Why Criminal Culpability Should Follow the Critical Path: Reframing the Theory of Effective Control

Commanders are the critical path enabling the formation and employment of any fighting organization. By extension, their units are most militarily effective where they are governed by adequate control mechanisms. The classic doctrine of command responsibility that imputes the criminality of subordinates onto their leaders is founded on the legal premise that commanders are responsible for establishing affirmative controls over their subordinates to regulate their conduct. The commander is thereby criminally culpable for failing to create a climate of compliance with the laws and customs of war. The obligation of commanders to control the conduct of their subordinates, or to take action to ameliorate violations when they do occur, applies to both formalized regular military organizations and the loosely structured non-state entities that are common in modern conflicts. Current legal tests for evaluating such ‘effective control’ inaccurately reflect modern operational reality by narrowly focusing on the particular circumstances of the criminal act and the precise relationship between the perpetrators and the superior at the moment of the offense. However, courts have developed and applied a series of tests for evaluating ‘effective control’ that in practice become formulaic and limiting. This trend is exacerbated when applied to warlords or non-state actors in nonhierarchical organizations. Command responsibility has deep historical roots that transcend culture and geography, indicating a timeless consensus that commanders bear personal and professional responsibility for the acts of their subordinates regardless of the context in which they occur. International law subsequently developed to place a heightened responsibility on commanders who field a fighting organization and control the application of violence by their subordinates. Without the proper internal enforcement of the laws and customs of warfare, the commander becomes liable to external criminal enforcement, directed towards both the subordinates and the commander. Prosecutorial trends toward charging joint criminal enterprises and other new theories of individual responsibility fail to understand the essence of the criminality at issue for all fighting organizations – that it is the fielding of the fighting organization without the proper safeguards that in many cases is the causal factor for mass atrocities. Is the law presently configured such that a rebel warlord, a terrorist leader or an outsourced intelligence operator may evade superior responsibility simply because of the unorthodox structure of the fighting organization or the disaggregated orchestration of violence? If the theory of effective control is not reconceived, the answer will be yes, and increasingly so. It is perhaps inevitable that the changing face of warfare requires a modernized conception of effective control. The concept of effective control should be reconceptualized by jurists to extend its present applications by including an imputed responsibility to any commander or non-state actor assuming that role who organizes a collective entity with the intent of conducting hostilities and thereafter fails to create a climate of compliance with the laws and customs of war. This approach will permit the extension of liability to commanders who organize cellular units that operate on the basis of primary loyalty to a local leader and with little/no tactical control by the hierarchy, such as the tactics seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a number of modern non-international armed conflicts. Jurists should analyze superior responsibility cases with full cognizance of modern command and control theory in order to sustain its viability as a practical prosecutorial tool to regulate the crimes committed by loosely knit groups and non-state actors conducting atrocities in chaotic circumstances. A reconceived theory of effective control would retain the current indicia developed by jurists, which are most often applicable to state actors and formalized military hierarchies. To be clear, the current jurisprudence may well support liability in many cases, but the Composite Theory proposed herein would make localized findings of effective control one aspect of the larger judicial inquiry. A Composite Theory of Responsibility would revitalize and modernize the doctrine of superior responsibility and avoid impunity for those perpetrators clever or lucky enough to exploit the lacunae in current case law

Dynamics of Wolbachia pipientis gene expression across the Drosophila melanogaster life cycle

