Justifying Uncivil Disobedience

A prominent way of justifying civil disobedience is to postulate a pro tanto duty to obey the law and to argue that the considerations that ground this duty sometimes justify forms of civil disobedience. However, this view entails that certain kinds of uncivil disobedience are also justified. Thus, either a) civil disobedience is never justified or b) uncivil disobedience is sometimes justified. Since a) is implausible, we should accept b). I respond to the objection that this ignores the fact that civil disobedience enjoys a special normative status on account of instantiating certain special features: nonviolence, publicity, the acceptance of legal consequences, and conscientiousness. I then show that my view is superior to two rivals: the view that we should expand the notion of civility and that civil disobedience, expansively construed, is uniquely appropriate; and the view that uncivil disobedience is justifiable in but only in unfavorable conditions

Remote sensing of earth terrain

In remote sensing, the encountered geophysical media such as agricultural canopy, forest, snow, or ice are inhomogeneous and contain scatters in a random manner. Furthermore, weather conditions such as fog, mist, or snow cover can intervene the electromagnetic observation of the remotely sensed media. In the modelling of such media accounting for the weather effects, a multi-layer random medium model has been developed. The scattering effects of the random media are described by three-dimensional correlation functions with variances and correlation lengths corresponding to the fluctuation strengths and the physical geometry of the inhomogeneities, respectively. With proper consideration of the dyadic Green's function and its singularities, the strong fluctuation theory is used to calculate the effective permittivities which account for the modification of the wave speed and attenuation in the presence of the scatters. The distorted Born approximation is then applied to obtain the correlations of the scattered fields. From the correlation of the scattered field, calculated is the complete set of scattering coefficients for polarimetric radar observation or brightness temperature in passive radiometer applications. In the remote sensing of terrestrial ecosystems, the development of microwave remote sensing technology and the potential of SAR to measure vegetation structure and biomass have increased effort to conduct experimental and theoretical researches on the interactions between microwave and vegetation canopies. The overall objective is to develop inversion algorithms to retrieve biophysical parameters from radar data. In this perspective, theoretical models and experimental data are methodically interconnected in the following manner: Due to the complexity of the interactions involved, all theoretical models have limited domains of validity; the proposed solution is to use theoretical models, which is validated by experiments, to establish the region in which the radar response is most sensitive to the parameters of interest; theoretically simulated data will be used to generate simple invertible models over the region. For applications to the remote sensing of sea ice, the developed theoretical models need to be tested with experimental measurements. With measured ground truth such as ice thickness, temperature, salinity, and structure, input parameters to the theoretical models can be obtained to calculate the polarimetric scattering coefficients for radars or brightness temperature for radiometers and then compare theoretical results with experimental data. Validated models will play an important role in the interpretation and classification of ice in monitoring global ice cover from space borne remote sensors in the future. We present an inversion algorithm based on a recently developed inversion method referred to as the Renormalized Source-Type Integral Equation approach. The objective of this method is to overcome some of the limitations and difficulties of the iterative Born technique. It recasts the inversion, which is nonlinear in nature, in terms of the solution of a set of linear equations; however, the final inversion equation is still nonlinear. The derived inversion equation is an exact equation which sums up the iterative Neuman (or Born) series in a closed form and, thus, is a valid representation even in the case when the Born series diverges; hence, the name Renormalized Source-Type Integral Equation Approach

Quantification and Characterization of Allicin in Garlic Extract

Garlic (Allium sativum) is a plant well known for its extensive use in traditional and modern medicine. Its healing properties are attributed to thiosulfinates, compounds formed through an enzymatic reaction when garlic cloves are crushed. One of the most prominent thiosulfinate found in garlic is diallyl thiosulfinate or allicin. The condition in this research mimics Malaysian climate conditions. This allows allicin to be studied and characterized for its uses in the local agricultural sector as potential urea inhibitor. A spectophotometric method is used in this research to quantify allicin found in garlic extract. L-cysteine is used to react with allicin in garic extract with the knowledge that one molecule of allicin reacts rapidly with two molecules of cysteine to form two molecules of S-allyl mercaptocysteine. 5,5’-dithiobis-(2-nitrobenzoic acid) (DTNB) is added to the mixture so that spectrophotometrically active 2-nitro-5-thiobenzoate (NTB) is formed after residual cysteine reacts with DTNB. Quantification of allicin is done at 30°C with garlic extract concentration ranging from 0.005 g/mL to 0.03 g/mL. This is followed by tests on allicin stability at pH 4 – 8 at 30°C and effects of temperature on allicin from 30°C to 85°C

Stable geodesic nets in convex hypersurfaces

We construct convex bodies that can be "captured by nets." More precisely, for each dimension $n \geq 2$, we construct a family of Riemannian $n$-spheres, each with a stable geodesic net, which is a stable 1-dimensional integral varifold. Small perturbations of a stable geodesic net must lengthen it. These stable geodesic nets are composed of multiple geodesic loops based at the same point, and also do not contain any closed geodesic. All of these Riemannian $n$-spheres are isometric to convex hypersurfaces of $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ with positive sectional curvature.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figures. To be published in the Journal of Geometric Analysis. Minor amendments were made, such as adding more details to the proofs of Lemma 4.2 and Proposition 4.

Civil disobedience, costly signals, and leveraging injustice

Civil disobedience, despite its illegal nature, can sometimes be justified vis-à-vis the duty to obey the law, and, arguably, is thereby not liable to legal punishment. However, adhering to the demands of justice and refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience may lead to a highly problematic theoretical consequence: the debilitation of civil disobedience. This is because, according to the novel analysis I propose, civil disobedience primarily functions as a costly social signal. It is effective by being reliable, reliable by being costly, and costly primarily by being punished. My analysis will highlight a distinctive feature of civil disobedience: civil disobedients leverage the punitive injustice they suffer to amplify their communicative force. This will lead to two paradoxical implications. First, the instability of the moral status of both civil disobedience and its punishment to the extent where the state may be left with no permissible course of action with regard to punishing civil disobedience. Second, by refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience, the state may render uncivil disobedience—illegal political activities that fall short of the standards of civil disobedience—potentially permissible