Torture as a method of criminal prosecution: Police Brutality, the Militarization of Security and the Reform of Inquisitorial Criminal Justice in Mexico

How can societies restrain their coercive institutions and transition to a more humane criminal justice system? We argue that two main factors explain why torture can persist as a generalized practice in democratic societies: weak institutional protections of the rights of criminal suspects and the militarization of policing, which leads the police to act as if their job were to occupy a war zone. With the use of a large survey of the Mexican prison population and leveraging the date and place of arrest, this paper provides valid causal evidence about how these two explanatory variables shape torture. Our paper provides a grim picture of the survival of authoritarian policing practices in democracies. It also provides novel evidence of the extent to which the abolition of inquisitorial criminal justice institutions - a remnant of colonial legacies and a common trend in the region - has worked to restrain police brutality

Radio Proper Motions of Wolf-Rayet Stars

We present the analysis of observations taken from the Very Large Array archive of six Wolf-Rayet stars with radio emission, with the purpose of determining their proper motions. Typically, these observations cover periods of 10 to 20 years. To verify the method, we included WR 140 in the sample, finding that the proper motions determined by us are a few times more accurate than and consistent within noise with those of Hipparcos. The other five WR stars were not studied by Hipparcos and we report their proper motions for the first time. The proper motions for WR 145a = Cyg X-3 are consistent with the source being stationary with respect to its local standard of rest and suggest that the black hole in this binary system formed by direct collapse of a massive star, without expulsion of a supernova remnant.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Radio Continuum Sources Associated with AB Aur

We present high angular resolution, high-sensitivity Very Large Array observations at 3.6 cm of the Herbig Ae star AB Aur. This star is of interest since its circumstellar disk exhibits characteristics that have been attributed to the presence of an undetected low mass companion or giant gas planet. Our image confirms the continuum emission known to exist in association with the star, and detects a faint protuberance that extends about $0\rlap.{''}3$ to its SE. Previous theoretical considerations and observational results are consistent with the presence of a companion to AB Aur with the separation and position angle derived from our radio data. We also determine the proper motion of AB Aur by comparing our new observations with data taken about 17 years ago and find values consistent with those found by Hipparcos.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

On approximation numbers of composition operators

We show that the approximation numbers of a compact composition operator on the weighted Bergman spaces $\mathfrak{B}_\alpha$ of the unit disk can tend to 0 arbitrarily slowly, but that they never tend quickly to 0: they grow at least exponentially, and this speed of convergence is only obtained for symbols which do not approach the unit circle. We also give an upper bounds and explicit an example