Courts As Institutional Reformers: Bankruptcy and Public Law Litigation

This article compares two spheres in which courts induce and oversee the restructuring of organizations that fail systematically to comply with their legal obligations: bankruptcy reorganization and public law litigation (civil rights or regulatory suits seeking structural remedies). The analogies between bankruptcy and public law litigation (PLL) have grown stronger in recent years as structural decrees have evolved away from highly specific directives to “framework” decrees designed to induce engagement with stakeholders and make performance transparent. We use the comparison with bankruptcy, where the value and legitimacy of judicial intervention are better understood and more accepted, to address prominent criticisms of PLL. Our comparison shows that judicial intervention in both spheres responds to coordination problems that make individual stakeholder action ineffective, and it explains how courts in both spheres can require and channel major organizational change without administering the organizations themselves or inefficiently constricting the discretion of managers. The comparison takes on greater urgency in light of the Trump Administration’s vow to “deconstruct the administrative state,” a promise which, if kept, will likely increase demand for PLL

Self-Doping of Gold Chains on Silicon: A New Structural Model for Si(111)5x2-Au

A new structural model for the Si(111)5x2-Au reconstruction is proposed and analyzed using first-principles calculations. The basic model consists of a "double honeycomb chain" decorated by Si adatoms. The 5x1 periodicity of the honeycomb chains is doubled by the presence of a half-occupied row of Si atoms that partially rebonds the chains. Additional adatoms supply electrons that dope the parent band structure and stabilize the period doubling; the optimal doping corresponds to one adatom per four 5x2 cells, in agreement with experiment. All the main features observed in scanning tunneling microscopy and photoemission are well reproduced.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. (preprint with high quality figures available at http://cst-www.nrl.navy.mil/~erwin/papers/ausi111

Insulin release from pancreatic islets: Effects of CRF and excess PTH

Insulin release from pancreatic islets: Effects of CRF and excess PTH. Insulin secretion may be impaired in chronic renal failure (CRF) and available data suggest that this abnormality may be related to the state of secondary hyperparathyroidism of renal failure. We directly measured insulin release from isolated islets of Langerhans obtained from normal rats, CRF-control and CRF-PTX (parathyroidectomized) rats, and parathyroid hormone (PTH)-treated animals. Both early and total glucose-induced insulin release from islets of CRF-control were markedly and significantly (P < 0.01) lower than from islets of normal rats. Insulin release from islets of CRF-PTX rats was significantly (P < 0.01) higher than that from islets of CRF-control rats, and not different from insulin release from islets of normal rats. Forskolin and IBMX, which cause a rise in cAMP, significantly stimulated glucose-induced insulin release from islets of normal, CRF-control and CRF-PTX rats, but the increments from baseline were not significantly different between the three groups. Both early and total insulin release from islets obtained from PTH-treated rats with normal renal function were markedly and significantly (P < 0.01) lower than values obtained from normal rats. Calcium contents of the pancreas of CRF-control and PTH-treated rats were significantly (P < 0.01) higher than that in pancreas of normal rats and CRF-PTX animals, and values in the latter two groups of animals were not significantly different. The results show that: 1) CRF impairs insulin release from pancreatic islets; 2) this abnormality is reversed by prior parathyroidectomy; and 3) hyperparathyroidism induced by PTH-treatment in normal rats impairs insulin release from pancreatic islets. The data provide a direct evidence for the role of secondary hyperparathyroidism in the genesis of abnormal carbohydrate metabolism in CRF. This effect of excess PTH is not related to alterations in cAMP production but may potentially be due to calcium accumulation in the pancreas

Colonic ulcerations may predict steroid-refractory course in patients with ipilimumab-mediated enterocolitis

To investigate management of patients who develop ipilimumab-mediated enterocolitis, including association of endoscopic findings with steroid-refractory symptoms and utility of infliximab as second-line therapy

Deformable Model for 3D Intramodal Nonrigid Breast Image Registration with Fiducial Skin Markers

