Litigation Analytics: A Framework For Understanding, Using & Teaching

This article, appearing in the American Association of Law Libraries bimonthly member magazine, provides a brief introduction (under 2000 words) to litigation analytics. It contains a definition, common uses of litigation analytics, a brief history, as well as why litigation analytics should be taught in law school. The author provides his framework for teaching and understanding litigation analytics which includes types of analytics, pivot points (perspectives from which the analytics may be understood), and contextualizes the various analytics offerings by insight-needs categories: (1) categorizing and clustering; (2) ordering, ranking, and sorting; (3) distribution; (4) comparison; (5) trends; (6) geospatial location; (7) composition; and (8) relationships. Additionally, the article contains a cautionary hypothetical as to how the predictive nature of analytics might stifle the development of the law in a particular area

The Aggregate Harmony Metric and a Statistical and Visual Contextualization of the Rehnquist Court: 50 Years of Data

This article contains aggregated data from fifty years of the annual matrixes of justice inter-agreement for particular Supreme Court terms published by the Harvard Law Review (1956 to 2005 terms). Aggregating how often any two justices sided together on cases for a particular term relative to the amount of cases the two justices heard together allows one to derive a measure of the particular term that reflects the relative amount of agreement or disagreement for the term. This new metric, called the Aggregate Harmony Metric, allows for comparative benchmarks. For instance, the 2005 term, with an aggregate agreement of 70%, was the high water mark for agreement amongst the Court over the past 50 terms - significantly higher than the mean of 60% and the low of 50% (1970 term). Additionally, co-voting data is visualized spatially for teaching purposes. Spatial visualizations quickly convey to the viewer which justices are often in agreement, which are seldom in agreement, and which justices are outliers. In addition to providing new visualizations, the article surveys past visualizations and reporting of co-voting data. Another benefit of aggregating the Harvard Law Review\u27s statistics for all 50 Terms (1956-2005) is the ability to see the highest and lowest voting agreement percentages between any two justices over the span of the dataset. The article contains charts of these voting superlatives. For instance, Warren and Marshall are at a 50 year high for those having decided more than 100 cases together (88%). Similarly, the polemic nature of Justice Douglas is evident in the fact that he is one of the Justices in each of the first six, lowest voting agreement percentages. Furthermore, the status of O\u27Connor and, to a lesser extent Kennedy, as swing voters is visually portrayed using the network graphic metaphor with nodes and edges. Metrics and visualizations go a long way towards making the tacit knowledge of expert scholars of the Court available to both law students and the general public. Data mining, statistical processing, and visualization tools with built-in layout algorithms make this possible. The field of information visualization as it relates to legal topics is still in its infancy and ripe for substantial growth. This article contains aggregated data from fifty years of the annual matrixes of justice inter-agreement for particular Supreme Court terms published by the Harvard Law Review (1956 to 2005 terms). Aggregating how often any two justices sided together on cases for a particular term relative to the amount of cases the two justices heard together allows one to derive a measure of the particular term that reflects the relative amount of agreement or disagreement for the term. This new metric, called the Aggregate Harmony Metric, allows for comparative benchmarks. For instance, the 2005 term, with an aggregate agreement of 70%, was the high water mark for agreement amongst the Court over the past 50 terms - significantly higher than the mean of 60% and the low of 50% (1970 term). Additionally, co-voting data is visualized spatially for teaching purposes. Spatial visualizations quickly convey to the viewer which justices are often in agreement, which are seldom in agreement, and which justices are outliers. In addition to providing new visualizations, the article surveys past visualizations and reporting of co-voting data. Another benefit of aggregating the Harvard Law Review\u27s statistics for all 50 Terms (1956-2005) is the ability to see the highest and lowest voting agreement percentages between any two justices over the span of the dataset. The article contains charts of these voting superlatives. For instance, Warren and Marshall are at a 50 year high for those having decided more than 100 cases together (88%). Similarly, the polemic nature of Justice Douglas is evident in the fact that he is one of the Justices in each of the first six, lowest voting agreement percentages. Furthermore, the status of O\u27Connor and, to a lesser extent Kennedy, as swing voters is visually portrayed using the network graphic metaphor with nodes and edges. Metrics and visualizations go a long way towards making the tacit knowledge of expert scholars of the Court available to both law students and the general public. Data mining, statistical processing, and visualization tools with built-in layout algorithms make this possible. The field of information visualization as it relates to legal topics is still in its infancy and ripe for substantial growth

