Alternatives to Mainstream Alternative Dispute Resolution: Eliminating Forced Arbitration Agreements as a Condition of Employment

Today, many employers require their employees, as a condition of employment, to agree to arbitrate employment-related legal claims rather than pursue them in court. While arbitration can be mutually beneficial, allowing parties to avoid the cost, time, publicity, and unpredictability associated with traditional litigation, mandatory arbitration often lacks the same procedural safeguards afforded by the justice system. Forced arbitration not only deprives employees of their right to sue their employer in a public court, but it also denies them any meaningful voluntary choice to surrender that right. This Article takes a close look at a variety of workplace grievance procedures with a particular focus on peer-centered processes. This Article then argues that preserving employee choice to pursue litigation or internal dispute resolution with peer advocacy remains the most effective way to promote fairness and justice for employees. Finally, this Article suggests several workable alternatives to mandatory arbitration that are cost-effective and advantageous to employees and employers alike

STAT5-Interacting proteins: A synopsis of proteins that regulate STAT5 activity

© 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Signal Transducers and Activators of Transcription (STATs) are key components of the JAK/STAT pathway. Of the seven STATs, STAT5A and STAT5B are of particular interest for their critical roles in cellular differentiation, adipogenesis, oncogenesis, and immune function. The interactions of STAT5A and STAT5B with cytokine/hormone receptors, nuclear receptors, transcriptional regulators, proto-oncogenes, kinases, and phosphatases all contribute to modulating STAT5 activity. Among these STAT5 interacting proteins, some serve as coactivators or corepressors to regulate STAT5 transcriptional activity and some proteins can interact with STAT5 to enhance or repress STAT5 signaling. In addition, a few STAT5 interacting proteins have been identified as positive regulators of STAT5 that alter serine and tyrosine phosphorylation of STAT5 while other proteins have been identified as negative regulators of STAT5 via dephosphorylation. This review article will discuss how STAT5 activity is modulated by proteins that physically interact with STAT5

Accuracy threshold for concatenated error detection in one dimension

Estimates of the quantum accuracy threshold often tacitly assume that it is possible to interact arbitrary pairs of qubits in a quantum computer with a failure rate that is independent of the distance between them. None of the many physical systems that are candidates for quantum computing possess this property. Here we study the performance of a concatenated error-detection code in a system that permits only nearest-neighbor interactions in one dimension. We make use of a new message-passing scheme that maximizes the number of errors that can be reliably corrected by the code. Our numerical results indicate that arbitrarily accurate universal quantum computation is possible if the probability of failure of each elementary physical operation is below approximately 10^{-5}. This threshold is three orders of magnitude lower than the highest known.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, now with error bar

High threshold universal quantum computation on the surface code

We present a comprehensive and self-contained simplified review of the quantum computing scheme of Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 190504 (2007), which features a 2-D nearest neighbor coupled lattice of qubits, a threshold error rate approaching 1%, natural asymmetric and adjustable strength error correction and low overhead arbitrarily long-range logical gates. These features make it by far the best and most practical quantum computing scheme devised to date. We restrict the discussion to direct manipulation of the surface code using the stabilizer formalism, both of which we also briefly review, to make the scheme accessible to a broad audience.Comment: 18 pages, 28 figures, state distillation section correcte