Giving the Fourth Amendment Meaning: Creating an Adversarial Warrant Proceeding to Protect From Unreasonable Searches and Seizures

For at least the past 40 years, police and prosecutors have had free reign in conducting illegal searches and seizures nominally barred by the Fourth Amendment. The breadth of exceptions to the warrant requirement, the lax interpretation of probable cause, and especially the “good faith” doctrine announced in U.S. v. Leon have led to severe violations of privacy rights, trauma to those wrongly searched or seized, and a court system overburdened by police misconduct cases. Most scholars analyzing the issue agree that the rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment—to be free from unreasonable search and seizure—have been severely eroded or even eviscerated by the Supreme Court. Some suggest that in order to revitalize the Fourth Amendment, the United States should make it easier to secure civil damages after Fourth Amendment rights have been violated. Others have argued that the United States must guarantee stronger ex ante protections to uphold fundamental privacy rights before they are violated. This Note argues that, while warrant requirements do need to be more stringent to safeguard Fourth Amendment rights, warrant requirements cannot on their own sufficiently protect such a sacred right. This Note proposes the adoption of adversarial warrant proceedings, designed to ensure police and prosecutors meet their probable cause burden and to ensure that any lies or sloppy investigative work are rooted out from a warrant application before a warrant is granted. False searches and arrests can be deeply traumatizing and have excruciating and long-term impacts. For the Fourth Amendment to have any meaningful affect, the People must have an advocate—a Warrants Counsel— fighting for their right to be free from unreasonable searches before that right is violated. The Roberts Court’s destruction of the Fourth Amendment leaves little reason to expect protection from unreasonable search and seizure through litigation. Instead, Congress must create the Warrants Counsel program legislatively. Congress should look to the major success of the Federal Defenders program as a blueprint for zealous advocacy and protection of rights. A Warrants Counsel, like a public defender, would be a government paid attorney, present to argue against probable cause before a magistrate whenever police or prosecutors seek a warrant. Like the Sixth Amendment before the public defender system, the Fourth Amendment desperately needs some structure to give its language meaning; the Warrants Counsel system would counterbalance over-powered police and prosecutors in favor of the People

The Musical Culture of Iraqi Jewry: Three Countries and Two Continents

Galia Ben-Mordechai considère la culture musicale des Juifs irakiens et ses transformations depuis plus de 2500 ans, quand ce groupe s ’est déplacé à travers trois p a y s et deux continents. Elle décrit comment les Juifs ont quitté Israël pour Babylone dans l'Antiquité et comment ils sont revenus en Israël à l’époque moderne avant de partir pour Canada. L’auteur détaille quatre genres musicaux utilisées en Irak et rend compte des façons dont ces sortes de musique ont survécu à Toronto

Mathematical Surprises

This is open access book provides plenty of pleasant mathematical surprises. There are many fascinating results that do not appear in textbooks although they are accessible with a good knowledge of secondary-school mathematics. This book presents a selection of these topics including the mathematical formalization of origami, construction with straightedge and compass (and other instruments), the five- and six-color theorems, a taste of Ramsey theory and little-known theorems proved by induction. Among the most surprising theorems are the Mohr-Mascheroni theorem that a compass alone can perform all the classical constructions with straightedge and compass, and Steiner's theorem that a straightedge alone is sufficient provided that a single circle is given. The highlight of the book is a detailed presentation of Gauss's purely algebraic proof that a regular heptadecagon (a regular polygon with seventeen sides) can be constructed with straightedge and compass. Although the mathematics used in the book is elementary (Euclidean and analytic geometry, algebra, trigonometry), students in secondary schools and colleges, teachers, and other interested readers will relish the opportunity to confront the challenge of understanding these surprising theorems

IT/IS Management and Research Directions

The author spent much of the years prior to January 2000 as an international consultant for Y2K issues. During this period, a very large quantity of quantitative and qualitative data has been collected, together with many one-to-one interviews with very prominent IT leaders in business. This data led to extensive empirical research concerning the real ills of the IT/IS industry, with fascinating results. The phenomenology we have seen, in tens of installations, each with hundreds of millions of lines of code (or more) have shown the breadth of gap between academic research and real world business Information Technology / Information Systems. This paper attempts to point out part of this large gap and hopefully, shows some reasons for its continued existence. This paper is intended to trigger wider interest in IT / IS research