The Aggregate Harmony Metric and a Statistical and Visual Contextualization of the Rehnquist Court: 50 Years of Data

Part of Symposium: The Rehnquist Court in Empirical and Statistical Retrospectiv

The Nature of Composite LINER/HII Galaxies, As Revealed from High-Resolution VLA Observations

A sample of 37 nearby galaxies displaying composite LINER/HII and pure HII spectra was observed with the VLA in an investigation of the nature of their weak radio emission. The resulting radio contour maps overlaid on optical galaxy images are presented here, together with an extensive literature list and discussion of the individual galaxies. Radio morphological data permit assessment of the ``classical AGN'' contribution to the global activity observed in these ``transition'' LINER galaxies. One in five of the latter objects display clear AGN characteristics: these occur exclusively in bulge-dominated hosts.Comment: 31 pages, 27 figures, accepted by ApJ

Loss of ACTN3 gene function alters mouse muscle metabolism and shows evidence of positive selection in humans

More than a billion humans worldwide are predicted to be completely deficient in the fast skeletal muscle fiber protein α-actinin-3 owing to homozygosity for a premature stop codon polymorphism, R577X, in the ACTN3 gene. The R577X polymorphism is associ

The Carnegie Supernova Project: First Near-Infrared Hubble Diagram to z~0.7

The Carnegie Supernova Project (CSP) is designed to measure the luminosity distance for Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) as a function of redshift, and to set observational constraints on the dark energy contribution to the total energy content of the Universe. The CSP differs from other projects to date in its goal of providing an I-band {rest-frame} Hubble diagram. Here we present the first results from near-infrared (NIR) observations obtained using the Magellan Baade telescope for SNe Ia with 0.1 < z < 0.7. We combine these results with those from the low-redshift CSP at z <0.1 (Folatelli et al. 2009). We present light curves and an I-band Hubble diagram for this first sample of 35 SNe Ia and we compare these data to 21 new SNe Ia at low redshift. These data support the conclusion that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. When combined with independent results from baryon acoustic oscillations (Eisenstein et al. 2005), these data yield Omega_m = 0.27 +/- 0.0 (statistical), and Omega_DE = 0.76 +/- 0.13 (statistical) +/- 0.09 (systematic), for the matter and dark energy densities, respectively. If we parameterize the data in terms of an equation of state, w, assume a flat geometry, and combine with baryon acoustic oscillations, we find that w = -1.05 +/- 0.13 (statistical) +/- 0.09 (systematic). The largest source of systematic uncertainty on w arises from uncertainties in the photometric calibration, signaling the importance of securing more accurate photometric calibrations for future supernova cosmology programs. Finally, we conclude that either the dust affecting the luminosities of SNe Ia has a different extinction law (R_V = 1.8) than that in the Milky Way (where R_V = 3.1), or that there is an additional intrinsic color term with luminosity for SNe Ia independent of the decline rate.Comment: 44 pages, 23 figures, 9 tables; Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

First-Year Spectroscopy for the SDSS-II Supernova Survey

This paper presents spectroscopy of supernovae discovered in the first season of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey. This program searches for and measures multi-band light curves of supernovae in the redshift range z = 0.05 - 0.4, complementing existing surveys at lower and higher redshifts. Our goal is to better characterize the supernova population, with a particular focus on SNe Ia, improving their utility as cosmological distance indicators and as probes of dark energy. Our supernova spectroscopy program features rapid-response observations using telescopes of a range of apertures, and provides confirmation of the supernova and host-galaxy types as well as precise redshifts. We describe here the target identification and prioritization, data reduction, redshift measurement, and classification of 129 SNe Ia, 16 spectroscopically probable SNe Ia, 7 SNe Ib/c, and 11 SNe II from the first season. We also describe our efforts to measure and remove the substantial host galaxy contamination existing in the majority of our SN spectra.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal(47pages, 9 figures