33,928 research outputs found
Protecting the ‘rights of others’ in the UK: religious expression, reasonable accommodation and the real meaning of non-discrimination
Over the years, states have been developing and implementing legislation with the aim of protecting individuals against discrimination, inter alia, on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. Recent developments have led to an expansion of the concept of ‘family’ to include same-sex couples and single parents and the progressive adjustment of the law with a view to extend parenthood rights to less ‘’traditional’ family forms. In terms of access to parenthood, objections of conscience may arise in relation to facilitating adoption by same-sex couples or single parent adoption, whereby religious objectors may feel that their professional duties are in direct conflict with the tenets of their religion. Conscientious objections have traditionally been expressed by persons whose beliefs are at odds with laws compelling them to carry out certain functions, such as facilitating adoptions in same-sex families or registering and officiating civil unions. The progressive legal recognition of alternative family unions and parenthood rights to non-traditional family forms on the one hand, and the manifestation of religious beliefs outside an individual’s forum internum1 on the other, can be described as an ‘explosive mix’ of conflicting rights and freedoms. In addition to national courts in the Council of Europe’s member states, the European Court of Human Rights has been exploring the scope and limits of the right of conscientious objection as a particular aspect of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. In the European context, the European Court of Human Rights has demonstrated through its jurisprudence that although a ‘human right’ to conscientious objection exists, this is not absolute, but subject to permissible limitations as found in Article 9(2) ECHR2 including the protection of the rights and freedoms of others
Minimal area submanifolds in AdS x compact
We describe the asymptotic behavior of minimal area submanifolds in product
spacetimes of an asymptotically hyperbolic space times a compact internal
manifold. In particular, we find that unlike the case of a minimal area
submanifold just in an asymptotically hyperbolic space, the internal part of
the boundary submanifold is constrained to be itself a minimal area
submanifold. For applications to holography, this tells us what are the allowed
"flavor branes" that can be added to a holographic field theory. We also give a
compact geometric expression for the spectrum of operator dimensions associated
with the slipping modes of the submanifold in the internal space. We illustrate
our results with several examples, including some that haven't appeared in the
literature before.Comment: 24 pages, no figure
Deep Gaussian Processes
In this paper we introduce deep Gaussian process (GP) models. Deep GPs are a
deep belief network based on Gaussian process mappings. The data is modeled as
the output of a multivariate GP. The inputs to that Gaussian process are then
governed by another GP. A single layer model is equivalent to a standard GP or
the GP latent variable model (GP-LVM). We perform inference in the model by
approximate variational marginalization. This results in a strict lower bound
on the marginal likelihood of the model which we use for model selection
(number of layers and nodes per layer). Deep belief networks are typically
applied to relatively large data sets using stochastic gradient descent for
optimization. Our fully Bayesian treatment allows for the application of deep
models even when data is scarce. Model selection by our variational bound shows
that a five layer hierarchy is justified even when modelling a digit data set
containing only 150 examples.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures. Appearing in Proceedings of the 16th
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)
201
Emergent multipolar spin correlations in a fluctuating spiral - The frustrated ferromagnetic S=1/2 Heisenberg chain in a magnetic field
We present the phase diagram of the frustrated ferromagnetic S=1/2 Heisenberg
J_1-J_2 chain in a magnetic field, obtained by large scale exact
diagonalizations and density matrix renormalization group simulations. A vector
chirally ordered state, metamagnetic behavior and a sequence of spin-multipolar
Luttinger liquid phases up to hexadecupolar kind are found. We provide
numerical evidence for a locking mechanism, which can drive spiral states
towards spin-multipolar phases, such as quadrupolar or octupolar phases. Our
results also shed light on previously discovered spin-multipolar phases in
two-dimensional quantum magnets in a magnetic field.Comment: 4+ pages, 4 figure
Radio Linear and Circular Polarization from M81*
We present results from archival Very Large Array (VLA) data and new VLA
observations to investigate the long term behavior of the circular polarization
of M81*, the nuclear radio source in the nearby galaxy M81. We also used the
Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Association (BIMA) array to observe M81* at 86 and
230 GHz. M81* is unpolarized in the linear sense at a frequency as high as 86
GHz and shows variable circular polarization at a frequency as high as 15 GHz.
The spectrum of the fractional circular polarization is inverted in most of our
observations. The sign of circular polarization is constant over frequency and
time. The absence of linear polarization sets a lower limit to the accretion
rate of . The polarization properties are strikingly
similar to the properties of Sgr A*, the central radio source in the Milky Way.
This supports the hypothesis that M81* is a scaled up version of Sgr A*. On the
other hand, the broad band total intensity spectrum declines towards milimeter
wavelengths which differs from previous observations of M81* and also from Sgr
A*.Comment: Astronomy & Astrophysics, minor changes, matching the published
version, also available at
http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/staff/abrunthaler/pub.shtm
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