a lineage of writers who experimented with the Gothic mode in dramatic and verse forms. This study is, in the first instance, an experiment in applying a specific strain of Gothic critical theory, one that addresses issues of gender, to canonical literary materials not ordinarily approached in that light. Definitions of the Gothic are notoriously elusive, and this project is not an assertion that the Gothic is always, in all of its manifestations, about gender. Rather, my project draws on a substantial critical history of Gothic literature that identifies gender dynamics within familial relationships as one of many themes within a much broader constellation of Gothic signifiers, though, I would argue, a prominent and important one. In particular this project seeks to illustrate how those critical strategies utilized with Gothic fiction can be adapted and extended to the interpretation of poetry. In fact, the shape and focus of this topic were formed out of a need to redress Gothic scholarship\u27s conspicuous, almost exclusive, emphasis on the genre of novelistic fiction with its roots in prose Romance. While new work has appeared on Gothic tales, Gothic serial writing, and Gothic drama, poetry remains the neglected genre in the critical rehistoricizing of that literary mode. With this in mind, the project proposes as a test case the poetry of Tennyson and Browning, chiefly major dramatic works that were rather unfavorably received in their day and are still somewhat problematic today. In doing so, it proposes that a “Gothic” critical framework draws out implicit features of such texts that represent a critique of patriarchal stabilities in Victorian social ideology. In general terms, Tennyson and Browning, though otherwise more different than alike, shared at least four common points of interest, all of which fell under the purview of early Gothic fiction. Both poets are curious about abnormal emotional and psychological states, though Tennyson is more often associated with the former and Browning more often with the latter. Both poets investigate the troubled relationship between individual identity and larger social structures. Both also relate this trouble to dissonance between and among genders, and lastly, both poets experiment with poetic forms that could give critical expression to this nexus of interrelated concerns. More particularly, this dissertation investigates how these concerns, especially as they pertain to a crisis of masculinity, are expressed through the language and themes of the Gothic with an emphasis on characters who are caught between the dissolving matrices of old power structures and newer, more mobile forms of signification. By utilizing dramatic forms and a Gothic mode to depict these sets of relationships, Tennyson and Browning obliquely critique the evolving social codes through which masculinity was established, recognized, asserted and maintained. The poems that interest me most are the ones that investigate the unraveling of this social “text” within a moment of broader cultural crisis

Aeronautical Engineering: A special bibliography with indexes, supplement 64, December 1975

This bibliography lists 288 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in November 1975

Mathematical Optimization Techniques

The papers collected in this volume were presented at the Symposium on Mathematical Optimization Techniques held in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Santa Monica, California, on October 18-20, 1960. The objective of the symposium was to bring together, for the purpose of mutual education, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers interested in modern optimization techniques. Some 250 persons attended. The techniques discussed included recent developments in linear, integer, convex, and dynamic programming as well as the variational processes surrounding optimal guidance, flight trajectories, statistical decisions, structural configurations, and adaptive control systems. The symposium was sponsored jointly by the University of California, with assistance from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and The RAND Corporation, through Air Force Project RAND

Methodology for technology evaluation under uncertainty and its application in advanced coal gasification processes

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Chemical Engineering, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-287).Integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) technology has attracted interest as a cleaner alternative to conventional coal-fired power generation processes. While a number of pilot projects have been launched to experimentally test IGCC technologies, mathematical simulation remains a central part of the ongoing research efforts. A major challenge in modeling an IGCC power plant is the lack of real experience and reliable data. It is critical to properly understand the state of knowledge and evaluate the impact of uncertainty in every phase of the R&D process. A rigorous investigation of the effect of uncertainty on IGCC system requires accurate quantification of input uncertainty and efficient propagation of uncertainty through system models. This thesis proposes several uncertainty quantification methods which expand the sources of information that can be used for parameter estimation. Key features of these methods include the use of entropy maximization to translate subjective opinions to probability distribution functions, and a more flexible probability model that easily captures anomaly associated with small sample data. In addition, Bayesian estimation is extended to dynamic models. Aided by a computationally efficient algorithm, termed sequential Monte Carlo method, the Bayesian approach is shown to be an effective way to estimate time-variant parameters. Uncertainty propagation is performed using the deterministic equivalent modeling method (DEMM) which is based on polynomial chaos representation of random variables and probabilistic collocation algorithm. One major issue often overlooked in the analysis of IGCC models is to represent correlation in the input parameters. This thesis proposes the use of principal component analysis (PCA) to represent correlated random variables. The resulting formulation is the same as the truncated Karhunen-Lodve expansions. Explicit incorporation of correlation not only improves accuracy of the approximation but also reduces the overall computational time. A comprehensive study of the MIT-BP IGCC model is carried out to determine uncertainties of the key measures of performance and cost, including energy output, thermal efficiency, CO 2 emission, plant capital cost, and cost of electricity. Whenever possible, the probability distributions of input parameters are estimated based on realistic data. Experts' judgments are solicited if data acquisition is infeasible. Uncertainty analysis is conducted in a three-step approach. First, technology-related input parameters are taken into account to determine uncertainties of plant performance. Second, cost uncertainties are determined with only economic inputs in order to identify important economic parameters. Finally, the plant model is integrated with cost model and they are evaluated with the key technical and economic inputs identified in the previous steps. Our study indicates the property of coal feed has a substantial impact on the energy production of the IGCC plant, and subsequently on the cost of electricity. Immature technologies such as gasification and gas turbine have important bearing on model performance hence need to be addressed in future research.by Bo Gong.Ph.D