Electron Scattering for Nuclear and Nucleon Structure

The scattering of high-energy electrons from nuclear and nucleon targets provides a microscope for examining the structure of these tiny objects. The best evidence we have on what nuclei and nucleons actually look like comes from electron scattering. This 2001 book examines the motivation for electron scattering and develops the theoretical analysis of the process. It discusses our theoretical understanding of the underlying structure of nuclei and nucleons at appropriate levels of resolution and sophistication, and summarizes experimental electron scattering capabilities. Only a working knowledge of quantum mechanics and special relativity is assumed, making this a suitable textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses. It will also provide a valuable summary and reference for researchers already working in electron scattering and other areas of nuclear and particle physics. This text has been reissued as an Open Access publication

Religious leaders\u27 perceptions of advance care planning: a secondary analysis of interviews with Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, Sikh and Bahai leaders

Background: International guidance for advance care planning (ACP) supports the integration of spiritual and religious aspects of care within the planning process. Religious leaders’ perspectives could improve how ACP programs respect patients’ faith backgrounds. This study aimed to examine: (i) how religious leaders understand and consider ACP and its implications, including (ii) how religion affects followers’ approaches to end-of-life care and ACP, and (iii) their implications for healthcare. Methods: Interview transcripts from a primary qualitative study conducted with religious leaders to inform an ACP website, ACPTalk, were used as data in this study. ACPTalk aims to assist health professionals conduct sensitive conversations with people from different religious backgrounds. A qualitative secondary analysis conducted on the interview transcripts focussed on religious leaders’ statements related to this study’s aims. Interview transcripts were thematically analysed using an inductive, comparative, and cyclical procedure informed by grounded theory. Results: Thirty-five religious leaders (26 male; mean 58.6-years-old), from eight Christian and six non-Christian (Jewish, Buddhist, Islamic, Hindu, Sikh, Bahá’í) backgrounds were included. Three themes emerged which focussed on: religious leaders’ ACP understanding and experiences; explanations for religious followers’ approaches towards end-of-life care; and health professionals’ need to enquire about how religion matters. Most leaders had some understanding of ACP and, once fully comprehended, most held ACP in positive regard. Religious followers’ preferences for end-of-life care reflected family and geographical origins, cultural traditions, personal attitudes, and religiosity and faith interpretations. Implications for healthcare included the importance of avoiding generalisations and openness to individualised and/ or standardised religious expressions of one’s religion. Conclusions: Knowledge of religious beliefs and values around death and dying could be useful in preparing health professionals for ACP with patients from different religions but equally important is avoidance of assumptions. Community-based initiatives, programs and faith settin

Integrity: Its Causes and Cures

Integrity is a good thing, isn\u27t it? In ordinary parlance, we sometimes use it as a near synonym for honesty, but the word means much more than honesty alone. It means wholeness or unity of person, an inner consistency between deed and principle. Integrity shares etymology with other unity-words-integer, integral, integrate, integration. All derive from the Latin integrare, to make whole. And the person of integrity is the person whose conduct and principles operate in happy harmony. Our psyches always seek that happy harmony. When our conduct and principles clash with each other, the result, social psychology teaches us, is cognitive dissonance. And dissonance theory hypothesizes that one of our fundamental psychic mechanisms is the drive to reduce dissonance

Constitutional Limitations on Firearms Regulation

The constitutional debate over firearms regulation is centered on the requirements of the fifth and second amendments to the United States Constitution. In discussing the questions that will confront any federal regulatory scheme, this note examines recent fifth amendment decisions and explores the origins of the second amendment, which has been infrequently interpreted. It is concluded that while artfully drawn legislation could avoid the fifth amendment objections posed by Haynes v. United States, the impact of the second amendment is uncertain because of the historical and decisional ambiguity surrounding that provision

Federalism in the Taft Court Era: Can It Be “Revived”?

