Bases for Refusing International Extradition Requests - Capital Punishment and Torture

This Essay is an attempt to contribute to the scholarly investigation into how to reconcile the complementary and competing goals of protecting national security in the interest of law enforcement while still guaranteeing the protection of basic human rights of defendants. It focuses on two issues - capital punishment and torture - which form the bases for state refusal to extradite fugitives

Strain and Electric Field Modulation of the Electronic Structure of Bilayer Graphene

We study how the electronic structure of the bilayer graphene (BLG) is changed by electric field and strain from {\it ab initio} density-functional calculations using the LMTO and the LAPW methods. Both hexagonal and Bernal stacked structures are considered. The BLG is a zero-gap semiconductor like the isolated layer of graphene. We find that while strain alone does not produce a gap in the BLG, an electric field does so in the Bernal structure but not in the hexagonal structure. The topology of the bands leads to Dirac circles with linear dispersion in the case of the hexagonally stacked BLG due to the interpenetration of the Dirac cones, while for the Bernal stacking, the dispersion is quadratic. The size of the Dirac circle increases with the applied electric field, leading to an interesting way of controlling the Fermi surface. The external electric field is screened due to polarization charges between the layers, leading to a reduced size of the band gap and the Dirac circle. The screening is substantial in both cases and diverges for the Bernal structure for small fields as has been noted by earlier authors. As a biproduct of this work, we present the tight-binding parameters for the free-standing single layer graphene as obtained by fitting to the density-functional bands, both with and without the slope constraint for the Dirac cone.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Geo-location oriented routing protocol for smart dynamic mesh network

© 2016 IEEE. Wireless Mesh Network is an emerging technology with great potential to become a Self-Sustained Network. Unlike the traditional networks that dominate the current communication system and rely on a large and expensive setup of wired/wireless access points to provide connection between users, the Wireless Mesh Network is formed by the user devices (referred as Nodes) which connect to each other to form a network. However, due to the use of legacy/traditional network models for mesh networks, there exist various limitations towards its implementation. This paper presents a new approach towards the Wireless Mesh Network, incorporating a new routing scheme based on the Geo-Location of the devices. It puts forward the structure, working principle and its performance during the first implementation

Balancing the Tradeoff between Profit and Fairness in Rideshare Platforms During High-Demand Hours

Rideshare platforms, when assigning requests to drivers, tend to maximize profit for the system and/or minimize waiting time for riders. Such platforms can exacerbate biases that drivers may have over certain types of requests. We consider the case of peak hours when the demand for rides is more than the supply of drivers. Drivers are well aware of their advantage during the peak hours and can choose to be selective about which rides to accept. Moreover, if in such a scenario, the assignment of requests to drivers (by the platform) is made only to maximize profit and/or minimize wait time for riders, requests of a certain type (e.g. from a non-popular pickup location, or to a non-popular drop-off location) might never be assigned to a driver. Such a system can be highly unfair to riders. However, increasing fairness might come at a cost of the overall profit made by the rideshare platform. To balance these conflicting goals, we present a flexible, non-adaptive algorithm, \lpalg, that allows the platform designer to control the profit and fairness of the system via parameters $\alpha$ and $\beta$ respectively. We model the matching problem as an online bipartite matching where the set of drivers is offline and requests arrive online. Upon the arrival of a request, we use \lpalg to assign it to a driver (the driver might then choose to accept or reject it) or reject the request. We formalize the measures of profit and fairness in our setting and show that by using \lpalg, the competitive ratios for profit and fairness measures would be no worse than $\alpha/e$ and $\beta/e$ respectively. Extensive experimental results on both real-world and synthetic datasets confirm the validity of our theoretical lower bounds. Additionally, they show that \lpalg under some choice of $(\alpha, \beta)$ can beat two natural heuristics, Greedy and Uniform, on \emph{both} fairness and profit

Human Rights And Sovereign And Individual Immunities (Sovereign Immunity, Act Of State, Head Of State Immunity And Diplomatic Immunity) - Some Reflections

Reflections on the application of sovereign and individual immunities law are especially pertinent in light of the controversy surrounding the arrest and trial of General Augosto Pinochet in Britain, at the request of a Spanish magistrate on charges of murder, hostage-taking, and torture during his seventeen year rule in Chil

Design & Development of a Two-jaw parallel Pneumatic Gripper for Robotic Manipulation

The handling of abstract materials and mechanisms to pick and place are widely found in factory automation and industrial manufacturing. There are different mechanical grippers which are based on different motor technologies have been designed and employed in numerous applications. The designed robotic gripper in this paper is a two jaw actuated gripper which is different from the conventional cam and follower gripper in the way that controlled movement of the jaws is done with the help of pneumatic cylinders using air pressure. The force developed in the cylinder is very gentle and is directly delivered to the jaws in a compact way. The design, analysis and fabrication of the gripper model are explained in details along with the detailed list of all existing pneumatic grippers in market. The force and torque for the gripper have been calculated for different set of conditions. The working of the model is checked for and observation for pay load is recorded at various pressures. The highly dynamic and highly accelerated gripper model can be easily set at intermediate positions by regulating the pressure. Pneumatic grippers are very easy to handle and are generally cost-effective because air hoses, valves and other pneumatic devices are easy to maintain