Uranus science planning

Recommendations for a 1979 Mariner Jupiter-Uranus mission are discussed with the possibility of launching the first outer planet atmospheric entry probe. Measurement categories considered for the mission include conducting imaging experiments, observations in both the IR and UV spectral range, experiments associated with magnetic fields, plasma, charged particles, and S- and X-band occultation measurements

Fabrication of hollow ball bearings by diffusion welding

Two steel hemispheres are diffusion welded in an atmosphere of 0.00002 torr at a temperature of 2130 degrees F for 4 hours with a pressure of 4 psi holding the hemispheres together. Weld is accomplished with only microdeformation

Ethical Issues in Mass Tort Plaintiffs’ Representation: Beyond the Aggregate Settlement Rule

Those who have addressed ethics issues for plaintiffs’ lawyers in mass tort litigation have focused on possible reform of the aggregate settlement rule to facilitate global settlements. This Article addresses a broader range of ethical issues, including (1) application of the general conflicts of interest rule to both client-client and client-lawyer conflicts; (2) unresolved issues concerning the interpretation of the current aggregate settlement rule, including the need to disclose client names and the applicability of the rule to court-approved settlements and formula or matrix allocations; and (3) the ability of lawyers to voluntarily withdraw from representing plaintiffs who reject an offer of settlement

Choice of Law for Professional Responsibility Issues in Aggregate Litigation

As the rest of the papers in this symposium issue demonstrate, aggregate litigationi raises difficult, often intractable choice-of-law issues for judges, as well as for litigants and their lawyers. Typically, judges must choose among rules governing not only substantive law, but also statutes of limitations, allocation of damages, and punitive damages. 2 What is less well-recognized is that aggregate litigation may also present difficult choice-of-law issues regarding the ethical conduct of the lawyers involved in these cases. So far, these issues have barely surfaced, not because professional responsibility questions have not been raised with respect to aggregate litigation, but rather because most courts apparently assume either that there are no significant differences among the relevant choices 3 or that it is obvious which jurisdiction\u27s rules apply. 4 As for the former assumption, it may once have been true that the ethical landscape was similar no matter where a lawyer practiced; however, over the past few decades jurisdictions have developed increasingly divergent professional responsibility law, whether by adopting different rules of professional conduct or by interpreting the same rules differently. 5 As for the latter assumption, it may be true that representation in litigation raises fewer professional responsibility choice of law questions than other types of representation; 6 nevertheless, representation in litigation poses far more difficult choice of law questions than has generally been recognized. And, of course, any difficulties presented by ordinary two-party litigation are necessarily multiplied when the litigation is complex. Until recently, professional responsibility choice of law issues were rarely raised even in two-party litigation. Most lawyers tried cases in the states where they were licensed, and the professional responsibility rules were often the same wherever a case was tried. 7 This is no longer the case. Recent decades have witnessed an incredible growth in law firms with multistate branch offices and a growing need for litigation and transactional legal services that cross state lines. Moreover, although there was some variation in the versions of the ABA Model Code of Professional Responsibility adopted by almost all states shortly after its initial promulgation in 1969, the more halting acceptance of both the original 1983 ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct and its subsequent amendments have led to increasing conflicts. 9 It is only a matter of time before the choice of law issues raised by these conflicts come to the surface. The purpose of this brief essay is two-fold. First, I want to note the extent to which professional responsibility choice-of-law issues in litigation may be more complicated than is currently thought to be the case, even when the lawsuits are the typical twoparty variety. Second, I want to briefly sketch the nature of the additional complexities posed by aggregate litigation, including both class actions and individual lawsuits that have been aggregated (whether formally or informally) for various purposes. It is not my intention to offer either a comprehensive examination of these difficult issues or a specific proposal to resolve them. Rather, my goal is more modestly to raise consciousness about the nature of the professional responsibility choice-of-law issues that judges, litigants and their lawyers will almost certainly be confronting in the near and distant future

Stateman: Using Metafunctions to Manage Large Terms Representing Machine States

When ACL2 is used to model the operational semantics of computing machines, machine states are typically represented by terms recording the contents of the state components. When models are realistic and are stepped through thousands of machine cycles, these terms can grow quite large and the cost of simplifying them on each step grows. In this paper we describe an ACL2 book that uses HIDE and metafunctions to facilitate the management of large terms representing such states. Because the metafunctions for each state component updater are solely responsible for creating state expressions (i.e., "writing") and the metafunctions for each state component accessor are solely responsible for extracting values (i.e., "reading") from such state expressions, they can maintain their own normal form, use HIDE to prevent other parts of ACL2 from inspecting them, and use honsing to uniquely represent state expressions. The last feature makes it possible to memoize the metafunctions, which can improve proof performance in some machine models. This paper describes a general-purpose ACL2 book modeling a byte-addressed memory supporting "mixed" reads and writes. By "mixed" we mean that reads need not correspond (in address or number of bytes) with writes. Verified metafunctions simplify such "read-over-write" expressions while hiding the potentially large state expression. A key utility is a function that determines an upper bound on the value of a symbolic arithmetic expression, which plays a role in resolving writes to addresses given by symbolic expressions. We also report on a preliminary experiment with the book, which involves the production of states containing several million function calls.Comment: In Proceedings ACL2 2015, arXiv:1509.0552

Waveform simulator synthesizes complex functions

Multichannel apparatus produces or simulates a complex curve which can be viewed on an oscilloscope display surface and can be adjusted to match an original complex experimentally produced curve

The 1984 Mauna Loa eruption and planetary geolgoy

In planetary geology, lava flows on the Moon and Mars are commonly treated as relatively simple systems. Some of the complexities of actual lava flows are illustrated using the main flow system of the 1984 Mauna Loa eruption. The outline, brief narrative, and results given are based on a number of sources. The implications of the results to planetary geology are clear. Volume flow rates during an eruption depend, in part, on the volatile content of the lava. These differ from the volume flow rates calculated from post eruption flow dimensions and the duration of the eruption and from those using models that assume a constant density. Mass flow rates might be more appropriate because the masses of volatiles in lavas are usually small, but variable and sometimes unknown densities impose severe restrictions on mass estimates

Scientific reasoning abilities of non-science majors in physics-based courses

We have found that non-STEM majors taking either a conceptual physics or astronomy course at two regional comprehensive institutions score significantly lower pre-instruction on the Lawson's Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (LCTSR) in comparison to national average STEM majors. The majority of non-STEM students can be classified as either concrete operational or transitional reasoners in Piaget's theory of cognitive development, whereas in the STEM population formal operational reasoners are far more prevalent. In particular, non-STEM students demonstrate significant difficulty with proportional and hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Pre-scores on the LCTSR are correlated with normalized learning gains on various concept inventories. The correlation is strongest for content that can be categorized as mostly theoretical, meaning a lack of directly observable exemplars, and weakest for content categorized as mostly descriptive, where directly observable exemplars are abundant. Although the implementation of research-verified, interactive engagement pedagogy can lead to gains in content knowledge, significant gains in theoretical content (such as force and energy) are more difficult with non-STEM students. We also observe no significant gains on the LCTSR without explicit instruction in scientific reasoning patterns. These results further demonstrate that differences in student populations are important when comparing normalized gains on concept inventories, and the achievement of significant gains in scientific reasoning requires a re-evaluation of the traditional approach to physics for non-STEM students.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, 3 table