Proceedings of the Second Program Visualization Workshop, 2002

The Program Visualization Workshops aim to bring together researchers who design and construct program visualizations and, above all, educators who use and evaluate visualizations in their teaching. The first workshop took place in July 2000 at Porvoo, Finland. The second workshop was held in cooperation with ACM SIGCSE and took place at HornstrupCentret, Denmark in June 2002, immediately following the ITiCSE 2002 Conference in Aarhus, Denmark

ConcurrencySuite: Teaching concurrency and nondeterminism with Spin

The Spin model checker is an excellent system for teaching concepts such as concurrency, verification and nondeterminism. I will show pedagogical tools that I have built based upon Spin: the jSpin environment for developing and verifying concurrent programs; SpinSpider, a tool for generating graphical representations of state diagrams of concurrent programs; VN, a tool for “experiencing” the nondeterminism of finite automata

Mathematical Surprises

This is open access book provides plenty of pleasant mathematical surprises. There are many fascinating results that do not appear in textbooks although they are accessible with a good knowledge of secondary-school mathematics. This book presents a selection of these topics including the mathematical formalization of origami, construction with straightedge and compass (and other instruments), the five- and six-color theorems, a taste of Ramsey theory and little-known theorems proved by induction. Among the most surprising theorems are the Mohr-Mascheroni theorem that a compass alone can perform all the classical constructions with straightedge and compass, and Steiner's theorem that a straightedge alone is sufficient provided that a single circle is given. The highlight of the book is a detailed presentation of Gauss's purely algebraic proof that a regular heptadecagon (a regular polygon with seventeen sides) can be constructed with straightedge and compass. Although the mathematics used in the book is elementary (Euclidean and analytic geometry, algebra, trigonometry), students in secondary schools and colleges, teachers, and other interested readers will relish the opportunity to confront the challenge of understanding these surprising theorems

Segregation of striated and smooth muscle lineages by a Notch-dependent regulatory network

Background: Lineage segregation from multipotent epithelia is a central theme in development and in adult stem cell plasticity. Previously, we demonstrated that striated and smooth muscle cells share a common progenitor within their epithelium of origin, the lateral domain of the somite-derived dermomyotome. However, what controls the segregation of these muscle subtypes remains unknown. We use this in vivo bifurcation of fates as an experimental model to uncover the underlying mechanisms of lineage diversification from bipotent progenitors. Results: Using the strength of spatio-temporally controlled gene missexpression in avian embryos, we report that Notch harbors distinct pro-smooth muscle activities depending on the duration of the signal; short periods prevent striated muscle development and extended periods, through Snail1, promote cell emigration from the dermomyotome towards a smooth muscle fate. Furthermore, we define a Muscle Regulatory Network, consisting of Id2, Id3, FoxC2 and Snail1, which acts in concert to promote smooth muscle by antagonizing the pro-myogenic activities of Myf5 and Pax7, which induce striated muscle fate. Notch and BMP closely regulate the network and reciprocally reinforce each other’s signal. In turn, components of the network strengthen Notch signaling, while Pax7 silences this signaling. These feedbacks augment the robustness and flexibility of the network regulating muscle subtype segregation. Conclusions: Our results demarcate the details of the Muscle Regulatory Network, underlying the segregation of muscle sublineages from the lateral dermomyotome, and exhibit how factors within the network promote the smooth muscle at the expense of the striated muscle fate. This network acts as an exemplar demonstrating how lineage segregation occurs within epithelial primordia by integrating inputs from competing factors

Comments on “tautology testing with a generalized matrix reduction method”

AbstractBibel [1] has given a proof system for the propositional calculus called (generalized) matrix reduction. When matrix splitting is restricted to one literal at a time the system is the same as Galil's system [2] of enumeration dags. In fact the relation is even closer. The matrices produced by the reduction on a set of literals {I} are exactly the set of clauses appearing on a dag after |I| consecutive branches with substitute for the same literals. The clauses M1 (which do not appear in the matrices Mc) are exactly the clauses whose branches close with the empty clause Λ. Thus the saving in space is at most by a factor of |I|, but |I| is bounded from above by log2 M to ‘guarantee polynomial behaviour’. Hence Galil's system polynomially simulates matrix reduction and thus matrix reduction is also an exponential proof procedure