Slavery and its definition

Had the abolitionists of the past, the likes of Abraham Lincoln or William Wilberforce, been able to see into the twenty-first century, what might have struck them as very strange was that while they had come far in ending slavery and suppressing human exploitation, they seemed to have lost sight of what the term "slavery" means. This, despite the fact that for more than eighty-five years there has been a consensus in international law as to the legal definition of slavery. In the case of slavery the element of possession is fundamental. It allows people to drain the swamp and leave the definitional quagmire which has marginalised the legal definition of slavery. With the legal definition of slavery marginalised, people looked elsewhere to define slavery. A survey of the academic literature on contemporary slavery -- including much of the legal literature on the subject -- would show that, in the main, it has turned to the work of Kevin Bales and his sociological reading of what constitutes slavery

Muscle as a meta-material operating near a critical point

Passive mechanical response of skeletal muscles at fast time scales is dominated by long range interactions inducing cooperative behavior without breaking the detailed balance. This leads to such unusual "material properties" as negative equilibrium stiffness and different behavior in force and displacement controlled loading conditions. Our fitting of experimental data suggests that "muscle material" is finely tuned to perform close to a critical point which explains large fluctuations observed in muscles close to the stall force.Comment: Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

Slavery and its obligations erga omnes

This study explores the obligations of international law as they relate to slavery. In so doing, it recognises that recent developments of the law of slavery has brought to life existing treaty and customary international law obligations. The totality of these obligations is considered, with special emphasis given to slavery’s obligations erga omnes. That emphasis reveals both the failure of nearly half of all States to effectively incorporate the prohibition of slavery into their domestic legal order; and the underlying communal interest which necessitates all States cooperate in addressing wholesale reintroduction of the slave trade by Daesh / ISIS

AfSBT Congress abstracts Zimbabwe 2014: Epidemiology of hepatitis B virus infection in Africa

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Roughness of sandstone fracture surfaces: Profilometry and shadow length investigations

The geometrical properties of fractured sandstone surfaces were studied by measuring the length distribution of the shadows appearing under grazing illumination. Three distinct domains of variation were found: at short length scales a cut-off of self-affinity is observed due to the inter-granular rupture of sandstones, at long length scales, the number of shadows falls off very rapidly because of the non-zero illumination angle and of the finite roughness amplitude. Finally, in the intermediate domain, the shadow length distribution displays a power law decrease with an exponent related to the roughness exponent measured by mechanical profilometry. Moreover, this method is found to be more sensitive to deviations from self-affinity than usual methods

Shape Animation with Combined Captured and Simulated Dynamics

We present a novel volumetric animation generation framework to create new types of animations from raw 3D surface or point cloud sequence of captured real performances. The framework considers as input time incoherent 3D observations of a moving shape, and is thus particularly suitable for the output of performance capture platforms. In our system, a suitable virtual representation of the actor is built from real captures that allows seamless combination and simulation with virtual external forces and objects, in which the original captured actor can be reshaped, disassembled or reassembled from user-specified virtual physics. Instead of using the dominant surface-based geometric representation of the capture, which is less suitable for volumetric effects, our pipeline exploits Centroidal Voronoi tessellation decompositions as unified volumetric representation of the real captured actor, which we show can be used seamlessly as a building block for all processing stages, from capture and tracking to virtual physic simulation. The representation makes no human specific assumption and can be used to capture and re-simulate the actor with props or other moving scenery elements. We demonstrate the potential of this pipeline for virtual reanimation of a real captured event with various unprecedented volumetric visual effects, such as volumetric distortion, erosion, morphing, gravity pull, or collisions

Fundamentals of Plasma-Material Interactions in Magnetic Fusion Devices

The interaction of plasmas and materials has a long history in the modification of condensed matter. Plasma-material interaction (PMI) can govern how low-temperature and high-temperature plasmas interact and modify materials surfaces. In magnetic fusion devices, PMI can also influence the operation of the fusion device. For example, incident energetic charged particle on fusion wall material surfaces can release target atoms via sputtering and can implant fuel particles in the lattice. Implanted energetic particles can mix fuel and influence recycling of fuel back to the plasma. Sputtered target atoms can become ionized in the magnetic sheath and re-deposit at the wall surface. The magnetic sheath will influence the energy and angular distribution of incident energetic particles and influence the implantation and release of fusion fuel

Cooperative folding of muscle myosins: I. Mechanical model

Mechanically induced folding of passive cross-linkers is a fundamental biological phenomenon. A typical example is a conformational change in myosin II responsible for the power-stroke in skeletal muscles. In this paper we present an athermal perspective on such folding by analyzing the simplest purely mechanical prototype: a parallel bundle of bi-stable units attached to a common backbone. We show that in this analytically transparent model, characterized by a rugged energy landscape, the ground states are always highly coherent, single-phase configurations. We argue that such cooperative behavior, ensuring collective conformational change, is due to the dominance of long- range interactions making the system non-additive. The detailed predictions of our model are in agreement with experimentally observed non-equivalence of fast force recovery in skeletal muscles loaded in soft and hard devices. Some features displayed by the model are also recognizable in the behavior of other biological systems with passive multi-stability and long-range interactions including detaching adhesive binders and pulled RNA/DNA hairpins