Revive The Hague Evidence Convention

This article is about the Hague Evidence Convention\u27 and the Supreme Court\u27s decision in Aerospatiale.2 Because Of Aerospatiale, the Hague Evidence Convention is used only rarely for party discovery in United States litigation. That is unfortunate, and my purpose here is to suggest reasons and ways to revive use of the Convention. I will first discuss several aspects of the international discovery situation before Aerospatiale

Genebank ‐ in vitro propagation of potato and sweetpotato. CIP‐SOP056 V 3.0

This procedure describes the in vitro multiplication of potato and sweetpotato germplasm for international and national germplasm distribution, as well as, in vitro conservation, phytosanitary, and cryopreservation activities

Accusers as Adjudicators in Agency Enforcement Proceedings

Largely because of the Supreme Court’s 1975 decision in Withrow v. Larkin, the accepted view for decades has been that a federal administrative agency does not violate the Due Process Clause by combining the functions of investigating, charging, and then resolving allegations that a person violated the law. Many federal agencies have this structure, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Trade Commission. In 2016, the Supreme Court decided Williams v. Pennsylvania, a judicial disqualification case that, without addressing administrative agencies, nonetheless raises a substantial question about one aspect of the combination of functions at agencies. The Court held that due process prevented a judge from sitting in a case in which he had participated as district attorney years earlier. The operative principle for the decision was that “the Court has determined that an unconstitutional potential for bias exists when the same person serves as both accuser and adjudicator in a case.” This Article concludes that the reasoning of Williams should supersede Withrow on the need to disqualify a specific commissioner or agency head from participating in a particular adjudication if the agency official played a meaningful role, such as voting to approve enforcement charges, in the process leading to the agency’s initiation of proceedings against the defendant. Voting to approve enforcement charges would be a meaningful role. The due process cases do not permit a compromise on the high standards of impartiality demanded of a final agency decision maker in an adjudication to determine whether a private party committed a violation of law. That reading of Williams threatens to unsettle standard practices at various agencies, but a closer look at the procedures of the SEC shows that it would be able to accommodate the rule in Williams yet retain the combination of charging and adjudicating at the Commission level. Because of turnover of Commissioners and quorum rules, the SEC could continue to have the agency leaders bring enforcement cases and review nearly all administrative law judge decisions while disqualifying individual Commissioners under Williams when necessary

Utilizing Satellite Based Observations and Physical Hydrological Modeling for Freshwater Ecosystem Health in the Lower Mekong River Basin

Freshwater availability is necessary to promote economic growth through agriculture, fisheries, transport, environmental health, and social equity.The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Conservation International (CI) are partnering to use remote sensing Earth observations to improve regional efforts that assess natural resources for conservation and sustainable management. (Vollmer et al.,2018) have presented the social-ecological framework named the Freshwater Health Index (FHI), which takes account of the interplay between governance, stakeholders, freshwater ecosystems and the ecosystem services they provide.In this work, we develop decision support and making tools for natural resources conservation in the Lower Mekong by leveraging the FHI framework, multiple data products, and hydrological modeling capabilities (Mohammed et al., 2018). Modeling capabilities enable the integration of satellite-based daily gridded precipitation, air temperature, digital elevation model, soil characteristics, and land cover and land use information to simulate water flux framework

Mutations in the Lipopolysaccharide Biosynthesis Pathway Interfere with Crescentin-Mediated Cell Curvature in Caulobacter crescentus

Bacterial cell morphogenesis requires coordination among multiple cellular systems, including the bacterial cytoskeleton and the cell wall. In the vibrioid bacterium Caulobacter crescentus, the intermediate filament-like protein crescentin forms a cell envelope-associated cytoskeletal structure that controls cell wall growth to generate cell curvature. We undertook a genetic screen to find other cellular components important for cell curvature. Here we report that deletion of a gene (wbqL) involved in the lipopolysaccharide (LPS) biosynthesis pathway abolishes cell curvature. Loss of WbqL function leads to the accumulation of an aberrant Opolysaccharide species and to the release of the S layer in the culture medium. Epistasis and microscopy experiments show that neither S-layer nor O-polysaccharide production is required for curved cell morphology per se but that production of the altered O-polysaccharide species abolishes cell curvature by apparently interfering with the ability of the crescentin structure to associate with the cell envelope. Our data suggest that perturbations in a cellular pathway that is itself fully dispensable for cell curvature can cause a disruption of cell morphogenesis, highlighting the delicate harmony among unrelated cellular systems. Using the wbqL mutant, we also show that the normal assembly and growth properties of the crescentin structure are independent of its association with the cell envelope. However, this envelope association is important for facilitating the local disruption of the stable crescentin structure at the division site during cytokinesis

Form is Function: Faithful Transmission of Information as a Pressure for Linguistic Structure

We take descriptions of language structure and evolution in terms of information theory as the basis of an investigation of the information-preserving capacity of linguistic features. We begin by examining factors affecting the performance of conventional error-correcting codes, which we compare to message construction algorithms designed to replicate basic linguistic features. We then subject these message construction algorithms to selective pressure maximizing transmission accuracy and examine the structure of the resulting systems. The emergence of structural patterns in the optimized systems points to the centrality of information preservation as a pressure on emerging linguistic systems

Stochastic processes, galactic star formation, and chemical evolution. Effects of accretion, stripping, and collisions in multiphase multi-zone models

This paper reports simulations allowing for stochastic accretion and mass loss within closed and open systems modeled using a previously developed multi-population, multi-zone (halo, thick disk, thin disk) treatment. The star formation rate is computed as a function of time directly from the model equations and all chemical evolution is followed without instantaneous recycling. Several types of simulations are presented here: (1) a closed system with bursty mass loss from the halo to the thick disk, and from the thick to the thin disk, in separate events to the thin disk; (2) open systems with random environmental (extragalactic) accretion, e.g. by infall of high velocity clouds directly to the thin disk; (3) schematic open system single and multiple collision events and intracluster stripping. For the open models, the mass of the Galaxy has been explicitly tracked with time. We present the evolution of the star formation rate, metallicity histories, and concentrate on the light elements. We find a wide range of possible outcomes, including an explanation for variations in the Galactic D/H ratio, and highlight the problems for uniquely reconstructing star forming histories from contemporary abundance measurements.Comment: 12 pages, 12 Postscript figures, uses A&A style macros. Accepted for publication by Astronomy & Astrophysic