Empirical Perspectives on Mediation and Malpractice

The use of mediation in the medical malpractice context is examined. The impact of any court-related alternative dispute resolution program is also discussed

Pretrial Case Management Under the Amended Rules: Too Many Words for a Good Idea

To cope with the increasing complexity of embedded and cyber-physical system design, different system-level design approaches are proposed which start from abstract models and implement them using design flows with high degrees of automation. However, creating models of such systems and also formulating the mathematical problems arising in these design flows are themselves challenging tasks. A promising approach is the composable construction of these models and problems from more basic entities. Unfortunately, it is non-trivial to propose such compositional formulations today because the current practice in the electronic design automation domain tends to be on using imperative languages and frameworks due to legacy and performance-oriented reasons. This thesis addresses the system design complexity by first promoting proper formalisms and frameworks for capturing models and formulating design-space exploration problems for electronic system-level design in a declarative style; and second, propose realizations based on the industrially accepted languages and frameworks which hold the interesting properties such as composability and parallelism. For modeling, ForSyDe, a denotational system-level modeling formalism for heterogeneous embedded systems is chosen, extended with timed domains to make it more appropriate for capturing cyber-physical systems, and mapped on top of the IEEE standard system design language SystemC. The realized modeling framework, called ForSyDe-SystemC, can be used for modeling systems of heterogeneous nature and their composition to form more sophisticated systems and also conducting parallel and distributed simulation for boosting the simulation speed. Another extension to ForSyDe, named wrapper processes, introduces the ability to compose formal ForSyDe models with legacy IP blocks running in external execution environments to perform a heterogeneous co-simulation. In platform-based design flows, the correct and optimal mapping of an application model onto a flexible platform involves solving a hard problem, named design space exploration. This work proposes Tahmuras, a constraint- based framework to construct generic design space exploration problems as the composition of three individual sub-problems: the application, the platform, and the mapping and scheduling problems. In this way, the model of the design space exploration problem in Tahmuras is automatically generated for each combination of application semantics, target platform, and mapping and scheduling policy simply by composing their respective problems. Using constraint programming, problems can be modeled in a declarative style, while they can be solved in a variety of different styles, including imperative solving heuristics commonly used to solve difficult problems. Efficient parallel solvers exists for constraint programming. Den ökande komplexiteten är en stor utmaning för konstruktionen av framtida inbyggda system. För att möta utmaningen utvecklas nu konstruktionsmetoder som har som mål att starta från en abstrakt modell och att generera en implementering genom ett konstruktionsflöde med hög automatiseringsgrad. Dessvärre är dock skapandet av abstrakta systemmodeller och formaliseringen av de relaterade matematiska problemen i sig ett mycket utmanande problem. Konstruktion genom komposition av basenheter är en lovande idé, men tyvärr är det väldigt svårt att introducera metoden i dagens industriella konstruktionsflöden på grund av imperativa programmeringsspråk och ett gammalt arv i form av existerande kodbas och äldre konstruktioner. Avhandlingen adresserar komplexiten inom systemkonstruktion genom att föreslå passande formalismer för att uttrycka modeller i en deklarativ stil och angripa problemet att hitta en passande implementering. Dessutom visar avhandlingen hur dessa formalismer kan realiseras i en form som kan användas i ett industriellt sammanhang utan att förlora formalismens viktiga grundläggande egenskaper som komposition och parallelism. Modelleringen använder och utökar ForSyDe, en konstruktionsmetod för heterogena inbyggda system. Tilläggen består av en modelleringsmodell som kan fånga specifika egenskaper hos heterogena inbyggda system, samt en implementering av ForSyDe i SystemC, ett industriellt modelleringsspråk som är standardiserat av IEEE. Den nya utvecklingsmiljön, ForSyDe-SystemC, kan användas för att modellera inbyggda system, komponera systemmodeller till större system, samt möjliggör genomförandet av parallella och distribuerade simuleringar med medföljande hög simuleringshastighet. Avhandlingen introducerar också “wrapper”-konceptet i ForSyDe som möjliggör integrationen av existerande modeller och system som en del av en formell ForSyDe-modell och deras co-simulering. ForSyDe-SystemC har använts inom EU-projekt av industriella partner för modellering av egna system. Att hitta en korrekt och effektiv implementering av en abstrakt systemmodell är målet inom aktiviteten “design space exploration” (DSE) som är ett svårt problem för parametriserbara och flexibla plattformar. Avhandlingen presenterar två generationer av Tahmuras, som är baserade på villkorsprogrammering och har som mål att konstruera DSE-problemet som en komposition av tre olika delproblem: applikation, plattform, och bindning. Ett integrerat DSE-problem kan sedan automatiskt genereras genom en kombination av dessa delproblem. Olika metoder, från heuristisk till komplett sökning, kan användas inom villkorsprogrammering för att lösa DSE-problemet. För att visa Tahmuras potential har DSE-metoden validerats med hjälp av olika systemapplikationer av skilda tidsegenskaper och olika plattformar. QC 20141117</p

Ettore Majorana's course on Theoretical Physics: a recent discovery

We analyze in some detail the course of Theoretical Physics held by Ettore Majorana at the University of Naples in 1938, just before his mysterious disappearance. In particular we present the recently discovered "Moreno Paper", where all the lecture notes are reported. Six of these lectures are not present in the collection of the original manuscripts conserved at the Domus Galilaeana in Pisa, consisting of only ten lectures.Comment: AMS-latex, 16 pages, 2 figure

The Market for Preclusion in Merger Litigation

The recent finding that corporate litigation involving Delaware companies very often takes place outside of Delaware has disturbed the long-settled understanding of how merger litigation works. With many, even most, cases being filed and ultimately resolved outside of Delaware, commentators warn that the trend is a threat to shareholders, to Delaware, and to the integrity of corporate law generally. Although the out-of-Delaware trend suggests that litigants are seeking to use the procedural rules of other jurisdictions to their advantage, we argue that the result need not threaten the interests of any of the stakeholders in deal litigation. We reframe the process of resolving merger litigation as a market for preclusion, in which plaintiffs seek to sell and defendants seek to buy an important element of transactional certainty. Moreover, this market has the potential to efficiently process and price shareholder complaints while also providing benefits to Delaware and to corporate law more generally. We are not blind to reality, however, and also address how a well-functioning market for preclusion can be distorted by the opportunistic conduct of plaintiffs’ and defense attorneys alike. Greater judicial oversight is necessary to preserve the benefits of this market while preventing the distortions brought on through opportunistic conduct. In order to make this a reality, however, judges in different courts must have a means of communicating and coordinating across state lines. We therefore offer a theory of horizontal comity in which judges build trust and cooperation through communication across jurisdictional boundaries. We use this theory to suggest a set of concrete policy proposals designed to provide for a more efficient market for preclusion