Proposed wavelet-neurofuzzy combined system for power qualityviolations detection and diagnosis

A system for the identification of power quality violations is proposed. It is a two-stage system that employs the potentials of the wavelet transform and the adaptive neurofuzzy networks. For the first stage, the wavelet multiresolution signal analysis is exploited to denoise and then decompose the monitored signals of the power quality events to extract its detailed information. A new optimal feature-vector is suggested and adopted in learning the neurofuzzy classifier. Thus, the amount of needed training data is extensively reduced. A modified organisation map of the neurofuzzy classifier has significantly improved the diagnosis efficiency. Simulation results confirm the aptness and the capability of the proposed system in power quality violations detection and automatic diagnosis

'Travails of Truth: Achieving Justice for Victims of Impunity in Nigeria”'

Following its transition to democracy from an authoritarian military rule marked by gross violations of human rights, Nigeria established the Human Rights Violations Investigations Commission (HRVIC) in 1999. This paper critically examines the contributions of the HRVIC, popularly known as the ‘Oputa Panel,’ to the field of transitional justice and the rule of law. It sets out the process of establishing the Commission, its mandate and how this mandate was interpreted during the course of the Commission’s work. The challenges faced by the Oputa Panel, particularly those that relate to its legal status and relationship with the judiciary, are analyzed in an attempt to draw useful guidelines from these challenges for other truth commissions. Recourse by powerful individuals to the judicial process in a bid to shield themselves from the HRVIC merits particular review as it raises questions regarding the transformation of the judiciary and the rule of law in the wake of an authoritarian regime.

Absent Witnesses and the U.K. Supreme Court: Judicial Deference as Judicial Dialogue?

This article analyses the position of absent witness evidence under the UK Criminal Justice Act 2003 after significant European and domestic case law on the topic. It argues that flexibility in the hearsay regime under the 2003 Act and a permissive approach by appellate courts has increased the potential for fair trial violations in recent years. Moreover, the UK Supreme Court decision in R v Horncastle preserves domestic courts’ authority to determine the meaning of European rights and selectively defer to Parliament. This area of the law demonstrates the scope that the domestic system retains for divergence from European standards.

The Perils of Moviegoing in America, 1896-1950

The Perils of Moviegoing in America is a film history that examines the various physical and (perceived) moral dangers facing audiences during the first fifty years of film exhibition.

Chapter 1: “Conflagration”
As early as 1897, a major fire broke out at a film exhibition in San Francisco, with flames burning the projectionist and nearby audience members. From that point until the widespread adoption of safety stock in 1950, fires were a very common movie-going experience. Hundreds of audience members lost their lives in literally thousands of theatre fires, ranging from early nickelodeons to the movie palaces of the thirties and forties.

Chapter 2: “Thieves Among Us”
Bandits robbed movie theatres on hundreds of occasions from the early days of film exhibition through the end of the Great Depression. They held up ticket booths, and they dynamited theatre safes. They also shot theatre managers, ushers, and audience members, as a great many of the robberies occurred while movies were playing on the screens inside.

Chapter 3: “Bombs Away”
Bombings at movie theatres became common in small towns and large cities on literally hundreds of occasions from 1914 to the start of World War II. Some were incendiary bombs, and some were stench bombs; both could be fatal, whether due to explosions or to the trampling of panicked moviegoers

Chapter 4: “It’s Catching”
Widespread movie-going in the early 20th century provoked an outcry from numerous doctors and optometrists who believed that viewing films could do irreparable harm to the vision of audience members. Medical publications (including the Journal of the American Medical Association) published major studies on this perceived problem, which then filtered into popular-audience magazines and newspapers.

Chapter 5: “The Devil’s Apothecary Shops”
Sitting in the dark with complete strangers proved worrisome for many early filmgoers, who had good reason to be concerned. Darkness meant that prostitutes could easily work in the balconies of some movie theatres, as could “mashers” who molested female patrons (and sometimes children) after the lights were dimmed. That was all in addition to the various murderers who used the cover of darkness to commit their crimes at movie theatres.

Chapter 6: “Blue Sundays”
Blue laws were those regulations that prohibited businesses from operating on Sundays. Most communities across the US had such legislation on their books, which by the nickelodeon era were at odds with the thousands of filmgoers who went to the movies every Sunday. Theatre managers were often arrested, making newspaper headlines over and over again. Police sometimes even arrested entire film audiences as accomplices in the Blue Law violations.

