Measuring intermediate mass black hole binaries with advanced gravitational wave detectors

We perform a systematic study to explore the accuracy with which the parameters of intermediate-mass black-hole binary systems can be measured from their gravitational wave (GW) signatures using second-generation GW detectors. We make use of the most recent reduced-order models containing inspiral, merger and ringdown signals of aligned-spin effective-one-body waveforms (SEOBNR) to significantly speed up the calculations. We explore the phenomenology of the measurement accuracies for binaries with total masses between 50 and 500 $M_\odot$ and mass ratios between 0.1 and 1. We find that (i) at total masses below ~200 $M_\odot$, where the signal-to-noise-ratio is dominated by the inspiral portion of the signal, the chirp mass parameter can be accurately measured; (ii) at higher masses, the information content is dominated by the ringdown, and total mass is measured more accurately; (iii) the mass of the lower-mass companion is poorly estimated, especially at high total mass and more extreme mass ratios; (iv) spin cannot be accurately measured for our injection set with non-spinning components. Most importantly, we find that for binaries with non-spinning components at all values of the mass ratio in the considered range and at network signal-to-noise ratio of 15, analyzed with spin-aligned templates, the presence of an intermediate-mass black hole with mass >100 $M_\odot$ can be confirmed with 95% confidence in any binary that includes a component with a mass of 130 $M_\odot$ or greater.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures; published versio

Large scale evaluation of importance maps in automatic speech recognition

In this paper, we propose a metric that we call the structured saliency benchmark (SSBM) to evaluate importance maps computed for automatic speech recognizers on individual utterances. These maps indicate time-frequency points of the utterance that are most important for correct recognition of a target word. Our evaluation technique is not only suitable for standard classification tasks, but is also appropriate for structured prediction tasks like sequence-to-sequence models. Additionally, we use this approach to perform a large scale comparison of the importance maps created by our previously introduced technique using "bubble noise" to identify important points through correlation with a baseline approach based on smoothed speech energy and forced alignment. Our results show that the bubble analysis approach is better at identifying important speech regions than this baseline on 100 sentences from the AMI corpus.Comment: submitted to INTERSPEECH 202

Marxism and the Rule of Law

The revival of interest in Marxist legal analysis has prompted a reconsideration of the function of the concept of the rule of law. Appreciation of the rule of law as an instrument of legitimation of the economic and political order has assumed particular significance in Canada due to the recent enactment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In this article the author examines the two aspects in which the rule of law may be said to exist - the democratic and the juridical - and through the application of Marxist analysis to several recent political events demonstrates the relationship of the rule of law to developments in the politico-legal system characteristic of late capitalism

Discrediting the McDonald Commission

It\u27s a safe bet that very few Canadians will ever actually read the McDonald Commission\u27s report on RCMP wrong-doing. Four years of waiting were probably enough to disinterest the amateurs, and the report itself - 1,784 or so ponderously written and densely printed pages of minute pickings over testimony, dry legal analysis of same and exhaustive recommendations for the future - is calculated to daunt all but the most rabid of RCMP-scandal watchers and the driest of legal academics. After receiving the report in January, 1981, the Government spent the next eight months preparing the proper context for releasing it, which was finally done on August 25. The proper context, naturally, was one in which the less pleasant aspects of the report would do the least damage. This meant a public relations campaign in which, among other things, much was made of the fact that the commissioners had absolved Liberal cabinet ministers of legal complicity in RCMP crimes and in which the Government announced with great fanfare that it was accepting the Commission\u27s recommendation that the Security Service be located outside of the RCMP