Lightweight load support serves as vibration damper

Omnidirectional antennas and solar panels can be supported by a thin-walled tubular strut. Silicon grease is used as the vibration-damping medium and a coil spring supports static loads

Modern Logic and Judicial Decision Making: A Sketch of One View

Two hundred years elapsed before the nineteenth century logicians Boole, De Morgan, and others, finally succeeded in formally developing the calculus of reason-ing first suggested by the German mathematician, Leibniz. It is, perhaps, to the credit of the legal profession that less than one century has subsequently elapsed, and already some lawyers and legal writers, along with other scholars, are beginning to explore the relationship between modern logic and law. What is attempted here is to outline the bare bones of one tentative way of looking at the relationship between modern logic and the judicial decision process. From the useful vantage point of a Lasswellian social process framework of analysis, logic and judicial decision making are considered contextually within that total mani-fold of events that we call the world. Thus viewed, the judicial decision making process is just one constituent of the complex unfolding of events through time. We attempt to represent some of the complexities involved in each of these processes and the relationships between them by means of a series of diagrams. By suggesting that we begin with the world as our context, we make no claim to describing it in complete detail. To the contrary, the sketch presented here-we would emphasize the word sketch and the word tentative -is rough, incomplete, and subject to considerable improvement. But one of our purposes will be served if the outline points the way toward cumulative efforts to achieve a comprehensive description of the judicial decision process. In addition to this broad look at logic, judicial decision making, and the world, a more modest aim is to describe, in some detail and with reasonable clarity, one aspect of the relation between logic and judicial decision making

Control/structure interaction design methodology

The Control Structure Interaction Program is a technology development program for spacecraft that exhibit interactions between the control system and structural dynamics. The program objectives include development and verification of new design concepts (such as active structure) and new tools (such as a combined structure and control optimization algorithm) and their verification in ground and possibly flight test. The new CSI design methodology is centered around interdisciplinary engineers using new tools that closely integrate structures and controls. Verification is an important CSI theme and analysts will be closely integrated to the CSI Test Bed laboratory. Components, concepts, tools and algorithms will be developed and tested in the lab and in future Shuttle-based flight experiments. The design methodology is summarized in block diagrams depicting the evolution of a spacecraft design and descriptions of analytical capabilities used in the process. The multiyear JPL CSI implementation plan is described along with the essentials of several new tools. A distributed network of computation servers and workstations was designed that will provide a state-of-the-art development base for the CSI technologies

Festschrift: Lee Loevinger

Lee Loevinger is well-known and recognized for his outstanding achievements as a Minnesota Supreme Court Justice, as Assistant United States Attorney General for Antitrust, and as a superb practicing attorney. Perhaps less appreciated are his extraordinary contributions to the intersection of law and science generally and more particularly to the nurturing of the application of computer technology to law in its infancy

Clarifying Legal Drafting by Well-Structuring It: An Improved Version of the PLAIN LANGUAGE Game

In order to be plain, language should be well-structured. This is the theory upon which the PLAIN LANGUAGE Game is based. It provides those who aspire to be legal drafters with practice in constructing well-structured statements - a useful skill for expressing clear legal norms. You have already encountered the underlining of part of the term \u27well-structured\u27, \u27PLAIN LANGUAGE\u27 and \u27norm\u27, and may be wondering about it The underlining of the first two letters of each word of a term indicates that the term is a defined term and that it is being used in its defined sense. Thus, a well-structured statement has the property of being well-structured in a defined sense of the term \u27well-structured\u27. The term is defined by the following contextual definition. A statement is well-structured, IF AND ONLY IF the relationships between its constituent sentences are expressed by defined structural terms

Rules and Freedom: Games as a Mechanism for Ego Development in Children and Adolescents

A NEW PHASE of Part I begins with this chapter by Layman Allen. The chief difference between the earlier and the later chapters lies in an emphasis first on play, then later on games. Allen summarized the proceedings of a Rules and Freedom conference that had been set up by Dr. Eli Bower with the intention of bringing together professional people having a wide variety of backgrounds. In many cases practitioners in one field did not know about the interest in and uses by practitioners in another. In a situation conducive to free exchange of orientations and objectives, the assembled professionals expressed their own positions and explored the implications of positions held by the others. In each case the emphasis was on games as devices to achieve some goal for the participants. It became clear that the game referrents themselves varied considerably, but an even greater variety of views of games and play were held by the professionals of different disciplines. Some of the variety arose from the use to be made of the games-in-situation by the child-participants who were to be treated, taught or simply entertained. Definitions of game and play occupied the conference at some length, and the role-playing that characterizes both emerged as a third entity in its own right in some orientations. Allen noted that the group recommended an empirical study should be undertaken to describe and predict the effects of adult intervention on games and game participants. Such study could be directed toward a better understanding of the game-play continuum as it changes over the developmental sequence. It was emphasized that it was not clear at what level of skill or maturity it would be appropriate to initiate the next level of the sequence. However, it seemed clear that the participant\u27s relationship to rules was central to development and emerging maturity. For example cheating seems to precede negotiated changes in the rules. The urgency of a user\u27s need for the knowledge that such research would yield was highlighted by the conference members\u27 concern for the effects of any new intervention that they might undertake and/or the effect of their usual procedures with different populations or ages of children. They wanted guidelines as they ventured out to improve the welfare and maturational development of children through each child\u27s game-play life. The three following chapters represent efforts to fill the need for descriptive and predictive research findings. —Editor

Beyond Document Retrieval toward Information Retrieval

Electronic data processing systems are being seriouslyconsidered for use in legal research, and a veritable floodof articles has appeared in various legal periodicalsspeculating about the use to which such systemscan be put in legal context. The general tone ofthese articles is understandable, for we are all groping toachieve a better understanding of the relation of thesedevelopments in communication technology and law, andit is to be expected that discussion will be vague and generalat the outset. As one step in the direction of moreexplicitly defining the role of computers in the law, ProfessorAllen presents a specific proposal for improving thedrafting of legal documents so that some of the logicalanalysis of the contents can be performed automatically.He then applies this proposal to sample sections of thefederal estate tax.This Article is not easy reading, and a casual glance atthe text may unfortunately discourage all but a few fromeven beginning it. But the steps as Professor Allen hasdrawn them are gradual and are not difficult to follow.Should you decide to work through the Article, we thinkthat your knowledge and appreciation of this potentialrevolution in legal methods will be greatly enhanced

Language, Law, and Logic: Plain Legal Drafting for the Electronic Age

The achievement of current demands for clearer legal drafting in the United States (New York, 1973 and President\u27s Executive Order, 1978) and Great Britain (Renton Report, 1975) can be aided by applying modern logic to improve the language of the law. In considering how the expression of legal norms can be clarified by using some formal language techniques, particular attention will be given to alternatives for dealing with problems of inadvertent imprecision in current legal drafting, alternatives that facilitate human understanding as well as enhance the possibilities for analysis by computer. A brief sketch of the imprecision of the expression of legal norms will help place in context the discussion of this L-trio: language, law, and logic. This imprecision can be categorized into two types of uncertainty: the uncertainty that results from what is omitted in the writing and the uncertainty that results from what is written. Both of these types of uncertainty may be deliberate by the drafter of the document, or they may occur inadvertently. Here, attention is being focused on the inadvertent written uncertainties

Reviewed Work: Escapism: The Logical Basis of Ethics by P.H. Nowell-Smith and Lemmon

Review of P.H. Nowell-Smith and E.J. Lemmon, Escapism: the logical basis of ethics; in Mind