Reconstructing RFRA: The Contested Legacy of Religious Freedom Restoration

Almost every member of Congress voted to approve the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), a bill endorsed by an unprecedented coalition of dozens of religious and civil rights organizations spanning the political and ideological spectrum. President Clinton quipped at the signing ceremony that perhaps only divine intervention could explain such an unusual meeting of the minds: the establishment of “new trust” across otherwise irreconcilable “ideological and religious lines,” he remarked, “shows . . . that the power of God is such that, even in the legislative process, miracles can happen.” The RFRA consensus was especially “miraculous” because the legislation addressed a deeply divisive question: whether and under what circumstances religious objectors should be exempt from generally applicable laws. RFRA’s supporters, both within and outside Congress, would surely have had sharp disagreements about many specific claims for religious exemptions to particular laws. Yet they coalesced around RFRA, which circumvented such disagreements at the retail level by codifying a “cross-cutting” statutory standard that judges would be required to apply to an undifferentiated and unknown array of future claims for exemptions to every generally applicable law in the land

The National Security Agency\u27s Domestic Spying Program: Framing the Debate

On Friday, December 16, 2005, the New York Times reported that President George W. Bush had secretly authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans\u27 telephone and e-mail communications as part of an effort to obtain intelligence about future terrorist activity.\u27 The Times report was based on leaks of classified information, presumably by NSA officials concerned about the legality of the program. The Times reported that at the President\u27s request it had delayed publication of the story for more than a year. The Indiana Law Journal reprinted four documents that, taken together, set forth the basic arguments concerning the lawfulness of the secret NSA surveillance program. The debate outlined by the four documents raises important issues about statutory interpretation in the face of claims of constitutional conflict, executive power during times of war, fundamental privacy rights of Americans, and ultimately, the rule of law in the war on terror

The applicability of Brillouin scattering to flow field diagnostics

To fill the void between turbulence theory and experiment; particularly in the flow fields consisting of monatomic gases, for example in wind tunnels, means of measuring fluctuating quantities are needed. In the area of density fluctuation measurement, the optical method of Brillouin scattering was suggested. This was based on the theory, that the Brillouin scattered intensity is proportional to a function of density. In this investigation the potential of this method as a diagnostic tool was studied. Here the density fluctuations in gases were sought. Continuous wave lasers and interferometers were used as the primary illuminating source and scattered light filters respectively

Application of Raman diagnostics to combustion

The use of laser Raman diagnostic techniques to measure the specie concentrations and their temperatures in combustion flow fields is discussed. The system designed to measure the specie concentrations, which included a ruby laser and a photodiode to trip the laser at the maximum light and heat output of the combustion process, is described and problems encountered in developing the system are reported. Photographs of the combustion process are presented and analyzed detailing the evolution of the combustion in terms of the photodiode and the lack of a noticeable Raman-Stokes signal. The absence of the Raman-Stokes signal is discussed

Coherent control of injection currents in high-quality films of Bi2Se3

Films of the topological insulator Bi2Se3 are grown by molecular beam epitaxy with in-situ reflection high-energy electron diffraction. The films are shown to be high-quality by X-ray reflectivity and diffraction and atomic-force microscopy. Quantum interference control of photocurrents is observed by excitation with harmonically related pulses and detected by terahertz radiation. The injection current obeys the expected excitation irradiance dependence, showing linear dependence on the fundamental pulse irradiance and square-root irradiance dependence of the frequency-doubled optical pulses. The injection current also follows a sinusoidal relative-phase dependence between the two excitation pulses. These results confirm the third-order nonlinear optical origins of the coherently controlled injection current. Experiments are compared to a tight-binding band structure to illustrate the possible optical transitions that occur in creating the injection current.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure, journal articl

An investigation into the feasibility of myoglobin-based single-electron transistors

Myoglobin single-electron transistors were investigated using nanometer- gap platinum electrodes fabricated by electromigration at cryogenic temperatures. Apomyoglobin (myoglobin without heme group) was used as a reference. The results suggest single electron transport is mediated by resonant tunneling with the electronic and vibrational levels of the heme group in a single protein. They also represent a proof-of-principle that proteins with redox centers across nanometer-gap electrodes can be utilized to fabricate single-electron transistors. The protein orientation and conformation may significantly affect the conductance of these devices. Future improvements in device reproducibility and yield will require control of these factors

Roughness and spatial density judgments on visual and haptic textures using virtual reality

The purpose of this study is to investigate multimodal visual-haptic texture perception for which we used virtual reality techniques. Participants judged a broad range of textures according to their roughness and their spatial density under visual, haptic and visual-haptic exploration conditions. Participants were well able to differentiate between the different textures both by using the roughness and the spatial density judgment. When provided with visualhaptic textures, subjects performance increased (for both judgments) indicating sensory combination of visual and haptic texture information. Most interestingly, performance for density and roughness judgments did not differ significantly, indicating that these estimates are highly correlated. This may be due to the fact that our textures were generated in virtual reality using a haptic pointforce display (PHANToM). In conclusion, it seems that the roughness and spatial density estimate were based on the same physical parameters given the display technology used

Nonlocal mixing of supercurrents in Josephson ballistic point contact

We study coherent current states in the mesoscopic superconducting weak link simultaneously subjected to the order parameter phase difference on the contact and to the tangential to the junction interface superfluid velocity in the banks. The Josephson current-phase relation controlled by the external transport current is obtained. At phase difference close to pi the nonlocal nature of the Josephson phase-dependent current results in the appearance of two vortexlike states in the vicinity of the contact.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures; to be published in Phys. Rev. B; e-mail: [email protected]

Finite-size scaling in thin Fe/Ir(100) layers

The critical temperature of thin Fe layers on Ir(100) is measured through M\"o{\ss}bauer spectroscopy as a function of the layer thickness. From a phenomenological finite-size scaling analysis, we find an effective shift exponent lambda = 3.15 +/- 0.15, which is twice as large as the value expected from the conventional finite-size scaling prediction lambda=1/nu, where nu is the correlation length critical exponent. Taking corrections to finite-size scaling into account, we derive the effective shift exponent lambda=(1+2\Delta_1)/nu, where Delta_1 describes the leading corrections to scaling. For the 3D Heisenberg universality class, this leads to lambda = 3.0 +/- 0.1, in agreement with the experimental data. Earlier data by Ambrose and Chien on the effective shift exponent in CoO films are also explained.Comment: Latex, 4 pages, with 2 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett