A new nonparametric approach to the problem of testing the joint independence of two or more random vectors in arbitrary dimension is developed based on a measure of association determined by ...interpoint distances. The population independence coefficient takes values between 0 and 1, and equals zero if and only if the vectors are independent. We show that the corresponding statistic has a finite limit distribution if and only if the two random vectors are independent; thus we have a consistent test for independence. The coefficient is an increasing function of the absolute value of product moment correlation in the bivariate normal case, and coincides with the absolute value of correlation in the Bernoulli case. A simple modification of the statistic is affine invariant. The independence coefficient and the proposed statistic both have a natural extension to testing the independence of several random vectors. Empirical performance of the test is illustrated via a comparative Monte Carlo study.
The idea of universalism inherited from the French Revolution has been strongly discredited by its colonial history; today, it is also the target of nationalist attacks. What remains of it? Now ...available in English, Markus Messling's critically acclaimed study shows how contemporary Francophone literatures seek, after European universalism, approaches to a new universality, without which knowledge and justice cannot be organised in world society. With a foreword by Souleymane Bachir Diagne ; The idea of universalism inherited from the French Revolution has been strongly discredited by its colonial history; today, it is also the target of nationalist attacks. What remains of it? Now available in English, Markus Messling's critically acclaimed study shows how contemporary Francophone literatures seek, after European universalism, approaches to a new universality, without which knowledge and justice cannot be organised in world society. With a foreword by Souleymane Bachir Diagne
This is the first comprehensive study of John Thomond O’Brien, one of the most significant Irish-born figures in the history of modern South America. Born in Baltinglass, County Wicklow, in the late ...eighteenth-century, O’Brien emigrated to Buenos Aires in the second decade of the nineteenth century, hoping to profit from the burgeoning trade in textiles between Britain and Ireland and the River Plate. In 1813, in Buenos Aires, he enlisted as a cavalry officer in the armies fighting against Spanish rule. His actions on the battlefield, which contributed to the achievement of independence in Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, and his close acquaintance with the two most famous generals of the war, José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar, brought him renown in South America and Europe. O’Brien criss-crossed South America during his colourful post-war career, spending time in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil and Uruguay. In the 1820s, he promoted Irish emigration to Argentina, launched the highest sailing ship in the world on Lake Titicaca and led the campaign of support for O’Connell and Catholic Emancipation among the Irish in Buenos Aires. In the 1830s, he explored the Amazon for gold and was imprisoned in Buenos Aires by the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. In the 1840s, he represented the Montevidean government in London and Paris. During the last decade of his life, before his death in 1861, he campaigned to have monuments erected across South America to the leaders of the independence campaign. O’Brien’s compelling story mirrors that of a tumultuous period in Irish and South American history.
In a graph G=(V,E) (not necessarily be connected) an independent set S⊆V is said to be an outer connected independent set if ω(G−S)≤ω(G), where ω(G) is the number of components in G. The maximum ...cardinality of an outer connected independent set is called the outer connected independence number and it is denoted by Ioc(G). This concept was introduced in I. Sahul Hamid, R. Gnanaprahasam, M. Fatima Mary Outer Connected Independence in Graphs, Discrete Math, Algorithm, Appl Vol. 7, No. 3 1550039 (2015) 11 pages DOI. This paper examine the effect of Ioc when G is modified by deleting an edge.
After a critical evaluation of the proposal by van Dijk and Vos to make judicial independence and accountability measurable, this paper discusses a number of basic methodological decisions that need ...to be made before meaningful indicators can be constructed. The paper then moves on to deplore the lack of knowledge regarding the effects of judicial councils and proposes that more research be carried out to reduce our knowledge deficit. It further describes the rising importance of prosecutors and the complete lack of indicators regarding prosecutorial accountability. It argues that producing indicators with regard to prosecutors could add a lot more value than yet another indicator on judicial independence.
Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single ...text, the Declaration of Independence. In this insightful volume, Carli Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety of intellectual traditions, and explores its usage in two key legal texts of the Founding Era, the Declaration and William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England.For Blackstone, the pursuit of happiness was a science of jurisprudence, by which his students could know, and then rightly apply, the first principles of the Common Law. For the founders, the pursuit of happiness was the individual right to pursue a life lived in harmony with the law of nature and a public duty to govern in accordance with that law. Both applications suggest we consider anew how the phrase, and its underlying legal philosophies, were understood in the founding era. With this work, Conklin makes important contributions to the fields of early American intellectual and legal history.
Pseudocapacitance holds great promise for energy density improvement of supercapacitors, but electrode materials show practical capacity far below theoretical values due to limited ion diffusion ...accessibility and/or low electron transferability. Herein, inducing two kinds of straight ion-movement channels and fast charge storage/delivery for enhanced reaction kinetics is proposed. Very thick electrodes consisting of vertically aligned and ordered arrays of NiCo2S4-nanoflake-covered slender nickel columns (NCs) are achieved via a scalable route. The vertical standing ∼5 nm ultrathin NiCo2S4 flakes build a porous covering with straight ion channels without the “dead volume”, leading to thickness-independent capacity. Benefiting from the architecture acting as a “superhighway” for ultrafast ion/electron transport and providing a large surface area, high electrical conductivity, and abundant availability of electrochemical active sites, the NiCo2S4@NC-array electrode achieves a specific capacity up to 486.9 mAh g–1. The electrode even can work with a high specific capacity of 150 mAh g–1 at a very high current density of 100 A g–1. In particular, due to the advanced structure features, the electrode exhibits excellent flexibility with a unexpected improvement of capacity when being largely bent and excellent cycling stability with an obvious resistance decrease after the cycles. An asymmetric pseudocapacitor applying the NiCo2S4@NC-array as a positive electrode achieves an energy density of 66.5 Wh kg–1 at a power density of 400 W kg–1, superior to the most reported values for asymmetric devices with NiCo2S4 electrodes. This work provides a scalable approach with mold-replication-like simplicity toward achieving thickness-independent electrodes with ultrafast ion/electron transport for energy storage.
This book investigates the causes and consequences of congressional attacks on the US Supreme Court, arguing that the extent of public support for judicial independence constitutes the practical ...limit of judicial independence. First, the book presents a historical overview of Court-curbing proposals in Congress. Then, building on interviews with Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, and judicial and legislative staffers, the book theorizes that congressional attacks are driven by public discontent with the Court. From this theoretical model, predictions are derived about the decision to engage in Court-curbing and judicial responsiveness to Court-curbing activity in Congress. The Limits of Judicial Independence draws on illustrative archival evidence, systematic analysis of an original dataset of Court-curbing proposals introduced in Congress from 1877 onward and judicial decisions.
Random access coding is an information task that has been extensively studied and found many applications in quantum information. In this scenario, Alice receives an n-bit string x, and wishes to ...encode x into a quantum state x , such that Bob, when receiving the state x , can choose any bit i n and recover the input bit xi with high probability. Here we study two variants: parity-oblivious random access codes (RACs), where we impose the cryptographic property that Bob cannot infer any information about the parity of any subset of bits of the input apart from the single bits xi; and even-parity-oblivious RACs, where Bob cannot infer any information about the parity of any even-size subset of bits of the input. In this paper, we provide the optimal bounds for parity-oblivious quantum RACs and show that they are asymptotically better than the optimal classical ones. Our results provide a large non-contextuality inequality violation and resolve the main open problem in a work of Spekkens et al (2009 Phys. Rev. Lett.102 010401). Second, we provide the optimal bounds for even-parity-oblivious RACs by proving their equivalence to a non-local game and by providing tight bounds for the success probability of the non-local game via semidefinite programming. In the case of even-parity-oblivious RACs, the cryptographic property holds also in the device independent model.