Symbiotic interactions between microbes and their multicellular hosts have manifold impacts on molecular, cellular and organismal biology. To identify candidate bacterial genes involved in maintaining endosymbiotic associations with insect hosts, we analyzed genome-wide patterns of gene expression in the alpha-proteobacteria Wolbachia pipientis across the life cycle of Drosophila melanogaster using public data from the modENCODE project that was generated in a Wolbachia-infected version of the ISO1 reference strain. We find that the majority of Wolbachia genes are expressed at detectable levels in D. melanogaster across the entire life cycle, but that only 7.8% of 1195 Wolbachia genes exhibit robust stage- or sex-specific expression differences when studied in the "holo-organism" context. Wolbachia genes that are differentially expressed during development are typically up-regulated after D. melanogaster embryogenesis, and include many bacterial membrane, secretion system and ankyrin-repeat containing proteins. Sex-biased genes are often organised as small operons of uncharacterised genes and are mainly up-regulated in adult males D. melanogaster in an age-dependent manner suggesting a potential role in cytoplasmic incompatibility. Our results indicate that large changes in Wolbachia gene expression across the Drosophila life-cycle are relatively rare when assayed across all host tissues, but that candidate genes to understand host-microbe interaction in facultative endosymbionts can be successfully identified using holo-organism expression profiling. Our work also shows that mining public gene expression data in D. melanogaster provides a rich set of resources to probe the functional basis of the Wolbachia-Drosophila symbiosis and annotate the transcriptional outputs of the Wolbachia genome.Comment: 58 pages, 6 figures, 6 supplemental figures, 4 supplemental files (available at https://github.com/bergmanlab/wolbachia/tree/master/gutzwiller_et_al/arxiv

Determining the clog state of constructed wetlands using an embeddable Earth's Field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance probe

The recent rise in interest of green technologies has led to significant adoption of the constructed wetland as a waste water treatment technique. This increased popularity has only been mired by the decline in operational lifetime of wetland units, leading to the need for more regular, time consuming, and expensive rejuvenation techniques to be performed than initially anticipated. To extend operational lifetimes and increase efficiency of wetland units, it is crucial to have an accurate method to determine the internal state of the wetland system. The most important parameter to measure within the reed bed is the clog state of the system, which is representative of the overall system health. In previous work, magnetic resonance (MR) measurements, parameters of T1 and T2eff, have been demonstrated as extremely powerful tools to determine the internal clog state of a wetland [1, 2]. Measurements have been performed in a laboratory setting, using low field permanent magnet arrangements. This work presents an Earth's Field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (EFNMR) probe suitable for in situ measurements within constructed wetlands. We show T2eff and T1 measurements using the EFNMR probe. T1 values are shown to be sensitive to the change in the clog state with 1498 ms for the thickly clogged sample and 2728 ms for the thinly clogged sample. T2eff values are shown to be marginally more sensitive to clog state with 630 ms for a thickly clogged sample and 1212 ms for the thinly clogged sample. This gives distinguishable variation within both parameters suggesting that this probe is suitable for embedding into an operational constructed wetland. This work was conducted as part of an EU FP7 project to construct an Automated Reed Bed Installation, "ARBI"

Evorus: A Crowd-powered Conversational Assistant Built to Automate Itself Over Time

Crowd-powered conversational assistants have been shown to be more robust than automated systems, but do so at the cost of higher response latency and monetary costs. A promising direction is to combine the two approaches for high quality, low latency, and low cost solutions. In this paper, we introduce Evorus, a crowd-powered conversational assistant built to automate itself over time by (i) allowing new chatbots to be easily integrated to automate more scenarios, (ii) reusing prior crowd answers, and (iii) learning to automatically approve response candidates. Our 5-month-long deployment with 80 participants and 281 conversations shows that Evorus can automate itself without compromising conversation quality. Crowd-AI architectures have long been proposed as a way to reduce cost and latency for crowd-powered systems; Evorus demonstrates how automation can be introduced successfully in a deployed system. Its architecture allows future researchers to make further innovation on the underlying automated components in the context of a deployed open domain dialog system.Comment: 10 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2018 (CHI'18

The Molecular Basis of Drug Resistance against Hepatitis C Virus NS3/4A Protease Inhibitors

