Reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts: Procedural and Operational Changes

[Excerpt] The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 was the product of sweeping congressional investigation and deliberation prompted by perceived electronic surveillance abuses by the executive branch. Among other things, FISA established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to review government applications to conduct electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISA Court of Review) to review the decisions of the FISC. In the wake of revelations in June 2013 concerning the scope of orders issued by the FISC, many have questioned the efficacy of the current mechanisms for reviewing the executive branch’s intelligence gathering practices. While some have proposed altering the underlying substantive law that regulates such surveillance, other proposals address the practice and procedures of authorizing such surveillance activities. This report begins with an overview of both the FISC and the FISA Court of Review, including the jurisdiction of these courts, how the judges are appointed, and the FISC’s practices and procedures for reviewing and issuing surveillance orders. The report then discusses the scope and underlying legal principles behind congressional regulation of the procedures of the federal courts, and applies those principles with respect to the various proposals to reform the FISA judicial review process. These reforms include requiring the FISC to hear arguments from “friends of the court” or amici curiae, who would brief the court on the privacy or civil liberty interests implicated by a government application; mandating that in certain instances the FISC sit en banc—that is, with all 11 FISC judges; and altering the voting rules of the FISC and FISA Court of Review

Andrew I. Thompson - From Tragedy to Policy: Representations of Muslims and Islam in U.S. Mainstream Media

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11th came a flood of criticism of Islam and Muslims in the U.S. media. Many saw Islam as the root cause of the attacks, but failed to assess the political or social issues in the Middle East, or even the United States’ role in the region. An example of this is the New York Times’ section that ran immediately after the attacks entitled ‘A Nation Challenged,’ which included titles such as: “Yes, this is about Islam,” “This is a religious war,” “Barbarians at the gate,” and “The one true faith.” This project analyzes the mainstream print media’s—New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, and USA Today—representation of Muslims and Islam from September 11, 2001 to December 31, 2001 and its relation to U.S. foreign policy. My assertion is that the mainstream media employed rhetorical emulating, and sometimes mimicking, of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations theory when representing Muslims and Islam, which in turn supported aggressive military action in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In support of my assertion, I find that Huntington’s clash of civilizations absolves the US of all guilt regarding the attacks. Once the theory is adopted it becomes a given, something intrinsic to politics, thus making the ‘clash’ seem inevitable. The Clash of Civilizations theory also supports aggressive military action because of the implicit and explicit denunciation of all ‘civilizations’ that are not ‘Western.’https://epublications.marquette.edu/mcnair_2013/1016/thumbnail.jp

Mirror symmetry, Tyurin degenerations and fibrations on Calabi-Yau manifolds

We investigate a potential relationship between mirror symmetry for Calabi-Yau manifolds and the mirror duality between quasi-Fano varieties and Landau-Ginzburg models. More precisely, we show that if a Calabi-Yau admits a so-called Tyurin degeneration to a union of two Fano varieties, then one should be able to construct a mirror to that Calabi-Yau by gluing together the Landau-Ginzburg models of those two Fano varieties. We provide evidence for this correspondence in a number of different settings, including Batyrev-Borisov mirror symmetry for K3 surfaces and Calabi-Yau threefolds, Dolgachev-Nikulin mirror symmetry for K3 surfaces, and an explicit family of threefolds that are not realized as complete intersections in toric varieties.Comment: v2: Section 5 has been completely rewritten to accommodate results removed from Section 5 of arxiv:1501.04019. v3: Final version, to appear in String-Math 2015, forthcoming volume in the Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics serie

