A Gate Forever Closed? Retiring Immigration Law’s Post-departure Bar

Immigration law’s “post-departure bar” destroys the jurisdiction of either an immigration judge or the Board of Immigration Appeals to hear a motion to reopen or reconsider filed by an alien who is no longer physically within the country. This Note examines the current conflict between the federal circuits regarding the post-departure bar and why the circuits that have decided to strike down the bar in the cases before them have ruled in line with certain trends present in recent Supreme Court immigration cases. Conflict between the circuits has arisen because the governing statute, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, was enacted without reference to the bar, which had been in place before the Act’s passage. In that statutory silence, the Attorney General promulgated regulations intended to reestablish the bar. In recent years, circuits have taken various positions on the bar’s validity. Many have struck the bar down on the basis of either Chevron deference or the grounds outlined in Union Pacific Railroad Co. v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, which bars an agency from limiting its jurisdiction in certain situations. Still, other circuits have upheld the bar by using Chevron to conclude that deference to the agency is proper. This Note suggests that the circuits that have struck down the bar are in line with prevailing trends in recent immigration cases decided by the Supreme Court. Further, this Note argues that it does not matter whether a circuit court relies upon Chevron or Union Pacific to strike down the bar, as the use of either precedent to attack the bar serves these trends, and is consistent with the overall direction of American immigration law

The equivalence of information-theoretic and likelihood-based methods for neural dimensionality reduction

Stimulus dimensionality-reduction methods in neuroscience seek to identify a low-dimensional space of stimulus features that affect a neuron's probability of spiking. One popular method, known as maximally informative dimensions (MID), uses an information-theoretic quantity known as "single-spike information" to identify this space. Here we examine MID from a model-based perspective. We show that MID is a maximum-likelihood estimator for the parameters of a linear-nonlinear-Poisson (LNP) model, and that the empirical single-spike information corresponds to the normalized log-likelihood under a Poisson model. This equivalence implies that MID does not necessarily find maximally informative stimulus dimensions when spiking is not well described as Poisson. We provide several examples to illustrate this shortcoming, and derive a lower bound on the information lost when spiking is Bernoulli in discrete time bins. To overcome this limitation, we introduce model-based dimensionality reduction methods for neurons with non-Poisson firing statistics, and show that they can be framed equivalently in likelihood-based or information-theoretic terms. Finally, we show how to overcome practical limitations on the number of stimulus dimensions that MID can estimate by constraining the form of the non-parametric nonlinearity in an LNP model. We illustrate these methods with simulations and data from primate visual cortex

Discussion of "Statistical Modeling of Spatial Extremes" by A. C. Davison, S. A. Padoan and M. Ribatet

Discussion of "Statistical Modeling of Spatial Extremes" by A. C. Davison, S. A. Padoan and M. Ribatet [arXiv:1208.3378].Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-STS376B the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Factors controlling lava dome morphology

Research suggests that variations in lava dome morphology on different planets will depend much more critically on local gravity and the style of eruption than on the magma composition, ambient temperature, or the relative roles of convective and radiative cooling. Eruption style in turn reflects differences in tectonic conditions and the ability of magma to exsolve volatiles. Observed crude correlations between silica content and calculated yield strengths for terrestrial lava flows and domes probably are do to differences in extrusion rate and volatile solubility, rather than intrinsic rheological properties. Thus, even after taking the known effect of gravity into account, observed differences in gross dome morphology on different planets cannot by themselves be directly related to composition. Additional information such as the distribution of surface textures and structures, or spectroscopic data will be needed to conclusively establish dome compositions

Shuksan Story: An Original Soundtrack Composition

This thesis centers around a composition written to score a documentary called “Shuksan Story,” a film documentary about the revitalization of Shuksan Middle School in Bellingham, WA. To satisfy the needs of the documentary, the composition includes four sections, including a set all in the same key signature, a set featuring the main theme, stand-alone pieces, and brief “stingers”. The project also includes recordings of all compositions: performed, mixed and finalized by the composer. The intention is that the filmmaker will edit these pieces into the completed project. This paper outlines the historical context of Shuksan Middle School and its process of school culture transformation, details the successes and challenges of multi-media collaboration, discusses compositional decisions and explores the educational potential of the process with future students

It Doesn’t Matter What You Eat, it’s Who You Eat: The Pharisees and Food in the Gospel of Matthew

The imagery of Jesus holding a loaf of bread and saying “This is my body” is a profound, explicit in its image of the centrality of food to the Christian faith, which has great depth in Christian symbolism. The eucharist is a defining element in Christian spiritual life, from the early Church up until the present. The eucharist predates the composition of the gospels, and its influence on the early Church can be felt in the gospel of Matthew. Matthew especially uses food in this text to distinguish the early Church from the Pharisaic movement. In order to explore this distinction, I will survey what the Pharisees were, some background on the Gospel of Matthew, and the historical religious significance of bread and wine in the Levant to demonstrate the interconnectedness of food with faith. Next, for both Christians and Pharisees, it is impossible to separate the importance of food. For both traditions, manna from heaven at the time of Moses in Exodus 16 comes to mind as a critically important Torah story. Then, for the Christians, the sacrifice of Jesus during his execution symbolized by the body and blood in the sacrament of the elements of bread and wine. By using this cultural and religious imagery, I argue the Gospel of Matthew seeks to distinguish Matthew’s early church community from the Pharisees and possibly other Christians by emphasizing the focus of the gospel message should not be to get caught up in what to eat, but who to eat