3,109 research outputs found
The Forgotten FISA Court: Exploring the Inactivity of the ATRC
The Alien Terrorist Removal Court was established in 1996 after immense political pressure from the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations and wide bipartisan support to serve as a forum to prosecute the most complex and difficult national security immigration removal cases while protecting vital classified information from public disclosure. Yet, after twenty-three years, this Article III court has not heard a single case.
This article provides a fresh and critical inquiry into this veritable zombie court that has fallen from the public consciousness, yet still exists with a standing cadre of designated judges. It fills a significant gap in the conjunction of national security and immigration literature as the most comprehensive scholarly inquiry that has been done on the ATRC. Our novel conclusions include the reasons why the court has not ever heard a case and an analysis into its continued legitimacy despite subsequent War on Terror-era enactments that streamline the removal of most classes of noncitizen national security threats. We uniquely establish that the ATRC was dead on arrival due to its unworkable, yet legislatively remediable procedural flaws. We examine the dynamic history of this forgotten court, analyze its structure, and propose commonsense legislative revision that would render this important national security law enforcement tool viable
Snake and spider toxins induce a rapid recovery of function of botulinum neurotoxin paralysed neuromuscular junction
Botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) and some animal neurotoxins (-Bungarotoxin, -Btx, from elapid snakes and -Latrotoxin, -Ltx, from black widow spiders) are pre-synaptic neurotoxins that paralyse motor axon terminals with similar clinical outcomes in patients. However, their mechanism of action is different, leading to a largely-different duration of neuromuscular junction (NMJ) blockade. BoNTs induce a long-lasting paralysis without nerve terminal degeneration acting via proteolytic cleavage of SNARE proteins, whereas animal neurotoxins cause an acute and complete degeneration of motor axon terminals, followed by a rapid recovery. In this study, the injection of animal neurotoxins in mice muscles previously paralyzed by BoNT/A or /B accelerates the recovery of neurotransmission, as assessed by electrophysiology and morphological analysis. This result provides a proof of principle that, by causing the complete degeneration, reabsorption, and regeneration of a paralysed nerve terminal, one could favour the recovery of function of a biochemically- or genetically-altered motor axon terminal. These observations might be relevant to dying-back neuropathies, where pathological changes first occur at the neuromuscular junction and then progress proximally toward the cell body
The cryptographic power of misaligned reference frames
Suppose that Alice and Bob define their coordinate axes differently, and the
change of reference frame between them is given by a probability distribution
mu over SO(3). We show that this uncertainty of reference frame is of no use
for bit commitment when mu is uniformly distributed over a (sub)group of SO(3),
but other choices of mu can give rise to a partially or even asymptotically
secure bit commitment.Comment: 4 pages Latex; v2 has a new referenc
Supervised learning with quantum enhanced feature spaces
Machine learning and quantum computing are two technologies each with the
potential for altering how computation is performed to address previously
untenable problems. Kernel methods for machine learning are ubiquitous for
pattern recognition, with support vector machines (SVMs) being the most
well-known method for classification problems. However, there are limitations
to the successful solution to such problems when the feature space becomes
large, and the kernel functions become computationally expensive to estimate. A
core element to computational speed-ups afforded by quantum algorithms is the
exploitation of an exponentially large quantum state space through controllable
entanglement and interference. Here, we propose and experimentally implement
two novel methods on a superconducting processor. Both methods represent the
feature space of a classification problem by a quantum state, taking advantage
of the large dimensionality of quantum Hilbert space to obtain an enhanced
solution. One method, the quantum variational classifier builds on [1,2] and
operates through using a variational quantum circuit to classify a training set
in direct analogy to conventional SVMs. In the second, a quantum kernel
estimator, we estimate the kernel function and optimize the classifier
directly. The two methods present a new class of tools for exploring the
applications of noisy intermediate scale quantum computers [3] to machine
learning.Comment: Fixed typos, added figures and discussion about quantum error
mitigatio
Detecting Neutrino Magnetic Moments with Conducting Loops
It is well established that neutrinos have mass, yet it is very difficult to
measure those masses directly. Within the standard model of particle physics,
neutrinos will have an intrinsic magnetic moment proportional to their mass. We
examine the possibility of detecting the magnetic moment using a conducting
loop. According to Faraday's Law of Induction, a magnetic dipole passing
through a conducting loop induces an electromotive force, or EMF, in the loop.
We compute this EMF for neutrinos in several cases, based on a fully covariant
formulation of the problem. We discuss prospects for a real experiment, as well
as the possibility to test the relativistic formulation of intrinsic magnetic
moments.Comment: 6 pages, 4 b/w figures, uses RevTe
Chaidez v. United States - You Can\u27t Go Home Again
This article examines a 2013 Supreme Court decision, Chaidez v. United States, in which the Court declined to apply retroactively another recent decision, Padilla v. Kentucky. To many observers, Chaidez appears to be a discrete departure from previous Sixth Amendment right to counsel jurisprudence. On a personal level, noncitizens who pled guilty to a crime without being apprised of the plea’s removal risks are now unable to seek redress under Padilla and return to their homes in the United States. This article examines relevant Sixth Amendment and retroactivity jurisprudence and proposes an explanation for the Court’s apparent aboutface
Adaptive versus non-adaptive strategies for quantum channel discrimination
We provide a simple example that illustrates the advantage of adaptive over
non-adaptive strategies for quantum channel discrimination. In particular, we
give a pair of entanglement-breaking channels that can be perfectly
discriminated by means of an adaptive strategy that requires just two channel
evaluations, but for which no non-adaptive strategy can give a perfect
discrimination using any finite number of channel evaluations.Comment: 11 page
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