Guidelines to use tomato in experiments with a controlled environment

Domesticated tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is the most important horticultural crop worldwide. Low polymorphism at the DNA level conflicts with the wealth of morphological variation. Fruits vary widely in size, shape, and color. In contrast, genetic variation between the 16 wild relatives is tremendous. Several large seed banks provide tomato germplasm for both domesticated and wild accessions of tomato. Recently, the genomes of the inbred cultivar “Heinz 1706” (≈900 Mb), and S. pimpinellifolium (739 Mb) were sequenced. Genomic markers and genome re-sequencing data are available for >150 cultivars and accessions. Transformation of tomato is relatively easy and T-DNA insertion line collections are available. Tomato is widely used as a model crop for fruit development but also for diverse physiological, cellular, biochemical, molecular, and genetic studies. It can be easily grown in greenhouses or growth chambers. Plants grow, flower, and develop fruits well at daily light lengths between 8 and 16 h. The required daily light integral of an experiment depends on growth stage and temperature investigated. Temperature must be 10–35°C, relative humidity 30–90%, and, CO2 concentration 200–1500 μmol mol−1. Temperature determines the speed of the phenological development while daily light integral and CO2 concentration affect photosynthesis and biomass production. Seed to seed cultivation takes 100 days at 20°C and can be shortened or delayed by temperature. Tomato may be cultivated in soil, substrates, or aeroponically without any substrate. Root volume, and water uptake requirements are primarily determined by transpiration demands of the plants. Many nutrient supply recipes and strategies are available to ensure sufficient supply as well as specific nutrient deficits/surplus. Using appropriate cultivation techniques makes tomato a convenient model plant for researchers, even for beginners

Sparse Inverse Problems Over Measures: Equivalence of the Conditional Gradient and Exchange Methods

We study an optimization program over nonnegative Borel measures that encourages sparsity in its solution. Efficient solvers for this program are in increasing demand, as it arises when learning from data generated by a `continuum-of-subspaces' model, a recent trend with applications in signal processing, machine learning, and high-dimensional statistics. We prove that the conditional gradient method (CGM) applied to this infinite-dimensional program, as proposed recently in the literature, is equivalent to the exchange method (EM) applied to its Lagrangian dual, which is a semi-infinite program. In doing so, we formally connect such infinite-dimensional programs to the well-established field of semi-infinite programming. On the one hand, the equivalence established in this paper allows us to provide a rate of convergence for EM which is more general than those existing in the literature. On the other hand, this connection and the resulting geometric insights might in the future lead to the design of improved variants of CGM for infinite-dimensional programs, which has been an active research topic. CGM is also known as the Frank-Wolfe algorithm

Constraints on Neutron Star Crusts From Oscillations in Giant Flares

We show that the fundamental seismic shear mode, observed as a quasi-periodic oscillation in giant flares emitted by highly-magnetized neutron stars, is particularly sensitive to the nuclear physics of the crust. The identification of an oscillation at ~ 30 Hz as the fundamental crustal shear mode requires a nuclear symmetry energy that depends very weakly on density near saturation. If the nuclear symmetry energy varies more strongly with density, then lower frequency oscillations, previously identified as torsional Alfven modes of the fluid core, could instead be associated with the crust. If this is the case, then future observations of giant flares should detect oscillations at around 18 Hz. An accurate measurement of the neutron skin thickness of lead will also constrain the frequencies predicted by the model.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures; Version to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

COMPLACENT OR COMPETITIVE? BRITISH EXPORTERS AND THE DRIFT TO EMPIRE

The belief that Britain’s empire markets were soft is well entrenched in the literature. It is, however, a belief that has been largely untested. Indeed, the literature does not even offer an explicit definition of softness. This paper attempts to fill this gap by discussing the meaning of the term and, then, posing the question whether between 1870 and 1914 Britain’s fastest growing markets – Australasia and Canada – can in fact be reasonably labelled soft, as has often been assumed. The paper concludes that the demand for British imports in these markets were driven more by income and price considerations than by colonial sentiment or preference.Empire markets, soft markets, British exports, imperial sentiments

A Differential Abundance Analysis of Very Metal-Poor Stars

We have performed a differential, line-by-line, chemical abundance analysis, ultimately relative to the Sun, of nine very metal-poor main sequence halo stars, near [Fe/H]=$-$2 dex. Our abundances range from $-2.66\leq\mathrm{[Fe/H]}\leq-1.40$ dex with conservative uncertainties of 0.07 dex. We find an average [$\alpha$/Fe]$=0.34\pm0.09$ dex, typical of the Milky Way. While our spectroscopic atmosphere parameters provide good agreement with HST parallaxes, there is significant disagreement with temperature and gravity parameters indicated by observed colors and theoretical isochrones. Although a systematic underestimate of the stellar temperature by a few hundred degrees could explain this difference, it is not supported by current effective temperature studies and would create large uncertainties in the abundance determinations. Both 1D and $\langle$3D$\rangle$ hydrodynamical models combined with separate 1D non-LTE effects do not yet account for the atmospheres of real metal-poor MS stars, but a fully 3D non-LTE treatment may be able to explain the ionization imbalance found in this work.Comment: 18 pages, 13 tables, 5 figures, Accepted in Ap