1,811 research outputs found
CONSTITUTIONAL/LAND USE—SMALL-TOWN POLITICS, BIG-TIME PROBLEM: ADDRESSING THE DUE PROCESS IMPLICATIONS OF EX PARTE COMMUNICATIONS IN QUASI-JUDICIAL MUNICIPAL PROCEEDINGS
Town residents and politicians stand at odds over the conversion of a driving range and ice cream shop—a local favorite—into a big-box supermarket. The town zoning board’s decision on an appeal of the store’s permit will determine the practical fate of a neighborhood, and the metaphorical fate of the town. The supermarket, during an appeal of its granted permit, brings in new “local counsel,” an attorney-politician who ultimately meets with four of five zoning board members individually, in-person. He claims these meetings were merely to discuss “procedural questions.” Circumstantial evidence suggests otherwise. Upon judicial review of the board’s affirming the permit on appeal, the trial judge finds that bias played no role in the board’s decision, yet articulates no standard for when a finding of bias should be made in such circumstances.
These facts are drawn from a real situation, and similar situations occur in different factual settings before municipal boards. Despite this, Massachusetts (along with roughly forty-five other states) has no established law governing the effect of such ex parte communications on those quasi-judicial proceedings, a constitutional issue of due process.
Four other jurisdictions—Florida, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington—have addressed this problem, each reaching a different resolution. Idaho has a rule implying that undisclosed ex parte communications made to municipal boards in quasi-judicial settings are fatal to the outcome of the proceedings. A Washington statute requires disclosure to avoid nullification. Florida imputed a presumption of bias onto ex parte communications, whereas Oregon takes the approach that no such presumption results from such communications.
This Note describes the issue presented by ex parte communications in the municipal context; identifies the current rules and approaches adopted by jurisdictions that have addressed this issue, weighing their various strengths and weaknesses; and considers what guidance federal administrative law can provide. Ultimately, it synthesizes, proposes, and justifies a model rule for jurisdictions that have not yet addressed this issue: a rebuttable presumption of bias, curable by disclosure on the record
Energies of knot diagrams
We introduce and begin the study of new knot energies defined on knot
diagrams. Physically, they model the internal energy of thin metallic solid
tori squeezed between two parallel planes. Thus the knots considered can
perform the second and third Reidemeister moves, but not the first one. The
energy functionals considered are the sum of two terms, the uniformization term
(which tends to make the curvature of the knot uniform) and the resistance term
(which, in particular, forbids crossing changes). We define an infinite family
of uniformization functionals, depending on an arbitrary smooth function
and study the simplest nontrivial case , obtaining neat normal forms
(corresponding to minima of the functional) by making use of the Gauss
representation of immersed curves, of the phase space of the pendulum, and of
elliptic functions
Collective modes of Fermi superfluid containing vortices along the BEC-BCS crossover
Using the coarse-grain averaged hydrodynamic approach, we calculate all low
energy transverse excitation spectrum of a rotating Fermi superfluid containing
vortex lattices for all regimes along the BEC-BCS crossover. In the fast
rotating regime, the molecular BEC enters into the lowest Landau level, but the
superfluid in the unitarity and the BCS regimes occupies many low-lying Landau
levels. The difference between the breathing mode frequencies at the BEC and
unitarity limit shrinks to zero as the rotation speed approaches the radial
trap frequency, in contrast to the finite difference in the non-rotating
systems.Comment: To appear in Physical Review
Effective Lagrangian of unitary Fermi gas from expansion
Using expansion technique proposed in \cite{Nishida:2006br} we
derive an effective Lagrangian (Ginzburg-Landau-like functional) of the
degenerate unitary Fermi gas to the next-to-leading (NLO) order in
It is demonstrated that for many realistic situations it is
sufficient to retain leading order (LO) terms in the derivative expansion. The
functional is used to study vortex structure in the symmetric gas, and
interface between normal and superfluid phases in the polarized gas. The
resulting surface free energy is about four times larger than the value
previously quoted in the literature.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure
Cooling dynamics of ultracold two-species Fermi-Bose mixtures
We compare strategies for evaporative and sympathetic cooling of two-species
Fermi-Bose mixtures in single-color and two-color optical dipole traps. We show
that in the latter case a large heat capacity of the bosonic species can be
maintained during the entire cooling process. This could allow to efficiently
achieve a deep Fermi degeneracy regime having at the same time a significant
thermal fraction for the Bose gas, crucial for a precise thermometry of the
mixture. Two possible signatures of a superfluid phase transition for the Fermi
species are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Three-body problem in Fermi gases with short-range interparticle interaction
We discuss 3-body processes in ultracold two-component Fermi gases with
short-range intercomponent interaction characterized by a large and positive
scattering length . It is found that in most cases the probability of 3-body
recombination is a universal function of the mass ratio and , and is
independent of short-range physics. We also calculate the scattering length
corresponding to the atom-dimer interaction.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
Three-body recombination in a three-state Fermi gas with widely tunable interactions
We investigate the stability of a three spin state mixture of ultracold
fermionic Li atoms over a range of magnetic fields encompassing three
Feshbach resonances. For most field values, we attribute decay of the atomic
population to three-body processes involving one atom from each spin state and
find that the three-body loss coefficient varies by over four orders of
magnitude. We observe high stability when at least two of the three scattering
lengths are small, rapid loss near the Feshbach resonances, and two unexpected
resonant loss features. At our highest fields, where all pairwise scattering
lengths are approaching , we measure a three-body loss
coefficient and a trend
toward lower decay rates for higher fields indicating that future studies of
color superfluidity and trion formation in a SU(3) symmetric Fermi gas may be
feasible
Improving Annotations in Digital Documents
Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοAnnotation plays a major role in a user’s reading of a document: from
elementary school students making notes on text books to professors marking up
their latest research papers. A common place for annotations to appear is in the
margin of a document. Surprisingly, there is little systematic knowledge of how,
why and when annotations are written in margins or over the main text. This paper
investigates how margin size impacts the ease with which documents can be
annotated, and user annotation behavior. The research comprises of a two part
investigation: first, a paper study that examines margins and their use in physical
documents; secondly, we evaluate document reader software that supports an extended
margin for annotation in digital documents
Auger decay, Spin-exchange, and their connection to Bose-Einstein condensation of excitons in Cu_2O
In view of the recent experiments of O'Hara, et al. on excitons in Cu_2O, we
examine the interconversion between the angular-momentum triplet-state excitons
and the angular-momentum singlet-state excitons by a spin-exchange process
which has been overlooked in the past. We estimate the rate of this
particle-conserving mechanism and find a substantially higher value than the
Auger process considered so far. Based on this idea, we give a possible
explanation of the recent experimental observations, and make certain
predictions, with the most important being that the singlet-state excitons in
Cu_2O is a very serious candidate for exhibiting the phenomenon of
Bose-Einstein condensation.Comment: 4 pages, RevTex, 1 ps figur
Efficient and robust initialization of a qubit register with fermionic atoms
We show that fermionic atoms have crucial advantages over bosonic atoms in
terms of loading in optical lattices for use as a possible quantum computation
device. After analyzing the change in the level structure of a non-uniform
confining potential as a periodic potential is superimposed to it, we show how
this structure combined with the Pauli principle and fermion degeneracy can be
exploited to create unit occupancy of the lattice sites with very high
efficiency.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
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