The Jurisdictional Difficulties of Defining Charter-School Teachers Unions Under Current Labor Law

As charter schools have flourished in form, they have also evolved in variety: parents can send their children to a trilingual immersion school or a school whose classes meet entirely online. The same flexibility that charters offer as an alternative to traditional public schools also makes them difficult to classify for purposes of labor law. When charter-school teachers form a union, it is not clear why the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and not a state labor analogue, should have jurisdiction over a charter-school labor dispute. And yet, the NLRB has asserted jurisdiction in most charter-school cases. This Note examines the NLRB’s test for determining whether the broad protections of the National Labor Relations Act apply to a group of workers in the context of charter-school employees. It proposes a more robust test for differentiating between charter schools for purposes of the Act, and it applies the test to two charter schools

The antimicrobial activity of oil-in-water microemulsions is predicted by their position within the microemulsion stability zone

It has been shown previously that thermodynamically stable oil-in-water microemulsions have significant antimicrobial activity against planktonic cells and biofilm cells over short periods of exposure. It was the aim of this study to identify whether the position of the microemulsion within the microemulsion stability zone of the pseudo-ternary phase structure predicts the efficiency of the antimicrobial action of the microemulsion. Microemulsions were formulated at different points within the microemulsion stability zone. Experiments were performed to observe the kinetics of killing of these microemulsions against selected test microorganisms (Pseudomonas aeruginosa ATCC 9027, Candida albicans ATCC 10231, Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 6538 and Aspergillus niger ATCC 16404). The results indicated that the antimicrobial activity of the microemulsion is dependant upon its position within the zone of stability and is greater nearer the centre of that zone. The results indicate that significant antimicrobial activity can be observed at all points within the zone of microemulsion stability, but that maximal activity is to be found at the centre of that area

Casimir Force for Arbitrary Objects Using the Argument Principle and Boundary Element Methods

Recent progress in the simulation of Casimir forces between various objects has allowed traditional computational electromagnetic solvers to be used to find Casimir forces in arbitrary three-dimensional objects. The underlying theory to these approaches requires knowledge and manipulation of quantum field theory and statistical physics. We present a calculation of the Casimir force using the method of moments via the argument principle. This simplified derivation allows greater freedom in the moment matrix where the argument principle can be used to calculate Casimir forces for arbitrary geometries and materials with the use of various computational electromagnetic techniques.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Extensions Of The Concept Of Exchangeability And Their Applications

Permutation tests provide exact p-values in a wide variety of practical testing situations. But permutation tests rely on the assumption of exchangeability, that is, under the hypothesis, the joint distribution of the observations is invariant under permutations of the subscripts. Observations are exchangeable if they are independent, identically distributed (i.i.d.), or if they are jointly normal with identical covariances. The range of applications of these exact, powerful, distribution-free tests can be enlarged through exchangeability- preserving transforms, asymptotic exchangeability, partial exchangeability, and weak exchangeability. Original exact tests for comparing the slopes of two regression lines and for the analysis of two-factor experimental designs are presented

Analysis of MultiFactor Experimental Designs

In the one-factor case, Good and Lunneborg (2006) showed that the permutation test is superior to the analysis of variance. In the multi-factor case, simulations reveal the reverse is true. The analysis of variance is remarkably robust against departures from normality including instances in which data is drawn from mixtures of normal distributions or from Weibull distributions. The traditional permutation test based on all rearrangements of the data labels is not exact and is more powerful that the analysis of variance only for 2xC designs or when there is only a single significant effect. Permutation tests restricted to synchronized permutations are exact, but lack power