6,233 research outputs found
Sosa, Customary International Law, and the Continuing Relevance of Erie
Ten years ago, the conventional wisdom among international law academics was that customary international law (CIL) had the status of self-executing federal common law to be applied by courts without any need for political branch authorization. This modern position came under attack by so-called revisionist critics who argued that CIL had the status of federal common law only in the relatively rare situations in which the Constitution or political branches authorized courts to treat it as such. Modern position proponents are now claiming that the Supreme Court\u27s 2004 decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain confirms that CIL has the status of self-executing federal common law. As this Article explains, the decision in Sosa did not in fact embrace the modern position, and, indeed, is best read as rejecting it. Commentators who construe Sosa as embracing the modern position have confounded the automatic incorporation of CIL as domestic federal law in the absence of political branch authorization (i.e., the modern position) with the entirely different issue of whether and to what extent a particular statute, the Alien Tort Statute ( ATS ), authorizes courts to apply CIL as domestic federal law. The Article also explains how CIL continues to be relevant to domestic federal common law despite Sosa\u27s rejection of the modern position. The fundamental flaw of the modern position is that it ignores the justifications for, and limitations on, post-Erie federal common law. As the Article shows, however, there are a number of contexts in addition to the ATS in which it is appropriate for courts to develop federal common law by reference to CIL, including certain jurisdictional contexts not amenable to state regulation (namely admiralty and interstate disputes), and gap-filling and interpretation of foreign affairs statutes and treaties. The Article concludes by considering several areas of likely debate during the next decade concerning the domestic status of CIL: corporate aiding and abetting liability under the ATS; application of CIL to the war on terrorism; and the use of foreign and international materials in constitutional interpretation
Compound Multiple Access Channels with Partial Cooperation
A two-user discrete memoryless compound multiple access channel with a common
message and conferencing decoders is considered. The capacity region is
characterized in the special cases of physically degraded channels and
unidirectional cooperation, and achievable rate regions are provided for the
general case. The results are then extended to the corresponding Gaussian
model. In the Gaussian setup, the provided achievable rates are shown to lie
within some constant number of bits from the boundary of the capacity region in
several special cases. An alternative model, in which the encoders are
connected by conferencing links rather than having a common message, is studied
as well, and the capacity region for this model is also determined for the
cases of physically degraded channels and unidirectional cooperation. Numerical
results are also provided to obtain insights about the potential gains of
conferencing at the decoders and encoders.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
Relaying Simultaneous Multicast Messages
The problem of multicasting multiple messages with the help of a relay, which
may also have an independent message of its own to multicast, is considered. As
a first step to address this general model, referred to as the compound
multiple access channel with a relay (cMACr), the capacity region of the
multiple access channel with a "cognitive" relay is characterized, including
the cases of partial and rate-limited cognition. Achievable rate regions for
the cMACr model are then presented based on decode-and-forward (DF) and
compress-and-forward (CF) relaying strategies. Moreover, an outer bound is
derived for the special case in which each transmitter has a direct link to one
of the receivers while the connection to the other receiver is enabled only
through the relay terminal. Numerical results for the Gaussian channel are also
provided.Comment: This paper was presented at the IEEE Information Theory Workshop,
Volos, Greece, June 200
A note on the heat balance of the Mediterranean and Red Seas
The Mediterranean and Red Seas are used as test volumes in an attempt to assess the accuracy of estimates of climatological air-sea fluxes calculated using meteorological observations from merchant ships…
Economic and Psychological Theories of Forecast Bias and Learning: Evidence from U.S. Business Managers' Forecasts
