A Response to the Critics

My article on refugee burden-sharing ( Refugee Burden-Sharing: A Modest Proposal, 22 YALE J. INT\u27L. L. 243 (1997)) advances a novel approach to an appalling problem that desperately needs all the fresh thinking it can get. Unfortunately, the critique by Deborah Anker, Joan Fitzpatrick, and Andrew Shacknove, Crisis and Cure: A Reply to Hathaway/Neve and Schuck, 11 HARv. HUM. RTS. J. 295 (1998), while both serious and respectful, misrepresents my proposal in a number of significant respects-misrepresentations that I pointed out to them when they sent me a draft of their critique only days before this draft was to go to the printer. I shall briefly address each of those misrepresentations in the order in which they appear in their critique

Internationalism of American Federalism: Missouri and Holland, The

This Earl F. Nelson Lecture, given at the University of Missouri School of Law\u27s Symposium, Return to Missouri v. Holland: Federalism and International Law, developed from and overlaps with a series of articles including Ratifying Kyoto at the Local Level: Sovereigntism, Federalism, and Translocal Organizations of Government Actors (TOGAs), 50 ARIZ. L. REV. 709 (2008) (with Joshua Civin and Joseph Frueh); Lessons in Federalism from the 1960s Class Action Rule and the 2005 Class Action Fairness Act: The Political Safeguards\u27 ofAggregate Translocal Actions, 156 U. PA. L. REv. 1929 (2008); Law as Affiliation: Foreign Law, Democratic Federalism, and the Sovereigntism of the Nation-State, 6 INT\u27L J. CONST. L. 33 (2008); Foreign as Domestic Affairs: Rethinking Horizontal Federalism and Foreign Affairs Preemption in Light of Translocal Internationalism, 57 EMORY. L.J. 31 (2007); Law\u27s Migration: American Exceptionalism, Silent Dialogues, and Federalism\u27s Multiple Ports of Entry, 115 YALE L.J. 1564 (2006); and Categorical Federalism: Jurisdiction, Gender, and the Globe, 111 YALE L.J. 619 (2001). Thanks are due to Peggy McGuinness for bringing the group together, to the participants in this symposium\u27s sessions and in the Arizona Law Review symposium, Federalism and Climate Change: The Role of the States in a Future Federal Regime, to Joseph Frueh for his analysis of the precautionary principle and California\u27s legislative efforts involving toxic toys, to Joshua Civin whose research brought into focus for me the transnational work of the eighteenth century, to Camilla Tubbs of Yale\u27s Law Library for extraordinarily thoughtful research advice, to Adam Grogg, Chavi Nana, Vasudha Talla, and Monica Bell for helpful research and editorial assistance, and to my colleagues Dennis Curtis, Oona Hathaway, Vicki Jackson, and Reva Siegel

Host phenotype characteristics and MC1R in relation to early-onset basal cell carcinoma.

Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) incidence is increasing, particularly among adults under the age of 40 years. Pigment-related characteristics are associated with BCC in older populations, but epidemiologic studies among younger individuals and analyses of phenotype-genotype interactions are limited. We examined self-reported phenotypes and melanocortin 1 receptor gene (MC1R) variants in relation to early-onset BCC. BCC cases (n=377) and controls with benign skin conditions (n=390) under the age of 40 years were identified through Yale's Dermatopathology database. Factors most strongly associated with early-onset BCC were skin reaction to first summer sun for 1 hour (severe sunburn vs. tan odds ratio (OR)=12.27, 95% confidence interval (CI)=4.08-36.94) and skin color (very fair vs. olive OR=11.06, 95% CI=5.90-20.74). Individuals with two or more MC1R non-synonymous variants were 3.59 times (95% CI=2.37-5.43) more likely to have BCC than those without non-synonymous variants. All host characteristics and MC1R were more strongly associated with multiple BCC case status (37% of cases) than a single BCC case status. MC1R, number of moles, skin reaction to first summer sun for 1 hour, and hair and skin color were independently associated with BCC. BCC risk conferred by MC1R tended to be stronger among those with darker pigment phenotypes, traditionally considered to be at low risk of skin cancer

Efficient Semidefinite Spectral Clustering via Lagrange Duality

We propose an efficient approach to semidefinite spectral clustering (SSC), which addresses the Frobenius normalization with the positive semidefinite (p.s.d.) constraint for spectral clustering. Compared with the original Frobenius norm approximation based algorithm, the proposed algorithm can more accurately find the closest doubly stochastic approximation to the affinity matrix by considering the p.s.d. constraint. In this paper, SSC is formulated as a semidefinite programming (SDP) problem. In order to solve the high computational complexity of SDP, we present a dual algorithm based on the Lagrange dual formalization. Two versions of the proposed algorithm are proffered: one with less memory usage and the other with faster convergence rate. The proposed algorithm has much lower time complexity than that of the standard interior-point based SDP solvers. Experimental results on both UCI data sets and real-world image data sets demonstrate that 1) compared with the state-of-the-art spectral clustering methods, the proposed algorithm achieves better clustering performance; and 2) our algorithm is much more efficient and can solve larger-scale SSC problems than those standard interior-point SDP solvers.Comment: 13 page