American Culture: A Sociological Perspectives

The culture of the United States of America is primarily of Western origin but is influenced by a multicultural ethos that includes African, Native American, Asian, Pacific Island, and Latin American people and their cultures. American culture encompasses the customs and traditions of the United States. The United States is sometimes described as a "melting pot" in which different cultures have contributed their own distinct "flavors" to American culture. The United States of America is a North American nation that is the world\u27s most dominant economic and military power. Likewise, its cultural imprint spans the world, led in large part by its popular culture expressed in music, movies and television. The culture of the United States of America is primarily of Western culture (European) origin and form but is influenced by a multicultural ethos that includes African, Native American, Asian, Polynesian, and Latin American people and their cultures. The American way of life or simply the American way is the unique lifestyle of the people of the United States of America. It refers to a nationalist ethos that adheres to the principle of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

Crosstalk in stereoscopic displays: A review

Crosstalk, also known as ghosting or leakage, is a primary factor in determining the image quality of stereoscopic three dimensional (3D) displays. In a stereoscopic display, a separate perspective view is presented to each of the observer’s two eyes in order to experience a 3D image with depth sensation. When crosstalk is present in a stereoscopic display, each eye will see a combination of the image intended for that eye, and some of the image intended for the other eye—making the image look doubled or ghosted. High levels of crosstalk can make stereoscopic images hard to fuse and lack fidelity, so it is important to achieve low levels of crosstalk in the development of high-quality stereoscopic displays. Descriptive and mathematical definitions of these terms are formalized and summarized. The mechanisms by which crosstalk occurs in different stereoscopic display technologies are also reviewed, including micropol 3D liquid crystal displays (LCDs), autostereoscopic (lenticular and parallax barrier), polarized projection, anaglyph, and time-sequential 3D on LCDs, plasma display panels and cathode ray tubes. Crosstalk reduction and crosstalk cancellation are also discussed along with methods of measuring and simulating crosstalk

Modified brinley plots: advantages and disadvantages

Accepted manuscrip

A model study of enhanced oil recovery by flooding with aqueous surfactant solution and comparison with theory

With the aim of elucidating the details of enhanced oil recovery by surfactant solution flooding, we have determined the detailed behavior of model systems consisting of a packed column of calcium carbonate particles as the porous rock, n-decane as the trapped oil, and aqueous solutions of the anionic surfactant sodium bis(2-ethylhexyl) sulfosuccinate (AOT). The AOT concentration was varied from zero to above the critical aggregation concentration (cac). The salt content of the aqueous solutions was varied to give systems of widely different, post-cac oil–water interfacial tensions. The systems were characterized in detail by measuring the permeability behavior of the packed columns, the adsorption isotherms of AOT from the water to the oil–water interface and to the water–calcium carbonate interface, and oil–water–calcium carbonate contact angles. Measurements of the percent oil recovery by pumping surfactant solutions into calcium carbonate-packed columns initially filled with oil were analyzed in terms of the characterization results. We show that the measured contact angles as a function of AOT concentration are in reasonable agreement with those calculated from values of the surface energy of the calcium carbonate–air surface plus the measured adsorption isotherms. Surfactant adsorption onto the calcium carbonate–water interface causes depletion of its aqueous-phase concentration, and we derive equations which enable the concentration of nonadsorbed surfactant within the packed column to be estimated from measured parameters. The percent oil recovery as a function of the surfactant concentration is determined solely by the oil–water–calcium carbonate contact angle for nonadsorbed surfactant concentrations less than the cac. For surfactant concentrations greater than the cac, additional oil removal occurs by a combination of solubilization and emulsification plus oil mobilization due to the low oil–water interfacial tension and a pumping pressure increase

The Limits of Moral Intuitions for Human Rights Advocacy

The central ambition of human rights advocacy is to get people to care, who might otherwise not, about the suffering of others. To accomplish this, human rights advocates often appeal to moral intuitions by telling stories that evoke moral outrage, indignation, or guilt. Are these sorts of appeals a good way to promote human rights? The conventional wisdom suggests that they are. But perhaps the conventional wisdom is incomplete—perhaps human rights advocates should treat moral intuitions with skepticism rather than uncritical embrace. In this brief essay, I argue that appeals to moral intuitions are problematic because moral intuitions can lead people to make decisions that are suboptimal from the standpoint of the human rights regime’s goals. I attempt to show, in other words, that one of the great assets of the human rights regime—its ability to harness our strong intuitive reaction to the suffering of others—is also one of its great limitations. To make this argument, I draw from the mind sciences literature on moral decision-making. The latest research in this domain suggests that our moral intuitions are fallible. A number of studies have shown, for example, that moral outrage and indignation can cause people to make decisions that they would not defend under cooler conditions. I focus on three particular sorts of moral judgment biases and explore their implications for human rights advocacy. I then evaluate two different normative claims one might make about these moral judgment biases and offer several concluding thoughts

