Solving a Pleading Plague: Why Federal Courts Should Strike Insufficient Affirmative Defenses under the Twombly-Iqbal Plausibility Standard

The plausibility standard is the remedy to the rampant pleading of meritless affirmative defenses in federal courts. Set forth in Bell Atlantic Corp v. Twombly, and later clarified in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the plausibility standard requires pleadings to contain sufficient factual allegations that give rise to a plausible claim for relief. In both Twombly and Iqbal, the Supreme Court used the plausibility approach to dismiss factually-deficient complaints. Applying the plausibility test to insufficient affirmative defenses produces the same result. The central proposition of this Note is that federal courts should analyze affirmative defenses under the Twombly-Iqbal plausibility standard. In order to provide context for this argument, it is first necessary to explain the process of pleading in the federal courts. By examining the development and framework of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and discussing the historical and current state of the federal pleading standard, Part II of this Note is dedicated to this task. District courts are split on whether the plausibility standard should apply to affirmative defenses. Despite this divide, no Circuit Court of Appeals has directly ruled on this issue. Part III of this Note provides these courts with the pragmatic and textual reasons to support extending the plausibility standard to affirmative defenses in the future

Solving a Pleading Plague: Why Federal Courts Should Strike Insufficient Affirmative Defenses under the Twombly-Iqbal Plausibility Standard

The plausibility standard is the remedy to the rampant pleading of meritless affirmative defenses in federal courts. Set forth in Bell Atlantic Corp v. Twombly, and later clarified in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the plausibility standard requires pleadings to contain sufficient factual allegations that give rise to a plausible claim for relief. In both Twombly and Iqbal, the Supreme Court used the plausibility approach to dismiss factually-deficient complaints. Applying the plausibility test to insufficient affirmative defenses produces the same result. The central proposition of this Note is that federal courts should analyze affirmative defenses under the Twombly-Iqbal plausibility standard. In order to provide context for this argument, it is first necessary to explain the process of pleading in the federal courts. By examining the development and framework of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and discussing the historical and current state of the federal pleading standard, Part II of this Note is dedicated to this task. District courts are split on whether the plausibility standard should apply to affirmative defenses. Despite this divide, no Circuit Court of Appeals has directly ruled on this issue. Part III of this Note provides these courts with the pragmatic and textual reasons to support extending the plausibility standard to affirmative defenses in the future

Charles M. Breder, Jr.: Atlantis Expedition, 1934

Dr. Charles M. Breder participated on the 1934 expedition of the Atlantis from Woods Hole, Massachusetts to Panama and back and kept a field diary of daily activities. The Atlantis expedition of 1934, led by Prof. A. E. Parr, was a milestone in the history of scientific discovery in the Sargasso Sea and the West Indies. Although naturalists had visited the Sargasso Sea for many years, the Atlantis voyage was the first attempt to investigate in detailed quantitative manner biological problems about this varying, intermittent ‘false’ bottom of living, floating plants and associated fauna. In addition to Dr. Breder, the party also consisted of Dr. Alexander Forbes, Harvard University and Trustee of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI); T. S. Greenwood, WHOI hydrographer; M. D. Burkenroad, Yale University’s Bingham Laboratory, carcinology and Sargasso epizoa; M. Bishop, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Zoology Dept., collections and preparations and H. Sears, WHOI ichthyologist. The itinerary included the following waypoints: Woods Hole, the Bermudas, Turks Islands, Kingston, Colon, along the Mosquito Bank off of Nicaragua, off the north coast of Jamaica, along the south coast of Cuba, Bartlett Deep, to off the Isle of Pines, through the Yucatan Channel, off Havana, off Key West, to Miami, to New York City, and then the return to Woods Hole. During the expedition, Breder collected rare and little-known flying fish species and developed a method for hatching and growing flying fish larvae. (PDF contains 48 pages

Remote-sensing-based analysis of the 1996 surge of Northern Inylchek Glacier, central Tien Shan, Kyrgyzstan

