The City as Laboratory and the Urban-Rural Divide: the Revival of Private Property and its Limits in Post-Mao China

This paper focuses on the revival of private property and its limits in urban China. It explores the emergence of urban property markets; urban property-holding in relation to the complexity of urban governance; “minor property rights apartments” that form a de facto real estate market and cross over the urban-rural divide; the “grey areas” of blurring legal and administrative boundaries in modern China; and recent changes to the rural land system and the rural-urban divide. The conclusion flags the theme of the city as laboratory with regard to the blurring legal and governmental urban-rural distinction.

HIV-1 Nef limits communication between linker of activated T cells and SLP-76 to reduce formation of SLP-76-signaling microclusters following TCR stimulation

Signal initiation by engagement of the TCR triggers actin rearrangements, receptor clustering, and dynamic organization of signaling complexes to elicit and sustain downstream signaling. Nef, a pathogenicity factor of HIV, disrupts early TCR signaling in target T cells. To define the mechanism underlying this Nef-mediated signal disruption, we employed quantitative single-cell microscopy following surface-mediated TCR stimulation that allows for dynamic visualization of distinct signaling complexes as microclusters (MCs). Despite marked inhibition of actin remodeling and cell spreading, the induction of MCs containing TCR-CD3 or ZAP70 was not affected significantly by Nef. However, Nef potently inhibited the subsequent formation of MCs positive for the signaling adaptor Src homology-2 domain-containing leukocyte protein of 76 kDa (SLP-76) to reduce MC density in Nef-expressing and HIV-1-infected T cells. Further analyses suggested that Nef prevents formation of SLP-76 MCs at the level of the upstream adaptor protein, linker of activated T cells (LAT), that couples ZAP70 to SLP-76. Nef did not disrupt pre-existing MCs positive for LAT. However, the presence of the viral protein prevented de novo recruitment of active LAT into MCs due to retargeting of LAT to an intracellular compartment. These modulations in MC formation and composition depended on Nef's ability to simultaneously disrupt both actin remodeling and subcellular localization of TCR-proximal machinery. Nef thus employs a dual mechanism to disturb early TCR signaling by limiting the communication between LAT and SLP-76 and preventing the dynamic formation of SLP-76-signaling MCs.

ENVIRONMENTAL LIMITS ON THE NONRESONANT COSMIC-RAY CURRENT-DRIVEN INSTABILITY

We investigate the so-called nonresonant cosmic-ray streaming instability, first discussed by Bell (2004). The extent to which thermal damping and ion-neutral collisions reduce the growth of this instability is calculated. Limits on the growth of the nonresonant mode in SN1006 and RX J1713.7-3946 are presented.

Religious Political Parties and the Limits of Political Liberalism

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship.

The limits of democracy: Ireland 1778-1848

A survey of the use of the term democracy in Irish politics in the late eighteenth and early ninetenth centuries

The Revival of Private Property and Its Limits in Post-Mao China

This monograph examines the nature and significance of the re-emergence of private property in rapidly changing post-Mao China.

In examining this issue, the study explores a key dichotomy in Chinese law, that is, ‘public versus private’, and examines the manner in which the Chinese define ownership. The study stresses the importance of lack of clarity in the boundaries between the public and the private in property rights.

While there is a limited move towards the recognition of private property in real estate in contemporary China, this analysis also shows that ownership in the law, and ownership as understood and practised socially, often diverge significantly.

From the Qing dynasty reforms of the late nineteenth century onwards, ‘modernist’ law and entrenched social practice have often opposed each other. In contrast to the official, and indeed legal, support for unitary and exclusive property rights, the reality of the property regime has been a fragmentation of property rights. ‘Modern’ conceptions and theories of property rights emerged in the context of nation-building from the late Qing onwards, and unitary and exclusive property rights were considered as ‘badges’ of modernity.

These conceptions and theories served (and still serve) the purposes of control and governance but were, and still are, often resisted in social practice and popular thinking, leading to alienation and conflict. As a result, analysis of the nature and the social and political implications of re-emerging private property rights provides important insights for our understanding of the changing nature of modern China.

