An Incomplete Inclusion of Non-cooperators into a Rawlsian Theory of Justice

John Rawls’s use of the “fully cooperating assumption” has been criticized for hindering attempts to address the needs of disabled individuals, or non-cooperators. In response, philosophers sympathetic to Rawls’s project have extended his theory. I assess one such extension by Cynthia Stark, that proposes dropping Rawls’s assumption in the constitutional stage (of his four-stage sequence), and address the needs of non-cooperators via the social minimum. I defend Stark’s proposal against criticisms by Sophia Wong, Christie Hartley, and Elizabeth Edenberg and Marilyn Friedman. Nevertheless, I argue that Stark’s proposal is crucially incomplete. Her formulation of the social minimum lacks accompanying criteria with which the adequacy of the provisions for non-cooperators may be assessed. Despite initial appearances, Stark’s proposal does not fully address the needs of non-cooperators. I conclude by considering two payoffs of identifying this lack of criteria

Reviewing resistances to reconceptualizing disability

I attempt to adjudicate the disagreement between those who seek to reconceptualize disability as mere difference and their opponents. I do so by reviewing a central conviction motivating the resistance, concerning the relationship between disability and well-being. I argue that the conviction depends on further considerations about the costs and extent of change involved in accommodating individuals with a particular disability trait. I conclude by considering three pay-offs of this clarification

Coherent optical control of polarization with a critical metasurface

We describe the mechanism by which a metamaterial surface can act as an ideal phase-controlled rotatable linear polarizer. With equal-power linearly polarized beams incident on each side of the surface, varying the relative phase rotates the polarization angles of the output beams, while keeping the polarization exactly linear. The explanation is based on coupled-mode theory and the idea of coherent perfect absorption into auxiliary polarization channels. The polarization-rotating behavior occurs at a critical point of the coupled-mode theory, which can be associated with the exceptional point of a parity-time (PT) symmetric effective Hamiltonian

The Braided Quantum 2-Sphere

In a recent paper the quantum 2-sphere $S^2_q$ was described as a quantum complex manifold. Here we consider several copies of $S^2_q$ and derive their braiding commutation relations. The braiding is extended to the differential and to the integral calculus on the spheres. A quantum analogue of the classical anharmonic ratio of four points on the sphere is given, which is invariant under the coaction of $SU_q(2)$.Comment: 14 page

Learning Spatial-Aware Regressions for Visual Tracking

In this paper, we analyze the spatial information of deep features, and propose two complementary regressions for robust visual tracking. First, we propose a kernelized ridge regression model wherein the kernel value is defined as the weighted sum of similarity scores of all pairs of patches between two samples. We show that this model can be formulated as a neural network and thus can be efficiently solved. Second, we propose a fully convolutional neural network with spatially regularized kernels, through which the filter kernel corresponding to each output channel is forced to focus on a specific region of the target. Distance transform pooling is further exploited to determine the effectiveness of each output channel of the convolution layer. The outputs from the kernelized ridge regression model and the fully convolutional neural network are combined to obtain the ultimate response. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.Comment: To appear in CVPR201