Foreign Precedents in Constitutional Adjudication by the Supreme Court of Singapore, 1963-2013

This article surveys the use of foreign precedents in constitutional adjudication by the Supreme Court of Singapore for over half of a century during the terms of the first three Chief Justices—Wee Chong Jin (1963–1990), Yong Pung How (1990–2006), and Chan Sek Keong (2006–2012)—and the first year in office of the fourth Chief Justice, Sundaresh Menon (2012–2013). It concludes that while judges have always cited foreign case law, they have only actually applied foreign cases where the wording of the Constitution and the constitutional arrangements in Singapore are fairly analogous to the constitutional texts and arrangements upon which the cases were decided. Sometimes, Singapore judges quoted passages from cases in an instrumental manner to support statements of law without necessarily analyzing in detail the reasoning underlying such cases. There were also instances where foreign jurisprudence was rejected on the basis that it related to constitutional texts that were worded differently from the Constitution. In recent times the courts have been more willing to examine why foreign courts arrived at certain results, but this has not necessarily led them to adopt the same conclusions that those courts reached. It is likely that the courts’ choice of which foreign precedents are followed or rejected will depend on whether they remain deferential to the policy choices of the political branches of government, or develop constitutional principles to subject these choices to greater scrutiny

Event Structure at RHIC from p-p to Au-Au

Several correlation analysis techniques are applied to p-p and Au-Au collisions at RHIC. Strong large-momentum-scale correlations are observed which can be related to local charge and momentum conservation during hadronization and to minijet (minimum-bias parton fragment) correlations.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, 20th Winter Workshop on Nuclear Dynamics, Trelawny Beach, Jamaica, March 15-20, 200

3-D Beamspace ML Based Bearing Estimator Incorporating Frequency Diversity and Interference Cancellation

The problem of low-angle radar tracking utilizing an array of antennas is considered. In the low-angle environment, echoes return from a low flying target via a specular path as well as a direct path. The problem is compounded by the fact that the two signals arrive within a beamwidth of each other and are usually fully correlated, or coherent. In addition, the SNR at each antenna element is typically low and only a small number of data samples, or snapshots, is available for processing due to the rapid movement of the target. Theoretical studies indicates that the Maximum Likelihood (ML) method is the only reliable estimation procedure in this type of scenario. However, the classical ML estimator involves a multi-dimensional search over a multi-modal surface and is consequently computationally burdensome. In order to facilitate real time processing, we here propose the idea of beamspace domain processing in which the element space snapshot vectors are first operated on by a reduced Butler matrix composed of three orthogonal beamforming weight vectors facilitating a simple, closed-form Beamspace Domain ML (BDML) estimator for the direct and specular path angles. The computational simplicity of the method arises from the fact that the respective beams associated with the three columns of the reduced Butler matrix have all but three nulls in common. The performance of the BDML estimator is enhanced by incorporating the estimation of the complex reflection coefficient and the bisector angle, respectively, for the symmetric and nonsymmetric multipath cases. To minimize the probability of track breaking, the use of frequency diversity is incorporated. The concept of coherent signal subspace processing is invoked as a means for retaining the computational simplicity of single frequency operation. With proper selection of the auxiliary frequencies, it is shown that perfect focusing may be achieved without iterating. In order to combat the effects of strong interfering sources, a novel scheme is presented for adaptively forming the three beams which retains the feature of common nulls

A Holographic Theory for the Phase Transitions Between Fermionic Symmetry-protected Topological States

In an earlier work we developed a holographic theory for the phase transition between bosonic symmetry-protected topological (SPT) states. This paper is a continuation of it. Here we present the holographic theory for fermionic SPT phase transitions. We show that in any dimension $d$, the critical states of fermionic SPT phase transitions has an emergent $Z_2^T$ symmetry and can be realized on the boundary of a $d+1$-dimensional bulk SPT with an extra $Z_2^T$ symmetry.Comment: 35 pages, 10 figure