In defence of global egalitarianism

This essay argues that David Miller's criticisms of global egalitarianism do not undermine the view where it is stated in one of its stronger, luck egalitarian forms. The claim that global egalitarianism cannot specify a metric of justice which is broad enough to exclude spurious claims for redistribution, but precise enough to appropriately value different kinds of advantage, implicitly assumes that cultural understandings are the only legitimate way of identifying what counts as advantage. But that is an assumption always or almost always rejected by global egalitarianism. The claim that global egalitarianism demands either too little redistribution, leaving the unborn and dissenters burdened with their societies' imprudent choices, or too much redistribution, creating perverse incentives by punishing prudent decisions, only presents a problem for global luck egalitarianism on the assumption that nations can legitimately inherit assets from earlier generations – again, an assumption very much at odds with global egalitarian assumptions

Activity Identification and Local Linear Convergence of Douglas--Rachford/ADMM under Partial Smoothness

Convex optimization has become ubiquitous in most quantitative disciplines of science, including variational image processing. Proximal splitting algorithms are becoming popular to solve such structured convex optimization problems. Within this class of algorithms, Douglas--Rachford (DR) and alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) are designed to minimize the sum of two proper lower semi-continuous convex functions whose proximity operators are easy to compute. The goal of this work is to understand the local convergence behaviour of DR (resp. ADMM) when the involved functions (resp. their Legendre-Fenchel conjugates) are moreover partly smooth. More precisely, when both of the two functions (resp. their conjugates) are partly smooth relative to their respective manifolds, we show that DR (resp. ADMM) identifies these manifolds in finite time. Moreover, when these manifolds are affine or linear, we prove that DR/ADMM is locally linearly convergent. When $J$ and $G$ are locally polyhedral, we show that the optimal convergence radius is given in terms of the cosine of the Friedrichs angle between the tangent spaces of the identified manifolds. This is illustrated by several concrete examples and supported by numerical experiments.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure, published in the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Visio

Individual differences and rating errors in first impressions of psychopathy

The current study is the first to investigate whether individual differences in personality are related to improved first impression accuracy when appraising psychopathy in female offenders from thin-slices of information. The study also investigated the types of errors laypeople make when forming these judgments. Sixty-seven undergraduates assessed 22 offenders on their level of psychopathy, violence, likability, and attractiveness. Psychopathy rating accuracy improved as rater extroversion-sociability and agreeableness increased and when neuroticism and lifestyle and antisocial characteristics decreased. These results suggest that traits associated with nonverbal rating accuracy or social functioning may be important in threat detection. Raters also made errors consistent with error management theory, suggesting that laypeople overappraise danger when rating psychopathy.N/

Plane-Symmetric Inhomogeneous Bulk Viscous Cosmological Models with Variable Λ\Lambda

A plane-symmetric non-static cosmological model representing a bulk viscous fluid distribution has been obtained which is inhomogeneous and anisotropic and a particular case of which is gravitationally radiative. Without assuming any {\it adhoc} law, we obtain a cosmological constant as a decreasing function of time. The physical and geometric features of the models are also discussed.Comment: 11 page

The Domination Number of Grids

In this paper, we conclude the calculation of the domination number of all $n\times m$ grid graphs. Indeed, we prove Chang's conjecture saying that for every $16\le n\le m$, $\gamma(G_{n,m})=\lfloor\frac{(n+2)(m+2)}{5}\rfloor -4$.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Investigation, Development, and Evaluation of Performance Proving for Fault-tolerant Computers

A number of methodologies for verifying systems and computer based tools that assist users in verifying their systems were developed. These tools were applied to verify in part the SIFT ultrareliable aircraft computer. Topics covered included: STP theorem prover; design verification of SIFT; high level language code verification; assembly language level verification; numerical algorithm verification; verification of flight control programs; and verification of hardware logic

Structural, item, and test generalizability of the psychopathology checklist - revised to offenders with intellectual disabilities

The Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R) is the most widely used measure of psychopathy in forensic clinical practice, but the generalizability of the measure to offenders with intellectual disabilities (ID) has not been clearly established. This study examined the structural equivalence and scalar equivalence of the PCL-R in a sample of 185 male offenders with ID in forensic mental health settings, as compared with a sample of 1,212 male prisoners without ID. Three models of the PCL-R’s factor structure were evaluated with confirmatory factor analysis. The 3-factor hierarchical model of psychopathy was found to be a good fit to the ID PCL-R data, whereas neither the 4-factor model nor the traditional 2-factor model fitted. There were no cross-group differences in the factor structure, providing evidence of structural equivalence. However, item response theory analyses indicated metric differences in the ratings of psychopathy symptoms between the ID group and the comparison prisoner group. This finding has potential implications for the interpretation of PCL-R scores obtained with people with ID in forensic psychiatric settings

An Experimental Platform for Pulsed-Power Driven Magnetic Reconnection

We describe a versatile pulsed-power driven platform for magnetic reconnection experiments, based on exploding wire arrays driven in parallel [Suttle, L. G. et al. PRL, 116, 225001]. This platform produces inherently magnetised plasma flows for the duration of the generator current pulse (250 ns), resulting in a long-lasting reconnection layer. The layer exists for long enough to allow evolution of complex processes such as plasmoid formation and movement to be diagnosed by a suite of high spatial and temporal resolution laser-based diagnostics. We can access a wide range of magnetic reconnection regimes by changing the wire material or moving the electrodes inside the wire arrays. We present results with aluminium and carbon wires, in which the parameters of the inflows and the layer which forms are significantly different. By moving the electrodes inside the wire arrays, we change how strongly the inflows are driven. This enables us to study both symmetric reconnection in a range of different regimes, and asymmetric reconnection.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures. Version revised to include referee's comments. Submitted to Physics of Plasma