Is that a threat?: Elonis v. United States and the Standard of Intent for True Threat Convictions

This commentary analyzes the Supreme Court case Elonis v. United States where the Court will determine the applicable criminal-intent standard required to convict a defendant for threatening speech. After a series of violent Facebook posts against coworkers and his estranged wife, Petitioner Elonis was convicted for making so-called true threats of violence--speech not granted First-Amendment protection. Elonis argues that the prosecution should have been required to prove that he actually had the intent to threaten people when he wrote the posts, not simply that a reasonable person would find the posts threatening. The Author argues that the Court should rule in the Petitioner\u27s favor and require a finding of subjective intent because such a mens rea requirement is suggested in the plain meaning, legislative history, and by the Court\u27s true-threat jurisprudence

Is that a threat?: Elonis v. United States and the Standard of Intent for True Threat Convictions

This commentary analyzes the Supreme Court case Elonis v. United States where the Court will determine the applicable criminal-intent standard required to convict a defendant for threatening speech. After a series of violent Facebook posts against coworkers and his estranged wife, Petitioner Elonis was convicted for making so-called true threats of violence--speech not granted First-Amendment protection. Elonis argues that the prosecution should have been required to prove that he actually had the intent to threaten people when he wrote the posts, not simply that a reasonable person would find the posts threatening. The Author argues that the Court should rule in the Petitioner\u27s favor and require a finding of subjective intent because such a mens rea requirement is suggested in the plain meaning, legislative history, and by the Court\u27s true-threat jurisprudence

Coxeter Groups and Wavelet Sets

A traditional wavelet is a special case of a vector in a separable Hilbert space that generates a basis under the action of a system of unitary operators defined in terms of translation and dilation operations. A Coxeter/fractal-surface wavelet is obtained by defining fractal surfaces on foldable figures, which tesselate the embedding space by reflections in their bounding hyperplanes instead of by translations along a lattice. Although both theories look different at their onset, there exist connections and communalities which are exhibited in this semi-expository paper. In particular, there is a natural notion of a dilation-reflection wavelet set. We prove that dilation-reflection wavelet sets exist for arbitrary expansive matrix dilations, paralleling the traditional dilation-translation wavelet theory. There are certain measurable sets which can serve simultaneously as dilation-translation wavelet sets and dilation-reflection wavelet sets, although the orthonormal structures generated in the two theories are considerably different

Intrinsic finite element modeling of a linear membrane shell problem

A Galerkin finite element method for the membrane elasticity problem on a meshed surface is constructed by using two-dimensional elements extended into three dimensions. The membrane finite element model is established using the intrinsic approach suggested by [Delfour and Zol\'esio, A boundary differential equation for thin shells. J. Differential Equations, 119(2):426--449, 1995]

The Indo-Australian weevil genus Platytenes Pascoe, 1870 (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Cryptorhynchinae)

The formerly monotypic weevil genus Platytenes Pascoe (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Cryptorhynchinae: Cryptorhynchini: Cryptorhynchina) as treated here, includes two commonly encountered and broadly distributed species in the eastern Indo-Australian region. Label data indicate that both species are associated with semicultivated betel palm (Areca catechu L., Arecaceae) and human mediated dispersal is suggested to have influenced their present-day distribution. Herein, we provide a diagnosis for Platytenes and redescribe its type species, P. varius Pascoe. We also describe P. occultus Setliff and Larson, a new species from the Solomon Islands. New host and locality records are provided, including the first records of the genus occurring on Ambon Island, the Bismarck Archipelago, D’Entrecasteaux Islands, and many previously unreported localities on New Guinea. A full bibliography, key to species, and distribution map for the genus are also provided

A stabilized cut finite element method for partial differential equations on surfaces: The Laplace-Beltrami operator

We consider solving the Laplace-Beltrami problem on a smooth two dimensional surface embedded into a three dimensional space meshed with tetrahedra. The mesh does not respect the surface and thus the surface cuts through the elements. We consider a Galerkin method based on using the restrictions of continuous piecewise linears defined on the tetrahedra to the surface as trial and test functions. The resulting discrete method may be severely ill-conditioned, and the main purpose of this paper is to suggest a remedy for this problem based on adding a consistent stabilization term to the original bilinear form. We show optimal estimates for the condition number of the stabilized method independent of the location of the surface. We also prove optimal a priori error estimates for the stabilized method