Chapter 7: “Something for Nothing”
In an effort to bolster ticket sales, many movie theatres in the 1910s began to hold lotteries in which lucky audience members won cash prizes; by the time of the Great Depression, lotteries like “Bank Night” became a common aspect of the theatre-going enterprise. However, reception studies have generally overlooked the intense (and sometimes coordinated) efforts by police, politicians, and preachers to end this practice, which they viewed as illegal and immoral gambling.

Rethinking Amnesties: Atrocity, Accountability And Impunity In Post-Conflict Societies.

The notion of accountability that is propagated in transitional justice often appears limited to demands for the prosecution and imprisonment of those who have been involved in serious human rights violations. Amnesties, widely understood as the absence of punishment for wrongdoing, are in turn considered by many scholars and activists as an example par excellence of the kind of Faustian pacts which are made in the name of political expediency in transitions from conflict. Drawing from a range of interdisciplinary literature, as well as research completed by the authors in a number of societies with a violent past, this paper uses amnesties as a case-study to argue for a more rounded interrogation of the notion of accountability in transitional justice. The paper charts the various forms of intersecting accountability which both shape and delimit amnesties at key ‘moments’ concerning their remit, introduction and operation. The paper concludes that the legalistic view of amnesties as equating to impunity and retribution as accountability is inaccurate and misleading. It argues that a broader perspective of accountability speaks directly to the capacity for amnesties to play a more constructive role in post conflict justice and peacemaking.

A Human Rights Triumph? Dictatorship-Era Crimes and the Chilean Supreme Court

This article assesses the dramatic shift in Chilean Supreme Court jurisprudence toward accountability for crimes committed during the dictatorship and sets it within the context of judicial reform and political change. Chile's experience has been identified as emblematic of delayed justice, but an examination of key case law identifies the narrow scope and instability of Supreme Court decision-making. The Court has been uncharacteristically assertive in its application of human rights norms yet vulnerable to external influences. The Chilean example underscores the need for political leadership to address past violations in post-conflict societies. Political inertia impeded justice claims and, as a result, change required significant judicial innovation.

A multiagent network for peer norm enforcement

In a multiagent system where norms are used to regulate the actions agents ought to execute, some agents may decide not to abide by the norms if this can benefit them. Norm enforcement mechanisms are designed to counteract these benefits and thus the motives for not abiding by the norms. In this work we propose a distributed mechanism through which agents in the multiagent system that do not abide by the norms can be ostracised by their peers. An ostracised agent cannot interact anymore and looses all benefits from future interactions. We describe a model for multiagent systems structured as networks of agents, and a behavioural model for the agents in such systems. Furthermore, we provide analytical results which show that there exists an upper bound to the number of potential norm violations when all the agents exhibit certain behaviours. We also provide experimental results showing that both stricter enforcement behaviours and larger percentage of agents exhibiting these behaviours reduce the number of norm violations, and that the network topology influences the number of norm violations. These experiments have been executed under varying scenarios with different values for the number of agents, percentage of enforcers, percentage of violators, network topology, and agent behaviours. Finally, we give examples of applications where the enforcement techniques we provide could be used.

Religiosity, Political Orientation, and Consequentialist Moral Thinking

Three studies demonstrated that the moral judgments of religious individuals and political conservatives are highly insensitive to consequentialist (i.e., outcome-based) considerations. In Study 1, both religiosity and political conservatism predicted a resistance toward consequentialist thinking concerning a range of transgressive acts, independent of other relevant dispositional factors (e.g., disgust sensitivity). Study 2 ruled out differences in welfare sensitivity as an explanation for these findings. In Study 3, religiosity and political conservatism predicted a commitment to judging “harmless” taboo violations morally impermissible, rather than discretionary, despite the lack of negative consequences rising from the act. Furthermore, non-consequentialist thinking style was shown to mediate the relationship religiosity/conservatism had with impermissibility judgments, while intuitive thinking style did not. These data provide further evidence for the influence of religious and political commitments in motivating divergent moral judgments, while highlighting a new dispositional factor, non-consequentialist thinking style, as a mediator of these effects.

Non-apologies and prolonged silences in post-conflict settings: The case of post-colonial Cyprus

Despite the growing use of apologies in post-conflict settings, cases of non-apology remain unaddressed and continue to puzzle scholars. This article focuses on the absence of apology by non-state and anti-state actors by examining the case of the Cypriot armed group EOKA, which has refused to offer an apology to the civilian victims of its ‘anti-colonial’ struggle (1955–1959). Using field data and parliamentary debates, and drawing on comparisons, this article analyses the factors that contributed to a lack of apology. It is argued that the inherited timelessness of Greek nationalism, and the impression of a perpetual need for defence, set up textbook conditions for the development of a hegemonic discourse and prevented an apology for human rights violations.

