Human Zoning: The Constitutionality of Sex-Offender Residency Restrictions as Applied to Post-Conviction Offenders

[H]igh recidivism rates shows that the threat of jail time alone is not sufficient to curb sex crimes. With this in mind, legislators sought to find other ways that would protect potential victims. Community notification laws were the first policy to be implemented. Community notification methods included press releases, flyers, phone calls, door-to-door contact, neighborhood meetings, and Internet sites, which informed citizens of the name, location, and/or other information of persons who had been convicted of sex crimes. Part II of this note will describe current sex-offender restrictions in place across the country. Part III will provide a constitutional analysis of these sex-offender restrictions. Based on this analysis, Part IV will conclude by advocating against sex-offender restrictions and offering alternatives

Consequences of an Abelian Z′Z' for neutrino oscillations and dark matter

The Standard Model's accidental and anomaly-free currents: $B-L$, $L_e-L_\mu$, $L_e-L_\tau$, and $L_\mu-L_\tau$, could be indicative of a hidden gauge structure beyond the Standard Model. Additionally, neutrino masses can be generated by a dimension-5 operator that generically breaks all of these symmetries. It is therefore important to investigate the compatibility of a gauged $U'(1)$ and neutrino phenomenology. We consider gauging each of the symmetries above with a minimal extended matter content. This includes the $Z'$, an order parameter to break the $U'(1)$, and three right-handed neutrinos. We find all but $B-L$ require additional matter content to explain the measured neutrino oscillation parameters. We also discuss the compatibility of the measured neutrino textures with a non-thermal dark matter production mechanism involving the decay of the $Z'$. Finally, we present a parametric relation that implies that a sterile neutrino dark matter candidate should not be expected to contribute to neutrino masses beyond ten parts per million.Comment: 9 page

When Basketball was Jewish

Philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writing in Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, describes Barney Tiny Sedran, born Bernard Sedransky on the Lower East Side of New York, as a quintessential Jewish basketball player: manically energetic, compulsively alert, upending expectations, and compensating for short—really short—comings (17). Sedransky was the shortest player ever inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, she writes, who excelled at a time when Jews ruled basketball — and lest you think those last three words are a misprint, let me repeat: Jews ruled basketball (17). Indeed, in the modern era it is easy to forget who the great boxers and basketball players were, for these city sports have changed, just like the neighborhoods that stimulated their growth. Previous books have explored the topic of Jewish exceptionalism in sport from a broad historical-sociological perspective. Peter Levine\u27s Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (1993) chronicles how sport helped transform Jewish immigrants into citizens in full. Allen Bodner\u27s When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport (1997) focuses on boxing\u27s golden era in the 1920s and 1930s, when Jewish fighters vied for ring dominance against Italian- and Irish-American opponents. Each of these writers provide a specific historic context for their subjects. The header of Goldstein\u27s essay, for instance, contains the title, the subject, and dates: Tiny Baller, Barney Sedran, (1891-1964) (17). [excerpt

Marching in Step: USCT Veterans and the Grand Army of the Republic

For many United States Colored Troops, remembering the Civil War and their comrades who fell in it became an important part of their post-war life. One of the primary opportunities for public expression of remembrance was Decoration Day, now known as Memorial Day. African Americans played a critical part in the creation of this holiday. On May 1, 1865, the newly-freed black residents of Charleston asserted their place in Civil War memory by leading a parade to a recently constructed cemetery for Union prisoners at the city’s horseracing course. The procession heaped flowers upon the graves of the honored dead, after which ministers from the town’s black congregations gave dedicatory speeches. This event, known among some in the North as the “First Decoration Day,” exemplified African American interest in perpetuating the memory of the Civil War. However, the resentment of white Southerners at the time towards this instance of black agency led to the marginalization and eventual forgetting of the event in the mind of the public at large

Training Neural Networks with Stochastic Hessian-Free Optimization

Hessian-free (HF) optimization has been successfully used for training deep autoencoders and recurrent networks. HF uses the conjugate gradient algorithm to construct update directions through curvature-vector products that can be computed on the same order of time as gradients. In this paper we exploit this property and study stochastic HF with gradient and curvature mini-batches independent of the dataset size. We modify Martens' HF for these settings and integrate dropout, a method for preventing co-adaptation of feature detectors, to guard against overfitting. Stochastic Hessian-free optimization gives an intermediary between SGD and HF that achieves competitive performance on both classification and deep autoencoder experiments.Comment: 11 pages, ICLR 201