Administrative Balance

Two of the most discussed administrative-law theories in contemporary discussion are executive preemption and big waiver. Executive preemption is the idea that agency regulations preempt state law by extension of the federal statutes the agencies are charged with enforcing. Big waiver is the idea that Congress delegates, to administrative agencies, the power to waive statutory provisions. The constitutional questions raised by executive preemption and big waiver can be put in the following terms. Executive preemption raises constitutional issues as regulatory agencies go farther and farther away from the “clear statement” of a given statute. Thus, one wonders whether agencies are turning themselves into an unconstitutional lawmaking body. Big waiver also raises constitutional issues. To some, it inverts the traditional approach to delegation and allows regulatory agencies to, in part, cancel laws that Congress passed. Executive preemption and big waiver currently constitute two separate theories of administrative law. This paper instead argues that these theories should be thought of in tandem. Executive preemption takes rights away from the states and big waiver gives rights back. As such, these tools allow agencies to balance federalism concerns in our present era of legislative gridlock

Orifice plates in a shock tube

This note points out some interesting aspects of a recent study of the flow resulting from the use of area change near the diaphragm of a shock tube. (1) Earlier studies (2,3) have been directed toward the use of area change for increasing the available shock speed, and thus have considered geometries where A4/A1 > 1 and A*/A1 = 1 [see notation on Fig. 1(a)]. In the current work, shock tubes with arbitrary values of these parameters are considered over the complete range of Ms (the shock Mach number)

Exploring notions of genre in 'academic literacies' and 'writing across the curriculum': approaches across countries and contexts

The SIGET IV panel on genre in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and “academic literacies” (ACLITS) has set rolling a discussion of the similarities and differences in the two traditions, the former originating in the US in the early 1970s, the latter originating in England in the early 1990s. This paper maps out some elements of each in relation to the other and to genre, which we hope will set in motion further discussions and cross-fertilization

Processes on Unimodular Random Networks

We investigate unimodular random networks. Our motivations include their characterization via reversibility of an associated random walk and their similarities to unimodular quasi-transitive graphs. We extend various theorems concerning random walks, percolation, spanning forests, and amenability from the known context of unimodular quasi-transitive graphs to the more general context of unimodular random networks. We give properties of a trace associated to unimodular random networks with applications to stochastic comparison of continuous-time random walk.Comment: 66 pages; 3rd version corrects formula (4.4) -- the published version is incorrect --, as well as a minor error in the proof of Proposition 4.10; 4th version corrects proof of Proposition 7.1; 5th version corrects proof of Theorem 5.1; 6th version makes a few more minor correction