Constitutional Analogies in the International Legal System

This Article explores issues at the frontier of international law and constitutional law. It considers five key structural and systemic challenges that the international legal system now faces: (1) decentralization and disaggregation; (2) normative and institutional hierarchies; (3) compliance and enforcement; (4) exit and escape; and (5) democracy and legitimacy. Each of these issues raises questions of governance, institutional design, and allocation of authority paralleling the questions that domestic legal systems have answered in constitutional terms. For each of these issues, I survey the international legal landscape and consider the salience of potential analogies to domestic constitutions, drawing upon and extending the writings of international legal scholars and international relations theorists. I also offer some preliminary thoughts about why some treaties and institutions, but not others, more readily lend themselves to analysis in constitutional terms. And I distinguish those legal and political issues that may generate useful insights for scholars studying the growing intersections of international and constitutional law from other areas that may be more resistant to constitutional analogies

Growth and shear loss characteristics of an aerobic biofilm : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Technology in Biotechnology at Massey University

The application of biofilms in fermentation and waste treatment processes has been increasingly considered in recent years due to several inherent advantages over suspended growth systems. For example, they enable higher biomass hold-up providing larger quantity of cell per unit reactor volume which allows high loading rates. The biofilm systems, with fixed or immobilised cells, avoid washout conditions. The often difficult problems of sludge thickening, separation, recycle, and wasting associated with suspended growth systems are eliminated for biofilm systems. However, the major drawback lies in the control of film thickness in order to maintain high reactor productivities. The attached film thickness depends on both the biological parameters such as growth rate, and physical parameters such as hydrodynamic shear. The understanding of the growth and shear loss characteristics is a prerequisite for effective film thickness control. The main objective of this work therefore is to investigate the growth and shear loss characteristics of an aerobic biofilm utilizing phenol in a concentric cylindrical bioreactor. The growth and detachment of the biofilm was studied at different shear stresses, and their relationships were established. Detachment by shear was studied under two different conditions. One was examined simultaneously with growth under a constant shear stress where the biofilm detachment and growth occurred at the same time in the bioreactor. The other was examined via a separate shear test performed on the biofilm initially grown at a shear stress lower than that applied during the test. A method for measuring the torque exerted on the biofilm surface was first developed to enable computation of the related shear stress necessary for the study. The effect of film thickness on torque at film surface for a constant rotational speed was not significant. Shear stress can be conveniently determined from a quadratic relationship between torque and rotational speed for the range of film thickness studied. The substrate consumption is directly proportional to film thickness up to about 0.050 to 0.100 mm only, and beyond that it becomes independent of film thickness. The mass transfer resistance in the liquid phase appears to reach a minimum at shear stress greater than 3.44 N/m2 coinciding with the maximum steady-state substrate removal rate. The shear loss resistance of the biofilm increases with increasing shear stress during growth. The ultimate shear loss rate and shear stress relationship follows approximately: Rs = (40.82 – 2.750+0.1502 – 31.83e-0.610 ) × 10-2 The net growth rate varies with shear stress according to a parabolic function which predicts a shear stress of 19 N/m2 is required to achieve zero net growth. The biofilm-support adhesion must remain stronger than the film layer adhesion, otherwise, detachment will occur at the film-support interface rendering it impossible to control the film thickness

The Use and Abuse of Special-Purpose Entities in Public Finance

States increasingly are raising financing indirectly through special-purpose entities (SPEs), variously referred to as authorities, special authorities, or public authorities. Notwithstanding their long history and increasingly widespread use, relatively little is known or has been written about these entities. This article examines state SPEs and their functions, comparing them to SPEs used in corporate finance. States, even more than corporations, use these entities to reduce financial transparency and avoid public scrutiny, seriously threatening the integrity of public finance. The article analyzes how regulation could be designed in order to control that threat while maintaining the legitimate financing benefits provided by these state entities

A Systematic Study of Neutrino Mixing and CP Violation from Lepton Mass Matrices with Six Texture Zeros

