American Equal Protection and Global Convergence

Commentators have noted that equal protection doctrine is in a state of transformation. The nature of that transformation, however, is poorly understood. This Article offers a clearer view of the change underway. This Article is the first to reveal and synthesize three major trajectories along which the U.S. Supreme Court has begun to move. First, the Court has begun to blur the line that it previously drew between facial discrimination and disparate impact. Second, the Court has begun to collapse its previously established tiered standards for reviewing discrimination. These two trajectories combine to produce a third trajectory of change: by blurring the distinction between facial discrimination and disparate impact, and by collapsing tiered review, the United States’ equal protection doctrine is converging with equality jurisprudence from peer jurisdictions abroad. After describing these changes, we argue that the collective wisdom of foreign jurisdictions should serve as persuasive authority encouraging the United States to continue along its current trajectories of doctrinal reform. We contend that foreign jurisdictions have served as laboratories of doctrinal innovation from which the United States could learn

A Case Report of Case Report Pursuit by Medical Student

Medical students often seek case reports as vehicles for academic writing opportunities, conference presentation avenues, and residency/fellowship application highlights. Here we review a case where, due to unfortunate circumstances, a student made a unique diagnosis central to proper patient clinical care, wished to write up the case subsequently, but was ultimately excluded from the final work stemming from the patient case. We review the pitfalls that occurred in the process of pursuing publication of an interesting case, the educational value of pursuing case reports for students, the necessity for strong mentorship in this process, and general principles that medical students can follow regarding case report creation to avoid being burned

Ontology-based specific and exhaustive user profiles for constraint information fusion for multi-agents

Intelligent agents are an advanced technology utilized in Web Intelligence. When searching information from a distributed Web environment, information is retrieved by multi-agents on the client site and fused on the broker site. The current information fusion techniques rely on cooperation of agents to provide statistics. Such techniques are computationally expensive and unrealistic in the real world. In this paper, we introduce a model that uses a world ontology constructed from the Dewey Decimal Classification to acquire user profiles. By search using specific and exhaustive user profiles, information fusion techniques no longer rely on the statistics provided by agents. The model has been successfully evaluated using the large INEX data set simulating the distributed Web environment

Empirical prediction of traffic noise transmission loss across plenum windows

A parametric study on the traffic noise transmission loss across plenum windows was carried out experimentally in this investigation in an attempt to establish a simple empirical model for predicting this transmission loss. A total of fourteen full scale plenum windows were included in this study. The results of a site mockup measurement were used for model validation. The present model was developed based on the existing plenum chamber theory in which the sound fields inside the plenum window cavities were assumed to make up of a diffracted wave and a reverberant field. Results suggest that both the diffracted and reverberant field inside the plenum window cavities are weaker than those assumed in existing plenum chamber theory. It is found that a model, which assumes frequency-independent diffraction directivity and percentage reverberant field attenuation, gives the best prediction of traffic noise transmission loss. This prediction model is also able to predict site test results with good accurac

Automatic domain ontology extraction for context-sensitive opinion mining

Automated analysis of the sentiments presented in online consumer feedbacks can facilitate both organizations’ business strategy development and individual consumers’ comparison shopping. Nevertheless, existing opinion mining methods either adopt a context-free sentiment classification approach or rely on a large number of manually annotated training examples to perform context sensitive sentiment classification. Guided by the design science research methodology, we illustrate the design, development, and evaluation of a novel fuzzy domain ontology based contextsensitive opinion mining system. Our novel ontology extraction mechanism underpinned by a variant of Kullback-Leibler divergence can automatically acquire contextual sentiment knowledge across various product domains to improve the sentiment analysis processes. Evaluated based on a benchmark dataset and real consumer reviews collected from Amazon.com, our system shows remarkable performance improvement over the context-free baseline

Ontology-based specific and exhaustive user profiles for constraint information fusion for multi-agents

Intelligent agents are an advanced technology utilized in Web Intelligence. When searching information from a distributed Web environment, information is retrieved by multi-agents on the client site and fused on the broker site. The current information fusion techniques rely on cooperation of agents to provide statistics. Such techniques are computationally expensive and unrealistic in the real world. In this paper, we introduce a model that uses a world ontology constructed from the Dewey Decimal Classification to acquire user profiles. By search using specific and exhaustive user profiles, information fusion techniques no longer rely on the statistics provided by agents. The model has been successfully evaluated using the large INEX data set simulating the distributed Web environment

vSkyConf: Cloud-assisted Multi-party Mobile Video Conferencing

As an important application in the busy world today, mobile video conferencing facilitates virtual face-to-face communication with friends, families and colleagues, via their mobile devices on the move. However, how to provision high-quality, multi-party video conferencing experiences over mobile devices is still an open challenge. The fundamental reason behind is the lack of computation and communication capacities on the mobile devices, to scale to large conferencing sessions. In this paper, we present vSkyConf, a cloud-assisted mobile video conferencing system to fundamentally improve the quality and scale of multi-party mobile video conferencing. By novelly employing a surrogate virtual machine in the cloud for each mobile user, we allow fully scalable communication among the conference participants via their surrogates, rather than directly. The surrogates exchange conferencing streams among each other, transcode the streams to the most appropriate bit rates, and buffer the streams for the most efficient delivery to the mobile recipients. A fully decentralized, optimal algorithm is designed to decide the best paths of streams and the most suitable surrogates for video transcoding along the paths, such that the limited bandwidth is fully utilized to deliver streams of the highest possible quality to the mobile recipients. We also carefully tailor a buffering mechanism on each surrogate to cooperate with optimal stream distribution. We have implemented vSkyConf based on Amazon EC2 and verified the excellent performance of our design, as compared to the widely adopted unicast solutions.Comment: 10 page

Dipolar-glass-like relaxor ferroelectric behaviour in the 0.5BaTiO3-0.5Bi(Mg1/2Ti1/2)O3 electroceramic

In this study, the dielectric and ferroelectric switching behaviour of 0.5BaTiO3-0.5Bi(Mg1/2Ti1/2)O3 (BT-BMT) ceramics are investigated. The BT-BMT ceramic exhibits a typical dipolar-glass-like, dielectric polarisation relaxation. This is attributed to the 15 distinct possible local A4B2 configurations around the O ions and the effect this unavoidable local compositional variability has on the dipole relaxation behaviour of inherent {1-D h111} dipole chains, arising from correlated off-centre displacements of Bi3+ and Ti4+ ions along local {111} directions. On the other hand, switchable polarisation under strong applied electric fields is observed on different length scales accompanied by the appearance of strong polarisation relaxation, as observed via time-delayed piezoresponse hysteresis loop measurements. These experimental results demonstrate that this BT-BMT ceramic is relaxor ferroelectric in nature, although it exhibits dipolar-glass-like dielectric relaxation behaviour.The authors J.W., Y.L., and R.L.W. acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council (ARC) in the form of Discovery projects. Y.L. also appreciates support from the ARC Future Fellowships program