1,182 research outputs found
For (Some) Immigration Restrictions
According to many philosophers, the world should embrace open borders – that is, let people move around the globe and settle as they wish, with exceptions made only in very specific cases such as fugitives or terrorists. Defenders of open borders have adopted two major argumentative strategies. The first is to claim that immigration restrictions involve coercion, and then show that such coercion cannot be morally justified. The second is to argue that adopting worldwide open borders policies would make the world a much better place, particularly by improving average well-being. This essay contends that both of these argumentative strategies fail. Some immigration restrictions are not only morally justified, but morally required
Evaluation of protein surface roughness index using its heat denatured aggregates
Recent research works on potential of different protein surface describing parameters to predict protein surface properties gained significance for its possible implication in extracting clues on protein's functional site. In this direction, Surface Roughness Index, a surface topological parameter, showed its potential to predict SCOP-family of protein. The present work stands on the foundation of these works where a semi-empirical method for evaluation of Surface Roughness Index directly from its heat denatured protein aggregates (HDPA) was designed and demonstrated successfully. The steps followed consist, the extraction of a feature, Intensity Level Multifractal Dimension (ILMFD) from the microscopic images of HDPA, followed by the mapping of ILMFD into Surface Roughness Index (SRI) through recurrent backpropagation network (RBPN). Finally SRI for a particular protein was predicted by clustering of decisions obtained through feeding of multiple data into RBPN, to obtain general tendency of decision, as well as to discard the noisy dataset. The cluster centre of the largest cluster was found to be the best match for mapping of Surface Roughness Index of each protein in our study. The semi-empirical approach adopted in this paper, shows a way to evaluate protein's surface property without depending on its already evaluated structure
Effective dielectric tensor of deformed-helix ferroelectric liquid crystals with subwavelength pitch and large tilt angle
Short pitch deformed helix ferroelectric liquid crystals have numerous
applications as active materials in displays, optical telemetry and biomedical
devices. In this paper, we derive convenient analytical formulas to calculate
the effective dielectric tensor of these materials beyond the space average
approximation. By comparison with exact numerical calculations, we show that
our formulas are remarkably accurate in predicting optical properties in
virtually all practical situations, including the important case of large tilt
angles, where the space average approximation breaks down. We also present a
comparison between the two complementary approaches of expanding the mesoscopic
dielectric tensor vs. the mesoscopic transfer matrix, by deriving an expression
for the effective transfer matrix as an infinite expansion and explicitly
calculating the corresponding effective dielectric tensor for the first time.
Our results demonstrate that both methods give accurate predictions when
two-photon scattering terms are taken into account
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