Tests of multimode quantum nonlocality with homodyne measurements

We investigate the violation of local realism in Bell tests involving homodyne measurements performed on multimode continuous-variable states. By binning the measurement outcomes in an appropriate way, we prove that the Mermin-Klyshko inequality can be violated by an amount that grows exponentially with the number of modes. Furthermore, the maximum violation allowed by quantum mechanics can be attained for any number of modes, albeit requiring a quantum state whose generation is hardly practicable. Interestingly, this exponential increase of the violation holds true even for simpler states, such as multipartite GHZ states. The resulting benefit of using more modes is shown to be significant in practical multipartite Bell tests by analyzing the increase of the robustness to noise with the number of modes. In view of the high efficiency achievable with homodyne detection, our results thus open a possible way to feasible loophole-free Bell tests that are robust to experimental imperfections. We provide an explicit example of a three-mode state (a superposition of coherent states) which results in a significantly high violation of the Mermin-Klyshko inequality (around 10%) with homodyne measurements.

In Defiance of Duverger: The Class Cleavage and the Emergence of District-Level Multiparty Systems in Western Europe

At its core, Duverger’s Law—holding that the number of viable parties in first-past-the-post systems should not exceed two—applies primarily at the district level. While the number of parties nationally may exceed two, district-level party system fragmentation should not. Given that a growing body of research shows that district-level party system fragmentation can indeed exceed two in first-past-the-post systems, I explore whether the major alternative explanation for party system fragmentation—the social cleavage approach—can explain such violations of Duverger’s Law. Testing this argument in several West European elections prior to the adoption of proportional representation, I find evidence favouring a social cleavage explanation: with the expansion of the class cleavage, the average district-level party system eventually came to violate the two-party predictions associated with Duverger’s Law. This suggests that sufficient social cleavage diversity may produce multiparty systems in other first-past-the-post systems.

Exploiting dynamic timing margins in microprocessors for frequency-over-scaling with instruction-based clock adjustment

Static timing analysis provides the basis for setting the clock period of a microprocessor core, based on its worst-case critical path. However, depending on the design, this critical path is not always excited and therefore dynamic timing margins exist that can theoretically be exploited for the benefit of better speed or lower power consumption (through voltage scaling). This paper introduces predictive instruction-based dynamic clock adjustment as a technique to trim dynamic timing margins in pipelined microprocessors. To this end, we exploit the different timing requirements for individual instructions during the dynamically varying program execution flow without the need for complex circuit-level measures to detect and correct timing violations. We provide a design flow to extract the dynamic timing information for the design using post-layout dynamic timing analysis and we integrate the results into a custom cycle-accurate simulator. This simulator allows annotation of individual instructions with their impact on timing (in each pipeline stage) and rapidly derives the overall code execution time for complex benchmarks. The design methodology is illustrated at the microarchitecture level, demonstrating the performance and power gains possible on a 6-stage OpenRISC in-order general purpose processor core in a 28nm CMOS technology. We show that employing instruction-dependent dynamic clock adjustment leads on average to an increase in operating speed by 38% or to a reduction in power consumption by 24%, compared to traditional synchronous clocking, which at all times has to respect the worst-case timing identified through static timing analysis.

Violation of Bell inequalities in larger Hilbert spaces: robustness and challenges

We explore the challenges posed by the violation of Bell-like inequalities by d-dimensional systems exposed to imperfect state-preparation and measurement settings. We address, in particular, the limit of high-dimensional systems, naturally arising when exploring the quantum-to-classical transition. We show that, although suitable Bell inequalities can be violated, in principle, for any dimension of given subsystems, it is in practice increasingly challenging to detect such violations, even if the system is prepared in a maximally entangled state. We characterize the effects of random perturbations on the state or on the measurement settings, also quantifying the efforts needed to certify the possible violations in case of complete ignorance on the system state at hand.

A Pension for Injured Victims of the Troubles: Reparations or Reifying Victim Hierarchy?

Reparations have been often used victim-centred measures to redress both private harm and gross violations of human rights. However, with the increasing occurrence of internal armed conflict and political violence, identities of victims and perpetrators in protracted conflicts can become blurred for some individuals. In countries like Peru and Northern Ireland that have suffered protracted violence, victimhood has been contested around which individuals are seen as innocent and deserving to exclude any members of non-state armed groups from claiming reparations. This article explores the issue of a proposed bill on a pension for injured victims of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It identifies that there is no consistent state practice or human rights jurisprudence in this area, but instead offers a more complex approach through four models that can grapple with the seeming diametrically opposed victimhood and responsibility, by including victimised-perpetrators in reparations programmes such as that proposed for a pension of seriously injured victims in Northern Ireland.

