Commercial Arbitration in Federal Courts

With increasing frequency attorneys are confronted with disputes arising under commercial contracts which contain arbitration agreements. Before the attorney can advise the client as to his legal position and recommend a course of conduct, he must interpret the effect of the arbitration agreement. Often the first question for the attorney is whether the client (or, in turn, the opposing party) can be forced to arbitrate. The answer depends upon whether agreements to arbitrate future disputes are enforceable under the law applicable to the transaction. Where both parties to the contract are citizens of the same state, the answer is readily found since the arbitration law of that state will govern the transaction. But in our increasingly mobile society, a growing number of commercial contracts involve parties of different states. In the disputes arising under many of these contracts, federal diversity jurisdiction will lie. The major problem faced by the attorney in such a case is whether the enforceability of the arbitration clause in the contract will be governed by federal law or state law, since in many instances the two will be diametrically opposed. Of course, if state law is found to govern the diversity case, the enforceability question cannot be answered until it is determined which of the two or more states\u27 law applies. This raises a conflicts choice of law question, with which this paper is not directly concerned. The conflicts methods of choosing the state law applicable to a transaction involving many states will be used only as an illustration of a process which may also be useful in deciding whether federal or state law should apply to a particular enforceability problem in a diversity case

An Optical Approach to Aid Cerebral Hemiplegics

Communication is the process by which information is received, interpreted, and retained; however, communication often breaks down as a result of brain injury. It has been estimated that there are 400,000 adults in the United States with some degree of communication loss from stroke, and each year another 20,000 people become similarly afflicted. The ability to transmit and/or receive information depends on visual and auditory comprehension and retention, reading comprehension, visual motor facility, and speech. These areas are so interrelated that a collapse in one often causes a breakdown in a closely connected ability

Modelling Random Antibody Adsorption and Immunoassay Activity

One of the primary considerations in immunoassay design is optimizing the concentration of capture antibody in order to achieve maximal antigen binding and, subsequently, improved sensitivity and limit of detection. Many immunoassay technologies involve immobilization of the antibody to solid surfaces. Antibodies are large molecules in which the position and accessibility of the antigen-binding site depend on their orientation and packing density. In this paper we propose a simple mathematical model, based on the theory known as random sequential adsorption (RSA), in order to calculate how the concentration of correctly oriented antibodies (active site exposed for subsequent reactions) evolves during the deposition process. It has been suggested by experimental studies that high concentrations will decrease assay performance, due to molecule denaturation and obstruction of active binding sites. However, crowding of antibodies can also have the opposite effect by favouring upright orientations. A specific aim of our model is to predict which of these competing effects prevails under different experimental conditions and study the existence of an optimal coverage, which yields the maximum expected concentration of active particles (and hence the highest signal)

Direct Immunoassays and Their Performance: Theoretical Modelling of the Effects of Antibody Orientation and Associated Kinetics

The orientation and activity of antibodies immobilized on solid surfaces are of direct relevance to many immunosensing applications. We therefore investigate a mathematical model which estimates the fraction of antibodies which are available for reaction in a randomly adsorbed sample. Numerical simulations are presented which highlight the separate effects of antibody orientation, accessibility and loss of binding ability on the amount of captured antigen. The assay response can then be expressed as a function of total antibody density and used for optimizing the surface coverage strategy under various conditions

