Group testing problems in experimental molecular biology

In group testing, the task is to determine the distinguished members of a set of objects L by asking subset queries of the form ``does the subset Q of L contain a distinguished object?'' The primary biological application of group testing is for screening libraries of clones with hybridization probes. This is a crucial step in constructing physical maps and for finding genes. Group testing has also been considered for sequencing by hybridization. Another important application includes screening libraries of reagents for useful chemically active zones. This preliminary report discusses some of the constrained group testing problems which arise in biology.Comment: 7 page

On fiber diameters of continuous maps

We present a surprisingly short proof that for any continuous map $f : \mathbb{R}^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^m$, if $n>m$, then there exists no bound on the diameter of fibers of $f$. Moreover, we show that when $m=1$, the union of small fibers of $f$ is bounded; when $m>1$, the union of small fibers need not be bounded. Applications to data analysis are considered.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Lynching and the Law in Georgia Circa 1931: A Chapter in the Legal Career of Judge Elbert Tuttle

Elbert Parr Tuttle joined the federal bench in 1954, shortly after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. In 1960, he became the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the court with jurisdiction over most of the deep south. As Chief Judge, he forged a jurisprudence that proved effective in overcoming the intransigence and outright rebellion of those who had long denied fundamental constitutional rights to African Americans. This Essay traces an episode that occurred in 1931, when Tuttle spearheaded an effort to obtain a fair trial for John Downer, a black man accused by a white woman of rape. As a National Guard officer, Tuttle joined in an effort that saved Downer from lynching by a mob. He then took up Downer\u27s cause in the courts. Even with the help of a number of highly regarded attorneys, he was unable to save Downer from death in Georgia\u27s electric chair. Tuttle\u27s commitment to obtaining justice for one man, John Downer, would be echoed in a long and distinguished career. Elbert Tuttle died at the age of ninety-eight on June 23, 1996. An editorial in The New York Times commemorating his life and work closed with a fitting epitaph: He brought honor to his calling and justice to millions of Americans

Towards Domain-Specific Modeling Methodology for Avionic Safety-Critical Systems

The use of domain-specific modeling languages and associated methodologies, provide support in application domain where the safe and reliable operations of the systems are of paramount importance to the users and organizations, and wherein the domains are well understood and documented. One such area of domain-specific modeling application is in the field of avionic systems. For software systems to be used onboard aircrafts they must be certified, and as such certification protocols have been established for developing these safety-critical systems. These established protocols are usually represented as textual documents and inherently are difficult to apply directly in software development environments. The work presented herein proposes a graphical modeling representation for an avionic software system certification specification and an accompanying model-driven methodology for implementing the certification specification. This work is based on the RTCA Software Consideration in Airborne Systems and Equipment specification and the Unified Modeling Language. The presented model-driven methodology, incorporates the use of formal specification techniques to satisfy many of the verification requirements of the RTCA specification. The benefit of this work is in the transformation of textual description to graphical models in support of precise software system development, and a rigorous model-driven software development methodology for avionic soft-ware system development