2,974 research outputs found
Mental Torture: A Critique of Erasures in U.S. Law
Both international and federal law criminalize mental torture as well as physical torture, and both agree that âsevere mental pain or sufferingâ defines mental torture. However, U.S. law provides a confused and convoluted definition of severe mental pain or sufferingâone that falsifies the very concept and makes mental torture nearly impossible to prosecute or repress. Our principal aim is to expose the fallacies that underlie the U.S. definition of mental torture: first, a materialist bias that the physical is more real than the mental; second, a substitution trick that defines mental pain or suffering through a narrow set of causes and effects, ignoring the experience itself; third, a forensic fallacy, in which the due process requirements of specificity in criminal law become wrongly identified with defining characteristics of the crime of torture (an understanding that loops back to corrupt the law); and fourth, a mens rea requirement that excludes all mental torture not committed with the sadistic intention of causing long-lasting harm. Our article begins with an analysis of the concept of mental pain and suffering, as well as a factual discussion of U.S. practice. We also examine the legislative history of the definition in U.S. law. We demonstrate that it derives from political concerns that other countries might accuse U.S. law enforcement personnel of torture. We conclude by examining the specific evil of mental torture: the merciless attempt to break down and occupy the personality of the victim
An Energy-Aware Protocol for Self-Organizing Heterogeneous LTE Systems
This paper studies the problem of self-organizing heterogeneous LTE systems.
We propose a model that jointly considers several important characteristics of
heterogeneous LTE system, including the usage of orthogonal frequency division
multiple access (OFDMA), the frequency-selective fading for each link, the
interference among different links, and the different transmission capabilities
of different types of base stations. We also consider the cost of energy by
taking into account the power consumption, including that for wireless
transmission and that for operation, of base stations and the price of energy.
Based on this model, we aim to propose a distributed protocol that improves the
spectrum efficiency of the system, which is measured in terms of the weighted
proportional fairness among the throughputs of clients, and reduces the cost of
energy. We identify that there are several important components involved in
this problem. We propose distributed strategies for each of these components.
Each of the proposed strategies requires small computational and
communicational overheads. Moreover, the interactions between components are
also considered in the proposed strategies. Hence, these strategies result in a
solution that jointly considers all factors of heterogeneous LTE systems.
Simulation results also show that our proposed strategies achieve much better
performance than existing ones
Joint Subcarrier and Power Allocation in NOMA: Optimal and Approximate Algorithms
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technology to increase
the spectral efficiency and enable massive connectivity in 5G and future
wireless networks. In contrast to orthogonal schemes, such as OFDMA, NOMA
multiplexes several users on the same frequency and time resource. Joint
subcarrier and power allocation problems (JSPA) in NOMA are NP-hard to solve in
general. In this family of problems, we consider the weighted sum-rate (WSR)
objective function as it can achieve various tradeoffs between sum-rate
performance and user fairness. Because of JSPA's intractability, a common
approach in the literature is to solve separately the power control and
subcarrier allocation (also known as user selection) problems, therefore
achieving sub-optimal result. In this work, we first improve the computational
complexity of existing single-carrier power control and user selection schemes.
These improved procedures are then used as basic building blocks to design new
algorithms, namely Opt-JSPA, -JSPA and Grad-JSPA. Opt-JSPA
computes an optimal solution with lower complexity than current optimal schemes
in the literature. It can be used as a benchmark for optimal WSR performance in
simulations. However, its pseudo-polynomial time complexity remains impractical
for real-world systems with low latency requirements. To further reduce the
complexity, we propose a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme called
-JSPA. Since, no approximation has been studied in the literature,
-JSPA stands out by allowing to control a tight trade-off between
performance guarantee and complexity. Finally, Grad-JSPA is a heuristic based
on gradient descent. Numerical results show that it achieves near-optimal WSR
with much lower complexity than existing optimal methods
Who Misvotes? The Effect of Differential Cognition Costs on Election Outcomes
If voters are fully rational and have negligible cognition costs, ballot layout should not affect election outcomes. In this paper, we explore deviations from rational voting using quasi-random variation in candidate name placement on ballots from the 2003 California Recall Election. We find that the voteshares of minor candidates almost double when their names are adjacent to the names of major candidates on a ballot. Voteshare gains are largest in precincts with high percentages of Democratic, Hispanic, low-income, non-English speaking, poorly educated, or young voters. A major candidate that attracts a disproportionate share of voters from these types of precincts faces a systematic electoral disadvantage. If the Republican frontrunner Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic frontrunner Cruz Bustamante had been in a tie, adjacency misvoting would have given Schwarzenegger an edge of 0.06% of the voteshare. This gain in voteshare exceeds the margins of victory in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election and the 2004 Washington Gubernatorial Election. We explore which voting technology platforms and brands mitigate misvoting.
A General Upper Bound on the Size of Constant-Weight Conflict-Avoiding Codes
Conflict-avoiding codes are used in the multiple-access collision channel
without feedback. The number of codewords in a conflict-avoiding code is the
number of potential users that can be supported in the system. In this paper, a
new upper bound on the size of conflict-avoiding codes is proved. This upper
bound is general in the sense that it is applicable to all code lengths and all
Hamming weights. Several existing constructions for conflict-avoiding codes,
which are known to be optimal for Hamming weights equal to four and five, are
shown to be optimal for all Hamming weights in general.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur
The Nerd
The Nerd depicts the struggle between obligation, friendship, hospitality and sheer exasperation with those thrown together. It was performed at John Carroll University in October of 1991.https://collected.jcu.edu/plays/1047/thumbnail.jp
Recent Developments: Casey v. Mayor and City Council of Rockville: A Governmental Action to Classify a Property as Historic under Article 66B of the Maryland Code Does Not Require Consideration of the Resulting Economic Impact the Changed Classification Will Have on the Property Owner
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