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infects over 170 million people worldwide and is the leading cause of chronic liver diseases, including cirrhosis, liver failure, and liver cancer. Available antiviral therapies cause severe side effects and are effective only for a subset of patients, though treatment outcomes have recently been improved by the combination therapy now including boceprevir and telaprevir, which inhibit the viral NS3/4A protease. Despite extensive efforts to develop more potent next-generation protease inhibitors, however, the long-term efficacy of this drug class is challenged by the rapid emergence of resistance. Single-site mutations at protease residues R155, A156 and D168 confer resistance to nearly all inhibitors in clinical development. Thus, developing the next-generation of drugs that retain activity against a broader spectrum of resistant viral variants requires a comprehensive understanding of the molecular basis of drug resistance. In this study, 16 high-resolution crystal structures of four representative protease inhibitors - telaprevir, danoprevir, vaniprevir and MK-5172 - in complex with the wild-type protease and three major drug-resistant variants R155K, A156T and D168A, reveal unique molecular underpinnings of resistance to each drug. The drugs exhibit differential susceptibilities to these protease variants in both enzymatic and antiviral assays. Telaprevir, danoprevir and vaniprevir interact directly with sites that confer resistance upon mutation, while MK-5172 interacts in a unique conformation with the catalytic triad. This novel mode of MK-5172 binding explains its retained potency against two multi-drug-resistant variants, R155K and D168A. These findings define the molecular basis of HCV N3/4A protease inhibitor resistance and provide potential strategies for designing robust therapies against this rapidly evolving virus

Groundwater : the world's neglected defence against climate change

Currently, millions of people across the globe don’t have safe water to drink. As climate change continues to wreak havoc, communities will see their homes and means of survival washed away, their drinking water contaminated or dry up, their crops wither and fail, their health devastated by infectious diseases, and their children forced out of school. Communities need sustainable and safe water and sanitation to have the best chance of combatting the devastating impacts of extreme weather, like heatwaves, droughts and floods. Yet one in four people across the globe do not have safely managed water in their homes. However, new analysis by the British Geological Survey (BGS) and WaterAid, reveals that many countries in Africa – including most parts of subSaharan Africa – and parts of Asia, have enough water to meet everyone’s daily needs. And this hidden resource is often right under our feet – groundwater. Groundwater – which exists almost everywhere underground, in gaps within soil, sand and rock – has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives and be the world’s insurance policy against climate change. It would help communities cope with slow onset climate impacts like drought and irregular rainfall, and provide broader resilience after floods by ensuring there is safe water available for all. But groundwater will only be able to lessen the impacts of climate change if it is carefully managed and if we invest in mechanisms to ensure that it gets to the people who need it most. All too often, this is not the case. In some regions, there isn’t enough investment in the services needed to find, capture, treat, manage and distribute groundwater – so it remains largely untouched. In others, we see rampant over-extraction with far too much groundwater being used, particularly by the agricultural sector. In both cases, only a limited amount of this life-saving resource gets to those who need it most. BGS and WaterAid assessed data on the amount of groundwater there is, how quickly it is replenished by rain, and how much the rocks can store. Our experts concluded that, on a national level, most countries in Africa have sufficient groundwater for people to not only survive, but to thrive. This includes countries such as Ethiopia and Madagascar, where only half the population have clean water close to home, and large parts of Mali, Niger and Nigeria. Although, on a sub-national level, there are some places where groundwater is more difficult to get to or is contaminated, our research estimated that today’s total groundwater on the continent could provide people with enough drinking water for at least five years in the event of a drought – and in some cases even decades. This calculation is based on 130 litres of domestic water use a day per capita, which would provide people with more than enough to drink, cook and wash with.i What’s more, as groundwater is below the surface, it is more resilient to extreme weather than other water sources – such as lakes, rivers, streams and dams – and is largely protected from evaporation and less susceptible to pollution. This means that even if our weather becomes more extreme and unpredictable, there is enough groundwater stored in aquifersii to provide a buffer for many years to come for the millions of people living on the frontline of climate change. For them, daily life is already a struggle simply because they do not have access to sustainable and safe water and sanitation

