A Visible Radiation: Interpreting the History of the Eleventh Amendment as Foreign Policy to Circumscribe the Treaty Power

In the longstanding debate over the proper place of the Treaty Power in the Constitution\u27s federal structure, on the one hand there are Federalists and on the other hand there are federalists. During the ratification of the Constitution, many Federalists believed the national government needed an expansive Treaty Power to preserve the nascent union. Today, many federalists see such a Treaty Power as a potential threat to the sovereignty of the states. Between 1998 and 2000, the Michigan Law Review published a series of articles by Curtis Bradley and David Golove on competing conceptions of how the Treaty Power fits in the Constitution\u27s federal structure. Bradley argued that federalism delimits the capacity of the national government to create binding national law through the forging of treaties. That is, the national government may not invade the sovereign province of the states by using the Treaty Power to circumvent the restrictions placed on the national government by federalism. In contrast, Golove argued that the national government may use the Treaty Power to legislate in areas generally reserved to the states so long as the Constitution does not explicitly prevent it. Unfortunately, neither author\u27s argument addressed the history of the most important constitutional event bearing on the issue -- the ratification of the Eleventh Amendment

"What does the customer want to tell us?" - An automated classification approach for social media posts at SMEs.

Social media posts created by customers capture a lot of business relevant information for decision-makers, e.g., current consumer expectations on products and services. For that purpose, the social media posts need to be analyzed thoroughly. In this respect, a topic-related classification facilitates managerial decision-making because business-relevant topics, social media users discuss about, immediately become obvious and the need for action can be derived. For instance, it may get obvious that the majority of a company’s negative customer posts refers to a particular product or a specific campaign. However, such a classification of social media posts is particularly challenging for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This is because human resources for a manual examination of posts are missing and an automatic analysis is error-prone due to particularities of customer posts such as the occurrence of regional dialect or branch-specific expressions. We thus develop a tool, which enables the automatized topic-related classification of social media posts and matches the particular requirements of SMEs in southern Germany. Our solution is evaluated by using a data set stemming from three collaborating companies

Hail formation triggers rapid ash aggregation in volcanic plumes.

During explosive eruptions, airborne particles collide and stick together, accelerating the fallout of volcanic ash and climate-forcing aerosols. This aggregation process remains a major source of uncertainty both in ash dispersal forecasting and interpretation of eruptions from the geological record. Here we illuminate the mechanisms and timescales of particle aggregation from a well-characterized 'wet' eruption. The 2009 eruption of Redoubt Volcano, Alaska, incorporated water from the surface (in this case, a glacier), which is a common occurrence during explosive volcanism worldwide. Observations from C-band weather radar, fall deposits and numerical modelling demonstrate that hail-forming processes in the eruption plume triggered aggregation of ∼95% of the fine ash and stripped much of the erupted mass out of the atmosphere within 30 min. Based on these findings, we propose a mechanism of hail-like ash aggregation that contributes to the anomalously rapid fallout of fine ash and occurrence of concentrically layered aggregates in volcanic deposits.AVE acknowledges NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship EAR1250029 and a seed grant from NASA Ames Supercomputing Center. Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) software from UCAR/Unidata was used in the analysis and visualization of the large-eddy simulation. ASTER GDEM is a product of NASA and METI. NCAR Reanalysis data provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL Physical Sciences Division, Boulder, Colorado, USA. We acknowledge Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, for access to the laser particle size analyzer, and Matt Rogers at University of Alaska, Anchorage for use of the freeze dryer. Rick Hoblitt is thanked for discussions and comments on the manuscript.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from NPG via http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms886

No evidence for tephra in Greenland from the historic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE: implications for geochronology and paleoclimatology

Volcanic fallout in polar ice sheets provide important opportunities to date and correlate ice-core records as well as to investigate the environmental impacts of eruptions. Only the geochemical characterization of volcanic ash (tephra) embedded in the ice strata can confirm the source of the eruption, however, and is a requisite if historical eruption ages are to be used as valid chronological checks on annual ice layer counting. Here we report the investigation of ash particles in a Greenland ice core that are associated with a volcanic sulfuric acid layer previously attributed to the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius. Major and trace element composition of the particles indicates that the tephra does not derive from Vesuvius but most likely originates from an unidentified eruption in the Aleutian arc. Using ash dispersal modelling, we find that only an eruption large enough to include stratospheric injection is likely to account for the sizeable (24–85 μm) ash particles observed in the Greenland ice at this time. Despite its likely explosivity, this event does not appear to have triggered significant climate perturbations, unlike some other large extra-tropical eruptions. In light of a recent re-evaluation of the Greenland ice-core chronologies, our findings further challenge the previous assignation of this volcanic event to 79 CE. We highlight the need for the revised Common Era ice-core chronology to be formally accepted by the wider ice-core and climate modelling communities in order to ensure robust age linkages to precisely dated historical and paleoclimate proxy records

Direct comparison of activation maps during galvanic vestibular stimulation: A hybrid H-2[(15) O] PET-BOLD MRI activation study

Previous unimodal PET and fMRI studies in humans revealed a reproducible vestibular brain activation pattern, but with variations in its weighting and expansiveness. Hybrid studies minimizing methodological variations at baseline conditions are rare and still lacking for task-based designs. Thus, we applied for the first time hybrid 3T PET-MRI scanning (Siemens mMR) in healthy volunteers using galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) in healthy volunteers in order to directly compare (H2O)-O-15-PET and BOLD MRI responses. List mode PET acquisition started with the injection of 750 MBq (H2O)-O-15 simultaneously to MRI EPI sequences. Group-level statistical parametric maps were generated for GVS vs. rest contrasts of PET, MR-onset (event-related), and MR-block. All contrasts showed a similar bilateral vestibular activation pattern with remarkable proximity of activation foci. Both BOLD contrasts gave more bilateral wide-spread activation clusters than PET;no area showed contradictory signal responses. PET still confirmed the right-hemispheric lateralization of the vestibular system, whereas BOLD-onset revealed only a tendency. The reciprocal inhibitory visual-vestibular interaction concept was confirmed by PET signal decreases in primary and secondary visual cortices, and BOLD-block decreases in secondary visual areas. In conclusion, MRI activation maps contained a mixture of CBF measured using (H2O)-O-15-PET and additional non-CBF effects, and the activation-deactivation pattern of the BOLD-block appears to be more similar to the (H2O)-O-15-PET than the BOLD-onset