[Review of] Dennis J. Starr. The Italians of New Jersey: A Historical Introduction and Bibliography

This volume does not aim to be a definitive history of the Italians of New Jersey, but it is an excellent model of regionally grounded scholarship, offering not only the story of one state, but an excellent synthesis of the scholarship on the Italian role in that greatest migration of peoples in history to the new world at the end of the nineteenth century. From 1891 to 1915 more Italians entered the United States than did immigrants from any other country

Predictive Due Process and the International Criminal Court

The International Criminal Court (ICC) operates under a regime of complementarity: a domestic state prosecution of a defendant charged before the ICC bars the Court from hearing the case unless the state is unable or unwilling to prosecute the accused. For years, scholars have debated the role of due process considerations in complementarity. Can a state that has failed to provide the accused with adequate due process protections nonetheless bar a parallel ICC prosecution? One popular view, first expressed by Professor Kevin Jon Heller, holds that due process considerations do not factor into complementarity and the ICC could be forced to cede a case even to a state intent on subjecting the accused to a show trial. Drawing on recent ICC precedents, this Article argues that the Pre-Trial Chamber has begun to resolve this open question. The Court is now developing a system of predictive due process. Under this new model of due process, the Court considers to a limited extent whether domestic criminal proceedings abide by international norms and, as part of the analysis, the Court tries to predict how the state in question would treat the accused if given control of the case. Taking a rational actor view of judicial behavior, this Article concludes that the rise of predictive due process is inevitable. From the perspective of ICC judges entrusted with the Court\u27s institutional legitimacy, some consideration of due process factors is the optimal risk-averse strategy. Finally, proceeding from the conclusion that the ICC inevitably will use predictive due process, the Article argues that the ICC should learn from other courts that engage in similar inquiries. Specifically, the Court should seek guidance from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia\u27s decision making under Article 11 bis, international economic law jurisprudence on standards of review, and the proportionality jurisprudence of international human rights tribunals. Although reliance on human rights law conflicts with stated ICC doctrine, this standard may give way in practice, if not in form

Do soil microbes drive Acacia species invasion in non-native ranges in Australia?

Australian acacias are one of the most notable invaders worldwide. Across Australian states, acacias became invasive or even naturalized after being introduced to ecosystems outside their natural distribution range. The relative importance of soil biota in their invasion success remains unknown, particularly that of rhizobial and fungal communities. We tested the Enemy Release Hypothesis and the Acquired Mutualism Hypothesis to disentangle the belowground invasion mechanisms that may have assisted in the invasion success of these acacias across Australia

Distribution and growth dynamics of invasive goldenrod (Solidago canadensis) in its introduced range in Estonia, and some Australian comparisons

Understanding the distribution and population dynamics of invasive plant species is fundamental to our capacity to appropriately predict and manage plant invasions. The invasion biology of non-native Solidago canadensis in Estonia was investigated for the first time by assessing its distribution patterns and growth dynamics. First, fifty-two peri-urban populations were surveyed, and population location, size, adjacent communities, number of shoots as well as shoot height were recorded. Then, thirty genets were excavated from previously surveyed populations in order to analyze their age and growth traits in the vicinity of Tartu. The majority of S. canadensis populations were small, i.e. occupying less than 50 m2, had 1 to 50 plants per population and were located predominantly on disturbed roadsides. The surveyed populations were young, with the average age of genets estimated to be five years at the time of sampling in 2006. We suggest that S. canadensis is well adapted to a wide range of habitats but predominantly occurs in human-disturbed habitats adjacent to settlements and roads. We found that Solidago canadensis genet age did not affect significantly its growth traits suggesting that growth traits are similar between younger and older genets

Tolerant Compressed Sensing With Partially Coherent Sensing Matrices

We consider compressed sensing (CS) using partially coherent sensing matrices. Most of CS theory to date is focused on incoherent sensing, that is, columns from the sensing matrix are highly uncorrelated. However, sensing systems with naturally occurring correlations arise in many applications, such as signal detection, motion detection and radar. Moreover, in these applications it is often not necessary to know the support of the signal exactly, but instead small errors in the support and signal are tolerable. In this paper, we focus on d-tolerant recovery, in which support set reconstructions are considered accurate when their locations match the true locations within d indices. Despite the abundance of work utilizing incoherent sensing matrices, for d-tolerant recovery we suggest that coherence is actually beneficial. This is especially true for situations with only a few and very noisy measurements as we demonstrate via numerical simulations. As a first step towards the theory of tolerant coherent sensing we introduce the notions of d-coherence and d-tolerant recovery. We then provide some theoretical arguments for a greedy algorithm applicable to d-tolerant recovery of signals with sufficiently spread support

Oesophageal cancer and amplification of the human cyclin D gene CCND1/PRAD1.

The human CCND1/PRAD1 gene, located in the 11q13 chromosomal region, encodes a cyclin D protein with potential oncogenic capacity and is involved in several human malignancies. The amplification and expression status of CCND1 was investigated in a series of oesophageal tumours. CCND1 is amplified in 54% and overexpressed in 63% of the tumours of the squamous cell type