AN OVERVIEW OF THE VIRGINIA UCITA

Virginia has taken a strong and important leadership in establishing rules for the Information Highway through the Joint Committee on Technology and Science (JCOTS) and Delegate Joe T. May. Without the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) no established rules exist in common law for the Information Highway, which means that each judge must create the rules in each case as it arises. Every judge will make his own rules for the particular case. This results in great inconsistency and uncertainty adversely affecting the realization of the full potential of the Information Age economy. Governor Gilmore states: In 2000, Virginia was the first state to enact UCITA, and I was proud to be the first governor in the nation to sign it into law. We did so with the expectation that a sound legal structure would attract entrepreneurs to locate in Virginia, generate prosperity here, and enhance our quality of life. It is inconceivable that an electronic signature or an electronic contract, or term thereof, should be valid in Virginia but not in California, or indeed, in the U.S. but not in the U.K. or France. The Internet is borderless and faceless. E-Commerce is driving our economy and enhancing productivity and economic growth. Not very long ago, we transacted business face-to-face. Now we do business where and whenever we choose. On every airline flight, laptop computers are open and contracts are being made while flying over an unknown state with a party at an unknown location. Has a valid contract been entered into? With whom? Did the party have authority to contract? What are the terms of the contract? Can the contract be attributed to a particular person? What law governs? What forum has jurisdiction? All these questions need answers

A Conversation With Ring Lardner, Jr, Frances Chaney, Studs Terkel, John Henry Faulk. Revisiting the 50\u27s: The Blacklist in America

On the evening of February 20, Columbia College sponsored a special dialogue, Revisting the 50\u27s: The Blacklist in America, in association with the American Issues Forum. The discussion was moderated by Anthony Loeb, chair of the Film Department. Photographer: Randy Donofrio. 21 pages.https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/conversations/1001/thumbnail.jp

Parity Violating Measurements of Neutron Densities

Parity violating electron nucleus scattering is a clean and powerful tool for measuring the spatial distributions of neutrons in nuclei with unprecedented accuracy. Parity violation arises from the interference of electromagnetic and weak neutral amplitudes, and the $Z^0$ of the Standard Model couples primarily to neutrons at low $Q^2$. The data can be interpreted with as much confidence as electromagnetic scattering. After briefly reviewing the present theoretical and experimental knowledge of neutron densities, we discuss possible parity violation measurements, their theoretical interpretation, and applications. The experiments are feasible at existing facilities. We show that theoretical corrections are either small or well understood, which makes the interpretation clean. The quantitative relationship to atomic parity nonconservation observables is examined, and we show that the electron scattering asymmetries can be directly applied to atomic PNC because the observables have approximately the same dependence on nuclear shape.Comment: 38 pages, 7 ps figures, very minor changes, submitted to Phys. Rev.

A quantum Monte-Carlo method for fermions, free of discretization errors

In this work we present a novel quantum Monte-Carlo method for fermions, based on an exact decomposition of the Boltzmann operator $exp(-\beta H)$. It can be seen as a synthesis of several related methods. It has the advantage that it is free of discretization errors, and applicable to general interactions, both for ground-state and finite-temperature calculations. The decomposition is based on low-rank matrices, which allows faster calculations. As an illustration, the method is applied to an analytically solvable model (pairing in a degenerate shell) and to the Hubbard model.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Quantitative cross-species extrapolation between humans and fish: The case of the anti-depressant fluoxetine

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Fish are an important model for the pharmacological and toxicological characterization of human pharmaceuticals in drug discovery, drug safety assessment and environmental toxicology. However, do fish respond to pharmaceuticals as humans do? To address this question, we provide a novel quantitative cross-species extrapolation approach (qCSE) based on the hypothesis that similar plasma concentrations of pharmaceuticals cause comparable target-mediated effects in both humans and fish at similar level of biological organization (Read-Across Hypothesis). To validate this hypothesis, the behavioural effects of the anti-depressant drug fluoxetine on the fish model fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas) were used as test case. Fish were exposed for 28 days to a range of measured water concentrations of fluoxetine (0.1, 1.0, 8.0, 16, 32, 64 μg/L) to produce plasma concentrations below, equal and above the range of Human Therapeutic Plasma Concentrations (HTPCs). Fluoxetine and its metabolite, norfluoxetine, were quantified in the plasma of individual fish and linked to behavioural anxiety-related endpoints. The minimum drug plasma concentrations that elicited anxiolytic responses in fish were above the upper value of the HTPC range, whereas no effects were observed at plasma concentrations below the HTPCs. In vivo metabolism of fluoxetine in humans and fish was similar, and displayed bi-phasic concentration-dependent kinetics driven by the auto-inhibitory dynamics and saturation of the enzymes that convert fluoxetine into norfluoxetine. The sensitivity of fish to fluoxetine was not so dissimilar from that of patients affected by general anxiety disorders. These results represent the first direct evidence of measured internal dose response effect of a pharmaceutical in fish, hence validating the Read-Across hypothesis applied to fluoxetine. Overall, this study demonstrates that the qCSE approach, anchored to internal drug concentrations, is a powerful tool to guide the assessment of the sensitivity of fish to pharmaceuticals, and strengthens the translational power of the cross-species extrapolation