Economists and psychologists have each puzzled over the nature of decision making and the formation of expectations. Mainstream economists currently base their theory of expectation formation on the assumption of rationality Rationality implies unbiased forecasts and learning from past mistakes. Psychologists, however, see people as guided by processes other than the assumption of rationality. These processes often result in biased predictions and a failure to learn from past mistakes. This paper uses Conference Board data to examine the forecasts of business managers for evidence of bias and learning. Our analysis reveals systematically biased decision making by business executes in nearly every industry studied. The managers in the sample proved to be overly optimistic. In addition we find evidence of the learning that economists predict. However, this learning is of little consequence to the accuracy of managerial forecasts. These outcomes are analyzed using both the economics and cognitive psychology literature.Expectation; Forecast; Forecasts; Learning; Prediction; Rationality
Ionized gas at the edge of the Central Molecular Zone
To determine the properties of the ionized gas at the edge of the CMZ near
Sgr E we observed a small portion of the edge of the CMZ near Sgr E with
spectrally resolved [C II] 158 micron and [N II] 205 micron fine structure
lines at six positions with the GREAT instrument on SOFIA and in [C II] using
Herschel HIFI on-the-fly strip maps. We use the [N II] spectra along with a
radiative transfer model to calculate the electron density of the gas and the
[C II] maps to illuminate the morphology of the ionized gas and model the
column density of CO-dark H2. We detect two [C II] and [N II] velocity
components, one along the line of sight to a CO molecular cloud at -207 km/s
associated with Sgr E and the other at -174 km/s outside the edge of another CO
cloud. From the [N II] emission we find that the average electron density is in
the range of about 5 to 25 cm{-3} for these features. This electron density is
much higher than that of the warm ionized medium in the disk. The column
density of the CO-dark H layer in the -207 km/s cloud is about 1-2X10{21}
cm{-2} in agreement with theoretical models. The CMZ extends further out in
Galactic radius by 7 to 14 pc in ionized gas than it does in molecular gas
traced by CO. The edge of the CMZ likely contains dense hot ionized gas
surrounding the neutral molecular material. The high fractional abundance of N+
and high electron density require an intense EUV field with a photon flux of
order 1e6 to 1e7 photons cm{-2} s{-1}, and/or efficient proton charge exchange
with nitrogen, at temperatures of order 1e4 K, and/or a large flux of X-rays.
Sgr E is a region of massive star formation which are a potential sources of
the EUV radiation that can ionize the gas. In addition X-ray sources and the
diffuse X-ray emission in the CMZ are candidates for ionizing nitrogen.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure
Diatom analysis of Polish cores
The purpose of this project is to supply high resolution diatom data to the Norwegian Institute of Water Research for cores from three Polish lakes: Lakes Rumian, Kiełpińskie and Lidzbarskie, and
lower resolution diatom data from a further seven Polish lakes: Dąbrowa Wielka, Dąbrowa Mała,
Grądy, Tarczyńskie, Zwiniarz, Zarybinek and Hartowieckie. The data will feed into a
palaeolimnological project which also includes analysis of algal pigments and radiometric dating of
the cores. The study aims to assess shifts in the diatom assemblages and to determine the nature of the baseline assemblages. Additionally the project aims to apply an existing diatom-phosphorus (P)
transfer function to the diatom data in order to infer the trophic histories of the lakes
Constraints on the Stellar/Sub-stellar Mass Function in the Inner Orion Nebula Cluster
We present the results of a 0.5-0.9" FWHM imaging survey at K (2.2 micron)
and H (1.6 micron) covering 5.1' x 5.1' centered on Theta 1C Ori, the most
massive star in the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC). At the age and distance of this
cluster, and in the absence of extinction, the hydrogen burning limit (0.08 Mo)
occurs at K~13.5 mag while an object of mass 0.02 Mo has K~16.2 mag. Our
photometry is complete for source detection at the 7 sigma level to K~17.5 mag
and thus is sensitive to objects as low-mass as 0.02 Mo seen through visual
extinction values as high as 10 magnitudes. We use the observed magnitudes,
colors, and star counts to constrain the shape of the inner ONC stellar mass
function across the hydrogen burning limit. After determining the stellar age
and near-infrared excess properties of the optically visible stars in this same
inner ONC region, we present a new technique that incorporates these
distributions when extracting the mass function from the observed density of
stars in the K-(H-K) diagram. We find that our data are inconsistent with a
mass function that rises across the stellar/sub-stellar boundary. Instead, we
find that the most likely form of the inner ONC mass function is one that rises
to a peak around 0.15 Mo, and then declines across the hydrogen-burning limit
with slope N(log M) ~ M^(0.57+/-0.05). We emphasize that our conclusions apply
to the inner 0.71 pc x 0.71 pc of the ONC only; they may not apply to the ONC
as a whole where some evidence for general mass segregation has been found.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
Preprints/tables also available at http://phobos.caltech.edu/~jmc/papers/onc
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