1,321 research outputs found
State duties of protection and fundamental rights
Duties of protection are duties of the state to protect certain legal interests of its citizens. They cover the interests of life, health, freedom and property and also protect some other interests and certain constitutionally recognised institutions. State duties of protection must be considered in connection with fundamental rights. The foundations of modern constitutionalism and attendant procedures are essential to develop guidelines for a constructive critique of the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. This is done with reference to the recent history of France, Germany and England. The historical excursus reveals that a single theory underlies the variety of constitutional states. The development of the constitutional state gave rise to the significance of the preservation of freedom through the maintenance of law and the separation of powers. This has given rise to various legal devices, based also in part on experience with moderate rule and earlier theories of the imperium limitatum. A textual analysis of the German Basic Law is undertaken to determine whether and how the duties of protection are expressly created. Furthermore, the duties that have been discovered in the Basic Law by the Federal Constitutional Court are considered. These duties include the protection of human life and health, personal freedom, the right to autonomous development of one's personality, freedom of science, research and teaching, marriage and the family, children, mothers, professional freedom, property and the protection of German nationals against foreign states. Finally the justification of such duties and the constitutional control of the manner of protection are considered. In a final section a critique of relevant constitutional jurisprudence is undertaken. It is argued that claims to protection cannot be directly binding law. They presuppose legislation. If statutory protection is connected with infringements of third-party fundamental rights, the principle of proportionality can be adopted to test whether the protection is effective. Insofar as protection can be achieved without infringements of rights, one must attempt to test the effectiveness of protection by some other means. Where the legislature omits to protect at all, the court should limit itself to establishing the existence of a duty and to querying its non-fulfilment. The Court may not pass protective regulations or impose a duty to pass specific regulations. Where general statutory norms apply, protective duties can be realised through the so-called indirect third-party effect of fundamental rights. In its reaching its decision, the German Federal Constitutional Court is responsible for preserving the political discretion of the legislature in protecting interests and remembering the structural distinction between "hard" defensive rights and "soft" protective duties in order to prevent the erosion of the directly binding nature of defensive rights
Volumetric performance capture from minimal camera viewpoints
We present a convolutional autoencoder that enables high fidelity volumetric
reconstructions of human performance to be captured from multi-view video
comprising only a small set of camera views. Our method yields similar
end-to-end reconstruction error to that of a probabilistic visual hull computed
using significantly more (double or more) viewpoints. We use a deep prior
implicitly learned by the autoencoder trained over a dataset of view-ablated
multi-view video footage of a wide range of subjects and actions. This opens up
the possibility of high-end volumetric performance capture in on-set and
prosumer scenarios where time or cost prohibit a high witness camera count
Plasma and Warm Dust in the Collisional Ring Galaxy VIIZw466 from VLA and ISO Observations
We present the first mid-infrared (Mid-IR) (m) and radio
continuum (20,~6 and 3.6 cm) observations of the star-forming
collisional ring galaxy VII Zw 466 and its host group made with the Infrared
Space Observatory and the NRAO Very Large Array. A search was also made for CO
line emission in two of the galaxies with the Onsala 20m radio telescope and
upper limits were placed on the mass of molecular gas in those galaxies. The
ring galaxy is believed to owe its morphology to a slightly off-center
collision between an `intruder' galaxy and a disk. An off-center collision is
predicted to generate a radially expanding density wave in the disk which
should show large azimuthal variations in overdensity, and have observational
consequences. The radio continuum emission shows the largest asymmetry,
exhibiting a crescent-shaped distribution consistent with either the trapping
of cosmic-ray particles in the target disk, or an enhanced supernova rate in
the compressed region. On the other hand, the ISO observations (especially
those made at m) show a more scattered distribution, with
emission centers associated with powerful star formation sites distributed more
uniformly around the ring. Low-signal to noise observations at
m show possible emission inside the ring, with little emission
directly associated with the \ion{H}{2} regions. The observations emphasize the
complex relationship between the generation of radio emission and the
development of star formation even in relatively simple and well understood
collisional scenarios.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, 23 pages + 6
PS figure
Full-Sky Weak Lensing Simulation with 70 Billion Particles
We have performed a 70 billion dark-matter particles N-body simulation in a 2
Gpc periodic box, using the concordance, cosmological model as favored
by the latest WMAP3 results. We have computed a full-sky convergence map with a
resolution of arcmin, spanning 4 orders of
magnitude in angular dynamical range. Using various high-order statistics on a
realistic cut sky, we have characterized the transition from the linear to the
nonlinear regime at and shown that realistic galactic
masking affects high-order moments only below . Each domain
(Gaussian and non-Gaussian) spans 2 decades in angular scale. This map is
therefore an ideal tool for testing map-making algorithms on the sphere. As a
first step in addressing the full map reconstruction problem, we have
benchmarked in this paper two denoising methods: 1) Wiener filtering applied to
the Spherical Harmonics decomposition of the map and 2) a new method, called
MRLens, based on the modification of the Maximum Entropy Method on a Wavelet
decomposition. While the latter is optimal on large spatial scales, where the
signal is Gaussian, MRLens outperforms the Wiener method on small spatial
scales, where the signal is highly non-Gaussian. The simulated full-sky
convergence map is freely available to the community to help the development of
new map-making algorithms dedicated to the next generation of weak-lensing
surveys.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, accepted in Astronomy and Astrophysics, final
version after language editin
Dust in an extremely metal-poor galaxy: mid-infrared observations of SBS 0335-052
The metal deficient (Z = Z_sun/41) Blue Compact Dwarf Galaxy (BCD) SBS
0335-052 was observed with ISOCAM between 5 and 17 mic. With a L_12mic/L_B
ratio of 2.15, the galaxy is unexpectedly bright in the mid-infrared for such a
low-metallicity object. The mid-infrared spectrum shows no sign of the
Unidentified Infrared Bands, which we interpret as an effect of the destruction
of their carriers by the very high UV energy density in SBS 0335-052. The
spectral energy distribution (SED) is dominated by a very strong continuum
which makes the ionic lines of [SIV] and [NeIII] very weak. From 5 to 17 mic,
the SED can be fitted with a grey-body spectrum, modified by an extinction law
similar to that observed toward the Galactic Center, with an optical depth of
A_V~19-21 mag. Such a large optical depth implies that a large fraction (as
much as ~ 75%) of the current star-formation activity in SBS 0335-052 is hidden
by dust with a mass between 3x10^3 M_sun and 5x10^5 M_sun. Silicate grains are
present as silicate extinction bands at 9.7 and 18 mic can account for the
unusual shape of the MIR spectrum of SBS 0335-052. It is remarkable that such a
nearly primordial environment contains as much dust as galaxies which are 10
times more metal-rich. If the hidden star formation in SBS 0335-052 is typical
of young galaxies at high redshifts, then the cosmic star formation rate
derived from UV/optical fluxes would be underestimated.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, requires aaspp4.sty, accepted in Ap
- âŠ