Abbott, AIDS, and the ADA: Why a Per Se Disability Rule for HIV/AIDS is Both Just and a Must

HIV/AIDS should be classified as a per se disability under the Americans with Disablities Act. Such a ruling is justified by the plain language of the act itself, legislative history, administrative regulations, and court precedent. Absent such a ruling, individuals with HIV must demonstrate that they have (1) an mental or physical impairment, (2) that substantially limits (3) a major life activity. While most courts to address the applicability of the ADA to individuals with HIV/AIDS have found that such individuals are disabled because HIV impairs the major life activity of reproduction, such an interpretation leaves open the possibility that courts may refuse to classify those otherwise not interested in or capable of reproduction, arguably including homosexuals, as falling beyond the scope of the ADA\u27s protection

Can Might Make Right? The Use of Force to Impose Democracy and the Arthurian Dilemma in the Modern Era

US President George W. Bush used force to bring the Taliban to its knees and create a fledgling democracy in Afghanistan, then invaded Iraq with the end goal of establishing a democracy there, as well. Meanwhile, presidential hopeful Barack Obama praised those who built democracy\u27s arsenal to vanquish fascism, and who then built a series of alliances and a world order that would ultimately defeat communism, seeming to extol and vindicate the previous US efforts to impose democracy by force. These two leaders\u27 struggles to nail down a definitive answer on whether force should ever be used to impose democracy exemplify some of the challenges in evaluating the practice. In connection, Thompson discusses these legal, moral, and political complexities. He addresses whether the use of force to impose democracy passes international legal muster, and addresses the practicalities and policy questions to be considered when deciding whether to impose democracy through force

Empirical Issues in Lifetime Poverty Measurement

This paper demonstrates the implications of adopting an approach to measuring poverty that takes into account the lifetime experience of individuals rather than simply taking a static or cross-sectional perspective. Our approach follows the theoretical innovations in Hoy and Zheng (2008) which address various aspects of the specific pattern of any poverty spells experienced by an individual as well as a possible retrospective consideration that an individual might have concerning his life experience as a whole. For an individual, our perspective of lifetime poverty is influenced by both the snapshot poverty of each period and the poverty level of the permanent lifetime consumption; it is also influenced by how poverty spells are distributed over the lifetime. Using PSID data for the US, we demonstrate empirically the power of alternative axioms concerning how lifetime poverty should be measured when making pairwise comparisons of individual lifetime profiles of consumption (income) experiences. We also demonstrate the importance of taking a lifetime view of poverty in comparing poverty between groups by use of the classic FGT ‘snapshot’ poverty index in conjunction with period weighting functions that explicitly reflect concerns about the pattern of poverty spells over individuals’ lifetimes.Lifetime poverty, snapshot poverty, chronic poverty, early poverty, poverty measurement

The Stylised Facts of Stock Price Movements

The stylised facts of stock price movements are statistical properties expected to be present in any sufficiently long series of observed stock prices. The below is a review of the current literature on the presence and identification of these stylised facts in observed price series for stocks listed in both developed and developing markets. Frequently identified stylised facts include the heavy tailed distribution of observed stock price returns, the significant autocorrelation of absolute and squared observed returns ("volatility clustering"), the slow decay of the autocorrelation function of absolute observed returns, and the Taylor and Leverage effects

House of Wisdom or a House of Cards? Why Teaching Islam in U.S. Foreign Detention Facilities Violates the Establishment Clause

In an attempt to erase Islamic-fundamentalist sentiments held by detainees apprehended in the course of the war on terror, the United States government began teaching and preaching a more moderate version of the Qur\u27an and Islam to detainees in Iraq. One such detention program in Iraq was dubbed the House of Wisdom. But the wisdom of such a practice is highly suspect--both because it likely runs afoul of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and because it may be doing more harm than good to the American effort to defuse Islamic-extremism and anti-American sentiment. This Article examines the practice of promoting the true meaning of Islam in detention centers for its legal legitimacy and uses the program as a lens to evaluate the extraterritorial reach of the Establishment Clause. The Article explains that the Establishment Clause is both a structural restraint on government and a protection of individual liberty, but that however the Establishment Clause is construed, in either case it extends extraterritorially

Optical waveguide arrays: quantum effects and PT symmetry breaking

Over the last two decades, advances in fabrication have led to significant progress in creating patterned heterostructures that support either carriers, such as electrons or holes, with specific band structure or electromagnetic waves with a given mode structure and dispersion. In this article, we review the properties of light in coupled optical waveguides that support specific energy spectra, with or without the effects of disorder, that are well-described by a Hermitian tight-binding model. We show that with a judicious choice of the initial wave packet, this system displays the characteristics of a quantum particle, including transverse photonic transport and localization, and that of a classical particle. We extend the analysis to non-Hermitian, parity and time-reversal ($\mathcal{PT}$) symmetric Hamiltonians which physically represent waveguide arrays with spatially separated, balanced absorption or amplification. We show that coupled waveguides are an ideal candidate to simulate $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric Hamiltonians and the transition from a purely real energy spectrum to a spectrum with complex conjugate eigenvalues that occurs in them.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, Invited Review for European Physics Journal - Applied Physic