The evolution of Northern Inylchek Glacier and its proglacial lake - Upper Lake Merzbacher - during its 1996 surge and the surrounding decades is analyzed with remote sensing imagery. Overall retreat of the glacier from 1943 to 1996 enlarged the lake to 4 km long and ≈ 100 m deep. The surge in 1996 initiated between 12 September and 7 October and advanced the glacier by 3.7 km to override most of Upper Lake Merzbacher. The surge phase probably ended in December 1996 and involved mean flow velocities across the lower trunk of the glacier that reached 50 m d− 1 over a 32-day period. Water displaced by the surge from Upper Lake Merzbacher, totalling 1.5 × 108 m3 in volume, accelerated filling of Lower Lake Merzbacher downvalley and helped trigger this marginal ice-dammed lake to outburst in a jökulhlaup around late November/early December. The characteristics and duration of the surge render it as similar to temperate glacier surges elsewhere. It may have been facilitated by low basal friction caused by water-saturated sediments in the upper lake bed. Furthermore, bathymetric measurements show that the surge evacuated much sediment into the upper lake, causing its depth to reduce from 20 to 30 m in 1996 to 8 m by 2005 and 2 m by 2011; the corresponding deposition rates imply glacier-catchment specific mean sediment yields of 1.4 to 3.4 × 103 Mg km− 2 a− 1 in the years after the surge. Our study documents novel interactions within a cascade system of glaciers and lakes that exhibits surging and outburst-flood behavior

Previous attentional set can induce an attentional blink with task-irrelevant initial targets

Identification of a second target is often impaired by the requirement to process a prior target in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). This is termed the attentional blink. Even when the first target is task-irrelevant an attentional blink may occur providing this first target shares similar features with the second target (contingent capture). An RSVP experiment was undertaken to assess whether this first target can still cause an attentional blink when it did not require a response and did not share any features with the following target. The results revealed that such task-irrelevant targets can induce an attentional blink providing that they were task-relevant on a previous block of trials. This suggests that irrelevant focal stimuli can distract attention on the basis of a previous attentional set

Improving Lifelong Learning by Fostering Students' Learning Strategies at University

The foundation of how students usually learn is laid early in their academic lives. However, many or even most students do not primarily rely on those learning strategies that are most favorable from a scientific point of view. To change students' learning behavior when they start their university education, we developed a computer-based adaptive learning environment to train favorable learning strategies and change students' habits using them. This learning environment pursues three main goals: acquiring declarative and conditional knowledge about learning strategies, consolidating that knowledge, and applying these learning strategies in practice. In this report, we describe four experimental studies conducted to optimize this learning environment (n = 336). With those studies, we improved the learning environment with respect to how motivating it is, investigated an efficient way to consolidate knowledge, and explored how to facilitate the formation of effective implementation intentions for applying learning strategies and changing learning habits. Our strategy-training module is implemented in the curriculum for freshman students at the Department of Psychology, University of Freiburg (Germany). Around 120 students take part in our program every year. An open version of this training intervention is freely available to everyone

Bcl-XL is qualitatively different from and ten times more effective than Bcl-2 when expressed in a breast cancer cell line

