The Evolution of the 1267 Sanctions Regime: Challenges & Prospects

Due process rights prevent the arbitrary deprivation of all other rights and liberties and ensure that the process undertaken to arrive at the determination of whether or when rights and liberties must be curtailed or deprived, is impartial and consistent. The creation and operation of special courts and due process mechanisms to combat terrorism has facilitated the perpetuation of counterterrorism measures that violate due process and further enabled the erosion of other internationally recognized human rights. Using qualitative methodology such as case analysis, legal research methods, process tracing, and comparative case studies, this thesis will evaluate the 1267 Regime’s human rights drawbacks, assess the judicial and institutional challenges brought against the Regime and their limited success but will ultimately conclude that the Regime still falls short of international human rights standards. Special judicial and quasijudicial institutions maintained for the purpose of countering terrorism, such as the 1267 Regime, are founded on due process exceptionalism, making it impossible for them to carry out the purpose for which they were created while upholding human rights. Thus, such paradigms are incompatible with human rights and must not be tolerated. However, the UN’s continued enforcement of the Regime through Resolutions that interrupt states’ compliance with their own human rights obligations may only serve to discredit the Regime and deter states from implementing the measures within its borders, which may nevertheless render the Regime ineffective

The Dynamics of Energy Systems and the Logistic Substitution Model

This work is dedicated to the empirical testing and theoretical formulation of an invariant, the logistic learning curve, as it applies to the structural evolution of energy systems and systems related to energy, such as coal mining. The great success of the model in organizing past data, and the insensitivity to major political and economic perturbations of the structures obtained seem to lend great predictive power to this invariant

Driven depinning of strongly disordered media and anisotropic mean-field limits

Extended systems driven through strong disorder are modeled generically using coarse-grained degrees of freedom that interact elastically in the directions parallel to the driving force and that slip along at least one of the directions transverse to the motion. A realization of such a model is a collection of elastic channels with transverse viscous couplings. In the infinite range limit this model has a tricritical point separating a region where the depinning is continuous, in the universality class of elastic depinning, from a region where depinning is hysteretic. Many of the collective transport models discussed in the literature are special cases of the generic model.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Decision Fusion in Space-Time Spreading aided Distributed MIMO WSNs

In this letter, we propose space-time spreading (STS) of local sensor decisions before reporting them over a wireless multiple access channel (MAC), in order to achieve flexible balance between diversity and multiplexing gain as well as eliminate any chance of intrinsic interference inherent in MAC scenarios. Spreading of the sensor decisions using dispersion vectors exploits the benefits of multi-slot decision to improve low-complexity diversity gain and opportunistic throughput. On the other hand, at the receive side of the reporting channel, we formulate and compare optimum and sub-optimum fusion rules for arriving at a reliable conclusion.Simulation results demonstrate gain in performance with STS aided transmission from a minimum of 3 times to a maximum of 6 times over performance without STS.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Tan(beta)-enhanced supersymmetric corrections to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon

We report on a two-loop supersymmetric contribution to the magnetic moment (g-2)_mu of the muon which is enhanced by two powers of tan(beta). This contribution arises from a shift in the relation between the muon mass and Yukawa coupling and can increase the supersymmetric contribution to (g-2)_mu sizably. As a result, if the currently observed 3 sigma deviation between the experimental and SM theory value of (g-2)_mu is analyzed within the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), the derived constraints on the parameter space are modified significantly: If (g-2)_mu is used to determine tan(beta) as a function of the other MSSM parameters, our corrections decrease tan(beta) by roughly 10% for tan(beta)=50.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Motor-driven Dynamics of Cytoskeletal FIlaments in Motility Assays

We model analytically the dynamics of a cytoskeletal filament in a motility assay. The filament is described as rigid rod free to slide in two dimensions. The motor proteins consist of polymeric tails tethered to the plane and modeled as linear springs and motor heads that bind to the filament. As in related models of rigid and soft two-state motors, the binding/unbinding dynamics of the motor heads and the dependence of the transition rates on the load exerted by the motor tails play a crucial role in controlling the filament's dynamics. Our work shows that the filament effectively behaves as a self-propelled rod at long times, but with non-Markovian noise sources arising from the coupling to the motor binding/unbinding dynamics. The effective propulsion force of the filament and the active renormalization of the various friction and diffusion constants are calculated in terms of microscopic motor and filament parameters. These quantities could be probed by optical force microscopy.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 1 Tabl

An exploration of the reactivity of singlet oxygen with biomolecular constituents

The thermal reaction between biomolecules and singlet oxygen (1O2) is important for rendering the genetic material within toxic cells inactive. Here we present results obtained from state-of-the-art multi-reference computational methods that reveal the mechanistic details of the reaction between 1O2 and two exemplary biomolecular systems: guanine (Gua) and histidine (His). The results highlight the splitting of the doubly degenerate 1Δg state of O2 upon complexation and the essentially barrierless potential energy profile of the thermally allowed cycloaddition reaction when the O2 molecule is in its lower energy 1Δg state.</p