Bases for Refusing International Extradition Requests - Capital Punishment and Torture

This Essay is an attempt to contribute to the scholarly investigation into how to reconcile the complementary and competing goals of protecting national security in the interest of law enforcement while still guaranteeing the protection of basic human rights of defendants. It focuses on two issues - capital punishment and torture - which form the bases for state refusal to extradite fugitives

Strain and Electric Field Modulation of the Electronic Structure of Bilayer Graphene

We study how the electronic structure of the bilayer graphene (BLG) is changed by electric field and strain from {\it ab initio} density-functional calculations using the LMTO and the LAPW methods. Both hexagonal and Bernal stacked structures are considered. The BLG is a zero-gap semiconductor like the isolated layer of graphene. We find that while strain alone does not produce a gap in the BLG, an electric field does so in the Bernal structure but not in the hexagonal structure. The topology of the bands leads to Dirac circles with linear dispersion in the case of the hexagonally stacked BLG due to the interpenetration of the Dirac cones, while for the Bernal stacking, the dispersion is quadratic. The size of the Dirac circle increases with the applied electric field, leading to an interesting way of controlling the Fermi surface. The external electric field is screened due to polarization charges between the layers, leading to a reduced size of the band gap and the Dirac circle. The screening is substantial in both cases and diverges for the Bernal structure for small fields as has been noted by earlier authors. As a biproduct of this work, we present the tight-binding parameters for the free-standing single layer graphene as obtained by fitting to the density-functional bands, both with and without the slope constraint for the Dirac cone.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Balancing the Tradeoff between Profit and Fairness in Rideshare Platforms During High-Demand Hours

Rideshare platforms, when assigning requests to drivers, tend to maximize profit for the system and/or minimize waiting time for riders. Such platforms can exacerbate biases that drivers may have over certain types of requests. We consider the case of peak hours when the demand for rides is more than the supply of drivers. Drivers are well aware of their advantage during the peak hours and can choose to be selective about which rides to accept. Moreover, if in such a scenario, the assignment of requests to drivers (by the platform) is made only to maximize profit and/or minimize wait time for riders, requests of a certain type (e.g. from a non-popular pickup location, or to a non-popular drop-off location) might never be assigned to a driver. Such a system can be highly unfair to riders. However, increasing fairness might come at a cost of the overall profit made by the rideshare platform. To balance these conflicting goals, we present a flexible, non-adaptive algorithm, \lpalg, that allows the platform designer to control the profit and fairness of the system via parameters $\alpha$ and $\beta$ respectively. We model the matching problem as an online bipartite matching where the set of drivers is offline and requests arrive online. Upon the arrival of a request, we use \lpalg to assign it to a driver (the driver might then choose to accept or reject it) or reject the request. We formalize the measures of profit and fairness in our setting and show that by using \lpalg, the competitive ratios for profit and fairness measures would be no worse than $\alpha/e$ and $\beta/e$ respectively. Extensive experimental results on both real-world and synthetic datasets confirm the validity of our theoretical lower bounds. Additionally, they show that \lpalg under some choice of $(\alpha, \beta)$ can beat two natural heuristics, Greedy and Uniform, on \emph{both} fairness and profit

Human Rights And Sovereign And Individual Immunities (Sovereign Immunity, Act Of State, Head Of State Immunity And Diplomatic Immunity) - Some Reflections

Reflections on the application of sovereign and individual immunities law are especially pertinent in light of the controversy surrounding the arrest and trial of General Augosto Pinochet in Britain, at the request of a Spanish magistrate on charges of murder, hostage-taking, and torture during his seventeen year rule in Chil

Abreviasi, Afiksasi, Dan Reduplikasi Ragam Bahasa Remaja Dalam Media Sosial Facebook

Penggunaan ragam bahasa remaja dimaksudkan untuk menciptakan identitas kelompok yang terpisah dari kelompok yang lainnya. Tujuan penelitian ini menjelaskan abreviasi, afiksasi, dan reduplikasi dalam ragam bahasa remaja di media sosial facebook dan menyebutkan faktor yang mempengaruhi penggunaan abreviasi, afiksasi, dan reduplikasi dalam ragam bahasa remaja di media sosial facebook. Metode dalam penelitian ini yaitu metode deskriptif. Pendekatan dalam penelitian ini yaitu kualitatif. Dengan pendekatan ini, data dikumpulkan dan disajikan dalam bentuk kata-kata. Data dalam penelitian ini yaitu bahasa tulis yang berupa satuan lingual yang terdapat pada akun facebook. Teknik pengumpulan data pada penelitian ini yaitu mengumpulkan data sekunder. Data diambil secara acak sepanjang bulan Januari 2013 sampai April 2013, dicuplik dari 122 (seratus dua puluh dua) tulisan dalam facebook yang mengandung data proses morfologis berupa abreviasi, afiksasi, dan reduplikasi dengan memegang prinsip kerahasiaan dan menjaga pribadi responden. Data akan dideskripsikan dan diklasifikasikan berdasarkan abreviasi, afiksasi, dan reduplikasi dalam ragam bahasa remaja di media sosial facebook dan faktor yang mempengaruhi penggunaan abreviasi, afiksasi, dan reduplikasi dalam ragam bahasa remaja di media sosial facebook. Teknik analisis data dengan cara reduksi data, meneliti proses morfologi, mengelompokkan berdasarkan abreviasi, afiksasi dan reduplikasi, display data, verifikasi, dan simpulan. Penelitian ini menghasilkan 4 pola pemenggalan, 2 pola penyingkatan, 6 pola prefiks, 5 pola sufiks, dan 3 pola reduplikasi dwilingga. Faktor kemunculan proses morfologis tersebut antara lain remaja mengungkapkan ekspresi diri, membangun satu identitas yang berbeda, membuat suasana pergaulan terasa lebih “hidup” dengan memberi kesan keren, gagah, modern, santai, dan akrab. Mereka menyingkat kata atau menyederhanakan bentuk untuk keindahan tulisan, mengedepankan Kenyamanan bunyi dengan mengganti huruf yang memiliki kemiripan bunyi, menghiasi komunikasi dengan memainkan huruf, tanda baca, dan angka

