Hope-Fulfilling or Effectively Chilling? Reconciling the Hate Crimes Prevention Act With the First Amendment

Living on a meager disability pension and without means of transportation, forty-nine-year-old African American James Byrd, Jr. of Jasper, Texas thought he had caught a break when three white men offered him a ride home on June 6, 1998. The following morning, police found Byrd\u27s torso in the middle of the road, his head and arm in a ditch a mile away, and a three-mile trail of blood staining the road. That racial animus was the motivation for Byrd\u27s torture, dragging, and death was hardly in dispute. Two of the three perpetrators were members of white supremacist organizations and bore tattoos of swastikas and black men in nooses, and one perpetrator allegedly made a number of racial slurs both before and during the murder. As gruesome as this crime was, prosecutors were unable to seek enhanced sentences for the perpetrators due to inadequacies in existing state and federal hate crime law. Federal hate crime law applied only if victims were engaging in federally protected activities when attacked, and Texas laws enhancing sentences for hate crimes were not useful in this case. Later that year, Wyoming lawyers were precluded from seeking an enhanced sentence in the case of Matthew Shepard, a college student who was tortured and murdered because of his homosexuality, because Wyoming was one of the few states at the time with no hate crime laws

Baseline design of the filters for the LAD detector on board LOFT

The Large Observatory for X-ray Timing (LOFT) was one of the M3 missions selected for the phase A study in the ESA's Cosmic Vision program. LOFT is designed to perform high-time-resolution X-ray observations of black holes and neutron stars. The main instrument on the LOFT payload is the Large Area Detector (LAD), a collimated experiment with a nominal effective area of ~10 m 2 @ 8 keV, and a spectral resolution of ~240 eV in the energy band 2-30 keV. These performances are achieved covering a large collecting area with more than 2000 large-area Silicon Drift Detectors (SDDs) each one coupled to a collimator based on lead-glass micro-channel plates. In order to reduce the thermal load onto the detectors, which are open to Sky, and to protect them from out of band radiation, optical-thermal filter will be mounted in front of the SDDs. Different options have been considered for the LAD filters for best compromise between high quantum efficiency and high mechanical robustness. We present the baseline design of the optical-thermal filters, show the nominal performances, and present preliminary test results performed during the phase A study.Comment: Proc. SPIE 9144, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 91446

Advantages of ERTS data collection system in south Florida

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Pilgrims and MERS-CoV: What's the risk?

10.1186/s12982-015-0025-8Emerging Themes in Epidemiology12

Acquisition and processing problem of ERTS data in south Florida

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Surface water modeling Everglades Water Basin, Florida

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Study of some Anthropometric Parameters of Itsekiri and Okpe Ethnic Groups of Delta State, South-South Nigeria

This determines and compares the human physical variations in some selected anthropometric parameters among the Itsekiri and Okpe ethnic communities Delta, Nigeria. 1000 apparently healthy adult subjects comprising 250 males and 250 females from each of the communities, were randomly selected for this study. Using standard laboratory procedures, height, knee height, waist circumference, hip circumference, arm length, head length, head breadth, nasal length, and nasal breadth were measured while nasal index, waist/hip ratio and cephalic index were calculated using standard formulae. Results showed that the two ethnic groups presented typical nose (platyrrhine) and head (dolicocephaly) types for African populations. Except for nasal index (90.78 vs 92.05), the Itsekiris’ presented higher mean head length (18.45cm vs 18.29cm), head breadth (13.46cm vs 13.06cm), cephalic index (73.04 vs 71.84), nasal height(4.59cm vs 4.38cm), nasal breadth (4.14cm vs 4.06cm), waist circumference (80.75cm vs 77.09cm), hip circumference (94.64cm vs 92.05cm), waist-hip ratio (0.85 vs 0.83), height (169.06cm vs165.28cm), knee height (49.82cm vs 47.05cm) and arm length (38.93cm vs36.63cm) than Okpes. Overall, sexual dimorphism was observed in the ethnic groups, with males showing higher values than females (p<0.05). This data is recommended to anthropologists, forensic experts’ geneticists and medical practitioners who may find it very  useful.Keywords: Anthropometry, Nigeria, Parameters, Ethnic grou

High-precision Measurements of Ionospheric TEC Gradients with the Very Large Array VHF System

We have used a relatively long, contiguous VHF observation of a bright cosmic radio source (Cygnus A) with the Very Large Array (VLA) to demonstrate the capability of this instrument to study the ionosphere. This interferometer, and others like it, can observe ionospheric total electron content (TEC) fluctuations on a much wider range of scales than is possible with many other instruments. We have shown that with a bright source, the VLA can measure differential TEC values between pairs of antennas (delta-TEC) with an precision of 0.0003 TECU. Here, we detail the data reduction and processing techniques used to achieve this level of precision. In addition, we demonstrate techniques for exploiting these high-precision delta-TEC measurements to compute the TEC gradient observed by the array as well as small-scale fluctuations within the TEC gradient surface. A companion paper details specialized spectral analysis techniques used to characterize the properties of wave-like fluctuations within this data.Comment: accepted for publication in Radio Scienc