Prosecuting Alleged Terrorists by Military Commission: A Prudent Option

President Obama has announced that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay will be closed by January 22, 2010. He has also said that at least some of the detainees facing criminal prosecution will be tried in military commissions. The system of military commissions established by President Bush after the 9/11 attacks, as well as the one which Congress enacted in 2006 following the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, were widely criticized as being unproductive and not meeting international legal standards. The Congress has, very recently, revised the rules and procedures for military commissions to make them fair, effective and much more like those used for courts-martial. This article compares and contrasts trials in revised military commissions with trials in federal district courts. It concludes that a combination of both forums would best serve the President, and that military commissions are still a prudent option for prosecuting some detainees where there are security and admissibility of evidence concerns

Bifurcation in Quantum Measurement

We present a generic model of (non-destructive) quantum measurement. Being formulated within reversible quantum mechanics, the model illustrates a mechanism of a measurement process --- a transition of the measured system to an eigenstate of the measured observable. The model consists of a two-level system $\mu$ interacting with a larger system $A$, consisting of smaller subsystems. The interaction is modelled as a scattering process. Restricting the states of $A$ to product states leads to a bifurcation process: In the limit of a large system $A$, the initial states of $A$ that are efficient in leading to a final state are divided into two separated subsets. For each of these subsets, $\mu$ ends up in one of the eigenstates of the measured observable. The probabilities obtained in this branching confirm the Born rule.Comment: A revised version that includes a more general presentation of the model (in Sect. 4) and a larger revision of the Introductio

Metamorphosis: Transforming Non-designers into Designers

In this paper we make the case that there is today a growing number of educational settings experiencing challenges when it comes to transforming non-designers into designers, and in particular, interaction designers. We see this development as a consequence of an increased awareness and recognition of what broadly could be labeled as a design perspective. We examine the transformational process, the metamorphosis, by which non-designer students become interaction designers. We identify and describe the barriers that make it difficult for the students to move through this transformational process. We also propose some pedagogical approaches that can reduce the barriers and improve the possibility for the transformation to occur. The approach that we have developed and describe consists of three parts. Based on a fundamental understanding of the nature of design, we have developed (i) a tentative transformational model of how non-designers become interaction designers; (ii) a special kind of conceptual framework used to support students in the transformational process; and (iii) design assignments based on real-world design problems. We end the paper with two conclusions. First we argue that there is a challenge in transforming non-designers into designers, but that it is possible if the educational effort is based on an understanding of design and on the transformational process with its barriers. Finally we argue that the experience of trying to turn non-designers into interaction designers is in itself a valuable research approach. Dealing with non-designer students reveals deep insights about the nature of the design process and makes it possible to better formulate what constitutes a designerly approach. Keywords Design, Design education, Pedagogy, HCI</p

Labor market discrimination of minorities? yes, but not in job offers

This paper presents evidence from a field experiment designed to evaluate the efficacy of anonymous application procedures. While the policy evaluation itself is of interest, more importantly the experiment provides a unique opportunity to detect race based differential treatment in a controlled market environment. Over a 6 month period we observe all applications sent in response to local public sector vacancies. We observe both the callback and the job oer decision. We compare decisions of recruiters when they can observe ethnic markers (control) with a treatment condition where ethnic markers are absent. We find a substantial differential in the callback decision. Interestingly, we do not find evidence for differential treatment in the job offer decision. A follow up experiment provides indications that recruiters respond strategically to the announcement of the results of the first experiment.Field Experiment; Discrimination; Public Sector; Anonymous Application Procedures

Global Scale Impacts

Global scale impacts modify the physical or thermal state of a substantial fraction of a target asteroid. Specific effects include accretion, family formation, reshaping, mixing and layering, shock and frictional heating, fragmentation, material compaction, dilatation, stripping of mantle and crust, and seismic degradation. Deciphering the complicated record of global scale impacts, in asteroids and meteorites, will lead us to understand the original planet-forming process and its resultant populations, and their evolution in time as collisions became faster and fewer. We provide a brief overview of these ideas, and an introduction to models.Comment: A chapter for Asteroids IV, a new volume in the Space Science Series, University of Arizona Press (Patrick Michel, Francesca E. DeMeo, William F. Bottke, Eds.