Combating Money Laundering and International Terrorism: Does the USA PATRIOT Act Require the Judicial System to Abandon Fundamental Due Process in the Name of Homeland Security?

The USA PATRIOT Act was part of a wave of legislation which reshaped national security policies while simultaneously restricting traditional civil liberties in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Among the many terrorism related provisions of the Act, the executive branch was given authority to freeze the assets of organizations in which there is a foreign interest suspected of funding terrorist organizations through the use of an asset blocking order pending further investigation. The Act further permits the use of classified information which will be subjected to only ex parte, in camera inspection by the judge presiding over a challenge to such an action as a means of supporting the government’s actions in freezing such assets. This article addresses the question of whether the government’s use of secret evidence to justify a challenged blocking order pursuant to the provisions of the Patriot Act represents a violation of the fundamental due process rights of an aggrieved party. The article first examines the rapidly developing body of legal precedent emerging from recent challenges to such blocking orders and the Government’s efforts to enforce such orders through the submission of “confidential and sensitive” evidence on an ex parte, in camera basis. The article also examines the legal and public policy arguments, both in favor of and against the continued use of such ex parte, in camera evidence as a part of judicial proceedings challenging blocking orders as well as some of the potential ramifications of such a course of action. What emerges from this analysis is the determination that while the provisions of the Act relating to the ex parte, in camera submission of evidence supporting the government’s allegations are alarming at first glance, the ultimate goal of cracking down on money laundering as an increasingly potent source of terrorist financing can only be supported by broad enforcement capabilities held in check by the unbiased members of the judiciary

The composition of Event-B models

The transition from classical B [2] to the Event-B language and method [3] has seen the removal of some forms of model structuring and composition, with the intention of reinventing them in future. This work contributes to thatreinvention. Inspired by a proposed method for state-based decomposition and refinement [5] of an Event-B model, we propose a familiar parallel event composition (over disjoint state variable lists), and the less familiar event fusion (over intersecting state variable lists). A brief motivation is provided for these and other forms of composition of models, in terms of feature-based modelling. We show that model consistency is preserved under such compositions. More significantly we show that model composition preserves refinement

Planck LFI flight model feed horns

this paper is part of the Prelaunch status LFI papers published on JINST: http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/-page=extra.proc5/jinst The Low Frequency Instrument is optically interfaced with the ESA Planck telescope through 11 corrugated feed horns each connected to the Radiometer Chain Assembly (RCA). This paper describes the design, the manufacturing and the testing of the flight model feed horns. They have been designed to optimize the LFI optical interfaces taking into account the tight mechanical requirements imposed by the Planck focal plane layout. All the eleven units have been successfully tested and integrated with the Ortho Mode transducers.Comment: This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in JINST. IOP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The definitive publisher authenticated version is available online at 10.1088/1748-0221/4/12/T1200

ClgR regulation of chaperone and protease systems is essential for Mycobacterium tuberculosis parasitism of the macrophage

Chaperone and protease systems play essential roles in cellular homeostasis and have vital functions in controlling the abundance of specific cellular proteins involved in processes such as transcription, replication, metabolism and virulence. Bacteria have evolved accurate regulatory systems to control the expression and function of chaperones and potentially destructive proteases. Here, we have used a combination of transcriptomics, proteomics and targeted mutagenesis to reveal that the clp gene regulator (ClgR) of Mycobacterium tuberculosis activates the transcription of at least ten genes, including four that encode protease systems (ClpP1/C, ClpP2/C, PtrB and HtrA-like protease Rv1043c) and three that encode chaperones (Acr2, ClpB and the chaperonin Rv3269). Thus, M. tuberculosis ClgR controls a larger network of protein homeostatic and regulatory systems than ClgR in any other bacterium studied to date. We demonstrate that ClgR-regulated transcriptional activation of these systems is essential for M. tuberculosis to replicate in macrophages. Furthermore, we observe that this defect is manifest early in infection, as M. tuberculosis lacking ClgR is deficient in the ability to control phagosome pH 1 h post-phagocytosis