Geo-location oriented routing protocol for smart dynamic mesh network

© 2016 IEEE. Wireless Mesh Network is an emerging technology with great potential to become a Self-Sustained Network. Unlike the traditional networks that dominate the current communication system and rely on a large and expensive setup of wired/wireless access points to provide connection between users, the Wireless Mesh Network is formed by the user devices (referred as Nodes) which connect to each other to form a network. However, due to the use of legacy/traditional network models for mesh networks, there exist various limitations towards its implementation. This paper presents a new approach towards the Wireless Mesh Network, incorporating a new routing scheme based on the Geo-Location of the devices. It puts forward the structure, working principle and its performance during the first implementation

Understanding the role of marketing communications in direct marketing

The standard RFM models used by direct marketers include behavioral variables, but ignore the role of marketing communications. In addition, RFM models allow customer responsiveness to vary across different customers, but not across diiferent time periods. Hence, the authors first extend RFM models by incorporating the effects of marketing communications and temporal heterogeneity. Then, using direct-marketing data from a Dutch charity organization, they calibrate the proposed model, and find that it better explains customer behavior because it includes information on both the past behavior and marketing communications. More specifically, they show that direct mail communication builds goodwill, which, in turn, enhances customer's likelihood to buy. However, cumulative exposure to direct mail creates irritation, and erodes goodwill. The two opposite effects induce a cyclic pattern of goodwill formation, which repeats over four quarters. Next, the authors find that, when they control for these communications effects, the standard result - customer's likelihood to buy increases as shopping frequency increases - reverses. That is, in contrast to the extant literature, customers who donate frequently are less likely to donate in the near future. These findings are not only stable over time, but also replicate across two large data sets. Finally, the authors discuss the need for implementing pulsing strategy to mitigate irritation, and the possibility of practicing one-to-one marketing by using information on customer responsiveness, which can be estimated for each customer via the proposed model

Design & Development of a Two-jaw parallel Pneumatic Gripper for Robotic Manipulation

The handling of abstract materials and mechanisms to pick and place are widely found in factory automation and industrial manufacturing. There are different mechanical grippers which are based on different motor technologies have been designed and employed in numerous applications. The designed robotic gripper in this paper is a two jaw actuated gripper which is different from the conventional cam and follower gripper in the way that controlled movement of the jaws is done with the help of pneumatic cylinders using air pressure. The force developed in the cylinder is very gentle and is directly delivered to the jaws in a compact way. The design, analysis and fabrication of the gripper model are explained in details along with the detailed list of all existing pneumatic grippers in market. The force and torque for the gripper have been calculated for different set of conditions. The working of the model is checked for and observation for pay load is recorded at various pressures. The highly dynamic and highly accelerated gripper model can be easily set at intermediate positions by regulating the pressure. Pneumatic grippers are very easy to handle and are generally cost-effective because air hoses, valves and other pneumatic devices are easy to maintain

Credibility problems and tradeoff between realistic and abstraction in WANET and WSN Simulation

Wireless network Simulation is challenging due to the effect of the dynamic and fading channel. The task is even more challenging in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), adding the factor of energy source limitation. Validating simulation results with real implementation are still an unresolved question in wireless research in general and in particular WSN. There are few standard procedures to follow which guarantee accuracy and credibility in terms of answering the question in hands. On one hand, simulation results are aimed towards as realistic as possible conforming to real world implementation. On the other hand, abstraction can eliminate the fragmentation of hardware prototypes, operating system models and different simulation tools. In our research we try to tackle credibility problem in WSN with tradeoffs between realistic and abstraction, and setup the principles and guideline for practical simulations in WSN. © 2011 IEEE

A novel Hash-Based File Clustering scheme for efficient distributing, storing and retrieving of large scale Health Records

Cloud computing has been adopted as an efficient computing infrastructure model for provisioning resources and providing services to users. Several distributed resource models such as Hadoop and parallel databases have been deployed in healthcare-related services to manage electronic health records (EHR). However, these models are inefficient for managing a large number of small files and hence they are not widely deployed in Healthcare Information Systems. This paper proposed a novel Hash-Based File Clustering Scheme (HBFC) to distribute, store and retrieve EHR efficiently in cloud environments. The HBFC possesses two distinctive features: it utilizes hashing to distribute files into clusters in a control way and it utilizes P2P structures for data management. HBFC scheme is demonstrated to be effective in handling big health data that comprises of a large number of small files in various formats. It allows users to retrieve and access data records efficiently. The initial implementation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms original P2P system in term of data lookup latency