Freedom of the Press and Public Access: Toward a Theory of Partial Regulation of the Mass Media

The purpose of this article is to examine critically these decisions and to explore whether there is any rational basis for limiting to one sector of the media the legislature\u27s power to impose access regulation. The article takes the position that the Court has pursued the right path for the wrong reasons. There is a powerful rationality underlying the current decision to restrict regulatory authority to broadcasting, but it is not, as is commonly supposed, that broadcasting is somehow different in principle from the print media and that it therefore is not deserving of equivalent first amendment treatment. As will be discussed in section I, the Court\u27s attempt to distinguish broadcasting on the basis of its dependence on scarce resources (the electromagnetic spectrum) is unpersuasive; moreover, whatever validity the distinction may once have had is now being undercut by the advance of new technology in the form of cable television. Further, other possible points of distinction that may be raised, such as the broadcasting industry\u27s high level of concentration and television\u27s purported special impact on its viewers, do not presently justify the different first amendment treatment. For reasons that will be developed in section II, access regulation has been treated differently in the context of broadcasting than it has in that of the print media largely because we have long assumed that in some undefined way broadcasting is, in fact, different. Rather than isolate broadcasting from our constitutional traditions, however, the Court should now acknowledge that for first amendment purposes broadcasting is not fundamentally different from the print media. Such an admission would not compel the Court either to permit access regulation throughout the press or to disallow it entirely. There is, we shall see, an alternative solution

Molecular design and control of fullerene-based bi-thermoelectric materials

Molecular junctions are a versatile test bed for investigating nanoscale thermoelectricity and contribute to the design of new cost-effective environmentally friendly organic thermoelectric materials. It was suggested that transport resonances associated with discrete molecular levels could play a key role in thermoelectric performance, but no direct experimental evidence has been reported. Here we study single-molecule junctions of the endohedral fullerene Sc3N@C8 connected to gold electrodes using a scanning tunnelling microscope. We find that the magnitude and sign of the thermopower depend strongly on the orientation of the molecule and on applied pressure. Our calculations show that Sc3N inside the fullerene cage creates a sharp resonance near the Fermi level, whose energetic location, and hence the thermopower, can be tuned by applying pressure. These results reveal that Sc3N@C80 is a bi-thermoelectric material, exhibiting both positive and negative thermopower, and provide an unambiguous demonstration of the importance of transport resonances in molecular junctions

Modern tests of Lorentz invariance

Motivated by ideas about quantum gravity, a tremendous amount of effort over the past decade has gone into testing Lorentz invariance in various regimes. This review summarizes both the theoretical frameworks for tests of Lorentz invariance and experimental advances that have made new high precision tests possible. The current constraints on Lorentz violating effects from both terrestrial experiments and astrophysical observations are presented.Comment: Modified and expanded discussions of various points. Numerous references added. Version matches that accepted by Living Reviews in Relativit

The self-organizing fractal theory as a universal discovery method: the phenomenon of life

A universal discovery method potentially applicable to all disciplines studying organizational phenomena has been developed. This method takes advantage of a new form of global symmetry, namely, scale-invariance of self-organizational dynamics of energy/matter at all levels of organizational hierarchy, from elementary particles through cells and organisms to the Universe as a whole. The method is based on an alternative conceptualization of physical reality postulating that the energy/matter comprising the Universe is far from equilibrium, that it exists as a flow, and that it develops via self-organization in accordance with the empirical laws of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. It is postulated that the energy/matter flowing through and comprising the Universe evolves as a multiscale, self-similar structure-process, i.e., as a self-organizing fractal. This means that certain organizational structures and processes are scale-invariant and are reproduced at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. Being a form of symmetry, scale-invariance naturally lends itself to a new discovery method that allows for the deduction of missing information by comparing scale-invariant organizational patterns across different levels of the organizational hierarchy

Freedom of the Press and Public Access: Toward a Theory of Partial Regulation of the Mass Media

The purpose of this article is to examine critically these decisions and to explore whether there is any rational basis for limiting to one sector of the media the legislature\u27s power to impose access regulation. The article takes the position that the Court has pursued the right path for the wrong reasons. There is a powerful rationality underlying the current decision to restrict regulatory authority to broadcasting, but it is not, as is commonly supposed, that broadcasting is somehow different in principle from the print media and that it therefore is not deserving of equivalent first amendment treatment. As will be discussed in section I, the Court\u27s attempt to distinguish broadcasting on the basis of its dependence on scarce resources (the electromagnetic spectrum) is unpersuasive; moreover, whatever validity the distinction may once have had is now being undercut by the advance of new technology in the form of cable television. Further, other possible points of distinction that may be raised, such as the broadcasting industry\u27s high level of concentration and television\u27s purported special impact on its viewers, do not presently justify the different first amendment treatment. For reasons that will be developed in section II, access regulation has been treated differently in the context of broadcasting than it has in that of the print media largely because we have long assumed that in some undefined way broadcasting is, in fact, different. Rather than isolate broadcasting from our constitutional traditions, however, the Court should now acknowledge that for first amendment purposes broadcasting is not fundamentally different from the print media. Such an admission would not compel the Court either to permit access regulation throughout the press or to disallow it entirely. There is, we shall see, an alternative solution