BACKGROUND: Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL are anti-apoptotic paralogues that inhibit apoptosis elicited by a wide variety of stimuli, and play critical roles in cancer development and resistance to treatment. Many clinical studies have indicated that expression of these anti-apoptotic proteins in tumours is associated with poor prognosis. It has therefore been assumed that in cells the essential difference between Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL involves regulation of expression and that they are otherwise functionally similar. To examine this issue, we have compared the function of the proteins and of mutants of Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL specifically targeted to different subcellular sites. METHODS: We generated clones of the human breast cancer line MCF-7 stably expressing known amounts of Bcl-2, or Bcl-XL as determined by quantitative immunoblotting. Clones expressing equivalent amounts of wild-type and mutants of Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL with subcellular localization restricted to the cytoplasm, endoplasmic reticulum or outer mitochondrial membrane were studied in both MCF-7 and Rat-1 fibroblasts. In MCF-7 cells we measured the functional activities of these proteins in preventing apoptosis induced by four different agents (doxorubicin, ceramide, thapsigargin, TNF-α). Etoposide and low serum were used to compare the effect of Bcl-2, Bcl-XL and mutants located at the endoplasmic reticulum on induction of apoptosis in fibroblasts. RESULTS: We noted both qualitative and quantitative differences in the functional activity of these two anti-apoptotic proteins in cells: Bcl-2 localized to the endoplasmic reticulum inhibits apoptosis induced by ceramide and thapsigargin but not by doxorubicin or TNFα, while Bcl-XL at the endoplasmic reticulum is active against all four drugs. In fibroblasts Bcl-2 localized to the ER did not prevent cell death due to etoposide whereas Bcl-XL in the same location did. Finally in MCF-7 cells, Bcl-XL is approximately ten times more active than Bcl-2 in repressing apoptosis induced by doxorubicin. This difference can be manifest as a large difference in clonal survival. CONCLUSION: When examined in the same cellular context, Bcl-2 and Bcl-XL differ substantially in the potency with which they inhibit apoptosis, mediated in part by differences in the inhibition of specific subcellular pathways

Asynchronous BCI control using high-frequency SSVEP

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP) is a visual cortical response evoked by repetitive stimuli with a light source flickering at frequencies above 4 Hz and could be classified into three ranges: low (up to 12 Hz), medium (12-30) and high frequency (> 30 Hz). SSVEP-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) are principally focused on the low and medium range of frequencies whereas there are only a few projects in the high-frequency range. However, they only evaluate the performance of different methods to extract SSVEP.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This research proposed a high-frequency SSVEP-based asynchronous BCI in order to control the navigation of a mobile object on the screen through a scenario and to reach its final destination. This could help impaired people to navigate a robotic wheelchair. There were three different scenarios with different difficulty levels (easy, medium and difficult). The signal processing method is based on Fourier transform and three EEG measurement channels.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The research obtained accuracies ranging in classification from 65% to 100% with Information Transfer Rate varying from 9.4 to 45 bits/min.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our proposed method allows all subjects participating in the study to control the mobile object and to reach a final target without prior training.</p

Monotherapy Trials of New Antiepileptic Drugs

A number of clinical trials that test the efficacy and safety of the newer antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) have recently been concluded. Two dose-response trials in inpatients with refractory partial seizures and outpatients with newly diagnosed partial epilepsy established the efficacy of gabapentin as monotherapy. Lamotrigine was found to have efficacy similar to that of phenytoin and carbamazepine (CBZ) and to be better tolerated than CBZ in patients with newly diagnosed epilepsy. It was also shown to have efficacy as monotherapy in partial seizures, based on the results of an active controlled trial, and in the treatment of absence seizures, based on the results of a responder-enriched study. Topiramate as monotherapy was found to be efficacious for treatment of partial-onset seizures, based on the results of a single-center dose-response trial. A dose-response trial that tested the efficacy of tiagabine monotherapy in patients with refractory partial epilepsy was uninformative. Oxcarbazepine was found to be safe and efficacious in four comparative trials in patients with newly diagnosed epilepsy as well as in one placebo-controlled inpatient trial in patients with refractory partial seizures.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65625/1/j.1528-1157.1997.tb05201.x.pd

Postexposure Treatment and Animal Rabies, Ontario, 1958-2000

This paper investigates the relationship between animal rabies and postexposure treatment (PET) in Ontario by examining the introduction of human diploid cell vaccine (HDCV) in 1980 and the initiation of an oral rabies vaccination program for wildlife in 1989. Introducing HDCV led to an immediate doubling of treatments. Both animal rabies and human treatments declined rapidly after the vaccination program was introduced, but human treatments have leveled off at approximately 1,000 per year