Improving Historic Preservation Enforcement in the District of Columbia

Within the past few years, the creation of the Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH) has been an important change in the District of Columbia government. OAH is viewed by many as an innovative government agency that provides fair and impartial administrative adjudication for District agencies, with efficiency. However, since OAH began full operations in 2004, the effectiveness of historic preservation enforcement has actually decreased. The primary indicators of this are the fewer number of completed adjudications and the smaller amount of fines collected in the past year. This paper is a policy paper. As such, the paper will identify problems in historic preservation enforcement that have arisen during the transition to OAH\u27s centralized adjudicative system, as well as offer possible solutions to such problems. Prior to identifying the problems, however, it is important to summarize the enforcement process within the District so that the identified problems can be placed in their proper context

One-dimensional weakly nonlinear model equations for Rossby waves

In this study we explore several possibilities for modelling weakly nonlinear Rossby waves in fluid of constant depth, which propagate predominantly in one direction. The model equations obtained include the BBM equation, as well as the integrable KdV and Degasperis-Procesi equations.Comment: 15 page

Mental Torture: A Critique of Erasures in U.S. Law

Both international and federal law criminalize mental torture as well as physical torture, and both agree that “severe mental pain or suffering” defines mental torture. However, U.S. law provides a confused and convoluted definition of severe mental pain or suffering—one that falsifies the very concept and makes mental torture nearly impossible to prosecute or repress. Our principal aim is to expose the fallacies that underlie the U.S. definition of mental torture: first, a materialist bias that the physical is more real than the mental; second, a substitution trick that defines mental pain or suffering through a narrow set of causes and effects, ignoring the experience itself; third, a forensic fallacy, in which the due process requirements of specificity in criminal law become wrongly identified with defining characteristics of the crime of torture (an understanding that loops back to corrupt the law); and fourth, a mens rea requirement that excludes all mental torture not committed with the sadistic intention of causing long-lasting harm. Our article begins with an analysis of the concept of mental pain and suffering, as well as a factual discussion of U.S. practice. We also examine the legislative history of the definition in U.S. law. We demonstrate that it derives from political concerns that other countries might accuse U.S. law enforcement personnel of torture. We conclude by examining the specific evil of mental torture: the merciless attempt to break down and occupy the personality of the victim

On the existence of steady periodic capillary-gravity stratified water waves

We prove the existence of small steady periodic capillary-gravity water waves for general stratified flows, where we allow for stagnation points in the flow. We establish the existence of both laminar and non-laminar flow solutions for the governing equations. This is achieved by using bifurcation theory and estimates based on the ellipticity of the system, where we regard, in turn, the mass-flux and surface tension as bifurcation parameters.Comment: 17 pages, to appear in Ann. Scuola Norm. Sup. Pisa Cl. Sc

The Composition of Strike Activity in the Construction Industry

This study shows that strikes in construction have, by most measures, increased during the years since 1949, a period during which strike activity tended to decline in American industry as a whole. The authors demonstrate that this increase has resulted not from an increase in the number of wage disputes but from a growing number of jurisdictional strikes and the increasing severity of economic and union-organizing strikes. They also show that the number of strikes in construction does not vary significantly with the unemployment rate in that industry nor with the presence of wage controls, but both of those factors have a significant impact on the composition of strike activity in construction

Cohomology fractals

We introduce cohomology fractals; these are certain images associated to a cohomology class on a hyperbolic three-manifold. They include images made entirely from circles, and also images with no geometrically simple features. They are closely related to limit sets of kleinian groups, but have some key differences. As a consequence, we can zoom in almost any direction to arbitrary depth in real time. We present an implementation in the setting of ideal triangulations using ray-casting.Comment: 8 pages, 30 figures and subfigure