Surviving \u3cem\u3eCastle Rock:\u3c/em\u3e the Human Rights of Domestic Violence

In 2005, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales and held that Jessica Gonzales did not have a constitutional right to police enforcement of a restraining order. The decision highlighted the Court’s reluctance to recognize citizens’ affirmative rights, fortifying a deeply ingrained conceptualization of the Constitution of the United States as a “Negative Constitution” that creates a government with restraints on its actions and extremely limited obligations to its citizens. In August 2011, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released a report publicizing its finding that by failing to take affirmative measures to address domestic violence, the United States had violated the human rights of Jessica Gonzalez as well as human rights belonging to abuse survivors across the country. This Article builds on the Commission’s report by pinpointing the extent and cause of these human rights violations and the systematic oppression of American women and minority populations that cannot incite necessary change through the exercise of financial and political power. This Article focuses on solutions stemming from modern American jurisprudence and present opportunities to curb the economic, reputational, and expressive fallout of domestic violence in the United States

Dying for Dollars: Health Equity in the Age of Reform

On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ( ACA ) into law. Almost instantly, fourteen state attorneys general joined together to file suit to challenge ACA in federal courts in Virginia and Florida. These states took action amid widespread political rhetoric that condemned Congress for shattering its constitutional limits by invading citizens\u27 private decisions to purchase health insurance. Few political trends are as divisive as the changing role of government in private health care coverage decisions. Yet, the American debate continues to be distracted by marketplace rhetoric. This Comment argues that the American preoccupation with the business of health thwarts meaningful exploration of health equity. By challenging the process of health care financing and administration rather than focusing on more systemic forces in society, current health care reform ignores the most influential factors in health, such as preexisting socioeconomic differentials and basic social conditions. This Comment will extricate ACA’s regulatory outcomes from the politics surrounding it, offering comparisons with European health systems and urging policymakers to implement incremental, multisectoral advancements toward better health in the American body politic

The Future of Family

The State organizes society into families, implicating and often ignoring various liberty and equality interests while fortifying a “traditional” family structure comprised of one man, one woman, and their mutually and exclusively conceived offspring. This structure has historically benefited the heterosexual elite within the United States, but modern advancements for sexual minorities suggest a new standard for State recognition of family. Queer liberation will erase the traditional family by rewriting its legal and social dimensions, resulting in laws and policies that track more closely with familial bonds outside a heteronormative, man-woman binary. This Article explores the ramifications of enhanced queer liberty beyond the lives of sexual minorities and establishes how these civil rights advancements stand to dismantle exclusionary notions of family. As an example, and in light of the rapid growth of familial creation in the context of donated embryos, ova, and sperm, this Article argues that queer liberation benefits donor-conceived family communities, which are familial groups that have connected on the basis of donated reproductive materials but which persist with various unmet legal needs. Finally, by highlighting dignity as the historical and contemporary link between the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, this Article asserts that liberty as dignity connects rights across society, including donor-conceived family communities, and, by moving all communities away from the traditional family, a queer redefinition of family stands to unleash personal agency in the legal construction of all citizens’ familial lives

On Herbert J. Phillips’s “Why Be Rational?”

In recent metaethics, moral realists have advanced a companions-in-guilt argument against moral nihilism. Proponents of this argument hold that the conclusion that there are no categorical normative reasons implies that there are no epistemic reasons. However, if there are no epistemic reasons, there are no epistemic reasons to believe nihilism. Therefore, nihilism is false or no one has epistemic reasons to believe it. While this argument is normally presented as a reply to Mackie, who introduced the term “companions-in-guilt” in his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong of 1977, Herbert J. Phillips presented a form of this argument in Ethics in 1940. In this paper, I will discuss Phillips’ version of the companions-in-guilt argument, demonstrate how recent epistemology bears out an important premise of the argument, and compare Phillips’ argument to Derek Parfit’s recent wor

Prospective search time estimates reveal the strengths and limits of internal models of visual search

Having an internal model of one's attention can be useful for effectively managing limited perceptual and cognitive resources. While previous work has hinted at the existence of an internal model of attention, it is still unknown how rich and flexible this model is, whether it corresponds to one's own attention or to a generic person-invariant schema, and whether it is specified as a list of facts and rules or alternatively as a probabilistic simulation model. To this end, we tested participants' ability to estimate their own behavior in a visual search task with novel displays. In six online experiments (four pre-registered), prospective search time estimates reflected accurate metacognitive knowledge of key findings in the visual search literature, including the set-size effect, higher efficiency of color over conjunction search, and the asymmetric contributions of target and distractor identities to search difficulty. In contrast, estimates were biased to assume serial search, and demonstrated little to no insight into sizeable effects of search asymmetries for basic visual features, and of target-distractor similarity. Together, our findings reveal a complex picture, where internal models of visual search are sensitive to some, but not all, of the factors that make some searches more difficult than others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

On the intersections of Fibonacci, Pell, and Lucas numbers

We describe how to compute the intersection of two Lucas sequences of the forms $\{U_n(P,\pm 1) \}_{n=0}^{\infty}$ or $\{V_n(P,\pm 1) \}_{n=0}^{\infty}$ with $P\in\mathbb{Z}$ that includes sequences of Fibonacci, Pell, Lucas, and Lucas-Pell numbers. We prove that such an intersection is finite except for the case $U_n(1,-1)$ and $U_n(3,1)$ and the case of two $V$-sequences when the product of their discriminants is a perfect square. Moreover, the intersection in these cases also forms a Lucas sequence. Our approach relies on solving homogeneous quadratic Diophantine equations and Thue equations. In particular, we prove that 0, 1, 2, and 5 are the only numbers that are both Fibonacci and Pell, and list similar results for many other pairs of Lucas sequences. We further extend our results to Lucas sequences with arbitrary initial terms

Coalescing the Vapors of Human Experienceinto a Viable and Meaningful Comprehension

Models of concept learning and theory acquisition often in-voke a stochastic search process, in which learners generatehypotheses through some structured random process and thenevaluate them on some data measuring their quality or value.To be successful within a reasonable time-frame, these mod-els need ways of generating good candidate hypotheses evenbefore the data are considered. Schulz (2012a) has proposedthat studying the origins of new ideas in more everyday con-texts, such as how we think up new names for things, can pro-vide insight into the cognitive processes that generate good hy-potheses for learning. We propose a simple generative modelfor how people might draw on their experience to proposenew names in everyday domains such as pub names or actionmovies, and show that it captures surprisingly well the namesthat people actually imagine. We discuss the role for an anal-ogous hypothesis-generation mechanism in enabling and con-straining causal theory learning

Distribution Effectiveness and Impacts on Equipment Sizing for Residential Thermal Distribution Systems

This report was prepared as a result of work sponsored by the California Energy Commission (Commission), through a contract with the Regents of the University of California, California Institute for Energy Efficiency (CIEE). It does not necessarily represent the views of the Commission, its employees, the State of California, The Regents, or CIEE. The Commission, the Regents, the State of California, CIEE, their employees, contractors, and subcontractors, make no warranty, express or implied, and assume no legal liability for the information in this report; nor does any party represent that the use of this information will not infringe upon privately owned rights. This report has not been approved or disapproved by the Commission or CIEE, nor has the Commission or CIEE passed upon the accuracy or adequacy of the information in this report