Me Artsy compiled and edited by Drew Hayden Taylor

Review of Me Artsy compiled and edited by Drew Hayden Taylor

A derivative-free bracketing scheme for univariate minimization

AbstractA derivative-free scheme for univariate minimization is developed. This scheme has a quadratic convergence rate and requires two function evaluations each iteration

Defining Excessiveness: Applying the Eighth Amendment to Civil Forfeiture after Austin v. United States

In 1971, agents of the federal government seized a $20,000 yaught after finding a small quantity of marijuana on board. Ten years later government agents confiscated a twenty-eight foot boat that held drugs consisting of one marijuana twig and two marijuana leaves. Since then, the government has taken possession of a$250,000 home because a drug transaction occurred in a car parked in the driveway and of a smaller dwelling because the owner used the telephone inside to set up a drug deal at another location. In another incident, local, county, state, and federal agents shot and killed the owner of a Malibu, California ranch during a raid on the property. The government excused its actions on the mistaken assumption that the owner had grown marijuana on the land, but the Ventura County District Attorney\u27s office concluded that “the Los Angeles County Sheriff\u27s Department was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to seize and forfeit the ranch for the government.” Actions like these, even when they involve citizens who cannot be characterized as completely innocent, have fueled recent criticism of civil forfeiture statutes. The statistical evidence of forfeiture actions supports the anecdotal evidence of aggressive enforcement. Since 1984, government agencies have executed more than 200,000 forfeiture actions. The value of these forfeitures has increased each year, with the federal government seizing cash and property with a total value of $580 million in 1989, compared with$207 million in 1988 and $94 million in 1986. By most estimates, forfeitures have added over$1 billion to state and federal budgets since the mid-1980s. The Department of Justice asset-sharing program split approximately $826 million in cash and property in one five-year period. The government generated these resources with relatively little effort. In more than eighty percent of civil forfeiture cases, neither the state nor the federal government ever charges the potential claimant with a crime, and because indigent property owners, unlike indigent defendants, do not receive court-appointed attorneys, many feel that they cannot afford to reclaim the property. Under ever-increasing budget constraints, “(l)aw enforcement on the federal, state and local levels became increasingly dependent on the much-needed revenue generated under these statutes.” Yet as agencies increased their dependence on forfeiture, well-publicized confiscations focused attention on these actions and led to calls for reform. As the use of forfeiture increased, even government officials began to recognize the possibility of mixed priorities in the forfeiture programs. After the Malibu, California ranch seizure, California redrafted its forfeiture laws to require a criminal conviction. Legislators in the state of Washington have also considered various proposals to control enforcement of forfeiture laws, such as setting a seizure minimum to confine the use of the law to property connected with major drug dealers. On the federal level, Representative Henry Hyde, a Republican from Illinois, and Representative John Coyners, Jr., a Democrat from Michigan, each proposed legislation designed to limit forfeiture abuses, although a review proposed by Attorney General Janet Reno preempted their efforts. Similarly, the Administrative Conference of the United States attempted to address what it considered a “fundamental issue about the fairness and effectiveness of the entire administrative civil seizure/forfeiture process,” by recommending the establishment of a Central Forfeiture Registry and time limits to provide better notice to claimants a considerably watered-down version of the original proposal. Initially, legal arguments for reform met with little success. Courts felt unable to control law enforcement agencies, given the permissive language of the statutes and the presumed inapplicability of most constitutional protections in the civil context. By 1993, only one circuit court had declared that forfeitures could sometimes rise to such a level as to violate the Eighth Amendment. Other circuits expressed dissatisfaction with the law but apparently felt bound to allow all seizures in which the government had met the statutory requirements. In Austin v. United States, the Supreme Court reversed this trend by unanimously holding that the lower courts could overturn civil forfeitures on the grounds that they constituted constitutionally excessive fines, and by directing the inferior courts to establish a test for excessiveness. This Article surveys the approaches taken by courts in fashioning a test to satisfy Austin. It begins with a brief overview of the applicability of the Eighth Amendment in general, especially the Excessive Fines Clause, and a review of the reasoning which led the Supreme Court to apply the Eighth Amendment to civil forfeiture cases. This Article then examines the scope of the Austin decision, including the difficult question of its applicability to proceeds of criminal activity. It also discusses the emerging issue concerning the ability of the courts to mitigate the severity of forfeitures. The main body of the paper reviews the two primary tests for excessiveness which have emerged from the lower courts and endorses a test based on a combination of the two as best comporting with the requirements of the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment

An α-disconnected space has no proper monic preimage

AbstractAll spaces are compact Hausdorff. α is an uncountable cardinal or the symbol ∞. A continuous map τ:X→Y is called an α-SpFi morphism if τ-1(G) is dense in X whenever G is a dense α-cozero set of Y. We thus have a category α-SpFi (spaces with the α-filter) which, like any category, has its monomorphisms; these need not be one-to-one. For general α, we cannot say what the α-SpFi monics are, but we show, and R.G. Woods showed, that ∞-SpFi monic means range-irreducible. The main theorem here is: X has no proper α-SpFi monic preimage if and only if X is α-disconnected. This generalizes (by putting in α = ∞) the well-known fact: X has no proper irreducible preimage if and only if X is extremally disconnected. If, in our theorem, we restrict to Boolean spaces and apply Stone duality, we have the theorem of R. Lagrange, that in Boolean α-algebras, epimorphisms are surjective.The theory of spaces with filters has a lot of connections with ordered algebra—Boolean algebras of course, but also lattice-ordered groups and frames. This paper is a contribution to the development of this topological theory

Probabilistic Weyl laws for quantized tori

For the Toeplitz quantization of complex-valued functions on a $2n$-dimensional torus we prove that the expected number of eigenvalues of small random perturbations of a quantized observable satisfies a natural Weyl law. In numerical experiments the same Weyl law also holds for ``false'' eigenvalues created by pseudospectral effects.Comment: 33 pages, 3 figures, v2 corrected listed titl

In-service Initial Teacher Education in the Learning and Skills Sector in England: Integrating Course and Workplace Learning

The aim of the paper is to advance understanding of in-service learning and skills sector trainee teachers’ learning and propose ways of improving their learning. A conceptual framework is developed by extending Billett’s (International Journal of Educational Research 47:232–240, 2008) conceptualisation of workplace learning, as a relationally interdependent process between the opportunities workplaces afford for activities and interactions and how individuals engage with these, to a third base of participation, the affordances of the initial teacher education course. Hager and Hodkinson’s (British Educational Research Journal 35:619–638, 2009) metaphor of ‘learning as becoming’ is used to conceptualise the ways trainees reconstruct learning in a continuous transactional process of boundary crossing between course and workplace. The findings of six longitudinal case studies of trainees’ development, and evidence from other studies, illustrate the complex interrelationships between LSS workplace affordances, course affordances and trainee characteristics and the ways in which trainees reconstruct learning in each setting. The experience of teaching and interacting with learners, interactions with colleagues, and access to workplace resources and training are important workplace affordances for learning. However, some trainees have limited access to these affordances. Teaching observations, course activities and experiences as a learner are significant course affordances. Trainees’ beliefs, prior experiences and dispositions vary and significantly influence their engagement with course and workplace affordances. It is proposed that better integration of course and workplace learning through guided participation in an intentional workplace curriculum and attention to the ways trainees choose to engage with this, together with the use of practical theorising has the potential to improve trainee learning