Exile Vol. XLIII No. 1

41st Year Title Page 1 Epigraph by Ezra Pound 2 Table of Contents 3 Shame(d) by alex e. blazer 4 enter play by alex e. blazer 5 sunday\u27s sex ed fundamentals by alex e. blazer 6 Dancing, Dedicated to Shannon by Paul Genesius Durica 7-8 On the Rocks by Katie Keller 9-10 In Heritage Station, Huntington, WV by Trish Klei 11 Untitled by Tyler Smith 12-14 Untitled by Camille Gammon-Hittelman 15 Untitled by erika laine hansen 16 Androgynous Implications by Elizabeth Nutting 17 Patterns of the Clouds by Angela Rae Bliss 18 Sister, Sister, Aspirations by Elizabeth Nutting 19 Sick Girl by Helena Jasna Oroz 20-21 The Television Era by Trish Klei 22 I\u27m Mistaken; He\u27s Alive by Bekah Taylor 23 Crucifixion on the Corner of State and Bruening by Paul Genesius Durica 24-25 reLiAnce: CorKscrews by Bekah Taylor 26 Colors of the Beast by Helena Jasna Oroz 27 Development by Brian P. Voroselo 28-31 Untitled by Peter Rees 32 Public Bathhouse by Paul Genesius Durica 33 The Sound of Silence Upon the Onyx Wall of Memories by Angela Rae Bliss 34 Untitled by Peter Rees 35 Empress by Paul Genesius Durica 36-37 Life is what you make it by Cathy Graham 38-42 Untitled by Peter Rees 43 Competition by Bekah Taylor 44 changeling by Casey McArdle 45 A Kiss is Just a Kiss, A Lick is Just a Lick by Helena Jasna Oroz 46 the-r-apist by alex e. blazer 47 Gone by Latisha Newton 48 Sonnet by Touch by Trish Klei 49 Contributors\u27 Notes 49-51 Staff Page & Editorial Policy 52 Editorial decisions are shared equally among the editorial board. Submissions are judged on a name-blind basis. Members of boards whose own work is under consideration must abstain from discussion regarding that work. -5

Quality of Care for Heart Failure Patients Hospitalized for Any Cause

The study sought to assess the quality of care for heart failure patients who are hospitalized for all causes

Temperature dependence of magnetic resonance probes for use as embedded sensors in constructed wetlands

Constructed wetlands are now accepted as an environmentally friendly means of wastewater treatment however, their effectiveness can be limited by excessive clogging of the pores within the gravel matrix, making this an important parameter to monitor. It has previously been shown that the clog state can be characterised using magnetic resonance (MR) relaxation parameters with permanent magnet based sensors. One challenge with taking MR measurements over a time scale on the order of years is that seasonal temperature fluctuations will alter both the way that the sensor operates as well as the relaxation times recorded. Without an understanding of how the sensor will behave under different temperature conditions, meaningful information about the clog state cannot be successfully extracted from a wetland. This work reports the effect of temperature on a permanent magnet based MR sensor to determine if the received signal intensity is significantly compromised as a result of large temperature changes, and whether meaningful relaxation data can be extracted over the temperature range of interest. To do this, the central magnetic field of the sensor was monitored as a function of temperature, showing an expected linear relationship. Signal intensity was measured over a range of temperatures (5 °C to 44 °C) for which deterioration at high and low temperatures compared to room temperature was observed. The sensor was still operable at the extremes of this range and the reason for the signal loss has been studied and explained. Spin-lattice relaxation time measurements using the sensor at different temperatures have also been taken on a water sample and seem to agree with literature values. Further to this, measurements have been taken in an operational wetland over the course of 203 days and have shown a linear dependence with temperature as would be expected. This work concluded that the sensor can perform the task of measuring the spin-lattice relaxation time over the required temperature range making it suitable for long-term application in constructed wetlands

The status of GEO 600

The GEO 600 laser interferometer with 600m armlength is part of a worldwide network of gravitational wave detectors. GEO 600 is unique in having advanced multiple pendulum suspensions with a monolithic last stage and in employing a signal recycled optical design. This paper describes the recent commissioning of the interferometer and its operation in signal recycled mode