Outpatient Civil Commitment in North Carolina: Constitutional and Policy Concerns

Outpatient commitment of the mentally ill is court-ordered treatment in the community and is usually characterized by short, recurring visits to a mental health clinic that provides treatment such as medication, individual or group therapy, day or part-day activities or supervision of living arrangements. The history and design of the North Carolina preventive commitment scheme and constitutional difficulties with this statute are discussed

Effect of Varying Bulk Viscosity on Generalized Chaplygin Gas

In this paper, viscous generalized Chaplygin gas as a model of dark energy considered. We assume non-constant bulk viscous coefficient and study dark energy density. We consider several cases of density-dependent viscosities. We find that, in the special case, the viscous generalized Chaplygin gas is corresponding to modified Chaplygin gas.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, references adde

Thermodynamics of Classical Systems on Noncommutative Phase Space

We study the formulation of statistical mechanics on noncommutative classical phase space, and construct the corresponding canonical ensemble theory. For illustration, some basic and important examples are considered in the framework of noncommutative statistical mechanics: such as the ideal gas, the extreme relativistic gas, and the 3-dimensional harmonic oscillator.Comment: 11 pages, no figur

Encoding Higher Level Extensions of Petri Nets in Answer Set Programming

Answering realistic questions about biological systems and pathways similar to the ones used by text books to test understanding of students about biological systems is one of our long term research goals. Often these questions require simulation based reasoning. To answer such questions, we need formalisms to build pathway models, add extensions, simulate, and reason with them. We chose Petri Nets and Answer Set Programming (ASP) as suitable formalisms, since Petri Net models are similar to biological pathway diagrams; and ASP provides easy extension and strong reasoning abilities. We found that certain aspects of biological pathways, such as locations and substance types, cannot be represented succinctly using regular Petri Nets. As a result, we need higher level constructs like colored tokens. In this paper, we show how Petri Nets with colored tokens can be encoded in ASP in an intuitive manner, how additional Petri Net extensions can be added by making small code changes, and how this work furthers our long term research goals. Our approach can be adapted to other domains with similar modeling needs