This Article analyzes the Supreme Court\u27s view of federalism during the decade of the 1920s. It offers a detailed discussion of four jurisprudential areas: congressional power, dormant Commerce Clause doctrine, intergovernmental tax immunity, and judicial centralization through the enforcement of federal common law and constitutional rights. The resurgent federalism of the contemporary Court is typically characterized as reviving pre-New Deal principles. This Article concludes, however, that any such revival is highly implausible. It offers four reasons for this conclusion. First, the pre-New Deal Court conceived federalism in terms of the ideal of dual sovereignty, which imagined that the federal government and the states regulated distinct and exclusive spheres of social and economic life. But because the national market had by the twentieth century become thoroughly integrated, this ideal produced doctrinal incoherence in the areas of both intergovernmental tax immunity and the dormant Commerce Clause. The application of the ideal of dual sovereignty also significantly undercut state power, because it invited the pre-New Deal Court to prohibit states from regulating the exclusively federal area of interstate commerce. For these reasons the modern Court has abandoned the ideal of dual sovereignty in its doctrine of intergovernmental tax immunity and the dormant Commerce Clause. Contemporary opinions in these areas imagine federal and state interests as intermingled and overlapping, rather than as separated into discrete spheres. The modern view actually offers more protection for state regulations than did the ideal of dual sovereignty espoused by the pre-New Deal Court. Second, the pre-New Deal Court understood itself as a common law court authorized to articulate the deepest experiences and values of the American people. This authority transcended the distinction between federal and state power, which is why the pre-New Deal Court never conceived itself as an agent of a federal government that was potentially in tension with state sovereignty. The Court never understood the centralization resulting from judicial decisionmaking as a federalism issue. The Court freely regulated intimate areas of state life through the promulgation of general common law. The pre-New Deal Court\u27s common law authority was regarded as even more fundamental than Congress\u27s claim to articulate the national will. The triumph of Holmesian positivism in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins transformed the Court into an instrument of specifically federal law. The federalism implications of judicial decisionmaking in the areas of common law and constitutional rights were thus made manifest for the first time. The Court\u27s authority to impose structural limitations on congressional power was also profoundly altered. Third, the pre-New Deal Court, like the country generally, regarded the federal government as a potentially distant, bureaucratic, and oppressive institution. States were by contrast conceptualized as sites of democratic self-government. Federalism was typically conceived as the problem of reconciling centralization with self-government. Thus federal and state regulations, even of the same subject matter, were not regarded as equivalent. State regulation was self-chosen; federal regulation was potentially coercive. This view of the federal government was pushed to the margins of American political culture when the crisis of the New Deal legitimated the national government\u27s authority to speak as the genuine representative of an authentic national democratic will. Combined with the demise of the Court\u27s common law authority, this transformation of Congress\u27s legitimacy undercut the Court\u27s ability to second-guess Congress\u27s vision of national priorities when reviewing the limits of congressional power. Fourth, the pre-New Deal Court conceived structure and rights as complementary and mutually dependent concepts. The Court defined individual rights in ways designed to serve structural principles, like the integration of the national market. And it defined structural principles, like the limits of congressional power, in terms of the individual rights affected by federal legislation. Because the Lochnerism of the pre-New Deal Court inclined it to protect freedom of contract, it sought to impose limits on congressional power that were highly sensitive to the nature of the economic transactions regulated by federal legislation. Modern constitutional thinking, by contrast, sharply distinguishes structure from rights, and it does not seek to protect the same kind of economic rights as did pre-New Deal Lochnerism. The revival of pre-New Deal federalism, in short, would require the contemporary Court to restore an ideal of dual sovereignty that in important doctrinal areas is not only incoherent, but deeply antagonistic to state power; to reassert its authority as a common law court; to resurrect an image of Congress as a national legislature unsupported by a genuine national democratic will; and to dismantle the contemporary distinction between structure and rights so as to limit congressional power in ways designed to protect rights of substantive due process

Electron Scattering for Nuclear and Nucleon Structure

The scattering of high-energy electrons from nuclear and nucleon targets provides a microscope for examining the structure of these tiny objects. The best evidence we have on what nuclei and nucleons actually look like comes from electron scattering. This 2001 book examines the motivation for electron scattering and develops the theoretical analysis of the process. It discusses our theoretical understanding of the underlying structure of nuclei and nucleons at appropriate levels of resolution and sophistication, and summarizes experimental electron scattering capabilities. Only a working knowledge of quantum mechanics and special relativity is assumed, making this a suitable textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses. It will also provide a valuable summary and reference for researchers already working in electron scattering and other areas of nuclear and particle physics. This text has been reissued as an Open Access publication

A Need for Caring

Review of AIDS AND THE LAW: A GUIDE FOR THE PUBLIC. Edited by Harlon L. Dalton, Scott Burris, and the Yale AIDS Law Project. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1987. Pp. vii, 382