Restoring the Balance: The Second Amendment Revisited

In this article, the Second Amendment is analyzed through a discussion of the history of the right to private arms under English common law, the Second Amendment\u27s legislative history and context, and the United States Supreme Court\u27s decision in United States v. Miller. The articles argues that the private right of keeping arms plays a fundamental role in the constitutional system of checks and balances and that the Second Amendment supports the twin goals of individual and collective defense against violence and aggression. The article concludes that efforts to limit firearms possession to the organized militia undermines these twin goals and that the theories behind such efforts do not withstand constitutional history

Functorial Data Migration

In this paper we present a simple database definition language: that of categories and functors. A database schema is a small category and an instance is a set-valued functor on it. We show that morphisms of schemas induce three "data migration functors", which translate instances from one schema to the other in canonical ways. These functors parameterize projections, unions, and joins over all tables simultaneously and can be used in place of conjunctive and disjunctive queries. We also show how to connect a database and a functional programming language by introducing a functorial connection between the schema and the category of types for that language. We begin the paper with a multitude of examples to motivate the definitions, and near the end we provide a dictionary whereby one can translate database concepts into category-theoretic concepts and vice-versa.Comment: 30 page

Hydrology

When applied to wetlands, the science of hydrology is concerned with how the storage and movement of water into and out of a wetland affects the plants and animals, and the soils on which they grow. Most wetland scientists agree that the single most important factor determining both wetland type and function is hydrology. Consequently, changes in hydrology are the leading causes of wetland degradation or destruction. The two case studies in this chapter illustrate how water was returned to a previously drained lowland swamp and a peat bog and the effects on the vegetation communities. Both sites had been drained as further dry land was desired for farming and urban development, a common scenario throughout New Zealand

Conformal Transformations with Multiple Scalar Fields

Many interesting models incorporate scalar fields with non-minimal couplings to the spacetime Ricci curvature scalar. As is well known, if only one scalar field is non-minimally coupled, then one may perform a conformal transformation to a new frame in which both the gravitational portion of the Lagrangian and the kinetic term for the (rescaled) scalar field assume canonical form. We examine under what conditions the gravitational and kinetic terms in the Lagrangian may be brought into canonical form when more than one scalar field has non-minimal coupling. A particular class of two-field models admits such a transformation, but models with more than two non-minimally coupled fields in general do not.Comment: 17 pages, no figures. References added to match published version