Control design for multicast-aware class-based networks

The expectations of citizens from the Information Technologies (ITs) are increasing as the ITs have become integral part of our society, serving all kinds of activities whether professional, leisure, safety-critical applications or business. Hence, the limitations of the traditional network designs to provide innovative and enhanced services and applications motivated a consensus to integrate all services over packet switching infrastructures, using the Internet Protocol, so as to leverage flexible control and economical benefits in the Next Generation Networks (NGNs). However, the Internet is not capable of treating services differently while each service has its own requirements (e.g., Quality of Service - QoS). Therefore, the need for more evolved forms of communications has driven to radical changes of architectural and layering designs which demand appropriate solutions for service admission and network resources control. This Thesis addresses QoS and network control issues, aiming to improve overall control performance in current and future networks which classify services into classes. The Thesis is divided into three parts. In the first part, we propose two resource over-reservation algorithms, a Class-based bandwidth Over-Reservation (COR) and an Enhanced COR (ECOR). The over-reservation means reserving more bandwidth than a Class of Service (CoS) needs, so the QoS reservation signalling rate is reduced. COR and ECOR allow for dynamically defining over-reservation parameters for CoSs based on network interfaces resource conditions; they aim to reduce QoS signalling and related overhead without incurring CoS starvation or waste of bandwidth. ECOR differs from COR by allowing for optimizing control overhead minimization. Further, we propose a centralized control mechanism called Advanced Centralization Architecture (ACA), that uses a single state-full Control Decision Point (CDP) which maintains a good view of its underlying network topology and the related links resource statistics on real-time basis to control the overall network. It is very important to mention that, in this Thesis, we use multicast trees as the basis for session transport, not only for group communication purposes, but mainly to pin packets of a session mapped to a tree to follow the desired tree. Our simulation results prove a drastic reduction of QoS control signalling and the related overhead without QoS violation or waste of resources. Besides, we provide a generic-purpose analytical model to assess the impact of various parameters (e.g., link capacity, session dynamics, etc.) that generally challenge resource overprovisioning control. In the second part of this Thesis, we propose a decentralization control mechanism called Advanced Class-based resource OverpRovisioning (ACOR), that aims to achieve better scalability than the ACA approach. ACOR enables multiple CDPs, distributed at network edge, to cooperate and exchange appropriate control data (e.g., trees and bandwidth usage information) such that each CDP is able to maintain a good knowledge of the network topology and the related links resource statistics on real-time basis. From scalability perspective, ACOR cooperation is selective, meaning that control information is exchanged dynamically among only the CDPs which are concerned (correlated). Moreover, the synchronization is carried out through our proposed concept of Virtual Over-Provisioned Resource (VOPR), which is a share of over-reservations of each interface to each tree that uses the interface. Thus, each CDP can process several session requests over a tree without requiring synchronization between the correlated CDPs as long as the VOPR of the tree is not exhausted. Analytical and simulation results demonstrate that aggregate over-reservation control in decentralized scenarios keep low signalling without QoS violations or waste of resources. We also introduced a control signalling protocol called ACOR Protocol (ACOR-P) to support the centralization and decentralization designs in this Thesis. Further, we propose an Extended ACOR (E-ACOR) which aggregates the VOPR of all trees that originate at the same CDP, and more session requests can be processed without synchronization when compared with ACOR. In addition, E-ACOR introduces a mechanism to efficiently track network congestion information to prevent unnecessary synchronization during congestion time when VOPRs would exhaust upon every session request. The performance evaluation through analytical and simulation results proves the superiority of E-ACOR in minimizing overall control signalling overhead while keeping all advantages of ACOR, that is, without incurring QoS violations or waste of resources. The last part of this Thesis includes the Survivable ACOR (SACOR) proposal to support stable operations of the QoS and network control mechanisms in case of failures and recoveries (e.g., of links and nodes). The performance results show flexible survivability characterized by fast convergence time and differentiation of traffic re-routing under efficient resource utilization i.e. without wasting bandwidth. In summary, the QoS and architectural control mechanisms proposed in this Thesis provide efficient and scalable support for network control key sub-systems (e.g., QoS and resource control, traffic engineering, multicasting, etc.), and thus allow for optimizing network overall control performance.