Reclaiming Refugee Rights as Human Rights

On April 5, 2019, PILR held their triennial symposium titled: Revisiting Human Rights: The Universal Declaration at 70. As a reflection of the event, a few panelists composed contribution pieces reflecting on the topic

The Legislative History of the Administrative Procedure Act

During the twentieth century, one of the most important developments in American government and politics was the expanding power of administrative agencies of all kinds. The enactment of the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) of 1946 was the crucial event in the course of this expansion. The APA was the culmination of long-term efforts to regulate the decision-making of administrative agencies, and it reflected a significant political compromise. This paper traces the outlines of that reflection. In Part I, it reviews the political background leading up to the proposal of the legislation in the 79th Congress that became the APA. In Part II, it reviews the circumstances surrounding how the APA developed and was eventually enacted during 1945 and 1946. Part III discusses the evolution of the definitions of the crucial statutory terms that categorized agency and culminated in Section 2 of the APA. Parts IV-VI describe how the APA regulated agency rulemaking, agency adjudication, and the judicial review of agency action respectively

The Supersymmetric Fat Higgs

Supersymmetric models have traditionally been assumed to be perturbative up to high scales due to the requirement of calculable unification. In this note I review the recently proposed `Fat Higgs' model which relaxes the requirement of perturbativity. In this framework, an NMSSM-like trilinear coupling becomes strong at some intermediate scale. The NMSSM Higgses are meson composites of an asymptotically-free gauge theory. This allows us to raise the mass of the Higgs, thus alleviating the MSSM of its fine tuning problem. Despite the strong coupling at an intermediate scale, the UV completion allows us to maintain gauge coupling unification.Comment: Talk given at the 12th International Conference on Supersymmetry and Unification of Fundamental Interactions (SUSY 04), Tsukuba, Japan, 17-23 Jun 2004. To appear in the proceedings. 4 page

Feed-forward volume rendering algorithm for moderately parallel MIMD machines

Algorithms for direct volume rendering on parallel and vector processors are investigated. Volumes are transformed efficiently on parallel processors by dividing the data into slices and beams of voxels. Equal sized sets of slices along one axis are distributed to processors. Parallelism is achieved at two levels. Because each slice can be transformed independently of others, processors transform their assigned slices with no communication, thus providing maximum possible parallelism at the first level. Within each slice, consecutive beams are incrementally transformed using coherency in the transformation computation. Also, coherency across slices can be exploited to further enhance performance. This coherency yields the second level of parallelism through the use of the vector processing or pipelining. Other ongoing efforts include investigations into image reconstruction techniques, load balancing strategies, and improving performance

Efficient, Safe, and Probably Approximately Complete Learning of Action Models

In this paper we explore the theoretical boundaries of planning in a setting where no model of the agent's actions is given. Instead of an action model, a set of successfully executed plans are given and the task is to generate a plan that is safe, i.e., guaranteed to achieve the goal without failing. To this end, we show how to learn a conservative model of the world in which actions are guaranteed to be applicable. This conservative model is then given to an off-the-shelf classical planner, resulting in a plan that is guaranteed to achieve the goal. However, this reduction from a model-free planning to a model-based planning is not complete: in some cases a plan will not be found even when such exists. We analyze the relation between the number of observed plans and the likelihood that our conservative approach will indeed fail to solve a solvable problem. Our analysis show that the number of trajectories needed scales gracefully

Multikulturna edukacija: implicitna in eksplicitna etnocentricna edukacija – vsebinska analiza sodobnega izraelskega programa za vzgojo za vrednote

In the year 2000, Israel purportedly adopted a multicultural educational policy. It replaced the covert assimilation policy, which was referred to as ‘the integration policy’. The aim of the present study was to analyse the contemporary Israeli program of value education. Using the method of content analysis, the present study sought to determine whether the syllabi of the contemporary program reflect the adoption of a multicultural educational policy, or whether they produce only multicultural rhetoric. The findings reveal that the program reflected mainly the pluralistic approach while still maintaining traces of ethnocentric rhetoric of certain syllabi in the program. (DIPF/Orig.