Moral Judgments & International Crimes: The Disutility of Desert

The international criminal regime exhibits many retributive features, but scholars and practitioners rarely defend the regime in purely retributive terms—that is, by reference to the inherent value of punishing the guilty. Instead, they defend it on the consequentialist grounds that it produces the best policy outcomes, such as deterrence, conflict resolution, and reconciliation. These scholars and practitioners implicitly adopt a behavioral theory known as the utility of desert, a theory about the usefulness of appealing to people\u27s retributive intuitions. That theory has been critically examined in domestic criminal scholarship but practically ignored in international criminal law. This Article fills this gap and argues that whatever its merits in the domestic realm, there are special reasons to be skeptical about the utility of desert claim in the international context. Moral intuitions as heuristics for moral judgments are error-prone, and the international criminal regime has a number of extraordinary features that may increase the likelihood and cost of these errors. These features include the complexity of the crimes; the diversity of stakeholders who possess heterogeneous intuitions; and the regime\u27s multiple goals, some of which may be inhibited by moral condemnation. After examining these differences, the Article outlines the implications of the analysis for regime design. Some of these design implications accommodate the international criminal regime\u27s current retributive approach, and some are fundamentally incompatible with retributivism

The Transparency Tax

Transparency is critical to good governance, but it also imposes significant governance costs. Beyond a certain point, excess transparency acts as a kind of tax on the legal system. Others have noted the burdens of maximalist transparency policies on both budgets and regulatory efficiency, but they have largely ignored the deeper cost that transparency imposes: it constrains one’s ability to support the law while telling a self-serving story about what that support means. Transparency’s true tax on the law is the loss of expressive ambiguity. In order to understand this tax, this Article develops a taxonomy of transparency types. Typically, transparency means something like openness. But openness about what—the law’s obligations? The reasons for the obligations? The actors behind the law? And open to whom? These are different aspects of what we typically lump together and call “transparency,” and they present different tradeoffs. With these tradeoffs in mind, we can begin to make more informed choices about how to draw the line between maximal and minimal transparency. Of particular note is the finding that we can demand maximal transparency about the law’s obligations without incurring much of the transparency tax. This runs contrary to the soft law literature, which suggests that vagueness about obligation is less costly than the alternative. The Article concludes with a guide for thinking through future transparency tradeoffs

Litigating Data Sovereignty

Because the internet is so thoroughly global, nearly every aspect of internet governance has an extraterritorial effect. This is evident in a number of high-profile cases that cover a wide range of subjects, including law enforcement access to digital evidence; speech disputes, such as requests to remove offensive or hateful web content; intellectual property disputes; and much more. Although substantively distinct, these issues present courts with the same jurisdictional challenge: how to ensure one state’s sovereign interest in regulating the internet’s local effects without infringing on other states’ interests

Robophobia

Robots-machines, algorithms, artificial intelligence-play an increasingly important role in society, often supplementing or even replacing human judgment. Scholars have rightly become concerned with the fairness, accuracy, and humanity of these systems. Indeed, anxiety about machine bias is at a fever pitch. While these concerns are important, they nearly all run in one direction: we worry about robot bias against humans; we rarely worry about human bias against robots. This is a mistake. Not because robots deserve, in some deontological sense, to be treated fairly-although that may be true-but because our bias against nonhuman deciders is bad for us. For example, it would be a mistake to reject self-driving cars merely because they cause a single fatal accident. Yet all too often this is what we do. We tolerate enormous risk from our fellow humans but almost none from machines. A substantial literature-almost entirely ignored by legal scholars concerned with algorithmic bias-suggests that we routinely prefer worse-performing humans over better-performing robots. We do this on our roads, in our courthouses, in our military, and in our hospitals. Our bias against robots is costly, and it will only get more so as robots become more capable. This Article catalogs the many different forms of antirobot bias and suggests some reforms to curtail the harmful effects of that bias. The Article\u27s descriptive contribution is to develop a taxonomy of robophobia. Its normative contribution is to offer some reasons to be less biased against robots. The stakes could hardly be higher. We are entering an age when one of the most important policy questions will be how and where to deploy machine decision-makers

Data Beyond Borders: Mutual Legal Assistance in the Internet Era

The global nature of today’s Internet services presents a unique challenge to international law enforcement cooperation. On a daily basis, law enforcement agents in one country seek access to data that is beyond their jurisdictional reach; as one industry analyst put it, there has been, “an internationalization of evidence.” In order to gain lawful access to data that is subject to another state’s jurisdiction, law enforcement agents must request mutual legal assistance (MLA) from the country that can legally compel the data’s disclosure. But the MLA regime has not been updated to manage the enormous rise of requests for MLA. This report reviews existing MLA law and policy and proposes a number of reforms