Statistical Analysis of Coevolution in Protein Structure and in Ecology

In this thesis we explore the theory of coevolution. Yip et al. (2008) define coevolution to be the change in one biological object as a result of the change in one or more associated objects. The process of coevolution has been observed at many biological levels; from microscopic to macroscopic. We explore coevolution at the molecular level by studying protein sequences and their corresponding structures to determine how correlated areas of multiple sequence alignments and structures have coevolved. At the species level, we assess how coevolution drives ecological systems of interacting phylogenetic trees. Determining the three-dimensional structure of proteins is of interest because the structure of a protein is constrained by its function. Proteins carry out vital functions in every cell and are arguably the most important biological molecule found in organisms. Multiple sequence alignments of protein families contain evolutionary information on these functional constraints. In the first part of this thesis, we aim to develop a method to identify correlated mutations within multiple sequence alignments. These correlated positions are used to predict residues that are in close proximity in three-dimensional space. In turn these structural constraints can be used in ab initio protein structure prediction. Currently the most accurate way to determine protein structure is using experimental techniques such as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and X-ray Crystallography. These techniques are expensive and take time. As a result, the proteins that are chosen to have their structures determined may be subject to selection bias. Initially, we focus on a preliminary analysis of the trypsin protein family. We align trypsin structures from a variety of species using a multiple structural alignment algorithm, to determine how the structure of the family has evolved. Basic summary statistics of the aligned distance matrices reveal a set of residues where the distance between these specific residues and every other residue in the structure is highly conserved across all of the structures in the protein family. We label these residues as ‘anchor residues’ because they appear to hold the structure of the trypsin protein family in place like anchors. Following this, we develop a regularised logistic regression model to detect correlated mutations in multiple sequence alignments. We successfully apply our method to a number of small artificial test alignments. When applied to real Pfam datasets, our method has varying success at identifying coevolving columns that are close in physical proximity. In the second part of this thesis we develop a new method to test efficiently for cospeciation in multitrophic ecological systems. Our method can be applied to bitrophic and tritrophic systems, with the potential to generalise to higher order systems and networks. We utilise methods from electrical circuit theory to reduce higher order systems into two vectors of electrically equivalent patristic distances that can be compared using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. Compared to existing methods, our method has equal or higher performance at both trophic levels. To test our method, interacting systems of phylogenetic trees were simulated by generating random trees, and separately, their interaction matrices. Simulating the systems in this way does not take into account how the systems might have evolved. We propose a more realistic simulation method that evolves over time. The algorithm starts with one species per lineage, that are assumed to have an ecological interaction. The joint evolution of these species is simulated by sampling the time at which evolutionary events occur from an exponential distribution. We explore speciation events, and gaining and losing ecological interactions. Each of these events are controlled by rate parameters. By experimenting with these parameters, a wide range of systems with different cospeciation properties can be simulated. We show that a wide range of systems that can be produced using our method

Angular analysis of the B0 d ! K0 + decay with the ATLAS experiment.

PhDAn angular analysis of B0 d ! K0(! K+ ��) + �� is presented using 20:3 fb��1 of pp collision data collected at p s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS experiment. The angular observables FL and S3;4;5;7;8 were extracted in six bins of q2, the invariant mass squared of the dimuon system, within the full range 0:04 < q2 < 6:00 (GeV=c2)2. The observables were determined from an unbinned maximum likelihood t using four folded parameterisations of the full angular distribution. The t results were used to obtain corresponding values for the optimised observables P1 and P0 4;5;6;8. The results presented are compatible with Standard Model predictions

Foreign direct investment in Chicago real estate : are foreign investors different from domestic investors?

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1987.Bibliography: leaves 131-135.by Deborah Ann Nooney.M.S

INTERSEGMENTAL COORDINATION DIFFERENCES BETWEEN BEGINNING PERFORMERS EXECUTING A BADMINTON SMASH FOR ACCURACY OR VELOCITY

Proper coordination is generally accepted as a very important process in skilful execution of many movement activities. It is also believed ballistic skills will exhibit a sequential intersegmental coordination pattern. Yet, what we know about how intersegmental coordination develops is relatively minimal. The purpose of this investigation was to examine a new skill (badminton smash) under two conditions (accuracy and velocity) to determine which condition would elicit the most theoretically correct intersegmental coordination pattern (Work in progress)

Rural Food Pantry Users’ Stigma and Safety Net Food Programs

Increasing numbers of individuals in our community have been seeking local food pantry assistance. Previous studies of food pantries found that users show low rates of governmental aid receipt, especially in rural areas. We assessed evidence that suggests that post-recession need has mitigated rural reluctance to pursue government assistance. The inadequacy of government and local food assistance to address the problem of food insecurity in our community is discussed