Endangered Hydrocarbons by Lesley Battler

A review of Lesley Battler\u27s Endangered Hydrocarbons

No TV for Woodpeckers by Gary Barwin, If Pressed by Andrew McEwan, and Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World by Christine L. Marran

Review of Gary Barwin\u27s No TV for Woodpeckers, Andrew McEwan\u27s If Pressed, and Christine L. Marran\u27s Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World

The Policies of State Succession: Harmonizing Self-Determination and Global Order in the Twenty-First Century Tai-Heng Cheng, State Succession and Commercial Obligations

I differ with Cheng\u27s appraisal of certain events and think that we need a more sophisticated analysis of the twin policy goals he identifies and embraces--self-determination and global order--before they can offer real policy guidance. But State Succession and Commercial Obligations stands out as a rigorously researched, original, and insightful effort to understand this quite confused and opaque body of international law. Cheng\u27s work will both enable and encourage a more candid, reasoned, and constructive debate about the global policies at stake each time “a state fundamentally changes its structures of power and authority, and an authoritative international response is needed to manage disruptions to international arrangements that may result from that change.” Briefly, I find Cheng\u27s analysis of the dynamics of State succession relative to commercial obligations sophisticated, pragmatic, descriptively comprehensive, and, for the most part, normatively compelling. But it may be too ambitious. Defining disruptions to global commerce as the principal indicia of State succession tends to inflect, and at times to bias, the general analysis of the diverse phenomena that fall within the rubric of State succession. This commercial focus can obscure or normatively predispose our understanding and appraisal of equally vital, but non-economic, dimensions of State succession, including the core policy goals--self-determination and global order--that Cheng identifies and recommends. And to a certain extent, this compromises the work\u27s descriptive accuracy and normative appeal

Geometry of all supersymmetric type I backgrounds

We find the geometry of all supersymmetric type I backgrounds by solving the gravitino and dilatino Killing spinor equations, using the spinorial geometry technique, in all cases. The solutions of the gravitino Killing spinor equation are characterized by their isotropy group in Spin(9,1), while the solutions of the dilatino Killing spinor equation are characterized by their isotropy group in the subgroup Sigma(P) of Spin(9,1) which preserves the space of parallel spinors P. Given a solution of the gravitino Killing spinor equation with L parallel spinors, L = 1,2,3,4,5,6,8, the dilatino Killing spinor equation allows for solutions with N supersymmetries for any 0 < N =< L. Moreover for L = 16, we confirm that N = 8,10,12,14,16. We find that in most cases the Bianchi identities and the field equations of type I backgrounds imply a further reduction of the holonomy of the supercovariant connection. In addition, we show that in some cases if the holonomy group of the supercovariant connection is precisely the isotropy group of the parallel spinors, then all parallel spinors are Killing and so there are no backgrounds with N < L supersymmetries.Comment: 73 pages. v2: minor changes, references adde

The Cost of Conflation: Preserving the Dualism of Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello in the Contemporary Law of War

On October 9, 2007, a trial chamber of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) sentenced two leaders of the Civil Defence Forces (CDF), one of the parties to Sierra Leone\u27s civil war. The Chamber had convicted them of exceptionally brutal crimes: mutilation, amputation, hacking civilians to death with machetes, and other sadistic killings. Among relevant mitigating factors, however, it noted that the defendants had fought for a legitimate cause : to restore the democratically elected Government of President Kabbah. It held that their sentences should therefore be mitigated significantly, for although their conduct transgressed acceptable limits, they served a cause that is palpably just and defendable : facilitating the restoration of democracy, peace and security in [Sierra Leone] -precisely the objective the Security Council sought to achieve by encouraging the SCSL\u27s establishment. Furthermore, the Chamber opined, absent mitigation, militias in future civil wars might not intervene on behalf of legitimate governments. Their members might fear that they, too, would be judged harshly after the conflict

More Than What Courts Do: Jurisprudence, Decision, and Dignity-In Brief Encounters and Global Affairs

The same, perhaps, may be said of jurisprudence. If so, then, like Spinoza, W. Michael Reisman, this conference\u27s honoree, falls clearly into the latter category. His jurisprudence informs his work and his life-as a scholar, teacher, practitioner, friend, and public citizen. Having been privileged to know or work with him in most of these capacities, I have often been struck by how the methods and injunctions of the New Haven School shape his personal, no less than professional, character traits. He exhibits an acute sensitivity to context, cultivates a studied habit of disengaging from biases, and always reflects on arguments before replying: he responds rather than reacts. Not coincidentally, the New Haven School encourages these traits, and no living scholar or practitioner is identified more closely with it than Reisman. Below, beyond describing some precepts of the School, I want to focus on a few areas in which Reisman made signature contributions to its jurisprudence of realistic idealism

Multiple Description Vector Quantization with Lattice Codebooks: Design and Analysis

The problem of designing a multiple description vector quantizer with lattice codebook Lambda is considered. A general solution is given to a labeling problem which plays a crucial role in the design of such quantizers. Numerical performance results are obtained for quantizers based on the lattices A_2 and Z^i, i=1,2,4,8, that make use of this labeling algorithm. The high-rate squared-error distortions for this family of L-dimensional vector quantizers are then analyzed for a memoryless source with probability density function p and differential entropy h(p) < infty. For any a in (0,1) and rate pair (R,R), it is shown that the two-channel distortion d_0 and the channel 1 (or channel 2) distortions d_s satisfy lim_{R -> infty} d_0 2^(2R(1+a)) = (1/4) G(Lambda) 2^{2h(p)} and lim_{R -> infty} d_s 2^(2R(1-a)) = G(S_L) 2^2h(p), where G(Lambda) is the normalized second moment of a Voronoi cell of the lattice Lambda and G(S_L) is the normalized second moment of a sphere in L dimensions.Comment: 46 pages, 14 figure