Identity, Unity, and the Limits of Democracy

Can the demos be uncoupled from the ethnos? Can there be a democratic politics of state‐boundaries, or are borders a condition of the possibility of democratic politics rather than a possible subject for those politics? The author argues for the decoupling strategy and affirms the possibility of a democratic politics about borders, anchoring the discussion in the politics of Northern Ireland. The argument turns on the analysis of public reasoning. It is argued first that culturalist accounts of self‐determination are misconceived and that political institutions, and not cultural identity, make collective self‐determination possible. Second, that the demos is constituted by acts of mutual recognition required by the practice of public reasoning, and that this practice cannot be confined with state‐boundaries. Taken together this allows us to conceive of the unity of a people as constituted by practices of public reason, given effect by institutions whose configuration is never finally fixed.

The host galaxy of the super-luminous SN 2010gx and limits on explosive nickel-56 production

Super-luminous supernovae have a tendency to occur in faint host galaxies which are likely to have low mass and low metallicity. While these extremely luminous explosions have been observed from z=0.1 to 1.55, the closest explosions allow more detailed investigations of their host galaxies. We present a detailed analysis of the host galaxy of SN 2010gx (z=0.23), one of the best studied super-luminous type Ic supernovae. The host is a dwarf galaxy (M_g=-17.42+/-0.17) with a high specific star formation rate. It has a remarkably low metallicity of 12+log(O/H)=7.5+/-0.1 dex as determined from the detection of the [OIII] 4363 Angs line. This is the first reliable metallicity determination of a super-luminous stripped-envelope supernova host. We collected deep multi-epoch imaging with Gemini + GMOS between 240-560 days after explosion to search for any sign of radioactive nickel-56, which might provide further insights on the explosion mechanism and the progenitor's nature. We reach griz magnitudes of m_AB~26, but do not detect SN 2010gx at these epochs. The limit implies that any nickel-56 production was similar to or below that of SN 1998bw (a luminous type Ic SN that produced around 0.4 M_sun of nickel-56). The low volumetric rates of these supernovae (~10^-4 of the core-collapse population) could be qualitatively matched if the explosion mechanism requires a combination of low-metallicity (below 0.2 Z_sun), high progenitor mass (>60 M_sun) and high rotation rate (fastest 10% of rotators).

A new look at dual-hop relaying: Performance limits with hardware impairments

Physical transceivers have hardware impairments that create distortions which degrade the performance of communication systems. The vast majority of technical contributions in the area of relaying neglect hardware impairments and, thus, assume ideal hardware. Such approximations make sense in low-rate systems, but can lead to very misleading results when analyzing future high-rate systems. This paper quantifies the impact of hardware impairments on dual-hop relaying, for both amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward protocols. The outage probability (OP) in these practical scenarios is a function of the effective end-to-end signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR). This paper derives new closed-form expressions for the exact and asymptotic OPs, accounting for hardware impairments at the source, relay, and destination. A similar analysis for the ergodic capacity is also pursued, resulting in new upper bounds. We assume that both hops are subject to independent but non-identically distributed Nakagami-m fading. This paper validates that the performance loss is small at low rates, but otherwise can be very substantial. In particular, it is proved that for high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the end-to-end SNDR converges to a deterministic constant, coined the SNDR ceiling, which is inversely proportional to the level of impairments. This stands in contrast to the ideal hardware case in which the end-to-end SNDR grows without bound in the high-SNR regime. Finally, we provide fundamental design guidelines for selecting hardware that satisfies the requirements of a practical relaying system.

Inhuman and Degrading Punishment, Dignity, and the Limits of Retribution

The recent judgment of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Vinter and others v United Kingdom provides a much needed clarification of the parameters of the prohibition on inhuman and degrading punishment under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as it applies to whole life orders of imprisonment under mandatory life sentences – essentially, life imprisonment without parole. The Grand Chamber’s judgment refines Strasbourg doctrine on life imprisonment and the prospect of release and illuminates key principles concerning inhuman and degrading punishment under Article 3 of the ECHR. This article considers the judgment’s profound significance in relation to both human rights and penology.