We implemented a new approach to intramodal non-rigid 3D breast image registration. Our method uses fiducial skin markers (FSM) placed on the breast surface. After determining the displacements of FSM, finite element method (FEM) is used to distribute the markers’ displacements linearly over the entire breast volume using the analogy between the orthogonal components of the displacement field and a steady state heat transfer (SSHT). It is valid because the displacement field in x, y and z direction and a SSHT problem can both be modeled using LaPlace’s equation and the displacements are analogous to temperature differences in SSHT. It can be solved via standard heat conduction FEM software with arbitrary conductivity of surface elements significantly higher than that of volume elements. After determining the displacements of the mesh nodes over the entire breast volume, moving breast volume is registered to target breast volume using an image warping algorithm. Very good quality of the registration was obtained. Following similarity measurements were estimated: Normalized Mutual Information (NMI), Normalized Correlation Coefficient (NCC) and Sum of Absolute Valued Differences (SAVD). We also compared our method with rigid registration technique

Perfect imaging: they don't do it with mirrors

Imaging with a spherical mirror in empty space is compared with the case when the mirror is filled with the medium of Maxwell's fish eye. Exact time-dependent solutions of Maxwell's equations show that perfect imaging is not achievable with an electrical ideal mirror on its own, but with Maxwell's fish eye in the regime when it implements a curved geometry for full electromagnetic waves

Effective Soft-Core Potentials and Mesoscopic Simulations of Binary Polymer Mixtures

Mesoscopic molecular dynamics simulations are used to determine the large scale structure of several binary polymer mixtures of various chemical architecture, concentration, and thermodynamic conditions. By implementing an analytical formalism, which is based on the solution to the Ornstein-Zernike equation, each polymer chain is mapped onto the level of a single soft colloid. From the appropriate closure relation, the effective, soft-core potential between coarse-grained units is obtained and used as input to our mesoscale simulations. The potential derived in this manner is analytical and explicitly parameter dependent, making it general and transferable to numerous systems of interest. From computer simulations performed under various thermodynamic conditions the structure of the polymer mixture, through pair correlation functions, is determined over the entire miscible region of the phase diagram. In the athermal regime mesoscale simulations exhibit quantitative agreement with united atom simulations. Furthermore, they also provide information at larger scales than can be attained by united atom simulations and in the thermal regime approaching the phase transition.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, 3 table

Coriolis Effect in Optics: Unified Geometric Phase and Spin-Hall Effect

We examine the spin-orbit coupling effects that appear when a wave carrying intrinsic angular momentum interacts with a medium. The Berry phase is shown to be a manifestation of the Coriolis effect in a non-inertial reference frame attached to the wave. In the most general case, when both the direction of propagation and the state of the wave are varied, the phase is given by a simple expression that unifies the spin redirection Berry phase and the Pancharatnam--Berry phase. The theory is supported by the experiment demonstrating the spin-orbit coupling of electromagnetic waves via a surface plasmon nano-structure. The measurements verify the unified geometric phase, demonstrated by the observed polarization-dependent shift (spin-Hall effect) of the waves.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

A new classification method using array Comparative Genome Hybridization data, based on the concept of Limited Jumping Emerging Patterns

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Classification using aCGH data is an important and insufficiently investigated problem in bioinformatics. In this paper we propose a new classification method of DNA copy number data based on the concept of limited Jumping Emerging Patterns. We present the comparison of our limJEPClassifier to SVM which is considered the most successful classifier in the case of high-throughput data.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our results revealed that the classification performance using limJEPClassifier is significantly higher than other methods. Furthermore, we show that application of the limited JEP's can significantly improve classification, when strongly unbalanced data are given.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Nowadays, aCGH has become a very important tool, used in research of cancer or genomic disorders. Therefore, improving classification of aCGH data can have a great impact on many medical issues such as the process of diagnosis and finding disease-related genes. The performed experiment shows that the application of Jumping Emerging Patterns can be effective in the classification of high-dimensional data, including these from aCGH experiments.</p