Totemic Functionalism in Foreign Affairs Law

In many Western democracies, and particularly in the United States, foreign affairs are primarily an executive enterprise. The travel ban, the exit from the Irannuclear deal, and the airstrikes against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria are just a few recent illustrations of unilateral assertions of presidential power. A large part of the justification for treating foreign affairs differently than other areas of public policy, in which political and judicial checks on the executive are more robust, is functional. Owing to the executive’s relative institutional advantages over the legislature and the judiciary—in expertise, knowledge, speed, unitary structure, and democratic accountability—courts afford the President considerable deference in cases relating to foreign affairs. But there is something deeply flawed in the way judges apply functionalist reasoning in this context. Instead of using functionalism for what it is—a contextual and adaptable paradigm for ascertaining whether and how much deference is desired in order to make the challenged policy or act work best—judges frequently simply rely on the executive’s special competence to apply a de facto presumption of near-total deference. I term this practice “totemic functionalism.” This Article traces the conceptual underpinnings of totemic functionalism and critically analyzes its pervasive effect in foreign affairs law. Using three case studies and other recent examples, it then shows how totemic functionalism undermines the system of checks and balances, first between the organs of government and then, indirectly, inside the executive branch. As a result, while judicial deference in foreign affairs is often excused with the assertion that other non-judicial checks provide adequate substitute, I show that the near-total deference arising from totemic functionalism insulates the President from any sort of accountability

Verifiable conditions of ℓ1\ell_1-recovery of sparse signals with sign restrictions

We propose necessary and sufficient conditions for a sensing matrix to be "s-semigood" -- to allow for exact $\ell_1$-recovery of sparse signals with at most $s$ nonzero entries under sign restrictions on part of the entries. We express the error bounds for imperfect $\ell_1$-recovery in terms of the characteristics underlying these conditions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these characteristics, although difficult to evaluate, lead to verifiable sufficient conditions for exact sparse $\ell_1$-recovery and to efficiently computable upper bounds on those $s$ for which a given sensing matrix is $s$-semigood. We concentrate on the properties of proposed verifiable sufficient conditions of $s$-semigoodness and describe their limits of performance

Jellyfish galaxies with the IllustrisTNG simulations – No enhanced population-wide star formation according to TNG50

Due to ram-pressure stripping, jellyfish galaxies are thought to lose large amounts, if not all, of their interstellar medium. Nevertheless, some, but not all, observations suggest that jellyfish galaxies exhibit enhanced star formation compared to control samples, even in their ram pressure-stripped tails. We use the TNG50 cosmological gravity+magnetohydrodynamical simulation, with an average spatial resolution of 50-200 pc in the star-forming regions of galaxies, to quantify the star formation activity and rates (SFRs) of more than 700 jellyfish galaxies at z = 0 − 1 with stellar masses 108.3 − 10.8 M⊙ in hosts with mass 1010.5 − 14.3 M⊙. We extract their global SFRs, the SFRs within their main stellar body vs. within the tails, and we follow the evolution of the star formation along their individual evolutionary tracks. We compare the findings for jellyfish galaxies to those of diversely-constructed control samples, including against satellite and field galaxies with matched redshift, stellar mass, gas fraction and host halo mass. According to TNG50, star formation and ram-pressure stripping can indeed occur simultaneously within any given galaxy, and frequently do so. Moreover, star formation can also take place within the ram pressure-stripped tails, even though the latter is typically subdominant. However, TNG50 does not predict elevated population-wide SFRs in jellyfish compared to analogue satellite galaxies with the same stellar mass or gas fraction. Simulated jellyfish galaxies do undergo bursts of elevated star formation along their history but, at least according to TNG50, these do not translate into a population-wide enhancement at any given epoch

Jellyfish galaxies with the IllustrisTNG simulations – When, where, and for how long does ram pressure stripping of cold gas occur?

Jellyfish galaxies are prototypical examples of satellite galaxies undergoing strong ram pressure stripping (RPS). We analyze the evolution of 512 unique, first-infalling jellyfish galaxies from the TNG50 cosmological simulation. These have been visually inspected to be undergoing RPS sometime in the past 5 billion years (since z = 0.5), have satellite stellar masses $M_\star ^{\rm sat}\sim 10^{8-10.5}\, {\rm M}_\odot$, and live in hosts with M200c ∼ 1012 − 14.3 M⊙ at z = 0. We quantify the cold gas (T ≤ 104.5 K) removal using the tracer particles, confirming that for these jellyfish, RPS is the dominant driver of cold gas loss after infall. Half of these jellyfish are completely gas-less by z = 0, and these galaxies have earlier infall times and smaller satellite-to-host mass ratios than their gaseous counterparts. RPS can act on jellyfish galaxies over long time scales of ≈1.5 − 8 Gyr. Jellyfish in more massive hosts are impacted by RPS for a shorter time span and, at a fixed host mass, jellyfish with less cold gas at infall and lower stellar masses at z = 0 have shorter RPS time spans. While RPS may act for long periods of time, the peak RPS period – where at least 50 per cent of the total RPS occurs – begins within ≈1 Gyr of infall and lasts ≲ 2 Gyr. During this period, the jellyfish are at host-centric distances ∼0.2 − 2R200c, illustrating that much of RPS occurs at large distances from the host galaxy. Interestingly, jellyfish continue forming stars until they have lost ≈98 per cent of their cold gas. For groups and clusters in TNG50 $(M_{\rm 200c}^{\rm host}\sim 10^{13-14.3}\, {\rm M}_\odot )$, jellyfish galaxies deposit more cold gas (∼1011 − 12 M⊙) into halos than exist in them at z = 0, demonstrating that jellyfish, and in general satellite galaxies, are a significant source of cold gas accretion

Fully Automatic Expression-Invariant Face Correspondence

We consider the problem of computing accurate point-to-point correspondences among a set of human face scans with varying expressions. Our fully automatic approach does not require any manually placed markers on the scan. Instead, the approach learns the locations of a set of landmarks present in a database and uses this knowledge to automatically predict the locations of these landmarks on a newly available scan. The predicted landmarks are then used to compute point-to-point correspondences between a template model and the newly available scan. To accurately fit the expression of the template to the expression of the scan, we use as template a blendshape model. Our algorithm was tested on a database of human faces of different ethnic groups with strongly varying expressions. Experimental results show that the obtained point-to-point correspondence is both highly accurate and consistent for most of the tested 3D face models