Note on a Combinatorial Application of Alexander Duality

AbstractThe Möbius number of a finite partially ordered set equals (up to sign) the difference between the number of even and odd edge covers of its incomparability graph. We use Alexander duality and the nerve lemma of algebraic topology to obtain a stronger result. It relates the homology of a finite simplicial complexΔthat is not a simplex to the cohomology of the complexΓof nonempty sets of minimal non-faces that do not cover the vertex set of

Effective Approaches in Reducing Reading Discrepancy Scores between Students in General Education and Special Education

This research study examined curricular and instructional approaches that help students who receive special education services meet common Illinois state standards as measured by annual state standardized testing. Despite having supportive accommodations and modifications, Illinois students who receive special education services have lagged behind their general education peers in meeting academic standards as measured by annual Illinois state testing. Participants included personnel from schools that were identified as being high performing while also having the smallest discrepancy between students in general education and special education. These schools were investigated to determine what approaches they use to have this reduced achievement gap. Teachers and administrators from these schools were interviewed to gain insights regarding effective instructional and curricular methods. The results suggest that schools closing the achievement gap implemented instructional approaches including co-taught and inclusion classrooms, differentiation, and time for professional planning and collaboration. Additionally, these schools offered purchased, researched-based reading curricula that were implemented with high fidelity. Teachers in both special education and general education had the same materials to reference and offer students. Implications for practice and future research directions are reported

Cross Pixel Optical Flow Similarity for Self-Supervised Learning

We propose a novel method for learning convolutional neural image representations without manual supervision. We use motion cues in the form of optical flow, to supervise representations of static images. The obvious approach of training a network to predict flow from a single image can be needlessly difficult due to intrinsic ambiguities in this prediction task. We instead propose a much simpler learning goal: embed pixels such that the similarity between their embeddings matches that between their optical flow vectors. At test time, the learned deep network can be used without access to video or flow information and transferred to tasks such as image classification, detection, and segmentation. Our method, which significantly simplifies previous attempts at using motion for self-supervision, achieves state-of-the-art results in self-supervision using motion cues, competitive results for self-supervision in general, and is overall state of the art in self-supervised pretraining for semantic image segmentation, as demonstrated on standard benchmarks

Numerical Renormalization Group Study of non-Fermi-liquid State on Dilute Uranium Systems

We investigate the non-Fermi-liquid (NFL) behavior of the impurity Anderson model (IAM) with non-Kramers doublet ground state of the f$^2$ configuration under the tetragonal crystalline electric field (CEF). The low energy spectrum is explained by a combination of the NFL and the local-Fermi-liquid parts which are independent with each other. The NFL part of the spectrum has the same form to that of two-channel-Kondo model (TCKM). We have a parameter range that the IAM shows the $- \ln T$ divergence of the magnetic susceptibility together with the positive magneto resistance. We point out a possibility that the anomalous properties of U$_x$Th$_{1-x}$Ru$_2$Si$_2$ including the decreasing resistivity with decreasing temperature can be explained by the NFL scenario of the TCKM type. We also investigate an effect of the lowering of the crystal symmetry. It breaks the NFL behavior at around the temperature, $\delta /10$, where $\delta$ is the orthorhombic CEF splitting. The NFL behavior is still expected above the temperature, $\delta/10$.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figure

Hydrodynamic response of rotationally supported flows in the Small Shearing Box model

The hydrodynamic response of the inviscid small shearing box model of a midplane section of a rotationally supported astrophysical disk is examined. An energy functional ${\cal E}$ is formulated for the general nonlinear problem. It is found that the fate of disturbances is related to the conservation of this quantity which, in turn, depends on the boundary conditions utilized: ${\cal E}$ is conserved for channel boundary conditions while it is not conserved in general for shearing box conditions. Linearized disturbances subject to channel boundary conditions have normal-modes described by Bessel Functions and are qualitatively governed by a quantity $\Sigma$ which is a measure of the ratio between the azimuthal and vertical wavelengths. Inertial oscillations ensue if $\Sigma >1$ - otherwise disturbances must in general be treated as an initial value problem. We reflect upon these results and offer a speculation.Comment: 6 pages, resubmitted to Astronomy and Astrophysics, shortened with references adde