We present a systematic study of 400 combinations of the charged lepton and neutrino mass matrices with six vanishing entries or texture zeros. Only 24 of them, which can be classified into a few distinct categories, are found to be compatible with current neutrino oscillation data at the $3\sigma$ level. A peculiar feature of the lepton mass matrices in each category is that they have the same phenomenological consequences. Taking account of a simple seesaw scenario for six parallel patterns of the charged lepton and Dirac neutrino mass matrices with six zeros, we show that it is possible to fit the experimental data at or below the $2\sigma$ level. In particular, the maximal atmospheric neutrino mixing can be reconciled with a strong neutrino mass hierarchy in the seesaw case. Numerical predictions are also obtained for the neutrino mass spectrum, flavor mixing angles, CP-violating phases and effective masses of the tritium beta decay and the neutrinoless double beta decay.Comment: 35 pages, 15 figures, minor change

Potential estimates and quasilinear parabolic equations with measure data

In this paper, we study the existence and regularity of the quasilinear parabolic equations: $$u_t-\text{div}(A(x,t,\nabla u))=B(u,\nabla u)+\mu$$ in $\mathbb{R}^{N+1}$, $\mathbb{R}^N\times(0,\infty)$ and a bounded domain $\Omega\times (0,T)\subset\mathbb{R}^{N+1}$. Here $N\geq 2$, the nonlinearity $A$ fulfills standard growth conditions and $B$ term is a continuous function and $\mu$ is a radon measure. Our first task is to establish the existence results with $B(u,\nabla u)=\pm|u|^{q-1}u$, for $q>1$. We next obtain global weighted-Lorentz, Lorentz-Morrey and Capacitary estimates on gradient of solutions with $B\equiv 0$, under minimal conditions on the boundary of domain and on nonlinearity $A$. Finally, due to these estimates, we solve the existence problems with $B(u,\nabla u)=|\nabla u|^q$ for $q>1$.Comment: 120

Performance of common-mode chokes

A low-cost method for experimental investigation of common-mode chokes for reducing high-frequency motor ground-currents of inverter-based drive systems of several hundred kW is presented. It provides a powerful tool during the design stage of such chokes to verify their predicted performance. The method draws from the mainly capacitive behavior of machines at very high frequencies. Results of experimental tests for drives with peak ground-current amplitudes of more than 60 Amperes, carried out on a 4 kW test-bed, are presented. They confirm the feasibility of such tests as well as the capability of small, inexpensive, single-turn chokes to effectively reduce the ground-current

Supermembrane with Non-Abelilan Gauging and Chern-Simons Quantization

We present non-Abelian gaugings of supermembrane for general isometries for compactifications from eleven-dimensions, starting with Abelian case as a guide. We introduce a super Killing vector in eleven-dimensional superspace for a non-Abelian group G associated with the compact space B for a general compactification, and couple it to a non-Abelian gauge field on the world-volume. As a technical tool, we use teleparallel superspace with no manifest local Lorentz covariance. Interestingly, the coupling constant is quantized for the non-Abelian group G, due to its generally non-trivial mapping \pi_3(G).Comment: 16 pages, no figures. The content has been considerably changed with non-Abelian generalizatio

To build trust with employee and gain their loyalty as the key to success

Employees are your most valuable assets. Organisations are highly dependent on employees' loyalty and expect their trust in the organization as a key ingredient factor. A successful company needs employees trust and who are loyal to what it stands for and to what it’s trying to achieve. Therefore, to ensure the sustainability and competitive advantage of an organization in facing the challenge of success, it is advised that employers examine several approaches that can be taken to win loyalty and build their trust and see the benefits and significant impact on the organization in the future. it is a step forward in creating organizational solutions and success

Lost in Time: Temporal Analytics for Long-Term Video Surveillance

Video surveillance is a well researched area of study with substantial work done in the aspects of object detection, tracking and behavior analysis. With the abundance of video data captured over a long period of time, we can understand patterns in human behavior and scene dynamics through data-driven temporal analytics. In this work, we propose two schemes to perform descriptive and predictive analytics on long-term video surveillance data. We generate heatmap and footmap visualizations to describe spatially pooled trajectory patterns with respect to time and location. We also present two approaches for anomaly prediction at the day-level granularity: a trajectory-based statistical approach, and a time-series based approach. Experimentation with one year data from a single camera demonstrates the ability to uncover interesting insights about the scene and to predict anomalies reasonably well.Comment: To Appear in Springer LNE